The Patron Saint of Ugly (30 page)

After the cemetery, our house overflowed with hill and village dwellers. The blue-collar set—Dad’s coworkers and his favorite mechanic; neighbors who had borrowed his tools; Mr. O’Grady, whose wooden floors my father had bartered for T-bones—gravitated toward steerage, the kitchen. They paid homage to Grandpa Ferrari at the head of the table, one of Dad’s stogies plugged in his mouth, the smoke blending with sickly sweet flowers and simmering tomato sauce. He accepted their deference, as if he cared about my father. As if he gave a damn. All the while Nonna poured cream in their coffees, tears running down her cheeks.

Saint Brigid’s white-collar congregants gathered in the living room around Father Luigi, who sat ex cathedra in one of the wingbacks. Sister Barnabas hovered behind to keep his wineglass full, his cookie plate heaped, her own tears glistening against the red splotches on her cheek. Mom, barely sentient, slumped in the other wingback; she’d been placed there by Grandma, who had instructed her on her duty on that horrid day. I leaned against the archway that straddled both worlds and watched the parade of old nonnas slip Mom envelopes containing the few dollars they could scrape together, a holy card, a pope-blessed scapular. After offering condolences they genuflected before Father Luigi and kissed his hand. Then they surrounded Nonna in the kitchen, gift bottles of Marsala clinking beneath their shawls.

Mom’s eyes glazed as if she were replaying the last twenty-four hours of Dad’s and Nicky’s lives, as if she were trying to think of one thing that would have stopped them from bolting out of the house. She kept looking at the balled-up rosary one of the nonnas had pressed into her hand. I knew it wasn’t beads she was seeing. I also knew she was wishing that when she found Dad’s keys she had thrown them down the sewer grate in front of our house. I was rewinding my own actions, and in my mind I would have just given up after being unable to open the station wagon’s hood. I would have clapped my hands and run to my closet. I would never have heard Candy Man, or if I did, I would have plugged my ears so that I would not be tempted, would not go outside and ultimately to Snakebite Woods. But that wasn’t right either, because Nicky would still have been there, being brutalized by Ray-Ray.

Grandma Iris provided alcohol in obscene proportions. She kept Mom lubricated and acted as hostess to the rest of the first-class guests, trying to appear the epitome of grace under duress, mascara smudges giving her away.

In steerage, Dad’s coworkers began telling stories about the day Dad saved Ernie Silva’s life. There had been an explosion in one of the furnaces, and Ernie’s clothes had caught fire. Dad knocked him to the ground and rolled him around until the flames were out. I remembered that day Dad came home with his shirt all smoky and his eyebrows singed. He never told us what happened. Al Malarkey recalled when Dad brought his family a week’s worth of groceries after a steel sheet had sliced off Al’s thumb. I watched Grandpa’s face as the men paid homage to his honorable son. I couldn’t decode the tight grimace.

Most of the guests didn’t know what to say to me. “So how are you doing?” they asked, looking at my feet, my shoulder, my hair. Their pity and revulsion made me squirm, so I drifted down the hall, but my bedroom held stragglers ogling my globes. “They are real-a! I thought it was a big-a fable,” Celeste Xaviero muttered. “Wait’ll my sister hears about this!” They discussed issues unrelated to Dad and Nicky: the price of milk, their favorite soap opera. How long we would have to boil the water, though the Water Authority had announced that despite the color, it was safe for consumption.

There was only one person in my parents’ room. Annette Funicello opened Dad’s closet, tugged out the sleeve of one of his shirts, and held it to her nose. It was such a brazen display, I couldn’t be angry. She would never again call with the excuse of a home repair. I looked at her, and beyond her, to my reflection in the vanity mirror, the only one Mom hadn’t thrown out. I was wearing the same impenetrable scowl Grandpa Ferrari was wearing in the kitchen. Only then did I realize that, like Grandpa, I didn’t know my father. I didn’t know he was capable of saving lives.

In the living room, alcohol had taken effect. Even Father Luigi’s eyes drooped. I leaned against the wall and scanned the congregants who had gathered around him as if he were a deity, which he resembled even more when the conversation took a theological turn.
Why would God put a good man on the planet only to yank him so brutally away? Not to mention Nicky, who never had a chance to prove what kind of man he might have been
.

I had my own question:
What is the punishment for
portafortuna
-tampering that results in the deaths of members of your family?

Mom had been so quiet, they forgot she was there.

The priest took another sip of wine, and after several clattering attempts, Sister Barnabas set the wineglass down on the table for him.

“It is not for us to question God,” Father said. “Perhaps He could see even greater tragedies in their futures and was sparing them. This could have been a great act of mercy.”

Mom’s head lolled forward and then snapped back as she tried to rouse herself from Grandma’s anesthetic. “Mercy? You call this an act of mercy?”

“W-well,” Father stammered, surprised to see the grieving widow sitting right beside him. “God knows all and sees all. His time is not linear, so it’s possible that—”

“God doesn’t see shit,” Mother said, not angry, voice not even raised. “And if this is what your God calls mercy, I don’t want Him in my house.”

The congregants gasped.

Mother stood, shaky, hand clutching the chair arm. “You’re not welcome here either,” she said to the priest. “Now get the hell out.”

Father Luigi coughed under the scrutiny of all those onlookers witnessing his dismissal. Their eyes shifted to Mom as she wobbled down the hall, shoulder brushing the plaster. She paused before the fist-shaped hole in the wall.

Annette Funicello rushed past her, something bunched up under her coat. Mother didn’t notice. I think in her mind she was crawling into that hole where she could hide with the wall studs and wiring and copper tubing. The intricacies of the house that so mesmerized Dad.

Of course she couldn’t dive in, so she went to her room and closed the door, sealing the rest of us out. Except for Grandma Iris, who padded down the hall and slipped inside.

Drawn in by the sudden silence, Nonna edged into the room drying a ceramic bowl.

Father sputtered as he tried to reclaim his dignity. “She’s in a great deal of pain.”

“Yes,” said Sister Barnabas.

“Of course you know she’s a nonbeliever,” he added, scooping up his wineglass.

It was the wrong thing to say, and the same surge I had felt in my gut as I raced home from Snakebite Woods began again.

“Perhaps God arranged this tragedy to bring her to belief.”

“What?” I said, unable to fathom that the God I believed in would sacrifice my father and brother just to get Mom’s attention, much less do it by using me as an unwitting pawn.

“If you don’t answer God’s knock, He may tear off your door,” Father said.

Nonna looked at the front door. “What?”

Sister Barnabas tugged his sleeve. “Father.”

“If you don’t answer God’s door, He may rip off your roof,” Father said.

Nonna looked up at the ceiling. “What?”

“Father,” Sister Barnabas said with more force, trying to remind him of the proximity of the kin of those door-torn, roof-ripped, car-mangled sacrifices.

Father brushed Sister’s hand off. “I’m just saying that God must love this woman dearly if He’d go to such lengths to bring her into the flock.”

The bowl in Nonna’s hand fell to the floor and split in two. “God loves-a this woman more than-a my son? My grandson?”

“No!” Father said. “That’s not what I meant—”

“He destroy my fam-i-ly for her?” Nonna looked down the hall at my mother’s closed door.
“Jettatura!”
Nonna tore at her hair, bobby pins scattering, braid springing free like a garden hose.

Kitchen chairs scraped against linoleum as the entirety of steerage gathered around to watch the commotion, the house listing. Even Grandpa Ferrari stopped ramming cold cuts down his throat when he realized his wife was at the center of the tumult.

Grandma Iris dashed from Mom’s room wagging her finger. “Will you be quiet out here? My daughter is trying to sleep!”

“
Your
daughter!
Your
daughter!” Nonna spat. “What about-a my son! She kill-a my son! That no-good son-ama-beetch with her no-priest, pajama-judge marriage that is-a no marriage! She kill-a my son and-a my grandson too!”

Grandma held out her hands. “What is she talking about?”

Father Luigi looked up, his face trembling at the scene he had caused, his cantilever mole trembling. “I—”

“He says it’s-a your daughter’s fault. God kill-a my son for her!”

Sister Barnabas, the bravest woman on the planet, hustled forward and tried to pat Nonna’s hand, her shoulder. Nonna batted her away.

“Your daughter bring evil into this-a town, this-a house, this-a fam-i-ly. Now I wash-a my hands of a-you and of-a her!” Nonna scuffed her feet against the carpet as if she were wiping off the dust of our existence. I remember thinking:
She doesn’t mean me. Surely she doesn’t mean me
. I tried to catch her eye for assurance, but given her state, I don’t think she even remembered she had a granddaughter. She lunged for the door. “I no set-a my feet in this house-a no more. You are a-dead to me!”

Grandma Iris stood there, stunned. When her composure returned she said, “Clearly the woman is unbalanced,” before padding back to Mom’s room.

Nonna banged outside, leaving her husband sucking fat from his teeth. He took his time adjusting his newsie cap and digging for his keys.

Eventually he shoved outside. I bolted to the door and looked at Nonna in the street grating her feet against the blacktop, flicking her hand under her chin, offering
up-yours
gestures toward us that had nothing to do with the
malocchio
. Her mouth blubbered a foul curse that would shrivel our futures for good. Grandpa walked up beside her, grabbed her arm, and dragged her to the car. Once tossed inside, she cranked down the window, and as Grandpa drove away she continued to cast her bad spell that settled over our house like a fishnet.

I had lost not only my brother and father but also Aunt Betty, and now Father Luigi and his soul-swapping God had sliced Nonna from my life. I can only imagine what I must have looked like when I pivoted toward him: a heap of pulsing-red flesh. I glowered at the priest and at Sister Barnabas, who looked, frankly, scared shitless as I inflated, bile gurgling inside. To her credit, she once again angled herself in front of Father Luigi, but it was no good. I opened my mouth and out roared a blast of the same pejoratives my father had spewed about Ray-Ray: “Goddamn, motherfucker, son of a bitch,
testa di cazzo, bastardo, figlio di puttano, individuo spregevole
!”

Sister’s veil blew straight back in my fiery explosion, as did Father’s hair, and the room grew hotter and hotter as I vomited words that pummeled the pair of holy faces, their eyes squinting against the barrage, Father’s wineglass quaking in his hand.

When I finally clamped my mouth shut, it was as if we were in a vacuum devoid of sound. Nobody moved. Except for Abe Lincoln, who started quivering on the side of Father’s face, not just tremors, but wiggling like a cocooned caterpillar, the mini-face imploding, the chin and nose caving in, and then, remarkably, it fell off and plunked into Father’s wineglass, where it fizzled, a little tendril of bubbles drifting up.

Father raised the glass to inspect the pea-size bit resting at the bottom. He gasped anew when he looked up at Sister Barnabas, whose cheeks were no longer rosacea’d.

“Holy Mother of God.” Father slid to the floor to kneel before me. “It’s true. I had heard rumors, but now I know it’s true.”

I backed away as the congregants, except for Sister Barnabas, gaped at me; Sister took off her glasses and squinted into the lenses to assess her now-flawless reflection. She spun to face me, tears in her eyes, and crossed herself.

“Saint Garnet,” she whispered, collapsing to her knees, kissing the crucifix on the rosary that once served as my teething ring (but is now on display in a glass case in the Saint Brigid narthex along with shriveled-up Abe Lincoln). Though I implored them to stop, to please get up, Sister groveled with the rest of my followers, both first-class and steerage, who had also slid from their chairs to pay homage to me.

TAPE SIXTEEN

Acts of Contrition

Padre
:

First of all, I did
not
kill Abraham Lincoln, nor did I cure Sister Barnabas. Maybe La Strega’s spells had backfired with grief. Or the nonnas’ collective evil-eye remedies had taken effect. Or Nonna’s foot-scraping curse had scraped off those anomalies. It most definitely was not me, because I wouldn’t lift one sainted (or stained) finger to heal Father Luigi, though I might for Sister Barnabas if I had the inclination and powers, which I do not.

Second of all, Abe Lincoln wasn’t the only one to die that day. My reverence for the One True Faith also withered, an important artifact, but not so easy to display in the Saint Brigid narthex. Father Luigi’s theology made me question what the hell kind of God that was. Perhaps, as Mom had once proclaimed, it was all so much God hooey.

After that moment of clarity in my living room, I raced to my bedroom, opened my underwear drawer, pulled out the box that held my pillowcase veil, and charged to the kitchen to dump it into the trash. It was a theatrical performance, but I wanted the gawkers, particularly the ordained ones, to see my own version of wiping their dust off the soles of my shoes. I didn’t know that as I left, one of my neighbors rescued the box and tucked it into his underwear drawer, where it sat for over a decade. Now if you send twenty dollars to a particular Sweetwater PO box, you can be the proud owner of a quarter-inch square of my veil in a cardboard coin holder. Be forewarned: I have seen several of these quote-unquote relics and not only are a number of them the wrong shade of blue, some are dotted swiss, Padre. Dotted swiss.