“Sit on down, and we’ll check lighting. Do me a favor and look over at Ben. Thanks, darling.” He flips a chunk of my hair over my shoulder and then takes a look into the screens on the cameras to my left that will catch my profile.
“Ben, pull the desk this way a little.” The desk is relocated with a screech.
Father Ignatius intervenes. “Wait a moment. Please don’t move things. I didn’t say anything could be changed in the room. I didn’t give permission for that.”
“Sorry, the lighting is better this way. We can put it all back after. I promise we won’t disturb anything permanently,” Ben explains in his slight New York accent.
“I . . . I . . . ,” the elderly priest stutters, growing more overwhelmed. “I don’t know about that . . .”
Mac straightens up, running fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair.
“Well, if you don’t, then could we speak to Father Patrick? Perhaps you could locate him for me?” The tension in the room is growing by the second, and I wonder if we’ll get out of here without a godly lightning bolt of retribution striking one or more of us dead.
“How can I help?” a voice from the back of the room chimes in. I don’t have to turn around to know who’s speaking. It’s the man from before. The production assistant or whatever.
“Oh, thank the Lord,” I hear Ben mutter as he adjusts a light behind me. I try to take a quick glance over my shoulder.
“In the camera, please,” Mac corrects and then whispers over my shoulder to one of the crew. “The other priest is here. Get him miked and lit fast, and let’s get moving.”
After a momentary scuffle, I can hear the priest’s footsteps crossing the floor. I sit up a little straighter. He crosses my line of vision, but I don’t get a good look with everyone flocking around him.
“What do you think? Does he need any powder? Do I need to call Lisa?” a production assistant asks Mac.
I peek at the priest. I expected a slightly oily middle-aged clergyman. Instead, I lock eyes with the azure gaze I became acquainted with in the nave.
“Hey! It’s you,” I blurt out.
Production assistant Ben gives me a look that I translate as “Shut up; we’re running behind.” The friendly man sitting across from me, wearing a priest’s collar, raises an eyebrow in my direction but doesn’t say a word.
Damn it. He’s the priest. I smile with tight lips. I told this priest I think cathedrals are pissing contests. And I swore. Right in front of him—I swore.
But I don’t get far in my regret spiral before Mac settles into his chair. It’s positioned off to the side with a fourth camera filming his reactions.
With the crew in place, Mac turns to me and with his camera voice makes the introduction official.
“Elise, this is Father Patrick Kelly. Father Patrick, Elise Branson. The bride.”
“Nice to meet you,” he says from behind the desk.
“You too,” I say, pretending we’ve never met.
The assistant director steps forward with a black-and-white slate with digital numbers across the top and other information written on it in grease pencil. He holds it in front of Father Patrick’s face, waiting for confirmation from the cameramen, and then calls out:
“Vivian Snow: Bombshell, Father Patrick, Take One.”
And we begin.
CHAPTER 8
Vivian
Thursday, May 13, 1943
Santini Home
I have lip color, rouge, mascara, and eye pencil all tucked inside my purse, along with my mother’s silver compact. Looking in the mirror, I add one more comb to my hair, hoping I’ve done enough to keep everything in place on the bus if Mary doesn’t arrive in time to pick me up. In the mornings, I stand at my bus stop, fingers crossed I’ll see her heading down the street with her red-nailed, long-fingered hand hanging out the window of her navy-blue Plymouth Special Deluxe.
Otherwise, I’m stuck on the bus. And with the days getting warmer, passengers let down the windows, so I can’t trust I’ll arrive at the base with my hair in presentable condition. Papà doesn’t want his girls using anything “unnatural,” which includes stiffeners in our hair, so I have to rely on a hairnet to keep my long strands in place and up to code. I’d like to cut it, but papà has a rule about that too.
At least makeup is easier to hide. Aria leaves me a wet washcloth in the mailbox at the end of the day when she gets the mail for papà. It’s often cold as a snowdrift in January when I wipe my face at night, but I’ll take the icy touch of the terry cloth over papà’s fiery temper.
Before leaving the bedroom I share with Aria, I smooth the bedspread and check that the delicate perfume bottles are lined up in order on my dresser. That’s the mamma I like to remember, the dark-haired beauty who collected lovely things from far-off places. I always knew my mother was beautiful. My father knew it too. She wore lipstick, and when I was young, I’d ask for an extra kiss on my lips before I went to school, hoping I’d get a little smudge of color on my mouth so I could be as pretty as her. She kept her nails painted red and her toenails, too, and when strands of silver began to show in her dark locks, she took to dying it.
But mamma had moods. When she got too wild, papà would calm her with a glass of wine. When she got too low, he’d pump her up with pills he got from a friend at the factory. I don’t blame my papà; he didn’t know what to do when she’d run off for days or even weeks, or when she’d stay in bed and talk about how much better off we’d all be without her. Papà thought he was helping. We all thought he was helping.
I sought refuge at school, and I found any way to stay late when I had the chance. Then when I was ten, my mother fell pregnant with baby Tony.
As her belly grew, something like a miracle happened. Her fits stopped, her wild, sleepless nights, the weeks of not knowing if my mother would ever return—gone. I’d crawl into her bed in the morning after papà went to work for the early shift, and I’d put my hand on her belly and feel the baby inside shift and wiggle, and I let myself believe a miracle had happened.
I knew other Catholic families whose houses were bursting with babies, and I often wondered why my family had so few. I had some idea it had to do with mamma’s sickness, but once that baby started growing in her belly, I was convinced God decided to heal her.
We all thought she was better then, that she’d kicked the demons or whatever she called her fits and mood shifts that “followed her from the old country.” And when Tony was born, my father seemed happy in a way I hadn’t seen him before.
His anger was gone. And a peaceful softness took its place. At first, I was jealous of Tony, the baby who fixed everything, the baby who healed my mamma and calmed my papà.
But then I fell under his spell too. Baby Tony, with thick black hair and slate-gray eyes that might turn blue or brown at any minute. Before Tony, I’d said I didn’t want children, even though it made Father Theodore cringe. Once he suggested I become a nun, and I considered it for a little while, thinking it a way to avoid having babies and staying home with an angry husband. I loved my baby sister, but I was required to care for her so often I felt like I’d already experienced parenthood. And I loved my imperfect father, but he made marriage and family seem like an immeasurable burden. Which I guess it was, but mamma’s illness didn’t only affect papà. I think that’s what he forgot in all of this.