Recalling that Lieutenant Pinkerton had leased an apartment, and that the bride had come along with the place, Nicky thought briefly of renting a room in town. But all the houses with rooms to let belonged to war widows and families who’d lost sons in the fighting; their bitter, reproachful faces made the barracks seem homey and inviting.
Even as the plane took off, and Nicky watched the gray city, the bright green rice fields disappear beneath him, he never stopped praying for the miracle which would transform his life into Madame Butterfly. Only now, as he noticed that Lino’s apartment hadn’t changed since his departure and realized that it would probably stay the same till both he and his father were dead, did he finally accept the fact that his miracle would never come. He went straight to his room, turned on the radio and lay down on his bed.
Dreading this homecoming, he had timed it to coincide with the opera broadcast. Now, as the sounds of the orchestra tuning up and Milton Cross’s hushed, pompous whisper filled the apartment, Lino put his fingers in his ears and kept them there, on and off, till four, when the program ended.
Nicky went out and returned a few minutes later with a bottle in a paper bag. Back in his room, he drained the bottle in one gulp and passed out through Saturday night and much of Sunday.
Monday morning, Nicky stumbled down to the shop, where Lino soon discovered that a second stint in the army had done nothing for his mechanical sense. Not that it mattered, for business was slower than ever. Everyone was buying televisions, and the radios that broke were left broken. All week, Nicky toyed with a battered Emerson, a hopeless case which had lain in the shop nearly two years. On Friday evening, Lino paused in the midst of closing up to examine his son’s work, and found that Nicky had eviscerated the radio and abandoned it, an empty Bakelite shell.
That same weekend, Mrs. Santangelo got it into her head to invite the Falconettis to dinner, as a way of formally welcoming Nicky home.
“I don’t know,” said Lino. “I haven’t seen much of your sister since before you left. If you ask me, she’s not doing so hot, and the old lady isn’t much better. Anyhow, don’t you think it’s a little peculiar? She’s never invited us before….”
Lino caught himself. Who was Nicky to ask about ‘peculiar’?
The party got off to an inauspicious start as Nicky and Mrs. Santangelo greeted each other with rigid, almost theatrical formality. Like two inmates in a nuthouse, thought Joseph. Joseph shook his brother-in-law’s hand and Catherine kissed the air in his direction.
“I won’t hug you,” she said. “I’ve got a cold.”
“Sit,” said Mrs. Santangelo. “The food’s all ready.”
Nothing could have been further from the truth. The melon was crispy and green, the pasta stuck together in clumps. Up and down the table, forks pierced the sausage and undercooked meat oozed out like toothpaste from a tube.
Joseph, who’d expected as much, thanked God that Augie, Evelyn, and the twins hadn’t been able to come. He looked around the table and didn’t bother putting any sausage on his plate. His mother was shredding a hunk of bread.
“At my age,” she said, “who’s got teeth for crust?” Then she noticed that the guest of honor had stopped eating.
“What’s the matter?” She glared at Nicky. “They don’t eat sausage in Uncle Sam’s army?”
“Mama, I bought some seafood salad yesterday,” said Joseph, who’d not only predicted, but prepared for, calamity. “Five pounds. Maybe the Falconettis would like some with their sausage.”
“Seafood salad with their sausage?” Mrs. Santangelo still had a sense—however dim—of the proper order of things.
“Sure, why not?”
“Where is it?”
“The refrigerator. You know.”
Mrs. Santangelo was gone a long time before returning with the salad, still in its cardboard container. She set the carton on the table and motioned for her guests to pass it around. No one took much except Nicky, who loaded his plate with the marinated squid. The family sat in silence, watching him eat.
“In Japan,” Nicky spoke with his mouth full, “they live on this stuff. Seafood and noodles, it’s all they eat.”
“What kind of country is that,” Mrs. Santangelo leaned forward and scrutinized him, “where the women can’t cook anything but seafood and pasta?”
“I didn’t say can’t.” Bristling, Nicky rose to defend Madame Butterfly’s honor. “I meant, it’s all they can get. It’s been rough for them since the war, you don’t know. They can’t get meat, sugar, ordinary ingredients—”
“Ingredients?” repeated Mrs. Santangelo. “What ingredients? When I first came over from the old country, me and Zio were so poor, I had to pick clam shells out of the garbage. And believe me, I made a delicious soup. If a woman can’t cook what God gives her, she can’t cook.”
“You’re a great one to talk.” Nicky pointed at the untouched food on his plate.
“At least my son married an Italian girl.” Mrs. Santangelo snapped her lips together like a turtle. “Instead of chasing after the Japanese.”
“Right,” said Nicky. “An Italian girl he won in a pinochle game.”
“That’s my wife you’re talking about.” Joseph slammed the blunt end of his knife on the table. “And your sister.”
There was a silence. Finally Catherine said, “What pinochle game?”
“What pinochle game?” mimicked Mrs. Santangelo.
“You know.” Ignoring his sister, Nicky addressed Mrs. Santangelo.
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Santangelo. “I don’t remember.”
The subject was dropped. The meal ended. The Falconettis went home. Catherine cleared the table and went to her room, leaving her mother-in-law to do the dishes. Joseph paced the living room, feeling like a guest who has outstayed his welcome so long that his hosts have abandoned the pretence of courtesy and gone off to clean up or sleep. But where could he go? He couldn’t bear the sight of his mother transferring the leftover sausage into refrigerator dishes, nor could he face Catherine, who’d be curious about that pinochle game. A grown man, he thought, afraid to go into his own bedroom.
Just as he was getting up the nerve to confront Catherine, his mother appeared from the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron.
“Joseph, I got a question. That boy that was here tonight—who was he?”
“That was my brother-in-law.” Joseph couldn’t look at her. “Catherine’s brother Nicky.”
“You mean, we’re related to that?” said Mrs. Santangelo, but Joseph had already left the room.
The bedroom light was out, and Catherine lay on her back—so still that Joseph had to fight the urge to pinch her for some sign of life. Shamed by the thought, he undressed and got under the covers.
Catherine didn’t speak; perhaps she was planning to ignore the whole thing. Joseph’s relief was soon dissipated as he realized that it was not about to be ignored. Now that the pinochle game had been mentioned, it lay between them like another gloomy presence in the bed.
“You know what that dinner tonight reminded me of?” Joseph decided to broach the subject in a roundabout way. “It reminded me of that meal you cooked before we were married, that first night I went to your father’s apartment.”
Often, in the early months of their marriage, they’d joked about that meal, about how nervous Catherine was, how good the ruined food had tasted to Joseph. It was part of their history, the private history which lovers construct around the beginnings of their love. And now, as Joseph prayed for this memory to ignite some long-extinguished spark of affection, Catherine turned toward him.
“What meal?” she said. “What dinner at my father’s house?”
On Easter morning, Catherine woke up knowing that something was different. As she lay in bed trying to figure out what it was, she realized that the bedroom smelled of flowers. Easter lilies? The scent was lighter and less cloying than the fragrance of lilies. Seeking its source, Catherine looked around the room.
<
br /> It was then that she noticed the violets on her dresser.
Last night, when she’d gone to bed, those plants were dead: crisp leaves curled up on dry stalks.
This morning they were in full bloom.
“Joseph,” she said. But Joseph was asleep. Climbing over him, she picked up one of the pots and touched the purple blossoms. It was impossible. She didn’t understand and didn’t try. For by then, she had realized that the perfume wasn’t coming from the violets, but seemed to be wafting in beneath the bedroom door. She put on her robe and went out into the hall.
The apartment looked like a garden, and the air was moist with an earthy greenhouse smell. Healthy plants, perfect as pictures in a seed catalogue, grew everywhere. Curtains of ivy hung from the kitchen shelves; asparagus ferns grew matted as birds’ nests and overflowed their pots; spider plants sprouted tendrils tipped with star-like white blossoms. On the mantel, two geraniums climbed up toward San Gennaro, offering scarlet flowers which the saint received with outstretched arms.
This time Catherine knew she hadn’t put them there.
She ran back to the bedroom.
“Joseph!” she cried. “Wake up, there’s been a miracle!”
To Joseph, this meant only one thing: The miracle he’d been praying for, the miracle it would take to make Catherine go to bed with him again.
“You want to see a miracle?” Laughing, he reached out and pulled her down on top of him. “I’ll show you a miracle.”
“Why not?” said Catherine.
After so long, Joseph’s kisses seemed so sweet that Catherine began to think she was experiencing a second miracle. She wound her arms around his back, feeling not only the physical pleasure, but also the rare and more complicated exaltation known to those chosen few who are lucky enough to make love after witnessing a miracle.
Afterwards, as she lay with her head on Joseph’s chest, Catherine thought of the men and women, side by side in their tents on the night Moses led them across the Red Sea. She thought of the women at the well, going back to their husbands after seeing Jesus risen. She thought of the bride at Cana and smiled as she tried to imagine her wedding night.
“Was that enough of a miracle for you?” asked Joseph. “Or do you want more?”
“It’s enough.” Catherine turned to kiss his shoulder. “But there’s more.”
“More?”
“The plants. They’re alive. All over the apartment …”
“Damn right they’re alive. I thought you’d never notice. I’ve been watering them for weeks. Somebody had to take care of them, it was getting depressing around here.”
“You?”
“Yours truly. The Italian gardener.”
“Wait a minute.” Catherine shook her head. “Water or no water, those plants were dead when we went to bed last night. And now they’re—”
“They were fine last night, same as they are now. You’ve just been out of it for so long, you didn’t pay attention.”
“Not so out of it that I don’t know: You can’t bring dead things back to life.”
“What kind of thing is that for a Catholic girl to say?”
“Joseph, I’m serious.”
“Okay, okay. The ones that didn’t recover, I bought new ones at the florist. What’s the big deal?”
“You cheated. I thought it was a miracle.”
“What a believer.” Joseph laughed. “I pour a little water on your houseplants, you think you’ve seen a miracle. Well, try some of this”—he took her hand and put it on his thigh—“next thing, you’ll be saying I’m a saint.”
It was almost noon when they got dressed. Out in the hall, the smell of flowers was gone, obliterated by metallic smoke.
“Come on.” Joseph grabbed Catherine’s hand. “Mama’s burning the teapot again.”
They ran to the kitchen, where they found a blackened saucepan smoking on the stove and Mrs. Santangelo sitting on the floor—one cheek pressed against the bottom of the sink, like a child grown tired in the midst of playing, overtaken by a nap. Her eyes were shut, her skin gray. There was a purplish stain around her lips, as if death had caught her eating blueberries.
“Mama.” Joseph gave her a gentle shake, and she slumped forward. “Holy Christ. This isn’t the miracle you meant, is it?”
“God no.” Catherine crossed herself. “I didn’t know….”
And then as she looked at her mother-in-law, surrounded by all those leafy and blossoming plants, Catherine began to think that maybe it was a miracle: How nice of God and His saints to send Mrs. Santangelo flowers.
When the first thud of dirt hit Mrs. Santangelo’s coffin, Joseph and Augie hugged each other and wept. But theirs were the only tears. The old people grieved less for Mrs. Santangelo than for themselves, and for the end of that part of their lives. Carmela Santangelo’s existence was something they’d taken for granted, like the sidewalk under their feet; and now the sidewalk had vanished. At the chapel, the younger mourners spoke of God’s kindness, of blessings in disguise, as if the death were some kind of divine mercy killing (“Face it,” said Evelyn, “she was getting on”), until Joseph almost believed it.
As he reached for Augie’s handkerchief, a curious numbness overcame him, blunting the realization that his mother, however crazy, was the only mother he would ever have; he had loved her and now she was gone. At the cemetery, on Long Island, it was a sunny spring day; birds were singing in the bare branches. His mother’s grave was side by side with his father’s, and it was comforting to think of them bickering about Zio’s cigars for eternity.
But when the family went back to Augie and Evelyn’s for a spread of supermarket bologna, white rolls, and processed cheese, Joseph couldn’t eat for thinking what his mother would have said about the food. And when he and Catherine returned home, his mother’s presence was standing at the stove, kneeling by the altar, settled in her favorite chair. Joseph needed to use the bathroom, but couldn’t bring himself to walk past her room. He felt like crying again, but it was easier at the graveyard with Augie for company; alone with Catherine, he would have been ashamed.
Catherine seemed unaffected, or perhaps she was showing it differently: The first thing she did on arriving home was to put on one of his mother’s old aprons and haul out the sausage grinder.
“Do me a favor,” she said. “Go down to the shop and get me a small side of pork.”
“Now?”
“It’s what your Mama would have wanted.” Even as she said it, Catherine knew that it was and wasn’t true. Mrs. Santangelo would have wanted the family business to continue, the sausage to be made. But she didn’t want anyone else to make it.
Joseph was glad to have something to do. The smell of sawdust soothed him, and he could use the toilet downstairs. When he got back, Catherine was dicing garlic with his mother’s paring knife and speaking of her new respect for Mrs. Santangelo: “If anyone could come back as a ghost and ruin things in the kitchen, it’s your mother. But the fact is, Joseph, I can practically hear her mumbling the recipe.”
Only this time, Catherine could understand every word; from this remove, she could appreciate her mother-in-law’s forbearance. The whole process went so smoothly that in two hours the kitchen was clean, and there was fresh sausage and pasta on the table.
They sat down to a meal which consoled Joseph more than all the talk of blessings in disguise. For the food allowed him to remember his mother without her superstitious and passionate meanness, but simply as a wonderful cook. Her spirit was with them in the food and he ate three helpings, which is just what his mother would have wanted.
The smell of fried sausage drifted out through the neighborhood until even the old women—depressed by Mrs. Santangelo’s mortality and their own—couldn’t wait to get up the next morning and compare Catherine’s work with her mother-in-law’s.
The first batch sold out by noon. By dinnertime, the word had spread: Catherine’s sausage was Mrs. Santangelo’s at its best. That night, husb
ands got up from the table with tears in their eyes, as if they’d actually eaten that something special which Mama used to make.
“Life goes on,” said their wives. “An old lady dies and the next day her daughter-in-law’s making sausage good as ever.”
One morning, nearly six weeks later, Catherine was stuffing sausage when she felt a sinking in her stomach, like dropping in an elevator, only more evocative, like something recalled from another life—or, more specifically, from her first pregnancy. It was on her mind: She’d skipped an entire period. But until that morning, she’d blamed the delay on overwork and nerves. What else could it be? After Easter, she and Joseph had quit making love again—first out of respect for Mrs. Santangelo, and then because the sudden demand for sausage left them little time for married life. Either Catherine stayed up working hours after Joseph went to bed, or collapsed hours before.
If she were pregnant—and suddenly Catherine knew she was—the child had been conceived on that Easter morning when Mrs. Santangelo died and the houseplants came back to life. Catherine shuddered. Just last month, Photoplay had queried fifty Hollywood stars for their views on reincarnation, and most of them seemed to believe….
This child, Catherine promised herself, would not be suffocated in her womb by the weight of all that ignorance and superstition. This baby would be carried and born like an American. This time there was work to do—pork to grind, peppercorns to crush, fennel and parsley to chop—and not one minute to waste lighting candles.
It was the end of May, the kind of weather which usually starts women thinking of seafood and salads. But the shop was full of waiting customers.
Catherine greeted them, looking each one in the eye, daring them to guess she was pregnant.
“You’re all dressed up,” said Joseph. “Where you going?”
“For a walk. Uptown.”
Catherine walked uptown to St. Vincent’s Hospital where, like a true American woman, she submitted to a complicated series of indignities to confirm what she already knew. She undressed with her eyes shut and kept them shut until at last she opened them to find herself fully clothed, sitting in a cubicle with a young red-headed intern who was filling out a form.
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