Household Saints Read online

  Now, for example, he had a vague recollection of losing some money, then making his way home past a few tired revelers and zeppole vendors consuming the last of their unsold pastries….

  “That’s it!” Lino pointed straight up like a witness at the Ascension. “That’s what I need—a bite to eat.”

  Later, Lino would blame this selective amnesia for all his subsequent misfortunes. If only, he would say, if only he had remembered the terms of the previous night’s betting, he would never have yelled upstairs and ordered Catherine to go buy some sausage at Joseph Santangelo’s shop.

  Later, Catherine would blame it on the weather. If it hadn’t been so hot, Joseph would have been selling sausage instead of playing pinochle. If not for the heat wave, her father would never have bet her for a breath of cold air. But by then, the extraordinary course of their daughter’s life had led Joseph to see deeper reasons for everything. And he would urge his wife to look beyond the heat to the hand turning up the flame—the same hand which timed the cloudburst for the next afternoon, for the instant that Catherine stepped out to buy sausage.

  Catherine had just left her father’s shop when the sky cracked open, releasing a low boom of thunder and a hail of raindrops so fat, they struck the pavement and bounced. Sheets of water flapped in the wind; streams washed through the gutters.

  Released ten minutes early, the children came tearing out of St. Boniface and started shrieking and slamming one another with their lunch boxes. Watching from the doorways, their mothers fought the long-forgotten urge to run out and dance around with their heads tipped back and raindrops falling into their open mouths. They had to remind themselves that full-grown women didn’t go out and get drenched for no reason—until, one by one, they came up with a reason to go out. For the cool air had made them imagine how nice it would be: The whole family gathered around platters of veal chops steaming in tomato sauce and cheese, sausage fried with onions and peppers, the good hot food they hadn’t had the appetite for all summer—everyone eating, talking, laughing while the rain pattered softly outside. Even the ones who would eventually go home to a dinner table in hell, meals soured by rancor and arguments, imagined as they hurried through the rain that they were rushing to buy food for an ideal family, a cozy dinnertime paradise.

  By the time the women reached Santangelo’s, they were giddier than their children. Breathless from running and laughing, they shook their heads, streaming droplets onto the sawdust.

  “Sweetheart!” Joseph greeted each one. “Lover, where have you been?”

  The women blushed, as if he were really their lover, and perhaps that was why they felt so unself-conscious, though their wet dresses clung to them, revealing intimate details. All they could think of was how much they’d missed him. Crowding into the shop, each was reminded of some long-ago wedding when she’d danced past midnight like Cinderella, one night when the rules which governed the rest of her life were suspended. Now, in that same way, the women dispensed with the rules of normal butcher shop behavior, and giggled and gossiped without the usual itchy awareness of whose turn was next. Even the thriftiest forgot to watch Joseph’s thumb, but it didn’t matter; that day, in celebration of the heat wave’s end, Joseph refrained from sneaking it onto the scale.

  Ordinarily, Joseph was a master of dishonesty. Like his father before him, Joseph knew exactly when and how to tip the scales, knew which housewives would notice the short weight and which were so oblivious, they could cook and carve a roast with the meat hook still inside it.

  And yet, like countless generations of Santangelos, Joseph never thought of himself as a dishonest butcher but rather as a leveler, an instrument of primitive justice like the legendary outlaws of the old country. In this tradition, he sold to widows at cost and sent rich matrons home with a pound of pancetta that was half a pound of paper. Like all great bandits, Santangelo men delighted in playing cat-and-mouse with the law, and indeed the housewives’ strategies equalled those of the cagiest detectives. Fed up, the women ordered Joseph to write his computations on the brown paper bags, and they reweighed their purchases on the scales in other shops. Always the sums totalled, the weights checked out, and still the women knew that they hadn’t received what they’d paid for.

  Of course there were other butchers in Little Italy, and nothing prevented Joseph’s customers from taking their business elsewhere. But their families would have missed his special sausage, made by old Mrs. Santangelo from a secret family recipe which they could never quite duplicate. And they themselves would have missed Joseph.

  In part it was the cheating itself which won their loyalty. They enjoyed the perpetual challenge of trying to catch him and couldn’t help admiring a man who could lie to their faces and get away with it. But why didn’t they feel the same thrill when other merchants shortchanged them? Why had they wasted no love on Joseph’s father Zio, a sour-faced man who never took his cigar out of his mouth long enough to talk?

  The answer was that Joseph liked women, and they knew it. As he strutted behind the counter—slicing, grinning, saluting them with his knives—his customers felt such warmth in their hearts that his petty dishonesties flattered them like secret signs of attention, and the energy he put into cheating them made them feel as lovely and desirable as brides.

  On that rainy September afternoon, Joseph’s dashes to the meat locker made the women think of a lover running for that special bottle of chilled champagne awaiting his mistress’s return. Like women reunited with their lovers, they felt that there was nowhere else they would rather be, no way they would rather celebrate this God-sent break in the weather.

  Yet this celebration, like so many others, included one determined holdout, one teenage girl leaning into a corner with the folded arms and put-upon expression of someone who’s not enjoying herself and doesn’t care who knows, someone so unable to get into the swing of things that she forgets completely where she is and winds up being the last one to leave.

  And so the shop was empty again when Catherine Falconetti remembered what she was doing there, stepped up to the counter and said, “Two pounds of sausage.”

  “Hot or sweet?” Joseph’s sly grin suggested a choice between two delicious and obscene alternatives.

  “Mixed.” Catherine didn’t smile back.

  “Half and half it is.” Reaching into the display case, Joseph bent till his eyes were level with Catherine’s chest, then straightened up and said, “Two pounds of sausage for a shrimp like you?”

  Catherine looked as if she were eyeing a silverfish in the bathtub.

  “Not just for me.”

  “Too bad. If you don’t mind my saying so, you could use the extra meat.”

  “Spare me the beauty advice and let’s have the sausage so I can get home and start cooking. Lino’s hungover from your card game last night and he’s hungry.”

  “Right,” murmured Joseph. “Two pounds of special sausage for my good friend Lino Falconetti.”

  Unlike Lino, Joseph was blessed with a memory which no amount of alcohol could impair. He awoke in the morning with perfect recall and no intention of holding his drinking companions to the stupid things they did and said the night before. A spiteful man could have used such a memory to ruin half the businesses and marriages on Mulberry Street. But Joseph kept his neighbor’s confidences to himself, for his own amusement—just as it amused him now to think that little Catherine Falconetti belonged to him. He would never collect on the bet, no more than Frank Manzone would dream of claiming poor Nicky’s reconditioned Stromberg-Carlson. For one thing, Lino wouldn’t remember staking his daughter. For another, Joseph didn’t want her.

  Idly, he took another look at his prize—built like a ten-year-old boy and about as attractive as she stood there, chewing gum like a kid who imagines that toughness is a matter of how sullenly you can chew. Rain dripped from her spiky dark hair and shone in the pebbles of her black, old lady’s cardigan. Like his other customers, Catherine was soaked, but she was the only one w
ith hunched shoulders, arms folded in on herself—as if, thought Joseph, she had something to hide.

  What would he do with her if he had her? No father, no matter how drunk, would gamble away his daughter’s honor—and that automatically left marriage. But Joseph wasn’t ready to marry; and if he were, Catherine wasn’t the wife he would choose.

  Still, she was a female. In honor of that fact, and for the sake of form, Joseph tossed the coiled sausage up into the air and caught it on his knife blade in such a way that it fell to the counter with six links neatly separated from the rest. The elegance of this gesture was wasted on Catherine, who was gazing over his head at the poster of a cow divided into cuts of meat.

  No longer amused, Joseph slammed the sausage onto the scale and was suddenly overcome by the disappointment which so often follows near-disasters, catastrophes survived. The heat wave was over, people were buying sausage again. Just yesterday, he’d wondered how his life would change in some slow, hot, vegetarian end of the world—but now he knew that it would never change at all. And what did that leave him? Forty, maybe fifty years of cheating housewives out of their precious pennies, of drinking his way through dull pinochle games and winning uncollectible bets from the Falconettis. At this, Joseph’s melancholy changed to anger—directed, for want of a better object, at Lino Falconetti. The old man owed him something—if not a daughter, then something to redeem a lifetime of worthless IOUs.

  Joseph decided to make the Falconettis pay in the only way he knew. Pressing his thumb into the sausage, he leaned ever so lightly on the weighing pan.

  “A couple ounces over. Dollar fifteen.”

  “Don’t think I didn’t see that,” said Catherine. “Weigh it again.”

  “See what?”

  “I saw you weigh your thumb along with that sausage.”

  “You saw that, did you?” Joseph raised his thumb, clenched his fist, and thrust it inches from her nose. “See this thumb?”

  “Sure.”

  “You know where I can put this thumb if I want to?”

  “No.” Catherine popped her gum and stared off into the distance beyond his left shoulder.

  Joseph wheeled around. Sometimes his mother came downstairs from the apartment and stood at the back of the store to see how her sausage was selling. But now, thank God, there was no one there.

  He grabbed a link of sausage and shoved it toward Catherine. Slowly he rubbed his thumb along the casing, pulling till the skin stretched.

  “Now,” he said. “Now do you know what I mean?”

  “No.” Catherine’s black eyes were serious and innocent, so wide open that Joseph realized: She didn’t know.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  Ten years behind the counter had given Joseph plenty of chances to study his taste in women. He liked them all, but the ones he loved best were the plump ones, so eager to get home and eat that they bounced in and out of his shop; the pretty ones with fast reputations; and the married ones who had borne ten children without losing the will to sparkle for an appreciative man. What moved him was how sweetly they examined their purchases, checking for gristle as if it were human flesh, probing with a practiced gentleness which Joseph had always associated with women of experience. Only now, after all this time, did Joseph understand the fuss men made over virgins, the longing for that startled grace which vanishes with experience. Only now did he feel the urge to watch a girl cross over; and now, as he thought of his customers, he felt that he would never know them because he hadn’t been the one to watch them cross. Now, staring back at Catherine Falconetti, he began to imagine what he would do with her if he had her. First he’d dress her in a white communion outfit which he’d peel off, petticoat by petticoat, like the outer leaves of an artichoke. And then he would show her exactly where he could put his thumb.

  Right then, Joseph decided that Catherine was kind of pretty: No Rita Hayworth, maybe, but delicate. And it was then that he made up his mind to collect on Lino’s bet.

  “Dollar even,” he mumbled. “My mistake.”

  He stuffed the sausage into a bag, took Catherine’s money, graced her with one final sexy smile and said, “Go ask Lino. Go home and ask your father where Joseph Santangelo can put his thumb.”

  He was so delighted with this parting shot that Catherine was long gone before he noticed: She’d only given him eighty-five cents.

  By that time, the sausage was browning in the pan. Stepping back to avoid the sputtering fat, Catherine heard coins jingling in her cardigan and thanked God that they were in her pocket and not in Joseph Santangelo’s. Theoretically the change was Lino’s, but Catherine had worked so hard to keep it that she felt as if she’d earned it and had every right to make plans for the money she’d saved.

  Tomorrow morning, she’d leave the breakfast dishes in the sink, the laundry in the hamper. She’d walk up Sixth Avenue to the Woolworth’s and treat herself to a slip of begonia or a few strands of ivy in a cardboard pot. Edgy and alert as a mother taking her newborn on its first outing, she would hurry back downtown, stopping only once, at the newsstand, to buy the September Silver Screen.

  All month, its red banner headline had shouted to her from the magazine rack, loud as a voice crying: What is Loretta Young’s Tragic Secret? All month, she’d speculated, like someone trying to outguess the detective in a mystery. But tomorrow, she would put off finding out till she’d repotted and watered her new plant. This she did immediately, with an urgency which was part of the pleasure; it was the only time when Catherine felt she was doing something which couldn’t wait.

  Catherine’s plant collection dated from a trip to the five-and-dime years before. On her way to buy darning thread for Lino’s socks, she’d paused in the houseplant section. There, amid the sacks of dried-out potting soil and peat containers, she’d found herself thinking of some photos of Italian war orphans which the nuns had passed around at school. The class had been instructed to say ten additional Hail Marys for their less fortunate brothers and sisters, but Catherine had forgotten till the pitiful plants reminded her of those children—starving, abandoned, calling out to be taken home and loved. This maternal sense stayed with her; as the plants sprouted new leaves and flowered, Catherine felt as proud as any adoptive mother, watching her skinny foundling polish off a meal.

  Tomorrow, dozens of healthy plants would be shifted so the newest addition could bask in that brief spot of morning sun by the kitchen window. Only then would Catherine open her Silver Screen and learn Loretta Young’s secret.

  So far, Catherine’s guesses included a failed marriage, a broken contract, a retarded little sister, a boyfriend killed in the war. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be worse than the story of that distant cousin of Lino’s who’d once been a movie actress. According to family legend, a certain Maria Falconetti had appeared in a silent movie about Joan of Arc, made somewhere in Europe in the twenties. With typical Falconetti luck, the picture was a total flop. But the worst of it was that Saint Joan’s part was nothing but crying and crying; the director made Maria cry so hard that she couldn’t stop when the movie was finished, and wound up crying in a mental hospital for the rest of her life. Catherine had never seen the film, nor was it mentioned in any of her movie magazines. She wondered if the story were true.

  It wasn’t that Catherine accepted Silver Screen as the gospel truth, but she did believe that the truth could be learned by comparing its gossip with the facts she observed on Mulberry Street. In this way, she had come to two conclusions which made her life easier to bear.

  The first was that fate had no respect for celebrity. Gene Tierney and Judy Garland were living proof that famous stars could draw unluckier hands than the most obscure Falconettis. The second was that work was work. To hear Myrna Loy tell it, waiting around soundstages and slaving under hot lights was as bad as ironing Lino and Nicky’s shirts. The only difference was that Myrna Loy got paid a lot better than Catherine Falconetti, because no matter how you fooled yourself, life was not the movies.
Hollywood had its Leslie Howards, its Charles Boyers; Mulberry Street had its Joseph Santangelos, shoving their thumbs in your face.

  Catherine turned the sausage and put Santangelo out of her mind. She had a talent for suppressing unpleasant thoughts, a knack which allowed her to think she’d been switched in her cradle and left with a family known for dwelling on its own misfortunes. Most days, she tried to forget about her mother dying so young and leaving her responsible for two men who would never say thank you in their lives, about the fact that she was seventeen and had never had a boyfriend or any sign of male attention but a butcher’s grimy thumb. To check herself, she concentrated on immediate realities—the popping sausage and, beyond that, the clamor of her father and brothers homecoming, their wordless racket directed at the kitchen, as if even the scraping chairs and rattling silver were demanding to be fed.

  Yet when Catherine set out the food, the room fell so silent that she could hear the sound of chewing and the rain outside. She thought of the other women at Santangelo’s shop and wondered how many of them were hearing these discouraging noises, so unlike the warm appreciative buzz which the rain had tricked them into imagining.

  “Sausage,” said Lino, and that was all. No one spoke again till Lino put down his fork, tossed his balled-up napkin onto his plate and said, “Okay, Nicky, finish up. Let’s go play some pinochle. Must be the weather, I feel like this could be my lucky night.”

  Somehow Lino sensed from the start that tonight’s game would be different. Maybe it was the weather. All summer, they’d smacked their cards on the table as if trying to rouse each other from some hot weather stupor. Yet tonight, thought Lino, the cards would slip and slap, gentle as the tapping rain. Though Lino knew better than to hope for luck, what he felt tonight was so close to hope that he could hardly wait to pick up the cards and deal.