Household Saints Read Free

forecast or the fact that the radio was working.
    “For what?”
    “Rain by late afternoon.”
    “You need a radio to tell you that?” Nicky pointed a thumb at the window, the overcast sky.
    “Bread and butter is what I need it for. Otherwise I don’t need it for a thing.” To illustrate, Lino turned off the radio, for the truth was that he had no interest in anything which might have come over it. Lino’s own English was fluent, but after twenty years, radio English was yet another foreign language. Music only reminded him of those afternoons when Nicky’s opera took over the apartment and he felt excluded, embarrassed, as if he were overhearing a neighbor couple in bed. The only thing he liked about radios was fixing them, and even that (he hated tinkering) was limited to the moment when he turned on a “broken” set and heard the Bakelite hum.
    In the exhilaration of the wartime boom, Lino had joked about being a better mechanic than God: It didn’t take him three days to bring a radio back from the dead. But the armistice (and its companion, television) had put a stop to his joking. When Nicky came home from the service, Lino began to suspect that the only pleasure which God had ever gotten from Jesus was the momentary thrill of resurrecting Him—and even that was more than he had ever gotten from his son.
    “I need something,” groaned Lino. “Wish to God I knew what it was.”
    “What you need,” said Nicky, “is a hair of the dog that bit you.”
    “The hell,” said Lino, infuriated by how proudly his son suggested this, like a doctor coming up with some brilliant diagnosis. Then, if for no other reason than to keep from cursing his own flesh and blood, Lino cursed the poison which Frank Manzone passed off as wine, cursed his bad luck in general and would have gone on to curse every hand he’d been dealt the night before—except that Lino was one of those drinkers who can never remember the night before.
    Now, for example, he had a vague recollection of losing some money, then making his way home past a few tired revelers and zeppole vendors consuming the last of their unsold pastries….
    “That’s it!” Lino pointed straight up like a witness at the Ascension. “That’s what I need—a bite to eat.”
    Later, Lino would blame this selective amnesia for all his subsequent misfortunes. If only, he would say, if only he had remembered the terms of the previous night’s betting, he would never have yelled upstairs and ordered Catherine to go buy some sausage at Joseph Santangelo’s shop.
    Later, Catherine would blame it on the weather. If it hadn’t been so hot, Joseph would have been selling sausage instead of playing pinochle. If not for the heat wave, her father would never have bet her for a breath of cold air. But by then, the extraordinary course of their daughter’s life had led Joseph to see deeper reasons for everything. And he would urge his wife to look beyond the heat to the hand turning up the flame—the same hand which timed the cloudburst for the next afternoon, for the instant that Catherine stepped out to buy sausage.
    Catherine had just left her father’s shop when the sky cracked open, releasing a low boom of thunder and a hail of raindrops so fat, they struck the pavement and bounced. Sheets of water flapped in the wind; streams washed through the gutters.
    Released ten minutes early, the children came tearing out of St. Boniface and started shrieking and slamming one another with their lunch boxes. Watching from the doorways, their mothers fought the long-forgotten urge to run out and dance around with their heads tipped back and raindrops falling into their open mouths. They had to remind themselves that full-grown women didn’t go out and get drenched for no reason—until, one by one, they came up with a reason to go out. For the cool air had made them imagine how nice it would be: The whole family gathered around platters of veal chops steaming in tomato sauce