At the end of the term, she coaxed copies of next year’s lesson plans from the sisters and spent the summer preparing for fifth-grade math. Three summers later, while the girls on her block were stuffing tissues in the tops of their bathing suits and working on their suntans at Coney Island, Theresa was working ahead on the eighth-grade essay, “Why Communism is the Anti-Christ,” six pages of narrow-ruled looseleaf covered with her neat round print. Her theme was that the Russian people, cut off from the church, were like infants snatched from their mothers’ breasts; her style was so eloquent that she couldn’t believe she had written it.
The nuns couldn’t either, but they knew Theresa too well to suspect her of plagiarism, and voted unanimously to award her first prize in the St. Boniface Middle School Essay Competition. In a ceremony held in the auditorium for the entire school, Theresa was presented with a copy of St. Therese of Lisieux’s autobiography, The Story of a Soul, specially bound in white vinyl with gold-tooled letters.
Much later, Theresa’s former schoolmates would tell of having seen her take this prize and press it to her chest, as if hoping that the words inside it might somehow skip her eyes and brain and pass directly through her clothes to her heart. But the truth was that Theresa didn’t open the book till later that evening, when she’d finished her homework; and even then, she approached it from a certain distance.
The first book she’d ever read was a life of St. Francis, in simple sentences with big round print and color illustrations of birds. Since then, she’d read dozens of saints’ lives, preferring the ones who traveled and had adventures, like St. Helena, and the ones with the grisliest martyrdoms; she’d reread St. Lucy’s blinding till she could hardly stand it. Most of all, though, she loved the saints who did crazy things, like St. Simon, perched atop a pillar in the desert for twenty years. But she could never connect these stories with her own life, and she wondered: Where would St. Simon perch today? A rooftop TV antenna? Nor could she picture St. Theresa of Avila riding her donkey down Mulberry Street.
Yet now, in the introduction to The Story of a Soul, Theresa learned that St. Therese was born Therese Martin, in France, a country without deserts, in 1873, a time without knights in castles—not Mulberry Street, exactly, but more like Theresa’s own world. And besides, as the monsignor who wrote the introduction kept emphasizing: except for one thing—the intensity of her devotion—Therese Martin, “The Little Flower of Jesus,” was in no way extraordinary, but rather, the simplest of simple girls.
By the time Theresa finished the first paragraph of the autobiography itself, she had opened her notebook and was copying down whole sentences with the dreamy absorption of a bride copying recipes from a magazine. And indeed no cookbook could have seemed easier to follow than the Little Flower’s Little Way. Her whole life was a testimony to modesty, humility, vocation. Service to God in the most mundane and menial tasks.
“To ecstasy,” wrote St. Therese, “I prefer the monotony of daily toil.”
When Theresa read that line, she understood that her prayers had been answered. She had asked God to show her the way, and He had not only taken her by the shoulders and turned her around, but given her step-by-step directions, impossible to miss: Theresa, go here. Do this. Turn there. Stop when you see Me.
The painting-on-metal of St. Therese (which Theresa bought at the same store where her mother had purchased the St. Anna medallion) showed a pink-cheeked girl with the eyes of a cocker spaniel: The Little Flower was prettier than Theresa, sweeter than the sweetest girls in her class, and dressed like a nun, in brown. Still, she looked like a pretty nun you might see on the street. And she wasn’t carrying her head on a plate like St. John, or her eyes like St. Lucy, but rather an armful of roses and a crucifix.
Certainly the Little Flower had suffered; as the introduction said, she had packed a lifetime of suffering into her short span. But her specific martyrdom could have happened to any sickly, unlucky girl on Mulberry Street. By the age of four, she had lost four siblings and watched her mother die horribly, of cancer. Later, she would see her beloved Papa crumble away—insanity, paralysis, another slow death. She herself nearly died at nine, suffering fever and hallucinations so violent that the nails in the wall appeared to her as the stumps of charred fingers. And she departed this world at twenty-four, of the virulent consumption which, she confided, felt “like fire, like sitting on a bed of nails.”
Yet through all this, she kept faith. Her first near-fatal illness was cured when a statue of Our Lady—perhaps the same one Theresa had in her room—seemed to smile and shed radiance on the ailing girl. On recovering, Therese sought admission to the convent—a request denied, because of her youth, until she was sixteen. Then she was taken into the Carmelite order to live out a few brief years of service and humility till her final agony began.
Shortly before she died, the Little Flower was sent a bouquet of roses. When the petals dropped, she asked the sisters to save them, and predicted: Someday, someone would find the petals “pleasurable.” After her death, there would fall “a shower of roses.” This shower, as the introduction pointed out, was symbolic. For the petals which rained on the world were the copies of her “little book,” The Story of a Soul, the spiritual autobiography completed in the last weeks of her life. Promoted by the church, translated into fifteen languages, the book became an instant best-seller—its influence not merely inspirational, but miraculous. Slowly at first, then faster, the reports came in: A poor Lyons family prayed to Therese and, while gardening, unearthed a sock stuffed with a million francs. A modest Saint-Malo shipbuilder received, with Therese’s intercession, a government contract. An Auvergne boy, mute from birth, spontaneously began to read aloud from The Story of a Soul. A Lisieux man recovered from terminal cancer after swallowing a petal from the Little Flower’s last bouquet. Documented cures, recorded in a ledger at the Lisieux convent, soon filled an entire library. Her birthplace became an unofficial shrine. Three miracle cures were chosen as substantial proof of Therese’s beatitude; canonization followed shortly thereafter. And the whole church welcomed this paragon of modern saintliness, of holiness achieved not through heroic mortification, but through ordinary domestic chores; this unassuming girl who moved sainthood out of its medieval castle and into modern life.
“I am only a very little soul,” wrote the Little Flower, “who can serve God only in very little ways.” Young women were exhorted to follow her Little Way, and the good ones, like Theresa Santangelo, were rewarded with copies of her “little book.” All over the world, girls like Theresa reread their copies so often that the bindings disintegrated, and the pages had to be tied with string and rubber bands; not that it mattered, for they knew the book by heart and could recite their favorite passages like prayers. Countless bedrooms like Theresa’s sheltered private altars: candles, plaster Virgins, saucers to catch the dripping wax, paintings of St. Therese, embroidered cards and, invariably, a certain holy card—the best known photo of the saint. Grainy, out of focus, the picture showed a skinny girl on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor with a brush. “To ecstasy,” said the caption, “I prefer the monotony of daily toil.”
Every night, some little girl like Theresa read The Story of a Soul and felt that she had been graced with revelation: The answer was love. The way was serving God in the simplest acts, in the dirty dishes, the laundry. And every morning, some girl would wake to discover the difficulty of following this Little Way through one single hour. Each day, these girls would reaffirm that old cliché, the truth which the church and even the Little Flower identified as one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the spiritual path: That is, you can take a million vows in the middle of the night, but things look different in the morning.
The next morning, Theresa insisted on doing the breakfast dishes. The warm water and the flowery smell of detergent were pleasant, and Theresa reminded herself, over every plate, that she was scouring it for God. But when she found a smear of egg yolk on her clean white cuff, her first
impulse was to throw a dish at the wall. Determined to love everyone, she smiled at the people she passed on the way to school; but by second period, she was hating Sister Angelica, the Latin teacher, for getting all teary-eyed and quivery over Cicero’s Oration Against Catiline.
That afternoon, Theresa offered to cook dinner. Catherine was delighted, partly because she wanted so badly to see it as a sign that Theresa was changing; as far as she knew, nuns didn’t go in for cooking. Besides, she had read in her magazines that girls of Theresa’s age showed an inclination—sometimes a positive genius—for imitating their mothers. But whom was Theresa imitating, to imagine that normal people ate omelettes and raw vegetables for dinner? Never suspecting that these were among the few foods which the Little Flower was documented to have eaten, Catherine reassured herself with the magazine-advice that girls should start with something simple: Eggs. Salad. English muffin pizza.
Later, Theresa would never understand exactly how she burned the omelette, but would think of it as a lesson which most of the great female saints must have learned, and which even the Little Flower had taught her Carmelite sisters: That is, the kitchen is no place for ecstasy. All Theresa knew was that she had the eggs in the pan and was cutting the carrots in perfect julienne strips, contemplating every cross-section with its thin green ribbon, its grain like orange and yellow wood….
Suddenly the kitchen filled with smoke, and Catherine, who’d been studiously keeping her distance, rushed in, shut off the burner and opened the window. She flipped the omelette onto a plate, sliced the blackened crust off the top, cut the remaining egg into three parts and called downstairs to Joseph.
“Don’t worry,” she told Theresa. “Some days, everything goes wrong in the kitchen.”
The apartment was still smoky when they sat down to eat; everything tasted of charcoal. But Joseph and Catherine were so charmed by their daughter’s effort at domesticity that they crunched their carrots and ate their scorched egg with genuine pleasure; already they were prepared to look back on this bit of family history with irony and warmth, like the dinner Catherine ruined at her father’s house.
“Always,” said Joseph, “there’s something delicious. With your mother, it was the antipasto. And tonight … the carrots.”
But Catherine would never have laughed so happily if she’d known that Theresa, like Mrs. Santangelo, saw the hand of God in every cooking mistake; the difference was that Theresa didn’t see it working the family destiny, but only her own.
No sooner had Theresa taken her first mouthful of egg than she remembered: The Little Flower hadn’t just eaten an omelette—but a burned one. As a test of humility, Therese had taken the charred part which none of the other Carmelites would touch. With this in mind, Theresa could have eaten burned omelette for the rest of her life. But as she watched her parents, cheerfully and determinedly chewing the bitter eggs, she decided that mortification was worthless unless it was freely chosen. If burned eggs were all you were served, it didn’t count. Right then, Theresa resolved to become a good cook and pay attention, because if you’re cooking for God, you might as well cook something which people might like to eat.
Theresa became an excellent cook, and such a competent housekeeper that the cockroaches (which had long preceded the Santangelos and survived two generations of constant attack) fled the apartment. A dirty dish never touched the sink, a crumb never lingered on the breadboard. Bed sheets, bath towels, even dishcloths were ironed; the beds were made up with hospital corners. Worn socks disappeared from the hamper and came back clean, darned, soft as kittens.
After school, when the bad girls rolled their skirts and the good ones clapped their erasers, Theresa rushed home to reline the silverware drawers. Too busy for friends, she had no time to envy the others with their giggling, their autograph books and slumber parties. At rare lonely moments, she reminded herself that the Little Flower had endured worse torments than loneliness, and consoled herself with dreams of another world, some lost Atlantis where everyone was exactly like her. In the convent, she imagined, her sisters would know why it took her two hours to line each drawer, and would treasure the perfect rectangles of butcher paper.
The only one she really envied was the Little Flower. Sainthood had come naturally to her; as a child, she’d seen her name written in the stars. She hadn’t had to follow anyone’s example, but had only to lead her own life—in another place, another time, when it was so much easier to be saintly. True, she’d suffered slights and insults; she’d had to contend with doubts, aridity, even the pride which made her rage at some sisters who quoted her without naming their source.
Yet the Little Flower had so much help—family and friends to love and guide her on her Little Way. While Theresa had no one but Joseph and Catherine—two stubborn parents who seemed to have locked arms and planted themselves in their daughter’s path.
It was during this time that Joseph came home from the shop with a brand-new eighteen-inch television. Winking at Catherine, he announced that it had fallen off the back of a truck.
“It’s a miracle it didn’t break,” said Theresa.
Joseph turned on her with such a stunned look that Theresa felt she had robbed him of his pleasure in his new possession, and vowed again to watch how she talked at home, guarding even casual references to miracles and blessings. Then Joseph laughed.
“Fell off a truck,” he repeated. “It’s only an expression.”
After promising Catherine that the set would be hidden away when Lino came to visit, Joseph installed it in the living room. All three of them watched through the Sunrise Sermon and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as they did the next night and the next. But on Saturday night, Theresa got up in the middle of Perry Como and went off to do her Monday homework. Within a month, Joseph and Catherine were turning the television off by nine, and gradually it fell into disuse, much like the radio which Joseph had never bothered asking his father-in-law to repair.
Yet every afternoon, when Joseph was down in the shop and Theresa away at school, Catherine tuned in her favorite program, “The Millionaire.” Counting reruns, she’d seen each segment twice, but she never tired of watching lives disrupted and almost ruined by the anonymous gift of a million dollars with no conditions except secrecy about how it came. For unlike the movies, these modest stories confirmed what Catherine had learned from life, from living with Theresa.
From the outside, it looked like a blessing, a million-dollar daughter whose only desire was to help around the house. But like the recipients of those anonymous gifts, Catherine knew that every blessing had its drawbacks. In the shop, when she complained of how hard it was to make sausage with Theresa snatching the grinder away to wash it before she was even done, the mothers asked: Was she boasting or complaining?
The answer was: Both. Catherine loved her daughter; she was proud of her sweet nature, and of the beauty which was growing more obvious each day despite the St. Boniface uniform’s considerable skill at hiding it. Still, Theresa made her nervous. She went too far. It was hard enough stuffing eighty pounds of sausage a week without someone breathing down your neck, nearly tripping you. A day was long enough without the extra work of contending with a daughter who’d turned, overnight, into a picky eater.
Theresa wasn’t skinny, thank God; but she didn’t eat like a normal person. She pushed stuffed artichokes, scallopini Marsala, fettuccine with cheese and butter around on her plate, and preferred the spinach, meatloaf, and reheated leftovers which (Catherine knew from her magazines) other children wouldn’t go near. For a while, till Joseph put a stop to it, Theresa ate with a towel pinned from her collar to the tablecloth, like a sling. Why? Because the Carmelites believed in catching and eating every crumb. She refused to touch meat on Fridays, no matter what the Pope said, and asked to be allowed to eat standing, or kneeling at the stove.
“You want to eat?” said Joseph. “You can sit at the table like a human being.”
Catherine never told him about the times she c
aught Theresa doctoring her food—salting her zabaglione, adding mustard to her cocoa, watering her stew. Catherine didn’t have to be an expert on theology to recognize that Theresa was trying to mortify her sense of taste. She wondered how such a child had been born to her and Joseph, and joked with the mothers about babies switched in the cradle. The women only laughed: For Theresa, with her mother’s dark coloring and her father’s sturdy build, was a perfect cross between her parents—and her nature was pure Mrs. Santangelo.
Catherine admitted that Theresa had inherited her grandmother’s talent for padding around the apartment and appearing over your shoulder, like Judith Anderson in Rebecca. She had all the old lady’s pride, the arrogance of true believers who act as if the world will stop turning without their candles and novenas. And Mrs. Santangelo’s zeal for her family and her saints seemed almost mild in comparison with Theresa’s passion for the convent.
Yet Catherine, like mothers of troublesome children everywhere, convinced herself that everything would be all right. One day, the holy pictures in Theresa’s room would yield to Elvis and Frankie Avalon. One night, the phone would ring, and a boy would ask for Theresa. Imagining this, Catherine felt time rush by, and so much love for Theresa that she was ashamed of her impatience with her daughter’s eagerness to help. How could she complain about this blessing, this million-dollar gift, this girl who asked nothing but permission to polish the meat grinder and do the laundry?
Children went through phases—particularly little girls. For some it was horses; for others, ballerinas or dogs. She herself had had her movie magazines, and dozens of plants had survived as mementoes of her first love. Time had changed her; it would change Theresa.
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