Household Saints (12 page)

Catherine slapped his hand away.

“No thanks,” she said. “None of that.”

“That’s what you said when we first got married.” Joseph forced a laugh. “And look how much fun we had.”

“Look how we paid for that fun.”

“Paid for what? We didn’t do anything wrong. We’re married, we’ve got rights.”

“That was then. And this is now.”

“Okay, you win.” Joseph rolled away from her. “I’ve got the patience of Job. I can wait. I know these things take time.”

“Joseph.” Catherine’s voice was hollow. “It takes more than time. Believe me, Joseph. It would take a miracle to make me do that with you again.”

It was not a time for miracles or even small wonders. Sadness lingered in the house, together with the smell of scorched metal. Mrs. Santangelo couldn’t seem to make tea without letting the water boil out of the pot; it was almost as if the smoke from that Saint Anna medallion had never left the apartment. Catherine’s dead plants sat on the shelves, like the skulls which the saints kept around as constant reminders of mortality.

Mrs. Santangelo had given up hope. What was there to hope for? A child, of course, a child to carry on the line and restore their luck. But the sound of Joseph’s bedsprings suggested that a child was unlikely. These nights, she heard only the erratic shiftings of restlessness, tossing and turning, ill will between husband and wife, and she found herself longing for the squeaks and bounces which used to infuriate her. But how could she ask San Gennaro to make the bedsprings creak like before?

“What will become of us?” she asked aloud. No one answered; even Zio’s spirit had abandoned her in this trying time. “What will become of us?” she repeated, if only to keep from hearing Joseph’s bed and the morbid noises which rose up to her window from Mulberry Street.

All night, the muffled conversations reminded Mrs. Santangelo of whispering mourners, and the hoofbeats of the knife grinder’s horse sounded like those of an animal being led to slaughter. The street was never quiet for more than a second, and during those seconds, she panicked: Everyone was dead. The noises of life would never resume.

The days were no better. Now, when she walked through the neighborhood, the only building she saw was Castellano’s Funeral Home; she imagined her own body laid out among the lilies, viewed as if from a great height. Was it any wonder that the shortest walks left her out of breath, with black spots dancing in front of her eyes?

“Zio,” she said, not daring to hope that he was listening. “If you’re coming, you’d better come quick. If you wait too long, I won’t recognize you.”

Her memory was fading; her knowledge of signs and portents was going first. Two pigeons perched on the windowsill—what did that mean? How could she count the eyes on a potato when she couldn’t remember how many potatoes went into the gnocchi? She forgot the reason for wearing the
cornuto
she’d worn all her life, forgot that hopelessness was a sin, forgot where to find the priest she was supposed to confess it to.

The only thing she never forgot was her prayers, and eventually they were answered.

Late one night, anise-scented cigar smoke filled her room. Despite her failing memory, she had no trouble recognizing Zio’s brand.

“Zio, help me.” Mrs. Santangelo had waited too long to waste time on pleasantries. “Tell me: What will become of us? What’s there to hope for?”

“Hope for a miracle,” said Zio.

“What kind of miracle?” she asked, forgetting that Zio, in his spiritual state, resisted direct questions.

“The only miracle we can hope for,” he said.

It was not a time for miracles. In all those months, the strangest thing that happened was that Nicky showed up—unannounced, still in uniform and apparently unhurt—at Lino’s door.

Lino reached out to shake his son’s hand, but Nicky just stood there, encumbered by the heavy duffel bag he was carrying in one hand, the thin, lacquered sword case in the other. It was this sword case, this samurai souvenir, which reminded Lino of all the missed pinochle games, the hours of pleasure sacrificed to Nicky’s idiotic dreams, and so irritated him that he said, “Where’s Madame Butterfly?”

Nicky squeezed past him through the door. How could he have explained that until seventy-two hours ago, when the troop plane took off from the air base near Yokohama, Madame Butterfly had been everywhere, always but never quite within reach?

For the truth was as Lino had suspected, that Nicky had reenlisted in search of a Japanese wife. He imagined her in a kimono, white socks and those high wooden sandals, fluttering from room to room in his Mulberry Street apartment. His geisha-wife would light incense, pour tea, set bowls of formally arranged flowers in the places where Catherine’s ugly houseplants used to be; she would blush and vanish behind a rice paper screen whenever a stranger entered the house.

Admittedly it was an incongruous vision, but the very incongruity of it struck Nicky with a piercing beauty which only made him desire it more. Their lives would smell of joss sticks and not of garlic and frying sausage; their days would be scored to a delicate blend of opera and koto music. Instead of pinochle, they’d play go and those coy games the geishas played with sake cups and disappearing shells.

On enlisting, he extracted a promise from the recruiting officer which the army honored: He was sent to Japan. There, he saw other men living out his dreams, half the company sleeping with Japanese girls, the other half boasting about it. A few were even marrying war brides, braving bureaucratic hell and high water to bring them back home.

The soldiers were generous with advice on how to meet girls, and Nicky did what they said. They told him to eat in local restaurants—he haunted every sushi bar and noodle parlor in Kyoto. They suggested public transportation—he took trams for short distances he could have walked. Dutifully, he accompanied his bunkmates to off-limits nightclubs and drank huge quantities of watered scotch. Still, somehow, he could never seem to find the proper approach; even the B-girls shied away from him. Besides, it seemed impossible that Madame Butterfly would be working in one of those sleazy, neon-lit bars; and the pimps who hissed at him from the doorways of the red-light district were nothing like Goro, Puccini’s little “marriage-broker.”

Recalling that Lieutenant Pinkerton had leased an apartment, and that the bride had come along with the place, Nicky thought briefly of renting a room in town. But all the houses with rooms to let belonged to war widows and families who’d lost sons in the fighting; their bitter, reproachful faces made the barracks seem homey and inviting.

Even as the plane took off, and Nicky watched the gray city, the bright green rice fields disappear beneath him, he never stopped praying for the miracle which would transform his life into
Madame Butterfly.
Only now, as he noticed that Lino’s apartment hadn’t changed since his departure and realized that it would probably stay the same till both he and his father were dead, did he finally accept the fact that his miracle would never come. He went straight to his room, turned on the radio and lay down on his bed.

Dreading this homecoming, he had timed it to coincide with the opera broadcast. Now, as the sounds of the orchestra tuning up and Milton Cross’s hushed, pompous whisper filled the apartment, Lino put his fingers in his ears and kept them there, on and off, till four, when the program ended.

Nicky went out and returned a few minutes later with a bottle in a paper bag. Back in his room, he drained the bottle in one gulp and passed out through Saturday night and much of Sunday.

Monday morning, Nicky stumbled down to the shop, where Lino soon discovered that a second stint in the army had done nothing for his mechanical sense. Not that it mattered, for business was slower than ever. Everyone was buying televisions, and the radios that broke were left broken. All week, Nicky toyed with a battered Emerson, a hopeless case which had lain in the shop nearly two years. On Friday evening, Lino paused in the midst of closing up to examine his son’s work, and found that Nicky had eviscerated the radio and abandoned it, an empty Bakelite shell.

That same weekend, Mrs. Santangelo got it into her head to invite the Falconettis to dinner, as a way of formally welcoming Nicky home.

“I don’t know,” said Lino. “I haven’t seen much of your sister since before you left. If you ask me, she’s not doing so hot, and the old lady isn’t much better. Anyhow, don’t you think it’s a little peculiar? She’s never invited us before….”

Lino caught himself. Who was Nicky to ask about ‘peculiar’?

The party got off to an inauspicious start as Nicky and Mrs. Santangelo greeted each other with rigid, almost theatrical formality. Like two inmates in a nuthouse, thought Joseph. Joseph shook his brother-in-law’s hand and Catherine kissed the air in his direction.

“I won’t hug you,” she said. “I’ve got a cold.”

“Sit,” said Mrs. Santangelo. “The food’s all ready.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth. The melon was crispy and green, the pasta stuck together in clumps. Up and down the table, forks pierced the sausage and undercooked meat oozed out like toothpaste from a tube.

Joseph, who’d expected as much, thanked God that Augie, Evelyn, and the twins hadn’t been able to come. He looked around the table and didn’t bother putting any sausage on his plate. His mother was shredding a hunk of bread.

“At my age,” she said, “who’s got teeth for crust?” Then she noticed that the guest of honor had stopped eating.

“What’s the matter?” She glared at Nicky. “They don’t eat sausage in Uncle Sam’s army?”

“Mama, I bought some seafood salad yesterday,” said Joseph, who’d not only predicted, but prepared for, calamity. “Five pounds. Maybe the Falconettis would like some with their sausage.”

“Seafood salad with their sausage?” Mrs. Santangelo still had a sense—however dim—of the proper order of things.

“Sure, why not?”

“Where is it?”

“The refrigerator. You know.”

Mrs. Santangelo was gone a long time before returning with the salad, still in its cardboard container. She set the carton on the table and motioned for her guests to pass it around. No one took much except Nicky, who loaded his plate with the marinated squid. The family sat in silence, watching him eat.

“In Japan,” Nicky spoke with his mouth full, “they live on this stuff. Seafood and noodles, it’s all they eat.”

“What kind of country is that,” Mrs. Santangelo leaned forward and scrutinized him, “where the women can’t cook anything but seafood and pasta?”

“I didn’t say
can’t
.” Bristling, Nicky rose to defend Madame Butterfly’s honor. “I meant, it’s all they can get. It’s been rough for them since the war, you don’t know. They can’t get meat, sugar, ordinary ingredients—”

“Ingredients?” repeated Mrs. Santangelo. “What ingredients? When I first came over from the old country, me and Zio were so poor, I had to pick clam shells out of the garbage. And believe me, I made a delicious soup. If a woman can’t cook what God gives her, she can’t cook.”

“You’re a great one to talk.” Nicky pointed at the untouched food on his plate.

“At least my son married an Italian girl.” Mrs. Santangelo snapped her lips together like a turtle. “Instead of chasing after the Japanese.”

“Right,” said Nicky. “An Italian girl he won in a pinochle game.”

“That’s my wife you’re talking about.” Joseph slammed the blunt end of his knife on the table. “And your sister.”

There was a silence. Finally Catherine said, “What pinochle game?”

“What pinochle game?” mimicked Mrs. Santangelo.

“
You
know.” Ignoring his sister, Nicky addressed Mrs. Santangelo.

“I
don’t
know,” said Mrs. Santangelo. “I don’t remember.”

The subject was dropped. The meal ended. The Falconettis went home. Catherine cleared the table and went to her room, leaving her mother-in-law to do the dishes. Joseph paced the living room, feeling like a guest who has outstayed his welcome so long that his hosts have abandoned the pretence of courtesy and gone off to clean up or sleep. But where could he go? He couldn’t bear the sight of his mother transferring the leftover sausage into refrigerator dishes, nor could he face Catherine, who’d be curious about that pinochle game. A grown man, he thought, afraid to go into his own bedroom.

Just as he was getting up the nerve to confront Catherine, his mother appeared from the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron.

“Joseph, I got a question. That boy that was here tonight—who was he?”

“That was my brother-in-law.” Joseph couldn’t look at her. “Catherine’s brother Nicky.”

“You mean, we’re related to
that
?” said Mrs. Santangelo, but Joseph had already left the room.

The bedroom light was out, and Catherine lay on her back—so still that Joseph had to fight the urge to pinch her for some sign of life. Shamed by the thought, he undressed and got under the covers.

Catherine didn’t speak; perhaps she was planning to ignore the whole thing. Joseph’s relief was soon dissipated as he realized that it was not about to be ignored. Now that the pinochle game had been mentioned, it lay between them like another gloomy presence in the bed.

“You know what that dinner tonight reminded me of?” Joseph decided to broach the subject in a roundabout way. “It reminded me of that meal you cooked before we were married, that first night I went to your father’s apartment.”

Often, in the early months of their marriage, they’d joked about that meal, about how nervous Catherine was, how good the ruined food had tasted to Joseph. It was part of their history, the private history which lovers construct around the beginnings of their love. And now, as Joseph prayed for this memory to ignite some long-extinguished spark of affection, Catherine turned toward him.

“What meal?” she said. “What dinner at my father’s house?”

On Easter morning, Catherine woke up knowing that something was different. As she lay in bed trying to figure out what it was, she realized that the bedroom smelled of flowers. Easter lilies? The scent was lighter and less cloying than the fragrance of lilies. Seeking its source, Catherine looked around the room.