Household Saints

by Francine Prose

  Later, Catherine would claim that she never believed this, that she had always known that her daughter would never be normal and had spent Theresa’s whole life waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Catherine wasn’t alone in listening for the sound of the other shoe, of uneasy premonitions confirmed. Even Lino, with his hereditary lack of foresight, predicted trouble; but in his view, the trouble was Nicky. Falconettis were known for their reserve, yet even Lino knew—to survive, to stay human, a man had to talk, if only a few sentences now and then: Nice weather we’re having, how’s the family? But Nicky never said a word.

  For months, Lino waited for Nicky to come out of his fog; finally he had come to accept it as Nicky’s permanent weather. He’d always been quiet, withdrawn, a peculiar duck. But Lino knew: This was different. Nicky grunted and mumbled, ate and slept, went through the motions of living. Yet for all the life in him, Lino could have been sharing his meals and his work place with a corpse.

  Over the years, Nicky had grown accustomed to his own detachment, that sense of observing his life from a distance. But this was something new. Ever since returning home, Nicky felt as if he were a shadow, a dim reflection of what he should have been. He felt like a newly brokenhearted lover: Everything reminded him of his loss. He couldn’t take a shower without thinking of the geisha who should have been scrubbing his back, couldn’t drink coffee without wishing for green tea, couldn’t pick up a fork without hearing the gentle click-click of chopsticks, couldn’t pass the kitchen table without picturing a bowl of formally arranged chrysanthemums, each one perfect as a miniature autumn sun. Every meal his father cooked made him long for incense to cover up the smell, and even his pleasure in the radio was diminished; now, he couldn’t listen to Milton Cross’s plot summaries without mentally translating them into sign language and simple English for his imaginary Japanese bride.

  Yet unlike a brokenhearted lover, Nicky was unable to take comfort in conjuring up his sweetheart’s imperfections, blemishes, her irritating mannerisms. Because Nicky’s Madame Butterfly had never existed outside his imagination—and it had never occurred to him to imagine her with defects.

  As if to convince himself that hope was still possible, he began taking occasional meals in Chinatown, praying that he and his geisha would find each other—Hollywood-style—across a crowded restaurant. But the waiters were all male, the girls accompanied by families and fiancés. He took his wash to the Chinese laundry, but the Chinaman’s daughter didn’t look up from her trouser press when her father did business with Nicky.

  Clutching his neatly wrapped, pressed shirts, stung because the girl in the steamy back room hadn’t noticed him, Nicky was forced to admit that his life would never be opera or tragedy or even high drama, but only the pathetic story of an ordinary GI who couldn’t find an Oriental girl to marry him. He saw his past as a private hell, a circle of sausage and pinochle, and now he had sunk to an even lower region, in which he couldn’t find a pinochle player on Mulberry Street willing to deal him into a game.

  The neighborhood watched him sink. Nicky had been drinking heavily since he was fourteen, but now disappointment drove him beyond Frank Manzone’s wine and straight to the Gordon’s gin. Now that the last holdouts had bought televisions, there wasn’t much business in Lino’s shop—which was just as well. Because Nicky couldn’t be counted on to do much of anything except stumble from the house to the liquor store and back.

  Watching him pass, the old women nodded at this sad example of what happens when you stray from the trodden paths and seek to marry outside your kind, clucked their tongues at this drama of misdirected longing, and shook their heads—just as they might have done at the final act of an opera.

  Of all of them, Theresa had the most compassion for her Uncle Nicky. Without knowing half the details, she recognized the terrible strain of transforming your life into something else—the plot of an opera, the autobiography of a saint. She prayed for Nicky, but went out of her way to avoid him. For whenever she saw her uncle weaving down the street, she felt instinctively that her story would never be any more like the Little Flower’s than his was like Madame Butterfly’s.

  Each day confronted Theresa with the near-impossibility of leading a consecrated life in New York City, in 1964. Though the good girls (whose number was dwindling) still observed the name days, the feast days, the seasonal devotions, by far the most popular saints at St. Boniface were Paul, John, George, and Ringo. Each day she rededicated herself to the Little Way, only to lose it when she couldn’t find the oregano; she asked God for the patience which deserted her when the sink clogged, and the aging washing machine shredded her father’s shirts.

  She could only remind herself that her real life had not yet begun. Her present existence was like shaking someone’s hand through a thick glove, and she lived for her high school graduation, when she would enter the convent and take off this glove. But she had learned to conceal these hopes at home, to behave as if she had no future, as if the Last Judgment were scheduled, conveniently, for graduation day.

  By now, her favorite part of The Story of a Soul was the Little Flower’s long and precocious struggle for admission to the convent. Burdened with a preternatural foreknowledge of her own early death, Therese first sought to take the veil as a child of nine. No one would permit this—not the Monsignor, the Bishop, nor even the Pope to whom Therese traveled in order to petition in Rome.

  Then one day, as if by some miracle, Therese got lost and was picked up by a carriage transporting a church official who heard her pleas and was charmed into acquiescence. Rereading this chapter, Theresa prayed for a similar miracle to aid her in her time of need.

  That time arrived near the start of Theresa’s senior year, heralded by a postcard inviting the Santangelos to a meeting with the St. Boniface college counsellor.

  “College?” In the face of all evidence to the contrary, Joseph had somehow assumed that Theresa would marry soon after high school and spare them the necessity of arranging her future.

  “I’m not going to college,” said Theresa. “I’m joining the Carmelites.”

  Catherine was setting a platter of polenta on the table when Theresa made this announcement so casually, she might have been asking for the serving spoon. Later, Catherine would say that this was the first of many times she would think: The other shoe. Bracing herself, she wondered if Joseph hadn’t been expecting it too. How else could he have ignited so quickly?

  “Over my dead body!” He slammed his fist down so hard that the silverware jumped. “You’ll see me buried before any daughter of mine works like a dog, twenty-four hours a day, to line the Pope’s pockets.”

  “It’s not for the Pope,” said Theresa. “It’s for God.”

  “For God?” mimicked Joseph. “You show me where God says some poor old lady has to freeze her ass off in the vestibule at Macy’s, shaking that little tray of coins at the Christmas shoppers.”

  “Joseph,” said Catherine. “Your language.”

  “Theresa, when you work as a butcher nearly thirty years, you get to know women. You know what makes them so beautiful, you know why you love them. And the reason is: They want something. Maybe it’s a pound of sausage, or a compliment on their new dress. Sometimes they want a tender roast and sometimes”—he winked at Catherine—“they want the butcher. It doesn’t matter. The wanting is what makes their eyes shine, and when you cheat them a bit, they just shine brighter. But the thing about nuns is: They don’t want anything. They come in for an order of veal and you don’t have veal, they never blink, they never miss a beat. You can practically see them thinking: It’s God’s will, I’ll have chicken. And their eyes look like this.” He fished in his pocket for a handful of change, sifted through the pennies, then shrugged. “I can’t find one dull enough.”

  “They do want something,” said Theresa. “God.”

  “If they want Him so bad, maybe they’ve already got Him. They should leave it alone, get married. Nuns are sick women,
Theresa. And my daughter isn’t sick.”

  Theresa almost wished she were sick; perhaps illness might give her the sense of urgency she needed. Back in her room, she unfocused her eyes, sucked in her cheeks, stared into the mirror. The depressing evidence confronted her: a big, healthy girl, more rosy-cheeked than those idealized portraits of St. Therese. Perhaps if she had galloping consumption, a taste of doom, a deadline to meet—some debilitating illness which might, paradoxically, give her the strength to ignore her father and take her case to the Pope. But nowadays, no one died of consumption. No matter how Theresa starved, she could never get below a size fourteen; she went without a scarf all year and never caught more than one cold each winter. How easy it would be to suffer for God, to spit out your lungs and die for Him. How hard it was to imagine climbing over your father’s corpse and up the steps to the Carmelites’ door.

  A death sentence would have been kinder—at least she would be going straight to God. But a life outside the convent was a life in prison, and Theresa knew that she had received this sentence as punishment for her sins. Worried about pride, she asked forgiveness for feeling superior to her classmates. Worried about gluttony, she brooded over the sinfulness of second helpings. Yet no matter how she agonized over envy, she couldn’t stop envying the Little Flower for her unshakeable vocation, her poor health, and especially for the many small miracles which had lifted her over the obstacles in her saintly path.

  Like any prisoner with an incommutable life sentence, Theresa prayed for a miracle to deliver her from jail. In December, it came—not a miracle, exactly, but inspiration enough for Theresa to reopen her case. And unlike those convicts with their registered letters and dog-eared law texts, Theresa found a means of petition which was not merely simple, but effortless; not merely effortless, but involuntary: One morning, she didn’t want breakfast. That evening, she had no appetite for dinner.

  Joseph and Catherine ignored it till the third night. Then, with studied casualness, Catherine asked Theresa what she’d eaten for lunch.

  “Nothing. I wasn’t hungry.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Take something. A slice of bread.”

  The way Theresa picked at the soft center of the bread so reminded Joseph of his mother that he could almost hear her saying, “At my age, who’s got teeth for crust?”

  “For Christ’s sake,” he muttered. “Eat.”

  “When you let me join the Carmelites,” said Theresa, “that’s when I’ll eat.”

  Theresa looked startled, even more so than Joseph and Catherine. She hadn’t planned on saying that. My vocation, she thought, speaking through me.

  “Then starve,” said Joseph.

  Later that evening, Catherine warmed up a plate of brasciole, dished out a bowl of ice cream and brought it on a tray to Theresa’s room. But Theresa refused, and Catherine ate the ice cream herself, thinking: At last, the other shoe.

  Later, when Joseph and Catherine came to regret the consequences of their stubbornness, they recalled, with melancholy irony, that those few weeks marked the height of Catherine’s cooking career. Shrimp fra diavolo, tortellini with ham, peas and cream, sponge cake soaked in rum and Amaretto—the Santangelo kitchen had never seen the likes of the meals she made to tempt Theresa. But there was no pleasure in the cooking. Catherine couldn’t light the oven without thinking of Mildred Pierce—Joan Crawford baking and sewing and scheming for a daughter whose only desire was to be someplace else. And Theresa wasn’t even tempted.

  That year, mothers were beginning to come into the shop with horrifying stories—the flask they’d found in Sal’s jacket pocket, the cigarettes in Mary Kay’s purse. But Catherine couldn’t bring herself to mention the tension at home, which had grown until she and Joseph ate almost as little as Theresa. Leftovers crowded the refrigerator; Catherine scraped full plates into the garbage, then turned to Joseph and said, “Give in. She’ll change her mind.”

  “Wait,” said Joseph. “She’ll get hungry.”

  But each passing day made it easier for Theresa to hold out. After a week, the dull ache in her stomach disappeared and she felt a peculiar giddiness, as if an angel were fluttering inside her head; then came euphoria, and the increasing certainty of victory. Like an impatient bride-to-be, marking off her calendar, Theresa believed that each uneaten bowl of tortellini was bringing her one step closer to her wedding day.

  And then one night she awoke from a dreamless sleep and smelled sausage. She looked at the clock, listened for sounds from the kitchen. Why would her mother be frying sausage at three A.M.? Suddenly Theresa realized that she was having an hallucination, and thought of all the convincing deceptions which the devil showed Jesus and the saints. Positive now that this smell had been sent to test her, she tried to tell herself that it was as foul as sulphur and brimstone. But the truth was that the delicious aroma was making her crave sausage more than anything on God’s earth.

  She started out of bed, then checked herself (as the priests advised), not with interdictions but with questions. Did she want this sausage enough to go back on her vow? Did she want it as much as a world in which everyone understood her, a life of peace broken only by ringing hymns? Did she want it more than a lifelong marriage with God?

  The answer, at that moment, was yes. Though fully awake, Theresa felt like a sleepwalker; nothing could have stopped her but a tap on the shoulder from God. And no one touched her as she moved toward the kitchen, no one stirred till the sausage was sizzling in the pan, and the smell woke Catherine. With a mother’s instinctive awareness of where her children are (in the dark, the night), Catherine knew that Theresa was in the kitchen and thought: Thank God. She’s eating. It never occurred to her to rouse Joseph, or to leave Theresa alone.

  Can I get you something? were the words on her lips. Can I help? But when she reached the kitchen, these questions caught in her throat and she leaned against the doorpost.

  For the set of Theresa’s back so resembled Mrs. Santangelo’s that Catherine was reminded of her first day of marriage, when she left Joseph’s bed to find her mother-in-law at the stove. She looked at Theresa, saw Mrs. Santangelo, and grabbed for the robe she’d forgotten to put on. And yet her confusion was only sensory; her instinct, unaffected, was not a daughter-in-law’s, but a mother’s.

  “Sausage on an empty stomach?” she cried. “Sweetheart, start with something easier to digest. A glass of milk. A peach.”

  Theresa never remembered how much sausage she ate, nor who cleaned up the kitchen, nor how she got back to bed. She woke the next morning with the taste of meat and garlic in her mouth, and a fullness in her stomach which suggested she’d had plenty. The taste disappeared when she brushed her teeth, but the heaviness stayed with her through a breakfast of juice, eggs, toast, and milk. She felt weighed-down, sleepy, as if at every moment she’d just finished a ten-course meal.

  God didn’t want her; otherwise, He’d have helped her keep her vow. Like any rejected lover, she walked around with a knot in her chest—which only Theresa could have mistaken for undigested sausage. Too tired to consider the future, she tried to forget convent life. It was as if her vocation were a suitor who’d come seeking her father’s permission; refused, he’d never dreamed of asking her to elope, but had simply shrugged and walked away.

  Months went by; the lassitude remained. Theresa was dimly aware that plans were being made for her, decisions she was too full and exhausted to protest. Yes, she kept saying, yes. And only later would she understand how easily she could have dissolved that lump in her chest if only she had seen the grace of God in that plate of sausage and all those unhappy yesses.

  That spring, an old woman came into Joseph’s shop for a half-pound of veal scallopine. Pale, white-haired, dressed in white gloves, white shoes, and a white dress printed with lilacs, the woman seemed to have been dusted from head to foot with talcum powder. Unaccountably moved by her fragility, Joseph took special care with the veal, as if to cut
slices delicate and pale as the woman herself. The thought of cheating her never crossed his mind.

  She inspected her order, smiled, told Joseph that she was a feature writer for The Daily News, and asked if she might look around the store. Holding his breath, uneasy lest something drip on those immaculate shoes, Joseph produced his best stock for her appraisal. The woman moved her lips as if she were tasting everything she saw. On her way out, she smiled again and said, “Look in this weekend’s News,” just as the good witch in a fairy tale might say, “Look under that toadstool in Grandmother’s garden.” And Joseph was so bewitched that he didn’t even realize she’d left without paying him.

  That week, it was Joseph’s turn to get up early and run to the newsstand before the blind man opened, to spread the paper on the breakfast table and search every column. But he was luckier than Theresa, or perhaps it was just that the old lady’s promise was easier to keep than Our Lady of Fatima’s.

  On Saturday, Joseph spotted a story about the neighborhood, followed by a list of stores. Right beneath Pollicini’s Bakery was Santangelo’s Sausage Shop: “Spectacular Sausage. First-rate meats cut to order at reasonable prices.”

  “Catherine,” said Joseph. “Look at this.”

  Joseph underlined the sentence, mounted the article in plastic and taped it inside the window of his shop. But after a few days, he took it down because the story didn’t mention Frank Manzone’s vegetable stand and Joseph didn’t want Frank reminded every time he passed.

  According to rumor, the old lady had breezed into Manzone’s and breezed right out. It was no wonder, the way Frank’s luck had been going. All summer, his brother hadn’t been able to grow a radish; his crops had fallen prey to every pest and blight to come through New Jersey. Forced to negotiate with the big California growers, Frank had signed contracts which were little better than suicide notes. His prices were the highest in the area, his store empty except for his oldest customers—who were not simply loyal, but also too infirm to walk around the corner to another stand. How much did such people buy? Joseph remembered his mother telling him about some saint, the patron of grocers, who could restore inferior produce to freshness; even if he’d remembered the saint’s name, he could never have brought himself to tell Frank to pray.