The Patron Saint of Ugly Read online

  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.

  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 wa
s 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.