Household Saints

by Francine Prose

  “Look at that rain,” said Joseph, and that was the end of the conversation till the train was pulling into Penn Station. Then Joseph turned to Catherine and said, “It makes you think. I mean, maybe there is a God, and He’s the kind of guy who cheats at pinochle. Isn’t that what they say, that you make Him in your own image? And like your father says: Isn’t it perfect? Isn’t it just perfect that a God who cheats at pinochle would end the story this way?”

  But it wasn’t the end of the story.

  There was something which Catherine never told Joseph. Ordinarily she might have mentioned it, but his talk on the train about patterns made her keep it to herself: Every Sunday evening, they had sausage fried with onions and peppers. Easy, quick, delicious, it was by now an integral part of their weekly ritual. But that Sunday, Theresa’s illness had so altered their established routine that Catherine couldn’t even fry the sausage without feeling that something was different.

  She was almost finished cooking when she realized that one of her cacti had flowered—the one she’d bought at Woolworth’s on that morning when Theresa disappeared. In all the years since, it had neither grown nor shrunk, blossomed nor looked any less like a pebble than it did that first day. Still Catherine had gone on watering it, treasuring it as a kind of memento which she could no more throw away than she could Theresa’s baby pictures.

  Now there was a marble-sized lump on top, covered with downy spines, a dark red tinged with fuchsia, like the center of a rose.

  Catherine had always loved flowering plants. But this one terrified her, and she moved it to the back of the shelf where she wouldn’t have to see it. This unaccountable dread stayed with her all night and woke her at five in the morning, thinking: There’s more. The other shoe.

  When the phone rang, she was not even startled, but lay there patiently, waiting for Joseph to answer.

  “Mister Santangelo,” said the voice on the phone, “this is Sister Cupertino from Stella Maris. I’m sorry to call so early, but I have some bad news for you. Mister Santangelo, your daughter has gone to God.”

  “Gone where?” Joseph mumbled groggily.

  “To heaven.”

  “No,” said Joseph.

  “What’s wrong?” said Catherine. “What happened?”

  “Mister Santangelo, are you still there?”

  “I’m here. What happened?”

  “God took her.”

  “I mean how. How did it happen?”

  “What?” said Catherine. “Joseph, tell me.”

  “Fever,” said Sister Cupertino. “A sudden high fever. That’s all we know. Sister Lucy went in to check on her on her morning rounds at four. She took Theresa’s temperature. It was a hundred and six. She went to call Doctor Fontana, and when she got back at four-fifteen, Theresa had passed away—”

  “It took her fifteen minutes to make a phone call?”

  “Mister Santangelo, it was four in the morning. She got the doctor’s answering service. Believe me, it was a great shock to us all.”

  “We’ll be right out.” Joseph hung up the phone.

  “Theresa’s dead,” said Catherine.

  Joseph put his arms around her and they held each other without speaking until Catherine said, “I feel like a hole’s opened up in the world and my life’s fallen through.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Joseph. “About the hole.”

  They got up and got dressed.

  “I guess there’s no hurry,” said Joseph. “We might as well wait for the light to come up.” They drank coffee till shortly after dawn, then left.

  It was a clear spring morning, so lovely that it seemed a shame to sleep it away, and Mulberry Street was wide awake. Shopkeepers were hosing down the sidewalk in front of their stores. Rainbows shone in the spray, and the asphalt gleamed in the morning sun. Early as it was, the streets were full of people dressed for work—secretaries in the new spring dresses which they’d bought as promises to themselves in the middle of winter.

  “Wouldn’t you know it?” said Joseph. “Now’s when we get a good day for traveling.”

  Catherine stared at him.

  “Some good day,” she said.

  At the entrance to Penn Station, boys were selling bunches of daffodils.

  “You want some flowers?” asked Joseph.

  “Daffodils? What for?”

  As the train rolled through the suburbs, Joseph and Catherine saw patches of green on every lawn. They passed freshly plowed gardens, and the air carried the smell of manure. Half the trees were surrounded by the reddish aura which immediately precedes the formation of buds; the other half were already in bud.

  “You know at the end of ‘Red Riding Hood’?” said Catherine. “When they cut the wolf’s stomach open and fill it with stones? That’s how my stomach feels.”

  “Red Riding Hood?” murmured Joseph. He pointed out the window. “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. A hyacinth, maybe.”

  In the taxi, Catherine said, “In the sunshine, it’s a whole different ride.”

  Stella Maris looked so unfamiliar that Catherine was momentarily afraid that the cab driver had let them off at the wrong place.

  “Jesus,” said Joseph. “Would you look at that?”

  “I’m looking,” said Catherine.

  The garden was in full bloom. Delicate pink strands hung from the weeping cherries like the fringes of a shawl. The forsythia and early willow were bright yellow, the new grass yellow-green. Beds of daffodils, violets and blue forget-me-nots lined the walkway, and sunlight shone pearly and translucent through drifts of jonquils.

  “It’s not natural,” whispered Joseph.

  “What? What are you whispering for?”

  “It’s not natural. It’s not right. Yesterday it was winter and today it’s spring.”

  “Some years it happens like that.”

  “Not like this. Mud one day, the next a garden. Besides, you saw on the way out—the rest of the Island doesn’t look like this.”

  “They’ve got good gardeners. The Church always gets the best. There’s always some monsignor who’ll throw a fit if he sees a dandelion on the lawn.”

  “The Pope couldn’t do this. Not overnight.”

  “What do you know about it? The closest you ever got to nature was Frank Manzone’s vegetable stand.”

  “Enough to know that you don’t pull a garden out of a hat.”

  “Its not out of a hat. There were buds yesterday, the flowers were ready to pop. But it was raining, you didn’t notice….”

  “Believe me, I would have noticed.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Okay, you’re the plant lady. You tell me. Is this natural or not?”

  Joseph had stopped beside a bed of daffodils and was looking down at the flowers. They were all the same color: creamy white, with pale yellow centers and saffron stigmata. Joseph wanted to touch the orange stamens, but hesitated. Strangely, he was remembering his wedding night—how scared he’d been to touch Catherine. That night, he’d convinced himself that it was not just permissible—but necessary for life to go on. Yet now, nothing could have persuaded him to touch the inside of those flowers.

  “It’s those patterns again,” he said. “Even the weather’s in on it. Remember how hot it was, the night of that pinochle game? And how it rained the next day when you came into the shop? Now for months it rains every Sunday and all of a sudden, the sun …”

  “Joseph.” Catherine spoke very softly. “Theresa’s lying out here dead and we’re talking about the weather.”

  “You think I forgot?” said Joseph. “What else should we talk about?”

  Catherine had turned her back to him. Her head was bent, her shoulders rounded. Joseph had to remind himself that forty wasn’t old, because at that moment the alley cat he had married looked like an old woman.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, then put his arm around her and kept it there till they reached the lobby.

  Sister Cupertino
and a priest whom she introduced as Father Dominic were waiting for them. Father Dominic was a thin little man with pointed features, blue-white skin, dark circles under his eyes and a heavy five o’clock shadow. It occurred to Joseph that the priest looked worse than Theresa ever did, and Theresa was dead.

  Sister Cupertino took Catherine’s hands between her dry palms and held them. Father Dominic, whose hands were somewhat stickier, did the same to Joseph.

  “Good morning.” Father Dominic’s voice was nearly expressionless, but the solemn look on his face said, God’s will be done.

  “That’s some garden you got out there,” said Joseph.

  Sister Cupertino and Father Dominic exchanged knowing looks. They’d seen it before—so many families needed that small talk, that buffer before getting down to the tragic business at hand.

  “Isn’t it?” said Sister Cupertino. “After all the bad weather we’ve been having, it’s a miracle.”

  Joseph gave her a funny look.

  “It always comes like that? Overnight?”

  “Mister Santangelo, it’s practically the middle of May.”

  Father Dominic ushered them to Theresa’s room, then discreetly vanished. Joseph and Catherine hesitated in the doorway. But when they forced themselves inside, they saw that Theresa looked almost exactly as she had the day before—only paler, eyes shut. Her head was still propped up on pillows, her hands folded over the blanket.

  “It’s hard to believe,” said Catherine.

  “What’s that smell?” said Joseph.

  “What’s got into you today?” Catherine sniffed. “I don’t know, some kind of flowers.”

  “Roses,” said Joseph. “It’s enough to knock you over.”

  “So?”

  “There’s no roses in this room. Do you see roses in this room?”

  “Calm down. Maybe one of the nurses was wearing perfume.”

  “You know nuns don’t wear perfume.”

  “Then maybe an orderly. Maybe the doctor was wearing cologne.”

  “It’s not cologne.”

  “Air freshener, then. How should I know?”

  “No air freshener in the world smells like this.”

  “Maybe it’s coming from the outside. From the garden.”

  Joseph went to the window.

  “There’s a parking lot out there.” Beyond it, he saw green…. “It didn’t smell like this in the garden.”

  “So they had flowers in here and took them out.”

  “Why would they do that? Besides, that smell that sticks around when you take flowers out of a room—it’s always kind of stale. And this isn’t stale, it’s like going up to a rose and sticking your nose right in it.”

  Joseph approached the bed.

  “It’s coming from Theresa. Did you ever know her to use perfume?”

  “Theresa?” Catherine came closer. “You’re right. Maybe it’s some kind of soap they use here.”

  “I know the smell of soap.” Joseph shook his head.

  Kneeling by the side of the bed, Catherine said a Hail Mary, and an Our Father, then added her personal prayer that Theresa’s soul would go straight to heaven. She imagined St. Peter greeting her at the gate, saying, “Theresa! How perfect that you should come today, it’s spring cleaning!” And Theresa would enter paradise to find the angels sweeping the clouds with golden brooms, raising puffs of feathery dust.

  When Catherine stood, Joseph said, “It’s not natural for a healthy young girl to die in one night with no warning.”

  “I thought they told you it was fever.”

  “Fever? What do psychiatrists know about fever?”

  “So maybe it wasn’t fever. Maybe it was her heart. Or some medicine they gave her. She’s dead, what can we do now? What do you think, they murdered her? What do you want, revenge?”

  “I guess God took her,” said Joseph. “Like the lady said.”

  “Maybe so. We might as well think so.”

  “It doesn’t help. It doesn’t help at all.”

  “I know,” said Catherine.

  Then Joseph said, “Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen when a saint dies? Everything starts smelling like flowers?”

  Catherine glanced at him. Was he joking? But he was serious when he said, “Suppose she was one.”

  “A saint? Theresa?”

  “Sure, why not? Maybe she got what she wanted.”

  “Joseph, Theresa was a beautiful girl. A good girl. I’ll never love anyone in my life like I loved her. But she was crazy, Joseph. She went crazy ironing shirts in her boyfriend’s apartment.”

  “Saints have done crazier. Look. Look at this.” Joseph held up Theresa’s hands. Not yet rigid, they bent gracefully at the wrists—both of which were covered with a network of red lines, faintly streaked with blood.

  “What’s this? Catherine, what’s this?”

  “What do you think? Stigmata?”

  “What then?”

  “Mosquito bites. She scratched herself in her sleep.”

  “Mosquitoes in May?”

  “Sure, in May.”

  “Catherine, remember how much she used to pray? All those times she fasted. Who else acts like that but a saint? Suppose that’s what she was?”

  “A saint?”

  “Who knows? There’s been miracles here. First the garden, then that smell in the room, the stigmata, even the way she died …”

  “You’re upset. You’re letting it get to you. There haven’t been any miracles. Nothing’s happened, nothing’s ever happened to us that couldn’t happen normally. The garden was green yesterday—you just didn’t notice. Theresa could have started wearing perfume here at the hospital—how would we know? Yesterday she was dying and we didn’t even see it. Maybe the burning bush was burning all the time and Moses didn’t notice. Maybe the miracle is when you stop and pay attention.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Joseph.

  “We’re not talking about walking on water,” said Catherine. “We’re talking about ordinary life. Remember when I thought that the dead plants in our place had been resurrected and the truth was, you’d watered them and bought new ones? Remember how your mother thought it was a miracle when that geranium bloomed on the mantelpiece—and all the time I’d known it was going to?”

  “It flowered.” Joseph was thinking of the daffodil bed. “No matter who knew. Maybe that was the miracle.”

  “Maybe so. But it’s not the kind of thing they canonize you for.” Again Catherine sniffed the air. The smell was getting stronger. “So what if it is a miracle? What then?”

  “Somebody should be told. Someone in the church …”

  “The church? You must be kidding.”

  “It’s what Theresa would have wanted.”

  “Okay, that’s it.” Catherine dusted her palms together. “Forget it, just forget it. There’s arrangements to make.”

  Sister Cupertino—her manner so breezy that she might have been outlining another phase of Theresa’s treatment—served them coffee in her office while discussing the funeral arrangements. When at last the Santangelos rose to leave, she put her doughy arms around their shoulders, smiled ruefully and said, “If Theresa had lived in another era, they might have called her a saint.”

  “If they’d had lithium in Jesus’ time,” said Joseph, “there wouldn’t have been any saints.”

  “Joseph,” said Catherine, “let’s go.”

  “If they’d had mental hospitals, they’d have had John the Baptist on occupational therapy,” muttered Joseph, and that was the last that either of them spoke till they were nearly home.

  Finally Catherine said, “Joseph, it’s not as if I believe this. But suppose Theresa was a saint—miracles, stigmata, the works. What if we told somebody and they took us seriously, and the church just happened to need an American Little Flower of Jesus? Service and devotion in every little thing—even ironing shirts in a Catholic law student’s apartment. Then what? Then poor Theresa, that’s what. Would you want h
er to spend eternity like that, people lighting candles—”

  “Who lights candles anymore?”

  “There will always be somebody. Telling the saints their problems, begging them for help they can’t give. Is that what you want for your daughter? Hasn’t she done enough favors?”

  “I never thought of it that way,” said Joseph.

  Catherine waited till they were back in the apartment, then closed and locked the door.

  “Joseph,” she said, “if you really think that Theresa was a saint, if you think we’ve seen miracles—think what you want, but keep your mouth shut. For Theresa’s sake, Joseph, if you ever loved her—don’t tell a soul.”

  One foot in front of the other: This was what was meant by God’s mercy. It seemed to Catherine as if her body were producing its own morphine, stronger than any painkiller a doctor could prescribe. She wasn’t expected to do anything, and yet she was so numb that she could help Joseph hang the bunting and accept her neighbors’ condolences without bursting into tears. The only trouble with this wonder drug was that it tended to wear off in the middle of the night. And it disappeared completely when she and Joseph walked into the funeral parlor and saw all the roses.

  The night after Theresa died had been the first warm evening of spring. The old people had dusted off their folding chairs and come out to take the air, to thank God for the weather and to remark how strange it was that they were alive to enjoy this breeze when a twenty-year-old girl lay dead. At this, the grandmothers had picked at their stockings and waited for their husbands to tease them out of their misery. But their husbands were in no mood for teasing. A young person’s death was always a tragedy—but this was like losing a daughter.

  It wasn’t that they’d felt particularly close to Theresa. She’d kept to herself, they hadn’t loved her as they’d loved their children’s friends, their grandchildren’s friends, the neighbors’ kids they’d fed and hugged and practically adopted. But they knew where Theresa came from, and her story was part of them, absorbed into their systems with every sausage they’d eaten in the last thirty years. The old people remembered Mrs. Santangelo and were shocked to realize how long she’d been gone. Middle-aged couples remembered being young and single and dancing at the wedding of the man who’d won his wife at a card game. The women remembered when their children were young and they’d traded stories with Catherine. Now their Mary Kay was married, their Sal had a good job in the garment district, and Theresa was dead.