Household Saints
Page 22
Her story had marked off their lives, become part of their own life stories—they couldn’t stand to know that it was ending this way. Only the good die young, they said so often that they couldn’t think of Theresa without conjuring up one of those marble lambs curled up on an infant’s tombstone.
Individually and together, the Santangelos’ neighbors came to the same conclusion. The only appropriate gesture—the only way to honor such innocence, to sweeten such a bitter end—was to spare no expense and send roses.
And so it happened that Joseph and Catherine walked into Castellano’s Funeral Home to find every surface covered with roses—massed on the altar, down the steps, on trestle tables lining the side aisles and spilling from the windowsills so that all four walls were blanketed with roses.
Catherine began to cry. Joseph put his arms around her to support her, and caught himself leaning on her. People were looking at them, trying not to stare, but Joseph and Catherine were alone in that chapel with the roses and Theresa’s body. Catherine prayed that Joseph wouldn’t start talking about patterns again, because now she was seeing them too, and this one made her angry.
She was remembering her wedding, the feast which—like these roses—had appeared out of nowhere. Two miracles, two magic tricks, except that both times all Mulberry Street was in on it. Like the wedding guests, the mourners in the lobby looked as if they knew something she didn’t, knew that it was more than her wedding, more than her daughter’s funeral. And suddenly she felt as if her whole life had been planned this way, without consulting her, contrived to satisfy someone’s idea of some old story which had nothing to do with her: First the wedding at Cana and now this shower of roses.
She got angrier each time an old woman filed by and laid a white rosary in the coffin. Nor did it help when Joseph whispered in her ear, “You know who sent those roses? The same guy who stacked that pinochle deck.”
All through the wake, the smell of roses grew stronger. By the funeral, their perfume was stale, almost suffocating. Joseph and Catherine barely heard the service; then someone ushered them into a black limousine. As the car swung through a complicated series of turns onto the highway, Joseph looked back and saw that the cortege was so long, every car in the cloverleaf behind them had its lights on.
Later, Catherine would remember nothing about the graveside except her fear that she would never stop crying. When the coffin was lowered, Joseph couldn’t watch, and instead looked around and saw that no one could watch.
For the first time that anyone could remember, no one went back to the family’s house after the service. Catherine had planned on having her neighbors in, but when she saw all the roses, she’d let it be known that she didn’t want company.
By evening, the merciful numbness had returned and Catherine went to bed early. Joseph waited till she was asleep, then went out with Augie to get drunk at the San Remo, where he told his brother the whole story. Perhaps it was the wine, or the will to believe that his daughter’s life had had more meaning than a premature death in a nuthouse. Whatever the reason, Joseph heard himself talking as if Theresa were really a saint: “You can tell me they were mosquito bites, but I say no. That hospital room smelled stronger than the funeral parlor this morning. And Augie, I swear to God: We were out there the day before, and that garden was dead. I keep seeing patterns—patterns in everything. Even that hot night, that night I won Catherine at pinochle—God was stacking the deck. God was turning up the heat.”
Augie went home and told Evelyn. By noon the next day, the entire neighborhood had heard about the peculiar circumstances surrounding Theresa’s death, and everyone was so happy to think that her story might have a different end that they were already beginning to revise it. Now suddenly people remembered that long-ago morning when Theresa got lost and was found splashing in the holy water. Former schoolmates recalled the ceremony in which she’d received The Story of a Soul. Except for some rumors about trouble with a boy, no one had much recent knowledge of the shy, standoffish girl, and so it was easy to invent details.
Each teller added new examples of her charity, her obedience, her patience. Somehow the rumor got started that a string of miracles had followed soon upon her death. It was said that all the patients at Stella Maris recovered instantaneously on the day of Theresa’s funeral and were discharged to make room for a new generation of residents. It was said that the hospital gardens retained their bloom all summer and were discovered to have healing powers; busloads of schizophrenics were imported from Pilgrim State and cured by touching Theresa’s favorite rose trellis. It was said that her bereaved parents gave her radio to her grandfather, and that this radio would play nothing but religious stations, picked up from all over the country. It was said that Lino Falconetti made no attempt to fix the set, though he lived another ten years and died believing himself a lucky man.
Finally it was said that Theresa’s holiness could still be partaken of by buying sausage from her father’s shop. Following her death, it was rumored, Joseph Santangelo never cheated a customer again. There were many who knew for a fact that this was untrue, and they told it like this: After the mourning period, Joseph reopened his shop and started cheating like never before. And when the women complained, he would flash them his sweetest smile and say, “You know who cheats? God cheats. Go complain to Him.”
But by then, the facts of Theresa’s life and death were less important than the story and the reasons people told it: At school, the good girls told it as conclusive proof that it was still possible to lead a consecrated life: God knew who thought good thoughts and helped around the house. At night, the men came home from playing cards and retold it, as if to say: You may think we’re wasting our time playing cards, but for all you know—we’re preparing the way for a saint. And their wives made similar claims whenever they ruined a meal, on those days when everything went wrong in the kitchen.
In the daytime, though, the women told it differently, to each other. The happy women, and the women who still imagined that happiness was attainable, sighed and said, “If only it would happen to me. If only I could see God in the dirty laundry.” And the women who looked back on a lifetime of laundry and thought, What did I do it for? said, “Why bother? Look where it gets you—the nuthouse.”
“What kind of life did she lead?” they said. “Nothing was accomplished, nothing left behind. She went crazy and died and went into the ground and that was it.” Then the others would point out some little girl with a bag of groceries.
“Life goes on,” they said, and the women would look at each other, not knowing how to feel.
The only ones who could tell the story with no mixed feelings and nothing to prove were the very old. They told it with reverence, with the same respect they would have shown the life of a saint. They told it as Theresa would have liked it told, as the story of an ordinary life redeemed by extraordinary devotion. They told it for hope, and its comfort stayed with them even as Theresa’s life receded into that time when everything was bigger and better and more extreme.
They saved it for the hottest nights, when the air was so heavy that they couldn’t breathe, so still that they could hear the untrustworthy rhythm of their heartbeats. They told it quietly, as if telling a bedtime story to a grandchild. But this was the story they told to reassure themselves, to remind each other: Wait. Such things can happen to anyone, on any hot night—a hot night exactly like this. Hush. Listen to the sound of cards slapping on the table. God is sending us a saint.
About the Author
Francine Prose is the author of sixteen novels, including A Changed Man, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. A former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Prose is a h
ighly regarded critic and essayist, and has taught literature and writing for more than twenty years at major universities. She is a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College, and she lives in New York City.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts for its support.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1981 by Francine Prose
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4804-4506-2
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