Authors: Francine Prose
“Always,” said Joseph, “there’s something delicious. With your mother, it was the antipasto. And tonight … the carrots.”
But Catherine would never have laughed so happily if she’d known that Theresa, like Mrs. Santangelo, saw the hand of God in every cooking mistake; the difference was that Theresa didn’t see it working the family destiny, but only her own.
No sooner had Theresa taken her first mouthful of egg than she remembered: The Little Flower hadn’t just eaten an omelette—but a burned one. As a test of humility, Therese had taken the charred part which none of the other Carmelites would touch. With this in mind, Theresa could have eaten burned omelette for the rest of her life. But as she watched her parents, cheerfully and determinedly chewing the bitter eggs, she decided that mortification was worthless unless it was freely chosen. If burned eggs were all you were served, it didn’t count. Right then, Theresa resolved to become a good cook and pay attention, because if you’re cooking for God, you might as well cook something which people might like to eat.
Theresa became an excellent cook, and such a competent housekeeper that the cockroaches (which had long preceded the Santangelos and survived two generations of constant attack) fled the apartment. A dirty dish never touched the sink, a crumb never lingered on the breadboard. Bed sheets, bath towels, even dishcloths were ironed; the beds were made up with hospital corners. Worn socks disappeared from the hamper and came back clean, darned, soft as kittens.
After school, when the bad girls rolled their skirts and the good ones clapped their erasers, Theresa rushed home to reline the silverware drawers. Too busy for friends, she had no time to envy the others with their giggling, their autograph books and slumber parties. At rare lonely moments, she reminded herself that the Little Flower had endured worse torments than loneliness, and consoled herself with dreams of another world, some lost Atlantis where everyone was exactly like her. In the convent, she imagined, her sisters would know why it took her two hours to line each drawer, and would treasure the perfect rectangles of butcher paper.
The only one she really envied was the Little Flower. Sainthood had come naturally to her; as a child, she’d seen her name written in the stars. She hadn’t had to follow anyone’s example, but had only to lead her own life—in another place, another time, when it was so much easier to be saintly. True, she’d suffered slights and insults; she’d had to contend with doubts, aridity, even the pride which made her rage at some sisters who quoted her without naming their source.
Yet the Little Flower had so much help—family and friends to love and guide her on her Little Way. While Theresa had no one but Joseph and Catherine—two stubborn parents who seemed to have locked arms and planted themselves in their daughter’s path.
It was during this time that Joseph came home from the shop with a brand-new eighteen-inch television. Winking at Catherine, he announced that it had fallen off the back of a truck.
“It’s a miracle it didn’t break,” said Theresa.
Joseph turned on her with such a stunned look that Theresa felt she had robbed him of his pleasure in his new possession, and vowed again to watch how she talked at home, guarding even casual references to miracles and blessings. Then Joseph laughed.
“Fell off a truck,” he repeated. “It’s only an expression.”
After promising Catherine that the set would be hidden away when Lino came to visit, Joseph installed it in the living room. All three of them watched through the Sunrise Sermon and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as they did the next night and the next. But on Saturday night, Theresa got up in the middle of Perry Como and went off to do her Monday homework. Within a month, Joseph and Catherine were turning the television off by nine, and gradually it fell into disuse, much like the radio which Joseph had never bothered asking his father-in-law to repair.
Yet every afternoon, when Joseph was down in the shop and Theresa away at school, Catherine tuned in her favorite program, “The Millionaire.” Counting reruns, she’d seen each segment twice, but she never tired of watching lives disrupted and almost ruined by the anonymous gift of a million dollars with no conditions except secrecy about how it came. For unlike the movies, these modest stories confirmed what Catherine had learned from life, from living with Theresa.
From the outside, it looked like a blessing, a million-dollar daughter whose only desire was to help around the house. But like the recipients of those anonymous gifts, Catherine knew that every blessing had its drawbacks. In the shop, when she complained of how hard it was to make sausage with Theresa snatching the grinder away to wash it before she was even done, the mothers asked: Was she boasting or complaining?
The answer was: Both. Catherine loved her daughter; she was proud of her sweet nature, and of the beauty which was growing more obvious each day despite the St. Boniface uniform’s considerable skill at hiding it. Still, Theresa made her nervous. She went too far. It was hard enough stuffing eighty pounds of sausage a week without someone breathing down your neck, nearly tripping you. A day was long enough without the extra work of contending with a daughter who’d turned, overnight, into a picky eater.
Theresa wasn’t skinny, thank God; but she didn’t eat like a normal person. She pushed stuffed artichokes, scallopini Marsala, fettuccine with cheese and butter around on her plate, and preferred the spinach, meatloaf, and reheated leftovers which (Catherine knew from her magazines) other children wouldn’t go near. For a while, till Joseph put a stop to it, Theresa ate with a towel pinned from her collar to the tablecloth, like a sling. Why? Because the Carmelites believed in catching and eating every crumb. She refused to touch meat on Fridays, no matter what the Pope said, and asked to be allowed to eat standing, or kneeling at the stove.
“You want to eat?” said Joseph. “You can sit at the table like a human being.”
Catherine never told him about the times she caught Theresa doctoring her food—salting her zabaglione, adding mustard to her cocoa, watering her stew. Catherine didn’t have to be an expert on theology to recognize that Theresa was trying to mortify her sense of taste. She wondered how such a child had been born to her and Joseph, and joked with the mothers about babies switched in the cradle. The women only laughed: For Theresa, with her mother’s dark coloring and her father’s sturdy build, was a perfect cross between her parents—and her nature was pure Mrs. Santangelo.
Catherine admitted that Theresa had inherited her grandmother’s talent for padding around the apartment and appearing over your shoulder, like Judith Anderson in
Rebecca.
She had all the old lady’s pride, the arrogance of true believers who act as if the world will stop turning without their candles and novenas. And Mrs. Santangelo’s zeal for her family and her saints seemed almost mild in comparison with Theresa’s passion for the convent.
Yet Catherine, like mothers of troublesome children everywhere, convinced herself that everything would be all right. One day, the holy pictures in Theresa’s room would yield to Elvis and Frankie Avalon. One night, the phone would ring, and a boy would ask for Theresa. Imagining this, Catherine felt time rush by, and so much love for Theresa that she was ashamed of her impatience with her daughter’s eagerness to help. How could she complain about this blessing, this million-dollar gift, this girl who asked nothing but permission to polish the meat grinder and do the laundry?
Children went through phases—particularly little girls. For some it was horses; for others, ballerinas or dogs. She herself had had her movie magazines, and dozens of plants had survived as mementoes of her first love. Time had changed her; it would change Theresa.
Later, Catherine would claim that she never believed this, that she had always known that her daughter would never be normal and had spent Theresa’s whole life waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Catherine wasn’t alone in listening for the sound of the other shoe, of uneasy premonitions confirmed. Even Lino, with his hereditary lack of foresight, predicted trouble; but in his view, the trouble was Nicky. Falconettis were known for their reserve, yet even Lino knew—to survive, to stay human, a man had to talk, if only a few sentences now and then: Nice weather we’re having, how’s the family? But Nicky never said a word.
For months, Lino waited for Nicky to come out of his fog; finally he had come to accept it as Nicky’s permanent weather. He’d always been quiet, withdrawn, a peculiar duck. But Lino knew: This was different. Nicky grunted and mumbled, ate and slept, went through the motions of living. Yet for all the life in him, Lino could have been sharing his meals and his work place with a corpse.
Over the years, Nicky had grown accustomed to his own detachment, that sense of observing his life from a distance. But this was something new. Ever since returning home, Nicky felt as if he were a shadow, a dim reflection of what he should have been. He felt like a newly brokenhearted lover: Everything reminded him of his loss. He couldn’t take a shower without thinking of the geisha who should have been scrubbing his back, couldn’t drink coffee without wishing for green tea, couldn’t pick up a fork without hearing the gentle click-click of chopsticks, couldn’t pass the kitchen table without picturing a bowl of formally arranged chrysanthemums, each one perfect as a miniature autumn sun. Every meal his father cooked made him long for incense to cover up the smell, and even his pleasure in the radio was diminished; now, he couldn’t listen to Milton Cross’s plot summaries without mentally translating them into sign language and simple English for his imaginary Japanese bride.
Yet unlike a brokenhearted lover, Nicky was unable to take comfort in conjuring up his sweetheart’s imperfections, blemishes, her irritating mannerisms. Because Nicky’s Madame Butterfly had never existed outside his imagination—and it had never occurred to him to imagine her with defects.
As if to convince himself that hope was still possible, he began taking occasional meals in Chinatown, praying that he and his geisha would find each other—Hollywood-style—across a crowded restaurant. But the waiters were all male, the girls accompanied by families and fiancés. He took his wash to the Chinese laundry, but the Chinaman’s daughter didn’t look up from her trouser press when her father did business with Nicky.
Clutching his neatly wrapped, pressed shirts, stung because the girl in the steamy back room hadn’t noticed him, Nicky was forced to admit that his life would never be opera or tragedy or even high drama, but only the pathetic story of an ordinary GI who couldn’t find an Oriental girl to marry him. He saw his past as a private hell, a circle of sausage and pinochle, and now he had sunk to an even lower region, in which he couldn’t find a pinochle player on Mulberry Street willing to deal him into a game.
The neighborhood watched him sink. Nicky had been drinking heavily since he was fourteen, but now disappointment drove him beyond Frank Manzone’s wine and straight to the Gordon’s gin. Now that the last holdouts had bought televisions, there wasn’t much business in Lino’s shop—which was just as well. Because Nicky couldn’t be counted on to do much of anything except stumble from the house to the liquor store and back.
Watching him pass, the old women nodded at this sad example of what happens when you stray from the trodden paths and seek to marry outside your kind, clucked their tongues at this drama of misdirected longing, and shook their heads—just as they might have done at the final act of an opera.
Of all of them, Theresa had the most compassion for her Uncle Nicky. Without knowing half the details, she recognized the terrible strain of transforming your life into something else—the plot of an opera, the autobiography of a saint. She prayed for Nicky, but went out of her way to avoid him. For whenever she saw her uncle weaving down the street, she felt instinctively that her story would never be any more like the Little Flower’s than his was like Madame Butterfly’s.
Each day confronted Theresa with the near-impossibility of leading a consecrated life in New York City, in 1964. Though the good girls (whose number was dwindling) still observed the name days, the feast days, the seasonal devotions, by far the most popular saints at St. Boniface were Paul, John, George, and Ringo. Each day she rededicated herself to the Little Way, only to lose it when she couldn’t find the oregano; she asked God for the patience which deserted her when the sink clogged, and the aging washing machine shredded her father’s shirts.
She could only remind herself that her real life had not yet begun. Her present existence was like shaking someone’s hand through a thick glove, and she lived for her high school graduation, when she would enter the convent and take off this glove. But she had learned to conceal these hopes at home, to behave as if she had no future, as if the Last Judgment were scheduled, conveniently, for graduation day.
By now, her favorite part of
The Story of a Soul
was the Little Flower’s long and precocious struggle for admission to the convent. Burdened with a preternatural foreknowledge of her own early death, Therese first sought to take the veil as a child of nine. No one would permit this—not the Monsignor, the Bishop, nor even the Pope to whom Therese traveled in order to petition in Rome.
Then one day, as if by some miracle, Therese got lost and was picked up by a carriage transporting a church official who heard her pleas and was charmed into acquiescence. Rereading this chapter, Theresa prayed for a similar miracle to aid her in her time of need.
That time arrived near the start of Theresa’s senior year, heralded by a postcard inviting the Santangelos to a meeting with the St. Boniface college counsellor.
“College?” In the face of all evidence to the contrary, Joseph had somehow assumed that Theresa would marry soon after high school and spare them the necessity of arranging her future.
“I’m not going to college,” said Theresa. “I’m joining the Carmelites.”
Catherine was setting a platter of polenta on the table when Theresa made this announcement so casually, she might have been asking for the serving spoon. Later, Catherine would say that this was the first of many times she would think: The other shoe. Bracing herself, she wondered if Joseph hadn’t been expecting it too. How else could he have ignited so quickly?