Rococo (21 page)

A shiver runs through me. Father Porp has always been cheap with the heat. We stand in silence looking at the mural. The face of the Blessed Lady, which I have prayed to without fail all of my life, suddenly seems bored by the whole scene. I used to believe that expression was one of quiet intelligence, but now it seems like she’s saying, “Oh, get on with it.” We hear footsteps. We look at one another and freeze.

“Someone’s here,” Christina whispers to me.

The sounds are coming from the sacristy. Father Porporino emerges from the door. “What’s going on here?”

“Father! Whew. I thought it was a ghost.”

“Or the Lady of Fatima making a Jersey appearance,” Capri says wryly. Father does not find this funny.

From my place closest to the door, I see a shadowy figure slip out of the sacristy, through the door that leads to a hallway, then to the cemetery. Father doesn’t notice that I saw anything. He casually closes the sacristy door behind him and joins us.

“I wanted Mr. McSherry and Mr. Alarcon to see the church while they’re here.” I chirp just like I did when I was a boy caught making figurines with the candle wax after Mass.

“Oh.” Father Porporino seems nervous.

“I’m finished with my plans for the renovation, and I wanted to toss around some ideas with Mr. McSherry.”

“It’s a beautiful church.” Rufus’s compliment seems to go a long way with Father Porp.

“Thank you.” Father smiles. “Let me show you around.” Capri looks at me as though she’d rather gnaw on a pipe than get another tour, but I shoot her a “keep quiet” look.

“Any idea about that third secret of Fatima, Father?” I ask as he walks us to the side door after the tour.

“There are a lot of rumors, but no one knows for sure.”

“Nobody can keep secrets like the Catholic Church,” Capri mumbles.

We bid Father Porporino good night, and once we’re outside, we laugh like a pack of teenagers caught with a six-pack and a
Playboy
after school. Capri and Christina say good night and get into my car. I walk Rufus and Pedro to theirs.

“So, what do you think?” I ask Rufus, pointing to the church.

“What do you have in mind?” he says as he lights a cigarette.

“I want to blow it wide open. New fresco, stained-glass windows, grotto, and floor plan.”

“Let’s figure out a time when you can show me the plans.”

“Absolutely. So can I count you in?” I ask him hopefully.

“Count me in,” he says and smiles.

As they drive away, I can’t help but look up at the night sky and holler, “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” The Bernini of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, is on board, so anything is possible.

The last bit of wisdom my professor Maeve Schlondorf imparted to me prior to my graduation from Parsons was “Never, never, never give anything away for free. Not advice, not a throw pillow, and not an ashtray. Nothing! We must train the public to hire interior decorators.” I should have listened. Instead, I find myself driving to Manasquan to install a wall mural for Toot’s college roommate, Booboo Miglio (one of the gregarious bobby-soxers from the all-girl St. Elizabeth’s College, Convent Station, New Jersey, Class of 1940), for free.

I park in front of her Victorian on Hammer Avenue (Victorians, as a general rule, don’t have driveways or garages, which is the first reason not to live in one). Booboo’s yard is loaded with Christmas claptrap, life-sized plastic choir boys, and enormous candy canes, stuck in the ground like striped stakes. On the roof, Santa and his sled pulled by the reindeer are anchored on the gutter. Christmas in Squan is always decorative. I pull the mural out of my trunk, along with a tub of wallpaper paste and my tools. She greets me on the porch.

“Bartolomeo, hun-nee!” Booboo is still a girl, despite five children in quick succession and a husband who drinks. She has kept the ready-kilowatt smile and trim figure of her youth. An adorable brunette with a cap of curls and sparkling brown eyes, she likes beautiful things but cannot afford them, which I find endearing. People who like nice things should have them. Booboo holds the door open as I wedge past.

“Merry Christmas! Get rid of that screen door,” I chide her. “It’s winter.”

“I know. By the time I get around to it, it’s spring, so I just leave it.”

“Remember what Aristotle said: ‘Good style must be clear, it must be appropriate.’ A screen door on a house in winter is like a sled in the swimming pool in summer.”

Per my instruction, Booboo decorated her house in soft yellow and white. The furniture is covered in a sturdy, tufted cotton check—simple, clean, and cheery. When there’s a gang of kids in a house, everything should be washable, so she used a clear lacquer sheen over the paint on her walls so she can wash them down like the family dog.

Booboo has cleared the wall in her living room and prepped it as I asked, so all I need to do is hang the mural. I spread the wallpaper paste evenly over a quarter of the wall. She helps me unroll the first of four panels and place it on the paste. “This is going to be stunning!” she squeals, clapping her hands. “You know, I need a little Italy in my life. A Venetian carnival. A seaside holiday. A little Rome, a little rococo.”

“What you’re getting is the harbor at Portofino.” She doesn’t need to know that they had a showroom final sale at D&D and I picked it up for a song.

“I love it already. I’ll have a destination on my wall, and I don’t have to actually go there.”

“That’s the idea.” I step back after smoothing down the panel and see a few boats bobbing in bright blue water at the foot of the stone cliffs on the glittering Mediterranean.

“It will brighten up the whole house,” Booboo says. “Did you know your sister is sleeping with her ex-husband?”

“What?”

“Toot is sleeping with Lonnie. They got together the Tuesday after your party. That strapless she wore drove him nuts. So they made a date. They went to Voltaco’s in Ocean City for hoagies and then grabbed a hotel room.”

“I don’t need to know this.”

“Somebody has to talk to her. She’ll listen to you.”

“I’m her brother. I don’t want to know this stuff. Besides, she’s dating Sal Concarni.”

“He’s impotent.”

“Dear God. She told you
that
?”

“Your sister got tired of Sal’s excuses—all to avoid . . . you know. Plus, he refuses to go to a doctor. What do men think, anyhow? That a lump goes away on its own? That a peter rises to every occasion without medical intervention? Anyhow, Toot has needs and Sal wasn’t meeting them. He said he was tired all the time. He also drinks.” Booboo motions toward the kitchen.

“Is your husband home?”

“No, he’s at work. I just point to the kitchen because that’s where the beer is kept.”

“Oh.”

“At a certain point, when a man drinks, it affects the apparatus.” Booboo makes a sweeping gesture toward her thighs.

“Say no more.”

“I have the same problem over here, but the difference is, I don’t want to have sex with my husband. If it never happens again in my natural lifetime, that will be absolutely fine with me.”

“Booboo, really. This is none of my business.”

“I’m telling you, a man hits, let’s say fifty-seven or so, my Vinnie is fifty-eight, and it goes away.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“It’s difficult for a man. You know, all your equipment is outside, and it has to work to be effective. Women can pretend to enjoy it or really enjoy it or not, it’s all the same to your partner. But a man has to perform. It must feel like a burden. It can’t be easy.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“It’s also the age. I mean, in a perfect world, I’d like to have a younger man. I didn’t count on winding up with Grandpa over here. But what’s a girl supposed to do?”

I feel myself getting claustrophobic, so I make fast work of the final panel, which features a couple in a rowboat reading to each other at the base of the mural.

“Oh look, young love.” Booboo sighs. “You know what I tell my children?”

“What?” In all honesty, I am afraid to find out.

“Make love while you’re young, while you’re brisk and supple and interested in it. Because someday it will leave you just as it came—in an instant.” She snaps her fingers.

I look her right in the eye. “Did
anything
the nuns at Convent Station drilled into you girls stick? My sister is gallivanting around in fleabag motels with a man from whom she was bitterly divorced. And you are instructing your children to enroll in Free Love Camp. Tell me, is this what the Holy Roman Church had in mind when they inculcated us with their dogma? What the hell is going on?”

“Life.”

I present my final plans for the church renovation on December 13 at the last scheduled parish council meeting of the year, with Rufus and Pedro in attendance. Father Porporino is very curious, as is the council, whose members have called me individually at home. We gather in the church basement, surrounded by the unfurled flags of the Knights of Columbus, which are displayed on poles around the room like an indoor United Nations Plaza.

Rufus and Pedro are good sports. They drove out to meet everyone and hear my ideas. The council members sit at a long bingo table with their notes in front of them. Rufus and Pedro sit at the head of the table with me. I’ve laid out fresh doughnuts and a pot of coffee, and Zetta made a plate of fudge, which she passes around the room.

The entire leadership of our church is in attendance. Sister Mary Michael, principal of our parish-operated grade school; Zetta Montagna, president of the sodality; Aurelia Mandelbaum, chair of the Ways and Means Committee; Zeke Nero, Exterior Grounds and Fountains; Tulio Savastanno, Cemetery Maintenance; Father Porp, RC Incorporated. And recently elected to four-year terms on the council: Artie Rego, Gus Lascola, Finola Franco, and Palmie Barrone. Christina takes notes. Perky Marie Cascario, recording secretary, takes the minutes.

Father Porp calls the meeting to order and turns the meeting over to me.

“Thank you, Father. I’ve dreamed all my life of renovating our church. I’m not going to kid you, it needs it. Besides the aesthetics, we have some structural issues. Our engineer, Norman Thresher, came in and surveyed the building.” I hand a stack of mimeographed reports to Christina, who gets up and distributes them around the table. “There is work to be done on the foundation, the stonework needs repointing, and there are issues with the roof.”

“Slow down, B, I’m getting a corn on my middle finger,” Marie complains.

“Don’t press so hard on your pencil,” advises Sister Mary Michael, who taught everybody in OLOF under the age of fifty to write.

For the life of me, I have never understood why the slowest woman in the parish is the recording secretary. I continue, upbeat yet speaking slowly and deliberately so poor Marie can keep up. “And then, once the building is secure, we will begin our renovation. My plans will go to the architect Severino Carosso, who will turn them around for the engineer. We will need to close the church at least until next summer.”

“Where will we have Mass?” Finola asks.

“The gym at OLOF High,” Father answers.

“You can’t hear a thing in there,” Finola complains. “You might as well have Mass on the turnpike.”

“What’s the budget for this thing?” Palmie asks as he dumps a carload of sugar into his black coffee. Never mind that he’s a diabetic.

“Aurelia Mandelbaum has graciously financed the renovation. A working budget can be found on page three of your report. Please note that not a penny of the church coffers will be used. Beyond that, I don’t like to talk money.”

“I don’t either,” Aurelia seconds me. “It takes the starch out of giving, my Sy used to say.”

“What’s the church gonna look like when you’re done with it?” Tulio asks.

“It will be majestic and inspirational. You can see some of my sketches on pages eight through twelve of the report. These are not set in stone. I’ll be consulting with Rufus McSherry before we make any final decisions.” I cut Tulio off because he is a malcontent who never has anything good to say about any project we undertake. He waited so long to make a decision about fixing the gutters in the church plaza that we had a flood on Easter Sunday 1969 that required half the congregation to skip the Mass of the Resurrection because they could not navigate the rushing water. Then I drive my point home. “I would like to introduce Rufus McSherry, the artist who will implement the design, paint the fresco, and, with the help of Pedro Alarcon, his talented apprentice, refurbish the stained-glass windows. Rufus and Pedro stand to a round of applause, then sit. “Any questions?”

“We gotta top St. Catharine’s in Spring Lake,” Finola says, pulling a hot-pink emery board out of her purse and commencing to file her thumbnail. “It’s a replica of Santa Maria del Popolo in Vatican City.” She points her file at me. “Three of my cousins were married there. I don’t think we can beat its majestic grandeur, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do. Look at my drawings,” I tell her bluntly. “We aren’t trying to
beat
Spring Lake, folks. We want our church to make its own statement and reflect the faithful of
our
community.”

Gus Lacola says, “Yeah, okay, but be careful. Don’t go off half-cocked and change everything. We worship in this church here, and we don’t want some newfangled thing like they got over in Lambertville, where people are sitting on the floor singing to a yippie-dippie with a guitar and there’s a modern dance during the Offertory and the priest half the time don’t wear a collar. I don’t want to see a buncha kids in leotards doing backflips when I’m taking my sacraments. We want what we’re used to. Good ole’ meat and potatoes Catholicism. Smells and bells. Just like they got over in Rome.”

“Aurelia?” I look pleadingly toward The Benefactor for support.

“I trust Bartolomeo,” she says simply.

I try not to sound terse when I address the skeptics on the council. “Gus, I’m going to be honest with you. Forget about Rome. The Pope doesn’t really give a fig about Our Lady of Fatima. Aurelia has financed this renovation. The Diocese of Trenton could care even less—they told us to fend for ourselves financially because our congregation has always been self-supporting.”