The Patron Saint of Ugly Read online

  I wanted to share the news that would send them packing, so I shouted: “It’s the water healing you, not me!”

  One of the nonnas answered back: “Sì. Saint Garnet, she send the healing waters!”

  “No! It’s not me! It’s the water! The water!”

  Someone in the back of the crowd hollered: “What did she say?”

  “She said she blessed the water so it would heal us!”

  “Thank you, Saint Garnet!”

  “It’s not me!” I yelled. “It’s whatever is in the water!”

  “And may God bless-a you for it!”

  “No!”

  “We love you, Saint Garnet!”

  No matter what I said, they just wouldn’t listen. Admittedly, though I had an explanation for some of the Sweetwater magic, the water never cured me. And there was still the riddle of who had been rearranging my personal geography over the years. In fact, at breakfast this morning, I discovered that Quebec on my inner elbow had separated from its sister provinces, microscopic inhabitants waving au revoir. Perhaps not so coincidentally, Nonna was flipping an omelet at the stove singing “‘Dominique, a-nique, a-nique.’” Still, at least now I had something concrete—or liquid—to point to that might siphon some attention away from me.

  As summer slid into fall, word about me spilled into bordering states: Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Maryland, even Virginia, our severed twin, whose inhabitants had to swallow their pride before crossing the state line to beg for a healing.

  But there were other forces that had a vested interest in keeping the Saint Garnet industry alive, a point driven home to me when I sent a water sample to Rodney for analysis so that I could offer the pilgrims irrefutable proof. He claimed that the lab lost the first sample, so I sent a second. Which was apparently contaminated by faulty equipment, so I sent a third, which a technician supposedly dropped. After the sixth bungled vial, I was visited by not only Rodney but the head of the newly formed Sweetwater Tourism Board and Father Shultz, all of whom showed up together at my intercom box with gifts, not Fontina cheese and sambuca, but Saint Garnet refrigerator magnets and bumper stickers printed with St. Garnet ♥ Sweetwater!

  I reluctantly opened the gate, and as I led Rodney, Ms. Abigail Stork, and Father Shultz to the springhouse, all three slathered me with appreciation for healing the people. They prattled on about how blessed Sweetwater was to have been gifted such a saint. The lines were well rehearsed and they couldn’t have sounded more disingenuous.

  “Please.” I pointed to the water burbling into the pond. “You’re college-educated people. You know it’s not me doing the healing; it’s whatever is in the water.”

  They rushed at me with hands ready to clamp over my mouth so the pilgrims wouldn’t hear. If only they would hear, I thought.

  “Don’t say that! That’s not true! Don’t deny God’s gift!” they sputtered all at once.

  I pushed them back to arm’s length. “For Pete’s sake. I have nothing to do with healing these people, and the sooner we clear this up, the sooner they can go home to their families and leave me alone.”

  “But Garnet,” Father Shultz said. “Would you deny these people their hearts’ desires? Would you deny God’s purpose for you?”

  My face pulsed and I guess the Padre had been informed about my previous run-in with Father Luigi, because he stepped back several paces.

  Ms. Stork bravely approached, hugging a clipboard. “Ms. Ferrari. I can see that you’re a practical woman who wants what’s best for the community she loves.” She held up a bumper sticker as proof. “Before you returned, Sweetwater was nearly a ghost town. Now, after only eight months, the village businesses are seeing increased profits, new stores are opening every day, and home sales on the hill are up twelve percent, which of course means rising property values and thus more paid in taxes to support Sweetwater’s infrastructure.”

  It’s hard to argue with statistics, and the village did look livelier. Folks on the hill were mending roofs and resurfacing driveways. Overgrown shrubs were being pruned. Maybe I wasn’t a healer, but somehow I had inspired civic pride.

  “But it’s not me,” I pleaded.

  “Whether you’re healing them or not, Sweetwater is coming back to life because of you.” She gripped my wrist. “As a citizen, you have a duty to the public.”

  At least she had taken God out of the equation.

  “Then take the water! Bottle it and sell it, for all I care!”

  That recommendation lit a spark in Ms. Stork’s eyes and she madly scribbled notes on her clipboard.

  “But please leave me out of it so I can live in peace!”

  Father Shultz stepped closer. “It’s about much more than the water, Garnet. Don’t you see? The people need a figurehead. They need to believe in you.”

  “Father, you can’t really believe in all this nonsense.”

  He studied a crepuscular sun ray shooting from a gap in the clouds, then he looked directly at me. “I believe in the people’s belief.”

  I said, “What you really believe in is more coins in the coffers.”

  Just then Nonna bustled outside. “Why you no tell-a me we have the important company?” She rushed forward to kiss Father’s hand. “Please come in for the cuppa coff and a sand’!”

  Father patted her shoulder. “We don’t want to be a bother.”

  “It’s-a no bother. Garney should have invited a-you herself.” She clucked her tongue at my bad manners.

  Father looped his arm through Nonna’s and they walked toward the house, me close on their heels.

  I marveled at Nonna’s deference to this holy man since I’d thought, like me, she’d had enough of priests on the day Father Luigi swapped our loved ones’ lives for my mother’s soul. Apparently in the intervening years, Father Shultz had unplugged Nonna’s heart so that a stream of forgiveness could spill out, a miracle confirmed when he leaned close to Nonna’s ear and said, “Thank you for the cannolis.”

  “Thank-a you for blessing the grapes.” They looked at the flourishing arbor, and I wondered how they had kept that ceremony a secret. I shook my head at this improbable pairing that offered no saint-dispelling escape route for me.

  One December evening I sat in the whippet room beneath that painting of the boy in a Lord Fauntleroy suit. I was rifling through the postcards Yvette had sent me over the past year. Since college, she had become quite the world traveler, chasing her mother, who was always two countries ahead. Yvette was joined by a variety of companions, some male, some female. I wasn’t a bit jealous, Padre. Truly. I hadn’t been pining for her like a certain Nereid had pined for her lover, but I was pining for something.

  Suddenly Aunt Betty appeared at the door, a man standing behind her wearing a hat and carrying a briefcase. Mr. Brodsky was Grandma Iris’s Charlottesville attorney. He sat across from me, flipped open his briefcase, and delivered both good news and bad, the bad news being the loss of a perfectly good Cadillac in a sewage-treatment plant.

  When he finished, the first thing I asked was “Where is my mother?”

  “I’ll get to that, but first, there’s the matter of your grandmother’s will.”

  Grandma Iris had left her estate to her daughter. However, several years before, she had declared said daughter of unsound mind. Thus, the estate went to the contingent beneficiary, moi, since I was now the only-child daughter of an only-child daughter of an only-child daughter, all the way back to the Mayflower. All I can say is who would have thought that on June twenty-fourth, 1950, the baby bursting from her mother’s womb would be the default heir to not one fortune, but two? Ah, that duality once again. I looked up at my substitute brother in his velveteen knickers, understanding that this inheritance should have been his.

  “That’s nice, but where is my mother?”

  Brodsky ignored me and instead handed over yet another ring of skeleton keys to a house with a three-tiered fountain, tennis courts, a bricked-up study window, remnants of slave quarters, and a Hal
l of Mirrors that I never, ever, ever wanted to step foot inside again.

  The other good news was that I did not have to. Brodsky opened an accordion folder containing the contents of Grandma’s safety-deposit box, which is when I discovered that I had a blood relative living on the premises, namely, one six-fingered, butt-chinned aunt.

  I opened my mouth to ask again about Mom, but Brodsky held out his hand. “There is the matter of the house. Would you like to close it up until you decide what to do?”

  Brodsky balked at it, but here is what I decreed: the Charlottesville mansion and its grounds and contents (except the reference books, globes, and two paintings whose subjects now wink at each other from inside my bedroom) would be given outright to Aunt Cookie. Though Grandfather Postscript would have loved the irony, I delighted in imagining Grandma spinning on her fiery spit at the idea of the colored help now wearing her diamonds, driving her cars, and, worse, drinking her vodka. I could imagine Chompers and Bowler and Taffy and Skiff seething as they thought, There goes the neighborhood! But they would have said that if I had moved in too.

  I also finally found out Grandma’s unlisted phone number, and I called Cookie immediately from the phone beside me. Cookie and I blubbered at our forced separation, our shared gene pool, our astounding good fortunes. When she finally understood that the mansion was hers, she started singing as if she really believed it: “‘There is a balm in Gilead!’”

  Since then Cookie has turned Grandma’s estate into Charlottesville’s hottest discotel, part disco, part posh hotel that caters to the hip black set. Cookie had a lit-up dance floor installed in the Hall of Mirrors and replaced Fanny Brice’s chandelier with a disco ball. It had tickled me to think of Aunt Cookie ordering Opal around (Opal, bring me more tea!), but in a tremendous act of grace, Cookie had made Opal the official mink-coated hostess. Muddy is now head of a maintenance staff of twenty. Cedrick packed up his silk scarves and sped the hell away in a Mercedes convertible painted aquamarine with pink interior.

  But on that December night in the whippet room, the last thing I blubbered into the phone was “Cookie, where is my mother?”

  “I don’t know, sugar. I never, ever knew.”

  Emboldened by the power of two fat bank accounts, I hung up the receiver, stood, and leaned over Brodsky, hands on my hips. “Where the hell is my mother!”

  Brodsky fiddled with his necktie. “Vermont. Your mother has been in a sanitarium in Vermont.”

  I nearly collapsed. All those years I had been in New Hampshire, my mother had been less than ninety miles away. Grandma Iris was a cruel woman.

  Brodsky pulled out two forms. I was to sign the one in his left hand if I wanted to commit Mom permanently to the facility, the one in his right if I wanted her released into my care.

  Thus, that year on Christmas Eve, delivered unto me was not a babe swaddled in a manger, but my mother swaddled in the back of an ambulance that had to honk to clear the pilgrims away from my gate.

  As we hovered by the front door waiting, Nonna and I struggled with conflicting emotions. We were elated that Mother was returning, but Nonna grieved anew over the loss of her treasured son and grandson, her ire resurrecting as if she still blamed Mom. I ached for the mother I hadn’t seen in ten years who had brought me joy, but also great pain.

  The ambulance arrived, and Dr. Trogdon and an attendant hauled my mother out of the back on a gurney. My still-dozing mother looked like a skeleton beneath the sheet. Her ponytail now measured three feet and rested outside the covers.

  Aunt Betty sobbed. “What did they do to you? What did they do to you?”

  Even Nonna softened at the sight.

  I practically crawled onto the gurney, bawling like a five-year-old, hoping Mother’s eyes would pop open, that she would sit up, wrap her bony arms around me, and lavish me with maternal love.

  But Mom remained inert.

  We rolled her into the library by the window that faced Nonna’s garden. Dr. Trogdon opened his medical bag and began unpacking amber bottles, placing them on the table beside Mom’s bed.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Setting out her prescriptions. I’ve also taken the liberty of contacting a physician in—” He looked at the attendant. “What’s the name of that town?”

  “Vandalia.”

  “Yes, Vandalia, where their pharmacies are much more, how shall I say it, relaxed.”

  Dr. Trogdon reached into his bag for a syringe filled with the brown liquid I remembered from the Night of the Cracked Mirrors. He pulled Mom’s limp arm from beneath the covers and revealed what looked like a junkie’s track marks.

  “Until then.” Dr. Trogdon held the needle to Mother’s translucent flesh.

  “Stop!” I grabbed the syringe. “No more injections!”

  “But your grandmother decreed—”

  “To hell with my grandmother.” I swept my arm across the chess set of vials. “No more pills!”

  “You can’t just stop these medications cold turkey. The consequences could be dire.”

  I pointed at my virtually dead mother. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  I angled myself between the doctor and Mom. Nonna and Betty stomped over to stand with me, and we puffed out our torsos, a regular fortress of mammaries. “I want you out of my house!”

  Dr. Trogdon opened his mouth, but Nonna growled. The quack snapped his bag shut. “It matters not to me.”

  Once the doctor was gone, Nonna fetched her valise of counter-malocchio measures. She spread them around the library: amulets and rue branches, crucifixes and red afghans, even a certain four-tooth chisel. We sat by Mom’s bedside for the next seventy-two hours monitoring her pulse, watching her chest rise and fall, Nonna muttering her prayers.

  Mom did not convulse or froth at the mouth. Neither did she wake up.

  Week after week we kept vigil, giving her sponge baths, combing her hair, though I hired a nurse to tackle Mom’s private functions. Nonna continued praying aloud, mostly as she strolled her garden and grapevine or soaked her feet in the reflection pond surrounded by pilgrims. Children cuddled beside her and stroked her hair as she begged God to send a healing wave over us all.

  Nonna’s God didn’t see fit to zap my mother back to life, but more and more pilgrims claimed that I was healing them. Word spread across the country, the continent, because ten-year-old burns were healing, chickenpox scars were unscarring, and ringworm and scabies patches were disappearing, all of which had nothing to do with the sweet water, or me, I assure you. The worst were the parents who brought their perfectly fine children, wanting only smaller pores or fairer complexions. I raised my fist and shouted: “Love your children! If you don’t, you will rue the day!”

  Nine months later I lay beside Mom on her hospital bed gazing out the open window at Nonna in the distance harvesting the last of the butternut squash. She looked so content with her gnarled hands covered in dirt. Occasionally one of the pilgrims would shout, “God bless you, Nonna Ferrari!” Nonna would smile and blow a kiss. It was quite lovely and I wanted to share it with Mom. I wanted to see the aquamarine spark in her eyes. I wanted to hear her laughter, or even her voice raised in anger or blame. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted. I began crying anew at my guilt, at my portafortuna-stealing hands that had robbed my mother of her husband and son, and at the improbability of my vast fortunes that could do nothing to alleviate her pain, or mine. “Why won’t you wake up? I know it’s my fault. It’s all my fault. But why don’t you please-please-please wake up?”

  I heard sniffling and found Nonna standing outside the window resting her chin on a hoe, tears welling.

  Later that night, there was a full moon, and I padded through the house in my bare feet looking at moon shadows trembling on the parquet floors.

  A familiar droning of bees drew me out onto the patio, where I tilted my ear at the noise that was coming from beyond the springhouse. I was drawn to it and walked there, the cold wetness of the grass on my exposed so
les. Soon I recognized the drone as the rosary, someone gently chanting, “Our Father, Who art in-a heaven,” followed by the congregants, “Hail Mary, full of grace.”

  Just inside the fence, I hid behind a clump of pampas grass at the edge of the pond’s concrete deck and spotted Nonna, her back to me, sitting on the lip of the reflection pond, mist rising up as warm vapors met chilled air. She was surrounded by pilgrims, though they did not crowd her. Some were kneeling in the pond, all with their heads bent, eyes closed. Mother was draped across Nonna’s lap, her head cradled in Nonna’s arms. As she prayed, Nonna dipped her hand down into the water time after time and poured the warm liquid over Mom’s head, her drenched ponytail hanging in the pond and fanning out like gold kelp. Some of the water spilled onto the concrete deck, slid beneath the fence and through the pampas grass, and enveloped my feet.

  When the rosary was finished Nonna traced her fingers over mother’s lovely jaw and offered one final prayer. “I was the one who bring this curse on-a you, not Garney, so now I must-a remove it. God, please restore this mother to her daughter. Bring her back-a to life.”

  “Bring her back-a to life,” prayed the pilgrims.

  “So amen,” said Nonna.

  “So amen,” sighed the crowd.

  Suddenly the puddle I was standing in felt charged with electricity; a surge shot up my leg, torso, and neck and into my hair, which flared into a staticky cone. Nonna’s bun wiggled until it sprang free, the end of it levitating like a magic trick. I jumped back onto dry ground, severing the current that connected Nonna and me, and raced to my room wondering if La Strega had somehow enchanted this land before she died.

  The following morning, Nonna, Betty, and I were eating waffles in the upstairs kitchen. Betty was hogging the syrup, and I was about to wrestle it from her when Mom walked in in her nightgown, hair disheveled, and asked, “Is there any more coffee?”

  I don’t remember tipping out of my chair, but the next thing I knew I had my arms wrapped around her, dampening her nightgown with my tears. Nonna and Betty surrounded us, our twined arms hugging, prayers of thanksgiving squeaking out from Nonna and Betty until Mom asked, “Where the hell are we?”