The Patron Saint of Ugly (19 page)

“So the priest has sent the beggars for alms,” she said.

Nicky swallowed hard, no doubt wondering how she knew our goal. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And for what purpose?”

“We need a donation to buy church bells . . . that would be dedicated in your honor.”

Smooth, though I wondered if she would contribute to a religion at odds with her own spiteful one.

She harrumphed. “You should be attending a private academy, not that third-rate parochial school.”

Nicky could only nod, because he thought the same thing.

Whatever crystal ball La Strega used to peer into our shabby world below also enabled her to read minds. “Say no more. How much do you need?”

Nicky swallowed hard. “Six hundred and seventy-five dollars.”

“Radisson! Bring my purse!”

So Nigger Toe had a name.

Radisson exited and reentered carrying a tapestry handbag crammed with whatever it was that witches carried in their purses: vials of blood, dried frogs, dismembered human fingers that wiggled. La Strega settled it on her lap, dug and dug, and eventually pulled out seven crisp hundred-dollar bills.

“I, I,” Nicky stuttered. “I don’t have change.”

“I don’t expect any. The extra twenty-five is for you.”

“For me?” His eyeballs nearly popped out of their sockets and rolled across the floor.

“That should buy a lot of encyclopedias, yes?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Though perhaps it’s time I introduced you to the great books of lit-ra-toor.”

“Sure.” Nicky was still gawping at the greenbacks.

“Please show yourselves out.”

Nicky and I walked around Radisson and we were about to make a clean getaway when La Strega added one more thing. “Perhaps tomorrow you would like to visit my library, Nicholas? It’s quite extensive, you know.”

Reminded of his real aim, he ignored the errant forename and said, drooling, “Yes!”

As we were taking our leave I scoured the room for a crystal ball. How did La Strega know our parents? Our neighbors? Our reading habits? And then I saw it: a telescope pointing down on the saps toiling away their lives for her amusement. Before we reached the door, I heard what sounded like a slap followed by La Strega scolding: “How could you miss their pedigree, Radisson? Your research is shoddy. Shoddy!” A pause, then La Strega added, “That girl is hideous.”

After school the next day Nicky bolted outside and raced to Flannigan’s, visions of root-beer floats dancing in his brain. I tagged along because his pocket was bulging with twenty-five one-dollar bills. Sister Barnabas had been so bug-eyed she’d pulled out a fat wallet and made the change herself.

“What are you going to do with twenty-five dollars?” I called after him, panting.

“I don’t know.”

“I know what I would do.”

I was hoping he would ask, because I had my eye on a heavenly nightlight in the Sears catalog that salted the ceiling with stars. He did not ask.

We galloped past O’Grady’s and Paddy’s and pushed open the pharmacy door, the bell overhead jingling. Mr. Flannigan was behind the counter in the back filling prescriptions. Mrs. Flannigan washed sundae glasses at the soda fountain.

Nicky sat on a stool and I took the one beside him, swiveling, hoping he might buy me a root-beer float too.

“Hello, Nicky,” Mrs. Flannigan said. “And Garnet,” she added, though, like many villagers, she didn’t make eye contact with my skin. “What can I get you?”

“Two banana splits,” Nicky said.

I was stunned by his generosity. This was the priciest item on the menu.

“We’re celebrating the bells, I see.” Word had already spread about how Nicky slayed our malevolent dragon.

It was the best banana split I ever ate. As I savored every spoonful I ogled the penny candy in the glass case beside me. So many Mary Janes, Atomic Fireballs, BB Bats, wax lips, and licorice whips. If Nicky’s generous spirit held I might walk home clutching a bagful of decadence.

And then Nicky began naming Jack the Ripper’s throat-slit victims. I followed his gaze and spotted the Four Stooges, a collection of local bullies, gathered on the steps across the street in front of Dino’s Lounge, which is where they always loitered until Dino scattered them with the baseball bat he kept behind the counter. The thugs were an integrated collection of Irish and Italian teens, their miscreant blood thicker than the familial kind. They were the chief cigarette and beer thieves, egg lobbers and tire deflators, pee-ers in the town’s water basin. Cousin Ray-Ray would have fit right in, and maybe he occasionally did. Their hideout was Snakebite Woods, another reason Nicky warned me to avoid that scary copse. My pretty brother was increasingly the Stooges’ target. He would regularly come home splattered with the remnants of mud balls or crab apples.

Nicky hunched over his banana split hoping the Stooges wouldn’t see him or that Dino would appear and crack a few skulls, but he didn’t come and he didn’t come even as our spoons clinked the bottom of our dishes. Plus Nicky was due soon for a tour of La Strega’s library.

And suddenly there she was. Her car, anyway. Radisson parked the Packard in front of the pharmacy. He adjusted his chauffeur’s hat, blew a pink bubblegum bubble the size of a coconut, and then sucked the entire thing back into his mouth. When he got out I expected him to open the rear door for La Strega, but the back seat was empty. Radisson pushed open the pharmacy door, looked over at me, and tipped his hat. He loped to the back counter, and as Mr. Flannigan waited on him, I watched the Stooges cross the street and circle the car, rearrange the side mirrors, flip up the wiper blades, twist off the winged-cormorant hood ornament. I spun toward Radisson wondering if I should alert him, but one of the goons did it for me by reaching in the open front window and honking the horn.

Radisson turned around. Any damage to the car would likely come out of his paycheck, if La Strega even paid the man.

“Hey!” He ran outside as fast as his stick legs would carry him, shaking his fist at the boys, his jaw moving. The Stooges began to bounce up and down on the bumpers, making the car rock, and the tallest thug reached for the antenna that stuck out of the roof.

I looked back to see if the Flannigans were going to help, but they hustled through the back of the pharmacy and soon their footsteps pounded up the steps to their apartment. They had been the target of the Stooges’ shoplifting for years. Now the Stooges started circling Radisson, taking jabs at his chest, trying to swipe his hat.

“That’s not right. We’ve got to do something, Nicky.”

“Let’s go.”

I assumed that meant he was ready to take action, but when I followed him outside I discovered that he was using this diversion to slip away.

As we edged past the scuffle, the Stooges jabbed Radisson with words as well as fists. “Hey, Nigger Toe. You’re nothing but an ass wiper, you know that? An old hag’s ass wiper.” They started chanting, “Nigger Toe! Nigger Toe! Nigger Toe!”

I wasn’t even thinking when I swiveled to face them. “His name is not Nigger Toe! It’s Radisson! Radisson-Radisson-Radisson!”

All sound disappeared as the boys glared in disbelief at a girl daring to challenge them. They turned away from the car and toward me, hands balling into fists. “She’s even uglier up close,” one of them said as they all inched toward me. “God, what a freak.” I genuinely thought this might be the end of me. And then I glimpsed Mr. Flannigan on his second-story balcony with a phone to his ear, the cord stretched taut from all the way inside. “They’re out there right now harassing my customers. You’ve got to come, Mickey. Come now!” And the blessed sound of a distant police siren racing to save us. The Stooges scattered like cockroaches, leaving Radisson and me trembling. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you all right, miss?”

I could only nod since a glob of adrenaline was jammed in my throat.

“Would you like a ride home?”

I nodded again and turned around to include Nicky, but he was nowhere in sight. Radisson started to open the rear door, but I jumped in the shotgun seat since I rarely had that privilege. Radisson got in and turned the key in the ignition. We didn’t speak as he spiraled up the hill, passing neighbor kids who pointed at the spectacle of stain-faced me being ferried in such grand style. The only one who did not look up at the car was Nicky, who trudged not to La Strega’s library but homeward, nose practically touching the blacktop, probably listing infamous cowards.

TAPE TEN

The Saint Brigid’s Day Massacre

O Padre, My Padre:

I’m walking to the wine cellar, so bear with me as I negotiate these narrow and—eww—slimy passageways. Nonna is leading the way with a flashlight—

(Watch out for the wall sconce, Nonna!)

(Son-ama-beetch!)

I
told
Nonna I would get the wine for her—

(You no know which-a vino I need!)

But apparently I no know which-a vino she need. What’s the name again, Nonna?

(Moot Rot-a-chile.)

That’s it, the one and only wine that will go with her marinara, though I don’t know what we’ll do when that particular rack is cleared.

(I no drink-a too much!)

(I really and truly do not give a gnat’s ass, Nonna.)

Nonna certainly deserves refined wine after enduring Grandpa’s hand-pressed Gaglioppo swill all those years.

And here we are, another room I love because of the
ploink-ploink
of water dripping from the stone ceiling. It’s also thirty-five degrees cooler, so I’ve been known to drag a folding chair here on hot July nights. Last summer Nonna began lobbying for central air-conditioning. I’m on the verge of acquiescing and not because it’s-a her dying wish.

Nonna is marching us back, carrying her Rot-a-chile like a scepter. Can you hear that? She’s humming—not our E note but the theme from
The Godfather
. When
The Godfather: Part II
came out last year, she made me take her to see it five times, and I had to buy out the Sweetwater Cinema for secrecy. Nonna blubbered when the actors spoke in her mother tongue and the camera panned the Sicilian countryside.
I been-a there!
She also claims she knew Don Ciccio:
I know that no-good son-ama-Ciaffaglione-beetch!
Watch out for you life!
I didn’t have the heart to tell her he was a fiction, but by now most of her memories of life in Sicilia are probably fictions too.

Now we’re in Nonna’s basement kitchen, several steps below the main one. The flagstone floor is terra firma for the butcher-block table Nonna hauled up from her old Via Dolorosa house. I’m rubbing my hand over the concave depression made after years of Nonna’s kneading dough and cutting pasta.

(
Pop!
)

Here comes the red wine. One glass for me (grazie,
Nonna
), one for her, one for the marinara.

(And-a one for Padre
. Salute!
)

(
Salute.
)

A New York City scene in
Godfather II
resonated with me the same way the Sicilian ones must have with Nonna: the San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy when the young Vito Corleone offed the Black Hand.

One sweltering July, Sweetwater held its own patron-saint festival. The lampposts on the north side of Appian Way were decorated with Saint Brigid of Kildare gewgaws: reed crosses, like the kind Brigid fashioned when she was converting pagan chieftains, and papier-mâché red-eared cows, its milk the only source of nourishment for Brigid when she was a child. Their sidewalk was crowded with booths selling oatcakes and Guinness stout, plus tables where children could color pages that looked like the illuminated Book of Kildare, the original of which had been handmade in the monastery founded by that Irish Saint Brigid.

The south side of the street was decorated with Saint Brigid of Tuscany tributes. The streetlights were hung with flags of angels, like the ones who ferried Saint Brigid to her brother Saint Andrew’s deathbed, and papier-mâché Apennine Mountains, where that Brigid lived out her life in a cave. Their booths sold cannolis and Chianti.

Residents lined the street waiting for the double procession that would bring the two Saint Brigid statues from the church, through the village, and to the town square. The occasion would also be the inaugural ringing of the newly installed church bells.

In the school parking lot, white-clad children gathered in rows: peat-pressers on the left, garlic-grinders on the right. At the end of the lines, directly behind the two statues, each in her own cart, was a third cart holding a throne upon which sat the one and only Saint Brigid Queen. The nuns conspired, yet again, on behalf of a certain hill girl who was as divided as the congregation: half Italian, half British; half healer, half charlatan; half pale pink ocean, half mulberry continents. The Kildare Brigid had disfigured her face to avoid suitors, and I was sure I was chosen because I already looked the part.

I was sweating in the bride gown hand-sewn by Nonna. A lace veil covered my face, and though just five years before I would have luxuriated in all the netting, that day I felt ridiculous.

Eventually Grand Marshal Father Luigi bellowed, “Forward ho!” He marched ahead of everyone, waving both arms as if he were a celebrity, followed by a formation of nuns whirling rosary beads like propeller blades. Next came the children scattering oats and reed switches or blowing rude noises from ram horns. Bringing up the rear were the three Saint Brigid carts pulled by church ushers.

Families on both sides cheered as we passed, and though I was shrouded in netting, familiar wails drifted from the toddlers held in their parents’ arms: “Daddy! What’s wrong with—” Then I spotted Mom, mother of the bride; Nonna, mother of the bride gown; and Aunt Betty, mother of none. Beside them, Dad downed Chianti and longed to be in his basement sawing wood. Dom flirted with one of Dino’s waitresses. Ray-Ray flicked lit matches at Paddy’s dog before Paddy chased him off. Conspicuously absent was Grandpa, likely tending his grapevine.