The Patron Saint of Ugly

by Marie Manilla

  WALLACE: I don’t mean to be insensitive, Betty, but you have a rather unusual eye. Did you ever ask Garnet to heal you?

  BETTY FERRARI: Heal me? Well, no. It never occurred to me to ask Garnet to do that, though it would certainly make life easier, especially with Mother here.

  DIAMANTE FERRARI: Walleye old-a gabbo.

  WALLACE: What’s that—

  BETTY FERRARI: There are so many people who deserve a healing much, much more than me.

  WALLACE: Don’t you think you deserve to be healed?

  DIAMANTE FERRARI: I see you over there with-a you squinty-eye camera trying to steal-a the miracolo from this holy water. Shoo! Shoo!

  WALLACE: As the sun sets on Sweetwater Hill, travelers snuggle together in tents, RVs, and cars. As it was for Mary and Joseph all those years ago, there’s not enough room in the inn, and the overflow has claimed the parking lot of the vacant plant. Pilgrims call it the Pit, and the ones who are here don’t get to bathe in the warm waters of the reflection pond. They rely on the foul-smelling liquid that trickles from the pipe at the backside of the factory. They may have come with visions of sugarplums, but they are leaving with dashed hopes and various disorders that, at least so far, Garnet has been unable or unwilling to heal. Their evening entertainment is sitting around the fire drums swapping tales of woe.

  VISITOR #1: Garnet didn’t heal me none. I still got this rash, and she didn’t heal my wife’s appendix scar neither.

  VISITOR #2: She didn’t heal my boy and it broke his heart. He told everyone back in Toledo his face would be normal again, but, well, I don’t know what he’s going to say to them now.

  WALLACE: Why do you think you and your children weren’t healed when so many others claim to have been?

  VISITOR #3: I want to see those healings for myself, but I think it all boils down to money.

  WALLACE: Money? Are you suggesting Garnet is selling her healings?

  VISITOR #1: What do you think? It’s the rich folk with the fancy cars that can make it up the hill that are the ones getting all the healings. Us poor slobs who maybe hitchhiked or came by bus or Amtrak and can’t get up there, you don’t see none of us being healed, do you?

  VISITOR #2: That’s right. Garnet doesn’t heal the poor.

  VISITOR #3: I don’t think she heals anyone. I think she’s a charlatan, that’s what I think. Planted a few confederates to go around saying their rashes disappeared. Probably painted the rashes on with food coloring.

  WALLACE: You really think she’s a fake? That this is all a big scam?

  VISITOR #4: Damn straight! We always heard nothing good ever came out of West Virginia. Shit. Here come those beggars again. Hey! Get away from our fire! Go build your own!

  BEGGAR: But you took all the wood.

  VISITOR #4: Not my problem, lady. Now go on back to your side of the lot. Git. Git!

  WALLACE: Who are those folks?

  VISITOR #4: Bunch of pathetic old beggars who have no business being here. Ugly as sin.

  WALLACE: Ugly indeed.

  WALLACE: Longtime resident Desiderata Evangelista, now Sister Evangelista, has made it her mission to tend to the disgruntled souls in the Pit as well as the camera-shy beggars. Every day she and her friend there with the pronounced limp bring pots of homemade soup and bread.

  WALLACE: Sister Evange—

  SR. DESIDERATA EVANGELISTA: Call me Sister Dee Dee. Everyone does.

  WALLACE: Sister, apparently not everyone is a believer. Do you think Garnet can heal people?

  SR. DEE DEE: Yes. Well, God is the healer, but He has been working through Garnet for years. I’ve known her all my life and she’s been performing miracles since we were children.

  WALLACE: What do you say to people who claim Garnet is a fraud?

  SR. DEE DEE: O ye of little faith, Mr. Wallace. I saw Garnet’s power with my own eyes. Of course there will always be skeptics, and to be perfectly honest there were instances when Garnet could not heal a physical affliction, but—

  WALLACE: What do you mean?

  SR. DEE DEE: Maybe you should ask Pippa here.

  WALLACE: Forgive my indelicacy, Pippa, but by the looks of your foot, Garnet didn’t heal you, and yet you continue to believe?

  PIPPA: Garnet did heal me, sir, years ago when I was a schoolgirl.

  WALLACE: She did? But your impair—

  PIPPA: My foot? Oh, my foot never needed healing. It was my father who needed the healing, and after Garnet prayed over me, he never beat me again.

  WALLACE: Your father hit—

  PIPPA: I have to run now. The soup is getting cold.

  WALLACE: One of the locals brought up an interesting point, Sister. If, according to you, Garnet can heal the skin afflictions of so many, why hasn’t she been able to heal herself?

  SR. DEE DEE: I’ve thought about that many times over the years. Perhaps erasing her birthmarks isn’t the healing Garnet needs. Perhaps God put her on this earth to act as a magnet.

  WALLACE: A magnet?

  SR. DEE DEE: Have you seen her, Mr. Wallace? She absorbs the world’s afflictions and takes them onto herself.

  WALLACE: That’s quite a burden.

  SR. DEE DEE: Some might call it a blessing.

  WALLACE: Tell me, Sister. Garnet has repeatedly insisted that she has no power, she is not responsible for the healings, and she would like nothing better than for the pilgrims to pack up and leave her in peace. What do you make of this?

  SR. DEE DEE: That’s the biggest mystery of all. But God has a pattern of using people who are at first resistant. That doesn’t mean He can’t still work through them. I pray every day that Garnet will finally accept her calling. Because with or without her consent, people are being healed. In one way or another, people are definitely being healed.

  WALLACE: So we leave this hallowed ground with more questions than answers. Is Garnet Ferrari a saint or isn’t she? I really don’t know, but there are plenty of believers who think she is. If you listen carefully, you can hear an angelic sound drifting down from the hill, the pilgrims serenading their healer with “O Little Town of Sweetwater” in the hopes that she will continue to be God’s healing saint, even if a reluctant one.

  TAPE FIFTEEN

  The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

  Most days I despise my captivity, Archie, but if I have to be a prisoner, it might as well be in a mansion with enough square footage to get lost in. Betty’s mission is to sleep in a different bedroom every night, which she can do for six weeks before beginning the rotation anew. There’s also the fur vault, cane closet, and hat room, with shelves of velvet heads topped with the history of millinery wear, from Victorian bonnets to Jackie Kennedy pillboxes. I often wonder where La Strega wore them, since she rarely left the premises.

  After the Night of the Braid, Betty discovered a use for all those chapeaus. Every Friday, she, Nonna, and I pick out headgear and stroll to the game room for our newest vice, bowling. We’re down here right now and Nonna is lining up her shot wearing a helmety toque complete with Mephisto feathers, though I can still see pink bangs. Betty is keeping score in a flouncy affair that looks like a spilled-out junk drawer: strands of pearls, silk flowers, a taxidermied sparrow nesting on top. I chose a maharajah turban with the eye of a peacock feather fastened in front by a brooch. Quite stylish, and, I must say, the pope would fit right in if he visited wearing his miter—tell him to bring his own bowling shoes, though.

  (I make-a the strike! I make-a the strike!)

  (Attagirl, Nonna!)

  You should see Nonna and Betty, jumping up and down like little girls, pearls spilling off Betty’s hat and rattling across the floor, no crabby husbands to rein in their glee. There was a time when I thought I would never see these women again, let alone share a mansion where they enjoy uninhibited bliss. After the Accident we were separated for too long by geography and grief. It took ten years and the alignment of several planets to bring us back together.

  But first: the Great Schism.


  Less than twenty-four hours after I lost my father and brother, Grandpa claimed Dad’s chair at the kitchen table and ate our consolation food. Nonna hovered by the stove, tears dripping into the pasta e fagioli, her cooking made difficult by the foul water that poured from the pipes. I wanted to stop Nonna’s busyness and make a full portafortuna-stealing confession, but it looked as if she needed to occupy her hands or she might fracture into a million pieces.

  Even from the kitchen I recognized the sound of Grandma Iris’s Cadillac pulling into the driveway, that grating tailpipe. Surprisingly, when I opened the door, she knelt and embraced me, her body a life preserver I tried to grab, but she withdrew it too quickly. Nonna crept up and I expected them to embrace over their shared losses, but Grandma just shucked her fur and draped it over Nonna’s arms.

  Nonna accepted her subservient station. “You wanna sand’? A cuppa coff?”

  Zelda’s eyebrows pinched together.

  “A sandwich and a cup of coffee,” I translated.

  “No. No. I . . . darling,” she said to me. “Where is Marina?”

  I looked toward Mother’s closed door, a sanctuary littered with untouched teacups, plates of saltines. Earlier that day I had slipped in and sat on the bed where she lay under covers, her body a crescent facing the wall. “Mom,” I had said. “Mom.” Her answer was gloomy: “Stopper the ice floe; unforge the steel.” I nudged her shoulder, hoping to rouse her so that she would stroke my head and utter some rational comfort. But she was still sunk at the bottom of her own murky ocean and I thought: There she finally goes.

  Zelda tiptoed down the hall, rapped gently on the door, and eased inside. An hour later she emerged, face as blank as a washed chalkboard, to find her suitcases lined up in the living room thanks to me, Grandpa too busy picking cashews out of a can of mixed nuts. He did, however, lift his wide ass when I told him there were two crates of vodka that I didn’t have the strength to haul in. That night I didn’t have to take the pullout couch. Quite unexpectedly, we now had a bedroom to spare.

  Our house became an old-timey luxury liner, our footing unsteady and slippery. The living room served as the upper-class deck, Grandma Iris in her wingback receiving visitors in place of her daughter, accepting meringue pies and High Mass cards that I had to explain. The kitchen transformed into steerage, where Nonna heated up dishes that Grandpa consumed. I became a porter navigating between these disparate worlds, bumbling around with trays loaded with coffee and biscotti and pain.

  Mom had to attend the viewings at the funeral parlor, but only her disengaged body emerged from her room, thanks to vials of Grandma’s pills. For whatever reason, Mother didn’t want me to go to the viewings. Before she left she hugged me, the first time since the Accident, wearing a black dress compliments of Grandma, the fabric slick against my cheek.

  “Stay here,” Mom slurred. “This is going to be awful.”

  I didn’t want to let go. I wanted Mom to tell me everything was going to be all right. That it wasn’t my fault. Tell me my Saint Garnet story until we both emerged from this soggy dream. But she didn’t, and Grandma had to peel my fingers off of my mother one by one.

  They left me alone with a bowl of ice cream and my brutal imagination. I pictured the hubbub at the funeral parlor: mourners shuffling by the coffins, lids raised to reveal the tragic father and son. I wondered if the mortician had gotten everything right: Nicky’s crisp collar and perfectly knotted tie. Dad’s pompadour that had made so many women woozy. I didn’t want to think about gashes and cuts filled with whatever compound miracle workers used to reconstruct loved ones’ faces.

  An image of Dad’s callused palms sent me to the basement, where his sawhorses were still set up, a board across them waiting, swells of sawdust coating the floor. It was absurdly quiet without the sound of his sawing, the only light the flame of the gas heater flaring, illuminating Dad’s cot against the wall, boxes of White Owls and stacks of girlie magazines shoved underneath. I pushed through the basement door to the garage and tugged the light string. The overhead bulb cast a circle of light on the spot where Nonna had once set up my Saint Garnet chairs. On the wall, the pegboard of tools that my father had meticulously organized. And there it was. His saw with the curlicues he had carved when he was a boy. I reached for it, but my hand shook so violently I couldn’t touch Dad’s most sacred possession. Instead I collapsed on the motor-oil-stained floor, the chilled cement stabbing my tailbone.

  The coffins were closed at the funeral the next day. Mom stood in the narthex between the two Saint Brigids, a grim statue of a different sort, standing erect only because of Grandma’s hand on her back.

  “You can do this, Marina,” Grandma said to bolster her. “You have to do this.”

  They took deep breaths and went up the aisle, followed by Grandpa Ferrari, number-one newsie cap in his hand. My knees began to buckle, but Nonna gripped my arm, leaned close to my ear, and whispered, “Hum. Just-a hum.” We both made a sound so faint few people could hear it, but it was enough as Nonna ushered me forward. Another gift was that on that day I was not assaulted by the whispers of children, the Mommy, what’s wrong with—that might have done me in completely.

  Here’s what I remember about the funeral: Rose-draped caskets at the front of the church, Father Luigi hovering over them, shaking his head at the shock of it all. Saint Brigid’s was packed on both sides with Irish and Italians, the Flannigans and O’Gradys, our Dagowop neighbors. Whole rows of nuns, their habits tainted by the foul water. Three pews crammed with hill nonnas in jersey dresses, black mantillas covering sepia buns. They rubbed keys, flashed hand signs; bits of rue branches peeked from their sleeves to ward off the evil eye that had obviously been cast upon our fam-i-ly, but by whom? One of them mumbled, “La Strega,” which ignited a vortex of prayers. It would have been easy to pin this on her, but perhaps the real jettatura was sitting right in their midst, humming. At the back of the church, leaning against a marble column twice as thick as him, a rake of a man with a chauffeur’s hat in his hand. I did not see La Strega.

  After the benediction, Father made the sign of the cross and we stood as the twelve pallbearers assembled, most of them church ushers and decidedly not Uncle Dom or Ray-Ray. No Betty, either, who must have been bawling in her room over in Grover Estates wondering how her life had ever come to this. Or perhaps she was gaping at the hole in the ceiling of Ray-Ray’s room. Apparently when Le Baron’s springhouse exploded, the geyser hurled the whippet weathervane miles through the air until it crashed through Uncle Dom’s roof, the shingles and insulation and plaster, before plunging completely through Ray-Ray’s mattress. If only he had been impaled there, my revenge would have been complete.

  Grandpa Ferrari held the front of his son’s coffin as if he were hauling a pallet of bricks. As the procession marched out, a woman’s howl erupted from the back of the church. Mother squeezed her eyes shut because she and I both knew which secondary widow that shriek belonged to. I trudged by the confessional booths and started shuddering, wondering if I would ever have the courage to admit what I’d done by removing Nonna’s good magic from the glove box, if there was enough atonement in the world.

  After the cemetery, our house overflowed with hill and village dwellers. The blue-collar set—Dad’s coworkers and his favorite mechanic; neighbors who had borrowed his tools; Mr. O’Grady, whose wooden floors my father had bartered for T-bones—gravitated toward steerage, the kitchen. They paid homage to Grandpa Ferrari at the head of the table, one of Dad’s stogies plugged in his mouth, the smoke blending with sickly sweet flowers and simmering tomato sauce. He accepted their deference, as if he cared about my father. As if he gave a damn. All the while Nonna poured cream in their coffees, tears running down her cheeks.

  Saint Brigid’s white-collar congregants gathered in the living room around Father Luigi, who sat ex cathedra in one of the wingbacks. Sister Barnabas hovered behind to keep his wineglass full, his cookie plate heaped, her own tears glistening against th
e red splotches on her cheek. Mom, barely sentient, slumped in the other wingback; she’d been placed there by Grandma, who had instructed her on her duty on that horrid day. I leaned against the archway that straddled both worlds and watched the parade of old nonnas slip Mom envelopes containing the few dollars they could scrape together, a holy card, a pope-blessed scapular. After offering condolences they genuflected before Father Luigi and kissed his hand. Then they surrounded Nonna in the kitchen, gift bottles of Marsala clinking beneath their shawls.

  Mom’s eyes glazed as if she were replaying the last twenty-four hours of Dad’s and Nicky’s lives, as if she were trying to think of one thing that would have stopped them from bolting out of the house. She kept looking at the balled-up rosary one of the nonnas had pressed into her hand. I knew it wasn’t beads she was seeing. I also knew she was wishing that when she found Dad’s keys she had thrown them down the sewer grate in front of our house. I was rewinding my own actions, and in my mind I would have just given up after being unable to open the station wagon’s hood. I would have clapped my hands and run to my closet. I would never have heard Candy Man, or if I did, I would have plugged my ears so that I would not be tempted, would not go outside and ultimately to Snakebite Woods. But that wasn’t right either, because Nicky would still have been there, being brutalized by Ray-Ray.