rape-and-murder story. There were no curtains on the windows and Tommy had averted his eyes, afraid to see someone peeking in. But when they were finished they walked around brazenly, their clothes on the floor, staying up way past midnight as though they both knew it would be a long time before they would have this kind of freedom again. Tommy remembered walking through the half-empty rooms with one word going through his head: Mine. Mine. He had meant his wife, too. He said it again, now, as he pulled impatiently at her shorts. Their skins stuck together in the heat, and made sucking noises when they pulled apart. As they lay side by side on the carpet afterward, Tommy realized that he had forgotten, for once, that she was pregnant. She, he realized from her response, simply did not care.
“We have to get dressed,” she said after a few minutes. “One of the children might come in.”
But he was already half-asleep by that time, and he only pulled on his pants and fell into his chair, his head thrown back, his mouth open. She covered him with one of Joseph’s blankets, a small square over the middle of his long body, and then she went upstairs to sleep by herself. In the middle of the night he woke up once, his head buzzing with a swarm of hangover gnats, filling his ears with noise and his eyes with little white lights, and he thought suddenly that he had been had once again. This was what his entire married life had been like: long stretches of tedium illuminated by moments, unexpected, when he knew that without her he would be lost. For weeks or months they moved through their separate lives and slept side by side as though they were two strangers who had mistakenly been assigned the same hotel room. And then something would happen and he would find himself staring at her as though he could see the soul of her, looking for an end to his troubles inside the loop of her arms, and he would be snagged with the fishhook of herself, with the barbed hook of his powerless infatuation with something that she seemed to have, some answer that she seemed to offer. She was the one, really, who had always had the power over him, and who always would; his father’s bluster was nothing compared to it. He tried to remember all this as he lay there, the aftertaste of liquor awful in his mouth. He wished he had a pen and could write it down, but instead he vowed—perhaps aloud, he thought he heard some muttering in the room—to remember it the next morning.
When he woke again the watery blue of the sky told him that it was dawn. The pressure behind his eyes was enormous. The buzzing had reawakened him, and he pressed his hands over his ears. After a moment he realized that the noise was not inside his head, but in the kitchen, and as he took his hands away Connie appeared at the top of the stairs, her face very pale above the white of her nightgown. He felt embarrassed to look at her.
“Tommy, James is on the phone,” she said. When he got up from the chair the room tilted a little. He picked up the kitchen phone and it was only when he actually said “Hello” that he realized he had never received a call this early in the morning, and even before James spoke Tommy knew what he would say.
“He’s dead,” his brother said.
21
GATES OF HEAVEN CEMETERY WAS NICE, Maggie thought, but not as nice as her grandfather Mazza’s cemetery. It had a slight rise and fall to it, little hills and valleys crisscrossed with wide roads. Whole areas were empty, the grass stretching bright green and unbroken for a long way. There were no trees. They took good care of the lawns. Just inside the entrance there was a sign:
NO: PLANTING AT GRAVESITES
FLAGS
MILITARY MEDALLIONS
GRAVE BLANKETS PERMITTED ON CHRISTMAS, EASTER, AND MOTHER’S DAY.
NO UNAUTHORIZED VISITORS. PLEASE RESPECT THIS PLACE OF REST.
Maggie thought the last sentence was sort of nice, but the rest of the rules seemed harsh. Strangers strolled around Angelo Mazza’s cemetery all the time, and no one thought anything of it. Mrs. Martini left photographs of the grandchildren on her husband’s grave, weighted down with small stones. Women were always coming with pots of hyacinths or gardenias. They would kneel with their trowels in