The Temptations of St. Frank (15 page)

Frank looked up at the roof of the church. The birds were still there, still settling down. He looked at Father Ugo, face to his rifle, gritting his teeth with that funny grin of his.

One of the black kids stopped walking and doubled over he was laughing so hard.

“Ssshhh!”

Phoop!

The kid who was doubled over screamed. He dropped his Popsicle and slapped his hand over his face. He howled like a cat, scared and hurt and panicked, a cat with bagpipe lungs. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaoooooooooooooooo!!!!”

“Go on!” Father Ugo shouted, coming out from behind the branches. “Get out! Go!”

Blood seeped through the boy's fingers. Blood on black skin.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaoooooooo!!!” The boy's eyes were squeezed shut he was in so much pain. The salt must've stung like hell.

“Go on, I say! Go!”

The other boy spotted the rifle in the priest's hand. He grabbed his friend by the arm and pulled him along, making him run.

Frank couldn't believe what he'd just seen. “You shot that kid, Father! What did you do that for?”

“They do not belong here. God does not want them here.”

“What, are you fucking crazy?”

“Watch your filthy mouth.” The priest jabbed a finger in Frank's face.

“My filthy mouth? How does that compare to you shooting a kid? You shot him just because he's black.”

“It's just salt. Now he will remember not to come here.”

“You could have blinded him. We have to call an ambulance.”

Frank ran down the driveway to see where the kids were, but they were long gone. Not surprising with Father Lee Harvey Oswald on the loose.

Father Ugo walked toward him, the rifle propped under his armpit hunter-style, muzzle pointed at the ground. His eyes were hard little pinpoints. “When you go to confession last time? Long time, I bet. Your mouth so filthy.”

Fuck you! Frank thought.

“Come. I hear your confession.”

Frank started to give him the finger, but an idea flew into his head and he stopped himself. “Okay,” he said.

“Come,” the priest pointing toward the church, indicating that Frank should go first.

Frank started walking, hoping that someone would see them, a crazy priest forcing him into church at gunpoint. Maybe the cops would come and shoot the racist son of a bitch. Of course a lot of cops were racist, too. Frank and Father Ugo crossed the lawn and passed the dead pigeons in the driveway, taking a short flight of steps to the rectory entrance.

The hallway inside was dim and narrow. Frank knew it well from his altar boy days. It smelled of candle wax and incense.

“I meet you in the confession box,” Father Ugo said as he opened the door to the sacristy.

Frank couldn't believe he was taking his gun into the room where the priests put on their holy vestments for Mass. Was it possible that he kept his guns in there? He supposedly had a collection of guns. Christ! The sacristy led directly to the altar. Maybe he intended to come out from behind the altar with guns blazing and ambush Frank the Sinner right in church, his bloody corpse lying in the center aisle like a dead pigeon. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost painted on the ceiling would look down at his lifeless body, his eyes open and glassy. Fuck!

Frank thought about just leaving, but the hallway called to him. He was like a character in a horror movie who knows he shouldn't go into the cave, but he has to do it because he has to save the heroine. If he doesn't go into the cave, there won't be a movie. Frank felt like Beowulf. He had to go take care of a monster.

The hallway led to the church through a side entrance. Walking into that cavernous space was the part of the movie where the hero finds a grotto in the cave, a perfect space for a showdown. The air was cold on his bare arms as he crossed the marble floor and stared up at the tall stained-glass windows, the colors bright on the west side of the church and dark on the east because of the setting sun.

An old Italian lady dressed completely in black knelt in a pew toward the front of the church, a set of black rosary beads in her gnarled fingers, the cross swinging slightly as she moved from bead to bead. Her lips moved as she prayed, her eyes shut tight.

Frank frowned at her. Some witness you'll be if Father Ugo plugs me in the confessional, he thought.

He walked toward the main aisle of the church and thought about disregarding the genuflection rule, but at the last second he genuflected anyway but without touching his knee to the floor.

Three confessional boxes were tucked away in the shadows against the far wall, like medieval port-a-potties. Each one had a carved wood door over the middle compartment where the priest sat, and heavy plum-colored velvet curtains on either side where the penitents knelt and confessed their sins. Father Ugo came out from behind the altar and genuflected as he crossed the tabernacle. His leather shoes clicked on the marble floor as he walked to the polished wood gate that surrounded the altar and let himself out. He went directly to his box, breezing past Frank without even looking at him. His box was the one on the far right, the one that all the kids tried to avoid when he had been a student at Perpetual Sorrow. Father Ugo flashed a look of displeasure and condemnation as he stepped into his box and pulled the door closed, which just turned up the flame on Frank's anger. He went to the Confessional, parted the curtain, and knelt down on the padded kneeler. The only light came from under the curtain, and there wasn't much of it. The old familiar musty smell dredged up memories of embarrassing confessions he'd rather forget. Confessions that were really interrogations.

He heard the screen panel slide open.

“You can begin,
Mr. Grimaldi
, ” Father Ugo saying his name with heavy sarcasm.

“Isn't that against the rules?” Frank said.

“What?”

“Confession is supposed to be anonymous. No names, no blame.”

“Start,” the priest barked.

Frank rattled off the preamble by rote: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, it has been—I don't know—two, three years since my last confession—”

The priest interrupted. “Do you practice self-abuse?” His voice was brittle with disgust.

“What do you mean?” But Frank knew exactly what he meant. What he couldn't figure out was why priests were so hung up about jerking off. They never asked about stealing or killing or shooting people.

“Do you abuse yourself?”

“I don't know what you mean, Father?”

“Do you touch yourself in an inappropriate manner?”

“I'm not following you.”

“Do you make the nocturnal emission?”

“What do you mean? Like pollution?”

“Listen to me. Do you have the wet dreams?”

“Wet dreams? I don't know what you're saying, Father?”

“I'm saying, DO YOU MASTURBATE?”

“You don't have to yell, Father. You'll give that poor old lady out there a heart attack.”

He lowered his voice to a testy hiss. “Do you masturbate?”

“No, Father. Hardly ever.”

“Then you do masturbate?”

“Very rarely.”

“Are you
sure
very rarely?”

“I swear, father.”

“I think you are lying.”

“No. I'm not. I almost never whack off.”

“You are lying.”

“No, I'm not. I'm telling you the truth.”

“Prove it.”

“Well, I have this girlfriend, see, and we have sex all the time.”

“What!”

“Yeah. Almost every night.”

“You must stop this immediately and cleanse your soul.”

“But, Father, we're gonna get married.”

“Holy Matrimony is a sacrament. You are just a boy. You do not know what Holy Matrimony means.”

“No, seriously. We're gonna get married. We have to.”

Suspicious silence seeped through the screen like orange heat from a toaster. “
Why
must you get married?”

“She's pregnant.”

“You must do a great penance.”

“Why? We love each other and we want to have a baby. What's wrong with that?”

“
Everything
is wrong with that. This is a child born of
lust
, not commitment.”

“Well, yeah, when it happened it was lust, but things changed. I
want
to marry her.”

“And what do your parents say about this? You have disrespected them. Do you know that? You must confess to that sin as well.”

“Well, they're coming around. I mean, they're having a little problem with the black thing.”

“The ‘black thing'? What is that?”

“My fiancée is black.”

Silence.

“I guess that means our kid will be half-black. Probably be a good-looking kid.”

More silence. Father Hugo was fuming. Frank could feel angry vibes radiating through the partition.

“You must do penance. You must make a full confession and make you soul clean once again.” He sounded like Charleton Heston, high and mighty, doing his parting-of-the-waters routine.

Frank was grinning in the dark.

“Can I ask you something, Father?”

“What?”

“What I tell you here is confidential, right? You can't spread it around. Even to the other priests.”

“You confess your sins to God. What you say here is between you and God. I am simply his conduit. My vows prohibit me from revealing what is said in the confessional. You know that.”

“That's what I thought. I just wanted to make sure.”

“Why do you want to make sure?”

“Well, I wouldn't want my situation to become public gossip. See, Geraldine's family doesn't know about us yet.” Geraldine was the first name that popped into his head, the female character that comedian Flip Wilson played on TV in a dress and a wig.

“Why do you want to keep this girl a secret? Are you ashamed?”

“No, not at all. We're just waiting for her father to get out of prison.”

“Prison? Why is he in prison?”

“He shot someone.”

Father Ugo was silent.

“I don't really know the details, Father. But he did shoot someone.”

“Are you mocking me?”

“No, Father. I wouldn't mock you.”

But shoot you with rock salt? That I might do.

“Hey, Father, do you know what time it is?”

“What does that matter? You are in confession.” He really sounded pissed.

“Well, I gotta get going.”

“Going where?”

“I gotta go home and masturbate.”

“
What?
”

“I won't be seeing Geraldine tonight, so you know how it is, I gotta take care of business.”

“You should be punished!” he yelled. “You are full of evil!”

“Yeah, well, you can shoot me in the face next time you see me. That should take care of my penance. Teach me a lesson, right?”

“You are going to
hell
for your sins!”

“If heaven is full of shitty hypocrites like you, Father, I'll take hell.”

The priest sputtered something about “sacrilege” and “blasphemy,” but Frank had already thrown back the curtain and left the confessional. The old Italian lady was staring at Frank. She must have heard Father Ugo's fit. Frank pressed his lips into a smile and gave her a little salute as he picked up his pace and headed for the vestibule and the front doors.

As he pushed through one of the heavy wooden doors, he turned back and looked at Christ on the cross over the altar. He thought about the little black kid Father Ugo had shot, and his chest heaved with anger.

If I'm wrong, strike me down with a lightning bolt, God.

Frank waited for a moment to give Him a chance. Nothing happened.

“Frank!”

Shit, he thought. He looked up and there was his mother at the open second-story window, hanging wet laundry on the clothesline that extended from the house to the huge maple tree that shaded the entire yard. She was wearing a robin's egg blue housedress, her hair rolled tight in bobby pins. The room she was in, the laundry room, was right next to his room. In fact to get to Frank's room, you had to walk through the laundry room. Shit! There wouldn't be any salami slamming with his mother doing laundry. Fuck!

“I heard you met a girl today,” his mother called out with a hopeful smile. She was like a saint hovering in the clouds up there.

Frank just shrugged.

“Your father told me.”

What a surprise, Frank thought.

“So did you ask her to the prom?”

“What?”

“The prom. Did you ask her?”

“I just met her.”

“But you are going to the prom, aren't you?”

“Why don't you go for me?”

“Me? Don't be silly. Why would I want to go to your prom?”

“Because you're so worried about it. You ask me about it all the time.”

“Well, it's important.”

“The prom is important?”

“It's the only high-school prom you'll ever get to go to.” His mother was from a small town in New Hampshire, and sometimes she acted like it.

“Don't worry about it, Ma.”

“I
do
worry.”

“Why?”

Because you think I'm queer, he thought.

“Because,” she said.

“Because why?”

“Just because.” She pinned a pair of his father's work pants to the line.

“Be careful. You're gonna fall out,” he said. His mother was a heavy woman. He worried about her.

“I'm not gonna fall out. I do this every day.”

Yeah, I know. You don't go out very much because you're always doing housework. Which makes jerking off very difficult. At home Frank often felt like a prisoner of war secretly digging a tunnel when the guards weren't watching.

“So come upstairs and tell me about this girl.”

Her painfully hopeful smile took up the whole sky. It was bigger than a Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon. It was like movie monster from outer space, threatening to crush him and eat him.

“There's nothing to tell,” he said. “I just met her. That's all.”

“Oh, come on. There's got to be more to it than that.”

Well, yeah, there is, but if I told you, you'd have a fit.

“Come upstairs,” she said. “You must be hungry.”

Bribery with food. A common tactic in his house.

“It's Mrs. Trombetta's daughter,” he said, hoping to end the conversation. His mother despised the woman even though they'd never met.

“That's all right. Is she nice?”

That's all right? What the hell was she talking about? She hated the Trombettas. Mr. Trombetta was a criminal, for chrissake. And Mrs. Trombetta was a demanding rich bitch who kept his father at her beck and call. How could his mother ever approve of a Trombetta for her only son? Was she that desperate for him to have a date for the prom? Did she think he was a lost cause and should take any girl he could get? Jesus!

“Wanna sandwich? I'll make you something. Come on up.”

“It's okay. I can wait for dinner.”

Food was love in Frank's house. His parents yelled and screamed about the most inane things in the world, but no one dared express a genuine emotion. True feelings were communicated through food—the offering of food, the savoring of food, the hostile presentation of food, the unappreciated devouring of food.

“Well, then come sit with me while I have coffee.”

“Okay, I'll be right there. I just gotta go see what grandpa wants first.” Frank pointed at the side door.

“What for?”

“He just called me,” Frank lied. “Didn't you hear him?”

His mother looked annoyed. “Go see what he wants. Then come upstairs.”

Frank's mother didn't have much to do with his grandfather even though they lived in the same house. He wasn't the typical Italian immigrant patriarch who had to have everything his way. He was more like the troll under the bridge. A nice troll but not a very social troll. Frank's grandfather was a gardener, too, with his own truck and his own small set of customers. He worked alone and liked it that way. When he wasn't out working, he pretty much lived in the cellar, which Frank thought of as his private lair. He had an old armchair and standup lamp positioned near an old-fashioned, full-sized wood-burning stove. If he didn't like what Frank's grandmother made for dinner, he'd make something else for himself in the cellar, usually
minestra
—a soupy mixture of spinach, white beans, and potatoes. He loved to read, and he read all the time. Frank's father bragged to the world that his father was a great intellect, a genius. Frank wouldn't go that far, but he loved talking with his grandfather—when his grandfather was in the mood to talk. But Frank's father was always a little nervous about what Antonio might be filling Frank's head with. Antonio was staunchly anti-Church and probably hadn't been in one since he'd gotten married. He was also an avowed socialist, though he would never hang anyone's VOTE FOR ME banner on his property no matter how radical the candidate was.

Frank went through the side door and took the wooden steps down to the cellar. The warm glow of the reading lamp made an island of light in the gloom of the overcrowded storage space. Frank's grandfather never threw anything out because he figured he might need it someday, so the cellar was a bric-a-brac museum of junk and potential treasure. Odd screws, bolts, nuts, and nails filled dozens of rusty Maxwell House and Chock Full o' Nuts coffee cans on the workbench. Three tin-top kitchen tables and a platoon of mismatched chairs were jammed in a dark corner. A scratched Jenny Lind trunk was filled to the brim with antique tools. Cardboard boxes on top of steamer trunks were stacked to the ceiling in the old coal cellar, a separate room off the main cellar. Lengths of iron pipe, aluminum rain gutters, curtain rods, pine molding, rake handles, rolls of leftover wallpaper, and whatever else that was vaguely long and thin hung from the wood braces nailed to the exposed floor joists. Yellow-painted pegboard covered one entire wall, and anything that could be hung was on display like souvenirs from a robot war—coils of wire, bow saws, straight saws, picture frames, tin funnels, fly swatters, rug beaters, lawn mower blades, a hatchet, a rubber mallet, and on and on and on. Whenever Frank came down here looking for something, he was usually looking right at it and didn't even realize it. He needed his grandfather to point it out.

Frank's grandfather sat in his armchair, a tattered hardcover book in his lap. Tortoise-shell reading glasses hung from his nose.

“Hi, Grandpa,” Frank said.

The old man looked up from his book as if he'd just noticed his grandson's presence, but Frank knew that when he was reading, he never acknowledged anyone unless they demanded his attention. He peered over his glasses and smiled up at Frank.

“Frank, you look for something?”

“No. Just came down to say hi. What're you reading?”

Antonio raised the book so Frank could see the cover. The Bible. He was using an old envelope to jot down notes with the stub of a pencil. He read the Bible all the time, but not because he was getting old and thinking about going back to the church while he still had time to get a ticket to heaven. He knew the Bible better than most so-called religious people, and he loved it when Jehovah's Witnesses knocked on the door.

“God so stupid,” he said, looking down at the page he'd been reading.

“How come?”

“He make people stupid, then he waste all his time with stupid people. For what? He not too smart.”

“You've got a point, Grandpa.” Most of the people Frank knew fell into the stupid category.

Frank's grandfather went back to his reading, but Frank didn't want to go upstairs, not yet. “Can I ask you something, Grandpa?”

“Why, sure.”

“The cross you made? In Italy? How old were you when you made it?”

He stuck out his lower lip and shrugged. “I dunno, sixteen when I start. Maybe fifteen”

“And it took you two years.”

“I don't remember. About two years.”

“And it was big, right?”

“Pretty big. Big as the tree I cut.”

“And were you like a hero or something because you did that?”

His grandfather made a sour face. “The cross, the cross, forget the cross! Your father, he like that story. Me, I don't care so much.”

“So why did you do it? Were you, like, religious back then?”

“I was
stupid
. I was a boy. What do you think?”

“But Dad says it was a big deal.”

“For him, it's a big deal. He like stories.”

“But I don't get it. Why did you make it?”

His grandfather set down the Bible and leaned forward. “You know the station of the cross. In my town all the stations outside on the road. Close to farm where I live was number ten, Christ die on the cross. But old cross was broken. Every day old ladies prop up with rocks, every night it fall down again. They come back, they cry. My aunt—I live with my aunt, my mother and father dead long time—my aunt see old ladies cry,
she
cry. Everybody cry every day. I say, okay, I make new cross. Everybody happy, they stop crying.”

“That's it?”

“That's all.”

“Oh…”

“What'sa matter? You don't like that story? I tell my way. Your father, he tell his way. You like his way better?”

“No. You were there, he wasn't. You know what happened.”

His grandfather grunted, confirming Frank's point. He leaned over toward the stove and lifted the lid on a small pot. He was making
minestra,
stirring it with a fork. It didn't smell great, but Frank always felt that his grandfather ate to live as opposed to the rest of his family who lived to eat. Maybe his grandfather's disinterest in food was deliberate to piss off his wife who was an incredible cook and big as a house.

His grandfather replaced the lid and sat back in his chair. “Your father, he ever tell you
his
story?”

“He made a cross, too?”

The old man shook his head. He looked over his shoulder and pointed at the ceiling in the dimmest corner of the cellar. “Go look.”

“At what?”

“Up over there.” He kept pointing at the ceiling. “Turn on the light.”

Frank walked to the section of the cellar where the kitchen tables and chairs were pushed together. He reached over one of the tables and pulled the string on the ceiling light. A naked low-watt bulb threw creepy shadows into the piles of junk.

“What am I looking for, Grandpa?”

“Up, up. The case. “

Frank stared at the stuff hanging from the floor braces—two rusty sickles, a lot of white fence stakes, a collapsed TV antenna. He wedged himself between the tightly packed chairs and continued to search. Far in the corner he spotted three bamboo fishing poles and a warped pool cue, and deep in the shadows he saw an old brown violin case.

“The violin case?” he said. “Is that what you mean?”

“Yes. Go get. Open it.”

Frank had to climb up on one of the tables and crawl on his knees to get to the case. He tried to pull it down with one hand, but it was wedged in tight. He moved it side to side, working it out little by little. Pieces of the case's imitation alligator exterior flaked off and rained down on his face. Blinking debris out of his eyes, he freed the case and crawled backwards, dragging it with him. He took it to the table under the light bulb. His hands were stained brown from the deteriorating case.

He flipped the rusty latches and glanced back at his grandfather, but he was engrossed in his reading. Frank opened the lid and saw the violin inside, his father's no doubt. He knew that his father had studied classical violin when he was a kid back in the 1930s. A musty smell rose from the case, and Frank got the feeling that it hadn't been opened in quite a while. Like a crypt. The rich whiskey color of the wood was dull but still beautiful. Moldy white blotches marred the ebony fingerboard. The tailpiece had broken off, and the strings were slack. The case was lined with crushed green velvet that had gone ratty. The bow was attached to the inside of the lid, held in place by two velvet-covered clips. Frank took the bow out and examined it. Loose horse hairs draped over his wrist. He ran the bow over his palm and realized that his father had used this bow when he was younger than Frank was now.

He put the bow back in its place and picked up the violin. The tailpiece hung loose from the strings and knocked against the body. Frank tipped the violin so that the tailpiece wouldn't scratch the wood. He felt as if he were holding something sacred and forbidden. He'd never heard his father play, and it was something his father rarely talked about. When asked about it, his father would shrug and say the violin wasn't a part of his life anymore, though he did noodle around on the piano from time to time. Frank couldn't imagine ever giving up the guitar.

Newspaper clippings had been left under the violin. Over time they had become as fragile as pressed flowers. Frank picked them up carefully and stared at the grainy photograph in the top clipping. He held it to the light to get a better look. It was his father as a young man holding a violin,
this
violin, smiling into the camera and showing his teeth, a very posed studio photo. The headline said, “Young Violin Master Plays Paganini.”

Frank looked through the rest of the clippings, careful not to crumble the brittle paper. They were all about his father and concerts he had played. One of them featured a photo of his father as a teenager shaking hands with a tall, thin balding man who was also holding a violin. The caption said, “Sixteen-year-old Frank Grimaldi shares the stage with renowned violinist Yeheudi Menuin.”