Household Saints Page 6

  Daydreaming, she overshot the Santangelos’ door and was passing the shop when its smell evoked the miracles of the previous night and made her knees go weak all over again. All night, the smell of meat and blood had clung to Joseph’s warm skin; by dawn, Catherine had found herself hunting it on his body, rooting for the secret places where it lingered.

  Joseph, who’d been chatting with Frank Manzone, fell silent when Catherine entered the store. She wondered, had they been talking about her? Too shaky to move, she nodded to him from the doorway.

  For a few moments, the neon light seemed to flicker and dim to the glow of a street lamp filtering in through blue curtains. Everything stopped, as if frozen in time, and did not begin again till Frank Manzone laughed, slapped his friend on the shoulder, and said, “I got the feeling you and me won’t be playing much pinochle tonight.”

  “You’re crazy,” said Joseph. “I’ll see you later. Same time, same place.”

  But Joseph was no longer the same.

  That night, he played two hands, then opened his mouth, yawned, rubbed his eyes and seemed so generally exhausted that it took all his energy to stand up and say, “Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure. Good night.”

  “What’s the matter?” said Frank Manzone. “Something come up at home, ha ha?” And when Joseph wouldn’t laugh, Frank turned to the Falconettis and said, “Boys, I got the feeling we won’t be playing pinochle for a while.”

  There followed that uncomfortable interval when the host is ready for the evening to end and stands there impatiently, faking yawns while his guests gather their things and go. But who could blame Joseph for this breach of hospitality? Surely not Frank Manzone, who remembered the start of his own married life, when he’d lost all interest in cards and couldn’t believe that he’d ever have time for pinochle again. Even the Falconettis weren’t affronted, just a little surprised that Joseph would pick Catherine over pinochle, when they had chosen the opposite way for so many years.

  Joseph was more surprised than anyone. Earlier that evening, after dinner, he’d sat at the kitchen table watching the women wash and dry the dishes. When they finished, and his mother was holding the glasses up to the light, inspecting them for streaks, Catherine had reached back to untie her apron. The sight of the thin cotton apron tightening over her tiny breasts had excited him; later, just the thought of it was enough to throw off his pinochle game. Leaving the shop, he had only one regret: It was still too early for bed.

  “Hey Catherine,” he said, the minute he got home. “How about a little walk?”

  “Where’s there to go?” said Mrs. Santangelo, who had never known her son to take a stroll for no reason. “Nowhere.”

  “Nowhere and back.” Joseph grabbed Catherine’s elbow and steered her out the door.

  There was nowhere to go, but neither of them noticed as they paced the streets, past the darkened shop windows in which there was nothing to see. Nor was there anything to say.

  “Nice evening,” ventured Joseph.

  “Beautiful,” said Catherine, thinking that she had never taken such a pleasant and interesting walk in her life.

  Often Joseph had heard it said that you could tell if a woman was getting laid from the way she moved. Now he was relieved to see that this wasn’t true of Catherine, who was walking the same as before. He was so busy studying her for signs of change that they were nearly run over by a big green Plymouth rounding the corner of Mulberry and Hester.

  Joseph yanked Catherine back from the curb and hugged her against him so tight that she couldn’t breathe.

  “We better get off the streets,” he said. “We’re a menace to the public safety.”

  Upstairs, Mrs. Santangelo had gone to sleep. They went directly to the bedroom, where now it was Catherine’s turn to be surprised. For how could she have imagined that the bedsprings could creak louder than the night before?

  “Santangelo!” she cried, and had to bite the edge of the pillow to keep from calling his name again.

  Like Joseph, Catherine was no longer the same. In twenty-four hours, she had become a married woman. And though this change was so subtle that it went unnoticed by her own husband, its principal symptom was this:

  Several times during that night, she looked over at Joseph’s bureau, its polished surface glinting in the street light, and she thought: How nice an African violet would look, right there.

  Mrs. Santangelo didn’t agree, but neither did she make a point of it. She tended to her sausage-making and kept quiet as Catherine moved her plants, one by one, from the Falconetti apartment. Frequently Catherine would turn from watering a plant to find her mother-in-law peering over her shoulder and glowering—just like Judith Anderson creeping up on Joan Fontaine in Rebecca. At such times, she felt sorry for Joan Fontaine, always wondering if the old lady and her husband were in cahoots. Catherine knew she could count on Joseph, knew from what happened between them every night in bed that he would defend her in anything—which is why she had the courage to move her plants over in the first place.

  It was lucky that her plants had adapted to Lino’s dark kitchen; here across the street, there was even less sun. And it was a miracle that they continued to survive under Mrs. Santangelo’s withering eye.

  One night at dinner, Joseph complimented his mother on the escarole fried in garlic.

  “Escarole?” she said. “You think this is escarole?”

  “Sure, it’s escarole.” Joseph helped himself to another portion. “It’s delicious.”

  “It’s African violets!” With a sweep of her arm. Mrs. Santangelo indicated every plant in the apartment, and her tone made the modest little violets sound like some barbaric head-hunting tribe which Catherine had invited in to live with them.

  “What’s this got to do with escarole?” said Joseph.

  “Garbage!” cried his mother. “That’s what it’s got to do with! Garbage growing in those pots, breathing our air, stealing the oxygen out of your mouth when you’re asleep in bed at night….”

  “Hold it,” said Joseph. “Just hold it.”

  Mrs. Santangelo should never have mentioned the bed. Suddenly Joseph felt such affection for Catherine that he fell in love with her plants.

  A green thumb! How could he have overlooked the ferns and ivy which—he saw now—had taken over much of his mother’s counter space? How could he have missed this evidence of Catherine’s tenderness and care, this clue to the life she led before they were together? Now as if to compensate, he paid special attention to each plant, particularly the latest addition—so recently arrived from across the street that even Mrs. Santangelo hadn’t spotted it.

  “Mama,” he said. “Look at the altar.”

  Directly in front of the image of San Gennaro was a fuzzy-leafed plant in a small clay pot.

  Mrs. Santangelo took one look and grabbed her chest.

  “I’m dying!” she cried. Yet she was clearly alive enough to scream at the top of her lungs,

  “Get that garbage off there!”

  “It’s not garbage,” Catherine said quietly. “It’s a geranium. And I can’t take it back. I gave it to the saint.”

  “You aren’t even Neapolitan,” said Mrs. Santangelo. “Gennaro isn’t even your saint.”

  “He’s Joseph’s family’s saint,” said Catherine, with such a sweet wifely smile that Joseph, feeling like a fool, smiled back. “So I guess now he’s mine.”

  “Catherine’s right,” said Joseph. “You give something to a saint, you can’t just change your mind and take it back.”

  Even Mrs. Santangelo couldn’t argue with the logic of that, and so Catherine’s plants gained a somewhat firmer foothold in the Santangelo apartment.

  By the next morning, they had claimed it as their rightful territory.

  Shortly before dawn, Mrs. Santangelo woke up choking from the lack of oxygen which the plants had stolen overnight. On her way to the kitchen, she shot a hateful look at the altar. Then, fearing that the saint might misunderstand, she
lit a votive candle and carried it toward the mantel. She looked at Catherine’s geranium, looked away, made the sign of the horns and looked again.

  “Joseph!” she called. “Wake up! There’s been a miracle!”

  Last night’s grubby and unpromising geranium had bloomed—two huge crimson blossoms cradled in San Gennaro’s outstretched arms.

  “It’s a miracle.” Mrs. Santangelo bobbed up and down and crossed herself as her son and daughter-in-law entered the room. “Last night that plant was a mess. And now?”

  “Sure, Mama,” Joseph agreed sleepily. Anything to keep peace in the family was a miracle. “Right, Catherine?”

  “Right,” said Catherine. “A miracle.”

  It wasn’t a complete lie. There was always something miraculous about the flowering of a plant. But miracles, as Catherine understood them, were supposed to be surprises—God’s way of shocking you into believing. And there was nothing surprising about those flowers. The geranium had been in bud, due to blossom any day. That was why she’d put it on the altar. Yet if Mrs. Santangelo wanted to believe it was a miracle, Catherine would not disillusion her. For she knew that she could trade on her new power as a worker of minor miracles for the one privilege which she had craved since the start of her married life:

  That same day, Catherine asked Joseph if she could work in the shop.

  Next to the bedroom, the shop was her favorite place, for it was only in those two places that she could find Joseph’s smell. She loved to watch him work, loved most of all to think that those hands which sliced and boned so deftly were the same ones which would touch her so gently that night.

  Joseph couldn’t believe that she really liked the smell. Ignoring her protests, he took hot showers before coming to bed. When she walked into the store to find him elbow-deep in gristle and blood, he was horrified to think that she might recognize those arms as the same ones which held her in bed.

  “What would you do in the shop?” he said. “It’s a man’s work, it takes muscles—”

  “It takes two fingers to work the cash register,” said Catherine.

  And so the job of cashier was invented for her.

  Mrs. Santangelo saw evil omens in every aspect of this arrangement.

  “That’s the end of the Santangelo business,” she predicted. “My Zio is turning over in his grave so fast, he can’t get up and visit me.”

  Mrs. Santangelo’s prophecies had a disconcerting tendency to come true, and Joseph feared that this one had a better chance than most. It seemed inevitable that Catherine’s help would hurt the business. How could he flirt with his customers if she were there? And more important, how could he cheat them with Catherine looking over his shoulder?

  As it happened, there was no need for Joseph to abandon these practices. In fact, Catherine’s presence made them easier. The saddest old women, the ones with no time or patience for flirting, were impressed by how nicely Joseph talked to Catherine—nicer than their husbands had ever talked to them. And there was nothing the others liked more than to catch a wink from Joseph when his pretty little wife’s back was turned.

  Of course Catherine’s back was never completely turned, but she forgave Joseph the winks, just as his customers overlooked the short weights. For she knew that he was winking for her, cheating for her, and she felt that loyalty stronger even than love—the passionate bond of partners-in-crime.

  Despite Mrs. Santangelo’s predictions, the business flourished—and yet she was not convinced. She continued to oppose Catherine’s working, if for no other reason than that her Zio had never let her work. And she took consolation in the old saying that God will never allow your wealth to multiply faster than the number of mouths at your table.

  Soon enough, she predicted, the nightly creaking of bedsprings would put an end to Catherine’s working career. And so, like a besieged and dethroned queen, she retreated to the heart of her fortress and waited for her kingdom to be restored.

  The first sign came on a muggy Friday morning in September, almost a year after Joseph and Catherine were married. The store was crowded with women shopping for the weekend, each one with small talk for Catherine, a giggle for Joseph.

  Suddenly Catherine felt as if the floor were sliding out from beneath her feet and the sawdust rising up to meet her.

  As luck would have it, Evelyn Santangelo walked into the shop just as Catherine ran out.

  “Hey!” called Evelyn. “How’s the little cashier?”

  “Fine,” Catherine muttered through clenched teeth, then brushed past her sister-in-law and headed into the street for some air. By the time she returned, feeling only slightly better, half of Mulberry Street knew that she and Joseph were expecting a child—a fact which Catherine had yet to admit to herself.

  “Congratulations!” said Evelyn. “You look a little green around the gills. Wait. It gets worse. With me it was gasoline. Every time I pulled into a gas station, I had to run straight to the Ladies’.” She waved at the cars parked out on the street, to remind everyone that she was from the suburbs and drove a Chrysler.

  “Congratulations!” chorused the younger women, Americans like Evelyn, while the older ones bit their lips because it was bad luck to offer congratulations so early in a pregnancy.

  “What do you want?” Evelyn rattled on. “Boy or girl? How about a little boy cousin for my Stacey?”

  “What’s this?” Joseph was so surprised by the drift of things that he momentarily forgot the others’ presence. “Catherine, is this the truth?”

  “Could be,” said Catherine.

  “Isn’t that typical?” said Evelyn. “Papa’s always the last to know.”

  Until that morning, thought Catherine, there hadn’t been anything to know; except for two missed periods, she’d felt no different. But as soon as Evelyn and her big mouth were turned loose on Mulberry Street, Catherine’s pregnancy became an established fact. She had no physical symptoms; in the mirror, she looked exactly the same. But people talked to her, looked at her in a new way. It was, she thought, as if you knew you were Italian and everyone acted as if you were Chinese. Now, women she’d never spoken to felt free to offer advice, information, predictions of her baby’s sex:

  “Boys don’t show till the sixth month—then they pop out like mushrooms.”

  “The way you can tell is: It’s the girls make your gums bleed.”

  “You can’t be sure till the last month. Then, if your fingers swell, you know for sure it’s a boy.”

  But all the prophets agreed on two things. The first was that it made no difference, girl or boy, so long as the child was healthy. Which reminded them of the second: A woman in Catherine’s condition shouldn’t be working in a butcher shop.

  Total strangers started warning her against working there. No one had hard evidence. Though everyone knew stories of mothers who brought forth gibbons after innocent trips to the zoo, children born with ghastly deformities because their fathers worked on Sant’Anielo’s day, no one could cite specific instances of pregnant women harmed at the butcher’s. Still, the women had a vague intuition: It didn’t seem right.

  “Doesn’t it make you queasy?” asked Joseph’s customers. “All this blood … the smell … in your state …?”

  “You know how some women are about pickles and ice cream?” said Catherine. “That’s how I am about this shop.”

  But she could never look them in the eye as she said this, for she knew that what she really craved was Joseph and the smell of Joseph’s skin.

  She and Joseph rarely discussed the baby, except to say that they couldn’t believe it was really coming. Yet always now, in the midst of making love, Joseph would stop and say, “Is it safe? Are you sure it’s all right?”

  “I’m sure,” said Catherine, urging him on. “If it isn’t all right, what is?”

  But once again, Mrs. Santangelo disagreed.

  A counter of days, an observer of signs, Carmela Santangelo kept intimate track of her daughter-in-law’s biological life
, and thus was the first to know that she was pregnant. Thrilled by the prospect of another grandchild, Mrs. Santangelo waited till she was sure, then held a burning candle over a basin of water. The wax solidified—not in separate droplets, but in one long curlicue which floated to the top.

  “A boy,” whispered Mrs. Santangelo. “Baby Zio.”

  They would call him Zio, and she herself would wean him on milk, bread, and honey. She would feed him pasta and good cheese, not Chinese pork like her undernourished grandchildren on the Island, and little Zio would grow closer to her than her own sons had been before they grew up and left her.

  Mrs. Santangelo took the candle, set it in front of San Gennaro and was just about to thank him for this blessing in her old age when a breeze gusted in the window and blew out the candle. She crossed herself.

  “God help us,” she said.

  That evening, she located Zio’s St. Anthony’s horn, wrapped in tissue at the back of her bureau drawer.

  “It was my husband’s,” she said, tying the cord around Catherine’s neck. “It’s not for you, it’s for the baby.”

  But despite the good effects of Zio’s cornuto, the bad omens continued: Blood streaks in the egg yolks. Three pigeons roosting on the portal of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Rain on crucial feast days. Of course there was trouble, thought Mrs. Santangelo, what with those creaking bedsprings, those hours Catherine spent downstairs in the shop. But how to convince Joseph that such omens were proof of more than her ill will toward his wife?

  Perhaps it would be wiser to concentrate on Catherine. Mrs. Santangelo knew that a pregnant woman could be persuaded of anything—provided you understood that she was temporarily out of her mind and that the only way to her brain was through her stomach.

  And so Mrs. Santangelo devoted herself to cooking for the mother-to-be.

  Every night, Catherine got sick on the meat. Usually she made it through the soup and bread, but could only force down a few mouthfuls of meat before stopping to excuse herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she’d say, back from the bathroom with cold water shining on her face. “It’s not the food. It’s me.”