The Patron Saint of Ugly

by Marie Manilla

  Grandma stood beneath the largest chandelier of all, arms crossed as she dressed down the maid, a globular black woman of sixty or so wearing a crisp dress, a white apron, and a cap. I had met a black person for the first time just a year before, when Nicky and I drove with Dad to the Sweetwater lumberyard. We were in the pickup bay and Dad was tying two-by-fours onto the roof of the station wagon when a black man approached.

  “Hey, Albert,” Dad said. They shook hands, Dad’s dark-skinned fingers meeting Albert’s slightly darker-skinned ones.

  “I want you to meet my boy—my kids,” Dad corrected himself when he twisted around and saw me. “Garnet, this is Mr. Fulwood. We work together at the Plant.”

  Albert bent forward, holding out his hand. I stared at it for no longer than he stared at Taiwan on my knuckle. I was captivated by the wide plane of his pink palm, thumb the size of a kosher dill. “Pleasure to meet you, sugar snap.” He shook my hand.

  “That’s Nicky.” Dad nodded at my brother, giving him a Come here look. Nicky obeyed, and Albert also shook his hand, though he offered no endearment.

  That simple memory of Dad, Nicky, even the stupid station wagon that now looked like an accordion and was sighing in the village dump, made my chest ache. The tears sprang, silent ones, since I didn’t want to give away my position.

  “This is intolerable, Opal,” Grandma railed. “Absolutely intolerable. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Opal said, eyes to the floor.

  Grandma spun on her pumps, leaving Opal as stiff as one of those statues. When Grandma was out of sight, Opal crossed her arms and flapped her lips in a good Grandma Iris imitation. I adored her instantly, and even more when she tipped her head toward me. “Morning, honeydew. You hungry?”

  I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “I want my mom.”

  Opal lumbered up to me and draped her arm around my shoulder. “Course you do.” She led me down the hall to the east wing. “It was her daddy’s suite.” I was not surprised that Grandfather Postscript had had his own section of the house, four rooms in a row. The first was the mother of all globe rooms, where pieces from my collection had already been reshelved. The second was a library with Nicky’s Britannicas stacked in a corner. The third was a study with a massive desk and walls completely covered with cocktail napkins, dry-cleaner receipts, matchbook covers, ticker tape, pages ripped from ledgers, all scribbled with phrases like fly-fish the queen and succumb the lowly collier. I remember thinking: Uh-oh.

  The last room was the bedchamber with a sleigh bed that ferried my mother to what I hoped were blissful dreams. I climbed up and leaned close to her face, her closed eyes. She had always been thin but looked fragile now, and all my anger vanished.

  Opal pulled a handkerchief from her apron to dab her eyes. “I helped raise your mama from the minute she was born. It’s good to have her home, but not like this, Lord. Not like this.”

  “Mom,” I whispered. “Mom.”

  Her eyelids fluttered, but they didn’t open. I saw a pharmacy on the bedside table and I wondered if Grandma had induced a coma in my mother to prevent her making yet another escape.

  “Better let her rest.” Opal guided me off the bed and down a back set of stairs that led to the kitchen.

  Sitting at the table was the cook, also dressed in maid regalia. Cookie was in her thirties, skinny as Radisson, and the third black person I’d ever met. Though her left hand was bare, her right was rammed into a too-tight rubber glove, which mildly impeded her task of peeling potatoes over a grocery sack. More fascinating to me was the cleft in her chin so pronounced that it made her chin look like butt cheeks. She was singing along with “Please Mr. Postman” blaring from the transistor radio beside her.

  “I told you not to listen to that racket in here!” Opal said, shutting it off.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cookie said, though she was eyeballing me.

  “Ma’am says she’s going to tan our hides if we streak up those mirrors again. I gave you that job ’cause I thought you could handle it. This is intolerable, Cookie. Absolutely intolerable. You understand me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cookie said, eyes now on her potatoes.

  Opal patted a chair, indicating that I should sit. “Cookie will fix you something to eat.” She sashayed out, apron bow above her rear end swaying from side to side. I looked at Cookie, expecting a good Opal imitation, but she just started singing, not “Please Mr. Postman” but “There Is a Balm in Gilead.” She stood and, still wearing that glove, cut a thick slice of bread, slathered it with apple butter, and handed it to me.

  “Bet the kids back home gave you a time of it.”

  I was stunned by her directness.

  “And plenty of grownups too,” she added, pouring me a glass of milk. “It won’t be easy for you here. Lord knows it hasn’t been easy for me and I only got—” She swiveled around to see if anyone was snooping.

  “Only got what?” I wondered if her butt chin was enough to induce Grandma’s scorn.

  Cookie sat beside me and slowly peeled off her glove. It took a moment for me to understand what I was seeing. Cookie had six fingers on that hand. Not a runty worm tacked on at the end, but a fully grown extra pinkie jutting out from the side.

  My mouth fell open—not out of disgust, necessarily. Mostly I was picturing how that extra digit might come in handy playing jacks, or cat’s cradle, or the piano.

  “I know it’s nothing, really, but kids can be cruel.”

  It really was nothing compared to the anomalies covering my body, but Uncle Dom’s crude jibes pinged around in my head: pickaninny, blue gum, nigger toe, obscenities based solely on the color of Cookie’s unmarred skin. With or without that extra pinkie, I figured, she suffered plenty.

  “I used to think God was punishing me,” she said, “but one day my mama told me a story.”

  Here we go, I thought. Another fairy tale to gloss over reality. Something about God having leftover clay from the sweetness bucket and tacking it onto His most prized girl. I wondered why He hadn’t used it to fill in her chin crack.

  I smiled politely, changed the subject. “Does it work like the rest of them?”

  Cookie wiggled all six fingers like spider legs, both delighting and repulsing me. “God made us this way for a reason, honey. We just have to wait and see what that is.”

  I didn’t want to contradict her since she was trying to offer solace, even if it was the God-hooey kind. Plus, a tiny molecule on the tip of my single right pinkie still wanted to believe.

  For the next several months I felt like a museum specimen. Grandma never took me out, and I eventually understood that it had nothing to do with her grief. People catered to us, delivering vodka and pearl onions, fresh flowers and choice cuts of meat. Workers arrived with a load of iron bars to install over every window from the ground floor to the third.

  Dr. Trogdon visited regularly to keep Mom’s bedside vials full. He examined me several times, measuring continents, tugging the skin on my forearm so taut that Thailand vanished beneath a tidal wave of pale flesh. Grandma gasped hopefully, but that part of the landmass resurfaced when he let the skin relax. “It’s a remarkable example of nevus flammeus,” Doctor said. “She would make a fascinating study, the results of which I’m sure we could publish.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Grandma.

  He spouted something about surgeries and the unlikelihood of success given the extent of my birthmarks. After hearing that, Grandma immediately hired a seamstress. She showed up with patterns, swatches, and a tape measure; Grandma groaned at my pre-growth-spurt chubbiness. Within a month I had a new wardrobe of froufrou dresses, opaque leotards, slacks, and long-sleeved blouses that itched like the dickens. My old clothes Grandma hauled off to who-knows-where.

  I refused to relinquish my Nonna-made necklace, however, since I longed for her white braid and cannolis. Countless times, I thought of calling her, had even picked up the phone once, but given the way she had so thoroughly wiped us off
the soles of her shoes, I wasn’t sure if she could suffer my voice. I was too afraid of permanent banishment to complete the call. There were also moments when I ached for Aunt Betty’s hugs, for the sound of her gum-snapping, but I was still so angry at her for harboring Ray-Ray that I couldn’t have stomached her voice.

  Instead, I retreated to Mom’s closet and pretended it was Nonna and Betty slathering me with caresses instead of just the hems of Mom’s dresses. I even found the silver one with the fishtail bottom, its tiny cousin hanging in Barbie’s closet back home. I tugged the full-size one from its hanger and hugged the Nereid skin to me, wishing I could morph into a fish and swim to some mythical place devoid of grief. But I couldn’t, and it was in that dim closet that my yearning for Betty and Nonna became unbearable, so I looked for a place to lodge it until we were all ready for a reunion. Because I no longer had a cigar box to store hidden treasures, I looked to my own geography, where I found a safe haven. Iceland, on my left forearm, with a freckle on the spot where a volcano with an unpronounceable name jutted up. I bundled together my longing and pushed it down the volcano’s mouth and then rammed in a cork to keep it in place until the time was ripe.

  It was in Mom’s closet that I began mulling over the dualities in my life: two wealthy widows, two mansions, two (Old, New) religions, two designations (charlatan, saint), two disfigured (one stained, one six-fingered) girls who had remarkably landed under one roof. I often wished I could split in two: one fully magenta Garnet, the other mere beige. A twin sister to shoulder some of the load. But there was no twin, and there wasn’t even a Grandma Iris—a ghost who never sat down for a meal and who spent her time downing martinis in the west wing as she stared at Nicky’s last-ever school picture. She was too distraught to remember the federal mandate that I had to attend school; I did not remind her. I frequently heard her offering regrets over the phone. “I’m afraid bridge is out, darling. I don’t dare leave Marina yet. No, her son died in the car wreck. Her husband was a war hero killed in Iwo Jima.”

  Each morning Grandma sat beside my mother with a bowl of warm water and a washcloth. She scoured Mom’s face and limbs before patting her dry and applying lotion. “This is where you belong, darling. Never leave me again.” Mother would not have stood for this ministering if she were awake, but if it took lost consciousness to have her daughter back home, Grandma’s expression seemed to say, then so be it. If only Mom and I could both squeeze into that Nereid dress. One time, however, after Grandma recapped her lotion, she cupped Mom’s cheeks in her hand and gently squeezed them together so that Mom’s mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. She leaned close to Mom and begged, “Please say it. Just once, darling. I love you.” She pressed Mom’s cheeks three times, her mouth popping open for each word, but no sound came out.

  An image of me leaning over Dad in his coffin, my fingers gripping his jaw, pulling harder and harder until his mouth opened, but he spilled no words. Then I felt a wrecking ball to my sternum as I realized that they had never, not once, poured from mine.

  Because that pain was too much, I hid it not only in Iceland, but beneath layers of distractions. Every morning I would hustle to the kitchen to eat breakfast with the help. Cookie bustled around in her one rubber glove refilling coffee cups and flipping eggs. Opal pored over Grandma’s to-do list; Cedrick, whose official title was chauffeur, read the Wall Street Journal. Then there was Muddy, the English gardener, who hummed “God Bless America” while he ate. At least someone was humming, since I had lost the inclination, and the note. The help lived on the premises: the women tucked on the third floor, the men over the carriage house.

  I spent my time exploring Grandma’s eighteenth-century Greek Revival home with its gobs of white columns and its symmetry. The interior was also eye-piercingly white: walls, furniture, carpet—the antithesis of La Strega’s dim chateau. Outside there were no longer ponies or Great Danes, but there was a pool and a clay tennis court. A three-tiered water fountain in the middle of the front circular drive. A shuffleboard pad. A knot garden, which Muddy coddled obsessively. At the back of the property I discovered foundations of the quarters for the slaves who had cleared the land and built the house. I looked from the narrow footprints of their shacks to the manor house, all that marble, those pillars, lugged in and installed by backbreaking labor. I added to my list of dualities half poor Italian, half descendant of slave owners.

  I also spent hours in the study trying to decipher Grandfather’s notes: climb high, bright soul, your purchased future awaits; regret, victorious, dogs the idle days. I recalled snippets of Mom’s Sweetwater poetry: steel pots waiting, steel wool scrubbing, steal far, far away. I imagined the two of them sitting shoulder to shoulder when she was a girl, he penning the first line, Whisper the golden joy that grates, she scribbling an answer he would understand completely, For she will swallow it whole.

  I wanted Mom to wake up so I could interrogate her about her chummy bond with her father that had resulted in a whole new language. The thought of Nicky carrying on the tradition by devouring Grandfather’s encyclopedias reminded me that there was still a hole in my chest that only fam-i-ly could fill, even a brother who both loved and hated me.

  Thus, on April Fools’ Day, I slipped into Grandfather’s library, sank into a leather chair, and began working my way through the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, A to Anno. It wasn’t just about joining that well-read club, and in fact it was grueling to slog through entry after entry—but that was my penance for hurling my brother into Mr. Dagostino’s garage.

  I know, I know. Why would I offer penance to a God I no longer believed in? Please remember that I was still wearing a necklace strung with the remnants of my two faiths; my atonement was meant primarily to assuage whatever evil-eye spirits crisscrossed the globe. However irrational it was, I couldn’t wipe off Nonna’s Old Religion as easily as I could the mole-faced religious leader’s Church.

  One afternoon when I was in Grandpa’s study, Opal came to do housework. I imagined she’d cleaned this room hundreds of times while Grandfather posted nonsense on his walls. It took three tries, but I finally asked, “What was Grandpa like?”

  Opal stopped dusting and closed her eyes. “Lord, he was handsome.” She checked over her shoulder before sitting on an ottoman. “He was known for his good looks even among the coloreds. He had this dimple”—she slid an index finger down her cheek—“and he knew how to use it.” Her mouth crimped on one side. “Used it a little too well on the ladies,” she said to herself. “Even some of the help, those weak-hearted fools.”

  Opal coughed. “Don’t mind what I say. But this place livened up after he slipped in with that New York crowd. He just showed up for Sunday tennis one spring and never left.” She went on to describe my grandparents’ extravagant marriage, how green-eyed the women guests were and some of the fussier men. “How she snagged him I’ll never know. Course he had that peculiar—” She looked at me in such a way that I wondered if he sported birthmarks that weren’t apparent in the one photo I’d seen.

  “That’s neither here nor there, and it didn’t seem to matter to your grandmother. Both her parents were dead and she was already twenty-nine. Uh, uh, uh.”

  Grandpa was also a thrower of legendary parties whenever Grandma slipped across the pond. He invited celebrated guests she would never have approved of: W. C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Ziegfeld Follies girls.

  “You know that giant chandelier in the mirror hall?” Opal asked. “One time Fanny Brice rode one of the horses underneath it, grabbed hold, and swung back and forth on it like a monkey, crystals falling off everywhere. Like to never get that thing back together before the old bat got home. She still found out and had a fit. But your grandfather just smacked her on the behind and said, ‘It’d do you a world of good to swing on that thing from time to time too!’”

  I eyeballed Grandpa’s weird graffiti. “Then what is all this?”

  Opal stood and reached out to touch a scrap but thought better
of it. “Your granddaddy was a wonderful man, full of pluck.” She pointed a finger at me. “And he was a good father. I don’t care what anybody says. No matter where he came from or what he did, he loved your mother and never would have left her alone with—well, I don’t care what anybody says.” Opal surveyed his desk, the letter opener and fountain pens. I wondered why Grandma hadn’t cleared away the remnants of his life the way she had cleared away ours.

  “But there was this other side of him,” Opal said, face sullen. “He had the moods.”

  An image of Mom staring into a ladle popped into my brain.

  “Locked himself in this room for weeks at a time writing that gobbledygook.”

  I heard distant thunder and it took a few seconds to realize it was my heart thudding in my ears. There was my mother, after all, locked inside herself. I opened and closed my mouth several times before whispering, “How did Grandpa die?”

  Opal looked over at a window, or what was once a window; it had been bricked up and painted white to match the walls, though curtains still hung over the space to continue the symmetry. She looked over at me. “Nobody told you?”

  I shook my head.

  “How old are you again?”

  “Thirteen. Almost thirteen.”

  Opal surveyed me up, down, sideways. “I suppose that’s old enough. You see—”

  A voice boomed from the heavens: “That’ll be enough, Opal!”

  My head swung to the doorway, but Grandma wasn’t there. I looked at Opal to make sure I wasn’t going cuckoo myself. She was already dashing around the room dusting like a lunatic.

  “Did you hear that?” I whispered.