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door from inside, said “Good luck” and drove away.
    Most people assumed that Tommy had fallen in love with Connie because of the way she looked. The fashion of their adolescence had been for pink-skinned blondes with small noses and soft mouths, and so Connie had never believed anyone, including Tommy, when they said that she was beautiful. Tommy remembered their first Christmas, when she had brought home two boxes of cards to send to their friends and families, the message “Blessed Christmas” inside on cream-colored paper and a Renaissance painting of the Virgin Mary on the front. Connie had picked the cards because she thought they would go over well with various Scanlans, but when Tommy had seen the painting he had burst out laughing. “I’ve heard of people who send out pictures of themselves on their cards, but nobody who sends out paintings,” he said. And in truth the serenely beautiful Madonna, with her slightly sallow skin, dark hair, prominent nose and full lips looked very much like Connie. Tommy had turned over the card and read the fine print. “Giotto,” he said. “Did you pose for this?”
    “For your information, we invented the Renaissance,” Connie had said in a huff, going up to their room until he came and kissed the frown from between her eyebrows.
    But it was not her looks that had so compelled him. Tommy had never been able to put it into words, but it was the blankness of her he was so mesmerized by, the feeling of an empty bottle waiting to be filled, and filled by him. He had been waiting for so long for someone to take him seriously, to listen to him. Looking at her great bottomless eyes he got the feeling that that was what she was doing, although as the years went by he would sometimes wonder if it was simply that nobody was home in there. He could never get a word in edgewise with his family, and he was a little afraid of both his parents, his mother with her patently false patina of elegance and control, his father with his seemingly effortless ability to rise in the world and his disdain for those who did not. It had not escaped Tommy’s notice that Connie Mazza would rise in the world simply by moving to a place where people lived, instead of one where they were buried. He was also sexually enthralled by her. When she would lean forward to tune the car radio and he would get a whiff of her, his blood felt as if it would burst from his body.
    He had suspected that there would-be trouble when, after a highly public breakdown by Mary Roe in the ladies’ room at Sacred Heart Academy, his sister Margaret had come home and asked him, meaning no harm, whether he was really going with a Puerto Rican girl from Spanish Harlem. But there was little talk of the affair until, six weeks after they had begun dating, and five weeks after Tommy decided he meant to marry Connie, he had brought her home for Sunday dinner.
    Connie had shopped for a week and had spent all the money she had saved from her secretarial job on a red satin dress with a sweetheart neckline and a tiny tight waist from which her bust loomed like a stretch of cream crepe de Chine. As they drove up the long driveway to the Scanlan house and saw Tommy’s sister and one of her friends sitting on the steps in navy-blue skirts and pale-blue sweater sets, Connie had known she had made a dreadful mistake.
    At dinner no one spoke to her except Mary Frances, who handed dishes across the table and said “Peas?” and “Potatoes?” as though she and Connie were characters in The Philadelphia Story . After Tommy had driven Connie home, he had come back to find his father sitting in the living room in the dark, his cigar burned to the nub at one end and chewed to the nub at the other. “If you think I busted my ass so you could marry some goddamn guinea from the Bronx, you’ve got another think coming,” said Mr. Scanlan, who was quite drunk. Tommy went upstairs while his father continued to talk; the only other word Tommy