Household Saints (26 page)

“Something’s wrong,” said Catherine. “I knew it the minute I got up this morning.”

All that was wrong was a slight touch of the flu—nothing serious, according to the nuns who padded in and out on their gum-soled shoes, bringing aspirin and orange juice. Doctor Fontana had been in to check on her that morning and had prescribed an antibiotic. With God’s help, she would recover in three or four days.

Theresa didn’t even look sick. She was wearing the sort of washed-out white flannel nightgown which can make healthy people look deathly ill; even so, her color was good, almost too good for a girl who’d spent the winter shuttling between an overheated laundry and a cold stone floor. Propped up on pillows, she lay between crisp sheets, her hands folded over the rough green blanket.

“At least it got her out of the laundry,” whispered Joseph.

“Shh.” Catherine hurried to give Theresa a hug and kiss. Joseph held back.

“You contagious?” he said. “I’ve got to go to work tomorrow.”

“Papa.” Theresa patted the edge of the bed. “Come sit by me. I need your help.”

“At your service.” Joseph took off his driving gloves and rubbed his hands together, blowing into his palms. “What can I do for you?”

“I need some advice.”

Joseph looked at Catherine. He couldn’t remember Theresa ever asking him for advice. Maybe Stella Maris was doing her good.

“What about?”

“Pinochle,” said Theresa.

“Pinochle?” Joseph laughed so hard that he had to sit down. “Is that what you’re doing here with my money? Playing pinochle?”

“We don’t play for money. Just points.”

“That’s a relief,” said Joseph. “Who do you play with?”

“God the Father and Jesus and St. Therese.”

Joseph laughed again, less heartily than before.

“You mean, there’s people here who think they’re God and Jesus and—”

“I mean God and Jesus and St. Therese.”

Joseph glanced at Catherine. She was patting the air: Easy, take it easy. Humor her.

“You folks play often?” he asked.

“Last night was the first time. God had to teach me the rules. Of course they let me have a few practice hands. But you would have been proud of me, Papa. I got the hang of it right away.”

“It’s in the blood,” said Joseph.

Catherine groaned.

“Don’t worry, Mama. If God’s playing, it’s got to be all right.”

“This is crazy,” said Joseph. “This is the craziest thing I ever heard.”

Catherine shot him a warning look.

“You play partners?” he said.

“Girls against boys.”

“I should have known,” said Joseph.

“We got slaughtered, Papa. We never had a chance. Please don’t tell anyone I said so, but the Little Flower wasn’t much of a pinochle player. She mumbled so low, you couldn’t hear what she bid. God had to make her repeat herself twenty times. It seemed like she passed them every card they needed—it was like she didn’t want to win.”

“That’s a saint for you,” said Catherine.

“I guess.” Theresa sighed. “I guess I’ll never be a saint. I wanted to win, I played hard. But even if I’d been an expert … we still didn’t have a chance. Because God and Jesus drew nothing but high cards—straights, flushes, the jack of diamonds, the queen of spades. Between them, they controlled every hand. We quit when they had five hundred points and St. Therese and I had zero.”

“Honey,” said Catherine, “it was God you were playing with. Wouldn’t you expect Him to win?”

“You too?” Joseph stared at her.

“I never expected to be playing pinochle with God,” said Theresa.

“I know what you mean,” admitted Catherine.

“And if I had,” continued Theresa, “I would have expected Him to play fair.”

“He didn’t?”

Theresa looked around the room and out into the hall, as if to make sure that no one was listening.

“If it hadn’t been God, I would have sworn He was cheating.”

“He probably was,” said Joseph.

“He was.” Again Theresa checked for eavesdroppers. “After the game was over, God let the others leave before Him. On His way out, He stopped and whispered real low so the others couldn’t hear:

“‘Theresa,’ He told me, ‘of all my great miracles, my favorites are tipping the scales and cheating at pinochle.’

“That’s what He said. Can you believe it?”

“I can believe it.” Joseph looked pale.

No one spoke for a long time. Then Catherine said, “Joseph, what time have you got?”

Joseph looked at his watch.

“The four o’clock train left ten minutes ago. We’d better go, we’ll be stuck at the station all night.”

“We’ll call tomorrow,” said Catherine. “You rest up, get better.”

“I feel wonderful,” said Theresa. “Don’t worry.”

Catherine touched her forehead.

“You’re burning up. I’ll send the nurse in when we go.”

Joseph and Catherine kissed their daughter’s flushed face and left. They were silent in the taxi, but in the train Joseph said, “It’s happening again. All that money we paid, and it’s happening again.”

“Nothing’s happening,” said Catherine. “She’s had a fever. She was delirious.”

“That’s nothing? Anyhow, I don’t believe that’s it. What about the last time, at Leonard’s? Ninety-eight-point-six.”

“This is different. You heard the nurses. In three or four days, she’ll be fine.”

They watched the landscape rush by, rain pecking holes in the melting snow.

“This has got to be some kind of record,” said Joseph. “Snow in May.” Then he said, “Listen, how much did she know?”

“About what?”

“You know about what. The pinochle game. Before we got married.”

“Maybe she knew, maybe not.
I
didn’t tell her. But people talk … What difference does it make?”

“It seems like the end of the story,” said Joseph. “Twenty years ago, I won my wife in a card game. And now our crazy daughter is playing pinochle with God.”

“Take it easy. It’s not your fault. No one ever went crazy because her father won her mother in a pinochle game.”

“I’m not saying it’s my fault. Far from it. I’m saying there’s a pattern.”

“Patterns. Next you’ll be counting potato eyes like your mother.”

“Look at that rain,” said Joseph, and that was the end of the conversation till the train was pulling into Penn Station. Then Joseph turned to Catherine and said, “It makes you think. I mean, maybe there is a God, and He’s the kind of guy who cheats at pinochle. Isn’t that what they say, that you make Him in your own image? And like your father says: Isn’t it perfect? Isn’t it just perfect that a God who cheats at pinochle would end the story this way?”

But it wasn’t the end of the story.

There was something which Catherine never told Joseph. Ordinarily she might have mentioned it, but his talk on the train about patterns made her keep it to herself: Every Sunday evening, they had sausage fried with onions and peppers. Easy, quick, delicious, it was by now an integral part of their weekly ritual. But that Sunday, Theresa’s illness had so altered their established routine that Catherine couldn’t even fry the sausage without feeling that something was different.

She was almost finished cooking when she realized that one of her cacti had flowered—the one she’d bought at Woolworth’s on that morning when Theresa disappeared. In all the years since, it had neither grown nor shrunk, blossomed nor looked any less like a pebble than it did that first day. Still Catherine had gone on watering it, treasuring it as a kind of memento which she could no more throw away than she could Theresa’s baby pictures.

Now there was a marble-sized lump on top, covered with downy spines, a dark red tinged with fuchsia, like the center of a rose.

Catherine had always loved flowering plants. But this one terrified her, and she moved it to the back of the shelf where she wouldn’t have to see it. This unaccountable dread stayed with her all night and woke her at five in the morning, thinking: There’s more. The other shoe.

When the phone rang, she was not even startled, but lay there patiently, waiting for Joseph to answer.

“Mister Santangelo,” said the voice on the phone, “this is Sister Cupertino from Stella Maris. I’m sorry to call so early, but I have some bad news for you. Mister Santangelo, your daughter has gone to God.”

“Gone where?” Joseph mumbled groggily.

“To heaven.”

“No,” said Joseph.

“What’s wrong?” said Catherine. “What happened?”

“Mister Santangelo, are you still there?”

“I’m here. What happened?”

“God took her.”

“I mean how. How did it happen?”

“What?” said Catherine. “Joseph, tell me.”

“Fever,” said Sister Cupertino. “A sudden high fever. That’s all we know. Sister Lucy went in to check on her on her morning rounds at four. She took Theresa’s temperature. It was a hundred and six. She went to call Doctor Fontana, and when she got back at four-fifteen, Theresa had passed away—”

“It took her fifteen minutes to make a phone call?”

“Mister Santangelo, it was four in the morning. She got the doctor’s answering service. Believe me, it was a great shock to us all.”

“We’ll be right out.” Joseph hung up the phone.

“Theresa’s dead,” said Catherine.

Joseph put his arms around her and they held each other without speaking until Catherine said, “I feel like a hole’s opened up in the world and my life’s fallen through.”

“I know what you mean,” said Joseph. “About the hole.”

They got up and got dressed.

“I guess there’s no hurry,” said Joseph. “We might as well wait for the light to come up.” They drank coffee till shortly after dawn, then left.

It was a clear spring morning, so lovely that it seemed a shame to sleep it away, and Mulberry Street was wide awake. Shopkeepers were hosing down the sidewalk in front of their stores. Rainbows shone in the spray, and the asphalt gleamed in the morning sun. Early as it was, the streets were full of people dressed for work—secretaries in the new spring dresses which they’d bought as promises to themselves in the middle of winter.

“Wouldn’t you know it?” said Joseph. “Now’s when we get a good day for traveling.”

Catherine stared at him.

“Some good day,” she said.

At the entrance to Penn Station, boys were selling bunches of daffodils.

“You want some flowers?” asked Joseph.

“Daffodils? What for?”

As the train rolled through the suburbs, Joseph and Catherine saw patches of green on every lawn. They passed freshly plowed gardens, and the air carried the smell of manure. Half the trees were surrounded by the reddish aura which immediately precedes the formation of buds; the other half were already in bud.

“You know at the end of ‘Red Riding Hood’?” said Catherine. “When they cut the wolf’s stomach open and fill it with stones? That’s how my stomach feels.”

“Red Riding Hood?” murmured Joseph. He pointed out the window. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know. A hyacinth, maybe.”

In the taxi, Catherine said, “In the sunshine, it’s a whole different ride.”

Stella Maris looked so unfamiliar that Catherine was momentarily afraid that the cab driver had let them off at the wrong place.

“Jesus,” said Joseph. “Would you look at that?”

“I’m looking,” said Catherine.

The garden was in full bloom. Delicate pink strands hung from the weeping cherries like the fringes of a shawl. The forsythia and early willow were bright yellow, the new grass yellow-green. Beds of daffodils, violets and blue forget-me-nots lined the walkway, and sunlight shone pearly and translucent through drifts of jonquils.

“It’s not natural,” whispered Joseph.

“What? What are you whispering for?”

“It’s not natural. It’s not right. Yesterday it was winter and today it’s spring.”

“Some years it happens like that.”

“Not like this. Mud one day, the next a garden. Besides, you saw on the way out—the rest of the Island doesn’t look like this.”

“They’ve got good gardeners. The Church always gets the best. There’s always some monsignor who’ll throw a fit if he sees a dandelion on the lawn.”

“The
Pope
couldn’t do this. Not overnight.”

“What do you know about it? The closest you ever got to nature was Frank Manzone’s vegetable stand.”

“Enough to know that you don’t pull a garden out of a hat.”

“Its not out of a hat. There were buds yesterday, the flowers were ready to pop. But it was raining, you didn’t notice….”

“Believe me, I would have noticed.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Okay, you’re the plant lady. You tell me. Is this natural or not?”

Joseph had stopped beside a bed of daffodils and was looking down at the flowers. They were all the same color: creamy white, with pale yellow centers and saffron stigmata. Joseph wanted to touch the orange stamens, but hesitated. Strangely, he was remembering his wedding night—how scared he’d been to touch Catherine. That night, he’d convinced himself that it was not just permissible—but necessary for life to go on. Yet now, nothing could have persuaded him to touch the inside of those flowers.

“It’s those patterns again,” he said. “Even the weather’s in on it. Remember how hot it was, the night of that pinochle game? And how it rained the next day when you came into the shop? Now for months it rains every Sunday and all of a sudden, the sun …”

“Joseph.” Catherine spoke very softly. “Theresa’s lying out here dead and we’re talking about the weather.”

“You think I forgot?” said Joseph. “What else should we talk about?”

Catherine had turned her back to him. Her head was bent, her shoulders rounded. Joseph had to remind himself that forty wasn’t old, because at that moment the alley cat he had married looked like an old woman.

“I’m sorry,” he said, then put his arm around her and kept it there till they reached the lobby.

Sister Cupertino and a priest whom she introduced as Father Dominic were waiting for them. Father Dominic was a thin little man with pointed features, blue-white skin, dark circles under his eyes and a heavy five o’clock shadow. It occurred to Joseph that the priest looked worse than Theresa ever did, and Theresa was dead.

Sister Cupertino took Catherine’s hands between her dry palms and held them. Father Dominic, whose hands were somewhat stickier, did the same to Joseph.