Household Saints (27 page)

“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 her 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.

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.