Object lessons by Anna Quindlen Page A

was sitting on top of her little patent handbag on the hall telephone table—“now we’ve got women bareheaded. Bareheaded! As though they were going to Coney Island instead of the House of the Lord of Hosts.
    “This is all because of that woman,” he added, meaning the president’s widow, who had begun wearing the mantilla to Mass on summer Sundays several years before, “who has probably never given a thought to the millinery industry in her life.
    “Similarly, Johnnie, who runs the hat shop on Main Street, tells me that business is bad. Men are not wearing hats anymore, he tells me. Now whose fault is that?”
    They all knew the answer. Mary Frances, who was her husband’s straight man as well as his wife, sipped her drink, put it down, folded her hands in her lap, and said obediently, “The president.”
    “Exactly!” John Scanlan slammed his broad flat hand down on the table next to him.
    From behind her Maggie could hear Monica sigh again. She looked over at her mother, whose eyes were shiny from alcohol. Connie looked as though she had left her consciousness at home in Kenwood and sent her body on to the Scanlans without her. Maggie realized that that was how her mother always looked when she was around Tommy’s family. She also realized that her parents never sat together when they were at John and Mary Frances’s house. Maggie’s father was sitting on the piano bench across the room.
    Variations of this conversation took place every Sunday at the Scanlan house. John hated the Kennedys, whom he saw as a bunch of second-rate Scanlans with too much hair. And he hated what was happening to the Catholic church because of Pope John XXIII, not because, like his contemporaries, he thought the changes were blasphemous, but because he thought they were bad for business. “The two Johns,” he called the men he thought responsible for unnecessary change in America, although both were now dead: the boy president and the populist pope.
    While all around him in Our Lady of Lourdes people slowly, painfully adapted themselves to the Mass in English, John Scanlan whispered the Latin. It was disconcerting to share a pew with him. The priest would intone “The Lord be with you,” and from John’s seat would come a sound, like a snake exhaling, the carrying sibilants of “Dominus vobiscum.” Occasionally when they were together her grandfather, a tall handsome man with yellowing white hair, would turn to Maggie and inquire, “Confiteor deo?” and Maggie would be expected to answer “omnipotenti,” or, on occasion, to finish the entire prayer. “A plus,” Monica sometimes called her, and, like everything else Monica said, the tone was pleasant, the smile ubiquitous, and the meaning mean as hell.
    John Scanlan had started manufacturing communion hosts when he was twenty-one, a newlywed with two years of college, eleven younger siblings, and a mother dying of the same lung cancer that had killed her husband ten years before. For a week after he quit school John had thought about growth industries and then he had rented a pressing machine and space in a garage on a back street in the South Bronx and begun to stamp out little wafers of unleavened bread. The Jews who rented him the place thought he was crazy. Two years later he had his own factory and twenty-two employees.
    He began to make holy cards, vestments, and assorted communion veils and confirmation robes, and the three sons who worked in the business knew how to market them all: buy from a Catholic. It was as simple as that. John Scanlan’s only real competitor had been a company in Illinois owned by a Methodist; the year Maggie was born it had gone out of business, only six months after its founder had gotten drunk at a convention and made a joke about Scanlan & Co., the Irish, and booze.
    John Scanlan now had a plant in Manila doing machine embroidery on vestments and altar cloths, a plant in White Plains that employed 160 people, and a not-so-hidden