Household Saints Read online

The first time, not long after his death, she was roused from a deep sleep by the smell of cigars.

  “God help me, I’ll kill you!” she screamed, forgetting he was dead. “Are you smoking in bed again?”

  Only later, when she saw him hovering in the corner and realized the truth, did she think how fitting it was that the presence of a man’s ghost should be announced by his worst habit. Much of Carmela Santangelo’s life had been a struggle against Zio’s cigars; in the end, the cigars had won. Yet that night, relieved of all responsibility for her husband’s physical body, she was delighted by the cigar-smoking spirit and even by the stogie smoldering unchanged beyond death.

  Zio, however, had changed a great deal. In life he’d been a down-to-earth man who wasted no more words than it took to tell her how many pounds of sausage were needed for the next day’s customers. But his ghost was given to the vague, the philosophical, the cryptic; often, Carmela had no idea what he meant. She forgave him for this, for it seemed only reasonable that the company of angels might make a man flighty.

  But she couldn’t forgive him that night when he came to her room and refused to answer the question she’d been asking San Gennaro all day.

  “Why Catherine Falconetti?” she asked. “Zio, why her?”

  “Man deals,” was all Zio’s ghost would say. “And God stacks the deck.”

  The task of illuminating Mrs. Santangelo fell to her daughter-in-law Evelyn, who so relished this mission that the very next morning she drove all the way in from Long Island to perform it.

  Evelyn waited till Joseph stepped out of the shop, then flounced in, opened her big orange mouth and said, “So, Mama. How do you like our Joey winning his bride-to-be in a pinochle game?”

  Mrs. Santangelo suffered occasional palpitations and shortness of breath; now she felt as if her heart were being lanced with a hot needle. But the pain was bearable compared to her distrust of Evelyn’s big mouth. So Mrs. Santangelo put one hand on her chest to contain it, shrugged nonchalantly and said, “Better pinochle than bingo.” This was a dig at Evelyn, who had met Augie at a prewar bingo game in the basement of Our Lady of Victory.

  “Mama.” Evelyn gave the air a playful slap. “That’s ancient history.”

  “What do you know about ancient history?” snarled Mrs. Santangelo, under her breath.

  For Evelyn cared only for the newest, the latest, the most American. Under her spell, Augie had been lured away from Mulberry Street. He’d deeded the family business to Joseph, then moved to Long Island, where he’d started a truck rental firm and fathered twins names Stacey and Scott. (“And who will protect them?” Mrs. Santangelo had demanded at the christening. “Saint Stacey and Saint Scott?”) Invited to her daughter-in-law’s home, Mrs. Santangelo was served a barbaric concoction of fried pork and celery in a briny sauce which Evelyn said was Chinese. (The children, Mrs. Santangelo thought, the poor children.) But the truth was that she had no great love for her freckled, suntanned grandchildren, who didn’t even look Italian. On that same visit, when she’d hugged them and asked when they were coming to her house, little Scott had wrinkled his nose and said, “Never. Your apartment smells funny.”

  Now, as if to atone for such ungrandmotherly thoughts, Mrs. Santangelo stuffed a bag full of sausage and passed it over the counter.

  “Here. For Augie and the kids. Fry it up with a couple onions and peppers.”

  “Mama!” Evelyn made a show of being affronted, though Mrs. Santangelo had found her to be virtually uninsultable. “I know how to cook sausage.”

  Mrs. Santangelo let it pass. She paused and then, struck by an afterthought, said, “Oh, and by the way. About that pinochle game. I wouldn’t tell anyone, would you?”

  “I certainly wouldn’t!” exclaimed Evelyn, her smile betraying the fact that there was no one left to tell.

  Mrs. Santangelo had no choice but to draw herself up to her full five-three and practice the line she knew she’d be called upon to deliver many times in the coming days: “If my Joseph won a horse and wanted to marry it, I’d feed it hay off my wedding china and love it like a daughter.”

  “Your daughter,” muttered Evelyn. It was hard to imagine. For the general consensus was that Mrs. Santangelo was the kind of woman who never had daughters, only sons; the kind who would have been happier in another century, when the times required them to pick up rifles alongside their men and defend the family compound from marauders; the kind who worked themselves harder than mules, then outlived the mules and the men by thirty years.

  “That’s what you say now,” sang Evelyn, and pecked a good-bye kiss in her mother-in-law’s direction.

  Evelyn was closer to the truth than she knew. For that same evening, when Mrs. Santangelo confronted Joseph over the dinner table, she said nothing about feeding a horse off her wedding china. Instead she ticked the facts off on her fingers.

  “One.” She started at the pinky. “The Falconettis haven’t got a pot to pee in. Two: The girl’s no beauty, that you can see yourself. And number three”—she waited for Joseph to stop chewing—“You don’t win your wife in a pinochle game.”

  “What’s number four?”

  “Number four is: How could you bring children into this world with that lousy Falconetti luck?”

  If there was one thing Carmela Santangelo knew about, it was luck. An expert on good and bad fortune, on benign and malicious influences, she knew precisely where to look for the Evil Eye and how to prevent it from looking back. No one was more conscious of hunchbacks, albinos, suspicious configurations of liver spots and moles. Mrs. Santangelo could spit three times and make the sign of the horns so discreetly that someone could be standing inches away and never notice.

  Stronger even than her faith in God was Mrs. Santangelo’s passion for serving and protecting her family. And though she had lost her battle with Zio’s cigars, she never stopped fighting the mischievous and invisible forces which threatened her boys. From birth, her sons wore silver cornuti around their necks and were forbidden to remove them even in the shower. When Augie was an infant, his mother cured him of pneumonia by hanging a lamb’s hoof from his crib. Superstition had turned her mind into an adding machine, perpetually counting sneezes, steps, pigeons, potato eyes, orange pits—and reading portents in the totals.

  “Number five: The meal that girl cooked. Raw meat, sandy greens, a hair on the tomato—every one of those things is a bad omen.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Joseph. “The kids will be half Santangelo.”

  “Joseph. Take some more sausage.”

  Of all Mrs. Santangelo’s arcane information, perhaps the most magical was the recipe for her homemade sausage which, like some powerful magnet, drew customers from upstate New York and the eastern tip of Long Island. This formula—passed down, like the augury, through generations of women—was the mainstay of the family business, and included the specification that the cook must work rapidly, crossing herself often and trying not to think of the exact proportions lest someone read her mind.

  That morning, as soon as Evelyn gave her the bad news, Mrs. Santangelo had started a fresh batch of sausage. With every pound of pork, every pinch of pepper, fennel and paprika, she had willed her son to change his mind about Catherine. Calling in a passing schoolboy, she’d sent three pounds across the street to thank the Falconettis for their hospitality. Then she’d gone back upstairs to fry some for Joseph’s dinner.

  Now, waiting for her sausage to work its magic, Mrs. Santangelo decided to help it along.

  “And number six.” She flexed the fingers of her left hand and held her right thumb beside it. “You don’t even know the girl.”

  This last point hit Joseph so hard that he forgot to swallow and inhaled his food. Hurrying over, his mother pounded his back and with every slap, Joseph thought: She’s right. He didn’t know Catherine Falconetti from the Blessed Virgin Mary. For all he knew, she could be stupid, insane, lazy in bed, a shrew and a nonstop talker. Or maybe he was the crazy one, marrying a total
stranger to collect on some drunken old man’s pinochle bet.

  And then, for the first time that either of them could remember, his mother’s own magic worked against her. For as Joseph stared down at his plate, he thought of the sausage he’d rubbed in front of Catherine’s face, and of her serious wide eyes watching him. More than anything in the world, he wanted to see her look like that again.

  Sensing the sudden change in him, Mrs. Santangelo resorted to her darkest tone, saying, “Joseph, if you marry that girl, your whole life will taste like that meal.”

  But Joseph’s only reaction to this gloomy prophecy was a dreamy grin.

  “As I remember,” he said, “the antipasto was delicious.”

  Across the street, Mrs. Santangelo’s plans were working no better. She had hoped that a peppery sausage meal might fire the Falconettis up to resist Joseph’s claim on Catherine. But the sausage, perfectly cooked, put Lino in such an unusually good mood that he gave up struggling against his fate and embraced it as a blessing in disguise: He wasn’t losing a daughter, he was gaining a lifetime supply of sausage.

  “Nice of the old lady to send this over,” he said.

  “After that meal we served her,” said Catherine, “it’s a miracle.” Then, knowing that neither her father nor brother would say it for her, she added, “It’s delicious.”

  “Good thing you think so,” said Nicky. “You’ll be eating enough of it from now on.”

  “What’s your problem?” said Lino.

  Picking at his food, Nicky was wondering if Madame Butterfly had had a brother, and thinking: Lucky him. Other men’s sisters were exquisite geishas who fell madly in love with dashing lieutenants and wound up singing arias with samurai swords in their chests. His sister married the butcher from across the street, on a pinochle bet. Most likely she’d get fat with the first kid and go on to have ten more. At sixty, she’d be able to pass for Mrs. Santangelo’s twin, with mean little eyes and legs as swollen as the sausage she stuffed for the shop. This image ruined Nicky’s appetite, and he pushed his plate away. The sausage, sent over for courage, so disheartened him that he felt a sinking sensation, forgot where he was, and spoke his private thoughts out loud: “Some guys, their life’s like Madame Butterfly. But for guys like us, it’s nothing but sausage and pinochle.”

  “What’s wrong with sausage?” said Lino, and would have kicked Nicky under the table if he hadn’t been afraid of startling him into deeper trouble. Why bring up pinochle? The last thing they needed was for Catherine to find out about that card game. But he needn’t have worried. Catherine was busy enjoying her meal and was only half-listening.

  She was thinking of how Bacall had told Bogart to whistle for her, of how Joseph Santangelo had told her that the food was great; she was considering this with one part of her mind and listening with the other. Yet perhaps the strains became confused, because now, in a gesture of tenderness so rare that it made Nicky jump, she reached out and took her brother’s hand.

  “Nicky,” she said, “it could be worse. There’s a lot worse in life than sausage and pinochle.”

  The neighborhood outdid itself for Joseph and Catherine’s wedding; no one would have missed it for the world. Even hard-boiled cynics were intrigued by the romance of this marriage, arranged not just in heaven, but in a pinochle game. Recluses made plans to emerge, and the bad boys who had to be dragged to their own sisters’ weddings now imagined telling their grandchildren that they had witnessed this historic event. Only the children, with their love of parties and sugared almonds, didn’t care whose wedding it was, but were glad for any excuse to stay up late, run around, and dance.

  At the bars and cafes, a man couldn’t pick up a pinochle deck without thinking of the upcoming wedding. Romantics were reminded of their own courtships, and couples married thirty years fell in love all over again. At night, the husbands said to their wives, “Isn’t that how it was with us? I won you in a card game.” And in the daytime, the women said to their friends, “Isn’t that how it is? One way or another, you win your husband in a card game.”

  The days leading up to the wedding were like the week before Christmas. The caterer’s assistant blanched and sugared fifty pounds of almonds. The bakers worked all night. The women skinned hundreds of tomatoes, diced thousands of onions, and slid them into vats of sauce which got richer and thicker all week. To make their work go faster, they took turns telling the story of how Joseph had won the Falconetti girl at pinochle for a blast of cold air. It was the best kind of gossip, juicy and bittersweet. Always they ended it by wishing the couple a dozen healthy children, then knocked on wood—not so much for protection from the spirits as from the presence of Mrs. Santangelo and the fact that Catherine didn’t seem to know the story at all.

  It was Catherine’s impression that Mrs. Santangelo was arranging a small reception for relatives and close friends; it went without saying that the bride’s family would never be able to manage it.

  Actually Catherine wasn’t thinking much about the wedding; she was too busy trying to keep her mind off the fact that she was getting married. She couldn’t stop thinking about Joseph Santangelo, though in all this time she saw him only twice, both times at the shop. On the first occasion, she counted four quarters into his hand, then realized that two of them were nickels. He pressed the coins back on her as if they were performing some awkward secret handshake, and told her to keep her money; he didn’t feel right about taking it. The other time, she was so self-conscious in front of the other customers that she waved them to go before her, which only shamed her more: Now they would think that she was stalling for extra time to watch Joseph. And she was watching him as he paced behind the counter—carving, weighing, flashing the ladies his smiles. She kept thinking, “Why does he want to marry me?” But even with her secondhand knowledge of men and women, she knew better than to ask. Did Ingrid Bergman ask Rossellini, “Why me?” That day, she ran out of the store without buying anything, went home and told Lino that he could do the meat shopping for a while because it was bad luck to see your fiancé too often before the wedding.

  “Our luck’s so bad already,” said Lino. “I wouldn’t worry.”

  Catherine’s greatest worry—which reflected nothing so much as the limit she put on her fantasies—was that after the ceremony, when it was time for her and Joseph to kiss, they would miss each other’s mouths. This preoccupation carried her though the last-minute preparations, up the aisle, and well into the service.

  The kiss at the altar was on target, more or less, but so hasty that its accuracy didn’t register. For all the passion in that first embrace, Joseph and Catherine might have been birds pecking water. By then, both had woken to the fact that all this was real, and both were in a panic. Somehow Joseph got his arm around Catherine’s shoulders and steered her around; they leaned against each other, down the aisle. They emerged into the daylight, blinking at the crowd of onlookers cheering and pelting them with rice. By the time their eyes adjusted to the sun, they were halfway down the block, on the steps of the parish hall.

  Joseph’s arm dropped. They couldn’t look at each other; neither could think of a word to say. They just stood there in the middle of the banquet room, feeling like two party crashers with the bad sense to arrive before any of the invited guests.

  Then Catherine saw the tables, each with its bowl of yellow chrysanthemums, its baskets of sugared almonds, trays of cigars, magnums of champagne on ice, the buffet spread, the platters of sliced meats, cold shrimp, pickled mussels, cheeses and cakes, chafing dishes of fettuccine and chicken Marsala, gardens of parsley, carrot curls, radish roses growing from stalks of fresh asparagus.

  “Joseph,” she said, “who did this?”

  “You’d be amazed what my mother can do when she puts her mind to it,” said Joseph. God help me, he thought. The first thing I tell her after the wedding is a lie.

  “Asparagus in November? Even your mother couldn’t do that.”

  “Asparagus? That must be Fr
ank Manzone. Let’s get something to drink.” Joseph jumped at the first loud pop, which he misheard as a gunshot.

  “Champagne?”

  “Sure.” Catherine drank three glasses in quick succession.

  The hall filled up with guests, a blur of eating and drinking, sitting down and standing up. Catherine found herself at a dozen different tables; as soon as she approached, they refilled her champagne glass. There were toasts which Catherine could never quite hear, followed by bursts of applause; then everyone turned toward her and she sensed that she was supposed to smile. Faces came into focus, congratulating her—always, she noticed, with the most peculiar expressions, as if they knew something she didn’t.

  Intermittently, people left her alone, as if by some private agreement she had become invisible. She was walking to stay conscious, lurching actually, around the perimeter of the room. On one of these slow revolutions, she passed Lino and Nicky—drinking all alone, in silence, at a corner table. She didn’t stop, nor did they call out to her.

  Never in all this walking did she once pass Joseph. In fact she fled from him, around and around the hall, without losing sight of him for a minute. She watched him kissing the ladies, hugging and slapping their husbands’ backs, always with an envelope in his hand. He seemed to have forgotten her, which excited her; she knew that he hadn’t forgotten.

  It was an odd time to think of the Bible, but suddenly Catherine caught herself thinking of the marriage at Cana, the wedding at which Jesus changed the water into wine. This, she thought, is the same story: A poor couple gets married, expecting nothing. And wham, out of nowhere, there’s music, wine: All you can drink.

  A band (two guitars, a bass and a mandolin) struck up a tarantella. The first ones on the dance floor were children, who whirled around in circles till they got dizzy and fell down. Then three old women danced a graceful scarf dance, their heavy bodies lovely in rippling black taffeta.

  Catherine had always imagined the people in the Bible as Italians, and now she pictured a big Italian wedding at Cana, with Jesus like somebody’s great uncle crying, “Drink, drink! More wine, Cousin Leo, more wine!” Then she thought of the bride at this wedding and wondered, who was she? Was it possible that she resented it? After all, it was her wedding, but the star of the show was Jesus with His magic tricks, His water into wine. Most likely, no one had paid any attention to her.