Household Saints (4 page)

“Company?” In fifteen years, Catherine and Lino and Nicky had never had company to dinner. For among the Falconetti misfortunes was not just a lack of family closeness, but a positive horror of other Falconettis, who only seemed to remind each other of their genetic bad luck. “Who?”

“Joseph Santangelo and his mother.”

“Oh no. Anyone but.”

“Don’t you like him?” asked Lino, his voice insinuating, like a poke in the ribs.

“Not especially.”

“That’s too bad. He likes you.”

The way Lino said “likes” reminded Catherine of certain boys in the seventh grade who would trap you into saying simple words with secret dirty meanings. This time she was wary.

“What does that mean?”

“It means he and his mother are coming to eat. It means my Catherine’s going to cook up a storm. And you know what
that
means.”

Catherine shook her head.

“Meat. Tomorrow night, we’ll show the Santangelos how the Falconettis cook a piece of meat. A roast, a veal roast. I’ll pick it up tomorrow when I go tell Santangelo what time to come.”

Of all the night’s surprises, this, to Catherine, was the most unexpected: Until that night, she had never once heard her father express a preference about his food. Who would have thought that Lino knew veal from liver? The shock of this was so great that it diminished her amazement when, moments later, Lino said, “I want this meal to be so good, a man would get married to eat like that every night.”

Suddenly Catherine remembered Joseph Santangelo telling her to ask her father where he could put his thumb. And now she understood what he’d meant as she imagined it, swollen to monstrous proportions, squashing the Falconettis like ants.

“I’ve got news for you,” she said. “No one gets married for the food.”

Catherine awoke at three in the morning with a vague sense of something wrong. She checked back over the previous day, imagined into tomorrow, got as far as Joseph Santangelo and stopped right there. By dawn, she was in no shape to cook up a storm. Long before she started cooking, she knew that it was going to be one of those days when everything goes wrong in the kitchen.

Yesterday’s rain, slowed now to a steamy drizzle, had refreshed the neighborhood, but the produce in its markets had yet to recover. The mozzarella in Passaglio’s dairy was yellowed and rubbery; the ricotta rose in grainy islands from seas of its own whey. At the Grand Street Market, olives were up ten cents a pound and specked with coarse dry salt. Frank Manzone’s tomatoes showed patches of fuzz, soft spots like circles of pudding; his spinach was so slimy that Catherine wondered how she could have bought it a few days before. The only items which weren’t overripe were the rock-hard pears and the acidy Gorgonzola.

Catherine complained to the storekeepers, who told her not to blame the weather on them and reminded her that no one was twisting her arm. But people rarely said that, she’d noticed, unless your arm was already twisted. She had to buy what the merchants offered, just as she had to cook it for Joseph Santangelo and his mother. If she struggled, her whole life would snap like a bone.

Upstairs, she concentrated on cooking to keep her mind off the upcoming dinner. But real concentration would have kept her from burning the butter, from scorching the cast-iron pan so badly that she had to scour and reseason it. Meanwhile she forgot the escarole soaking in the sink—which overflowed, strewing greens like beached seaweed on the floor. She broke three eggs into a bowl and the fourth was rotten, so she threw them out and started again. No matter how she experimented with the manicotti batter, the pancakes came out leathery, pocked with blisters and holes. The iodine smell of boiling shrimp mingled with that of burned butter and permeated the apartment.

At one, Lino came home with a roast which was brownish-purple, marbled with gristle and splintered bone.

“What’s this?” demanded Catherine. “Something the cats killed and left out in the alley?”

“Ha ha,” said Lino. “Santangelo swore up and down, it’s the best veal roast he had.”

“Ha ha,” said Catherine. “The best shoe leather.”

“Now why,” said Lino, “why would Santangelo sell me shoe leather when he’s the one that’s going to eat it?”

“Because he’s such a crook. When there’s no one else around to steal from, he’ll cheat himself.”

“Shut up and cook it,” said Lino.

Catherine tried, she tried. She hacked through sinew and fat till the roast was half its original size, then lowered the flame under the tomato sauce and ran out for some eels to replace the brackish shrimp. On her return she was greeted by the smell of scorched tomatoes. She dumped the eels into the sink and prodded them with long-handled tines; they sloshed in the cold water, too moribund to squirm.

She mixed together some stuffing, crammed it into the veal, then slid it into the oven and waited for the comforting pop of juices and fat. She waved her hand inside the stove—it was lukewarm. She turned up the heat, and the gravy began to burn.

Even the plants on the shelves seemed to shrink from the acrid smoke. But Catherine was glad when it watered her eyes, priming them for a good cry. Crying helped relieve the tension, and she let the tears fall until, she imagined, they had salted and further thinned the runny zabaglione. So she gave up on a sweet dessert and resigned herself to serving the Gorgonzola and pears.

At six, when Joseph and his mother arrived, Catherine was on her knees by the oven, mourning over the underdone roast. She missed their knock on the door and the spectacle of Lino greeting them with the somber formality of a mortician.

“Good evening,” said Mrs. Santangelo, in an appropriately funereal tone. Then, looking stricken, she sniffed the air.

“Mister Falconetti, is something burning?”

Catherine emerged from the kitchen just in time to see Mrs. Santangelo’s face fall like a stalk of overcooked broccoli.

“Mrs. Santangelo,” said Lino. “My daughter Catherine.”

“I know your daughter,” said Mrs. Santangelo.

Somehow Catherine got the first course onto the table. Somehow they found their places.

“Great antipasto,” said Joseph. “Delicious.”

“Thanks,” mumbled Catherine, so grateful that she couldn’t look at him and stared into her plate.

God is merciful, she thought. People understand. Even Mrs. Santangelo—she was a woman, she knew. If the celery was a little limp, she’d realize that it was the crispest Frank Manzone had. If the roasted peppers were a shade too black, she’d know that there were days when everything went wrong in the kitchen. Besides, why worry so about a meal for two strangers she didn’t particularly like?

“Not much you can do to ruin cold antipasto,” said Mrs. Santangelo. Then, as if to prove herself wrong, she picked a dark hair off a tomato and gingerly rubbed her fingertips till the hair dropped to the floor.

Catherine jumped up to clear the dishes and bring on the next course.

Though Lino and Joseph had arranged this meal to discuss the wedding, they each took one bite of the eels, looked at each other and silently agreed that this was no time to talk of marriage. With this subject excluded, there was little else to say.

“Thank God the hot weather’s over,” said Joseph.

“Thank God is right,” said Catherine. Then, with a pleading look at Mrs. Santangelo, she added, “You couldn’t cook a decent meal with the stuff they had in the stores—”

Mrs. Santangelo cut her off: “When I first came over from the old country, me and Zio were so poor, I had to pick shells out of the garbage can by Umberto’s Clam House. And believe me, I made a delicious soup.”

“When?” said Joseph. “When did you cook clam shells out of the garbage?”

The meal continued in silence, punctuated by the noise of silverware picked up and put down, food being scraped to the sides of plates, forks chasing recalcitrant strings of cheese, knives grating against china—all to a background of chewing and chewing and chewing.

No second helpings were offered, none requested. No one asked anyone to pass anything. No one looked up from their plates when a chunk of gristle flew out from under Nicky’s knife and landed by Mrs. Santangelo’s forearm. The men attacked their portions bravely enough, but their courage deserted them after one taste. Mrs. Santangelo sampled everything served her, then very deliberately pushed back her chair, folded her hands in her lap and stared into space. After each course, Catherine cleared the table, her work compounded by the extra clumsiness of stacking full plates.

At last Mrs. Santangelo nibbled at a crunchy pear, then stood, extended one regal hand to her son and said, “Thank you kindly, Mister Falconetti, Catherine, Nicky. Joseph, let’s go. I got sausage to make for tomorrow.”

On the way out, Joseph shook Lino’s hand.

“Falconetti,” he said. “We’ll talk.” Then he turned to Catherine, smiled, and said, “Thanks. The food was great.”

Catherine listened for sarcasm in his voice, heard none.

“Don’t thank
me
,” she mumbled, too pleased and embarrassed to acknowledge the first such compliment she had ever received.

No sooner had Lino shut the door behind them then he spun around and slapped Catherine’s face.

“What was that for?” Catherine, who’d been raised to decipher the occult meanings of men’s insults and slaps, now had the distinct impression that Lino was actually pleased with her. Perhaps this was what he’d meant when he’d told her to show the Santangelos how the Falconettis could cook a piece of meat. Perhaps, for some perverse reason of his own, he’d wanted her to serve a meal bad enough to scare off the Santangelos.

“For putting crap like that on the table.”

“Crap? You heard your friend Santangelo. The food was great.”

“Great,” mimicked Lino. “Since when has love got taste buds?”

“Love? What’s this got to do with love?”

“What else do you think this meal was about? The good-neighbor policy? You’re marrying that guy. It’s settled. I’ve given my word.”

“
Your
word? Papa, this isn’t the old country. It’s America.”

“It’s my house,” said Lino, but Catherine had already left it. Pushing past him, she ran down the stairs and didn’t stop till she reached the ticket booth of the Essex theater.

The Heiress
was almost over, and Catherine was glad. Tonight, Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift depressed her. She sat through the second feature,
To Have and Have Not,
which she’d missed in its first run, years before.

By the time she left the theater, the temperature and humidity had dropped; it was a crisp autumn night. All the way home, Catherine kept thinking of Bogart and Bacall—their teasing and fencing and falling in love. Somehow these thoughts led to Joseph Santangelo—how tough he’d acted in his shop, how sweet he’d been in her apartment, smiling and telling her that the food was great.

That night, as Catherine got into bed, she found herself thinking that life was more like the movies than she’d ever dreamed.

Long ago, when an erupting volcano threatened Mrs. Santangelo’s ancestral home, a teenage boy named Gennaro waited till the last possible moment, then ran up to the smoldering crater, arms outstretched as if to greet a long-lost friend. Down below, the Neapolitans watched him catch the flowing lava in his arms and prayed for Gennaro’s soul. But their newfound patron saint survived to turn and wave, leaving his impression in the hissing rock, a fossil of two open arms preserved to this day in the hillside above Mrs. Santangelo’s birthplace.

If San Gennaro could do that, thought Mrs. Santangelo, he could tell her what her Joseph saw in a girl like Catherine Falconetti.

She lit a votive candle in a beveled glass holder and set it on the mantelpiece which served as the family altar: a plaster Madonna, a statuette of Gennaro with his arms spread wide, and a photo of her husband Zio, framed in gold and matted with black crepe.

“Holy Saint,” whispered Mrs. Santangelo, easing herself down on her knees. “I’m not praying for a miracle. Just a simple explanation.”

After a while she got up and slid the candle over in front of the photo.

“Zio,” she said. “How about it? How could a smart boy like our son marry a Falconetti?”

It was not a rhetorical question; Carmela Santangelo fully expected an answer. Every few weeks, she was visited by the ghost of her late husband.

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.