Household Saints Page 5

  Catherine wondered if this was how all brides felt on their wedding day—like spectators, or travelers who have stumbled in on the ceremonies of an alien religion. What a waste, she thought, what a pity to let such feelings spoil a wedding, when God Himself is providing the wine.

  And she stopped at another table, where they refilled her glass.

  2

  Wedding Night

  TWO DAYS BEFORE THE wedding, Augie Santangelo walked into Joseph’s shop with a present for his brother. Inside a crisp manila envelope, which looked as if it should have contained a deed or a will, was a magazine called Wedding Night, a kind of comic book with photos instead of drawings. Joseph glanced at the title, thanked Augie, and slipped the magazine back inside the envelope. But on the afternoon of the ceremony, he rested up before the wedding by reading it from cover to cover a dozen times.

  The first shots showed a ’46 Buick, festooned with tin cans and streamers, pulling up to a rambling wooden structure marked “Honeymoon Hotel.” The next page belonged to the groom—middle-aged, balding, with a greasy pencil moustache, mugging nervousness at the camera as he signs the hotel register. Then an elevator scene, the groom and the bellhop smirking, with the shy blonde bride half-disappeared into the woodwork; into the room, and a photo of the bride from the back, heading for the bathroom so fast that her train and veil are a white blur. Shots of the husband pacing the room, checking his watch, kneeling outside the bathroom door and talking through the keyhole—until the door opens and there on the very last page is his wife, pouting and licking her glossy lips, a tough, busty blonde in high heels and a sheer black nightie.

  Now, on his wedding night, as Joseph lay in bed waiting for his own bride to return from the bathroom, it occurred to him that the couple in the magazine weren’t staying in a small apartment with the groom’s mother. Imagine Catherine sashaying down the hall in that get-up. The doorknob clicked, and while Joseph would not have been disappointed by the blonde in her push-up bra, he was more excited by the sight of Catherine in her little white dress, her white angora sweater trimmed with pearls.

  Catherine closed the door and stood with her back against it. She had always reminded Joseph of an alley cat, and now, like a newly adopted stray, she seemed to be casing the room for a bed to dive beneath, a bureau to crawl behind.

  Joseph raised himself up on one elbow.

  “Nice dress.”

  “Thanks.” Unable to look at him, Catherine searched the room for something to focus on. She passed over the faded gray and rose carpeting, the hard wooden chair, the obligatory crucifix on the wall, lingered briefly at the framed photo on the dresser: Joseph and Augie in bathing trunks, posed arm in arm before the parachute jump at Coney Island. Behind the photo was a mirror, and there in the mirror was Joseph in bed.

  “You need something?” he asked.

  “Someplace to change.”

  “What are you going to change into? Batman?” Joseph chuckled at his own joke, then instantly regretted it as Catherine turned white as her wedding dress and said, “Change my clothes.”

  “Right. Well, go ahead. I won’t look, I promise.”

  “Here?”

  “There’s always the bathroom.” Joseph shrugged.

  “Your mother’s in there now.”

  “Too bad. She’ll be in there all night.”

  “In that case, I guess here’s okay.”

  Reaching up to unfasten the clip of artificial feathers which held her veil in place, Catherine realized how tipsy she was; the effort nearly threw her off balance. The bobby pins caught in her hair, raising stiff hairsprayed points which stuck out from her head like antennae and defied her attempts to pat them down.

  “Where’s the cord?” she said.

  “What cord?”

  “To turn out the light.”

  Joseph pointed to a switch near his bed and said, “How about leaving it on?”

  “Are you crazy? You start undressing with the lights on, there’s fifty guys on the fire escape before you’ve got your top button undone. Little girls know that, little kids with nothing to show.”

  From the visible evidence, Catherine herself had nothing much to show. Yet Joseph had climbed a few fire escapes in his time, and he knew that what she had was enough. He rolled onto his stomach to hide himself, just as he’d done on those fire escapes, even when there was nothing to see. Yet now his excitement was only half sexual and half the thrill of finding himself a married man with a wife he was honor-bound to protect.

  “What guys?” he said. “Tell me their names, I’ll kill them.”

  “Those guys on the fire escape right now. Turn out the lights and you’ll see.”

  “Okay, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll get the light, you undress and hop in.”

  “It’s a deal.” Quickly Catherine checked for her overnight bag, memorizing the arrangement of the room so she could change in the dark and find the bed.

  Joseph leaned over and flipped the switch. The night lamp went out, but the ceiling fixture stayed on. The room was nearly as bright as before.

  “You cheated,” said Catherine.

  “For a Santangelo, that’s the greatest compliment there is. And now that you’re part of the Santangelo family, I’ll never cheat on you, just for you.”

  Too dizzy to understand the distinction, Catherine sighed and thought how much easier it was before she knew she was going to marry Joseph—how simple it had been to stick up for her rights and make sure that the butcher gave her a fair deal. Now what was hers was Joseph Santangelo’s, and she no longer knew what her rights were.

  So she turned resolutely, opened her suitcase, and fished out her pink flannel nightgown. In doing so, she recalled a photo of Rita Hayworth showing off her wedding trousseau—all lace and silk and pale filmy satin.

  “She doesn’t have to buy stuff to last all winter,” Catherine said aloud, as if called upon to defend herself. “You marry Ali Khan, you can wear a nightgown once and throw it away.”

  “Huh?” said Joseph.

  “Nothing.” Catherine slid the nightgown over her head, smoothed it down in back and let it ruck up in front so she could undo the tiny buttons on her dress. Her dress and half-slip slid down in a circle around her feet. Stepping out of it, she tripped, then turned to face Joseph.

  “Please,” she said. “Please turn out the light.”

  She forced herself to watch as Joseph jumped out of bed, crossed the room in two steps and turned off the wall switch. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, he looked as natural and unashamed as he did in his butcher’s coat in the shop. The ceiling light went out, and the springs creaked loudly as Joseph got back into bed. Catherine was left trying to figure out why the room was still so light.

  From outside the window, a street lamp shone in through the blue curtains, illuminating the room with the dusky glow of a grotto—soft, yet bright enough for Catherine to make out the photo of Joseph, bare-chested, one arm around Augie’s shoulders, smiling the same cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile he was smiling now.

  “You win,” said Catherine.

  Revealing a minimum of flesh, she unfastened her stockings, garter belt and bra, eased the whole mass down beneath her nightgown, and stuck her arms into the sleeves. Then she lifted the blanket and lay down on her back, as far from Joseph as the narrow bed would permit.

  Joseph rolled toward her and in one motion raised the hem of her nightgown to her chin. He slid one hand down the front of her body, grazing her skin.

  “Scared?”

  “No,” said Catherine, though in fact she was shaking so hard, she had to hold her breath to keep from rocking the bed.

  “Don’t be scared.” Then in a husky voice, Joseph said, “Hey, remember what I told you that day in the shop, that I’d show you where I could put my thumb?”

  Catherine nodded.

  “Well, here’s what I meant.” Joseph moved his thumb down her stomach. “Understand?”

  Even before Catherine shook her hea
d, Joseph realized that she didn’t understand at all. So he took his thumb out from beneath the sheet and put it in his mouth till it was wet, then slid it very gently back between her legs.

  “Now? Now do you understand?”

  When her back arched forward, pressing her hips toward his hand, Joseph knew that she understood.

  “Now look. Look what else I can put there.”

  He slipped down his shorts, knelt between her legs and entered her, thanking God for how easy it was, despite what he’d heard about virgins.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  Catherine caught her breath, then slowly began to move against him.

  “Santangelo,” she said. “Santangelo, Santangelo.”

  She forgot where she was, forgot everything but his face in the underwater light, everything but the urgency (a million times sharper than the exigency of watering a new plant), the sweetness of doing something that absolutely cannot wait.

  Then she remembered, and froze.

  Joseph stopped.

  “What’s the matter? Am I hurting you?”

  “The bedsprings. Listen, they’re creaking like crazy. And your Mama’s right there in the next room….”

  “No problem. She sleeps like a log.”

  This was a lie. And yet if God had taken Joseph Santangelo at that moment, He would not have sent him to that special circle of hell reserved for men who can lie to women in bed. For in his heart, Joseph was telling the truth—if not the truth on Mulberry Street, then the truth in some other world, some underwater-blue grotto where bedsprings creaked celestial music, where angels sang Santangelo Santangelo Santangelo, and mothers slept through it all like logs.

  Catherine awoke in a circle of light, warm through the blue curtains. Alone in bed, she curled up and pulled the covers around her chin. After a while her thumb wandered to the place where Joseph’s had been last night, but it was not at all like Joseph’s, and even less like that other thing of his for which she still had no name, and which seemed to her now like some miracle she must have imagined. Then she heard footsteps in the hall, heavy reproachful steps which shamed her out of bed and into the kitchen to begin her new life as Mrs. Santangelo’s daughter-in-law.

  Mrs. Santangelo was standing at the sink, cutting up a chicken. The set of her back told the whole story.

  “You sleep okay?” she said.

  “Like a log.”

  “Not me. I slept terrible.”

  If at that moment an erupting volcano had threatened to bury Mulberry Street, Catherine would have welcomed it with open arms. With no volcano to rescue her, she sank into a chair by the kitchen table and prepared for the worst. But what followed was not quite the martyrdom of embarrassment she expected.

  “It’s my late husband Zio,” said Mrs. Santangelo. “May he rest in peace.”

  “I guess you must miss him.” Catherine felt a rush of sympathy for all the lovers in the world, even Mrs. Santangelo. She wondered how a woman could possibly survive the loss of her husband; after one night of marriage, she was already praying that Joseph would outlive her.

  “Miss him?” Mrs. Santangelo laughed. “How can I miss him when he won’t go away? Fact is, I don’t know why I bother saying rest in peace. If my Zio was resting in peace, he wouldn’t be coming back and pestering me. Right?”

  “What?”

  “Always he picks the worst nights. When I been working like a dog, or like last night, after the wedding and all that excitement, my chest was hurting so terrible, I had to take a pill. And I’m finally closing my eyes when I smell that rotten cigar smoke, and there’s Zio.

  “‘Zio,’ I say, ‘What kind of hour is this for visiting?’

  “‘It’s all God’s time,’ says Zio. That’s how he talks.

  “‘Listen to you,’ I say.

  “‘Carmela,’ he says. ‘What is more precious than rubies?’ Up in heaven, my Zio has become a big Bible reader, always showing off and quizzing me.

  “‘I give up,’ I say. ‘What?’

  “‘A virtuous wife,’ he tells me. ‘A virtuous wife is more precious than rubies.’ Then he says, ‘But the most precious ruby of all is the blood.’ I ask you: Would you understand, a man talks like that?”

  Catherine shook her head.

  “‘Blood?’ I say. ‘What blood?’

  “‘The blood of a virgin on her wedding night,’ he says. And I’ll tell you, I blushed. I didn’t think they talked about such things in heaven.

  “‘And tonight,’ says Zio, ‘there are no rubies in the Santangelo home.’”

  After a dramatic pause, Mrs. Santangelo put down the chicken, rinsed her hands and turned to glare at Catherine.

  “How about it? Was there blood on my Joseph’s sheets?”

  “I didn’t look.”

  “Then I’ll go look.” Mrs. Santangelo was out the door and halfway down the hall before Catherine could catch up. By the time Catherine reached the bedroom, Mrs. Santangelo had stripped off the blanket to reveal a wrinkled bottom sheet, some dust specks, a few dark hairs and a number of yellowish stains. The sight of it made Catherine’s knees weak.

  “Disgrace,” hissed Mrs. Santangelo. “Infamy.”

  She bustled out of the room and returned seconds later with a shot glass full of what looked like wine.

  “You know what this is?” She shoved the glass under Catherine’s nose. Catherine jerked her head back from the stinking liquid. Then she thought: It smells like Joseph, and it was all she could do to keep from sniffing it again.

  “That’s right!” cried Mrs. Santangelo. “Chicken blood!”

  With one sharp pull, she had the bottom sheet in a heap on the floor. She gave the shot glass a quick, disdainful toss, and blood splashed across the center of the sheet.

  “That’s what it is! All your bouncing springs, your giggling and moaning, your Santangelo Santangelo Santangelo! It’s nothing but chicken blood, a patch of chicken blood and nothing more! You understand?”

  In her fury, Mrs. Santangelo seemed to puff up like an angry brood hen and flutter several inches off the ground. Catherine saw a giant vein pulsing in her mother-in-law’s neck in an awesome galloping rhythm which so alarmed her that she forgot to be ashamed, forgot even to wonder why there wasn’t any blood.

  “If this was the old country,” continued Mrs. Santangelo, “if this was anyplace decent, we’d go right now and hang this sheet from the kitchen window so everyone could see. But even here in America, there are ways. Ways to do what we have to do, when we have to do it. Steps that can be taken when the Santangelo family honor is at stake. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest.” In her panic, Catherine wondered how Deborah Kerr would have acted in a similar situation.

  “Don’t talk fresh to me. What I’m saying is: Last night, just before my Zio left to go wherever he goes, he tells me one last thing: “‘Carmela,’ he says, and you know I’m telling you the truth, how could I make this up? ‘Carmela,’ he says, ‘cover our Joseph’s sheet with rubies and send it to the Chinese laundry.’”

  It was obvious to Catherine that Mrs. Santangelo was crazy—but of course she would never say that to Joseph. Already, with her overnight knowledge of men and women, she realized that you don’t go telling a man that his mother is crazy—not if you want more of what you got on your wedding night.

  Pausing in the hallway, Catherine refolded the sheet so that the blood stain was hidden on the inside. Then she tucked it under her arm and headed for the Chinese laundry on the corner of Mott Street and Grand.

  On the way, it occurred to her that the circumstances of your life could be deduced from the way you did your laundry. Movie stars, she imagined, had everything dry-cleaned. She recalled her father telling her of the unlucky Falconetti woman who fell into the Tiber while beating her clothes on its rocky banks. Catherine, who had always used her mother’s hand-crank washer in the kitchen, pictured hell as an eternity of ironing shirts, a doom alleviated only slightly by th
e fact that Lino and Nicky weren’t especially particular about their collars and cuffs. Still, she’d never in her life used the Chinese laundry. Who could afford such luxuries? And besides, the Falconettis weren’t the sort of family who paid other people to do their dirty wash.

  As soon as she got to the laundry, she realized that Mrs. Santangelo had never been there either. For if her mother-in-law imagined it as a public place and believed that sending her sheets there was the equivalent of hanging them from the window, she couldn’t have been more wrong.

  The laundry was as dim as a confessional, and the old Chinese man was as odd, distant, and private as any priest. In fact, thought Catherine, the laundry would keep her secrets better than a confessional. Priests had been known to gossip, but the Chinaman could barely speak English.

  “Starch?” he said. The rattle and slam of the trouser press, which a young Chinese woman was operating in the back of the shop, made it nearly impossible to hear.

  “Starch in the sheets?” said Catherine.

  “No starch.” The old man took the sheet from her and stuffed it into a hamper behind the counter.

  “Tuesday,” he said.

  Only later, on the way home, did Catherine begin to wonder why there hadn’t been blood on the sheets. Finally she decided that blood was for the old days, when families hung the nuptial linens from their balconies. This was America, in the twentieth century, where girls grew taller than their mothers and virgins didn’t bleed. A million to one, she bet, there had been no blood on Rita Hayworth’s satin sheets. Luckily, there was no one around to bet against, for she knew that no movie magazine on earth would settle such a bet…. Not that she wanted a movie magazine. All Catherine really wanted was to go home and sleep till Joseph woke her getting into bed.