EIGHT YARDS OF DELICATELY hand-needled point de Venise lace was used to make her small gown. Her wings were fashioned with white chiffon left over from Big Betty LoMonico’s death shroud. (Massive heart attack after sharing Big Mamma’s magic meatball recipe.) Her little crown was crafted with pipe cleaners, tiny charms, and jingle bells. The basket she firmly held in her tomato-picking, feet-washing hands was lined with silver satin and filled to the lidded brim with white rose petals.
From her Clifton Savings Bank fire escape perch, eleven stories above the annual feast of San Michele, above the sausage and pepper sandwich stands, vats of frying zeppole, games of chance, the hats and kerchiefs of Italian men and women, the buzz cuts and banana curls of their children, nine-year-old Belladonna Marie Donato could see all of Van Houten Avenue.
S. S. Kresge Five and Dime (a great place for shoplifting); Bruno’s Elbow Room (mafia meetings under smoke-shrouded gambling lamps); Guido’s Pizza Pie Palace (sold whole or by the slice); Moglia’s Penny Candy, Ice Cream, and Soda Pop Shop (sweater girls rotating on spinning stools); Loprinzi’s Gymnasium (where smelly pretty boys made muscles pop and grin); and the neon marquee of the Jewel Box Theater (Saturday-morning cowboy serials, Mickey the Mouse, MGM, Paramount Pictures, Universal, RKO, and Looney Tunes). Just off Scales Drive sprawled the Robertson Scale factory (puffing clouds of lung-choking smoke and steam). Resting in one of the long shadows of the factory smokestacks sat Mozzarelli’s Star Barbershop (Xavier Patrizio Mozzarelli’s American dream: A Great Haircut Gives a Man Dignity!).
Not far from all of this Italian bliss rose Saint Anthony of Padua’s holy steeple, scratching the mighty balls of Heaven.
The Lord be with you.
And also with you.
Wobbling in the wind next to Bella, Guiseppi Sparza took a stiff nip off his bottle of hooch. With trembling hands, he attached the homemade harness strapped around her torso to a double laundry line that stretched all the way across the street to another pulley soldered to another fire escape precariously rusting off the building that housed Cipolini’s Home for Funerals, the death house where Big Betty LoMonico lay in state next to a generous pot of meatballs and tomato gravy. (It had taken ten men and three wailing ladies to pry Bella off the coffin.)
“Silenzio!” Guiseppi yelled. “Silenzio!”
A celebratory fanfare blasted from Dario Scungille’s one-man band, and a salad platter of fairy lights (green, white, and red) exploded over everything.
Echoes of silenzio! and a few shut-the-fuck-up!s from the crowd below brought everything down to a holy hush.
“Close your eyes,” Guiseppi whispered into Bella’s ear, “and get ready to fly!”
Into the night sky, where the moon had a crazy face.
The Glasgow-grinning face of Coney Island’s Steeplechase.
“One! Two! Three!”
Guiseppi gave Bella a rough little shove and she sailed across the line.
Papa! Catch me!
She never felt so alive.
She never felt so free.
Was that the specter of Big Betty LoMonico or Bella’s Cooking Spirit flying along beside her?
Bella’s soul was soaring.
Lots of oohs and ahhs from below until her hurtling weight made the rope jump the pulley attached to the bank’s fire escape.
The crowd screamed.
Dario flung his instruments and opened his arms wide. “I’ve got her!” he cried. But just before Bella hit the brave musician’s head, Guiseppi Sparza yanked the rope, and Bella was jerked back into oblivion.
A snowstorm of rose petals flew.
“Viva San Michele!” Bella yelled. “Viva San Michele!”
Saint Anthony’s dented church bells clanged as petals were caught and wishes were made. Somewhere in the crowd, a turkey-necked old octopus of a woman with a lit Pall Mall toggling between her lips released her ten-year-old son’s hand to smack a petal off her head.
“Francis!” the old woman yelled like a Tuscan circus bear as the kid ran. “Francis Anthony Mozzarelli!”
The boy dodged through the applauding crowd, ducked behind a statue of San Michele, and pulled his own cigarette out of his shoe. He ignored his mamma’s calls, struck a match, and puffed in solitary bliss until a single white rose petal, like a fat ash from Pompeii, spiraled down in front of his pretty face. He caught it and held it in his fist.
“Viva San Michele,” he whispered.
Then he made a secret wish, crossed himself, tossed the petal to the wind, and blew the little Angel Queen of Clifton, New Jersey, a tender kiss.