Free Household Saints by Francine Prose Page B

Catherine’s condition shouldn’t be working in a butcher shop.
    Total strangers started warning her against working there. No one had hard evidence. Though everyone knew stories of mothers who brought forth gibbons after innocent trips to the zoo, children born with ghastly deformities because their fathers worked on Sant’Anielo’s day, no one could cite specific instances of pregnant women harmed at the butcher’s. Still, the women had a vague intuition: It didn’t seem right.
    “Doesn’t it make you queasy?” asked Joseph’s customers. “All this blood … the smell … in your state …?”
    “You know how some women are about pickles and ice cream?” said Catherine. “That’s how I am about this shop.”
    But she could never look them in the eye as she said this, for she knew that what she really craved was Joseph and the smell of Joseph’s skin.
    She and Joseph rarely discussed the baby, except to say that they couldn’t believe it was really coming. Yet always now, in the midst of making love, Joseph would stop and say, “Is it safe? Are you sure it’s all right?”
    “I’m sure,” said Catherine, urging him on. “If it isn’t all right, what is?”
    But once again, Mrs. Santangelo disagreed.
    A counter of days, an observer of signs, Carmela Santangelo kept intimate track of her daughter-in-law’s biological life, and thus was the first to know that she was pregnant. Thrilled by the prospect of another grandchild, Mrs. Santangelo waited till she was sure, then held a burning candle over a basin of water. The wax solidified—not in separate droplets, but in one long curlicue which floated to the top.
    “A boy,” whispered Mrs. Santangelo. “Baby Zio.”
    They would call him Zio, and she herself would wean him on milk, bread, and honey. She would feed him pasta and good cheese, not Chinese pork like her undernourished grandchildren on the Island, and little Zio would grow closer to her than her own sons had been before they grew up and left her.
    Mrs. Santangelo took the candle, set it in front of San Gennaro and was just about to thank him for this blessing in her old age when a breeze gusted in the window and blew out the candle. She crossed herself.
    “God help us,” she said.
    That evening, she located Zio’s St. Anthony’s horn, wrapped in tissue at the back of her bureau drawer.
    “It was my husband’s,” she said, tying the cord around Catherine’s neck. “It’s not for you, it’s for the baby.”
    But despite the good effects of Zio’s cornuto, the bad omens continued: Blood streaks in the egg yolks. Three pigeons roosting on the portal of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Rain on crucial feast days. Of course there was trouble, thought Mrs. Santangelo, what with those creaking bedsprings, those hours Catherine spent downstairs in the shop. But how to convince Joseph that such omens were proof of more than her ill will toward his wife?
    Perhaps it would be wiser to concentrate on Catherine. Mrs. Santangelo knew that a pregnant woman could be persuaded of anything—provided you understood that she was temporarily out of her mind and that the only way to her brain was through her stomach.
    And so Mrs. Santangelo devoted herself to cooking for the mother-to-be.
    Every night, Catherine got sick on the meat. Usually she made it through the soup and bread, but could only force down a few mouthfuls of meat before stopping to excuse herself.
    “I’m sorry,” she’d say, back from the bathroom with cold water shining on her face. “It’s not the food. It’s me.”
    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