Household Saints (7 page)

“‘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 the 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.

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?”