Household Saints (28 page)

Finally it was said that Theresa’s holiness could still be partaken of by buying sausage from her father’s shop. Following her death, it was rumored, Joseph Santangelo never cheated a customer again. There were many who knew for a fact that this was untrue, and they told it like this: After the mourning period, Joseph reopened his shop and started cheating like never before. And when the women complained, he would flash them his sweetest smile and say, “You know who cheats? God cheats. Go complain to Him.”

But by then, the facts of Theresa’s life and death were less important than the story and the reasons people told it: At school, the good girls told it as conclusive proof that it was still possible to lead a consecrated life: God knew who thought good thoughts and helped around the house. At night, the men came home from playing cards and retold it, as if to say: You may think we’re wasting our time playing cards, but for all you know—we’re preparing the way for a saint. And their wives made similar claims whenever they ruined a meal, on those days when everything went wrong in the kitchen.

In the daytime, though, the women told it differently, to each other. The happy women, and the women who still imagined that happiness was attainable, sighed and said, “If only it would happen to me. If only I could see God in the dirty laundry.” And the women who looked back on a lifetime of laundry and thought, What did I do it for? said, “Why bother? Look where it gets you—the nuthouse.”

“What kind of life did she lead?” they said. “Nothing was accomplished, nothing left behind. She went crazy and died and went into the ground and that was it.” Then the others would point out some little girl with a bag of groceries.

“Life goes on,” they said, and the women would look at each other, not knowing how to feel.

The only ones who could tell the story with no mixed feelings and nothing to prove were the very old. They told it with reverence, with the same respect they would have shown the life of a saint. They told it as Theresa would have liked it told, as the story of an ordinary life redeemed by extraordinary devotion. They told it for hope, and its comfort stayed with them even as Theresa’s life receded into that time when everything was bigger and better and more extreme.

They saved it for the hottest nights, when the air was so heavy that they couldn’t breathe, so still that they could hear the untrustworthy rhythm of their heartbeats. They told it quietly, as if telling a bedtime story to a grandchild. But this was the story they told to reassure themselves, to remind each other: Wait. Such things can happen to anyone, on any hot night—a hot night exactly like this. Hush. Listen to the sound of cards slapping on the table. God is sending us a saint.

Francine Prose is the author of sixteen novels, including
A Changed Man
, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and
Blue Angel
, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
, and the
New York Times
bestseller
Reading Like a Writer
. A former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Prose is a highly regarded critic and essayist, and has taught literature and writing for more than twenty years at major universities. She is a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College, and she lives in New York City.

I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts for its support.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1981 by Francine Prose

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

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