Rococo by Adriana Trigiani Read Free Book Online

babies, and velvet knee pants (mine) with one whiff. I straighten the church bulletins on the entry table. When I notice they are last week’s, I take the stack with me. I enter the nave, then dip my fingers into the cold, clear holy-water font, blessing myself and then kissing my hand, remembering my parents, grandparents, favorite aunts and uncles, all dead.
    The clerestory windows fill the pews with afternoon light that turns to streams of pale blue around the altar. I become calm in God’s house, and it has always been this way for me. The place is filled with soft light and sweet silence, much as I imagine heaven to be.
    Behind the choir loft, the rose window makes a runner of pink light down the aisle that disappears at the gold-leafed Communion railing. Stained-glass windows, depicting scenes of miracles performed by saints, line the church walls like giant playing cards. Some of the windows are propped open at the bottom, leaving the occasional saint without feet.
    A fresco behind the main altar, painted by local amateur Michael Menecola during the 1920s, peels with age. It depicts the miracle at Fatima, where three village children in rural Portugal were said to have seen Mary, the Mother of God. The mural dramatizes the precise moment on May 13, 1917, when the Blessed Virgin appeared to little Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta in the sky over a field where they were tending sheep.
    I know many boys who fell in love with the face and form of this rendition of the Blessed Mother, hovering overhead like an angelic movie star. There were plenty of girls who tried to model themselves after her. The Holy Mother’s clear, creamy golden skin and wet blue eyes look up to heaven in complete supplication. There is something almost dreamy about her. My mother told me that the Blessed Lady’s pencil-thin eyebrows had all the girls in OLOF plucking to match them. The girls would light a wooden match, blow out the flame, and, with the charred end of the stick, draw thin arches over their own brows. Instant glamour.
    I walk down the aisle and genuflect before the altar, then make my way to the sacristy, the small room where the priest and servers dress. I check the vestments first.
    The priest’s white cassock with billowing sleeves and fat hems hangs next to the smaller versions, surplice robes for the altar boys. On separate pegs, braided white satin belts hang in a row like nooses. When I was a boy, I made three knots in my belt in honor of the Holy Trinity. I remember another altar boy, Vinnie de Franco, a real cut-up, who used to make two knots in his belt, one for Martin and the other for Lewis.
    The OLOF sodality does a good job with the spiritual laundry; the heavy cotton vestments are bleached to a bright white and pressed to a crisp. The smell of starch fills the tiny room like a vapor. Hanging to the side of the vestment closet, in a dress bag, are the altar cloths. Attached to the bag is a scrawled note from Nellie Fanelli, laundress to the church. It says: “
B: the purificator is in the baggie. N.
”
    I reach into the bottom of the dress bag, and there, just as she promised, is the pressed purificator, the official
moppeen
of the Mass celebration. The priest uses this starched dish towel to buff the chalice clean at the end of Communion. I take it out and place it on the credence table next to the cruets (for water and wine) and paten, a gold disc with a polished wooden handle held under the chin of the communicant by the altar boy to catch any fragments of the holy wafer that might drop during distribution.
    I return to the sacristy and take the rest of the linens to the altar, where I kneel, then rise and carefully dress the marble slab with the snow-white cloth. It takes a touch of maneuvering, just as it does when you set a formal dinner table at home. I return to the sacristy and take a second cloth off the hanger, the smaller one known as the corporal, which is like a place mat on the altar for the chalice and