The Patron Saint of Ugly (41 page)

It sounded exactly as it should have. Metal and glass plunging into bricks and mortar. A screeching, crunching, grating roar that was thunderous enough to rouse even the deepest of sleepers on Dagowop Hill . . . You get the idea. If Grandpa had survived, he really should have sued the city planners who’d chiseled out a spiraling road where spring waters froze over a particularly treacherous bend and caused inexperienced, distracted, or irate drivers to meet tragic ends.

Nine months later, a widow with a matrilineal fortune left her daughter in a sanitarium in an undisclosed locale to return to Charlottesville for a monthlong stay. The matron was unpacking her jewels while imbibing her favorite potable when she ran out of pearl onions. Rather than sending her cook or maid, who were un-sheeting furniture, she ran the errand herself. As she returned home, her Cadillac skidded across an icy patch of road, crashed through the fence surrounding a sewage-treatment plant, and drove headfirst into the basin of churning feces. The widow was knocked unconscious and subsequently drowned, her lungs filled, according to the coroner, with poo sludge.

Okay, okay. I know you’re shaking your head at the implausibility of all these ice-related crashes, so I feel I should mention that it’s quite possible Grandpa Ferrari did not die in a car wreck after speeding over No-Brakes Bend. Perhaps one day while ripping up a patch of Fiore Pergusa in his backyard, he stepped on a rake, fell backward, and fatally cracked his skull on a two-foot-square concrete slab intended for a statue of Mary of Lourdes. It’s also more than reasonable to believe that rather than kicking the bucket, Uncle Dom left Aunt Betty for a big-bosomed waitress from Dino’s Lounge. According to the
Sweetwater Herald
police blotter, a certain hilltop tycoon reported the theft from her home of a number of items; she suspected her uncle of the crime, as several of the items turned up in a pawnshop in Vandalia. Rumor had it that Uncle Dom and the waitress used the money to hightail it to Las Vegas, where she became a blackjack dealer and he got a job parking other people’s fancy cars.

Grandma Iris died exactly as described.

TAPE TWENTY

Thoroughly Modern Miracle

Archie:

This afternoon Betty had a thirty-seat dining table delivered to the ballroom, which is an entire wing, so it’s virtually a glasshouse, windows on three sides offering fabulous views of the springhouse and pond. After dinner Nonna and Betty shut themselves in there and taped a sign to the door:
Keep Out (That means you, Garnet!)
. They think they’re pulling off some grand holiday scheme.

It’s two in the morning, another sleepless night. I’ve had insomnia for days, Padre. An itch in my marrow because I can feel something coming, I just don’t know what it is. While my roomies were snoozing I slipped downstairs to see what they’re up to. The new table is covered in Christmas paper, Scotch tape, and hundreds of boxes filled with red socks and mittens, candy canes and globe pencil sharpeners, four-inch Saint Garnet statues—badly retooled Statue of Liberty souvenirs, but I was not consulted. Nonna bought the statues at Holy Treasures of Sicily in what used to be Paddy’s Pub, the residual tater tots grinding their molars at the Dagowop encroachment.

Tucked in each mitten is a Saint Garnet holy card, though it’s nothing like the cartoon ones I drew all those years ago at my Saint Brigid desk. The illustrator gave me pouty lips and bedroom eyes. My birthmarks are present, but the geography is all wrong. This Saint Garnet stands atop a volcano holding pumice stones in one hand and a bloody handkerchief in the other. I don’t know where the artist got her information, since I have no idea what a bloody handkerchief has to do with me.

I bet Nonna is dreaming about the looks on the children’s faces when she hands the gifts over. When she first moved in I granted her three wishes that made her grin like a little girl. The first was a vegetable garden, since she had always wanted her own plot not crowded with Grandpa’s bitter radicchio. She and I dug up La Strega’s rosebushes—though I secretly apologized to Radisson. Nonna’s second wish was a trellis on that sunny spot Grandpa had marked off beside the springhouse, where she would plant, not his swill-producing Gaglioppo grapes, but his brother Angelo’s much sweeter Orgoglio della Sicilia. We hired a carpenter who built a Japanese-influenced arbor. On the night of a full moon, Nonna led me outside with soupspoons and clippings of the grapevine she’d gotten from who-knows-where. I stuck in my spoon and out popped pumice stones. Nonna unearthed seashells. I opened my mouth, but Nonna blurted, “It’s not-a me!”

The only drawback was that Nonna had to lug bucket after bucket of water from the spigot on the side of the house all the way to her garden and grapes, spilling much of it along the way. I bought her a hose, but she said the rubber made the squash blossoms taste like balloons. Finally she asked for wish number three, though she plied me with eggplant parmigiana first.

She centered the steaming dish on the casual dining table set with La Strega’s second-best china. Nonna even wore a new jersey dress, and she did look pretty, her dingy braid once again silvery white. Betty looked lovely in a mink cape, her acne cleared up. We attributed these recoveries to posh living.

“My cooking she is so much-a better up-a here.” Nonna dished out the eggplant. “I no understand why it went-a so bad after you left, but now you back and my food is-a
delizioso
once-a more.”

Betty and I could only nod, our mouths crammed full.

“So now I ask for my last-a wish.”

Nonna wanted to unplug the spring so that the water could flow freely, not only to her vegetables and grapevine and the patch of Fiore Pergusa she’d cultivated, but to the heated reflection pond on the other side of the fence so she could soak her aching feet.

With eggplant like that, who could-a refuse, especially now that I was a woman of means.

We hired contractors with jackhammers to break up the concrete, the grating noise drawing the attention of not only the saint seekers but the Water Authority director, Rodney, who showed up at my fence with a basket of fruit. I was suspicious, but Nonna kept trying to wrestle a pineapple through the railings, so I let him in. He sprinted to the still-plugged spring as workers cleared chunks of cement from around the original pipes, which, according to Rodney, had once funneled spring water to both the pond and Le Baron’s underground system that fed the village below. During the post–World War II boom, the city tapped into Le Baron’s system so that all those cracker-box hill dwellers could also cook, bathe, and flush with the sweet water.

After the Great Explosion, when La Strega corked the headwaters, all of this dried up. Rodney tried countless times to coax her into letting the water flow, since the village had to tap into the water from where it now gushed, beside the Plant, and pump it back up into the hill houses at great expense. Plus, that water just tasted plain funky. La Strega had refused. Now, if Nicky had been alive to ask the witch—hmmm.

Rodney stared longingly at the spring and finally asked if I would pretty please let the naturally filtered water flow from atop the hill once more.

I asked myself what fifty-two-minute-fortune Radisson would have done, and I had my answer: “Of course.”

Rodney tittered and said he’d send up engineers to oversee the project and make sure the water started flowing in its new direction at the same time the system below was shut off. “And for the unveiling, we could have a parade!”

“No parade,” I said. “Please.”

Engineers and contractors worked diligently over the next two months, as did the pool men hired to replace the corroded heating elements and restore the reflection pond. My surprise to Nonna was to have the bottom inlaid with a mosaic of a Nereid modeled after the statue Great-Uncle Angelo had sculpted years before. It was not easy keeping that secret from Nonna.

The official uncorking was set for a Saturday in August. Rodney asked if I’d like to be mistress of ceremonies. I declined.

On that propitious day, from my open parlor window, I used binoculars to scour the villagers gathered around the stone basin and pump where the original craftsmen used to rinse their necks. Father Shultz and Rodney flanked the pump, surrounded by hill folk and villagers, children tied to helium balloons, and two men holding up a giant banner for my benefit that read
THANK YOU, SAINT GARNET
, though the man on the left rolled his eyes. There was Sister Dee Dee and Pippa Fabrini, as well as Nonna and Betty.

At exactly noon, just as the Saint Brigid church bells pealed, Father lifted his arms to bless the endeavor. I scanned the top of Italia Imports for a row of tomatoes but found none. Father bellowed into a microphone: “God bless the people of Sweetwater and this water that is so sweet. May it flow for a thousand years!”

When the Padre concluded, Rodney raised a red handkerchief as a signal to whoever was at the controls. I heard glugging in the chateau’s pipes, knocks and pings, toilets flushing on their own. Down below, Nonna had been granted the honor of turning on the new system, and she ambled to the pump, but before she worked the handle, she held up her arms and offered her own prayer: “Santa Garney send-a her healing upon this water and upon all of-a you, especially the bambinos with all of the bumps and a-splotches. May all-a you skin disorders be-a healed. So amen!”

“Amen!” cheered the crowd.

Thanks a lot, Nonna.

Nonna pumped the handle up and down, the townsfolk staring expectantly at the spigot, and then
whoosh!
—out poured that delicious sweet water they hadn’t tasted in years. Children jumped into the filling basin, as did a handful of adults, even Sister Dee Dee, all of them splish-splashing.

They were too busy to notice that a few miles away at the end of Via Dolorosa another jet of water shot into the sky. I was startled, and even more so when something crashed through my parlor window, whizzed by my ear, shattered a Ming dynasty vase on a pedestal, and landed in the fireplace. I focused my binoculars on the plume of water that was losing pressure fast until it was reduced to a steady stream pouring from the lips of the Nereid statue. I ran to the fireplace, got on my knees, and rooted around in layers of ash until I found what had apparently been corking the nymph’s throat for fifty years: a six-inch section of marble braid, no doubt snapped off and shoved down there by a mean-fisted tyrant who couldn’t stopper his drifting wife’s love.

Nonna returned at dusk, the sun a blood-orange ball hovering above the horizon. Because the hill folk and villagers were still feasting below, I led Nonna to the new globe-tipped springhouse that hid the engineers’ mechanizations. We went through the back gate to the reflection pond, where for the first time Nonna saw the undulating Nereid below the water. Nonna gripped my hand and a lightning bolt shot up my arm as another spring flowed freely from her eyes. The tears dripped from her chin into the pond, sending out concentric rings. It looked as if the tears sliding from Nonna’s eyes were glowing. She noted it too, capturing the wetness and holding it up like a palm full of lava. She let the liquid spill into the pond, where it spread across the surface like a sheet of colored glass.

“The red water of Lake Pergusa,” Nonna said. She pointed below to the stone trough at the base of the hill: the water inside also glowed red, as did the stream pouring from the mouth of a sea nymph on the street where Nonna once lived.

When the sun slid behind the earth it took the colored water with it; Nonna’s tears returned to saline. “It’s a sign,” Nonna said, but she didn’t say a sign of-a what.

I don’t know exactly what happened that night, Padre, if it was just the reflected sunlight or something else that made the pond change color and glow—fluorescent algae or calcite, perhaps. Red leakage from microscopic organisms like the ones in Lake Pergusa. What caused Nonna’s tears to glow, I have no clue.

Regardless, within two weeks, even more hill and village children, old nonnas, and parents were pressing their faces against my fence, grateful for the sweet water plus the fact that their rashes and boils were clearing up. One afternoon I stood on my bedroom balcony looking down at the throng, marveling that their gums were no longer gray, their hair was growing back, their skin pink and smooth. That was the precise moment a little
ping!
sounded in my head. I felt like a dolt that it had taken me so long to figure it out: it was the water healing these people, and probably had been for years.

I wanted to share the news that would send them packing, so I shouted: “It’s the water healing you, not me!”

One of the nonnas answered back: “
Sì
. Saint Garnet, she send the healing waters!”

“No! It’s not me! It’s the water! The water!”

Someone in the back of the crowd hollered: “What did she say?”

“She said she blessed the water so it would heal us!”

“Thank you, Saint Garnet!”

“It’s not me!” I yelled. “It’s whatever is in the water!”

“And may God bless-a you for it!”

“No!”

“We love you, Saint Garnet!”

No matter what I said, they just wouldn’t listen. Admittedly, though I had an explanation for some of the Sweetwater magic, the water never cured me. And there was still the riddle of who had been rearranging my personal geography over the years. In fact, at breakfast this morning, I discovered that Quebec on my inner elbow had separated from its sister provinces, microscopic inhabitants waving au revoir. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Nonna was flipping an omelet at the stove singing “‘Dominique, a-nique, a-nique.’” Still, at least now I had something concrete—or liquid—to point to that might siphon some attention away from me.

As summer slid into fall, word about me spilled into bordering states: Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Maryland, even Virginia, our severed twin, whose inhabitants had to swallow their pride before crossing the state line to beg for a healing.