Household Saints

by Francine Prose

  But it was the food.

  “Mama,” said Joseph, “this sausage taste all right to you?”

  “All right? It’s the best!”

  “Maybe if you cooked it a little more …”

  “And cook all the juice out of it? Eat up, Joseph. Anyone would think you were the pregnant one.”

  Little by little, her cooking worked its magic: Catherine lost her taste for meat. After gagging on enough of her mother-in-law’s underdone stews, she could no longer stand the smell of it and finally told Joseph that it was time for her to quit working in the shop. She still loved the scent on Joseph’s skin; but now when he took a shower before bed, she didn’t argue.

  “It’s my mother’s cooking making you sick,” said Joseph. “We’ll go out, get a hamburger, you’ll be fine.”

  But Catherine was revolted by the idea of a hamburger, and for the first time felt like a different person, a pregnant woman nauseated by the food she had loved all her life. It was this difference which first made her conscious that the child inside her was real. Everything was changing—even the way she walked, cautiously now, hips turned inward, cradling her center, shielding something fragile as an egg. Gradually her habits changed as she homed, like any nesting creature, toward the comfortable and familiar. She took long naps, tended her plants, and in the afternoons walked uptown to buy this fragile secret thing an African violet and a movie magazine.

  Two weeks before Thanksgiving, everything changed again. One Monday morning, a green panel truck pulled up in front of the shop. And by the time Joseph and the driver had unloaded it, the sights and sounds and smells of life were different.

  It was as if there were nothing in the world but turkeys, as if the autumn days fell silent, as if Mulberry Street put a finger to its lips and listened to the squawking and gobbling. Even at night, turkey dust and pinfeathers swarmed around the street lights like clouds of gnats.

  The counters in the shop were pushed back against the wall to make room for the stacked crates; beaks and necks protruded through the wooden slats, and wattles hung down like wilted flowers. Upstairs, the familiar meat smell was gone, replaced by the sticky sweetness of turkey blood.

  “I turn my back for five minutes,” said Mrs. Santangelo, “and you turn your father’s shop into a chicken coop.”

  “It’s Thanksgiving,” said Joseph. “You know, the American holiday.”

  “In Italy, we had holidays for the saints, the Virgin. And here? They worship turkeys!” Then Joseph told his mother how much these turkeys were bringing in per pound and put an end to her grumbling.

  Even Joseph’s clientele was different. With nothing but contempt for this godless, wild-Indian holiday, the grandmothers fed their husbands fish and pasta, or took their business elsewhere. But their daughters drove in from Westchester and Long Island to talk of yams and marshmallows, to chastise the old-fashioned grocers for neglecting to stock enough cranberry sauce. Ladies in fur coats came in, dragging toddlers in velveteen riding suits. Taxis double-parked while Irish maids ducked into Santangelo’s to fill their mistresses’ orders.

  All of them wanted the fattest, juiciest bird Santangelo had—less of a meal than a monument to America and to the grandeur of their tables. Like the Plymouth pilgrims, they wanted to eat so much that God would feel duly thanked for delivering them through another year. And finally they wanted each member of their families to eat a double helping for all the wartime Thanksgivings when they’d had nothing but Spam.

  That was what they thought they wanted. But Joseph knew that what they really wanted was blood. His regular customers, the old ladies, had been wringing chickens’ necks for so many years that they were glad to have the butcher do it for them, off in the back room where they didn’t have to watch. But these American women, these city women, had never killed a chicken in their lives. Not only did they want their turkey, but they wanted its death, as if witnessing the slaughter would make them feel nearer to the tall corn, the yams, the fruits of the harvest and the sweet November earth.

  Joseph gave them what they wanted. He let them take their time picking over the live birds, choosing not merely the choicest flesh but their destined sacrificial victims. While they decided, he sharpened his knives so that the scraping of the blade raised the hairs on the backs of the women’s necks. When they’d chosen, he opened the cages and grabbed the turkeys in a violent stranglehold, loosened his grasp just long enough for one bone-chilling squawk, then snapped his wrist so hard that the birds began to quiver. Finally he brandished his knife in the air and slit the turkeys’ throats with three neat slices.

  “That’s the Z that stands for Zorro,” he said, and his customers shivered in the grip of an almost sexual thrill. For everyone knew that the movie-Zorro’s sword had brought forth only ketchup. But this was real blood.

  Joseph let them watch it soak the feathers. Then he lifted the lid of a huge oil drum and dropped the bird inside so that the death spasms would be amplified by the resonance of the metal.

  “For your protection,” he said, and the ladies would nod as if they were in dire need of protection from a dying bird. Arms crossed, Joseph stood before the oil drum, his face impassive, staring straight ahead until the pounding stopped. Then he picked the bird up by its feet. He let the ladies stare at the dangling head to their hearts’ content, then said, “You want it plucked?”

  When they nodded, speechless, Joseph gave it to the boy he’d hired to help till Thanksgiving. And when at last he handed over the turkeys, still warm in their paper bags, he knew that he could charge his customers anything. For they were paying not only for the meat, not only for the useless pounds of feathers, beak and blood, but also for a miracle, a spectacle which they imagined had brought them that much closer to the forgotten center of life.

  Watching from her window, Catherine saw the women leave the shop with radiant faces, as if they’d been at church. If they could be there with Joseph, why couldn’t she? Yet it was not exactly jealousy which moved her to go downstairs, but rather a deeper, more instinctive urge—like the impulse to suck her finger when she cut it, to gulp a glass of water she hadn’t even known she’d wanted.

  Entering the store, she nearly gagged on the feathers and dust. As the doorbell rang above her head, every turkey turned its neck to fix her with its piercing, opaque eyes. Only Joseph and his customer were too busy to notice her.

  The customer—a middle-aged woman with marcelled black hair and a nip-waisted suit—was standing on tip-toe, peering into each cage and pushing her face toward the turkeys’ beaks as if she meant to kiss them. Finally she stepped back, crooked one finger under her chin and tilted her head as if trying to judge if a picture were hung straight.

  “I swear,” she said in a Southern accent and a gravelly voice like Mae West’s, “if that one don’t remind me of a big tom lived one year on my daddy’s plantation.”

  “Madam,” said Joseph, “any turkey you could remember would be younger than that one there in the cage.”

  Giggling, the woman made a scissors of her fingers and pinched the crests of her waves.

  “I should hope that bird isn’t half as tough as me.”

  “Tender as a spring chicken,” said Joseph. “So help me God.”

  “Then that’s the one I’ll have.”

  Crossing the store to unlatch the cage, Joseph saw Catherine standing near the door.

  “Jesus Christ!” he shouted. “You shouldn’t be here in your condition, breathing in these feathers, lice, God knows what these filthy birds—”

  He caught himself. If Catherine were here, it was probably all right. She was a woman, she knew, just as she knew that it was still all right for him to climb on top of her in the dark….

  Quickly he opened the pen, grabbed the turkey and held it at arm’s length. It was an enormous bird, pure white, with rosy wattles and a scarlet crest. It began to struggle, scattering feathers like a torn pillow. Joseph gripped it harder.

  “It’s a twenty-pou
nd beauty,” he told the woman. “You got lots of kids to eat all this turkey?”

  “No children. Nephews. Lots and lots of cute nephews.” She gave him a sly wink, as if there were something dirty about these nephews, something he didn’t want her winking about in front of his wife. He glanced at Catherine, checking for damage, and was relieved to see that she wasn’t paying attention.

  Catherine was watching the turkey twitch in Joseph’s grip like a hanged man in a Western. But those men were supposed to be dead, and the turkey was still very much alive. Its wings thrummed like a revving engine. Catherine stared at its eyes, expecting some intimation of fear; but fear would have been less horrifying than the absolute expressionlessness of those flat black discs.

  Joseph loosened his hold on the turkey’s throat, just long enough for it to scream—a tortured cry, more human than anything Catherine would have imagined in the barnyard.

  “My God,” said the woman. “Can’t he fuss, though?”

  Joseph nodded proudly, as if the turkey were his creation. Ordinarily he stepped on the tail feathers and bent over for the kill. Yet this time he held it in the crook of his arm, close to his body. It was a crazy way to slaughter a turkey, and Joseph prayed that he wouldn’t slip and stab himself in the side. But if Catherine wanted to watch him work, he would risk an ignominious death to impress her.

  The turkey fought him—beating its wings, twisting around and raking its claws. Joseph braced one elbow against his hip and jammed the heel of his palm into its backbone. He stretched its chest along his forearm and yanked back its head until its neck bowed out before him.

  Joseph looked at Catherine. He turned and looked at his customer. Then he raised his arm, flicked the knife as if sharpening it on the air, and sliced through the throat—side to side, then down—a perfect cross.

  What shocked Catherine most was how long it took for the blood to come. As soon as Joseph lifted his knife, she expected it to spurt halfway across the room. But for what seemed like an interminable interval, there was not even a crease to show where the blade had passed. Then very slowly it welled up and flowed down the turkey’s breast, spraying away from its body in a narrow arc. Soon the white feathers were drenched, flattened and stuck together in pointed clumps, and its wings were spattered with red.

  The customer clapped her hands like a child, and Joseph knew that this was exactly what she’d wanted. This brutal and inexplicably beautiful sight of pure white stained pure red was what she remembered from her daddy’s plantation. There was something lovely about it, he thought proudly, and looked to Catherine for approval. But Catherine was flushed with another sort of pride.

  “This,” she thought, “this is what my husband does for me and our baby.” And she rested one hand on her stomach as if to remind the child inside her to pay attention.

  All Joseph knew was that Catherine was red in the face, holding her belly.

  “Hey,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  Catherine didn’t answer, but the customer looked at Joseph, Catherine, at the barely perceptible bulge beneath her black sweater, and cooed, “Ooh, are you expecting?”

  “Jesus Christ, this thing’s still kicking!” Joseph held the turkey away from him and let it jump, let its own weight spin it around so the women could see: Already it seemed to have shrunk to half its former size. When the turkey began to shudder, Joseph stuffed it into the oil drum, purposely fumbling to give the women one last impression of its power.

  Catherine watched the drum as if she could see straight through it, wincing each time the turkey crashed against its walls—first high up, then lower, then up again, as if it were trying to fly. Its feet grated against the metal, and the beating of its wings echoed with a hollow ring. Joseph inspected his fingernails. Finally he lifted the lid and pulled out the lifeless turkey, but the women continued to stare at the drum as if the dying were still going on inside it.

  “You want it plucked?” Turning to look for his helper, Joseph saw his mother—stolid and implacable as the angel guarding Eden—positioned at the back of the shop.

  Mrs. Santangelo stormed across the room and stopped in front of Catherine. She took a deep breath, inflated her chest, and closed her eyes.

  “Now you’ve done it,” she said. “Now you’ve gone and done it.”

  “Done what?” said Joseph.

  “I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to her.” She took another step toward Catherine. “How was I to know you were down here? I was upstairs minding my own business, making the sausage, I didn’t even hear you go out. So I’m standing there in the kitchen, I smell cigars … and there’s my Zio.

  “‘Zio,’ I say. ‘What’s this? Since when do they let you visit in the daytime?’

  “‘Carmela,’ he says, ‘it’s an emergency. That girl our son married, she’s downstairs killing turkeys!’”

  “I was doing the killing,” said Joseph. “She was just watching.”

  “So I ran down to see for myself,” continued Mrs. Santangelo. “And it’s true. Now you’ve gone and done it, now you’ve marked that child for life. Now, mark my words, you’ll give birth to a chicken!”

  “God!” shrieked the customer. “What a frightful thing to say. I shouldn’t be intruding on y’all’s private family business, so if you’ll just wrap that turkey up, I believe I’ll be …”

  Joseph ignored her. He walked across the room and put his arm around Catherine’s shoulders.

  “Mama,” he said, “there’s no point scaring her.”

  But Catherine didn’t seem scared—only amazed, as she looked down, touching her stomach.

  “It moved,” she said, laying both hands on the place where the child had just that moment shifted inside her with a flutter like the beating of wings.

  The next morning, Catherine awoke with the wings beating in her stomach and Mrs. Santangelo’s warning echoing in her ears. It was early, but her mother-in-law was already in the kitchen, stuffing scrap meat through the grinder. Without looking at Catherine, she said, “Your husband’s breakfast dishes been in the sink two hours.”

  Catherine was washing dishes when the fluttering began again. Still facing away, Mrs. Santangelo said, “It’s moving, the little chicken?”

  “Don’t call it that,” said Catherine.

  “Why not? You marked that child and now you’re going to bear my son a chicken.”

  “That’s superstition. You don’t know.”

  “You’d be surprised what I know,” said Mrs. Santangelo.

  From then on, Catherine haunted the kitchen, watching her mother-in-law and trying to figure out how much she knew. She noticed how the old woman counted everything, how her lips moved constantly, producing an almost inaudible chant—part English, part Italian, part recipe, part incantation. And gradually, as the weeks went by and Catherine grew so big that she had to go back to her father’s apartment and exhume her mother’s long black dresses from the cedar trunk, she came to the conclusion that Mrs. Santangelo knew plenty.

  Flattered by the attention, Mrs. Santangelo outdid herself in demonstrating the extent of her knowledge. She began with the simplest proofs:

  One December morning, she bought some California artichokes at Frank Manzone’s. Back home, she broke off the tough outer leaves and found a small slug nestled in the satiny interior.

  “Catherine, look. It’s going to snow.”

  That very night, the first light flurries fell on Mulberry Street.

  Peeling potatoes for gnocchi, she said, “Eighteen eyes on this big potato. Within twenty-four hours, two beggars will come to the door.”

  “In Italy, beggars come to the door,” said Catherine. “Not here in America.”

  But the next day, Catherine answered a knock on the door to find two bedraggled old ladies selling raffle tickets for the San Gennaro Benevolent Society.

  “If you can sell me one that ends with a thirty-seven,” said Mrs. Santangelo, “count me in.”

  Obligingly, the ladies flipped t
hrough their booklets till they came up with a number to match Mrs. Santangelo’s hunch. One week later, they returned with her prize—a scalloped cake plate in a rose pattern, with a metal hook for hanging on the wall.

  One afternoon, Mrs. Santangelo looked out the front window and said, “Catherine. Guess who just walked into Violetta’s Candy Store.”

  “I give up. Who?”

  “Death. That’s who.”

  By the end of that week, the candy store was closed, its window draped with black and purple bunting.

  That night, Catherine snuggled close to Joseph, lay her head on his chest and said, “Listen, do you think your mother could be right?”

  “About what?”

  “About me marking the child, that day in the shop. About us having a kid like a chicken.”

  “Let me feel.” Laughing, Joseph put his hand between her legs. “I’ll tell you what’s in there.”

  “No.” Catherine pushed his hand away. “I’m serious. You think she really knows?”

  “My mother knows sausage. That’s what she knows. She’s a superstitious old lady. She gets nasty. Don’t let her frighten you.”

  But Catherine was already so frightened that she couldn’t sleep and sat up half the night. Despite what Joseph thought, his mother knew a lot more than sausage … and she’d predicted the worst. The more Catherine brooded, the more it made sense. It was too miraculous that she and Joseph could go to bed one night and produce a perfect human being nine months later. It was too simple. There had to be a trick. Just before dawn, she understood that the trick was everything that could go wrong, the calamities that befell women and their unborn and newborn children….

  In the morning, Mrs. Santangelo made sure that these nighttime fears survived the light of day. Soon after Catherine awoke, she called her to the window.

  “That’s poor Jimmy Leucci.” She clicked her tongue and pointed to a blind man in a tartan cap, tapping his way down Mulberry Street. “His Papa, God rest his soul, was crazy for music. Colored people’s music. So he drags his poor wife, six months along with Jimmy, up to a club in Harlem to hear some blind colored piano player. The blind man finishes his act, turns around and looks straight at Mrs. Leucci. And that’s how come poor Jimmy …”