The Patron Saint of Ugly (6 page)

When Le Baron died, the property went to his widow, a purported witch, who enjoyed her secluded lifestyle until eminent domain pulled the hill, like a rug, out from under her feet. City planners left her the house and a scrap of land, which, except for the oddly situated reflection pond, she immediately contained within a wrought-iron fence. An asphalt road spiraled up the hill, streetlights placed along it intermittently to illuminate the more dangerous curves. On one turn in particular, dubbed No-Brakes Bend, a leak in the natural springs washed over the road and froze every winter, making for treacherous driving. The land was chopped into dinky Levittown parcels to accommodate returning World War II vets, like my father, who didn’t care about that frozen spot in the least.

There was always a smattering of grape stompers in Sweetwater, and they laid the grid of streets. The widest was Appian Way, which led from the foot of the hill through the village and up to the dogleg in the Ohio River, passing one perpendicular street where the Italians lived, called Via Dolorosa.

After the war, those Dolorosans flung their progeny up onto the hill, and then word spread outside of West Virginia and dozens of
famiglie
flocked upward, where they flushed boot-shaped turds in the villagers’ direction. Suddenly O’Grady’s Grocery had to stock salami and capocollo. Paddy’s Pub (where the stout was served warm) had competition from Dino’s Lounge (where the Chianti was served cold). Those Dagowop Catholics started attending Saint Brigid’s, lopping off the
of Kildare
and redubbing this Brigid their Tuscan saint. They even installed a dark-haired statue in the narthex across from the Irish version, so it was a regular Battle of the Brigids.

It was a war of epic proportions: Eye-talians claimed one side of the church, Irish the other. Same with the grade school: bogtrotters on the left, macaronis on the right. The taunting was merciless:

Get on up Dagowop Hill where you belong, you oily-haired, guinea
ragùs!

Up yours, you shillelagh-hugging, leprechaun-spawning, village tater tots!

Aware of the rift, the diocese appointed a cross-pollinated priest: Father Luigi O’Malley, who sported a massive, peculiarly shaped cantilevered mole on the side of his face that the children dubbed Abraham Lincoln. Father could guzzle whiskey with half of his flock and homemade wine with the other, which made him enormously popular but did little to fuse the congregation.

Enter my mother, that aquamarine jewel sparkling amid all the coal hunks on the hill. The Italians loved her because they believed her light coloring was superior to their own swarthiness. Whenever Mom traipsed downhill to the village for a loaf of bread or a wedge of cheese, silken ponytail swaying, the Italians, men and women alike, would stop changing sparkplugs or hanging laundry to admire her beauty.

Irish shopkeepers loved Mom because she was their British Empire kin—never mind the Protestant/Catholic turmoil—and because of the aforementioned superficial reasons. They displayed their awe in practical ways: a pound of bologna when she’d paid for only a half. A head of cabbage tossed in with the onions. Which was a good thing, because although she was smart, she never brought enough money with her to town, nor could she balance a checkbook.

Each time Mom strolled Nicky around the hill, the housewives fawned over him in ways they never did over their own dun-colored children. The wives squealed and followed them, offering nickels and Walnettos, and all the Old Country nonnas who lived in their children’s spare rooms shuffled after them, clanging cast-iron skillets, spitting, and praying because, like Nonna, they had been trained in the Old Religion.

I hope life on the hill was initially good for my parents, their days filled with cups of coffee over the back fence and comparing tools in neighbors’ garages. No Mom diving into her reflection or penning weird poetry. I don’t know how Mom kept her location a secret from Grandma Iris during her first twenty months of marriage, but eventually Grandma tracked her only child down. Nicky and I, our heads swimming with too many film noirs, wrote our version of the events in a short story we titled “The Pearl-Onion Dame” (exhibit B), which I’ll read for you now.

It was a rainy night in Charlottesville. The kind of night where—
wait! I forgot. Bear with me as I run downstairs to the conservatory.

(Where are you off to in such a rush, Garnet? Oh! Are you making one of your tapes?)

(Yes, Aunt Betty. What is that thing?)

(It’s a lampshade I mail-ordered. Don’t you just love it?)

(That’s a lampshade? But it’s all—)

(I know! It’s going in the carcass room.)

(Ah. Well, that explains it.)

Okay. I’m here. I have to dodge the piano and harp. Let me set the tape player down.
I’VE GOT A JAZZ RECORD LINED UP ON THE VICTROLA. JUST HAVE TO PUT DOWN THE NEEDLE
. There. I’m back. Listen to that horn. Saddest sound I’ve ever heard—next to my saw. Okay. Here we go. Take two, in my best Humphrey Bogart voice:

It was a rainy night in Charlottesville. The kind of night where a dame’s chilling scream might pierce the skinny hours like a train whistle. The Cadillac pulled up in front of Jake’s Place, a seedy tavern where merchant marines were routinely cheated in poker games. The chauffeur eased from the front seat and opened the rear door. Out slid a pair of well-formed gams attached to a shapely package in a mink coat, felt hat concealing her face
.

“Get the door, Cedrick,” the doll growled
.

“Yes, ma’am.” The driver obliged, protecting her with an umbrella
.

Inside the bar, the private dick sat slouched in a booth in the back, facing the door so he could spot the broad he’d spoken to only once, on the phone, when she hired him. He didn’t trust her, but he needed the work or he’d be flicked out of his third-floor walkup like a cigarette butt from a car window. And there she was, blowing in with the wind, red rose in her décolletage—their prearranged sign—clicking toward him in her high heels, a man wearing a chauffeur’s hat behind her. She paused at the booth
.

“Dirk Derringer?”

He nodded. “Mrs. Ruetheday?” Her name was an alias, he was certain, but so was his
.

“Dust the seat, Cedrick.”

Cedrick pulled the silk scarf from his neck and wiped the wooden bench as the moll peeled off her hat
.

Mrs. Ruetheday was older than Derringer had imagined, maybe fifty, but well preserved, every blond hair in place, diamond earrings the size of roulette balls. He didn’t bother to stand and he could tell that irked her. He was glad. She slid into her seat and commanded Cedrick: “Vodka martini. Extra dry. One pearl onion.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and slithered away
.

Ruetheday plucked off her gloves, one finger at a time. “Did you get it?”

The detective reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded slip of paper that contained the address and phone number. Sid the bartender appeared and dealt down a coaster and then Ruetheday’s martini, the pearl onion on the bottom bobbing like one of Saint Lucy’s plucked-out eyeballs
.

The doll ogled the slip of paper in Dirk’s hand, tinking her manicured nails against her glass. “Is that it?”

“Got the money?”

Mrs. Ruetheday groaned, as if discussing money were just too gauche, but she rifled through her clutch and pulled out an envelope
.

Derringer paused before sliding the information across the table. He could overtake Mrs. Ruetheday if there was nothing inside that envelope and she was trying to skip without paying. The hovering silkworm he could lay out with one punch
.

The dame took a sip of her martini, unfolded the paper, scanned the address, and choked on her vodka, coating Derringer in an alcohol mist. “There must be some mistake!” Ruetheday was dumbfounded to see that her crown jewel of a daughter had landed in godforsaken West Virginia. “My Marina would never live
there!
” Then she read a one-sentence addendum and her eyes rolled back in her head
.

Mrs. Ruetheday slumped in her seat, swooning at the indignity of it all, the improbable address, the secret. She might have fallen and melted into a vodka puddle if Cedrick hadn’t leaped forward to catch her, and as he did, Derringer scooped up his payola, bolted to the door, and shot out into the night like a .38 slug
.

It was the Wednesday before Christmas, Dad said. He had just come home from work and found Mom in the still-unfurnished living room changing Nicky on the carpet, her mouth full of diaper pins and an overripe secret she was waiting for Christmas morning to deliver. Dad was about to kneel when the phone rang.

Mom handed Nicky to Dad. “I’ll get it.”

She lifted the receiver, my father close beside her blubbering a glut of
I love you
s into his son’s ear.

“Hello?” Mom said.

“Marina? Is that you, darling?”

Mom swayed backward as if she’d been punched. “Yes, Mother.”

Even Dad could hear Grandma’s rant charging through the phone line, ruffling Mom’s hair.

“Marina! I’ve found you! Why would you shut me out of your life after all I’ve done for you? The best of everything, and you married that—
Italian
—and moved to West Virginia! You will rue the day, Marina, for making such a colossal mistake. Absolutely rue the day!” Mother held the phone away from her ear as Grandma fumed.

“And I had to learn from a complete stranger that you have a son! We have a Caudhill-Adams-Rutledge-[ad infinitum] heir! A male successor at last!”

Dad would later understand the full import of this. Grandma’s fortune flowed matrilineally and could be traced back to the
Mayflower
, her bank accounts stuffed with generations’ worth of inheritance, she being the only-child daughter of an only-child daughter of an only-child daughter and having birthed an only-child daughter, my mother. The various husbands’ surnames stacked up like postscripts, but the money was uterally bequeathed.

Grandma jabbered about the deprivation her grandson was surely suffering. “It’s not too late. Come home now. Bring the baby. We’ll say you married a war hero who died in Iwo Jima.” The math was all wrong, since that invented husband would have died four years before Nicky was born. “Come home, Marina. Please. For the sake of your child. Your father would agree. Don’t be melodramatic. Enough of this tantrum. Now, come home!”

Mom, face crimson, finally let loose. “I wouldn’t dare bring up my child in that gilded hellhole! I love my husband”—good news for my father, and at the time it was probably still true—“and besides, I’m pregnant!”

“What?” said Dad.

“What?” said Grandma.

“Don’t call me anymore!” Mom shoved in the last word before slamming the phone down.

That’s right. For three months I had already been stewing in Mom’s uterus. I was probably as pink and spotless then as my brother, and according to evil-eye lore, I might have remained so if Grandma Iris hadn’t gate-crashed my development.

Grandma Iris never let anyone have the last word. Two weeks after her call, a delivery truck backed into our forty-five-degree-angle ice-covered driveway. Before Mom could sputter dissent, two teamsters unloaded a brand-new living room suite. I imagine her noble-poor resolve shriveled as the suite was followed by children’s bedroom furniture, a washer and dryer, seven massive gilt mirrors, and a dozen wooden crates marked
FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE
. Grandma never would divulge how she knew which home furnishings Mom needed (Dirk Derringer, private eye, no doubt).

Twenty minutes later, an even more prescient delivery arrived in an aquamarine, tail-finned Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Grandma Iris had somehow navigated the hundreds of miles from Charlottesville to arrive at our door. She hustled past my mother—“What in the world are you wearing?”—and ordered the teamsters to pry open one of those
FRAGILE
crates, the one that held two dozen bottles of vodka, several jars of pearl onions, and a martini-mixing set. Grandma guzzled a cocktail down and hugged her stunned daughter. “Now, where is my grandson?”

Hours later Dad arrived and found his house jammed with high-end furniture, a Stonehenge of crates, a mother-in-law snoring away on the sofa, and a martini-hammered wife squiggling nonsense—
Hold tight, flyman; bolster the balustrade—
on her bedroom wall.

The next day Grandma traipsed from gilt mirror to gilt mirror, one hung in every room now, though they were ridiculously outsize for our walls. Mom began unloading the rest of those crates, likely squealing when she unearthed selected volumes from Grandfather Postscript’s library: Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, the Brontë sisters. Grandma had also had the forethought to include her dead husband’s beloved reference sets:
Encyclopaedia Britannica
s, various editions of
Webster’s
, even an
OED
, which I’m sure Mom and Grandma pored over as they sucked the vodka out of pickled onions.

When Nonna is pickled with her alcohol of choice, she offers an alternative explanation for my condition that has nothing to do with Saint Garnet del Vulcano and everything to do with the rest of those
HANDLE WITH CARE
crates. According to Nonna, anything the mother is startled or captivated by during her pregnancy can mar the developing fetus. Back in Sicily, Nonna swore, a toad had leaped from a pond and landed in front of her with-child friend Camelia, and her baby was born with a toad-shaped birthmark on his cheek. A meteor shower rained from the sky outside the bedroom where Nonna’s cousin was delivering, and a Leonid shower of freckles speckled the newborn’s shoulder. Abri the bachelor tipped his hat at Leta the milliner, and when Leta’s daughter was born, Abri’s profile was etched on her palm. Leta was soon divorced.