A Kiss Under the Christmas Lights

by Peggy Jaeger

  Nothing.

  Like I said, weird.

  He’d slipped his funky-colored gloves back on after shaking hands.

  I don’t know what possessed me, but before I could stop myself I said, “Nice hat and mittens.”

  I heard the sarcasm in my voice, but apparently no one else did, because Fr. Santini’s face lit up like an LED light.

  “My sister, Elizabeth Ann, made them for me last Christmas. In fact, she made them for all my siblings.”

  “Elizabeth Ann,” Daddy said, “is the one who’s special needs, right, Padre? I remember you saying that at mass.”

  “Yes. She’s the love of my family, too. I’ve never met a happier, sweeter kid. She’s simply a delight to be around.”

  Awww. That was just too sweet. What a great brother. I remembered he’d said pretty much the same thing in Pontevecchio’s about his sister. I said a silent prayer for the parking lot to open again so I could hop on that express to hell, where I so deserved to go.

  Addressing Daddy and looking around, the father said, “This turnout is wonderful. It’s great to see so many parishioners involved in the festival.”

  “St. Rita’s is a close-knit parish, Father. You’ll see, once you’re all settled in. We’re like a big family. Like yours.” Daddy looked down at me. “Remember the father is one of ten kids, Gia? He was telling us about his family during his homily.”

  I nodded, not correcting him about my whereabouts during mass. I didn’t want to remind him about Arianna’s gastric explosion. It didn’t seem like appropriate conversation in front of a priest.

  But as always, I forgot my family doesn’t hold back on whether something is appropriate or not.

  “Oh, wait. You missed that.” Daddy smacked his palm across his forehead. “My new granddaughter,” he said to the priest, “needed her diaper changed. Stunk up the entire section. Who knew something so little could be so packed with foul-smelling stuff?”

  He laughed, and I wanted the earth to open up and drop me down to hell ASAP.

  “Gia is Arianna’s godmother, so she did the honors of changing her. Missed your introduction.”

  “My sister Mary Alice just had a baby a month ago,” Fr. Santini said with a grin. “Her third girl. I’m used to being around little ones since I’m an uncle five times over.” His smile grew wider. “I’m finally going to get to baptize one, too. I’m officiating at little Sophia’s ceremony on New Year’s, right after my ordination.”

  Daddy smiled, said “Congrats,” and crossed himself.

  Reflexively, I did the same.

  The two of them continued speaking while I just stood there, silently seething and so uncomfortable I wanted to scream.

  How could he act as if nothing had happened between us? And forgetting all about the kiss, because, of course, he wouldn’t want to tell my father he’d had his tongue down my throat, his strong hands cupping my butt, why hadn’t he admitted we’d met on setup day? We’d spent quite some time together, and he never even acknowledged it.

  Why not?

  All this ran through my head while they spoke. I was beginning to get an Aunt Gracie-like headache when I was pulled away by someone wanting to buy a few jars of sauce. Thrilled for the diversion, I gladly took care of the sale.

  “I’ll have my wife call the rectory soon, Padre, and set up a time you can join my family for dinner,” Daddy said as Fr. Santini walked away from our booth.

  What?

  When Santini was out of earshot, I turned on my father. “Why did you invite him to dinner? He can’t possibly come to our house.”

  Daddy’s bushy eyebrows pulled together, making him look like he had two caterpillars crawling on his forehead. “Why not?” Concern tugged his mouth down. “Your mama specifically told me to ask him if I saw him here tonight.”

  There was no way I could tell him the real reason the good father should never be allowed in our home. If Daddy ever found out a priest had kissed me, and not in a pure, innocent, holy manner, and I’d been a willing participant in the encounter, well, Uncle Sonny would be calling some of his nefarious friends to make a St. Rita’s run at midnight and we’d never see the young padre again.

  Ever.

  “I just mean he’ll be too busy getting used to the parish to take time out to visit and have supper. He’s new. He needs to attend to parish business, not visit with people. Help Fr. Mario, now that he’s here. You know…do priest things and…stuff.”

  Mio Dio. This babbling was becoming an uncomfortable habit.

  Daddy continued to stare at me, his frown deepening, the groves folding down his cheeks like craters imploding. “When was the last time you ate something, Gia? ’Cuz your brain isn’t working too good right now. You’re talking all weird and disconnected. Here.” He handed me Mama’s care bag. “You need some food. Eat the snack Mama sent.”

  How to be a Good Italian, Lesson Six:

  When something emotional comes up, eat.

  Without a doubt, it is the only way

  to deal with the problem effectively.

  So I did.

  Chapter Eight

  Burying someone right before Christmas is a tricky endeavor. The churches are decorated for the joyous holiday, not a funeral procession, draped in virginal white, not despondent black. Bright red poinsettias fill the altar, not stark, frost-colored lilies of the valley. The Christmas season instills in one and all a sense of happiness at Jesus’s birth, not sadness at a mortal’s passing.

  But Uncle Vito needed to be waked and buried no matter what time of year he left us for his heavenly reward, and Nonna made sure her older brother went out in the style befitting a fallen son of Italy.

  And by that I mean she pulled out all the stops and spared no expense. Or I should say she spared none of Daddy’s expense, since he was the one footing the bill. How that happened I have no idea.

  We waked Uncle Vito in the Mogliadini Family Funeral Home on Thursday and Friday. Nonna had insisted her brother be laid out in the Cadillac of the viewing rooms, affectionately called the Eternal Reward Parlor. It was twice as big as the other viewing rooms and was the most aesthetically pleasing to the eye, according to Nonna. Rich, dark cherrywood paneling lined the walls; a floor-to-ceiling bay window on one side overlooked the East River; numerous capo diamanté cherubim and seraphim statues were scattered around the room on pedestals. Portraits of the last three Holy Fathers framed the walls, in addition to two humongous oil depictions of a crucified Christ.

  In my opinion the room was fourteen kinds of creepy, but whatever Nonna wants, Nonna gets.

  So.

  Eternal Reward was packed to the mourning rafters both nights. Cousins—first, second, and third—showed up to pay their respects, some of whom I hadn’t seen since I was a kid or had never even met.

  The room exploded with people, flowers, and floral arrangements, the largest from Uncle Vito’s old OTB gambling cronies. An obscenely massive assortment of red and pink lilies, carnations, and roses, it had a six-foot gold banner with “He played the odds and won big. Happy travels wherever you wind up, Vito” across it.

  Nonna’s face pinched into her constipated-and-needing-relief look when she spied it standing in a place of honor next to the coffin. She clicked her tongue, slithered her eyelids down to almost closing, and mumbled something under her breath in Italian.

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d put a curse on the whole gang of them.

  As good little Italians, we all wore black, although the only ones to be totally decked out from underclothes to outerwear were the relatives who were eighty and above, this being a sign of high respect for the departed. Very old-school Italian and old-world traditional. Nonna dressed head to toe in black every day of her life, so she looked just like she always did.

  I won’t bore you with all the over-the-top stories and remembrances about Vito that passed those two nights between his relatives and betting buddies. Suffice it to say I got a little queasy when tales of his rumo
red sexual prowess were discussed by the cronies, all of them laughing, then wheezing from laughing, and then choking from wheezing.

  I was prepared a couple of times for one of them to keel over from lack of oxygen. In fact, the owner of Vito’s favorite OTB parlor arrived attached to an oxygen tank he wheeled in front of him. He had the loudest laugh/wheeze of all.

  Mama instructed me to stick close to Nonna while she received the mourners and to make sure she had everything she needed, like tissues, memorial cards, water. In truth, Mama wanted me to keep an eye out for any signs my grandmother was getting ready to let loose and go postal on the relatives.

  Don’t laugh…there’s been precedent.

  At Nonno’s visitation, two of his surviving brothers arrived three-sheets-to-the-wind smashed, having spent the afternoon toasting him at a local bar. And by toasting, I mean doing shots. A lot of shots. The brothers were loud, obnoxious, and annoying during the somber service, saying inappropriate things and laughing at each other’s silly jokes. Nonna, the bereaved widow, had taken a fireplace poker and brandished it like a sword, expelling them from the wake.

  So when Mama asked me to stick close it was because, as the youngest grandchild, I’m also the quickest.

  Mogliadini’s was stifling and overheated from the crush of bodies present both nights. The heat was jacked up high because it was winter, but it was unnecessary since the throng of people throwing off body heat would have been sufficient to boil an egg. Everyone who came to pay respects stayed until viewing hours were over.

  There’s no such thing at an Italian wake as simply paying your respects and then leaving.

  No such luck.

  Every mourner arrived right on time—if not fifteen minutes early to claim a space in line—paraded in front of the decedent’s coffin, said a prayer, and then delivered a few words of condolence to the immediate family.

  This is where most people would now exit.

  Not my relatives.

  Every last one of them claimed a folding chair as their own or else crowded around the perimeter of the room, watching, noting, and assessing every other mourner.

  And also commenting on Uncle Vito: how he looked, the circumstances of his death, and what was going to happen to his estate since he never married and had apparently—according to one fourth cousin I overheard talking and whom I didn’t know from Adam—socked away his race-track winnings all his life to leave one tidy nest egg.

  All agreed he looked too young to have died. Ninety-six, they concurred, and he appeared no older than eighty.

  On my way to get Nonna more water because she was literally wilting from the heat, I eavesdropped on a pair of fifty-something fringe relatives as they were discussing how Vito died.

  Fringe relative #1: So sad to go out the way he did.

  FR #2: How?

  FR #1: Didn’t you hear? Gesu. They found him sitting up in his bed, covered in his own waste, a big whopping infection in his urine no one knew he had. Temperature of one hundred and six. Disgraceful.

  FR# 2: Madonna. Think we can sue?

  Remember that body language I told you Mama is a pro at? These two had the same moves. Fringe relative number one put her hands palms up, frowned, shot her eyebrows up her forehead, and shrugged. “Who knows?”

  I was so tempted to stop and tell them the plain, sad truth. Vito died when an all-consuming stroke shook through his weakened system, shutting off the necessary volume of blood and oxygen his heart and brain needed.

  He didn’t have an infection, and he hadn’t been found lying in bed covered in poop and pee.

  At the time he’d stroked, he’d been sitting in his wheelchair, strapped in with a chest restraint so he wouldn’t fall out, reruns of I Love Lucy playing on the big-screen television mounted on the wall.

  Italians do love their drama, though.

  Suffice it to say I neglected telling any of this to Nonna, fearful she’d grab the closest pointed object she could find and wield it at them.

  ****

  Saturday morning, we laid Vito to rest in St. Rita’s cemetery.

  The day was cold and clear, a steady wind pulling off the East River as Vito was placed into the family grave next to three brothers and a sister who beat him to heaven.

  Ten days before Christmas is not a bustling time for burials. The ground is winter-frozen hard, the work of opening it up for casket placement, tough and arduous. I’d heard Daddy whisper to Mama just the night before that Uncle Sonny had to call in some markers just so we’d have good gravediggers on hand and not some inebriated holiday part-timer fly-by-nights who wouldn’t do as good a job.

  Fr. Mario officiated at the mass, Fr. Heartthrob, as I’d taken to calling him, by his side.

  I hadn’t seen the good almost-priest since the first night of the festival. Chloe’s husband, Matt, and my brothers’ wives had been working at the family booth in shifts during the week so immediate blood family—and Nonna had been insistent on using that word—could help her plan for Uncle Vito’s wake and funeral. The entire family, though, was present for the wake, mass, and burial.

  Italians are amazing cooks, artists, architects, and carmakers. What we do best in my opinion, though, is mourn.

  We are not shy about showing our soul-sucking emotions, men and women alike. And when we are mourning a family member, well, that’s when we shine like the gold lacing the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica.

  Nonna and her remaining brothers and their wives sat in the front row in church, Mama and her sisters and brothers included. I was two rows back, behind my father, brothers, and their families, holding Arianna and sitting next to Chloe and her family.

  The church reeked of acrid-smelling incense as the good fathers swung the thurible back and forth across the altar and then over Uncle Vito’s closed casket, creating an incense smoke storm over the front of the church. This was the one part of any mass I hated. I always stank of frankincense and cloves for the rest of the day, no amount of fresh air or perfume helping to mask the powerful odor.

  Lorenzo was squirming in his seat next to his father, holding his nose, his mouth and the corners of his little eyes pulling down into disgusted and expressive two-year-old grimaces.

  The smoke billowed into a cloud of noxious vapor, wafting throughout St. Rita’s.

  Nonna held a handkerchief across her mouth and nose, spritzed with what I knew were a few drops of her favorite old-lady perfume, as pungent and overpowering as the burning spices and resins.

  Every few moments a sob or a loud sniffle would drown out Fr. Mario’s metronomic delivery of the mass. I knew this was just the buildup to what was coming. By the time Uncle Vito’s soul was blessed and sent on its way to heaven—or wherever it was headed—the wailing and keening would start, big time. Family members who hadn’t seen him in years would be prostrating themselves on one another, crying about what a good man he was and how could he leave us when he had so much still to live for, when he was still such a vital man?

  Obviously, they’d forgotten the past few years of his life, secured to a chair by a chest restraint so he wouldn’t fall to the floor and break a hip, a plastic catheter attached to his shriveled and unused manhood, and a feeding tube draining into his stomach.

  But he still had so much to live for, they’d say. Even at ninety-six.

  Italians…

  Arianna was sound asleep in my arms, her little newborn snores and baby body noises charming and delighting me as I rocked her gently. I snuck a glance at Chloe, her hand held in her good-looking, successful husband’s grip, a look of utter love and contentment across her face.

  The truth is I wanted the same thing in my life. A man who adored me beyond reason, children I could hold and coddle and spoil, and a love that lasted forever.

  My gaze drifted up to the altar. Fr. Santini, handsome and resplendent in his somber ceremonial robes, was preparing for Communion.

  I was still reeling from the way he’d so easily disregarded what had happened between us, a
nd I’d been deliberating the past few days if I should say something to him about it, in private.

  But in saying something, I had to admit culpability as well, something I didn’t want to do.

  How was it possible I could look at him one day and be so overcome by desire I couldn’t put a sentence together, and the next day, it was as if we were strangers just meeting?

  Something was obviously wrong with me. Exam stress, family commotion, my worries about my future…something. There was no logical way I could explain the dichotomy of my emotions and actions. I seriously considered making an appointment with our family doctor and scheduling a mental wellness checkup, but I nixed the idea almost the moment it bloomed because our family doc is the son of an old friend of one of Nonna’s Rosary Society members. You might think, so what? But believe me when I tell you in Italian culture there is no such thing as obeying federally mandated privacy laws. The information superhighway can trace its origins straight back to little-old-Italian- lady caffè klatches. If I went for a psych evaluation, the entire neighborhood and parish would know about it before I left the shrink’s office.

  When Communion came, I lifted Arianna and followed the procession. The church was packed with family, some of Vito’s ambulatory, non-brain-fried friends from the nursing home, and a large number of his old betting buddies and cohorts, so both priests were charged with giving Communion.

  I was happy I was on Fr. Mario’s side of the aisle. I didn’t know if I could look Santini in the eyes again and not blush or give away what I’d been thinking.

  As predicted, as soon as the mass drew to a close and the priests blessed the coffin, Vito’s soul, etc., the yowling and wailing started. Arianna gave a little slumberous, unconscious jump in my arms when one of the third—or possibly fourth—cousins screeched Vito’s name in grief-stricken reverence.

  How to be a Good Italian, Lesson Seven:

  Show the world your true emotions.