Household Saints Page 8

  “If that’s how come poor Jimmy, then how come you’re calling me over here to look at him.”

  “Your baby’s already marked. You can’t do any more harm than you’ve done already.”

  Catherine was silent for a long time. Then almost whispering, she said,

  “Isn’t there anything we can do?”

  Mrs. Santangelo turned to her with the satisfied smile of a deposed queen accepting the long-awaited invitation to reclaim her throne.

  “Yes,” she said. “There is.”

  Saint that he was, San Gennaro had not only the strength to catch volcanoes in his arms, but also the grace and humility to understand why, after so many years, his image should be moved toward the edge of the mantelpiece, why his favorite geranium should be taken from him and put in the kitchen, and why his accustomed place at the center of the altar should be usurped by a gilt medallion of Saint Anna, the Virgin’s mother, protectress of pregnant women and their unborn children.

  Following Mrs. Santangelo’s instructions, Catherine walked to the libreria on Second Avenue where she bought the embossed medallion and a small painting of a cherubic Baby Jesus. On the way home, she noticed for the first time that her center of gravity had shifted. Her back ached, and the sidewalk hurt her feet. Pausing on every corner to catch her breath, she felt as if this short crosstown trip were a pilgrimage, and she thought of the penitents in Quebec, climbing the stone steps of Ste. Anne de Beaupre on their knees. She stopped in at Our Lady of Mount Carmel to say a dozen Hail Marys, sprinkle the Saint Anna medallion with holy water, and purchase three dozen votive candles.

  Back at the apartment, she and Mrs. Santangelo arranged the altar, lit a candle, and asked Saint Anna to keep Catherine from giving birth to a chicken.

  Yet no amount of prayer could quiet Catherine’s fears. Secretly, she doubted that anyone was listening. The image on the medallion—Saint Anna, hands clasped in prayer, with a full-grown, fully clothed Madonna standing praying in her womb—what could she know about a husband who smelled of meat? When had desire ever driven her to the butcher shop to watch her man slit a turkey’s throat? Saints were surrounded by an aura of brilliant light; Catherine lived in a dark apartment where even the plants had to struggle for life.

  But Mrs. Santangelo—so unlike her normal self that everyone was astonished—was full of hope. Delighted by the change in Catherine, she was quite ready to reverse her former prediction.

  “Now you’ll see,” she said cheerily, scraping paraffin off the candleholders. “The saint won’t let anything happen.”

  Catherine nodded, but she wasn’t convinced. For all her mother-in-law’s reassurances and even the power of the saint seemed abstract and very distant compared to the fluttering inside her and the momentary hallucination, more and more frequent, of something flying past the corner of her eye, a blur of white wings soaring up past the saints and straight to God.

  Soon after Saint Anna made her appearance on the Santangelo family altar, Joseph approached Lino and Nicky and asked if they would like to get together some night for a little pinochle. The men accepted graciously, having never for one moment imagined that the game would not eventually be resumed.

  For this was the way of the world, the facts of life, as natural and inevitable as gray hair: A man gets married, he stops playing pinochle. A few months later, the wife is pregnant and he’s ready to play again.

  One evening, shortly before New Year’s, Joseph was relaxing after dinner in his living room. Knees spread to accommodate her belly, Catherine sat across from him, reading a movie magazine. In the kitchen, his mother was rearranging her cupboards, clanging pans and rattling dishes to remind him that God didn’t give her time to digest her food.

  Joseph remembered a bottle of Strega which one of the meat wholesalers had given him for Christmas, and went down to get it from the shop. When he returned, Catherine was pointing at her magazine and saying, “Look, Mama, Judy Garland just gave birth to a gorgeous eight-pound baby girl.”

  “May God protect it from the Evil Eye,” his mother called from the other room.

  But the Evil Eye was just what she gave Joseph as he walked into the kitchen and, after much searching, took three liqueur glasses from the top shelf.

  “How about a little drink for the New Year?” he said.

  “New Year’s isn’t for three days,” said his mother. “And these closets won’t wait three days to get cleaned.”

  So he replaced one of the glasses, filled the other two and brought them out. Catherine reached for one, then hesitated. Right on cue, Mrs. Santangelo appeared in the doorway:

  “Drink that, and the baby will be born the color of that Strega. That’s asking for jaundice.”

  “Thanks, Joseph.” Catherine’s hand dropped into her lap. “I better not.”

  Sickened now by the thought of the sweet liqueur, Joseph put down his glass. He needed something stronger. A whole bottle of Frank Manzone’s wine might just begin to make him feel right.

  “I should have known,” he said. “When you started calling her ‘Mama,’ that’s when I should have known.”

  Actually, he had known, weeks before, when he’d begun to catch Catherine and his mother whispering, head to head. In theory, he should have been delighted by this new closeness in the family; in fact, he couldn’t help thinking that they were conspiring to exclude him from a private world which held no room for anyone but women and their unborn children.

  The apartment smelled different, food smells mingled with the scented candles burning perpetually on the mantelpiece. Each night, Catherine knelt briefly at the altar before coming to bed.

  “Since when are you so hot on the saints?” he’d asked her one night.

  “For protection.” She’d pointed at her stomach.

  “What do you need protection from?” Joseph laughed. “Me?”

  When Catherine turned away from him, he’d noticed that she smelled different too; the familiar aroma of her flesh was gone, replaced by the chaste cold scent of wintergreen soap. Right then, he’d known that their lovemaking was over till after the baby was born—just as he’d known that she wouldn’t drink a glass of Strega for the New Year without consulting his mother.

  “I’m going out. You want anything?” He left without waiting for an answer.

  Outside, he picked his way across the icy asphalt and climbed the stairs to the Falconetti apartment, where he found Lino and Nicky drinking at the kitchen table. The house was a mess, but the only thing Joseph noticed was the pattern of circular rust stains on the bare shelves. He realized they’d been left there by Catherine’s plants. This thought made him so unaccountably miserable that he felt as if she were dead, and had to remind himself that she was safe at home, reading about Judy Garland’s new baby.

  “You gentlemen care to play some pinochle?” he said.

  “Sure,” said Lino. “I’ll talk to Manzone tomorrow. Your place?”

  “Too cold.” It depressed Joseph to think of playing in back of the shop.

  “Then I’d be honored.” Lino swung his arm to offer the comforts of his home.

  The next night, Frank Manzone showed up with half a dozen bottles of wine. But now it was the Falconettis’ responsibility, as hosts, to stay sober enough to keep an eye on things. Consequently their game improved, and the pinochle was no longer the nightly slaughter of before. Sometimes Joseph and Frank won, sometimes the Falconettis.

  Unaccustomed to losing, Joseph took it badly. He drank himself into black, self-pitying moods and, at the end of the games, paid his debts so resentfully that often the Falconettis told him to keep his money, and he kept it. He knew a thousand ways of cheating, but for the first time in his life was afraid of getting caught.

  One wet, chilly evening, early in March, Joseph lost every hand. He was down ten dollars when he stood and said, “That’s it. I haven’t seen a picture card all night. I feel like somebody’s trying to tell me something.”

  “What’s the matter, San
tangelo?” said Lino. “You getting psychic?”

  “On my mother’s side,” said Joseph, then shivered. Maybe he was getting psychic. Though Catherine wasn’t due for another month, somehow he felt it was starting…. He looked out the window and up at his apartment. Every light was blazing.

  “Jesus.” He grabbed his overcoat and rushed out the door. “I’ll see you guys later.”

  The living room was deserted, the door to his bedroom shut; from behind it came the muffled sound of his mother’s footsteps. A dozen candles were burning on the altar. The place smelled of Lysol. Then he heard a moan so low and distant, it could have been the wind.

  He ran down the hall toward the bedroom, but stopped halfway there. He’d heard it said that laboring women blame their husbands for every pain and swear between contractions that they’ll never let a man touch them again. He retreated to the living room, where he tried unsuccessfully to make himself comfortable, but kept jumping up at every sound—his nervousness compounded by the embarrassment of acting like the old cliché, the comedian playing expectant father. All he really knew about childbirth was what he’d seen in the movies, the kindly country doc saying, “Don’t just stand there! Heat up the water and get some towels!” With all his heart, Joseph wished that his mother would emerge from the bedroom and tell him to boil some water.

  Mrs. Santangelo shot past the living room on her way to the kitchen.

  “Hey!” yelled Joseph. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Pray,” she said. “For once in your life, you can pray.”

  “Can I go in there? I want to see Catherine.”

  “See? What’s there to see? What do you think this is, the movies? Stay right where you are and pray!”

  She was gone so fast that Joseph forgot to see if she was carrying hot water and towels. He knelt awkwardly before the altar and began to pray—a Hail Mary, an Our Father. He had to grope for the words and recited them woodenly, like the poems he’d been forced to memorize in parochial school.

  “Please let it be easy for her,” he said, though it seemed to him that Saint Anna and San Gennaro were eyeing him as if he were a total stranger asking for a loan, or worse, a bum panhandling a dime. Why should they do him any favors?

  He sat down on the couch and riffled through Catherine’s magazine till he found the picture of Judy Garland and her fat little baby. The accompanying article comforted him: With all the dope Judy Garland took, she’d done okay. Reading on, he learned that Judy’s husband had converted one wing of their Beverly Hills mansion into a private maternity hospital; he imagined this man, in a smoking jacket, puffing his pipe in the den while a procession of nurses tiptoed in to announce that everything was going fine.

  But when his mother came through, he had to jump up and trail her to the kitchen.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Not so hot,” she said, and was gone.

  These three words provided Joseph with endless scenarios of tragedy and horror: Catherine would die. The baby would die. Catherine and the baby would die. How could he have overlooked these terrible possibilities, dismissing Catherine’s fear as the crazy and perfectly normal delusions of a pregnant woman? He was the crazy one. Only now did he realize how badly he wanted the child, and he thought: This was some time to realize it.

  He turned the radio on for distraction and heard Nat King Cole crooning faintly through a loud buzz of static. Got to get Lino to fix this, he thought. Then he imagined how painful it would be, seeing Lino and Nicky with Catherine and the baby dead.

  Suddenly he felt as if the apartment were a mausoleum in which he and his mother and Catherine were walled up together, buried alive, the last three people on earth. He threw open the window. Was there anyone out there? His chest felt tight; he needed some air.

  “I’m going out,” he called. “Anything you want?”

  There was no reply. What could they possibly need?

  The drizzle had turned to sleet, and everything had a wavy, out-of-focus look, as if the sidewalks and street lights had melted, then frozen again in a slightly different place. Just as Joseph had feared, there was no one else in the world—not one drunk walking it off, not one poor slob escaping a fight with his wife. Everyone was safe inside, asleep or dead, and he was the only survivor.

  Upstairs, he found his mother standing in front of the altar. At first he assumed she was praying … but why was she making those odd noises?

  “Mama,” he said, “what—?”

  His mother glared at him, then, without a word, grabbed the Saint Anna medallion off the mantel. He followed her into the kitchen, where she lit a burner on the stove, grasped the medallion with a pair of tongs and held it over the flame.

  The gilt blistered; the metal began to buckle, releasing a stream of smoke. The edges curled, the medallion bubbled, but Mrs. Santangelo kept it in the flame until it was a tarry lump, fused with the tongs. Only then did she fill the sink and drop the medallion into the water, where it landed with a hiss.

  Mrs. Santangelo didn’t flinch from the smoke, though her eyes turned red and watered. Joseph realized that he hadn’t seen her cry since his father’s death.

  “Mama,” he said.

  “This is what Saint Anna has done for the Santangelos,” she said. “And this is what Saint Anna deserves.”

  “Catherine?”

  “Catherine’s fine. The baby didn’t have a chance. It lived three seconds, just long enough for me to splash some water on it and pray for God to accept it as a proper baptism. Go in now, go in and see your wife.” Then her eyes narrowed and she said, “Go in and see what you won in that pinochle game.”

  Catherine was lying in bed beneath a clean sheet. She was staring at the far wall and did not turn when Joseph entered. On the bed near the footboard was a pile of sheets, and in the center, a parcel wrapped in a white pillowcase. Slowly Joseph unfolded it, and saw the tiny corpse—shrunken and discarded-looking, like something meant to be thrown out with the garbage or into the laundry with the bloodstained sheets.

  He reached for Catherine’s hand, but she pulled back. He gazed at the child for as long as he could stand it. Crying, he turned away, but not before the thought had crossed his mind that the infant resembled nothing so much as a plucked and freshly slaughtered baby chicken.

  3

  Miracles

  THERE WAS A FUNERAL which Catherine was discouraged from attending, and a tiny white coffin like a toy boat. As the priest intoned the rites, Joseph imagined limbo as an endless Central Park Lake, with the souls of unbaptized infants skimming over the water in their miniature caskets, white sails rigged to catch the breeze.

  When Joseph and his mother got home, the first thing Mrs. Santangelo did was slide the statuette of San Gennaro back to the center of the altar.

  “That’s the last time I move you,” she promised the saint. “I swear to God.”

  Three days after the delivery, Catherine could hardly walk, but Mrs. Santangelo herded her and Joseph in front of the mantel and suggested that they pray:

  “If he can catch a volcano in his bare hands, he can help us get over this.”

  “If I kneel down,” said Catherine, “I’ll never get up.”

  So Mrs. Santangelo prayed for them all. Still wearing her bulky coat, she knelt with the slow clumsy dignity of a circus elephant: “Holy Saint, help us accept God’s will. And while you’re at it, help us remember: Life goes on.

  “Speaking of life goes on …” She stood up. “Catherine, that plant you used to have up here, we put it in the kitchen? Anyhow, it looks a little dry, maybe you could water it, we’ll put it back up….”

  “I don’t know why you bother.” Catherine nodded at the altar. “I don’t know why the hell you bother.” And she shuffled back to bed.

  “She’s going to be okay,” Mrs. Santangelo reassured Joseph. “It takes time, but you’ll see. There’ll be another baby, everything will be fine. I know, I’ve been seeing signs everywhere. And you, Josep
h? You and the boys going to play a little pinochle?”

  “What’s it to you?” Joseph was still bitter about the way his mother had acted on the night of the baby’s death, bringing up how he’d won Catherine at pinochle, as if it were all his fault. “Since when do you care?”

  “Since now.” Mrs. Santangelo held her ground. “You could use to step out, enjoy yourself, get your mind off your troubles. It would be good for you and Catherine.”

  “Sorry,” said Joseph. “I don’t have the heart.” But what could be more disheartening than the prospect of spending another evening with a wife who wouldn’t talk to him, wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t get out of bed?

  That night, Joseph and Frank Manzone called on Lino Falconetti.

  “Three-handed pinochle?” said Lino. “I never heard of such a thing.”

  “Where’s Nicky?” said Frank.

  “Flew the coop.” After two bottles of wine, Lino wasn’t upset, simply stating a fact. “Bright and early this morning. Go look in his room.”

  The perfect neatness and anonymity of Nicky’s room heightened the oddness of its single incongruity—a sheet draped over what appeared to be an enormous …

  “Holy Christ,” said Joseph. “A tombstone.”

  “Ha ha,” said Lino. “A tombstone, that’s terrific. It’s his radio.”

  “I guess I’ve got tombstones on the brain,” said Joseph.

  “Look.” Lino pointed to a postcard propped up against the radio. He passed it to Joseph and Frank and then, in case they’d missed the message, read it aloud:

  “‘Re-enlisting. Nicky.’ Re-enlisting.” Lino snorted. “A patriot.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Frank. “What’s in it for him?”

  Lino turned over the card. On the other side was a tinted photo of fluffy pink trees and the legend: Japanese Cherry Blossoms. Springtime, Washington, D.C.

  “Madame Butterfly,” said Lino. “That’s what’s in it for him.”