NINA

The church was very big for my mother. She came over when she must’ve been thirty-one, thirty-two, four kids in tow and one on the way. I think the Church was a big help. It was a place she could trust, she had the priest she could talk to. Plus it was a big connection to Strangolagalli, to what she knew. Right before we came over, one of my little brothers died; he was just a baby. Our priest there, Father Picarazzi, was a big help. She was still sad when she got here, so naturally she went to the priest here, too.

She prayed a lot at home, usually early early in the morning, before we all were up. She had all the little statues in her bedroom. And the pictures with the palms still behind them from whenever the last Palm Sunday was.

Our church was St. Anthony’s on North Avenue. Not St. Anthony of Padua, who helped people find lost things—the other St. Anthony. The one in the desert who was always resisting the temptations of the devil. The devil showed up at his hut in the form of a pig. Just what the temptation was involving the pig, we didn’t know. Maybe the devil was tempting him with bacon. But how big a temptation was that? It seemed like a lot of work. He had to kill the pig, etc. Anyway, the pig was in the stained-glass windows above the confessionals on the right side of the church. I prayed on that side. I was a little girl, twelve years old, just about Todd’s age. It sounds terrible now, but I used to pray sometimes to the pig. He was small and they did him cute. I guess I didn’t believe it was really the devil. I think I figured everybody pictured in church had to be good.

The confessionals on the other side didn’t get any light. They were much darker. They were used by visiting priests. You’d go in there, it’d be like a cave. You couldn’t see the priest and you didn’t know him anyway. So you went there if you had serious sins to confess or you hadn’t been to confession in a long time. It was good for gossip: we’d watch who went over there. Oh, Mr. Motz: what’s he doing over there? So it kind of backfired on you.

It was a very Italian church. Father Favale was the priest for thirty, thirty-five years. He joked every Pentecost Sunday that our sins were committed in Italian, confessed in English, and pardoned in Latin.

There was one sister always used to joke with me that because of me she prayed to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. She thought I was a hopeless case because I wasn’t religious enough.

She’d make notes when I was bad, like in the middle of the winter, and she wouldn’t punish me then. When it was spring and beautiful out, then she’d keep me after school. I could hear all the kids running around and having a great time, and she’d say, Nina, remember when you did this? And when you did that?

But I was good kid for the most part.

My mother was worried about my lying. I lied, you know, like kids do. I wasn’t a big liar. My mother believed as long as you never told a lie you were always on God’s side. The most important thing was to tell the truth. You did something wrong, okay. But it was worse to lie about it. And if you lied, that was bad enough. It was worse to pretend that you hadn’t lied, and to keep going: every second you lived the lie was another sin.

They’d hit us when we got caught. But not so often; it wasn’t like other schools. It was funny: when you were getting hit, you thought the world was like that. Then afterwards when you met other people who weren’t Catholic or didn’t get hit in school, you thought: it isn’t like that. And then, sometime after that, you realized the world was like that, after all. So then you thought maybe you were better off knowing early.