of the hospital out in the corridor, the rattling of the gurneys, the footsteps of the nurses. Finally he added, “You can’t deny your husband, Franny. That’s God’s law.”
He turned his head away from her and breathed so heavily that Connie was terrified and thought for a moment she should call the nurse. It was a horrible noise, and she wanted it to stop, but she was afraid that if it did he would begin to speak again. She did not want to hear any more.
Finally he turned his head back to her, and Connie saw that the tears were running down his face. He looked at their two hands, linked at the edge of the mattress, and then he looked up, and his face was contorted with grief, his lower lip shaking as though he had palsy, the tears dripping off his chin onto his pajamas, darkening the thin cotton. He pressed the back of her hand to his lips, and Connie recoiled, but he pulled her toward him again, with all the strength of a young man. Connie thought his tears must clear away his blindness and he would see her for who she was, but when he looked up again he only whispered “Please,” and she felt the kind of sympathy for him that she always felt for her husband, the sort you feel for a small child, although she never felt it for her own children.
“It’s all right, John,” she said softly, pressing his fingers. “Everything is all right.”
“Say you forgive me,” he said.
“I forgive you.”
He turned his head away and looked at the ceiling. Then his eyes closed. He dropped her hand, and the snoring began again.
She sat there for a while, and then picked up her purse and left. It was cooler out in the parking lot, and the sky seemed a deeper blue. She knew it must be past dinnertime. She wished she had taken the bottle of whiskey with her; she thought she could use a drink. Driving home, hunched slightly over the wheel, she knew she had learned one thing that afternoon: she would never be alone with Joey Martinelli again. She thought of the old man lying in the bed, of all the business deals and the machinations, and of him saying, last of all, “Say you forgive me.” She didn’t want to need forgiveness at the end.
That night when her husband came home from the hospital he told her that his father had fallen into a coma and that the doctors did not expect him to come out of it again. “My mother’s all upset,” said Tommy, sitting at the red Formica table in the kitchen, sipping his beer and staring into space, “because she says the last words he ever said to her were ‘This is the toughest goddamn roast beef I’ve ever tasted in my life’ when she brought him a sandwich for lunch yesterday.”
“It would be in character,” Connie said, knowing that if she did not tell him now she could never tell him, yet knowing that for some reason she could not tell him now. She looked into his face, trying to find the man she thought, so many years ago, would save her. And she realized, without regret, that it had been the other way around, and that she would have to live with that responsibility, even embrace it, for the rest of her life. She realized that for years she had wanted to sit by John Scanlan’s side and say “To hell with you.” But she had moved beyond the desires of that woman now. She had become a person who could sit there, hand in hand with that awful man, and forgive him his trespasses, whatever they might be. And if her husband knew that, he would know something that would ruin his life even more decisively than his father had tried to do. He would know that his wife was stronger than he was.
“She thought he was going to get better,” Tommy said sadly. “She thought he would be all right.”
19
IN ONE CORNER OF THE BLACK, A TINY zigzag of lightning leapt like a tic in the eye of the sky. Maggie could see it from her bedroom window, just beyond the sweep of gingham below the curtain rod. She was alone in the house. The lights were out. A thunderstorm was coming. Maggie’s mouth was dry and full of an awful taste.
The adults were gone again. Maggie often came home