The Patron Saint of Ugly

by Marie Manilla

  As Mom’s belly grew, the rest of her languished. Incubating an angel apparently takes a toll. Finally, her stomach was too outsize for her hips, and the doctor relegated her to bed rest. Mom spent hours holed up in that room reading library books and scribbling poetry. She filled whole tablets and then resorted to grocery sacks, envelopes, drawer liners. No one could unscramble Mom’s inner thoughts erupting as verse that sounded more like Chinese fortunes incorrectly translated: Cursed perfection perfects my curse. O shiny seed, a dissecting world awaits. Growl the toady barfly. I used to think I was too untrained to appreciate Mom’s obscure lines. I know different now.

  One might think Nonna would resent having an impenetrable poet in the house, having to haul trays of tea, bowls of pastina, up those steps five and six times a day. Quite the opposite. Nonna thrived on her duties, which enabled her to ward off envious visitors, particularly walleyed Aunt Betty, who might jinx the birth, the baby, or both.

  Grandpa’s gift to the couple was his temporarily moving to an army cot in the basement, where he was surrounded by bottles of his homemade wine, oily tools, and girlie pictures. Thank God Mom didn’t have to see him parading to the bathroom in his dingy boxers, scratching his bum, rearranging his Calabrian lug nuts, which would have been enough to jinx anyone’s birth.

  Uncle Dom’s gift was securing my father a blue-collar job stoking the furnace at the Plant, where Dom worked in personnel in the air-conditioned front office.

  On February fourteenth, 1949, Nicky began gently tapping on his amniotic sac. The timing must have felt like winning the lottery to Nonna. Could there be a luckier, more red-hearted day to deliver a child? The feast day of Saint Valentinus, our martyred Roman cousin? Grandpa Ferrari sped to Scourged Savior Hospital, Nonna next to him, leaning over the back of her seat and dangling holy medals above Mom’s belly. Dad held Mom’s hand and smoothed her hair. At the hospital, he kissed her forehead before they rushed her through the swinging doors to the delivery room.

  The fam-i-ly settled in the waiting room, prepared for hours of pacing and glugging cup after cup of bitter coffee. Nonna had brought her embroidery kit so she could stitch red crosses into my soon-to-arrive-brother’s diapers. She didn’t make it through even one cross because twenty minutes later, my brother slid effortlessly out of his brackish cocoon and into an oxygenated world eager to receive him. According to the nurses, Mom didn’t even have to push. He did cry, but it wasn’t shrill, more like a chorus of heavenly hosts or wind chimes tinkling in the breeze.

  They brought him to the waiting room for a quick perusal by the fam-i-ly: flawless alabaster skin, aquamarine eyes, a halo of blond ringlets. An Aryan dream that would have made Hitler weep, or my father, who at that exact moment probably uttered to his son the three words I would be chasing for years: I. Love. You.

  Nonna leaned over the baby, spit into his face (ptt-ptt-ptt), and blubbered her deflective chants with flip-flopped pronouns because the malocchio is much less interested in girls, the lesser sex. Grrr. Wonder what Maude would think about that! “Such a homely bambina,” Nonna cooed. “Ugly as a toad. Ought to send her back to cook a while longer.”

  While the others fawned, Grandpa snuck to the nurses’ station and filled in the birth certificate, forever burdening my brother with the cursed moniker Dominick Antonio Ferrari, Grandpa’s own name, despite the fact that my parents had settled on Donald Joseph, after Mom’s father. My mother exploded, although quietly, given her meager strength, but Dad acquiesced to the name, shaving off another inch of height.

  Days later, Mom and Dad brought Nicky home and ushered him into his red bassinet, where he was again protected by a web of good magic. Nonna had a drawer full of baby-girl dresses to disguise Nicky in, confounding my mother. The Italian neighbors—including snooping Celeste Xaviero—understood the cross-dressing. They dropped by with casseroles and stuffed monkeys, hand-knit blankets and rattles, that Nonna accepted before slamming the door on the gift bearers’ resentment.

  Aunt Betty had to wait two weeks to see her nephew. Nonna refused her admittance, so Betty chose the morning when all the men would be at work and Nonna would be chanting her monthly rosary at Saint Brigid’s—a prayer chain she wouldn’t dare break. Betty described how she gripped Ray-Ray’s mittened hand while she boarded the bus and how, when she got to the house, she slid the key from beneath her in-laws’ doormat. Inside, she tiptoed upstairs for her first peek at not only the baby but that hallowed red room, which startled her into yelling: “Holy crap!” Mom wrapped her arms around her sister-in-law, a buoyant ally who might keep Mom afloat in this fam-i-ly. Betty sat in the rocking chair as Mom placed Nicky on her lap. Aunt Betty cooed and fussed. “Such a beautiful baby boy! Such a perfect, lovely baby boy.” Ray-Ray sat on the floor plucking every strand of red yarn from Raggedy Andy’s head before biting off his plastic eyes.

  Betty was still chanting when Nonna hustled up the steps, too early, her rosary half prayed, because she had had a premonition. It was a disaster Betty and Mom recounted numerous times, telling it through Nonna’s eyes. When Nonna entered, she found the demonic tableau—Ray-Ray surrounded by a pile of plucked yarn, yawning (the first sign of the presence of a jettatura); Mom sitting on the edge of the bed rubbing her temples because of a recently descended headache (the second sign); and Betty uttering pronoun-appropriate praises that invited the malocchio’s ire, her green keyhole pupil scouring every inch of Nicky, who had just gotten the hiccups (the third and worst of all signs)—and Nonna knew the babe had been hexed.

  Nonna went spastic with signs of the cross, whirling around the room—all that iron jangling—pulling a knot of coral horns and scapulars from around her neck, bobby pins flying as she scooped Nicky up. “Ugly baby! Horrible! Pitiful! Pig-faced swine of a baby girl!” She plunked him into my mother’s arms before scooting Ray-Ray and Betty from the room, down the stairs, and out the front door, where she batted them off the porch with a broom.

  Such a tornado of holy cures! Mom was a prisoner in that chamber of undoing as Nonna performed ritual after ritual involving bowls of oil and water. She burned rue leaves and smeared the ashes on Nicky’s face. She hid salt crystals in his ringlets. Flashing her hand signs, index and pinkie fingers extended like horns, Nonna recited her antidotal prayer: “Malocchio che causi tanta miseria, noi ti caviamo l’occhio e ti mandiamo sulla luna! Distruggete il malocchio!” Nicky’s hiccups ceased, as did Mother’s headache, but to ward off future enchantments, Nonna rolled out the heavy artillery: urine. Exactly whose, I’m not sure, but she collected spaghetti pots full to dribble outside along the property line. Even worse, she sprinkled droplets in every room in the house, even trickled a circle of it around Nicky’s crib and Mother’s bed. I imagine Mom’s arched eyebrows, her horror as she stared into her reflection in a butter knife. What kind of hell have I married into!

  I’m impressed that she endured it for so long, one postpartum month of breathing in those fumes; she lasted until Grandpa Ferrari reclaimed his room across the hall, where his sardine burps and pig-knuckle farts mingled with the miasma hovering above Mom’s bed and kept her awake, and Nicky too; he finally started bawling like a real child. Not to mention that Mom began to suspect that Nonna’s cooking was laced with pee too.

  “Get us out of here!” Mom yelled at Dad one evening when he came home from work. “Get us the hell out of here now!”

  Dad, bless his henpecked heart, slunk over to Uncle Dom’s to beg for a down payment on a house.

  “Goody!” Aunt Betty remembers saying. “The house two doors down is for sale!”

  Dom wrote Dad a check, but it wasn’t large enough to secure a house in swanky Grover Estates, where Dom and Betty lived a flat-lotted life. It was, however, just enough for one of those squat Monopoly houses up on Dagowop Hill. Mom flew to that cracker box and kissed every concrete step as she hiked up to her new pee-free home.

  TAPE FOUR

  My Cursed, Cursed Birth

  Padre:

  It’s
a gusty day atop Dagowop Hill. I’m sitting in the whippet room, so named because of the painting over the mantel of a golden boy in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit with a doleful-eyed whippet by his side. The house came furnished, so I don’t know who the boy is, but I like to pretend it’s Nicky in the alternative childhood he always wished for himself, one surrounded by titled pets and the accouterments of privilege Grandma Iris would have gladly provided if given the chance.

  The room is circular with gobs of windows offering a three-hundred-sixty-degree view. Most of the leaves have blown from the trees, so I can see nearly every Monopoly house spiraling beneath my feet, even the one my father purchased all those years ago.

  But long before that, this swatch of West Virginia was bought by a robber baron who shall remain nameless because his heirs have lawyers cocked and pointed in my direction. When Le Baron’s workers began poking and prodding the soil, they discovered, not coal, as one might expect, but lead, mercury, and nickel. To process the loot, our tycoon immediately opened the Plant, a smoke-belching factory with pipes that glugged waste into the Ohio River.

  Le Baron’s town also boasted the sweetest water for miles. When he found the source—a spring that bubbled from the top of a hill that stood like a pert nipple in the river valley—he built a springhouse over it, the slate roof topped with a whippet weathervane.

  Le Baron also broke ground on the mountaintop for an estate that copied the Biltmore’s chateau-esque style, though a quarter of the size, with asymmetrical wings and round towers. When Le Baron finalized the plans, I doubt he could have imagined that one day a trio of Italian women would run barefoot through the halls and slide down the banisters in their pajamas. Lucky for us, he also installed a heated reflection pond on a slice of earth below the springhouse.

  Sweetwater Village was established at the foot of the hill to support Le Baron’s employees: cottages for the craftsmen and mill workers; a grocery store to feed them; a pub for them to avoid their nagging wives; and, because most of the workers were Irish immigrants, a Catholic church and a school dubbed Saint Brigid of Kildare. Le Baron benevolently allowed his sweet water to drain downhill into his workers’ pipes. He even had them construct a stone basin and pump in the town square where they could wash their necks and collect gossip.

  The majority of West Virginia is Protest-ant, so Sweetwater is plunked like West Berlin inside East Germany, a papal haven for Cat-lickers, without Checkpoint Charlie or the Berlin Wall. Maybe the wall of animosity between the Prods and Cat-lickers will topple if the actual Berlin Wall ever falls. Oddly enough, although I was born with bisected Germany on my left thigh, West Germany decidedly less mulberry than its eastern cousin, after I recovered from German measles, when I was three, I saw that the countries had melded into one unified magenta blotch. This was my earliest recollection that someone or something was tinkering with my personal geography, an awareness that kept me perpetually looking over my shoulder.

  When Le Baron died, the property went to his widow, a purported witch, who enjoyed her secluded lifestyle until eminent domain pulled the hill, like a rug, out from under her feet. City planners left her the house and a scrap of land, which, except for the oddly situated reflection pond, she immediately contained within a wrought-iron fence. An asphalt road spiraled up the hill, streetlights placed along it intermittently to illuminate the more dangerous curves. On one turn in particular, dubbed No-Brakes Bend, a leak in the natural springs washed over the road and froze every winter, making for treacherous driving. The land was chopped into dinky Levittown parcels to accommodate returning World War II vets, like my father, who didn’t care about that frozen spot in the least.

  There was always a smattering of grape stompers in Sweetwater, and they laid the grid of streets. The widest was Appian Way, which led from the foot of the hill through the village and up to the dogleg in the Ohio River, passing one perpendicular street where the Italians lived, called Via Dolorosa.

  After the war, those Dolorosans flung their progeny up onto the hill, and then word spread outside of West Virginia and dozens of famiglie flocked upward, where they flushed boot-shaped turds in the villagers’ direction. Suddenly O’Grady’s Grocery had to stock salami and capocollo. Paddy’s Pub (where the stout was served warm) had competition from Dino’s Lounge (where the Chianti was served cold). Those Dagowop Catholics started attending Saint Brigid’s, lopping off the of Kildare and redubbing this Brigid their Tuscan saint. They even installed a dark-haired statue in the narthex across from the Irish version, so it was a regular Battle of the Brigids.

  It was a war of epic proportions: Eye-talians claimed one side of the church, Irish the other. Same with the grade school: bogtrotters on the left, macaronis on the right. The taunting was merciless:

  Get on up Dagowop Hill where you belong, you oily-haired, guinea ragùs!

  Up yours, you shillelagh-hugging, leprechaun-spawning, village tater tots!

  Aware of the rift, the diocese appointed a cross-pollinated priest: Father Luigi O’Malley, who sported a massive, peculiarly shaped cantilevered mole on the side of his face that the children dubbed Abraham Lincoln. Father could guzzle whiskey with half of his flock and homemade wine with the other, which made him enormously popular but did little to fuse the congregation.

  Enter my mother, that aquamarine jewel sparkling amid all the coal hunks on the hill. The Italians loved her because they believed her light coloring was superior to their own swarthiness. Whenever Mom traipsed downhill to the village for a loaf of bread or a wedge of cheese, silken ponytail swaying, the Italians, men and women alike, would stop changing sparkplugs or hanging laundry to admire her beauty.

  Irish shopkeepers loved Mom because she was their British Empire kin—never mind the Protestant/Catholic turmoil—and because of the aforementioned superficial reasons. They displayed their awe in practical ways: a pound of bologna when she’d paid for only a half. A head of cabbage tossed in with the onions. Which was a good thing, because although she was smart, she never brought enough money with her to town, nor could she balance a checkbook.

  Each time Mom strolled Nicky around the hill, the housewives fawned over him in ways they never did over their own dun-colored children. The wives squealed and followed them, offering nickels and Walnettos, and all the Old Country nonnas who lived in their children’s spare rooms shuffled after them, clanging cast-iron skillets, spitting, and praying because, like Nonna, they had been trained in the Old Religion.

  I hope life on the hill was initially good for my parents, their days filled with cups of coffee over the back fence and comparing tools in neighbors’ garages. No Mom diving into her reflection or penning weird poetry. I don’t know how Mom kept her location a secret from Grandma Iris during her first twenty months of marriage, but eventually Grandma tracked her only child down. Nicky and I, our heads swimming with too many film noirs, wrote our version of the events in a short story we titled “The Pearl-Onion Dame” (exhibit B), which I’ll read for you now.

  It was a rainy night in Charlottesville. The kind of night where—wait! I forgot. Bear with me as I run downstairs to the conservatory.

  (Where are you off to in such a rush, Garnet? Oh! Are you making one of your tapes?)

  (Yes, Aunt Betty. What is that thing?)

  (It’s a lampshade I mail-ordered. Don’t you just love it?)

  (That’s a lampshade? But it’s all—)

  (I know! It’s going in the carcass room.)

  (Ah. Well, that explains it.)

  Okay. I’m here. I have to dodge the piano and harp. Let me set the tape player down. I’VE GOT A JAZZ RECORD LINED UP ON THE VICTROLA. JUST HAVE TO PUT DOWN THE NEEDLE. There. I’m back. Listen to that horn. Saddest sound I’ve ever heard—next to my saw. Okay. Here we go. Take two, in my best Humphrey Bogart voice:

  It was a rainy night in Charlottesville. The kind of night where a dame’s chilling scream might pierce the skinny hours like a train whistle. The Cadillac pulled up in front of Jake’s Place, a
seedy tavern where merchant marines were routinely cheated in poker games. The chauffeur eased from the front seat and opened the rear door. Out slid a pair of well-formed gams attached to a shapely package in a mink coat, felt hat concealing her face.

  “Get the door, Cedrick,” the doll growled.

  “Yes, ma’am.” The driver obliged, protecting her with an umbrella.

  Inside the bar, the private dick sat slouched in a booth in the back, facing the door so he could spot the broad he’d spoken to only once, on the phone, when she hired him. He didn’t trust her, but he needed the work or he’d be flicked out of his third-floor walkup like a cigarette butt from a car window. And there she was, blowing in with the wind, red rose in her décolletage—their prearranged sign—clicking toward him in her high heels, a man wearing a chauffeur’s hat behind her. She paused at the booth.

  “Dirk Derringer?”

  He nodded. “Mrs. Ruetheday?” Her name was an alias, he was certain, but so was his.

  “Dust the seat, Cedrick.”

  Cedrick pulled the silk scarf from his neck and wiped the wooden bench as the moll peeled off her hat.

  Mrs. Ruetheday was older than Derringer had imagined, maybe fifty, but well preserved, every blond hair in place, diamond earrings the size of roulette balls. He didn’t bother to stand and he could tell that irked her. He was glad. She slid into her seat and commanded Cedrick: “Vodka martini. Extra dry. One pearl onion.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and slithered away.

  Ruetheday plucked off her gloves, one finger at a time. “Did you get it?”

  The detective reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded slip of paper that contained the address and phone number. Sid the bartender appeared and dealt down a coaster and then Ruetheday’s martini, the pearl onion on the bottom bobbing like one of Saint Lucy’s plucked-out eyeballs.

  The doll ogled the slip of paper in Dirk’s hand, tinking her manicured nails against her glass. “Is that it?”