Household Saints Read Online Free PDF Page A

Lino.
    “Right here,” said Nicky, though in fact he’d been lost in the final act of Gluck’s Iphigenia, watching Agamemnon sacrifice his beloved daughter for the good of his navy, and longing to stay there, where he would never have to face the fact that his father had lost Catherine in a pinochle game.
    “It’s not so terrible.” Joseph replaced the cleaver and slid back into his chair. “I’m talking about marriage, a regular church wedding, everything on the up-and-up. No one will ever have to know what happened. The story will stop at that door. Let’s drink to it.”
    Lino took a sorrowful pull on his wine bottle.
    “All right,” he said. “We’ll discuss it later. Tomorrow night, Santangelo, you and your mother come to the house for dinner. We’ll work it out. Tonight, let’s play pinochle.”
    That night, as always, the Falconettis lost every hand. And yet as Lino had sensed from the start, things were different. That night, for the first time anyone could remember, Lino made no attempt to prolong the game. When his pockets were empty, he threw in his hand and walked home through the rain.
    Despite her intention to wait till tomorrow, Catherine had run out to the newsstand just before it closed. Now, curled on her bed, she was reading about how Loretta Young’s father was killed in a freak tractor accident on the family dairy farm. Because of this early tragedy, Loretta had problems with men, and a “perfect” marriage had ended in divorce.
    Just then, Catherine heard Lino coming upstairs and wondered if Loretta Young had been raised to listen for the menfolk at the end of the day, for the sounds which stopped conversations like an angel passing and cut through daydreams like the tolling of a knell. Could Loretta tell how the cows were milking from the rhythm of her father’s footsteps in the hall? Listening to Lino, and Nicky behind him, Catherine could almost count the radios which had come into the shop and the money gambled away at pinochle. Ordinarily the wine propelled Lino up, two steps at a time, like a much younger man. But tonight he waited on every rung. He was drunker than usual, or had lost more at cards. Something was different.
    But she didn’t know how different it was till the footsteps stopped outside her room. At the first hesitant knock, Catherine slipped the Silver Screen into her nightstand and opened the door, as if it were perfectly normal for her father to knock on it late at night.
    Swaying slightly from side to side, Lino blinked at her, his face expectant, slightly skeptical, as if she were the one who had knocked on his door. After a while he remembered his purpose, at least enough to say, “You cooking tomorrow? Company’s coming to eat.”
    “Company?” In fifteen years, Catherine and Lino and Nicky had never had company to dinner. For among the Falconetti misfortunes was not just a lack of family closeness, but a positive horror of other Falconettis, who only seemed to remind each other of their genetic bad luck. “Who?”
    “Joseph Santangelo and his mother.”
    “Oh no. Anyone but.”
    “Don’t you like him?” asked Lino, his voice insinuating, like a poke in the ribs.
    “Not especially.”
    “That’s too bad. He likes you.”
    The way Lino said “likes” reminded Catherine of certain boys in the seventh grade who would trap you into saying simple words with secret dirty meanings. This time she was wary.
    “What does that mean?”
    “It means he and his mother are coming to eat. It means my Catherine’s going to cook up a storm. And you know what that means.”
    Catherine shook her head.
    “Meat. Tomorrow night, we’ll show the Santangelos how the Falconettis cook a piece of meat. A roast, a veal roast. I’ll pick it up tomorrow when I go tell Santangelo what time to come.”
    Of all the night’s surprises, this, to Catherine, was the most unexpected: Until that night, she had never once heard her father express a preference about his food.