Household Saints

by Francine Prose

  “Can you remember the exact date of your last menstrual period?” he asked, coloring slightly, as if he secretly knew that it was none of his business.

  “Two weeks before Easter,” said Catherine.

  On the way home, she stopped at a bookstore and spent a week’s household money on three books. At the cash register, she put them down so that The Mother’s Medical Encyclopedia was on top. Beneath it was The First Nine Months of Life and beneath that, Childbirth Without Fear.

  It was an impulsive purchase, and later she regretted her haste. She opened the childbirth book at random and got so scared that she had to put it away. The Mother’s Encyclopedia turned out to be packed with information about bedwetting, orthodontia, and chicken pox.

  But The First Nine Months of Life was just what she’d wanted.

  Afternoons, Catherine lay on her bed and studied the diagrams, compared the lists of symptoms and sensations with her own, and forced herself to look at the line drawings of embryos—half-tadpole, half-baby, with their swollen heads, their clawed hands and feet. Always she paid particular attention to the section entitled “Old Wives’ Tales.” It is not true, she read, that a baby will strangle on its cord if you raise your arms above your head. It is not true that a child born in the seventh month has a better chance of survival than one born in the eighth. It is not true that you can make your baby musical by listening to music, nor can you mark it by exposing yourself to bad influences.

  Each time Catherine read these paragraphs, she embraced science for the most superstitious of reasons and vowed anew that this child would be born scientifically.

  Occasionally this promise proved difficult to keep. When Catherine felt the baby’s first quivering practice kick, she was on her bed, reading her book. This time, she knew what it was: There was life inside her, and she thought, “It’s a miracle.” Then she turned straight to the chapter on “quickening” and read the medical explanation till she had it memorized. When Joseph, reaching for her in bed, felt the change in her shape and said, “Hey, are you—,” Catherine clapped a hand over his mouth.

  “Shush,” she whispered. “The walls have ears.” Then she said, “Yes!” very loud, angry at herself for having made such an unscientific remark.

  That weekend she talked Joseph into accompanying her to Klein’s where, in defiance of every age-old warning against flying in the face of God, they purchased a complete baby layette, in yellow. And early Monday morning, as soon as Joseph left for the shop, Catherine—armed with a dry mop, rags, and a stack of cardboard boxes—invaded Mrs. Santangelo’s bedroom.

  Since her mother-in-law’s death, Catherine had not had the time, and Joseph had not had the heart, to deal with her possessions. Yet now she went at it with the optimistic, impersonal efficiency of someone moving into an apartment, staking claim by scrubbing away every trace of its previous occupant. First the crucifix came down from the wall and went into the bottom of the largest box. On top of it went Mrs. Santangelo’s clothes, forming a sort of nest on which Catherine laid the rosaries, the pictures of Zio, San Gennaro, the Holy Family. The knowledge that no one would ever use these things again gave her packing a certain carefreeness; and yet without thinking she wrapped the statuettes of the Virgin and Child in Mrs. Santangelo’s aprons, so they wouldn’t break. Likewise it never occurred to her to throw or give the boxes away; she stacked them in back of the hall closet.

  Returning to the room, she hung the yellow organdy curtains, soaked the decals of bunnies and frolicking lambs, and pasted them over the bare white spot where the crucifix had hung. She set up the changing table, the bassinet, the crib, then stepped back to contemplate the gleaming, cheerful, sexless nursery, equally suitable for a girl or boy.

  For Catherine refused to predict or even speculate about the baby’s sex, nor was she anxious to hear such predictions from anyone else. She told no one but Joseph about her pregnancy; the most old-fashioned grandmother could not have taken greater pains to foil the Evil Eye than Catherine took to evade her neighbors’ curiosity. By Thanksgiving, she had stopped leaving the house, and instructed Joseph to tell people that she was allergic to turkey feathers. Around this time, Evelyn marched upstairs and knocked on her door, but Catherine wouldn’t answer.

  Determined that everything be perfectly normal, Catherine spent an abnormal amount of time on her housework. Her plants doubled in size; new ones grew from cuttings. The hidden spots behind the canisters and spice jars shone, like trees falling in the forest where no one would ever know.

  Early in December, she was unpinning clean clothes from a line strung across the kitchen when she felt the first cramp travel from her back across her stomach. Folding the laundry, she had two more contractions, then three more as she wiped down the burners and the refrigerator door. She was intent on leaving the house so spotless that if she died in the hospital and never came home, its condition would not shame her memory. She worked till the spasms were coming so regularly that she had to stop. Then she called downstairs to Joseph and asked him to get a cab.

  The next day, Joseph’s customers were astounded by his announcement that a seven-pound, eight-ounce baby girl, Theresa Carmela Santangelo, had been born to Catherine in St. Vincent’s Hospital after a brief, uncomplicated labor.

  “A baby?” cried the women. “Where did you find it, in the cabbage patch?”

  Joseph took advantage of these pleasant exchanges to tip the scales. And though his customers knew it, they felt so selflessly happy for the proud new father that they wrote the extra pennies off as their baby gift.

  Every evening, Joseph rushed uptown to visit Catherine and to stare through the nursery window at his daughter. At last it was time for mother and child to come home. In honor of this occasion, Joseph borrowed Augie’s car—not only for comfort and safety, but also because he had something to discuss with Catherine—something too private to mention in a cab, too urgent to wait till they got back to the apartment.

  Catherine was nervous with the baby. When Joseph opened the car door for her, she hesitated, as if he were asking her to jump down a well.

  “Slide in,” he said.

  Joseph drove in silence till they stopped at a long red light. Then, staring straight ahead, he said, “Listen, about that pinochle game.”

  “What pinochle game?”

  “You know. Before we got married. The one Nicky was talking about, the night he came over to eat.”

  Catherine looked confused.

  “You remember. The one where Lino was supposed to have bet you.”

  “Oh, that pinochle game. What about it?”

  “What I want to say is … I would have married you anyhow, even if I didn’t win you in that game.”

  “Thanks.” Catherine wondered how this could be true. Then she said, “Did you cheat?”

  “Sure. While the others were sucking in that cold air, I was palming extra hearts from the deck.”

  Catherine laughed. The baby was sleeping against her chest, and she could feel its warm breath through her dress.

  “Isn’t that always the way?” she said. “You win your husband in a card game.”

  “Is it? I didn’t know it was such a common thing.”

  “It is. One way or another.”

  “I feel better,” said Joseph. “Somehow I feel better.” He smiled at his family, at Catherine and the soft little package wrapped in the yellow blanket from Union Square.

  “Look what I won in that card game,” he said. “An angel.”

  The baby was an angel, and the winter light, streaming into the nursery and bouncing off the plastic bassinette, surrounded her with a halo-like glow. Poking through the lacy covers, her tiny fingers grabbed at the sun motes, and Catherine couldn’t look at her without thinking that her existence was a miracle. Overwhelmed by her beauty, and by love, Catherine channeled these unruly passions into the most mundane and uninspiring tasks of motherhood.

  Sometimes it seemed to Catherine that the biggest change in her life w
as the staggering volume of Theresa’s baby laundry. She recalled Mrs. Santangelo telling her that when Augie and Joseph were born—even before their cords were cut—she’d sent Zio out for cornuti to hang around their necks. But what Catherine sent Joseph out to buy was a washing machine.

  Brand new, shiny, and big as an oven, the washer was installed in the kitchen. On clear days, Catherine strung Theresa’s clothes on a line and sailed them out across the alley. Catherine had always thought of laundry as a torture, like one of those eternal frustrations sinners suffer in hell: You roll a stone up the hill, it rolls down. You wash a shirt and the next day it’s dirty again. Yet now she was filled with joy by the sight of baby nightgowns flapping in the wind, and calmed by the very repetitiousness of the work: You wash a diaper, it gets dirty, you wash it again. Dirty laundry means the child is alive and growing. The diapers will stop, the baby clothes will get bigger. Life goes on….

  Catherine felt the urge to knock on wood. But this urge disappeared gradually, along with the wood, as Mrs. Santangelo’s oak furniture was replaced, piece by piece, by vinyl, formica, and chrome. For Catherine was bent on modeling herself after those women in the Good Housekeeping ads, those smiling, competent American housewives, their consciences as clear as their glassware. It was obvious to her that the search for newer and stronger detergents was part of the same blessed science which had arranged Theresa’s safe arrival into the world, equally obvious that America and its science had already served the Santangelos better than any old country saints. She felt that Theresa was a gift—and a provisional one; she wasn’t so much worried that the gift would be taken back (though that was part of it) as convinced that it had come with certain inviolable conditions. Mrs. Santangelo, with her spitting three times and making the sign of the horns, was no more fervent and ritualistic than Catherine with her one-cup-per-load of Ivory Snow.

  She consulted The Mother’s Medical Encyclopedia regularly, and every other month took Theresa to St. Vincent’s for checkups, blood tests, vaccinations. On the doctors’ advice, she fed her bottles of formula, then jars of processed baby food, and Theresa grew so fast that Catherine—sewing and crocheting according to the instructions in her women’s magazines—wore out stacks of back issues. With their help, Catherine struggled to keep Theresa’s wardrobe up to date, her baby smocks shirred like Ukrainian christening gowns, her felt skirts appliqued with woolly poodles in rhinestone collars.

  By Theresa’s second birthday, Catherine’s cuddly angel had turned into a devil. But her deviltry was classic, the same spaghetti-dumped-over-the-head which every mother who came into the shop described, and the women reassured each other: It was only temporary. So Catherine sponged up the spaghetti and watched Theresa destroy her pretty nursery, for the mothers had promised: At three, the devil would vanish as suddenly as it had appeared, and the child’s true nature would begin to emerge.

  So it happened with Theresa; to celebrate, Catherine redecorated her room. Occasionally she caught herself wishing that her mother-in-law were alive to witness the transformation; it amused her to imagine Mrs. Santangelo’s ghost revisiting her old haunts. Catherine scraped the half-peeled lambs off the wall and plastered it over with huge decals of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, dancing. In this room, the Holy Family was Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Swee’Pea. Mrs. Santangelo’s bed was unrecognizable beneath its canopy of candy-striped chintz, its ruffled valances and eyelet-covered bolsters. Enthroned like pashas, plush animals surveyed a kingdom of milk glass and mirrored vanities, jars of hand cream and vinyl jewel boxes lined with velveteen: A magazine-perfect little girl’s dream room.

  Yet even then, Catherine was beginning to realize that Theresa’s dreams were taking place in some imaginary recreation of Mrs. Santangelo’s old room.

  One morning, Catherine took Theresa to Woolworth’s to buy a plant. By that time, the plants had taken over every available space, but Catherine kept buying them, for Theresa’s sake. Inspired by countless articles on family togetherness, she intended these trips to the five-and-dime as ceremonies of mother-daughter closeness for Theresa to remember all her life. But they always seemed to bore her, and that morning she wandered off while Catherine was paying for some new kind of cactus which had caught her eye—a dry, gray lump, more like a pebble than a plant.

  Catherine searched the store, then notified the manager, who set the saleswomen looking: Theresa was gone.

  Often, in Joseph’s shop, mothers told stories of the time the baby took off and turned up, here or there; to illustrate their panic and subsequent relief, the women would put their hands to their hearts and sag at the knees. Now Catherine felt that tightness in her chest, that weakening in her legs, and in addition heard a ringing in her ears, as if all the sirens and burglar alarms in the city were sounding at once. In this state, she ran home and back. None of the old women on the doorsteps recalled a stocky, big-eyed, dark-haired girl in a shirtwaist dress printed with chickadees in night shirts and pointed sleeping caps. But all of them had stories about the time their children vanished and reappeared unharmed.

  First Catherine searched alone, then others joined in, and finally someone called from the door of Our Lady of Mount Carmel: She’s here! And there she was, perched on a stool by the font, splashing holy water like a sparrow in a birdbath.

  It was a week before Catherine could tell this story in the shop, and when she did, she put her hand to her heart, bent her knees, and said, “Elbow-deep in holy water.”

  “Like my Louise in every puddle,” chorused the women. “Like my Sal in the toilet bowl.”

  Years later, when people began telling stories about Theresa Santangelo, these same women would reminisce about the holy water incident to marvel at this prodigy of devotion. But Catherine could never think of it without remembering how she’d hit Theresa, right there in church. Not counting baby taps, it was the first real smack of Theresa’s life, more of a push actually, but a push from behind, hard enough to send her sprawling. And she remembered Theresa’s shoulder blades (so fragile they’d brought a lump to her throat whenever she’d bathed her) snapping together like wings when she fell from the stool to the floor.

  This memory disturbed Catherine so that she asked Joseph to ask Frank if Theresa could start attending Sunday mass with the Manzones. She herself hadn’t been to church since Theresa’s baptism, and it seemed wrong to her to treat church like the circus—someplace you’d never be except for your child. Every Sunday morning, Theresa trooped off with the Manzones, leaving Joseph and Catherine with the first time they’d had in years to drink an extra cup of coffee and go back to bed: A blessing.

  Two years passed so quickly that the mothers agreed: It seemed like yesterday that their Sal was splashing in the toilet, and now they were telling horror stories about his first day at school. This one’s Vincent got punched by a second-grader; that one’s Mary Kay threw up every morning; this one spent weeks making Jimmy’s turkey costume for the Thanksgiving pageant, and when Jimmy tried it on and looked in the mirror, he screamed and screamed.

  “That’s nothing,” said Catherine. “Five mornings in a row, I take Theresa to the public school. And every morning, by the time I get home, Joseph’s had a call from the sisters at St. Boniface: Theresa’s sitting there in the first grade class. All week I take her to the public and she runs away to the parochial. Where does she get it from?”

  Overhearing, the old women rolled their eyes. It was obvious to them that Theresa got it from Joseph’s mother, just as it was obvious that generations could live on apple pie and American cheese and still have pasta in the blood. But the younger mothers, who could hardly remember back past their own children’s births, had another explanation: “They come into the world, they’re people. What can you do? They’ve got minds of their own.”

  “Since when has a five-year-old girl got a mind of her own?” Joseph was not really asking, but rather, boasting about his little daughter’s independent mind, and the women were so charmed by this adoring and exasper
ated father that once again they forgave him for tipping the scales.

  Neither Joseph nor Catherine could imagine anyone choosing parochial school. But they’d survived it, and if that was what Theresa wanted … Judging from what the mothers said, they were lucky that she wanted to go to school at all.

  Rather than argue, Catherine put her energy into counteracting the damage done by St. Boniface. If Theresa went a little overboard at the holidays, Catherine made sure that they were celebrated in the safest, healthiest, most American way. At the Santangelo home, Easter had nothing to do with death and resurrection, but rather with dyed eggs, marshmallow bunnies, fluffy chicks in baskets of shredded green cellophane. During Christmas week, they stood on line at Macy’s for hours so Theresa could meet Santa. The official photo showed a pudgy Theresa, out-twinkling Santa. He was asking her what she wanted him to bring her, and she was telling him, a scapular. The ugliest and biggest scapular he had.

  “A scapular?” said Santa, in such a way that Theresa knew, he wouldn’t be bringing her one for Christmas.

  What Santa did bring her that year was a pair of needlework panels which Catherine had stitched and framed from directions in the Ladies’ Home Journal.

  “Yay.” Theresa cheered half-heartedly. “Snow White and Prince Charming.”

  The pictures went up on Theresa’s wall. By New Year’s, when Catherine went in to straighten up, they were gone, replaced by a big black crucifix and a plaque of the Holy Family. Catherine recognized Mrs. Santangelo’s things from the box in the hall closet. Her first thought was how pleased her mother-in-law would be to see her holy pictures side by side like comfortable old friends. Next it occurred to her that Theresa hadn’t just borrowed these objects at random, but had picked and chosen. San Gennaro (what did a New York City girl know about volcanoes?) was still packed away. But Baby Jesus was everywhere.