The Patron Saint of Ugly (5 page)

At that exact second, after only two days as a five-foot, six-inch husband, my father started shrinking in my mother’s eyes.

“You bring shame on this fam-i-ly.” Grandpa dropped Dad’s wrist and left the room, dragging behind him a trail of words that mortified my father. “You are no son of mine and you are not welcome in-a my house.”

Oh, the dejection. Oh, the misery . . . for about three months.

Our fam-i-ly is no melodramatic Italian opera filled with decade-long feuds and deathbed reconciliations. Okay, maybe we are, but not at that moment, because Mom and Dad were back in Grandpa’s house not twelve weeks later and all because of three words spoken over the phone that held more power than Grandpa’s decree: “Marina is pregnant.”

TAPE THREE

Nonna’s Mojo Risin’

Archangel Archie:

It’s Tuesday evening and I’m reclining on a settee in the hall outside the den—a room from which I have been banished. Nonna is in there indulging in her weekly trifecta of extravagances, beginning with her Barcalounger that could seat four Nonnas—those squat legs dangling a foot from the floor. On the table beside her is decadence number two: a bottle of Marsala. And in her lap, number three, a Whitman’s Sampler that will hold nothing but empty slots and a hint of remorse by the eleven o’clock news. I have been banished because it’s TV night, and I have an annoying habit of chattering too much during her favorite program—

(Hush-a you mouth out there!)

—
Maude
. Of course, Nonna rants at Maude’s liberal views.
You should no speech to your husband so mouthy! That’s a-no way for a wife to behave!
Look! Walter is wearing an apron!

It’s a good time to tell you about Nicky’s charmed birth. I wouldn’t dare if Nonna were beside me. It might propel her into a ritualistic tizzy—all that misplaced guilt—a weird Catholic-
malocchio
blend that I also shoulder. Before Nonna’s only grandson surfed into the world on a salty wave, she guaranteed a sound delivery by insisting that Angelo and Marina move out of that garage apartment Dad’s day-laborer salary afforded and into Uncle Dom’s boyhood bedroom—much larger than Dad’s, which was the size of a porta-potty.

Before they moved in, Nonna painted the walls red. Red curtains, red throw rug, red bedspread. Dad made a bassinet that Nonna slathered red too. Then she unpacked her valise of good Sicilian magic—branches of rue, horn-shaped (penis-shaped) coral amulets, silver crescent moons, horseshoes, ankhs, blue-eyed glass beads—lucky talismans that she tucked in drawers, nailed over doors and onto walls, and sewed into drapes. Nonna also slid a four-tooth chisel that held special powers beneath Mom’s mattress.

You might be wondering where Mom’s mother, Grandma Iris, was during this prenatal hullabaloo; this was her first grandchild too. Mom was practicing her own preventive hoodoo by keeping her marriage and pregnancy a secret for reasons best known to her.

As Mom’s belly grew, the rest of her languished. Incubating an angel apparently takes a toll. Finally, her stomach was too outsize for her hips, and the doctor relegated her to bed rest. Mom spent hours holed up in that room reading library books and scribbling poetry. She filled whole tablets and then resorted to grocery sacks, envelopes, drawer liners. No one could unscramble Mom’s inner thoughts erupting as verse that sounded more like Chinese fortunes incorrectly translated:
Cursed perfection perfects my curse
.
O shiny seed, a dissecting world awaits. Growl the toady barfly
. I used to think I was too untrained to appreciate Mom’s obscure lines. I know different now.

One might think Nonna would resent having an impenetrable poet in the house, having to haul trays of tea, bowls of pastina, up those steps five and six times a day. Quite the opposite. Nonna thrived on her duties, which enabled her to ward off envious visitors, particularly walleyed Aunt Betty, who might jinx the birth, the baby, or both.

Grandpa’s gift to the couple was his temporarily moving to an army cot in the basement, where he was surrounded by bottles of his homemade wine, oily tools, and girlie pictures. Thank God Mom didn’t have to see him parading to the bathroom in his dingy boxers, scratching his bum, rearranging his Calabrian lug nuts, which would have been enough to jinx anyone’s birth.

Uncle Dom’s gift was securing my father a blue-collar job stoking the furnace at the Plant, where Dom worked in personnel in the air-conditioned front office.

On February fourteenth, 1949, Nicky began gently tapping on his amniotic sac. The timing must have felt like winning the lottery to Nonna. Could there be a luckier, more red-hearted day to deliver a child? The feast day of Saint Valentinus, our martyred Roman cousin? Grandpa Ferrari sped to Scourged Savior Hospital, Nonna next to him, leaning over the back of her seat and dangling holy medals above Mom’s belly. Dad held Mom’s hand and smoothed her hair. At the hospital, he kissed her forehead before they rushed her through the swinging doors to the delivery room.

The fam-i-ly settled in the waiting room, prepared for hours of pacing and glugging cup after cup of bitter coffee. Nonna had brought her embroidery kit so she could stitch red crosses into my soon-to-arrive-brother’s diapers. She didn’t make it through even one cross because twenty minutes later, my brother slid effortlessly out of his brackish cocoon and into an oxygenated world eager to receive him. According to the nurses, Mom didn’t even have to push. He did cry, but it wasn’t shrill, more like a chorus of heavenly hosts or wind chimes tinkling in the breeze.

They brought him to the waiting room for a quick perusal by the fam-i-ly: flawless alabaster skin, aquamarine eyes, a halo of blond ringlets. An Aryan dream that would have made Hitler weep, or my father, who at that exact moment probably uttered to his son the three words I would be chasing for years:
I. Love. You
.

Nonna leaned over the baby, spit into his face (
ptt-ptt-ptt
), and blubbered her deflective chants with flip-flopped pronouns because the
malocchio
is much less interested in girls, the lesser sex. Grrr. Wonder what Maude would think about
that!
“Such a homely bambina,” Nonna cooed. “Ugly as a toad. Ought to send her back to cook a while longer.”

While the others fawned, Grandpa snuck to the nurses’ station and filled in the birth certificate, forever burdening my brother with the cursed moniker Dominick Antonio Ferrari, Grandpa’s own name, despite the fact that my parents had settled on Donald Joseph, after Mom’s father. My mother exploded, although quietly, given her meager strength, but Dad acquiesced to the name, shaving off another inch of height.

Days later, Mom and Dad brought Nicky home and ushered him into his red bassinet, where he was again protected by a web of good magic. Nonna had a drawer full of baby-girl dresses to disguise Nicky in, confounding my mother. The Italian neighbors—including snooping Celeste Xaviero—understood the cross-dressing. They dropped by with casseroles and stuffed monkeys, hand-knit blankets and rattles, that Nonna accepted before slamming the door on the gift bearers’ resentment.

Aunt Betty had to wait two weeks to see her nephew. Nonna refused her admittance, so Betty chose the morning when all the men would be at work and Nonna would be chanting her monthly rosary at Saint Brigid’s—a prayer chain she wouldn’t dare break. Betty described how she gripped Ray-Ray’s mittened hand while she boarded the bus and how, when she got to the house, she slid the key from beneath her in-laws’ doormat. Inside, she tiptoed upstairs for her first peek at not only the baby but that hallowed red room, which startled her into yelling: “Holy crap!” Mom wrapped her arms around her sister-in-law, a buoyant ally who might keep Mom afloat in this fam-i-ly. Betty sat in the rocking chair as Mom placed Nicky on her lap. Aunt Betty cooed and fussed. “Such a beautiful baby boy! Such a perfect, lovely baby boy.” Ray-Ray sat on the floor plucking every strand of red yarn from Raggedy Andy’s head before biting off his plastic eyes.

Betty was still chanting when Nonna hustled up the steps, too early, her rosary half prayed, because she had had a premonition. It was a disaster Betty and Mom recounted numerous times, telling it through Nonna’s eyes. When Nonna entered, she found the demonic tableau—Ray-Ray surrounded by a pile of plucked yarn, yawning (the first sign of the presence of a
jettatura
); Mom sitting on the edge of the bed rubbing her temples because of a recently descended headache (the second sign); and Betty uttering pronoun-appropriate praises that invited the
malocchio
’s ire, her green keyhole pupil scouring every inch of Nicky, who had just gotten the hiccups (the third and worst of all signs)—and Nonna knew the babe had been hexed.

Nonna went spastic with signs of the cross, whirling around the room—all that iron jangling—pulling a knot of coral horns and scapulars from around her neck, bobby pins flying as she scooped Nicky up. “Ugly baby! Horrible! Pitiful! Pig-faced swine of a baby girl!” She plunked him into my mother’s arms before scooting Ray-Ray and Betty from the room, down the stairs, and out the front door, where she batted them off the porch with a broom.

Such a tornado of holy cures! Mom was a prisoner in that chamber of undoing as Nonna performed ritual after ritual involving bowls of oil and water. She burned rue leaves and smeared the ashes on Nicky’s face. She hid salt crystals in his ringlets. Flashing her hand signs, index and pinkie fingers extended like horns, Nonna recited her antidotal prayer:
“Malocchio che causi tanta miseria, noi ti caviamo
l’occhio e ti mandiamo sulla luna! Distruggete
il malocchio!”
Nicky’s hiccups ceased, as did Mother’s headache, but to ward off future enchantments, Nonna rolled out the heavy artillery: urine. Exactly whose, I’m not sure, but she collected spaghetti pots full to dribble outside along the property line. Even worse, she sprinkled droplets in every room in the house, even trickled a circle of it around Nicky’s crib and Mother’s bed. I imagine Mom’s arched eyebrows, her horror as she stared into her reflection in a butter knife.
What kind of hell have I married into!

I’m impressed that she endured it for so long, one postpartum month of breathing in those fumes; she lasted until Grandpa Ferrari reclaimed his room across the hall, where his sardine burps and pig-knuckle farts mingled with the miasma hovering above Mom’s bed and kept her awake, and Nicky too; he finally started bawling like a real child. Not to mention that Mom began to suspect that Nonna’s cooking was laced with pee too.

“Get us out of here!” Mom yelled at Dad one evening when he came home from work. “Get us the hell out of here now!”

Dad, bless his henpecked heart, slunk over to Uncle Dom’s to beg for a down payment on a house.

“Goody!” Aunt Betty remembers saying. “The house two doors down is for sale!”

Dom wrote Dad a check, but it wasn’t large enough to secure a house in swanky Grover Estates, where Dom and Betty lived a flat-lotted life. It was, however, just enough for one of those squat Monopoly houses up on Dagowop Hill. Mom flew to that cracker box and kissed every concrete step as she hiked up to her new pee-free home.

TAPE FOUR

My Cursed, Cursed Birth

Padre:

It’s a gusty day atop Dagowop Hill. I’m sitting in the whippet room, so named because of the painting over the mantel of a golden boy in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit with a doleful-eyed whippet by his side. The house came furnished, so I don’t know who the boy is, but I like to pretend it’s Nicky in the alternative childhood he always wished for himself, one surrounded by titled pets and the accouterments of privilege Grandma Iris would have gladly provided if given the chance.

The room is circular with gobs of windows offering a three-hundred-sixty-degree view. Most of the leaves have blown from the trees, so I can see nearly every Monopoly house spiraling beneath my feet, even the one my father purchased all those years ago.

But long before that, this swatch of West Virginia was bought by a robber baron who shall remain nameless because his heirs have lawyers cocked and pointed in my direction. When Le Baron’s workers began poking and prodding the soil, they discovered, not coal, as one might expect, but lead, mercury, and nickel. To process the loot, our tycoon immediately opened the Plant, a smoke-belching factory with pipes that glugged waste into the Ohio River.

Le Baron’s town also boasted the sweetest water for miles. When he found the source—a spring that bubbled from the top of a hill that stood like a pert nipple in the river valley—he built a springhouse over it, the slate roof topped with a whippet weathervane.

Le Baron also broke ground on the mountaintop for an estate that copied the Biltmore’s chateau-esque style, though a quarter of the size, with asymmetrical wings and round towers. When Le Baron finalized the plans, I doubt he could have imagined that one day a trio of Italian women would run barefoot through the halls and slide down the banisters in their pajamas. Lucky for us, he also installed a heated reflection pond on a slice of earth below the springhouse.

Sweetwater Village was established at the foot of the hill to support Le Baron’s employees: cottages for the craftsmen and mill workers; a grocery store to feed them; a pub for them to avoid their nagging wives; and, because most of the workers were Irish immigrants, a Catholic church and a school dubbed Saint Brigid of Kildare. Le Baron benevolently allowed his sweet water to drain downhill into his workers’ pipes. He even had them construct a stone basin and pump in the town square where they could wash their necks and collect gossip.

The majority of West Virginia is Protest-ant, so Sweetwater is plunked like West Berlin inside East Germany, a papal haven for Cat-lickers, without Checkpoint Charlie or the Berlin Wall. Maybe the wall of animosity between the Prods and Cat-lickers will topple if the actual Berlin Wall ever falls. Oddly enough, although I was born with bisected Germany on my left thigh, West Germany decidedly less mulberry than its eastern cousin, after I recovered from German measles, when I was three, I saw that the countries had melded into one unified magenta blotch. This was my earliest recollection that someone or something was tinkering with my personal geography, an awareness that kept me perpetually looking over my shoulder.