The Patron Saint of Ugly Page 28

  Flyman was born in Tredegar, South Wales, the son of a coal miner who worked in Bedwellty pits. Young Flyman emigrated to the United States, where he initially sold encyclopedias and wrote greeting-card verse before infiltrating the wealthy class.

  Flyman and Caudhill-Adams-Rutledge had a brief engagement that culminated in the most anticipated wedding of 1929, held on Saturday, October 26, just days before Black Tuesday and the stockmarket crash that would financially devastate so many of theweddinggoers, but not the well-diversified Caudhills.

  Nine months after the ceremony, the young wife delivered a daughter, Marina, who, according to the same source, “was the apple of her father’s eye.”

  Mrs. Caudhill-Adams-Rutledge refused to allow her late husband’s remains to be interred in her family’s crypt.

  Flyman was buried in Potter’s Field with only the housekeeping staff and his daughter, now almost fifteen, in attendance.

  The second item was a black-and-white photograph of Grandfather standing in that three-tiered fountain wearing a shirt-and-trunks-combined swimsuit with horizontal stripes that made him look like a convict. He’s grinning broadly, his right hand waving, revealing a stunning anomaly: a second pinkie. Behind him, barely caught in the frame, one of the black maids smiles a bit too knowingly, one finger pressed to her butt-creased chin.

  TAPE EIGHTEEN

  Get Thee to a Nunnery

  Happy Holy Days, Archie:

  The ladies and I just watched Perry Como’s Christmas special, so we’re feeling all gooey inside, thanks to Mr. C.’s cardigan and Nonna’s ninety-proof wassail. Now Betty can’t wait to buy our tree, and she’s already ordered strings of pink-flamingo lights from the mail-order-crap store. I’m going to have to speak with her about her spending habits.

  I said nighty-night and now I’m in the crystal-ball room, one of the towers fitted with bubble windows, which offer excellent viewing. We got a dusting of snow today and the village is gussied up: Saint Garnet angels hanging from street lamps—sheesh—colored lights rimming storefronts, Christmas trees in apartment windows above them. Even my hill neighbors have outdone themselves in case they make the national news.

  The pilgrims still refuse to leave, though I had hoped this arctic blast would send them flapping back to Capistrano. They just pulled closer to the heated pond, where the steam works wonders on their pores. They’ve also somehow tapped into electricity since I see a number of space heaters, utility lamps, and pink-flamingo lights strung around luggage racks. Betty! They’re never going to leave. In fact, Nonna is out there right now handing out candy canes, afghans, and swigs of something from a thermos; high-octane wassail, no doubt. She really needs to stop that, though she does look content tugging children’s earlobes, muttering prayers, offering hugs and kisses. The children follow her as if she’s the real healer—as I keep insisting.

  There was a time when I thought I would never see her again, or Aunt Betty. And though the mood is ripe now, since I’m inside a crystal ball, I don’t think I could ever have forecast our reunification, especially during my exile in Virginia, and after Mom obliterated Grandma’s Hall of Mirrors, I was banished to even more distant lands.

  Back in Charlottesville, after Mom’s outburst, Dr. Trogdon and Grandma kept vigil by Mom’s bed, the doctor redressing the cuts on her hands, Grandma pushing back Mom’s cuticles, the words I win almost visibly scrolling across Grandma’s eyelids. I sat on the floor in the doorway tending my own wounds. Cookie—Aunt Cookie, though neither of us knew that yet—checked on me regularly, urging me to whisper something into Mom’s ear that might keep her from slipping so far away.

  Honestly, Padre, I don’t know what I would have said to Mom at that moment since I now doubted her maternal love. Perhaps, like her slog through the underclass, her love for me was merely a defiance of everything Grandma Iris held dear. I was a rue-the-day temper tantrum, that’s all.

  I wanted to jump somewhere too, through a bricked-up window perhaps, but mostly back to Sweetwater. I fingered that volcano in Iceland beneath which I had hidden my love for two women who I hoped would rush to embrace me, though I wasn’t sure. I longed for a way we could live together without Grandpa or Uncle Dom peeing testosterone all over our lives. Then there was the issue of Ray-Ray.

  Eventually I went to bed, but in the morning I discovered the next part of Grandma’s scheme. I was eating breakfast with Opal and Cookie when Grandma came in and sat beside me.

  I don’t think I just imagined the difficulty she was having spitting out what was on her mind. Finally, she turned her chair toward me. “Garnet, I’m sending you away to boarding school.”

  Cookie and Opal gasped.

  Grandma looked at them. “It’s really for the best.” She patted my wrist in a gesture she’d likely been practicing for months.

  I withdrew my arm. “I don’t want to leave Mom.”

  Grandma stood. “We must secure your future with a solid education. There’s no telling what they’ve been teaching you in West Virginia.”

  My mind flew back to all those nuns who genuinely loved me.

  Grandma added the final dollop. “I would have done the same for Nicky.”

  There was no rebutting that, even if her motives in each case were quite different.

  Grandma tugged me to my feet. “I’ll help you pack.”

  Upstairs, a trunk had already been placed in my room. In went the clothes, the makeup. No globes or Britannicas. Before I left I climbed onto Mom’s bed, wrapped my arms around her neck, and whispered into her ear, “Don’t let her send me away.”

  No response.

  “Mustn’t keep Cedrick waiting,” Grandma said, though she’d kept the man standing at attention for decades.

  She pried me off the bed and led me downstairs, past that painting of Mom in the Hall of Cracked Mirrors, her adoring eyes aimed across the room at Nicky—his heart’s desire fulfilled at last. Grandma rushed me through the farewell lineup of Opal, Cookie, and Muddy, all snuffling, holding out mementos I barely had time to snatch: a feather duster, a transistor radio, and, from Muddy, thankfully, my father’s saw.

  Outside, as Cedrick opened the back door of the Cadillac, I heard Cookie singing, “‘There is a balm in Gilead!’”

  I looked back at the house and saw Grandma heading inside, clapping her hands as if I were so much chalk dust. Cedrick nudged me between the shoulders and I fell into the back seat, where I was surrounded by blackened windows and automatic locks snapping down all around. Bluster the hatchet man, indeed.

  As the car sped away I performed my own disappearing act. I imagined myself bouncing on a diving board, sproinging higher and higher before vaulting into the air, hugging my knees for the biggest cannonball of my life.

  Suddenly, from the car radio, a voice announced Valentina Tereshkova’s impending U.S. visit, and I thought that if she could blast into space, so could I. My rocket would be my own body, and in my mind I launched myself and flew ever deeper into the cosmos, planets flickering by as I set my destination for Pluto, that perpetually dark ball that would hide me. But when I looked to the solar system on my wrist, Pluto was inexplicably gone, leaving Neptune to bring up the orbital rear. I would have to drift aimlessly, but even that was okay. Grandma’s war paint would protect my hull from stinging barbs, sideways glances, tragic deaths of sundry family members, even betrayals by one’s own mother. I determined I would not feel anything. Period.

  Archie, I’ll burn through my refugee years in New Hampshire as quickly as I burned through your questionnaire—now a pile of soot at the bottom of the barbecue pit. Tell the committee it’s a saint’s prerogative, but really, that was tiresome stuff.

  Grandma ensured that my home for the next several years would be a cramped dorm room that I shared with roommates who came and went as if the place had a revolving door, most of them lasting less than a week because my makeup would smear off overnight, giving them the crack-of-dawn fright of their lives. On those mornings, the traumatized ch
ild would be led from my room by our dorm monitor, young Sister Joanie, who scanned not only my smudged face but Dad’s saw, which was hanging brazenly, if unused, above my bed (the curriculum at Saint Leoma’s did not offer shop). Rumors spread among the students about who or what I was—a failed experiment, ax murderer—assuring my outcast status, but at least no one came looking for miracles. That sainted nonsense thankfully hadn’t yet trickled outside of West Virginia.

  Sister Walburga, the principal, was a German import who goose-stepped around campus spinning a Bakelite yo-yo, an innocuous-looking pastime until some girl wore her skirt too short or arrived late to morning Mass. Then Walburga would fling that yo-yo at the offender’s head and reel it back in without batting an Aryan eyelash. I was her target more than once because, though I was never tardy to chapel, I spent the hour earplugged to Cookie’s radio while perfecting my Etch A Sketch skills. God hooey, remember.

  I thought about Nicky constantly, especially since I was living his boarding-school dream. No doubt roommates would have been lining up to share a dorm with him. Countless times I traded spots with him in the crumpled station wagon, my embalmed body buried six feet deep beside my father and his sewn lips. My own hell. How different Mom’s and Nicky’s lives would have been if my brother had lived. This only amplified my guilt—an emotion that could penetrate my hull—which sent me to a windowless carrel in the school library to resume my encyclopedic penance, and where you can probably still find my initials carved into the desk and gum wads stuck in secreted locales.

  One academic requirement was that each girl had to master a musical instrument. By the time I made it to the music room for a private conference, the only choices left were cymbals and the tuba. Sister Joanie, also the music teacher, could tell I was uninspired. She put a finger to her lips and paced back and forth in her ugly nun shoes. Finally she looked at me. “Do you still have that saw hanging in your room?”

  I nodded, dumbstruck.

  “Go get it.”

  I raced back to my dorm, returned with Dad’s saw, and hesitated just a second before handing it over. Sister bent the blade back and forth, scrutinized the curlicues. “It’s quite lovely.”

  I bit my lip to keep from feeling. I bit it even harder when Sister lifted a bow from a pegboard, sat on a stool, tucked the saw handle between her knees, and drew the bow back and forth across the blade to sound a perfect E note.

  “Do you know ‘Good Morning, Heartache’?” I pitifully asked.

  Sister looked at my puckered face. “No, but I’m sure we can figure it out.”

  Sister Joanie sat me on a stool, positioned the beloved instrument between my knees and hands, and showed me how to perform my new penance, replete with Dad’s torch songs, which I continued in my room daily, even after lights-out. I ignored shoes hurled at my door and fists pounded on walls to get me to stop playing the music that tormented everyone’s dreams.

  I never heard from Opal, Cookie, or Muddy, who I later learned had no idea what hellhole Grandma had shipped me to. I did, however, receive care packages of makeup as well as allowance checks from Grandma, but no invitations to visit over the summer or holidays. I also never heard from my mother. Not once. Initially I tried calling Grandma’s house, but the operator always droned, “The number you dialed has been disconnected.” Letters to her were returned unopened. Finally Grandma had the decency to admit that she’d carted Mom off to a sanitarium, though she refused to tell me which one.

  Eventually even that was okay. Call it self-preservation, but during those space-drifting years, I decided that I didn’t need anyone. Not my mother, who had betrayed me. Certainly not Grandma Iris, who abhorred me. It was better not to risk relationships, since they would inevitably lead to pain.

  I turned fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen at Saint Leoma’s, adding five inches in height, obliterating my prepubescent pudge. I was a voyeur to milestones other girls celebrated, like first dates and first kisses. I didn’t attend mixers with our brother school, though I peeped into the crepe-papered gym to watch couples slow dancing. A weird feeling percolated as I watched all those mating rituals that had me smooching my pillow and practicing terrestrial exploration beneath the sheets—a carnal sin, I know—neither of which assuaged the yearning for human contact that was getting harder and harder to contain.

  After I yanked my diploma from Heil Walburga I enrolled in Mount Sexton, a Catholic college five miles to the west of my boarding school, where most of the castoff Saint Leoma’s girls matriculated. I again took up residence in a library carrel and in a frighteningly similar dorm room with a bevy of roommates who also couldn’t suffer my saw playing and removable face. Not to mention the collection of anti-malocchio charms I had amassed that had the girls scratching their heads: metal street signs, bowls of rusty nails, jars of cat’s-eye marbles that I hoped would protect me from even harsher penalties than the loss of my entire family—though what could be harsher than that?

  Instead of making friends, I amassed credits toward my double majors: geography and library science. My other preoccupation was outer space. On July twentieth, 1969, I trespassed onto my dorm roof with a telescope to gape at the moon, hoping to spot the American flag planted there. I rubbed my hand across my stomach, wishing someone would plant a flag and claim me. I was on the rooftop four months later to gawp at Apollo 12. I bought a sleeping bag, put fresh batteries in my radio, and skipped classes during the Apollo 13 scare. Though the rest of the country was by then blasé, I hiked up again for Apollos 14, 15, and 16. Campus police busted my ass the last time and confiscated my telescope for six weeks.

  I remained frequent grist for the rumor mill—born skinless so she wears liquid flesh!—but eventually I had competition. Yvette Guillaume transferred to the college in my junior year, a girl who had been bounced out of two dozen schools across the country, starting when she was in first grade. The nuns considered her an irritant not only because of her impertinence, but because of her political activism, her Sally Bowles haircut, and her military garb. I watched from a distance as she organized hunger strikes in the cafeteria on veal day and dive-ins during synchronized-swim meets to denounce the insulting smiles the athletes were forced to wear. Her unchecked fury both thrilled and frightened me.

  To my apolitical shame, I did not sit-in with Yvette’s antiwar set during the Vietnam protests, though my birthmarks participated. That little land sliver on the Indochinese peninsula on my hip was now inflamed and itchy. My scratching often drew blood, and though the area scabbed over time and again, I just couldn’t leave it alone.

  Nor did I join Yvette’s feminist crew and picket the town’s beauty pageant, or hurl my bra into a Freedom Trash Can to mingle with high heels and girdles. As the can was set ablaze I spotted Sister Joanie, who taught music at Mount Sexton too. It was fitting that she was there, since the older nuns had begun needling her when she opted for modern nun apparel: simple blouse and knee-length skirt, a veil that barely covered her hair—Jezebel. I was hoping she was going to toss in a starched wimple, but she just cheered the girls on. When she spotted me rubbernecking from across the street, she raced over. “You should throw away all that makeup, Garnet! You don’t need it.”

  My face flamed at the idea of what those girls might do if they saw my undiluted geography, a less sympathetic abnormality than being born without skin.

  I ran away without saying a word.

  Charismatic Yvette was at the center of numerous crushes. Both town boys and doe-eyed college girls hovered around her on campus, socialist tracts clutched in their hands. Plenty of other girls hated her, since her teachings often countered their charm-school lessons, especially the ones encouraging them to act dumb. “Read the damn book instead of balancing it on your head!” Rumors abounded about why she had been shipped to the hinterlands: Ex–Manson Family member. Founder of the Weather Underground. She also had a revolving-door cast of roommates, and they left not just because she tried to indoctrinate them in her leftist way
s, as parents claimed. Gossip circulated about Yvette’s weird rituals; they upset some of the students as much as my melting face. Not surprisingly, the nuns devised a plan to kill two troublesome birds with one stone.

  My favorite holiday during those years was Halloween, the one night when I could have paraded through the streets without makeup and fit in completely, though I never had the courage to try. I no longer had a taste for candy, but if I had gone ringing doorbells in my real face, I would surely have amassed the most loot of all. Instead, I attended the Halloween cult-film festival at the town’s movie house, where patrons smuggled in Boone’s Farm and joints. Year after year I went, and I began to recognize other folks who had made this their ritual too, especially the hippies who always sat three rows in front of me.

  On October thirty-first, in my senior year, I sat in my usual spot enjoying the aroma of pot wafting up from the hippies. We laughed our way through various Frankenstein sequels, yelling “Yes, master,” at inappropriate times.

  Afterward I bumbled to my dorm, though I wasn’t eager to arrive. I had been informed that yet another roommate would be installed that day. The moon was eerily bright; chilled wind gusts swayed my hair. Drunken teenagers wobbled by. A girl in a sandwich board painted like the new Pong game. A boy dressed in a rumpled Columbo coat. Several Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao masks because of Tricky Dick’s recent visit to China. One Nixon bumped into me, the papier-mâché penis jutting out from beneath his coat poking me in the hip. He slurred, “Pardon my dick,” slipped off his mask, and handed it to me as a goodwill gesture.