Authors: Francine Prose
His father, rest in peace, would be proud. Even without the clipping in the window, customers came from all five boroughs. Each week, Catherine’s sausage sold out, as did the seasonal Thanksgiving turkeys and Easter lambs. And Joseph took pride in his work. In an age of supermarket processors and plastic wrap, craftsmen like himself were rare, and people still knew the difference: His scallopini made supermarket veal look like chuck steak. So what if he cheated a few pennies? No one counted pennies, it was that much less to report on his taxes, and the IRS was no better at catching him than his customers were. The women still loved it, and Joseph gloried in the fact that business was so good, he didn’t have to cheat. No longer a matter of profit, it became even more of an avocation, an art.
In his home life, Joseph felt equally lucky. Catherine was a good wife and mother, an excellent cook except on those rare occasions when she went overboard with “Chinese” concoctions of canned soup and undercooked vegetables, like something his crazy sister-in-law would make. The apartment looked nice with her houseplants suspended in the hangers she knotted from instructions in her magazines. Obviously, she was no longer the sly little alley cat he married. But what would he—with his thickening middle—do with an alley cat now? Peace at home, strong coffee, tasty food on the table every night—that was sufficient. At Saturday dinner, they had wine—not homemade, but Chianti in straw bottles from the liquor store. On Sundays and holidays, there was pastry from the Roma.
Of course, he would have liked a son, but it hadn’t worked out that way. He was thankful for his daughter, and if she leaned a little too far on the saintly side, it was better than Frank Manzone’s girls, draped around the lampposts with their Newports. Joseph had seen plenty of girls go through holy phases. For years they had one foot in the convent, and the next thing you knew they walked into the shop with a baby in a stroller and another on the way. The healthy ones grew out of it, and Theresa, knock on wood, was healthy enough; the proof was that she’d started eating again after that stupid hunger strike. Besides, she was good-looking, smart. Before too long, she’d find a husband to take care of her, and that would be the end of her saintliness. If Joseph’s luck held, a line of boyfriends would be forming around the block by the time Theresa finished high school, and the light—that glow of desire which Joseph loved in women—would return to her eyes.
Graduation neared, but still there was no line of boyfriends, and Theresa’s eyes were as cool as a nun’s. Yet Joseph wasn’t discouraged. After several long talks with Augie (whose Stacey was in her second year at Marymount), he’d decided: This wasn’t Italy, where you married your baby daughter off in diapers; this wasn’t twenty years ago, when you staked her in a card game. This was the 1960s, in America, where you could send her to a respectable Catholic teacher’s college, a girls’ school where she couldn’t get into trouble and where (at a properly chaperoned social) she could meet some nice Italian law student, a future doctor or high school principal—a better class of boy than she could have found in high school. If the right boy didn’t turn up in college, Theresa would still have her teaching certificate—something to do till she found him. And finally, as Augie assured him, a daughter in college heaped honor on the Santangelo name.
“Like this,” Joseph told Catherine, “she won’t have to spend
her
life stuffing sausage.”
Catherine needed no persuading. She thought it a wonderful idea, as did Sister Madeline Dolorosa, the college counsellor at St. Boniface Hall. At a conference with Joseph and Catherine in her office, Sister Madeline numbered Theresa’s virtues as if delivering a eulogy, listed her awards and honors, and concluded by saying that of all the girls in her graduating class, Theresa was by far the best candidate for the holy orders.
“She doesn’t want to be a nun,” said Joseph. “She wants to be a teacher.”
“Is that true?” Sister Madeline asked Theresa. It was not what her teachers said.
“Yes.” Theresa nodded. Too numb to argue, she could only hope that God would change His mind if she showed Him that the Little Way could be followed anywhere—even in college.
“She’ll make a wonderful teacher, God love her,” and Sister Madeline produced a sheaf of applications from her desk.
Theresa shuffled and reshuffled the applications until it was arranged that she would attend St. Angela’s Academy, in Brooklyn; it was almost like going to another city, and yet she could live at home. With this resolved, graduation came and went, unremarked except for the cake (huge, white, layered like a wedding cake but with a solitary girl in a mortarboard on top) which Joseph ordered from the Café Roma. And Theresa spent the summer listlessly following her mother around the college sections of the midtown department stores, cringing when the pretty salesgirls in their college buttons approached her, and wondering how the girls from Iona and St. Joseph’s and Marymount always knew to zero in on her.
Later, Catherine would think of that summer with nostalgia for the air-conditioned melancholy of department stores on hot afternoons and the intimacy of those dressing rooms. Watching Theresa try on clothes, she could hardly believe that this nearly grown woman’s body was once a tangle of limbs under a yellow blanket. Because by the following summer, the other shoe had dropped, and Catherine had learned: There is never just one other shoe but always a rain of them—heavy, inexorable, like the footfalls of an approaching army.
Lino Falconetti had become one of those old men who cannot think of anything which didn’t used to be better. Having witnessed the decay of everything from cars to the weather to family life, he could pretend to accept his own decline philosophically. Yet no amount of philosophy could sweeten the bitter fact that everything was better before television, that Lino was a radio man who’d outlived his time.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried. He’d dissected hundreds of sets, paid meticulous attention. But when he reassembled them, the screens turned into funhouse mirrors, distorting the actors and actresses into Laurels and Hardys. He bought a TV repair manual and followed the instructions, but the misshapen faces only flipped upside down and croaked like frogs.
And so he had come to accept the fact that God had not meant him to fix televisions. Like butchers, radio repairmen were a dying breed; but unlike Joseph, Lino had no cause to exult in his rarity. It shamed him to admit that he would have gone out of business completely if not for the clock radio, and he believed that he was living on borrowed time till some genius thought of wiring an alarm to a television.
With Nicky, too, Lino felt that time was running out. But whereas the business seemed destined for a gentle and predictable demise, Lino sensed that his son was more likely to explode; and like the legendary Falconetti assigned the dreaded job of guarding Garibaldi’s powder kegs, he could only sit by and wait for the inevitable spark.
It was equally inevitable that in Nicky’s case, this spark would be struck by
Madame Butterfly.
It wasn’t the first time it had played since Nicky’s return; when Nicky saw it announced in the paper, he bought an extra bottle of gin and prepared for a dismal weekend. For unlike the other operas, which could still lift him partway out of himself,
Madame Butterfly
depressed him and pushed him back into the dead center of his life. Hearing it made him feel as if he were looking at an old photo of himself and trying to recall what the person in that picture was thinking.
That afternoon, Nicky drank through the first two acts and wept through the third. Just as Butterfly was bidding farewell to her baby, Nicky dozed off. When he awoke, it was dark outside his window, but it seemed to him that the opera was still in progress, and that Milton Cross was speaking Japanese.
That was the start of Nicky’s hallucinations. From then on, he heard music though none was playing, selections from his favorite operas set with new words—lyrics referring to him, mocking commentaries on his situation.
By far the most troublesome of Nicky’s delusions was his conviction that every Oriental in the city was personally responsible for his misery. At least once a month, he’d fire himself up on gin and go down to the laundry to harangue the Chinaman and his daughter in vile language which they wisely pretended not to understand. Eventually he’d charge off—uptown to a Korean greengrocer on Sixth Avenue, in and out of restaurants and finally into a Pell Street dumpling shop in which he made a particularly ugly scene on a busy Saturday night. Sunday morning, a chauffeured limousine pulled up in front of Lino’s shop, discharging two Chinese men in business suits who spoke to the Falconettis so convincingly that Nicky’s campaign of harassing Orientals stopped.
But still he prolonged his drama through two final acts—both of which took place on a single Saturday afternoon.
More than ever, Lino had come to hate Nicky’s opera broadcasts; whenever possible, he left the house. But that day, it was raining, there was nowhere to go. So he sat in the living room, reading the paper, his ears stuffed with cotton balls through which he could still hear every note; he noticed immediately when the music ended.
The door opened, and Nicky walked through the room with the radio on his shoulder. It was heavy, Lino knew, but not enough to make Nicky stagger beneath its weight like Jesus dragging the cross up Calvary. Lino’s first thought was that radio was broken; Nicky was taking it down to the shop. He doubted that Nicky could fix it in his present state, but for the sake of conversation said, “Something wrong with the set?”
“Yeah,” said Nicky, but he didn’t take it to the shop. Still stumbling on bent knees, he lugged it four blocks through the rain, down Grand Street to the Chinese laundry.
The laundry was closed, but Nicky pounded on the door and rattled the windows till the Chinaman and his daughter appeared at the back of the shop. Edging forward, they seemed not so much frightened as deeply uncomfortable lest someone overhear the commotion and blame it on them. Finally they unbolted the door.
“Here!” Nicky lowered the radio and shoved one corner of it through the half-open door. “Take it!”
The old man nodded and reached out his thin arms, but Nicky brushed past him and set the radio on the counter between two piles of brown paper parcels. Nicky waved the cord in the air till the young woman took it from him and plugged it into a socket at the end of a tube light.
“Carmen,”
said Nicky. “Sixteen hundred on the dial.”
The Chinaman gave Nicky a fleeting, embarrassed smile, then reached between him and the radio, and turned the knob. Beneath his fingers, the dial moved swiftly and surely, flew past the figures, way beyond sixteen hundred, and stopped in some polar region of the dial which Nicky had never explored. Nicky heard the plucking of stringed instruments, then an ear-splitting female voice, wailing like a cat.
“
Chinese
opera,” explained the daughter.
Suddenly Nicky felt himself turn to wood, with rigid limbs manipulated from above by some powerful puppeteer; he thought how lucky it was that this puppeteer knew what was supposed to happen next. The invisible strings jerked Nicky out of the laundry, down the street and back to the apartment, where he went straight to his room and shut the door.
“What happened?” Lino called after him. “Couldn’t fix it? I’ll see about it tomorrow….”
But Nicky didn’t answer, and it was then that Lino heard him singing. Until that moment, he had never heard Nicky do a musical thing in his life except turn on the radio; he’d never heard him hum, or even whistle. Now, his singing made Lino nervous, and this uneasiness increased as he realized that it was opera—a terrible burlesque of opera, a fake falsetto trilling off-key arias, cracking and dying as it strained toward the high notes.
The music ended abruptly. Lino ran to Nicky’s room and opened the door.
Nicky was lying on the floor with a samurai sword protruding from his chest. His knees were folded beneath him, as if he’d been kneeling and had fallen backwards. A dark stain was spreading on the carpet.
Even so, Nicky looked so cheerful, so radiant, and the whole situation was so operatic and absurd that Lino had to bend over and touch his son before he was sure that Nicky wasn’t joking.
Had Theresa been a saint, she might have been able to intercede directly on her Uncle Nicky’s behalf. As it was, she could only pray to St. Therese to intervene in his favor. Theresa sympathized with him—sentenced to perpetual torment, exiled to that section of hell reserved for suicides. By then, she too was in exile, off in another world—if not as dismal as Nicky’s, then certainly as different from any she had ever known.
Each day, Theresa took the A train to Brooklyn, transferred to the Myrtle Avenue El and got off at Vanderbilt Avenue, then walked three blocks past brownstones, used furniture shops, and Spanish groceries to reach St. Angela’s. If she’d joined the convent, she kept thinking, she would never have had to take the subway; but it comforted her to realize that no convent could have tried a novice’s patience more than the teacher’s college was testing hers. Eight hours praying on your knees on a cold stone floor would have passed like a flash compared to one of Sister Philomena’s beginning curriculum lectures. No Mother Superior could have been more demanding, nasty and capricious than Professor Kemper, who taught Catholic education theory. And the most antiquated and arbitrary rules of convent life could not have been more pointless than the college’s German requirement.
Theresa was determined to experience every trying minute of it, to receive her education as if it were a gift from God. At home, she copied German vocabulary words on three-by-five cards and puzzled over her philosophy texts, attempting to follow a dozen different proofs for the existence of God. She kept the radio on for company, ignoring the static, forgetting to listen till “The Star-Spangled Banner” signalled that the station was signing off for the night. Then she would panic, thinking that she’d fallen asleep, and had to reassure herself with the notes she’d taken, the lesson plans she’d copied. At such moments, she examined the smudged photo of St. Therese and felt certain that the saint was smiling, because another “little soul” had finally succeeded in bending itself to God’s will.