The Bible According to Nick Santangelo

NASA Chapter One The “shooting star” that Nick and his father saw Christmas Eve was not the Star of Bethlehem. “Nick!” “It’s just a shooting star, Pop.” They walked west on McKean St., heading back home from St. Agnes Hospital, by the old granite wall of the hospital where Nick and his big brother, Angelo, had giggled and screamed at the first light of dawn—home, where they’d killed Mama’s “Angel” in a drive-by shooting three or four years back—aware that in the bone-shattering frost of Christmas morning, they would be walking back east to the hospital—and that this time Mama, too, would be gone. A grand oak grandfather clock had chimed and struck eleven as Nick and his father crossed the magnificent marble foyer and left the hospital that oh, so holy night. The good Sisters of the Franciscan Order had relaxed their regu¬lations: they had permitted the men to stay two hours past the nine o’clock deadline; nobody stayed the night. At this stage in the progression of Mama’s illness, there was nothing that anybody could do: except, that is, to give her greater doses of morphine. The lawbreakers said that she was in God’s hands: that it was a matter of time. That’s a strange euphemism for the religious, thought Nick. Everything’s a matter of time; therefore, it meant nothing—not to this cynic, not to the philosophical anvil hammered on by this wordsmith. To Nick, it was pessimistic determinism at its Naturalistic best. The family doctor had told him that if Mama did not survive the night—and, this time, he did not expect her to—he would drop by first thing in the morning to check on Papa, who was also his patient, to break the news to him personally. That’s nice, thought Nick. But Papa was built like a bull, with the heart of a lion, and he had prepared for “The Worst.” Finally, the doctor had assured him that the hospital staff would do everything it could to make Mama’s last hours on Earth comfortable. That’s something. Nick knew that the Sisters loved Mama. No prophet, he knew that Father Flanagan, the last Irish priest—and a damned good one—in a parish that had gone Italian, would be sitting at her bedside at daybreak, and that Mama had received the Church’s Last Rites. That was important to Papa Santangelo. A gentle old man who went to mass faithfully every Sunday of his life, he yielded to his bride and made his Easter Duty every year since he married Mama. That was the way she wanted it. But since Mama had taken sick and had been diagnosed with cervical cancer, Papa went to mass every day, down the street and around the corner at St. Edmund’s Church. Raised in the old country and apprenticed to a printer in Catania, Sicily, he came to America, worked, saved his money, bought his honeymoon house, and married his 1st grade sweetheart, Mama, whom one-and-all proclaimed “a beauty.” After his first son, Angelo, had quit Temple U. and gone out on his own—and after Papa had put Nick through that same university—he retired as headline editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, which had bought out The Philadelphia Daily News, the tabloid where Nick (and, before him, his big brother, Angelo) worked, and spent his happy days at home in the same red-brick-row “honeymoon house” that he had bought for Mama. That honeymoon had since been trashed. Every morning after mass he made the coffee, called Nick, and when Nick came down to breakfast, he would find two slices of buttered toast on a china plate, a cup of brutally black coffee, and a white napkin, neatly folded with a knife on it, sitting next to a big glass of orange juice. It was beautiful. Touching. But it was hard for Nick, who had never had his father pay this much “domestic” attention to him. “Thanks, Pop.” “Merry Christmas, Son.” Almost as an afterthought, they em¬braced. Nick ached. “Pop. Anybody call?” His father flicked his chin with the back of his fingers: it was the strongest gesture that he used—out of the arsenal that his Sicilian countrymen had developed down the centuries—to express his disgust. As Papa used it, it was like saying What difference does it make? The Sicilian, a tad closer to I don’t care or the vulgar I don’t give a fuck. Nick understood the fatalism that lay at the heart of that gesture; he had inherited his fa-ther’s tendency to take things at their appropriate level of doom, and while it made him tough and realistic, it usually made him miserable, too. At those times, he didn’t like himself—Or, to be blunt about it, he hated himself with a passion that only a pessimist or a world-class misanthrope would have had the courage to muster. Mama’s slow decline had been slowing him down—dragging him ’way down—for months now. There was virtually nothing that he or the doctors or anybody could do to help her: to end her misery; to end their misery; to make a difference. They were chained to this malignancy. They waited; they suffered. The disease has to take its course; it’s God’s Will, the Sisters said. The Sisters smiled when they said it, which made Nick look at them as if he had gone a little crazy. He thought they were “touched”—not in the blesséd sense, but out-and-out insane. He understood the theology behind the silly smile, but that didn’t change the way he felt about it. Because of it—no cousin to the smile of peace and compassion associated with Gautama Buddha—he didn’t trust them or the wisdom they imparted. Siddhartha Gautama, the spiritual leader who antedated Jesus and who had taken the name “Buddha”—in Sanskrit, the Enlightened One—that man he could trust. He had requested and taken a sabbatical from the Rottenberg Literary Award fellowship committee to write his Bodhisattva Buddha, A Novel; the committee wanted to arrange for publication after he had finished this work-in-progress. That’s nice. But Nick had not worked on it nor on anything else of literary value in months. He ground out pulp for the paper, The Philadelphia Daily News; that’s about it. As for his novel about this Beatnik Buddha, a Bodhisattva—a perfected one who postpones nirvana, although meriting it, until all others may be similarly enlightened—he could not continue with it, though publication awaited at the end of the journey. Nick could not have fallen deeper into the Abyss nor drifted further from the Enlightenment that he would require to write it; that’s about how far he had descended. In his present state of disquiet, he felt as prolific and as enlightened as the dead. In this debilitating funk, finally, he feared the mockery of his goddess, the Muse, whatever daughter of Zeus she might be: that he ought not to continue to work on such a blesséd book—that it would be blasphemous to “tempt” it. Nauseous, this morning, the last thing that he wanted to do, if not to write, was to eat. But he sat down, sipped his coffee, and had a bite of noisy, crusty toast. A moment passed before the doorbell rang, and Papa—on his feet puttering about—went directly to answer it. Nick tensed up. The doctor, he thought. The razor cut he had gotten shaving that morning burned as he perspired. He touched the bloody toilet paper that he had stuck to his chin to stop the bleeding. It felt crispy dry. He clinked the cup back into the saucer and listened for scraps of conversation. His wooden chair creaked. His stomach was in knots; he felt the hot coffee burning through it. He was soaked with perspiration. “Your boss.” Nick turned and slowly got out of his chair. He felt like an arthritic robot. He had lost too much weight too fast. He had not been eating. He had been thin as it was. Bony. But this—this was ludi¬crous. This was sick. He felt anorectic. Like a brown paper bag jammed full of bent wire hangers. He chuckled. “My what?” The burning in his stomach made him think he was going to double up. He was still chewing his toast; he swallowed it hard. His teeth hurt. “Maurry,” he said.