The Patron Saint of Ugly Read online

  Angelo stared at his sea nymph and opened his mouth, but Dominick socked him in the jaw so hard that my great-uncle fell backward into the stack of bricks, toppling them over. Dominick threw the chisel at him, splitting his lip; the dripping blood was the exact color of the Pergusa water. Dominick heaved Angelo up by the front of his collar, spun him around, and booted his ass all the way down Appian Way to the train station. Diamante scooped up the chisel and followed in time to see Dominick hurl Angelo into a boxcar just as the two-thirty-five train pulled away, the shrill whistle blowing so loud it nearly drowned out Diamante’s proclamation: “We will be reunited some-a day! I have-a the profezia!”

  Dominick looked at his wife and balled up his fist. “You! Get back-a home or I’m gonna clock you for sure!”

  Diamante went back to a house emptier than it had ever been, curled up on the army cot in baby number two’s bedroom, and squeezed Angelo’s chisel in her palm as she cried herself to sleep. That was the night a six-inch segment of the Nereid’s braid went missing and water stopped pouring from her mouth.

  Seven months later Diamante gave birth to her second son in the same hospital where that son’s children would be delivered fewer than three decades later. Dominick went to Scourged Savior only to fill in a not-really name on the birth certificate: Non Miniera, “Not Mine.” It didn’t matter that Diamante kept assuring him, “He’s-a yours, Dominick! He’s-a yours,” which was a distinct, if slight, possibility.

  But before Dominick got the chance to assign the infant such a bastardo name, Diamante shuffled to the nurses’ station to fill in her choice: Angelo, her second and favorite son, who was born with a tiny birthmark on his left shoulder blade in the shape of a four-tooth chisel.

  When Betty finished her tale, Mom and I stared at the statue, stunned. Betty swore us to secrecy as we proceeded down Via Dolorosa, where Great-Uncle Angelo had left his fingerprints on every brick, a permanent reminder to Grandpa of everything else his brother had touched.

  We turned onto Appian Way, passing Aventine Laundry and Del Pizzo’s Florist adjacent to Saint Brigid’s. Uncle Dom and Dad were just leaving the church as we crossed the street and marched up the steps. They all grunted at one another, but when Dad raced off to keep up with his brother, Mom stared at him with newfound interest. Perhaps as she watched his receding back, she pictured the tiny birthmark she had traced her finger over countless times during their honeymoon years.

  Then Uncle Dom socked Dad in the arm, and Mom muttered, “No offense, Betty, but I will never understand Angelo’s devotion to Dom.”

  “He never told you?” Betty said.

  “Told me what?”

  “When they were boys, whenever their father went after Angelo with his fists, Dommy jumped in to take the beating for him.”

  Mom looked as perplexed as I felt. “Why did he do that?”

  Betty shrugged. “He always said that was the big brother’s duty.”

  I wondered who had instructed Dom about his fraternal obligation. Could it have been Grandpa, who’d had his own little brother to protect? The prospect was mind-boggling.

  In the narthex, Betty pulled mantillas from her purse for Mom and her to drape over their heads and took out a doily for me. As I pinned it to my hair I tried not to think of a blue pillowcase tucked in my underwear drawer. Inside the sanctuary Nicky was kneeling in a pew, head bowed, eyes shut. Ray-Ray sat behind him drawing anatomically correct stick figures in a hymnal. Mom slid into the last pew to read some novel, her crisp page-turning the only other noise in that hallowed nave besides the penitents clicking rosary beads.

  Betty and I padded up the side aisle toward the confessional booths, three cell-like chambers, each with its own door. The larger, middle one belonged to Father Luigi. Red lights glowed above the two smaller doors, indicating that some poor schmuck was spilling his guts in one and another schmuck was waiting his turn. Finally, the left door opened and out came the sinner, eyes to the floor. Aunt Betty went in and I wondered, as always, what sinful thoughts she harbored. Lusting after muscle cars. Loving her dead husband more than this new one. Infanticide. I could easily imagine Uncle Dom’s offenses crusting his soul, though taking beatings for my father absolved him somewhat. I had also keenly studied Ray-Ray’s face whenever he exited the booth: he was always wearing a vacant ax-murderer scowl.

  When it was my turn I entered and knelt, and eventually Father Luigi slid open the screen that separated us. I studied Father’s shadowy profile (and Abe Lincoln’s) as he made the sign of the cross. I began: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned . . .” then admitted my failings: Fighting with Nicky. Not doing my homework. Before doling out his penance, Father uttered his usual prayer. “May the person truly responsible for this child’s affliction repent of her sins.” I suffered his dig at Mom and tiptoed out of the booth to begin my prescribed prayers, though I thought that suffering through Father Luigi and Caruso was expiation enough. My other penance was to loiter in the narthex and allow all the First Friday nonnas to brush my cheek or touch my hair, letting them have some tangible element that they would run home to smear on their ailing kin. I had learned that it was useless to deny them.

  Afterward, Mom and Aunt Betty walked home arm in arm. Nicky ambled somberly behind them with his hands in his pockets, as if he were still in the confessional booth or wishing he were because he’d left out one important thing. He’d been walking around like that a lot lately, especially after Dom and Betty’s last poker party at our house. Nicky and Ray-Ray had once again disappeared after supper, and not only did Nicky not come out of his room the next day for poker change, he didn’t even come out for Alka-Seltzer.

  That postconfession day, even Ray-Ray must have sensed that Nicky was not to be harangued. I lagged behind my brother as we crossed Appian Way and stepped onto the sidewalk. Ray-Ray zigzagged around me, kicking a stone, racing to kick it again. Mom and Aunt Betty paused to check for traffic before crossing the alley between Aventine’s and Del Pizzo’s. Nicky looked neither right nor left, as if it would have been okay with him if he was flattened by a delivery truck.

  I, however, had an aversion to being hit by fast-traveling steel bumpers. I looked left into the alley before stepping off the curb. Thus it was a complete shock to be rammed from the right, not by a vehicle, but by Ray-Ray, who pushed me into the alley with a shove so hard it slammed me down, grinding my right hip into gravel. It knocked the wind out of me too, and I couldn’t even scream when Ray-Ray dived on top of me, yanked up my shirt, and ground my new breasts and bra in his gritty hands. “When the hell’d you get these honkers?” He eyed the landmasses on my torso he’d never seen. “God, you’re a freak,” he said, jumping up and racing away. It happened so fast that for a few moments I lay there, stunned, shirt still bunched up around my neck, head in a pile of putrid-smelling carnations tossed out from the flower shop. The neon sign in the window sputtered until both Zs in Del Pizzo burned out.

  Minutes later I stomped down the center of that snake street toward Grandpa’s house angrier than I had ever been in my life. My hands were balled into fists, and I was ready to punch Ray-Ray in the nose, gut, crotch—anywhere that would draw blood or induce vomiting.

  I kicked open the door and found everyone in the living room, Ray-Ray standing behind his father. I pointed at him and shouted, “Vaffanculo!,” a word I’d heard seethe from Grandpa’s lips a thousand times.

  I was about to leap over the coffee table and rip off Ray-Ray’s ears when Grandpa said, “What did you say?” He looked at my father. “What the hell did she say?”

  Mom rose and clamped both hands on my shoulders to hold me in place.

  Grandpa repeated, “Angelo. What did your daughter just say?”

  I wasn’t looking at Dad. I was glaring at Ray-Ray, sparks shooting from my eyes as I tried to impart nonverbally that as soon as Mom released me I would be kicking his balls up to his tonsils. Ray-Ray just stood there smirking, and when no one was looking, he lifted his hands, fingers s
played, and flexed those filthy digits just as he had moments before when he was mashing my breasts.

  “Goddamn, son-ama-beetch, asshole!” I broke free from Mom and dove at Ray-Ray, who ducked into the dining room. I dodged Nonna’s knitting basket and raced after him but was yanked back by Grandpa, who grabbed my wrist, making my already sore hip bang into his chair arm.

  “What kind-a daughter you raising with a foul mouth like this, Angelo? No granddaughter of mine is-a gonna speech like that. See?” He looked at my father, and so did I, remembering that horrible Corpus Christi day when he’d draped me across his knees.

  “But he pushed up my shirt!” I finally sputtered. “He touched my—” I couldn’t finish, didn’t want to expose my private anatomy to any more humiliation.

  “What?” my mother said.

  “He did what?” Aunt Betty said.

  I looked down at my chest and smoothed the fabric over it with my right hand, my other arm still clamped in Grandpa’s claw. “He—” was all I could say.

  Aunt Betty stood and ran into the kitchen. “Raymond!” she yelled in a tone I’d never heard from her. Even Uncle Dom pushed out of his chair, already whipping his leather belt from around his waist. “I’ll take care of this,” he growled, pounding after his stepson.

  Grandpa released my wrist. “Well, it’s a terrible thing, that’s-a for sure.”

  Finally I could breathe, but then Grandpa added, “It’s just as bad for a girl to speech that kind-a filth. Angelo,” he said in a syrupy voice, as if he really loved his maybe-maybe-not son, as if he knew what was best. “There’s only one way that children learn, and that’s with a firm hand.” He held up the back of his hand as proof.

  Nonna’s knitting needles clicked furiously.

  I shuddered as I looked at Dad.

  “Angelo,” Mom said as if she were trying to rouse him from a deep sleep. “Angelo!”

  But he didn’t budge; he just kept looking at Grandpa, who was drilling his Don’t you dare eyes into Dad’s, a look so fierce I could only imagine the punishment I was in for.

  Instead of spouting indecipherable verse, Mom stamped across the room and looped her arm through mine.

  “Come on.” Mom steered me to the front door, voice urgent. I wanted to wrap my arms around her neck and kiss her, but first we had to make our escape. “You too, Nicky.” I only then saw my brother standing by the front window, drapes wadded in his hands, naming murdered Romanov children.

  The three of us pushed outside and started walking the four miles home. No one breathed until we turned the corner and passed the alley with all those rotting carnations. I rubbed the Indochinese peninsula on my hip—including the raised welt of Vietnam that had suddenly appeared on the eastern coast—which was now scraped and pulsing thanks to Ray-Ray. I spit on my finger, dabbed at the tender flesh, and wished I could airmail Ray-Ray there and strand him in the jungle without a map or compass.

  As we marched onward Nicky kept looking behind us. I didn’t know why until Mom said, “He’s not coming.”

  My brother had been watching for the station wagon to pull up and for Dad to lean out his open window. Get in, he would say, it’s too far to walk home. It reminded me too much of the long walk home Nicky had made the day he had tossed Radisson and me to the Four Stooges. Except Nicky had redeemed himself.

  My father did not rescue his family and save them from the slog along Appian Way and up Sweetwater Hill, from the blisters on their heels and the balls of their feet from wearing the wrong shoes.

  As we huffed toward our house, I pictured him, a thirty-seven-year-old husband and father of two, kneeling in Grandpa’s backyard staking the old man’s tomatoes. I imagined him bent to his work, Grandpa standing over him, arms crossed, barking orders. Dad obeyed and he once again started shrinking, bones shortening, vertebrae compressing, pant legs bunching around his ankles, shirtsleeves swallowing up his hands until he was a timid six- or seven-year-old whimpering under his father’s might. Little Angelo kneeling in the dirt, holding back tears and sniffling up snot because he hopes this time, for once in his life, he might get it right.

  TAPE THIRTEEN

  Portafortuna

  Father:

  I’m sipping Alka-Seltzer so forgive the fizzing. I have a queasy stomach, which started when Betty brought Nonna back from the hairdresser several nights ago. I knew something was amiss even before they returned, because it was after six o’clock and supper wasn’t on the table. Finally Nonna schlepped into my bedroom in tears followed by Betty, who blubbered, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Nonna wore a headscarf, though I saw pink bangs poking out. I actually groaned. Nonna clutched a Whitman’s Sampler to her bosom, so I thought she was consoling herself with decadence number three. She opened the lid and I reached for a caramel, but what I found was Nonna’s lopped-off white braid coiled inside like a snake.

  I pulled my hand back as if it had bitten me, and I swear it did, Archie. Two pinpricks of Pergusa blood beaded on the tip of my thumb.

  “I just ran out for a minute to get cigarettes,” Betty said. “I told Sherri not to do anything drastic, but by the time I got back—”

  Nonna tugged off the scarf to expose tight pink ringlets covering her head like flower petals on a swim cap.

  “Pink?” I said, flabbergasted.

  “It was supposed to be strawberry blond,” Betty said. “And just a trim. Nonna, I am so, so sorry.”

  Nonna sank onto my bed and held the braid in her hand as if the essence of her being were woven inside. “It took-a my whole life to grow and she lop it off in-a two snips.” She cried for half an hour, enough tears to fill the Strait of Messina. Betty and I patted her shoulders and her brutalized locks.

  Eventually Nonna shrugged us off and pulled a hankie from her bra to sop up the wetness. “We have to bury this in-a the backyard.”

  Though it was dark outside, Betty and I wouldn’t dare deny Nonna.

  We snuck to the garage, Nonna in the lead with a flashlight since we didn’t want to give our mission away to the pilgrims. Betty followed with the Whitman’s Sampler. I grabbed a shovel and Nonna led us into the yard, her arms outstretched like divining rods. Nonna wove us around the birdbath and the barbecue pit and finally stopped at the patch of Fiore Pergusa she had planted and where stood a statue of Mary of Lourdes nestled in her own grotto.

  Okay. Let’s get this over with:

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been thirteen years since I last make-a confess. The only thing I want to admit besides a heart filled with unbelief is that two years ago I stole a holy statue from Annette Funicello’s backyard. To be fair, it was no longer Annette’s backyard. Turns out, Jake had been having an affair with a woman in Peoria with a prosthetic hand. The new homeowners are Baptists who don’t believe in saints and they let the statue become overgrown by wild morning glories. And to be doubly fair, it wasn’t my idea. Nonna had had her eye on the statue from the minute she did not win it all those years ago. Betty helped me lug the thing up the hill in the middle of the night, so half of the penance rightly belongs to her. And, umm, we’d been drinking.

  But on the Night of the Braid, Nonna knelt before Mary and made the sign of the cross. Betty and I knelt and crossed ourselves too. This was Nonna’s ritual, after all. She whispered a smattering of prayers, handed the flashlight to Betty, and heaved Mary to her chest.

  “Move-a the grotto,” she instructed me.

  I obeyed as Betty shone the light on the flattened disc of earth beneath the base where startled centipedes and potato bugs scampered into shadows.

  “Now dig,” Nonna said.

  I jammed the blade into the earth; its damp smell was rich and musty. I wasn’t sure if I needed to make a six-foot-deep rectangle, so I just kept heaving pumice-speckled dirt to the side until Nonna said, “At’s-a good.” We knelt before the gaping wound as Nonna took the cardboard coffin from Betty. More tears slid down Nonna’s cheeks as she laid the cord of herself into the grave and scra
ped earth over it, dirt raining on the yellow lid like a drum. We helped her fill the hole and tamped it down with our hands before setting the grotto back in place and nestling Mary inside, the roasted-almonds-and-nutmeg smell of crushed Pergusa blossoms wafting through the air.

  Later that night I found Nonna in her bed raking a four-tooth chisel through her hair as if it were a comb. “Angelo. Oh, Angelo,” she muttered before tucking the chisel under her pillow. I cleared my throat, made my way to her, and pressed my lips to her forehead. “Now you look just like Maude.”

  Nonna’s feet wiggled beneath the sheets.

  The next morning I went out to make sure it wasn’t all just a dream. I saw the raw dirt around the statue, the forgotten shovel leaning against the forsythia. I was about to walk away when I glanced at Mary and spotted a long plaster braid snaking over her shoulder, though I didn’t remember her having one. I spun around looking for someone to ask—Annette Funicello, perhaps—if the braid had been there all along or if it had sprouted overnight.

  I’m sitting before the statue right now, Archie, in a lawn chair pulled up for the occasion. It’s November tenth, Betty’s birthday, but instead of blowing out candles together we have all gone our separate ways. Betty no longer celebrates her birthday, and with good reason. It’s dusk and I can’t ignore the tang of freshly dug earth that overpowers even the Pergusa blossoms, a stench that brought on yet another wave of nausea that no Alka-Seltzer will cure. I’ve been putting off question forty-seven long enough. It’s time to get into that horrible chain of events, so here goes.

  For five months after the head-in-the-rotting-carnations incident, Mom not only barred Dad from her bedroom but also refused to let Dom and Betty and their monster cross our threshold. I’d thought the ban was forever, but that Saturday in November I watched Mom frost a caved-in sheet cake with lemon icing. She had even borrowed Mrs. Bellagrino’s pastry-chef gizmo to blob on orange flowers.