The Patron Saint of Ugly (32 page)

I refused to relinquish my Nonna-made necklace, however, since I longed for her white braid and cannolis. Countless times, I thought of calling her, had even picked up the phone once, but given the way she had so thoroughly wiped us off the soles of her shoes, I wasn’t sure if she could suffer my voice. I was too afraid of permanent banishment to complete the call. There were also moments when I ached for Aunt Betty’s hugs, for the sound of her gum-snapping, but I was still so angry at her for harboring Ray-Ray that I couldn’t have stomached her voice.

Instead, I retreated to Mom’s closet and pretended it was Nonna and Betty slathering me with caresses instead of just the hems of Mom’s dresses. I even found the silver one with the fishtail bottom, its tiny cousin hanging in Barbie’s closet back home. I tugged the full-size one from its hanger and hugged the Nereid skin to me, wishing I could morph into a fish and swim to some mythical place devoid of grief. But I couldn’t, and it was in that dim closet that my yearning for Betty and Nonna became unbearable, so I looked for a place to lodge it until we were all ready for a reunion. Because I no longer had a cigar box to store hidden treasures, I looked to my own geography, where I found a safe haven. Iceland, on my left forearm, with a freckle on the spot where a volcano with an unpronounceable name jutted up. I bundled together my longing and pushed it down the volcano’s mouth and then rammed in a cork to keep it in place until the time was ripe.

It was in Mom’s closet that I began mulling over the dualities in my life: two wealthy widows, two mansions, two (Old, New) religions, two designations (charlatan, saint), two disfigured (one stained, one six-fingered) girls who had remarkably landed under one roof. I often wished I could split in two: one fully magenta Garnet, the other mere beige. A twin sister to shoulder some of the load. But there was no twin, and there wasn’t even a Grandma Iris—a ghost who never sat down for a meal and who spent her time downing martinis in the west wing as she stared at Nicky’s last-ever school picture. She was too distraught to remember the federal mandate that I had to attend school; I did not remind her. I frequently heard her offering regrets over the phone. “I’m afraid bridge is out, darling. I don’t dare leave Marina yet. No, her
son
died in the car wreck. Her husband was a war hero killed in Iwo Jima.”

Each morning Grandma sat beside my mother with a bowl of warm water and a washcloth. She scoured Mom’s face and limbs before patting her dry and applying lotion. “This is where you belong, darling. Never leave me again.” Mother would not have stood for this ministering if she were awake, but if it took lost consciousness to have her daughter back home, Grandma’s expression seemed to say, then so be it. If only Mom and I could both squeeze into that Nereid dress. One time, however, after Grandma recapped her lotion, she cupped Mom’s cheeks in her hand and gently squeezed them together so that Mom’s mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. She leaned close to Mom and begged, “Please say it. Just once, darling.
I love you
.” She pressed Mom’s cheeks three times, her mouth popping open for each word, but no sound came out.

An image of me leaning over Dad in his coffin, my fingers gripping his jaw, pulling harder and harder until his mouth opened, but he spilled no words. Then I felt a wrecking ball to my sternum as I realized that they had never, not once, poured from mine.

Because that pain was too much, I hid it not only in Iceland, but beneath layers of distractions. Every morning I would hustle to the kitchen to eat breakfast with the help. Cookie bustled around in her one rubber glove refilling coffee cups and flipping eggs. Opal pored over Grandma’s to-do list; Cedrick, whose official title was chauffeur, read the
Wall Street Journal
. Then there was Muddy, the English gardener, who hummed “God Bless America” while he ate. At least someone was humming, since I had lost the inclination, and the note. The help lived on the premises: the women tucked on the third floor, the men over the carriage house.

I spent my time exploring Grandma’s eighteenth-century Greek Revival home with its gobs of white columns and its symmetry. The interior was also eye-piercingly white: walls, furniture, carpet—the antithesis of La Strega’s dim chateau. Outside there were no longer ponies or Great Danes, but there was a pool and a clay tennis court. A three-tiered water fountain in the middle of the front circular drive. A shuffleboard pad. A knot garden, which Muddy coddled obsessively. At the back of the property I discovered foundations of the quarters for the slaves who had cleared the land and built the house. I looked from the narrow footprints of their shacks to the manor house, all that marble, those pillars, lugged in and installed by backbreaking labor. I added to my list of dualities half poor Italian, half descendant of slave owners.

I also spent hours in the study trying to decipher Grandfather’s notes:
climb high, bright soul, your purchased future awaits; regret, victorious, dogs the idle days
. I recalled snippets of Mom’s Sweetwater poetry:
steel pots waiting, steel wool scrubbing, steal far, far away
. I imagined the two of them sitting shoulder to shoulder when she was a girl, he penning the first line,
Whisper the golden joy that grates
, she scribbling an answer he would understand completely,
For she will swallow it whole
.

I wanted Mom to wake up so I could interrogate her about her chummy bond with her father that had resulted in a whole new language. The thought of Nicky carrying on the tradition by devouring Grandfather’s encyclopedias reminded me that there was still a hole in my chest that only fam-i-ly could fill, even a brother who both loved and hated me.

Thus, on April Fools’ Day, I slipped into Grandfather’s library, sank into a leather chair, and began working my way through the first volume of the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
, A to Anno. It wasn’t just about joining that well-read club, and in fact it was grueling to slog through entry after entry—but that was my penance for hurling my brother into Mr. Dagostino’s garage.

I know, I know. Why would I offer penance to a God I no longer believed in? Please remember that I was still wearing a necklace strung with the remnants of my two faiths; my atonement was meant primarily to assuage whatever evil-eye spirits crisscrossed the globe. However irrational it was, I couldn’t wipe off Nonna’s Old Religion as easily as I could the mole-faced religious leader’s Church.

One afternoon when I was in Grandpa’s study, Opal came to do housework. I imagined she’d cleaned this room hundreds of times while Grandfather posted nonsense on his walls. It took three tries, but I finally asked, “What was Grandpa like?”

Opal stopped dusting and closed her eyes. “Lord, he was handsome.” She checked over her shoulder before sitting on an ottoman. “He was known for his good looks even among the coloreds. He had this dimple”—she slid an index finger down her cheek—“and he knew how to use it.” Her mouth crimped on one side. “Used it a little too well on the ladies,” she said to herself. “Even some of the help, those weak-hearted fools.”

Opal coughed. “Don’t mind what I say. But this place livened up after he slipped in with that New York crowd. He just showed up for Sunday tennis one spring and never left.” She went on to describe my grandparents’ extravagant marriage, how green-eyed the women guests were and some of the fussier men. “How she snagged him I’ll never know. Course he had that peculiar—” She looked at me in such a way that I wondered if he sported birthmarks that weren’t apparent in the one photo I’d seen.

“That’s neither here nor there, and it didn’t seem to matter to your grandmother. Both her parents were dead and she was already twenty-nine. Uh, uh, uh.”

Grandpa was also a thrower of legendary parties whenever Grandma slipped across the pond. He invited celebrated guests she would never have approved of: W. C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Ziegfeld
Follies
girls.

“You know that giant chandelier in the mirror hall?” Opal asked. “One time Fanny Brice rode one of the horses underneath it, grabbed hold, and swung back and forth on it like a monkey, crystals falling off everywhere. Like to never get that thing back together before the old bat got home. She still found out and had a fit. But your grandfather just smacked her on the behind and said, ‘It’d do you a world of good to swing on that thing from time to time too!’”

I eyeballed Grandpa’s weird graffiti. “Then what is all this?”

Opal stood and reached out to touch a scrap but thought better of it. “Your granddaddy was a wonderful man, full of pluck.” She pointed a finger at me. “And he was a good father. I don’t care what anybody says. No matter where he came from or what he did, he loved your mother and never would have left her alone with—well, I don’t care what anybody says.” Opal surveyed his desk, the letter opener and fountain pens. I wondered why Grandma hadn’t cleared away the remnants of his life the way she had cleared away ours.

“But there was this other side of him,” Opal said, face sullen. “He had the moods.”

An image of Mom staring into a ladle popped into my brain.

“Locked himself in this room for weeks at a time writing that gobbledygook.”

I heard distant thunder and it took a few seconds to realize it was my heart thudding in my ears. There was my mother, after all, locked inside herself. I opened and closed my mouth several times before whispering, “How did Grandpa die?”

Opal looked over at a window, or what was once a window; it had been bricked up and painted white to match the walls, though curtains still hung over the space to continue the symmetry. She looked over at me. “Nobody told you?”

I shook my head.

“How old are you again?”

“Thirteen. Almost thirteen.”

Opal surveyed me up, down, sideways. “I suppose that’s old enough. You see—”

A voice boomed from the heavens: “That’ll be enough, Opal!”

My head swung to the doorway, but Grandma wasn’t there. I looked at Opal to make sure I wasn’t going cuckoo myself. She was already dashing around the room dusting like a lunatic.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered.

Opal nodded to an intercom speaker on the highest shelf. Then I knew: Grandma was snooping on me and probably had snooped on Grandpa and Mom for years.

From then on I spent as much time outside as possible. Grandma couldn’t wire the trees or the air; at least, I didn’t think so. My excursions led me to another penance that I stumbled upon accidentally.

One Friday while Cedrick was out ferrying Grandma around so she could buy more Fabergé eggs, or whatever it was she did, and Muddy was sweet-talking his garden, I went to the carriage house and found a horse buggy, a Bailey Electric car, an evolution of Cadillacs, and an aquamarine and pink Cabriolet Mercedes. I was sitting in the convertible punching pedals, recalling my first joy ride with Dad, when I spied a tableau that at first froze me solid: two sawhorses set up in the corner with a two-by-four balanced across them. Then my legs were no longer under my control as they made their way over. I slid my hands across the wood, pretending that Dad had placed it there. All I needed was the saw and I raced to my room and dug under the bed. I ran back to the garage and gripped the saw handle in both hands. The blade wobbled and I rested it about two inches from the end of the board and began my flimsy back-and-forth motion, the blade stuttering, board sliding and slipping.

I needed to master this critical skill, so I hoisted the saw over my shoulder, figuring that if I brought it down hard enough I’d gouge a furrow where my blade could grab hold. Then I could make enough noise to echo throughout the property and rouse my mother. But when I brought the saw down, my force was too strong. I didn’t know to hold the board in place with one hand, since that was another thing my father never taught me. The board cartwheeled over, landing with a loud crack. The front sawhorse collapsed onto its side and lay there like a petrified animal.

Immediately my eyes teared up for my father, who no one else in that house seemed to miss, for not offering to him three holy words.

I would have started blubbering if I hadn’t caught sight of Muddy standing with a shovel in one hand as he assessed my distress.

“You’ve got to treat the wood like a friend, missy.”

Then that sweet man who smelled of manure and rosemary came over and wrapped my hand around Dad’s curlicues, rested the other firmly on the righted board. He placed his hand atop mine and guided the initial timid strokes until I gathered momentum. “That’s right. You’ve got it now.”

Muddy did not ask why I was dotting the wood with tears, or what I was building, or why, from then on, I needed a stockpile of lumber. I loved him for that, and I loved him even more when I heard his reply to Grandma after she cornered him one afternoon and asked, “Has she lost her mind?”

“By no means, ma’am,” he said. “It’s for mulching the rhododendrons. They like a good bite of acidy pulp.”

I sawed an hour a day, as if I were lopping off the end of my penance that stretched from the earth to the sun. With each stroke I muttered an endearment my father would never hear.

On the Fourth of July, Opal’s daughter and grandchildren came for a visit, a yearly extravagance Grandma, astoundingly, permitted. I planned to camp beside Mom and nibble my way through a box of scones Muddy had mail-ordered from London. He gave everyone a sampler to show there were no hard feelings about that American War of Independence business. My reverie was interrupted by the sounds of children whooping outside. I looked into the backyard at a puzzling sight.

Just three weeks before, I had helped Muddy put water in Grandma’s in-ground pool and line its perimeter with potted plants. Grandma lounged beneath a beach umbrella calling the shots. “The hibiscus should be spaced three feet apart. Three!”

It was inviting, all that cerulean water, but when Muddy urged me to change into my bathing suit for an inaugural swim, I discreetly nodded toward Grandma and declined. My new wardrobe intentionally did not include swimwear.