Free Object lessons by Anna Quindlen

Goretti, which was her full name, after the young Italian girl who had been canonized because she fought off a rapist and died rather than capitulate and live. Angelo had always thought Concetta’s decision to name the first child so flagrantly was a rebellion against her husband’s enormous, ebullient family, but if it had been, then the nickname given her by her grandmother Scanlan had effectively muted the protest. Not even the nuns at school called Maggie by her given name, except when they called her up to get her report card.
    “Hi, Grandpop,” she said, as she sat on the ground next to him.
    “You catch cold,” he said.
    “Grandpop, it’s July. It’s too hot to catch cold. The ground is dry. Can I work?”
    “You get your tools.”
    When she came back from the supply closet she went for a moment inside the house to go to the bathroom. As always she opened the door of the medicine cabinet and peered inside, at the small cake of black mascara and the disc of rouge left behind by her mother. In the small bedroom, its ceiling sloped with the roof line, there was also her mother’s high school yearbook and a closet full of old clothes: a black suit, a red satin dress with a low neck, a checked dirndl, a peasant blouse. It was stifling on the top floor, and Maggie did not stop to look again at the yearbook picture. She knew it by heart: Concetta Anna Mazza, Chorus, 2, 3, 4; Dance Club 4. And beneath that, in italics, the quotation: “She walks in beauty, like the night.”
    Outside, over the low stone wall just behind the rose garden, was the neighborhood—blocks of clapboard row houses shining clean and quiet in the sun, like so many others in the North Bronx, the backyards filled with tomato plants and the ornamental urns filled with hydrangeas. No one had ever suggested, however, that there was another cemetery like her grandfather’s anywhere else. When Angelo Mazza had taken over the place it had seemed half empty, tombstones only on one side, although a good many of the other plots had been purchased by families moving into the area around it. It had looked a little like a golf course, satisfyingly green and yet a bit austere, with its great metal gates crowned with one enormous cross flanked by two smaller ones. Angelo had gone to work.
    On either side of the gates he had planted pink azaleas, and along the fence that separated the cemetery from a back alley and a block of backyards he had put a wisteria, a stick of a thing with three skinny tendrils. Along the fieldstone wall he had planted orange lilies he had found beside a creek one day in Westchester Country, growing wild in mats of green foliage. He put violets around his own front door, which duplicated themselves as fast as field mice, and around back he put the rose garden and a vegetable garden and herb patch. When Concetta was a little girl he had sometimes taken her upstate for picnics on Sundays, when there were few funerals and her mother liked to rest, and he would dig up wildflowers and roll them in damp sheets of newspaper and plant them when they arrived back home. Angelo had been doing this for nearly forty years, and the result was that in Calvary Cemetery in July there were flowers everywhere. People said it was more wonderful than the Botanical Garden, and once, before Maggie was born, the curator there had even come to talk to him. Her grandfather always told Maggie that the man actually knew surprisingly little about the proper care of plants.
    When Maggie knelt down next to him he was working coffee grounds into the soil with his hands. Beside him was a bowl with soap, water, and a sponge, to clean the aphids from the rose bushes. The roses he liked best were white with an edging of bright pink along the petals. There were three bushes behind the house and two on either side of Maggie’s grandmother’s grave, grown so thick in the three years since the headstone had been put in and the bushes had been planted that only MAZZA in