The Patron Saint of Ugly Read online

  On the last Friday in March, though the hill had been hit with a hefty early-spring snow, I again opened my gate for the fam-i-ly. Grandpa and I went to the library, and he sat and tapped his fingers on his knees. As I built a fire I could hear Dom in the conservatory strumming the harp, tickling the ivories, taking pictures for whatever photo album he was assembling. Finally he strolled in holding something that made my blood shudder.

  “This is Angelo’s saw.” He traced his fingers over my father’s curlicues.

  Grandpa grumbled at the Sicilian import, but I ran to Dom and yanked the saw from his grip. “Leave that alone. It’s private. Private!”

  “Sorry,” Uncle Dom said. “That’s a beautiful Steinway. Betty always wanted a piano. Of course, there’s no way we could afford one now.”

  I ignored him, set the saw on the mantel, and rearranged logs with an iron poker.

  “Real shame. She always, always wanted a piano.”

  I kept my lips tightly shut.

  Grandpa took over. “And Nonna sure like-a your kitchen. All those fancy machines.”

  Pah. Just the day before Nonna had discovered the rustic kitchen beneath the main one, and she knelt down and kissed the floor. The old-timey refrigerator with the motor on top and the metal ice trays was a convenience she could understand.

  “She said she could-a cook up a storm in a kitchen like-a that. If only she could somehow make-a use of it three or four times a day. But that’s a lot of going back and a-forth, back and a-forth lugging food from her tiny, tiny house down on Via Dolorosa. Back in Italia, you know, the grandparents live with their children.”

  “You could always move in with Uncle Dom.”

  Dom choked on a hardened gumdrop he’d dug from a candy dish.

  Grandpa pursed his lips. “Perhaps, but he no have-a the room you have here. So many, many, many rooms.”

  “Plus, I’m not your child.”

  Grandpa squinted at me. “That-a may be, but you are my only grandchild. And Nonna’s. You know she want to move in here with-a you. Why you want to break-a her heart?”

  I nearly laughed, since this man had been breaking her heart for decades. “Maybe I’m your granddaughter, maybe I’m not.”

  Grandpa’s face drained of color as he tried to decipher all the four-tooth-chisel innuendoes gouged into that statement. His hands balled into fists and he opened his mouth just as unsuspecting Betty and Nonna wheeled in the teacart.

  Nonna handed Grandpa his wineglass, ice cubes tinkling inside.

  Grandpa looked at the glass. “What the hell is-a this?”

  Nonna looked at him, puzzled.

  “I tole you I wanted mini–ice-a cubes. Can’t you ever get it right, puttana?” Grandpa flung his cubes on the floor, where they skittered across the parquet. “Go getta me the good ice cubes. Now!”

  Nonna started to leave, but I pounded my iron poker against the hearth. “No! Get them your-goddamn-self!”

  “What did-a you say?” Grandpa stood to face me.

  I thought he was brave, considering I wielded fireplace tools. “I said get them your-goddamn-self.”

  Grandpa started to slap me, but I held up the poker. His eyes bored into mine. Instead of hitting me, he shoved Nonna’s shoulder, knocking her backward so that she stumbled over the teacart and fell. I lunged toward her, but Grandpa blocked my way.

  “Now go get-a my goddamn ice.”

  Nonna cupped her right elbow and moaned.

  Dom squatted to help the woman who had birthed him, but Grandpa yelled, “Leave her!”

  We all looked at Dominick, and like my father all those years ago, Uncle Dom suddenly began shrinking back into a quivering child. The thought of Dad fully ignited my fury at Grandpa, who had been bullying us all for too long.

  “You son of a bitch. I want you out of my house!”

  Grandpa looked at me with loathing and opened his mouth, so I clocked him in the head with the poker, not fatally, just enough to knock his newsie cap onto the floor and deliver a lovely welt.

  “Get the hell out!” I seethed.

  Grandpa harrumphed, scooped up his hat, and headed to the front door, followed by Dom.

  I herded the men to the gate and pressed the button to bluster them out. They realized their wives were not with them, and Grandpa shouted over my head, “Diamante! Get-a you ass out here right now!”

  Dom parroted him, his voice cracking like a pubescent boy’s: “Betty! Get your ass in the car!”

  The women appeared; Betty ushered Nonna through the door as Nonna clutched her arm to her bosom.

  “Not you!” I called to them. “You live up here with me now!”

  They looked at each other in disbelief. Betty pointed a finger to herself to see if she was included in this deliverance.

  I nodded vigorously. “Both of you. Please stay.”

  It was as if the millstones tied around their necks had suddenly been cut loose: their shoulders straightened, their chins jutted out.

  “The hell-a you will!” Grandpa tried to push back inside, but I used that strength of a mother protecting her young to muscle him out, and then I pressed the button to close the gate.

  “I’ll get-a you for this!” Grandpa pointed at the bump on his forehead. “I’ll sue you for every penny you have! Then you’ll-a see who lives in-a this fancy house. And I no make-a room for you either!”

  Dom by then had lost all language skills, but he raised his tiny fist through the gate, babbling. Grandpa hefted Uncle Dom and shoved him into the car like a watermelon, got in himself, and off they sped, Grandpa rolling down his window to offer obscene hand gestures as he barreled away.

  It sounded exactly as it should have. Metal and glass plunging into bricks and mortar. A screeching, crunching, grating roar that was thunderous enough to rouse even the deepest of sleepers on Dagowop Hill . . . You get the idea. If Grandpa had survived, he really should have sued the city planners who’d chiseled out a spiraling road where spring waters froze over a particularly treacherous bend and caused inexperienced, distracted, or irate drivers to meet tragic ends.

  Nine months later, a widow with a matrilineal fortune left her daughter in a sanitarium in an undisclosed locale to return to Charlottesville for a monthlong stay. The matron was unpacking her jewels while imbibing her favorite potable when she ran out of pearl onions. Rather than sending her cook or maid, who were un-sheeting furniture, she ran the errand herself. As she returned home, her Cadillac skidded across an icy patch of road, crashed through the fence surrounding a sewage-treatment plant, and drove headfirst into the basin of churning feces. The widow was knocked unconscious and subsequently drowned, her lungs filled, according to the coroner, with poo sludge.

  Okay, okay. I know you’re shaking your head at the implausibility of all these ice-related crashes, so I feel I should mention that it’s quite possible Grandpa Ferrari did not die in a car wreck after speeding over No-Brakes Bend. Perhaps one day while ripping up a patch of Fiore Pergusa in his backyard, he stepped on a rake, fell backward, and fatally cracked his skull on a two-foot-square concrete slab intended for a statue of Mary of Lourdes. It’s also more than reasonable to believe that rather than kicking the bucket, Uncle Dom left Aunt Betty for a big-bosomed waitress from Dino’s Lounge. According to the Sweetwater Herald police blotter, a certain hilltop tycoon reported the theft from her home of a number of items; she suspected her uncle of the crime, as several of the items turned up in a pawnshop in Vandalia. Rumor had it that Uncle Dom and the waitress used the money to hightail it to Las Vegas, where she became a blackjack dealer and he got a job parking other people’s fancy cars.

  Grandma Iris died exactly as described.

  TAPE TWENTY

  Thoroughly Modern Miracle

  Archie:

  This afternoon Betty had a thirty-seat dining table delivered to the ballroom, which is an entire wing, so it’s virtually a glasshouse, windows on three sides offering fabulous views of the springhouse and pond. After dinner Nonna
and Betty shut themselves in there and taped a sign to the door: Keep Out (That means you, Garnet!). They think they’re pulling off some grand holiday scheme.

  It’s two in the morning, another sleepless night. I’ve had insomnia for days, Padre. An itch in my marrow because I can feel something coming, I just don’t know what it is. While my roomies were snoozing I slipped downstairs to see what they’re up to. The new table is covered in Christmas paper, Scotch tape, and hundreds of boxes filled with red socks and mittens, candy canes and globe pencil sharpeners, four-inch Saint Garnet statues—badly retooled Statue of Liberty souvenirs, but I was not consulted. Nonna bought the statues at Holy Treasures of Sicily in what used to be Paddy’s Pub, the residual tater tots grinding their molars at the Dagowop encroachment.

  Tucked in each mitten is a Saint Garnet holy card, though it’s nothing like the cartoon ones I drew all those years ago at my Saint Brigid desk. The illustrator gave me pouty lips and bedroom eyes. My birthmarks are present, but the geography is all wrong. This Saint Garnet stands atop a volcano holding pumice stones in one hand and a bloody handkerchief in the other. I don’t know where the artist got her information, since I have no idea what a bloody handkerchief has to do with me.

  I bet Nonna is dreaming about the looks on the children’s faces when she hands the gifts over. When she first moved in I granted her three wishes that made her grin like a little girl. The first was a vegetable garden, since she had always wanted her own plot not crowded with Grandpa’s bitter radicchio. She and I dug up La Strega’s rosebushes—though I secretly apologized to Radisson. Nonna’s second wish was a trellis on that sunny spot Grandpa had marked off beside the springhouse, where she would plant, not his swill-producing Gaglioppo grapes, but his brother Angelo’s much sweeter Orgoglio della Sicilia. We hired a carpenter who built a Japanese-influenced arbor. On the night of a full moon, Nonna led me outside with soupspoons and clippings of the grapevine she’d gotten from who-knows-where. I stuck in my spoon and out popped pumice stones. Nonna unearthed seashells. I opened my mouth, but Nonna blurted, “It’s not-a me!”

  The only drawback was that Nonna had to lug bucket after bucket of water from the spigot on the side of the house all the way to her garden and grapes, spilling much of it along the way. I bought her a hose, but she said the rubber made the squash blossoms taste like balloons. Finally she asked for wish number three, though she plied me with eggplant parmigiana first.

  She centered the steaming dish on the casual dining table set with La Strega’s second-best china. Nonna even wore a new jersey dress, and she did look pretty, her dingy braid once again silvery white. Betty looked lovely in a mink cape, her acne cleared up. We attributed these recoveries to posh living.

  “My cooking she is so much-a better up-a here.” Nonna dished out the eggplant. “I no understand why it went-a so bad after you left, but now you back and my food is-a delizioso once-a more.”

  Betty and I could only nod, our mouths crammed full.

  “So now I ask for my last-a wish.”

  Nonna wanted to unplug the spring so that the water could flow freely, not only to her vegetables and grapevine and the patch of Fiore Pergusa she’d cultivated, but to the heated reflection pond on the other side of the fence so she could soak her aching feet.

  With eggplant like that, who could-a refuse, especially now that I was a woman of means.

  We hired contractors with jackhammers to break up the concrete, the grating noise drawing the attention of not only the saint seekers but the Water Authority director, Rodney, who showed up at my fence with a basket of fruit. I was suspicious, but Nonna kept trying to wrestle a pineapple through the railings, so I let him in. He sprinted to the still-plugged spring as workers cleared chunks of cement from around the original pipes, which, according to Rodney, had once funneled spring water to both the pond and Le Baron’s underground system that fed the village below. During the post–World War II boom, the city tapped into Le Baron’s system so that all those cracker-box hill dwellers could also cook, bathe, and flush with the sweet water.

  After the Great Explosion, when La Strega corked the headwaters, all of this dried up. Rodney tried countless times to coax her into letting the water flow, since the village had to tap into the water from where it now gushed, beside the Plant, and pump it back up into the hill houses at great expense. Plus, that water just tasted plain funky. La Strega had refused. Now, if Nicky had been alive to ask the witch—hmmm.

  Rodney stared longingly at the spring and finally asked if I would pretty please let the naturally filtered water flow from atop the hill once more.

  I asked myself what fifty-two-minute-fortune Radisson would have done, and I had my answer: “Of course.”

  Rodney tittered and said he’d send up engineers to oversee the project and make sure the water started flowing in its new direction at the same time the system below was shut off. “And for the unveiling, we could have a parade!”

  “No parade,” I said. “Please.”

  Engineers and contractors worked diligently over the next two months, as did the pool men hired to replace the corroded heating elements and restore the reflection pond. My surprise to Nonna was to have the bottom inlaid with a mosaic of a Nereid modeled after the statue Great-Uncle Angelo had sculpted years before. It was not easy keeping that secret from Nonna.

  The official uncorking was set for a Saturday in August. Rodney asked if I’d like to be mistress of ceremonies. I declined.

  On that propitious day, from my open parlor window, I used binoculars to scour the villagers gathered around the stone basin and pump where the original craftsmen used to rinse their necks. Father Shultz and Rodney flanked the pump, surrounded by hill folk and villagers, children tied to helium balloons, and two men holding up a giant banner for my benefit that read THANK YOU, SAINT GARNET, though the man on the left rolled his eyes. There was Sister Dee Dee and Pippa Fabrini, as well as Nonna and Betty.

  At exactly noon, just as the Saint Brigid church bells pealed, Father lifted his arms to bless the endeavor. I scanned the top of Italia Imports for a row of tomatoes but found none. Father bellowed into a microphone: “God bless the people of Sweetwater and this water that is so sweet. May it flow for a thousand years!”

  When the Padre concluded, Rodney raised a red handkerchief as a signal to whoever was at the controls. I heard glugging in the chateau’s pipes, knocks and pings, toilets flushing on their own. Down below, Nonna had been granted the honor of turning on the new system, and she ambled to the pump, but before she worked the handle, she held up her arms and offered her own prayer: “Santa Garney send-a her healing upon this water and upon all of-a you, especially the bambinos with all of the bumps and a-splotches. May all-a you skin disorders be-a healed. So amen!”

  “Amen!” cheered the crowd.

  Thanks a lot, Nonna.

  Nonna pumped the handle up and down, the townsfolk staring expectantly at the spigot, and then whoosh!—out poured that delicious sweet water they hadn’t tasted in years. Children jumped into the filling basin, as did a handful of adults, even Sister Dee Dee, all of them splish-splashing.

  They were too busy to notice that a few miles away at the end of Via Dolorosa another jet of water shot into the sky. I was startled, and even more so when something crashed through my parlor window, whizzed by my ear, shattered a Ming dynasty vase on a pedestal, and landed in the fireplace. I focused my binoculars on the plume of water that was losing pressure fast until it was reduced to a steady stream pouring from the lips of the Nereid statue. I ran to the fireplace, got on my knees, and rooted around in layers of ash until I found what had apparently been corking the nymph’s throat for fifty years: a six-inch section of marble braid, no doubt snapped off and shoved down there by a mean-fisted tyrant who couldn’t stopper his drifting wife’s love.

  Nonna returned at dusk, the sun a blood-orange ball hovering above the horizon. Because the hill folk and villagers were still feasting below, I led Nonna to the new globe
-tipped springhouse that hid the engineers’ mechanizations. We went through the back gate to the reflection pond, where for the first time Nonna saw the undulating Nereid below the water. Nonna gripped my hand and a lightning bolt shot up my arm as another spring flowed freely from her eyes. The tears dripped from her chin into the pond, sending out concentric rings. It looked as if the tears sliding from Nonna’s eyes were glowing. She noted it too, capturing the wetness and holding it up like a palm full of lava. She let the liquid spill into the pond, where it spread across the surface like a sheet of colored glass.

  “The red water of Lake Pergusa,” Nonna said. She pointed below to the stone trough at the base of the hill: the water inside also glowed red, as did the stream pouring from the mouth of a sea nymph on the street where Nonna once lived.

  When the sun slid behind the earth it took the colored water with it; Nonna’s tears returned to saline. “It’s a sign,” Nonna said, but she didn’t say a sign of-a what.

  I don’t know exactly what happened that night, Padre, if it was just the reflected sunlight or something else that made the pond change color and glow—fluorescent algae or calcite, perhaps. Red leakage from microscopic organisms like the ones in Lake Pergusa. What caused Nonna’s tears to glow, I have no clue.

  Regardless, within two weeks, even more hill and village children, old nonnas, and parents were pressing their faces against my fence, grateful for the sweet water plus the fact that their rashes and boils were clearing up. One afternoon I stood on my bedroom balcony looking down at the throng, marveling that their gums were no longer gray, their hair was growing back, their skin pink and smooth. That was the precise moment a little ping! sounded in my head. I felt like a dolt that it had taken me so long to figure it out: it was the water healing these people, and probably had been for years.