Household Saints

Household Saints by Francine Prose Page A

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Authors: Francine Prose
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towels!” With all his heart, Joseph wished that his mother would emerge from the bedroom and tell him to boil some water.
    Mrs. Santangelo shot past the living room on her way to the kitchen.
    “Hey!” yelled Joseph. “Is there anything I can do?”
    “Pray,” she said. “For once in your life, you can pray.”
    “Can I go in there? I want to see Catherine.”
    “See? What’s there to see? What do you think this is, the movies? Stay right where you are and pray!”
    She was gone so fast that Joseph forgot to see if she was carrying hot water and towels. He knelt awkwardly before the altar and began to pray—a Hail Mary, an Our Father. He had to grope for the words and recited them woodenly, like the poems he’d been forced to memorize in parochial school.
    “Please let it be easy for her,” he said, though it seemed to him that Saint Anna and San Gennaro were eyeing him as if he were a total stranger asking for a loan, or worse, a bum panhandling a dime. Why should they do him any favors?
    He sat down on the couch and riffled through Catherine’s magazine till he found the picture of Judy Garland and her fat little baby. The accompanying article comforted him: With all the dope Judy Garland took, she’d done okay. Reading on, he learned that Judy’s husband had converted one wing of their Beverly Hills mansion into a private maternity hospital; he imagined this man, in a smoking jacket, puffing his pipe in the den while a procession of nurses tiptoed in to announce that everything was going fine.
    But when his mother came through, he had to jump up and trail her to the kitchen.
    “How’s it going?” he asked.
    “Not so hot,” she said, and was gone.
    These three words provided Joseph with endless scenarios of tragedy and horror: Catherine would die. The baby would die. Catherine and the baby would die. How could he have overlooked these terrible possibilities, dismissing Catherine’s fear as the crazy and perfectly normal delusions of a pregnant woman? He was the crazy one. Only now did he realize how badly he wanted the child, and he thought: This was some time to realize it.
    He turned the radio on for distraction and heard Nat King Cole crooning faintly through a loud buzz of static. Got to get Lino to fix this, he thought. Then he imagined how painful it would be, seeing Lino and Nicky with Catherine and the baby dead.
    Suddenly he felt as if the apartment were a mausoleum in which he and his mother and Catherine were walled up together, buried alive, the last three people on earth. He threw open the window. Was there anyone out there? His chest felt tight; he needed some air.
    “I’m going out,” he called. “Anything you want?”
    There was no reply. What could they possibly need?
    The drizzle had turned to sleet, and everything had a wavy, out-of-focus look, as if the sidewalks and street lights had melted, then frozen again in a slightly different place. Just as Joseph had feared, there was no one else in the world—not one drunk walking it off, not one poor slob escaping a fight with his wife. Everyone was safe inside, asleep or dead, and he was the only survivor.
    Upstairs, he found his mother standing in front of the altar. At first he assumed she was praying … but why was she making those odd noises?
    “Mama,” he said, “what—?”
    His mother glared at him, then, without a word, grabbed the Saint Anna medallion off the mantel. He followed her into the kitchen, where she lit a burner on the stove, grasped the medallion with a pair of tongs and held it over the flame.
    The gilt blistered; the metal began to buckle, releasing a stream of smoke. The edges curled, the medallion bubbled, but Mrs. Santangelo kept it in the flame until it was a tarry lump, fused with the tongs. Only then did she fill the sink and drop the medallion into the water, where it landed with a hiss.
    Mrs. Santangelo didn’t flinch from the smoke, though her eyes turned red and watered. Joseph realized that he

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