The Patron Saint of Ugly (31 page)

However, I did not rip the Saint Garnet relic from around my neck, an external artery I just couldn’t sever. Or, to be completely honest, a tiny bit of me still wanted to believe, not in the Church’s ordained representatives, but in God.

Regardless of my sacrilegious act, the throng continued to kneel and began spouting the rosary, Father Luigi the loudest cantor of all. I ran to my room and dove into bed, held pillows over my head, but those repetitive words-words-words slithered under my door, up my box spring, through cotton weave and goose down, and into my ear. They must have wedged themselves under Mother’s door too, because soon I heard Grandma in the living room. “What in the world is going on? Get out and leave my daughter in peace!” Though the mob left, they took up residence in the street, bringing in candles for the night shift. It was really too much. Three solid days of their reverence that had nothing to do with my dead family or live mother.

In moments of near lucidity, Mom would emerge from her room and slide through the house like a wan shadow. Occasionally she looked outside. “What are they looking at? Why won’t they stop staring?” She plucked hair from the growing bald spot on her temple or searched for a steel spatula or brass light-switch plate, mumbling, “Bear the scrutiny, bear the freefalling pain.” Grandma began hiding the cutlery. She repeatedly stormed outside and raised her fist at the mob, but they would not budge. Their chants grew louder each day until we were all sleep deprived, and, even worse, Grandma ran out of vodka.

On the fourth morning I dodged suitcases lining the hall and found Grandma firing directives at her peon Cedrick and a trio of hired muscles. I thought Grandma was making her great escape, leaving Mom and me to our limited devices.

She pointed to Nicky’s room. “Gather all the books.” Then she pointed to my room. “And all the globes.”

I planted myself in my bedroom doorway. “No!” I had lost too much already.

“Garnet, let the men work!” Grandma said.

I held tight to both sides of the door frame, but one of the hired muscles reached under my arms, lifted me off the ground, and plopped me down in the hall. He snarled to indicate he meant business, so I sank to the floor and watched him pack up the spheres that had orbited me for years.

Soon the men began hauling luggage and boxes down the front steps to a moving van parked in the street, nudging pilgrims out of the way. They didn’t take any furniture. No cookware or box radio. No board games or Barbie house. I couldn’t breathe until Grandma led Mom from her room and said to me, “Come on, Garnet.” I nearly cried when I understood we were included among Grandma’s treasures. She steered Mom down the basement steps, to the garage, and into the back seat of the Cadillac. My heart thudded as I thought about everything we were leaving behind, and I almost ran upstairs to grab my cigar box of riches and Nonna’s lucky talismans, but then I spotted the only worldly possession I needed: Dad’s saw, drooping from the garage pegboard. I hugged it as I got in the front seat.

Someone—Cedrick—opened the garage door from outside, and Grandma began backing out. One of the nonnas outside pointed. “There she is!” The pilgrims rushed the car, but Grandma punched the gas, jerking my head forward as I traced my finger over the curlicue-etched handle, hoping that somehow Dad had embedded a three-word message there for me. We spiraled down past No-Brakes Bend and the caved-in garage where Dad and Nicky had landed. At the foot of the hill we careened around the pump where all those craftsmen had once watered their horses. We sped along Appian Way, past where Mr. Flannigan shoveled snow. I glanced up Via Dolorosa, where Nonna was no doubt preparing her husband’s lunch, salting pasta water with her tears. The hair on my neck bristled as we passed Grover Estates, but my body went numb as we crossed the railroad tracks then veered onto Route 60 East, a road I had never driven on in my life.

I slipped into a dream filled with gum wrappers; deep-sea divers; musical notes crowding the sky like crows, their theremin caws ringing in my ears. A vacuum nozzle poked through the clouds and sucked up the birds, taking all sound with it, including my E note, and even in my sleep I felt suddenly deaf. Soon I was being hoisted up a four-trunk sycamore by a crane, voices mumbling, “My God! What’s wrong with—” and “It’s even worse than Cedrick described.” Grandma’s and Mom’s voices bickered from a great height, Mom slurring, “If you put me back in that room I’ll jump out the window!”

Hours later I awoke to impeccable quiet. I strained to hear, but the music was gone and I was lying in a canopy bed. Wherever it was I had landed, I think I already knew it was a place without magic. Still, I marveled at the expansive room appointed with hoity-toity furniture, not antiquated La Strega stuff but white French Provincial. I slid off the mattress still clutching my father’s saw, and, remembering the power in Nonna’s four-tooth chisel, I tucked the saw under the bed. I opened doors looking for an exit but found a walk-in closet crammed with shiny dresses, another devoted to shoes, and a bathroom with a clawfoot tub, a vanity lined with brushes and combs, and a wall made of mirrors. That’s when I knew whose room this once was: Mom’s. I went back into the bedroom and spotted pictures of her posing with Great Danes, or in ballerina gear, or playing tennis. Even then she wore her hair in a ponytail.

I again wondered why Mom had chopped off this limb of her family tree, why she couldn’t at least have kept the fortune that would have made our lives so much easier. The four of us could have lived anywhere—Madagascar, Finland—and we wouldn’t have had to endure Uncle Dom, Grandpa Ferrari, and, worst of all, Ray-Ray. I was angry at Mom for denying us this salvation and for diving into herself when I needed her most. I wanted to rail at her disengagement, so I slipped from the room into a blindingly white hall lined with closed doors.

I heard voices and tiptoed toward them along the railing that led to a wide stairway flanked at the top by two giant vases. I crouched behind one and looked down at the mini-replica of the Versailles Hall of Mirrors: gobs of gilded looking glasses, crystal chandeliers, Grecian women on pedestals. Nicky would have drooled; Dad would have immediately started looking for the basement. On the far wall hung a painting of Mom as a teenager standing beside a horse, one arm resting on its mane. She was wearing riding breeches and a velveteen helmet. It was hard aligning this image with the one of her on her knees in our bathroom, scrubbing the toilet.

Grandma stood beneath the largest chandelier of all, arms crossed as she dressed down the maid, a globular black woman of sixty or so wearing a crisp dress, a white apron, and a cap. I had met a black person for the first time just a year before, when Nicky and I drove with Dad to the Sweetwater lumberyard. We were in the pickup bay and Dad was tying two-by-fours onto the roof of the station wagon when a black man approached.

“Hey, Albert,” Dad said. They shook hands, Dad’s dark-skinned fingers meeting Albert’s slightly darker-skinned ones.

“I want you to meet my boy—my kids,” Dad corrected himself when he twisted around and saw me. “Garnet, this is Mr. Fulwood. We work together at the Plant.”

Albert bent forward, holding out his hand. I stared at it for no longer than he stared at Taiwan on my knuckle. I was captivated by the wide plane of his pink palm, thumb the size of a kosher dill. “Pleasure to meet you, sugar snap.” He shook my hand.

“That’s Nicky.” Dad nodded at my brother, giving him a
Come here
look. Nicky obeyed, and Albert also shook his hand, though he offered no endearment.

That simple memory of Dad, Nicky, even the stupid station wagon that now looked like an accordion and was sighing in the village dump, made my chest ache. The tears sprang, silent ones, since I didn’t want to give away my position.

“This is intolerable, Opal,” Grandma railed. “Absolutely intolerable. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Opal said, eyes to the floor.

Grandma spun on her pumps, leaving Opal as stiff as one of those statues. When Grandma was out of sight, Opal crossed her arms and flapped her lips in a good Grandma Iris imitation. I adored her instantly, and even more when she tipped her head toward me. “Morning, honeydew. You hungry?”

I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “I want my mom.”

Opal lumbered up to me and draped her arm around my shoulder. “Course you do.” She led me down the hall to the east wing. “It was her daddy’s suite.” I was not surprised that Grandfather Postscript had had his own section of the house, four rooms in a row. The first was the mother of all globe rooms, where pieces from my collection had already been reshelved. The second was a library with Nicky’s
Britannica
s stacked in a corner. The third was a study with a massive desk and walls completely covered with cocktail napkins, dry-cleaner receipts, matchbook covers, ticker tape, pages ripped from ledgers, all scribbled with phrases like
fly-fish the queen
and
succumb the lowly collier
. I remember thinking:
Uh-oh
.

The last room was the bedchamber with a sleigh bed that ferried my mother to what I hoped were blissful dreams. I climbed up and leaned close to her face, her closed eyes. She had always been thin but looked fragile now, and all my anger vanished.

Opal pulled a handkerchief from her apron to dab her eyes. “I helped raise your mama from the minute she was born. It’s good to have her home, but not like this, Lord. Not like this.”

“Mom,” I whispered. “Mom.”

Her eyelids fluttered, but they didn’t open. I saw a pharmacy on the bedside table and I wondered if Grandma had induced a coma in my mother to prevent her making yet another escape.

“Better let her rest.” Opal guided me off the bed and down a back set of stairs that led to the kitchen.

Sitting at the table was the cook, also dressed in maid regalia. Cookie was in her thirties, skinny as Radisson, and the third black person I’d ever met. Though her left hand was bare, her right was rammed into a too-tight rubber glove, which mildly impeded her task of peeling potatoes over a grocery sack. More fascinating to me was the cleft in her chin so pronounced that it made her chin look like butt cheeks. She was singing along with “Please Mr. Postman” blaring from the transistor radio beside her.

“I told you not to listen to that racket in here!” Opal said, shutting it off.

“Yes, ma’am,” Cookie said, though she was eyeballing me.

“Ma’am says she’s going to tan our hides if we streak up those mirrors again. I gave you that job ’cause I thought you could handle it. This is intolerable, Cookie. Absolutely intolerable. You understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Cookie said, eyes now on her potatoes.

Opal patted a chair, indicating that I should sit. “Cookie will fix you something to eat.” She sashayed out, apron bow above her rear end swaying from side to side. I looked at Cookie, expecting a good Opal imitation, but she just started singing, not “Please Mr. Postman” but “There Is a Balm in Gilead.” She stood and, still wearing that glove, cut a thick slice of bread, slathered it with apple butter, and handed it to me.

“Bet the kids back home gave you a time of it.”

I was stunned by her directness.

“And plenty of grownups too,” she added, pouring me a glass of milk. “It won’t be easy for you here. Lord knows it hasn’t been easy for me and I only got—” She swiveled around to see if anyone was snooping.

“Only got what?” I wondered if her butt chin was enough to induce Grandma’s scorn.

Cookie sat beside me and slowly peeled off her glove. It took a moment for me to understand what I was seeing. Cookie had six fingers on that hand. Not a runty worm tacked on at the end, but a fully grown extra pinkie jutting out from the side.

My mouth fell open—not out of disgust, necessarily. Mostly I was picturing how that extra digit might come in handy playing jacks, or cat’s cradle, or the piano.

“I know it’s nothing, really, but kids can be cruel.”

It really
was
nothing compared to the anomalies covering my body, but Uncle Dom’s crude jibes pinged around in my head:
pickaninny, blue gum, nigger toe
, obscenities based solely on the color of Cookie’s unmarred skin. With or without that extra pinkie, I figured, she suffered plenty.

“I used to think God was punishing me,” she said, “but one day my mama told me a story.”

Here we go
, I thought. Another fairy tale to gloss over reality. Something about God having leftover clay from the
sweetness
bucket and tacking it onto His most prized girl. I wondered why He hadn’t used it to fill in her chin crack.

I smiled politely, changed the subject. “Does it work like the rest of them?”

Cookie wiggled all six fingers like spider legs, both delighting and repulsing me. “God made us this way for a reason, honey. We just have to wait and see what that is.”

I didn’t want to contradict her since she was trying to offer solace, even if it was the God-hooey kind. Plus, a tiny molecule on the tip of my single right pinkie still wanted to believe.

For the next several months I felt like a museum specimen. Grandma never took me out, and I eventually understood that it had nothing to do with her grief. People catered to us, delivering vodka and pearl onions, fresh flowers and choice cuts of meat. Workers arrived with a load of iron bars to install over every window from the ground floor to the third.

Dr. Trogdon visited regularly to keep Mom’s bedside vials full. He examined me several times, measuring continents, tugging the skin on my forearm so taut that Thailand vanished beneath a tidal wave of pale flesh. Grandma gasped hopefully, but that part of the landmass resurfaced when he let the skin relax. “It’s a remarkable example of nevus flammeus,” Doctor said. “She would make a fascinating study, the results of which I’m sure we could publish.”

“Absolutely not,” said Grandma.

He spouted something about surgeries and the unlikelihood of success given the extent of my birthmarks. After hearing that, Grandma immediately hired a seamstress. She showed up with patterns, swatches, and a tape measure; Grandma groaned at my pre-growth-spurt chubbiness. Within a month I had a new wardrobe of froufrou dresses, opaque leotards, slacks, and long-sleeved blouses that itched like the dickens. My old clothes Grandma hauled off to who-knows-where.