Household Saints (8 page)

“Sure, Mama,” Joseph agreed sleepily. Anything to keep peace in the family was a miracle. “Right, Catherine?”

“Right,” said Catherine. “A miracle.”

It wasn’t a complete lie. There was always something miraculous about the flowering of a plant. But miracles, as Catherine understood them, were supposed to be surprises—God’s way of shocking you into believing. And there was nothing surprising about those flowers. The geranium had been in bud, due to blossom any day. That was why she’d put it on the altar. Yet if Mrs. Santangelo wanted to believe it was a miracle, Catherine would not disillusion her. For she knew that she could trade on her new power as a worker of minor miracles for the one privilege which she had craved since the start of her married life:

That same day, Catherine asked Joseph if she could work in the shop.

Next to the bedroom, the shop was her favorite place, for it was only in those two places that she could find Joseph’s smell. She loved to watch him work, loved most of all to think that those hands which sliced and boned so deftly were the same ones which would touch her so gently that night.

Joseph couldn’t believe that she really liked the smell. Ignoring her protests, he took hot showers before coming to bed. When she walked into the store to find him elbow-deep in gristle and blood, he was horrified to think that she might recognize those arms as the same ones which held her in bed.

“What would you do in the shop?” he said. “It’s a man’s work, it takes muscles—”

“It takes two fingers to work the cash register,” said Catherine.

And so the job of cashier was invented for her.

Mrs. Santangelo saw evil omens in every aspect of this arrangement.

“That’s the end of the Santangelo business,” she predicted. “My Zio is turning over in his grave so fast, he can’t get up and visit me.”

Mrs. Santangelo’s prophecies had a disconcerting tendency to come true, and Joseph feared that this one had a better chance than most. It seemed inevitable that Catherine’s help would hurt the business. How could he flirt with his customers if she were there? And more important, how could he cheat them with Catherine looking over his shoulder?

As it happened, there was no need for Joseph to abandon these practices. In fact, Catherine’s presence made them easier. The saddest old women, the ones with no time or patience for flirting, were impressed by how nicely Joseph talked to Catherine—nicer than their husbands had ever talked to them. And there was nothing the others liked more than to catch a wink from Joseph when his pretty little wife’s back was turned.

Of course Catherine’s back was never completely turned, but she forgave Joseph the winks, just as his customers overlooked the short weights. For she knew that he was winking for her, cheating for her, and she felt that loyalty stronger even than love—the passionate bond of partners-in-crime.

Despite Mrs. Santangelo’s predictions, the business flourished—and yet she was not convinced. She continued to oppose Catherine’s working, if for no other reason than that her Zio had never let
her
work. And she took consolation in the old saying that God will never allow your wealth to multiply faster than the number of mouths at your table.

Soon enough, she predicted, the nightly creaking of bedsprings would put an end to Catherine’s working career. And so, like a besieged and dethroned queen, she retreated to the heart of her fortress and waited for her kingdom to be restored.

The first sign came on a muggy Friday morning in September, almost a year after Joseph and Catherine were married. The store was crowded with women shopping for the weekend, each one with small talk for Catherine, a giggle for Joseph.

Suddenly Catherine felt as if the floor were sliding out from beneath her feet and the sawdust rising up to meet her.

As luck would have it, Evelyn Santangelo walked into the shop just as Catherine ran out.

“Hey!” called Evelyn. “How’s the little cashier?”

“Fine,” Catherine muttered through clenched teeth, then brushed past her sister-in-law and headed into the street for some air. By the time she returned, feeling only slightly better, half of Mulberry Street knew that she and Joseph were expecting a child—a fact which Catherine had yet to admit to herself.

“Congratulations!” said Evelyn. “You look a little green around the gills. Wait. It gets worse. With me it was gasoline. Every time I pulled into a gas station, I had to run straight to the Ladies’.” She waved at the cars parked out on the street, to remind everyone that she was from the suburbs and drove a Chrysler.

“Congratulations!” chorused the younger women, Americans like Evelyn, while the older ones bit their lips because it was bad luck to offer congratulations so early in a pregnancy.

“What do you want?” Evelyn rattled on. “Boy or girl? How about a little boy cousin for my Stacey?”

“What’s this?” Joseph was so surprised by the drift of things that he momentarily forgot the others’ presence. “Catherine, is this the truth?”

“Could be,” said Catherine.

“Isn’t that typical?” said Evelyn. “Papa’s always the last to know.”

Until that morning, thought Catherine, there hadn’t been anything to know; except for two missed periods, she’d felt no different. But as soon as Evelyn and her big mouth were turned loose on Mulberry Street, Catherine’s pregnancy became an established fact. She had no physical symptoms; in the mirror, she looked exactly the same. But people talked to her, looked at her in a new way. It was, she thought, as if you knew you were Italian and everyone acted as if you were Chinese. Now, women she’d never spoken to felt free to offer advice, information, predictions of her baby’s sex:

“Boys don’t show till the sixth month—then they pop out like mushrooms.”

“The way you can tell is: It’s the girls make your gums bleed.”

“You can’t be sure till the last month. Then, if your fingers swell, you know for sure it’s a boy.”

But all the prophets agreed on two things. The first was that it made no difference, girl or boy, so long as the child was healthy. Which reminded them of the second: A woman in Catherine’s condition shouldn’t be working in a butcher shop.

Total strangers started warning her against working there. No one had hard evidence. Though everyone knew stories of mothers who brought forth gibbons after innocent trips to the zoo, children born with ghastly deformities because their fathers worked on Sant’Anielo’s day, no one could cite specific instances of pregnant women harmed at the butcher’s. Still, the women had a vague intuition: It didn’t seem right.

“Doesn’t it make you queasy?” asked Joseph’s customers. “All this blood … the smell … in your state …?”

“You know how some women are about pickles and ice cream?” said Catherine. “That’s how I am about this shop.”

But she could never look them in the eye as she said this, for she knew that what she really craved was Joseph and the smell of Joseph’s skin.

She and Joseph rarely discussed the baby, except to say that they couldn’t believe it was really coming. Yet always now, in the midst of making love, Joseph would stop and say, “Is it safe? Are you sure it’s all right?”

“I’m sure,” said Catherine, urging him on. “If it isn’t all right, what is?”

But once again, Mrs. Santangelo disagreed.

A counter of days, an observer of signs, Carmela Santangelo kept intimate track of her daughter-in-law’s biological life, and thus was the first to know that she was pregnant. Thrilled by the prospect of another grandchild, Mrs. Santangelo waited till she was sure, then held a burning candle over a basin of water. The wax solidified—not in separate droplets, but in one long curlicue which floated to the top.

“A boy,” whispered Mrs. Santangelo. “Baby Zio.”

They would call him Zio, and she herself would wean him on milk, bread, and honey. She would feed him pasta and good cheese, not Chinese pork like her undernourished grandchildren on the Island, and little Zio would grow closer to her than her own sons had been before they grew up and left her.

Mrs. Santangelo took the candle, set it in front of San Gennaro and was just about to thank him for this blessing in her old age when a breeze gusted in the window and blew out the candle. She crossed herself.

“God help us,” she said.

That evening, she located Zio’s St. Anthony’s horn, wrapped in tissue at the back of her bureau drawer.

“It was my husband’s,” she said, tying the cord around Catherine’s neck. “It’s not for you, it’s for the baby.”

But despite the good effects of Zio’s
cornuto,
the bad omens continued: Blood streaks in the egg yolks. Three pigeons roosting on the portal of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Rain on crucial feast days. Of course there was trouble, thought Mrs. Santangelo, what with those creaking bedsprings, those hours Catherine spent downstairs in the shop. But how to convince Joseph that such omens were proof of more than her ill will toward his wife?

Perhaps it would be wiser to concentrate on Catherine. Mrs. Santangelo knew that a pregnant woman could be persuaded of anything—provided you understood that she was temporarily out of her mind and that the only way to her brain was through her stomach.

And so Mrs. Santangelo devoted herself to cooking for the mother-to-be.

Every night, Catherine got sick on the meat. Usually she made it through the soup and bread, but could only force down a few mouthfuls of meat before stopping to excuse herself.

“I’m sorry,” she’d say, back from the bathroom with cold water shining on her face. “It’s not the food. It’s me.”

But it was the food.

“Mama,” said Joseph, “this sausage taste all right to you?”

“All right? It’s the best!”

“Maybe if you cooked it a little more …”

“And cook all the juice out of it? Eat up, Joseph. Anyone would think you were the pregnant one.”

Little by little, her cooking worked its magic: Catherine lost her taste for meat. After gagging on enough of her mother-in-law’s underdone stews, she could no longer stand the smell of it and finally told Joseph that it was time for her to quit working in the shop. She still loved the scent on Joseph’s skin; but now when he took a shower before bed, she didn’t argue.

“It’s my mother’s cooking making you sick,” said Joseph. “We’ll go out, get a hamburger, you’ll be fine.”

But Catherine was revolted by the idea of a hamburger, and for the first time felt like a different person, a pregnant woman nauseated by the food she had loved all her life. It was this difference which first made her conscious that the child inside her was real. Everything was changing—even the way she walked, cautiously now, hips turned inward, cradling her center, shielding something fragile as an egg. Gradually her habits changed as she homed, like any nesting creature, toward the comfortable and familiar. She took long naps, tended her plants, and in the afternoons walked uptown to buy this fragile secret thing an African violet and a movie magazine.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, everything changed again. One Monday morning, a green panel truck pulled up in front of the shop. And by the time Joseph and the driver had unloaded it, the sights and sounds and smells of life were different.

It was as if there were nothing in the world but turkeys, as if the autumn days fell silent, as if Mulberry Street put a finger to its lips and listened to the squawking and gobbling. Even at night, turkey dust and pinfeathers swarmed around the street lights like clouds of gnats.

The counters in the shop were pushed back against the wall to make room for the stacked crates; beaks and necks protruded through the wooden slats, and wattles hung down like wilted flowers. Upstairs, the familiar meat smell was gone, replaced by the sticky sweetness of turkey blood.

“I turn my back for five minutes,” said Mrs. Santangelo, “and you turn your father’s shop into a chicken coop.”

“It’s Thanksgiving,” said Joseph. “You know, the American holiday.”

“In Italy, we had holidays for the saints, the Virgin. And here? They worship turkeys!” Then Joseph told his mother how much these turkeys were bringing in per pound and put an end to her grumbling.

Even Joseph’s clientele was different. With nothing but contempt for this godless, wild-Indian holiday, the grandmothers fed their husbands fish and pasta, or took their business elsewhere. But their daughters drove in from Westchester and Long Island to talk of yams and marshmallows, to chastise the old-fashioned grocers for neglecting to stock enough cranberry sauce. Ladies in fur coats came in, dragging toddlers in velveteen riding suits. Taxis double-parked while Irish maids ducked into Santangelo’s to fill their mistresses’ orders.

All of them wanted the fattest, juiciest bird Santangelo had—less of a meal than a monument to America and to the grandeur of their tables. Like the Plymouth pilgrims, they wanted to eat so much that God would feel duly thanked for delivering them through another year. And finally they wanted each member of their families to eat a double helping for all the wartime Thanksgivings when they’d had nothing but Spam.

That was what they thought they wanted. But Joseph knew that what they really wanted was blood. His regular customers, the old ladies, had been wringing chickens’ necks for so many years that they were glad to have the butcher do it for them, off in the back room where they didn’t have to watch. But these American women, these city women, had never killed a chicken in their lives. Not only did they want their turkey, but they wanted its death, as if witnessing the slaughter would make them feel nearer to the tall corn, the yams, the fruits of the harvest and the sweet November earth.

Joseph gave them what they wanted. He let them take their time picking over the live birds, choosing not merely the choicest flesh but their destined sacrificial victims. While they decided, he sharpened his knives so that the scraping of the blade raised the hairs on the backs of the women’s necks. When they’d chosen, he opened the cages and grabbed the turkeys in a violent stranglehold, loosened his grasp just long enough for one bone-chilling squawk, then snapped his wrist so hard that the birds began to quiver. Finally he brandished his knife in the air and slit the turkeys’ throats with three neat slices.