Household Saints (22 page)

She could not imagine (nor was it hers to guess) what this something would be. Perhaps she would hear another call to the convent, stronger this time and accompanied by a more effective strategy. Perhaps God’s will would circumvent her entirely and work a miracle. Overnight, her parents would change their mind, they would take her out of college and escort her to the Carmelites’ door. Maybe He would show her the truth in a vision, a ray of light beamed on the dish suds. Or perhaps He meant to reconcile her to housework, to so addict her to the pleasures of a tidy kitchen that she gave up and married someone like Leonard.

Open to any kind of revelation, she believed that the intensity of her devotion to Leonard was a way of forcing God’s hand, and that God had put it into her mind to force things this way. She felt this so strongly that she stopped going to confession for fear that the priests might try to talk her out of it. She refused to bother herself with the illogicality of it, or wonder: Why would God reward her for serving Leonard when—after all those years of helping her own mother—He hadn’t even given her the strength to resist a plate of sausage? Instead, she defrosted Leonard’s refrigerator and rinsed the shelves with boiling water, all in the euphoric state induced by that rare intoxicant—the belief that her work had a purpose, that the smallest acts were part of a larger plan. Engrossed in the vegetable bins, she felt a calm come over her, soothing as the hot lemon and honey her mother used to brew her when she had a cold. She wondered if this were all she would ever feel, and thought that it was almost—but not quite—enough.

Inevitably, her daily visits to Leonard’s cut into her school time. But she was convinced that cleaning his apartment would teach her more and bring faster, more permanent results than any college. Still, she tried to keep to her former hours and carried her texts with her—mostly for show, but also to skim on the subway back from Leonard’s. In the evenings, Joseph and Catherine would look at her, their faces full of love, and ask what she was learning in school. Praying for forgiveness for misleading them, Theresa would summarize the pages she’d read on the way home. The truth—that this subway cramming was the only studying she did—would only have hurt them more.

Because now, when she went to her room to do her homework, her doubts and fears besieged her, demons so numerous that the room seemed just as crowded and more distracting than a rush hour train. She began sleeping with the night-light on, as if to keep away the dark suspicion that Leonard had been sent by the devil to ensnare her in sin upon sin. Suppose she were wrong, suppose her relations with Leonard weren’t God’s secret way of saving her soul. Most likely, it happened all the time—misled sinners brought to Judgement, saying, “You, I did it all for You!” only to hear God answer, “Me? You must be mistaken.”

It was equally possible that neither God nor the devil were at work but simply, ordinary life. Nothing had happened which wasn’t happening to some girl somewhere every minute. She’d found a boyfriend, she’d let him go too far. At worst, she’d get pregnant—Leonard had promised to marry her. But that was all she could hope for: No grace, no vision, no revelation.

She was also afraid of angering God with the arrogance of her challenge. For who was she to say, “Look, I’m scrubbing my knuckles raw for this boy I hardly know. Now show me something”? Who was she to test Him? Lying awake in the dim light, she recalled all the Bible stories in which someone (Lucifer, Adam, the citizens of Babel) called God’s hand and lost the game. And finally, she was terrified of the stakes, the penalty for losing—an eternity of hellfire which would burn her to ash so black and fine that a legion of devils couldn’t scour it off the grill.

Later, when Catherine wondered how all this could have happened without her suspecting, she would think of a page from
The Mother’s Medical Encyclopedia.
In an image so clear that she could see the drawing of a thermometer in the upper righthand corner, she remembered the section on childhood diseases and in particular the warning against confusing the flush of fever with the glow of health.

In the beginning, Catherine took this admonition so seriously that she was constantly fighting the urge to take Theresa’s temperature. But after a few minor illnesses, Catherine learned to read her daughter’s color, and developed enough confidence in this ability to take it for granted. When Theresa came down with her annual winter cold, Catherine was warming lemon and honey hours before the first sneeze; for the rest of the year, she could relax.

By the time Theresa was burning with the fever to serve Leonard Villanova, Catherine had forgotten the warning. And besides: After Nicky’s death and all that trouble over the convent, Catherine so longed for health and normality that no thermometer could have convinced her otherwise.

Also the symptoms were easy to misinterpret. Theresa left home in time for school and returned promptly for dinner. Perhaps it was the walk from the subway, but she invariably sailed in with good color and bright eyes. She was eating like a normal person—no hunger strikes, no water in the gravy, no slings to catch the crumbs. She helped with the dishes, swept the kitchen, then went to her room to study—and never once mentioned the convent.

The best—and most misleading—sign was the fact that Theresa finally had a boyfriend.

Catherine would have been longer in discovering this if not for the family laundry which Theresa did, as always, on Saturday mornings. Over the years, Catherine had grown so accustomed to Theresa’s steady efficient rhythm that she noticed immediately when Theresa began working faster, stuffing clothes into the machine with an awkward, secretive haste. When Catherine was busy in the kitchen, or anywhere near the washer, Theresa hovered over it, making idle conversation. If the cycle ended while Theresa was out of the room, she’d race back, as if to make sure that her mother didn’t get there first. She waited to unload the washer till Catherine stepped out; when Catherine wouldn’t leave, she pulled the clothes out in a tight little knot which she hid with her body.

In the shop, women were perpetually telling stories about teenagers who acted this way about their rooms, their purses, and mothers who ferreted out caches of marijuana and birth control pills. But what, Catherine wondered, could Theresa be hiding in the laundry?

One morning, Catherine waited in her room till she heard Theresa go into the bathroom, then hurried to the kitchen and opened the washing machine. As the spinning slowed, she saw several pairs of men’s socks plastered flat against the drum, white crews striped with blue. Where had Joseph gotten such socks? Then she realized: They weren’t Joseph’s. First she was embarrassed, then surprised to find herself so moved that tears came to her eyes. It wasn’t that she wanted to rush Theresa into a lifetime of washing some boy’s dirty socks; she herself had been doing it long enough to know that there was no intrinsic glory in it. Still, those blue stripes, stopped now in their orbit, had made her think: The next round of socks, and soon it’s the next set of baby clothes. Life goes on.

She closed the lid and told no one about her discovery. She knew from her magazines that girls wanted privacy in these matters, especially at first. Theresa would mention it when she was ready. Nor did she tell Joseph, for she knew how fathers worry.

Now more than ever, they had cause for alarm. In the afternoons, when Catherine turned on the television for company, a program didn’t go by without some reference to teenage sex, drugs, runaways, communes, gurus, innocent children ravaged by LSD and free love. Even in the neighborhood, life had changed. Women announced their daughters’ weddings and couldn’t look at you; but when the grandchildren came six months later, they dared you to look away. There had always been such babies, but now no one bothered pretending they were premature. Now the mothers said: “You think when the children are grown, you can stop worrying. But the worrying never stops.”

Yet Catherine wasn’t worried. She knew that Theresa would never turn into one of those commune girls with their frizzy hair, their beads and empty eyes. Theresa was the kind who had the wedding ring at least nine months before the baby. And even if she were doing more for this boy than washing his socks … Catherine knocked on wood and told herself that a slightly “premature” grandchild was better than a daughter in a convent.

Weeks passed, and Theresa remained so reticent about her boyfriend that Catherine had to reassure herself of his continued existence by examining the laundry. One Saturday, she found a T-shirt with a name tag—“Leonard Villanova”—carefully stitched on.

Later, remembering this, Catherine felt a chill—the shiver which, she imagined, would come over you on first hearing the name of someone who will eventually do you harm. But at the time, she thought: Thank God. An Italian boy with a mama who loves him.

Later, Catherine would recall all this to explain her misreading of the color in Theresa’s cheeks. And Joseph would comfort her, saying: How could they have known? Even if they had recognized the flush, they could never have diagnosed the disease. For how could they have suspected that Theresa’s flame for Leonard burned low beside her fever for those T-shirts and socks?

No one told Joseph and Catherine that Theresa had stopped going to school. No one noticed. She was not the kind of girl whose presence would be missed in a large lecture hall, nor had she ever been one to seek out her professors’ personal attention.

Each day, she stayed longer at Leonard’s apartment—dusting, straightening, intercepting discarded shirts on their way to the hamper. Salt stains were not permitted to accumulate on Leonard’s boots, nor was Leonard allowed to sleep on the same pillowcase twice. He couldn’t pick up a sugar spoon without her swiping beneath it to wipe the table. And yet, for all these intimate attentions, she seemed progressively less interested in going to bed with him. Often, in the midst of it, he’d catch her eyeing the clock, and it would turn out that she had put the spaghetti water on to boil before coming to his room.

She arrived in the morning to hand him his orange juice and coffee, to hold his jacket and knot his tie. Most days, when Leonard left for classes, Theresa was just getting busy in the kitchen.

“Go ahead.” She’d glance up at him from a sink full of dishes or a sudsy floor. “I’ll let myself out when I’m through.”

But she never seemed to finish. At lunch, Leonard and his roommates would come home to find her kneeling by the stove; the harsh smell of oven cleaner clung to their clothes and followed them to their rooms.

Though Al and Vince gladly shared the leftover delicacies and teased Leonard about loaning Theresa out to make their beds, they were just as glad that Leonard wasn’t about to loan her. They didn’t want anyone staring at them with that doggy look she gave Leonard. They suspected her of manufacturing work; it was a small apartment, there wasn’t that much to clean. They knew that girls went to extraordinary lengths to catch husbands. But Theresa was going too far.

One afternoon, Al walked into the kitchen to discover Theresa scouring the inside of the toaster with a toothbrush. Intent, nearly cross-eyed with concentration, she didn’t look up, didn’t even hear him. That evening, when Theresa went home, Al and Vince knocked on Leonard’s door.

“Al and I,” began Vince, in the hushed tone which he supposed a lawyer might use in approaching a partner on a personal and highly delicate matter, “we know you and Theresa are pretty close. We think the world of her, I swear. But what we’ve been thinking is, maybe you’re
too
close. What we mean is … Al and I’ve been noticing … It’s not normal how she knocks herself out around here. There’s neat people, there’s clean people, there’s good housekeepers … But Theresa’s not normal. Maybe it’s the strain—first year of college, papers, exams, you remember. Maybe she should talk to somebody.”

“I’ve talked to her,” said Leonard. “Believe me. Last week I found her dusting the radiators with a ripped-up handkerchief she’d fished out of the garbage. And the next day, she must have had second thoughts, she was darning the damn handkerchief. She scrubs the inside of the juice bottles before she’ll throw them in the trash, she’d brush my teeth if I let her….”

Leonard stopped. Al and Vince were staring at him. Misinterpreting, he imagined that the question in their minds was, “What’s a smart guy like Leonard doing with a crazy female like that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t. She wasn’t always like this. She’s a nice girl, it seemed like we had a lot in common. She was so sweet, she couldn’t do enough for me. How was I supposed to know? And
now
what? If I tell her I don’t want to see her anymore, God knows what she’ll do. I wouldn’t want to take the responsibility.”

“We’re not saying stop seeing her,” said Vince.

“Then what? You tell me.”

“You talked to her?” said Al.

“Twice a day. I tell her, ‘Look, Theresa, you don’t have to wash my socks. My own mother won’t do that anymore, I’m a grown man, I can go to the laundromat.’ But she just gives me that terrible scarey smile and says, ‘Please let me. I want to.’”

“Maybe you’d
better
tell somebody,” said Vince.

“Who?”

“Her family.”

“That’s all we need. Her father’s a butcher. He’ll be over here with a meat cleaver in five minutes flat.”

“Isn’t there a guidance counsellor at her school …?”

Leonard wouldn’t dignify this with an answer.

“Then okay, a doctor. A psychiatrist.” Al looked to Vince for support. Vince nodded. “Leonard, it looks to us like she’s having some kind of nervous breakdown.”

The truth was that Theresa’s behavior over the past weeks had so alarmed Leonard that he’d checked out every psychiatry text from the law school library.

“Listen,” he said. “Backward schizophrenics don’t cook gourmet meals. No, Theresa’s just going through a mild, pretty textbook manic-depressive episode. Overwork, mood swings, cycles … Sometimes these things blow over on their own, especially if there’s no previous history. Let’s wait. Ride it out. Spring’s coming, I’ll make her go easy on the housework, get out more. She’ll get better.” Winded from the effort of sounding like an expert, Leonard took a deep breath and thought of how, in a few short months, Theresa had shaken his confidence in expertise.