Wayward Saints

by Suzzy Roche

Genres: Family Life; Religious & Inspirational; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

From a folk-rock legend comes a tender, comic story of family, music, and second chances. "Wayward Saints is funny, smart, poignant, the prose so clear, so direct, so true. This book is a joy." --Jane Hamilton, author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World Mary Saint, the rule-breaking, troubled former lead singer of the almost-famous band Sliced Ham, has pretty much given up on music after the trauma of her band member and lover Garbagio's death seven years earlier. Instead, with the help of her best friend, Thaddeus, she is trying to piece her life together while making mochaccinos in San Francisco. Meanwhile, back in her hometown of Swallow, New York, her mother, Jean Saint, struggles with her own ghosts. When Mary is invited to give a concert at her old high school, Jean is thrilled, though she's worried about what Father Benedict and her neighbors will think of songs such as "Sewer Flower" and "You're a Pig." But she soon realizes that there are going to be bigger problems when the whole town--including a discouraged teacher and a baker who's anything but sweet--gets in on the act. Filled with characters that are wild and original, yet still familiar and warm--plus plenty of great insider winks at the music industry-- Wayward Saints is a touching and hilarious look at confronting your past and going home again. Praise for Wayward Saints " Wayward Saints is full of wonderful observations about family, fame, guilt, aging, the stupid music business, and the power and glory of performing and creating. Most importantly, Suzzy Roche has written a book about love and redemption. And it's funny! I loved the little details and the big surprises." --Loudon Wainwright, Grammy-winning songwriter "[Roche's] language is dazzling--unpredictable, supremely funny, irreverent, and full of authority. Wayward Saints is the best and most surprising debut novel I've read since I can't remember when." --Rosellen Brown, author of Half a Heart and Before and After "If you've ever had the privilege of hearing Suzzy Roche sing, you know all about her perfect pitch, her angel's voice, her subtle wit. Her masterful debut novel, Wayward Saints, mines these same prodigious gifts. When Mary Saint, a once-promising indie rocker, is invited to perform in her hometown, where her mother, Jean, still holds court, the two are forced into a long-deferred reckoning: with each other and with the demons of their past. This is a golden-threaded tale of redemption, of the transformative powers of art, and of the mysteries, pains, and sacrifices of love." --Deborah Copaken Kogan, author of Hell Is Other Parents and The Red Book "Spoiler alert: this book is wonderful from beginning to end. I loved every page." --Patricia Marx, author of Starting from Happy

Release date: January 17, 2012

Publisher: Voice

Print pages: 272

Sample

One

Glasgow

1994

It was a Tuesday night at Crud, a club on the outskirts of the city, and the place was packed with skinheads and their girlfriends. Donal Hogan had said it was “a bit dungeonesque,” but worse than that, it was a piss-hole toilet. Mary Saint stood behind the curtain by the side of the stage peeking out into the audience and cursed him. What was he thinking? This is a fucking shit sandwich—Yer goona have ta troost me, Mary, next time you play in Glasgoo it’ll be at Gustav’s, fooking sold out.

Sliced Ham had been all over England, blowing rooms away, mostly playing for college kids and hipsters, and Mary knew these weren’t her people; they were savages—maybe even violent—they would eat the band alive. She noticed one goon in particular, his arms sticking out like legs of lamb, stained with tattoos. He was leaning on the edge of the stage with a whole line of other freaks, but he didn’t seem to be hanging out with any of them. He scowled at the microphone where Mary was going to be standing, and every couple of minutes he’d say something to it. Christ, get me out of here, she thought. Who do these people think we are? Her legs were shaking with fear, and she was having trouble catching her breath. She held on to the red velvet curtain that was burned with cigarette holes and rubbed her lips up against it, trying to calm her nerves, as if it were a baby blanket.

If only she hadn’t left the bottle of tequila in the dressing room. It was too close to showtime to run down to the basement and take another swig. She nervously checked her bra to see if her guitar picks were there and pulled up her indigo stockings, which were streaked with runs. Then, shaking her head back and forth, she bunched up her hair with her fingers, making sure not to disturb the bluebird feather she had pinned into a curl. It was a gift from the new bass player. He’d slipped it to her after the sound check, saying, “I’m an expat, too.” What the hell, she’d wear it for the show.

Impatient, she spit on the floor, which was sticky from the fat-fuck-monitor-man’s beef stew that he’d eaten half of—cold—out of the can. It had been knocked over in the sound check, and left there. She kicked at it with her high-heeled shoes like a wild horse, as if to say, Let’s get this thing going before I bolt. Where the fuck was the band?

One by one they came up from the dressing room, heads drooping, shifting from foot to foot; the drummer flicked his cigarette down to the floor, and they all waited in a line in the tiny backstage area. The gray concrete wall by the stage was signed by some of the bands that had played there: the Four Broke Blokes, the Don’t Ask Mes, Jed Syringe and the Shoot Ups. The Shoot Ups had left an illustration, somebody’s idea of a masterpiece: an intricate pencil drawing of a couple of faceless vaginas with stick figure arms and legs that were dancing like chorus girls, in front of an audience of penises. The artist had given the penises eyes, noses, and in some cases beards. There were also assorted asses, tits, and guitars, scribbles and flowers, swastikas, hearts, and messages like BIG BARF BAG LOVES SHEENA and BOINK ME, BITCH. Mary leaned her head up against the wall, covered her face with her arm, and tried to breathe slowly to calm her heart. “I need help with this,” she whispered to the wall.

The lights went down and the crowd raised its collective voice into a scream. Mary looked behind her to see if the band was ready.

“Go,” she said as if she was the only soldier, leading unsuspecting farmers into a battle that she knew they couldn’t win.

They stomped onto the stage and picked up their instruments. Mary’s red electric guitar threw refracted light across the audience, which was packed into the dark cellar; she strummed down hard, and the crowd went dumb. Her voice was creamy and clear, spiked with agony, and like a hatchet it cut into their brains.

You wanna fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck me . . .

She couldn’t hear herself. She turned to the monitor guy and yelled, “Turn it up, asshole!” The crowd screeched praise, and the magic of Mary Saint exploded over them.

Mary wasn’t pretty; she was exotically beautiful, and she had no idea. She thought she was plain as a paper lunch bag. Her hair, a nest of black loose curls, flew around her wide face, her skin was pale and smooth, and her cheeks had a natural tint. She could have been a breakable china doll, except for her dark raccoon eyes, which marked her expression with perpetual melancholy, giving her the look of an abandoned child. Her eyelids were painted with too much sparkling raspberry goop, and her lips were wide and full, glistening with red. She’d glued a tiny silver star below her left eye.

The spotlight and the specials were on her, and they created a halo around her head in the smoky haze. She looked toward heaven, crazily, like a bird whose wing was hooked into a gate. Her breasts were large, too large for such a small-boned girl, and she offered them up to the room. She could have been a teenage hooker who was being forced to dance for old men. Standing tall on her skinny legs, her full hips swaying underneath satin boxer shorts, she let her hands explore her body; they went between her legs, they caressed her arms and face and breasts, and they danced in the sacred space around her, like everyone in the room wished they could do.

The skinheads and their girlfriends were hard to pull in; she had to work for it, and in the guitar break during the second song, “I Pee Like a Girl,” she knelt down in front of the guy with the leg of lamb arms, and spoke to him, nothing he could possibly hear, but she touched her wet lips to the rim of his ear, and the crowd went nuts. It turned out that they were her people after all, they already knew her songs, and had memorized them. They wanted to be loved, and once they saw her look upon them with desire, they surrendered like kids lost in a fairy tale, swaying back and forth, their porcupine hairdos, skull rings, and pierced lips fluttered in the shadowy shift of red and blue lights. They might have even sucked their thumbs if they’d been alone. Careful not to make noise until a song was done, many of them mouthed her words, and then, at the close of every tune, they rose together in a collective moan to ask for more; raising their fists into the air, they chanted, “Ma-ry! Ma-ry!” She led them through the wilderness of her songs, allowing the lines of the lead guitar to carry her deep into the obliteration of her self. At one point, she looked out into the crowd and said, “Oh, there you are,” and everybody thought she was their new best friend. But good-bye was what she was thinking. Good-bye. She opened her mouth and sang with the shattered heart she knew she had, its splinters flew from the stage. I sing for you, I sing for you . . .

Later, she remembered the vague feeling of surprise—they’re actually letting me fly—she could pinpoint the exact instant when she dove into the void, a place that she had visited many times in her mind, in her dreams, in her moments of clear sadness, a pool where angels swam without their wings, where devils were free to stab and boil children. It all happened in a flash of stunned silence, after the last chord came crashing down on “The Back of My Ass,” when nobody clapped and nobody screamed. It passed quickly, but for Mary, it was the heart of her triumph. I’m home, she thought. The fans followed her as far as they could, their eyes teary and stoned with reverence, but she went beyond, leaving them aching, their hearts melted and their brains branded. She’d had to pay a price, something private, unknown to them, so lonely, and yet she drove herself—on their backs—into her own oblivion.

When Sliced Ham finished their last song they left the stage but were called back four times, and when Mary Saint had had enough, she stormed off abruptly, turning once to blow a kiss to someone; but no one could figure out to whom.

After the show, in the bowels of Crud, thousands of miles from home, she sat slumped in the ratty armchair in the dressing room, licking the rim of the bottle of tequila the band had passed around, and thought hard about short, bald Donal Hogan, the serious Irish guy with the bow tie, whom she’d met in the pub in London the Saturday night she’d arrived in England, ten months before. The place was wall to wall with kids who were drinking warm beer and smoking joints. After she’d downed her first few glasses of ale, she’d stood on her barstool and sang “Man in the Airplane Bathroom.” The room had quieted, and Donal had elbowed through the crowd and slipped her his card.

“How the fook old are yeh? Sixteen?” he’d said.

“I’m twenty, darling,” she’d said.

“Where’d yeh coom froom?”

“Made in the USA.”

“Yer fooking brilliant, yer holy,” he’d whispered into her ear, and his breath was so repulsive, she’d backed away. But he’d smiled at her in the most genuine way, and she’d gone right for his mouth, sticking her tongue deep inside.

“Put yer hoort in my hand,” he’d said, lifting his delicate palm up to her breast. “You’re goon a be a staar.” She realized, now, that he was right. Up till now, it had been a gas, a good old time, but something had snapped tonight, and the power of it was coming back at her hard. She was transfixed in front of a cosmic mirror, looking at herself, but she was somebody even more ferocious than she’d thought she was.

Later, on the all-night trek back to London, in the van that Donal’s friend Ricky Boyle was driving, when the rest of the band had fallen off to sleep, with their heads bent sideways and vibrating against the windows, Mary was wide awake. She peered out at the sky and saw the billions of stars. Big fucking deal. Each one was just a ball of burning fire. And then she saw the sliver of the moon, and there was someone swinging from its point. I sing for you.

Two

Swallow, New York

June 2010

At the crack of dawn, when the streetlamps were still glowing and the day was already warm, Jean Saint drove down Swallow’s empty gray roads, past the duck pond and the elementary school, where the passerine birds that gave the town its name were perched in a long line, high up on a telephone wire, waiting to greet the sun. Weary with age, Swallow—population five thousand—sat nestled in a valley between Ingleton Mountain and Spider Lake. To a stranger passing through, it might appear that nothing had changed in this town for fifty years, and yet, that was an illusion. The citizens of Swallow struggled to keep abreast, like the rest of America, propelled by prescription drugs, overburdened by gadgetry and technology, grappling with the word global, and coping with a broken economy (which, for Swallow, seemed to be a perpetual condition). Still, the people preferred to live modestly; a five-and-ten thrived on Main Street, and you could still get an old-fashioned jelly doughnut at the bakery.

Jean turned left at the Presbyterian church and passed the bike shop, slowly creeping down Main, where parking spots were plentiful at this hour. She was the first one into Fred’s Papers and Mags.

Fred had only just switched on the lights and was bent down on one knee cutting the strings off the morning paper when the bells jingled on the door.

“You scared the bejesus out of me, Jean. What brings you out so early?” he said, breathing hard.

“Well, I’ll be needing a couple extra copies of the paper today, Fred,” she said importantly. “There’s an article about my daughter in the ‘What’s On’ section. She’s doing a concert over at the high school next week.”

“Of course she is, the whole damn town’s talking about it. My granddaughter has been tweeting about it. Don’t you think I won’t be there, hearing aid and all. You must be proud.”

Not realizing what tweeting was, Jean had a brief moment of feeling sorry for Fred, assuming that he must be getting a little mixed up with his words. “Well, I don’t like to brag, but just between us two, I am a little bit proud. I’ll take five copies.”

“Huh?” said Fred.

“Five,” said Jean, a little louder.

Fred looked up at her. “Why, Jean, that’s quite a hairdo you’ve got.”

Jean took a deep inhale. She’d mistakenly asked her neighbor, Celeste, a retired stylist, to cut her hair, just to save herself the trouble and expense of going down to Nadine, at Hair on Mane. It had been a mistake. Her bangs were crooked, as if they’d been chewed, not trimmed. She’d have to go to Nadine after all.

“Honestly, Fred, I didn’t have a chance to fix myself up this morning,” said Jean, annoyed, and she quickly checked her reflection in the window of the store. She was dismayed by what she saw and couldn’t help thinking she looked like an old lady wearing a silver cereal bowl on her head. Haircuts had long been a source of frustration for her, but what business was it of his?

“I think you look swell,” said Fred as he handed her the stack of papers. Jean embraced them as if they were a bunch of roses that she’d just been given after winning first prize in a beauty contest, and was so flustered that she rushed out of the store, forgetting to pay. Fred figured he’d catch her the next time she came in.

When Jean finally got her Chrysler safely back into the garage and carried the papers to the kitchen, she used all her restraint to put up the coffee before she would allow herself to flip through looking for the article. She carefully measured four heaping spoonfuls of Chock Full O’Nuts into the percolator and plugged it in, then pulled her favorite mug out of the cupboard, the one with the thin rim and handle, which had YOU CAN’T SCARE ME, I HAVE KIDS painted on the face of it. Jean popped two slices of Arnold bread into the toaster. She lifted the top off the butter dish, which she had taken out of the fridge as soon as she woke up, so the butter would be perfectly soft for toast. Though she was about to bust, she slowed yet again and set out her china plate, which she had glued together after dropping it last year (its edge was still chipped), and placed the napkin and knife in perfect alignment, even taking a moment to further adjust them. Only then did she allow herself to be seated and pick up the paper.

To her surprise, right there on the bottom of the front page was a small picture of her daughter and a caption that read, “Mary Saint of Sliced Ham—see ‘What’s On.’ ” She felt her heart pump. It was odd to see Mary’s face on the front page of The Woodside. Jean quickly turned the pages, skipping past the headline about the plane crash in India—Good God—past the traffic violations section; they’d nabbed another unsuspecting out-of-towner who was passing through at the stop sign at Main and Cherry—what a racket—the fire at the hardware store; John Stokes had tossed a cigarette butt in the garbage pail—dope—past the editorial on the mayor’s outburst at the last council meeting—what else is new?—until she saw the familiar “What’s On” logo, and there was Mary’s face, consuming half the page. The photo was almost too big, embarrassingly big, and it had been taken at least ten years earlier. There was Mary in a pout, with a ring through her nose and her eyes heavily lined. The caption read, “Hometown Girl, Mary Saint from Sliced Ham, comes to Swallow High for a Solo Concert.” Anyone could see that she was a pretty girl under all the makeup, but Jean was sorry they didn’t have a better picture, perhaps one where she was smiling. It occurred to Jean that her daughter looked poor, and she hoped no one else would think that.

Jean took a moment to rub her eyes, and then she looked around her kitchen, trying to reassure herself, but for all its gleaming red tiles and imitation Kohler faucets, her dream kitchen was highly imperfect, the counters and cabinets cheap, reminding her of the poverty that shaped her childhood. The workmanship at East Swallow Meadows was of the cut-corners variety, and it pained her to admit it was made only to look expensive. For some reason, whenever she was the slightest bit agitated, her mind seized on the imperfections in her home, a nervous habit, she supposed, and she could not stop herself. Jean returned to the paper, her stomach swarming.

The article talked about the success of Sliced Ham, with Mary as the pivotal member, primary songwriter, and lead singer. It told the story of how Mary had left Swallow in the early 1990s at the ripe old age of eighteen to find her heart’s desire, and within two years had made her way across the Atlantic, only to fall in with a scene of young musicians in London and form a band. Sliced Ham had “burned through the United Kingdom like a California wildfire,” according to The Woodside, and by the time the band came to perform in America, Sliced Ham was already a “hit with the hip,” and Mary Saint was “the fearless Goddess of Guts.” Now, at age thirty-six, “Ms. Saint will be heading back to her hometown to strut her stuff alone.” The article went on to describe the breakup of the group in 2003, shortly after the demise of the bass player, Garbagio, “whose tragic death was the result of a fall from a hotel balcony.”

Damn it all, thought Jean, why did they have to go and mention that? What will people think? She remembered what she had thought when she first heard about it; for a moment she had wondered who Garbagio could possibly be. Who would name a boy Garbagio? He was probably someone dirty with a name like that. What else could it be? What foolishness. How horrible that his mother had had to hear her son was dead: the sobbing, the rage, and on top of it, that name. For what? He wasn’t even a soldier, he was just a—who knows? Jean couldn’t have even imagined who or what he was back then. Garbagio, obviously a stage name. Now that the article was out, she was sure that the great tongues of Swallow were flapping about all this nonsense. She wished the article had not delved into the past.

Jean guessed it was possible that people assumed Mary had a stage name, too, and she hoped that wasn’t true. There was just something about Mary Saint—she had to admit it could seem fake, showy. In reality, when Mary was barely eight years old, she used to entertain her mother, pretending to be a famous actress. It was the first time Jean had had any idea Mary was interested in being on a stage, for she had always been so shy. Mommy, VaVaVa is my first name, Voom is my last name. Get it? VaVaVa Voom. Jean used to laugh out loud.

It didn’t say in the article, but Jean knew the private, tragic story of Garbagio’s death, for Mary had kept in touch with her mother over the years through a stream of letters, which was like a string that Jean held on to, having lost sight of the kite it was attached to, in the endless blue of the sky. Jean knew about much of what had happened: the drugs, the shame of it. She wished that none of it had to be dredged up, printed in the paper for all to see. After all, the whole thing had been an accident, and so much time had passed. Why couldn’t they just talk about the upcoming concert? She was beginning to dread the idea all over again.

The bread popped up out of the toaster, and Jean poured herself a coffee and scraped the butter across her toast. She looked out the window at the overgrown field behind her house; those weeds, the ones with the small white flowers, were still climbing through the lattice fence, and she remembered that Mr. Thoreau, the gardener, had told her they were called hairy bittercress. The thought crossed her mind that Hairy Bittercress could. . .