Household Saints (2 page)

Outside the gritty windows, scraps of tinsel and crepe paper clogged the sewer; festival garbage stewed in the gutter. An old woman in a man’s winter jacket shuffled by on swollen legs wrapped with layers of crew socks and nylon stockings and stuffed into open sandals. She was preaching at the top of her lungs, something about Jesus dying on the cross and dogshit on the sidewalks of Sodom and Gomorrah.

“Ever notice?” said Lino. “It’s always these gray cloudy days brings every cuckoo out of the clock.”

Any normal son would have nodded, even if he weren’t listening. But Nicky was off somewhere, in one of his operas, where even the crazy women wore satin, sang wild arias and never, never mentioned dogshit.

“Lost in a dream,” said Lino, and took it as proof that Nicky didn’t deny it.

Nicky was listening, but his father’s voice had a watery echo, like conversations in dreams or shouts ricocheted off the tile walls of the Carmine Street pool. All his life, Nicky had heard this echo and felt the peculiar detachment of observing his life in a dream. Other people’s earliest memories were sensual, immediate: The smell of Mama’s clean apron, a flash of gold from Papa’s Sunday watch. But Nicky’s first recollection was a flat and distant image of himself in his baby tender, eating something (he couldn’t remember what). The war had been a three-year dream set in an army radio shop in Germany, and now he had come home to a similar dream of losing his way inside radios—labyrinthine, eerily lit, cobwebbed and musty as attics. Evenings at Santangelo’s, he watched himself draw one nightmare pinochle hand after another.

At twenty-four, Nicky felt so tired from all this watching that he could barely stay awake—except for those few hours on Saturday afternoons when he sat in his room with his radio blasting Milton Cross, Live from the Metropolitan Opera. For Nicky listened to opera the way other men read pornography: He put himself in the scene, imagined that Mimi and Carmen were trilling exclusively for him. Twice, he’d actually attended Saturday matinees; both times, he was disappointed. The gaudy, strapping divas bore no resemblance to the fragile creatures of his fantasies, and the shock of seeing Madame Butterfly sung by a German lady wrestler in a geisha wig made his heart literally hurt.

The pain was particularly sharp in that
Madame Butterfly
was Nicky’s favorite opera. Often, as the days dragged on in his father’s shop, he escaped by picturing himself as Lieutenant Pinkerton, enthroned like an emperor amid chrysanthemums and paper screens as his Oriental mistress waited on him hand and foot. He worked so hard at this that the smell of solder and hot wire was transformed into jasmine incense, and he could move himself to tears by imagining the guilt of discovering that his geisha had sung “Un Bel Di” and plunged a samurai sword into her breast for love of him.

On the day after the pinochle game, Nicky was grieving over the carnage in his Japanese love nest when he heard a loud click, then the squawk of an announcer’s voice raving that the heat wave was about to break.

“Thank God,” said Lino. It was unclear whether he meant the weather forecast or the fact that the radio was working.

“For what?”

“Rain by late afternoon.”

“You need a radio to tell you that?” Nicky pointed a thumb at the window, the overcast sky.

“Bread and butter is what I need it for. Otherwise I don’t need it for a thing.” To illustrate, Lino turned off the radio, for the truth was that he had no interest in anything which might have come over it. Lino’s own English was fluent, but after twenty years, radio English was yet another foreign language. Music only reminded him of those afternoons when Nicky’s opera took over the apartment and he felt excluded, embarrassed, as if he were overhearing a neighbor couple in bed. The only thing he liked about radios was fixing them, and even that (he hated tinkering) was limited to the moment when he turned on a “broken” set and heard the Bakelite hum.

In the exhilaration of the wartime boom, Lino had joked about being a better mechanic than God: It didn’t take
him
three days to bring a radio back from the dead. But the armistice (and its companion, television) had put a stop to his joking. When Nicky came home from the service, Lino began to suspect that the only pleasure which God had ever gotten from Jesus was the momentary thrill of resurrecting Him—and even that was more than
he
had ever gotten from
his
son.

“I need something,” groaned Lino. “Wish to God I knew what it was.”

“What you need,” said Nicky, “is a hair of the dog that bit you.”

“The hell,” said Lino, infuriated by how proudly his son suggested this, like a doctor coming up with some brilliant diagnosis. Then, if for no other reason than to keep from cursing his own flesh and blood, Lino cursed the poison which Frank Manzone passed off as wine, cursed his bad luck in general and would have gone on to curse every hand he’d been dealt the night before—except that Lino was one of those drinkers who can never remember the night before.

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 with 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.