The Saint of Lost Things Read online

  “Buzzy’s in the clouds with love,” says Renato. Then, after a pause, “Maybe I am, too. Who knows? We don’t have any jobs lined up before Christmas. Not for more gifts, at least.” He stifles a mischievous smile.

  “What am I supposed to do, then?” says Antonio, ignoring the smirk on Renato’s face. He sounds like his niece, Nunzia, whining to her father. He sits on the edge of the bed. Last year, he took a gold ring with one bright ruby in the center. He hid it under Maddalena’s pillow after she fell asleep, then woke her an hour later because he couldn’t wait for her to find it. This year he must outdo himself, in honor of the baby.

  He is impatient for the Christmas Eve festivities to start, if only to break the silence between him and Maddalena. To reconcile before then would be to admit defeat, to signal a shakiness in his authority. Surrender even a little bit to your wife, he knows, and her voice gets louder and louder until it drowns yours out completely. It happened to Gianni. It was about to happen to Renato. Antonio already allowed Maddalena to return to the Golden Hem, a decision she must consider a victory. She did not know he needed her to make all the money she could—not only for the child, but for the trattoria.

  “I’m very sorry the Closet disappoints you,” says Renato. He digs through the pile and uncovers a heart-shaped locket on a chain. He snaps it open and shut. “What about this? It’s real silver. You put a little picture inside—what could be more romantic? Buzzy gave one of these to Marcie, and she fell down on the ground crying. I even have a little pink box for it somewhere—”

  Antonio rolls the locket around in his palm. It feels heavy enough. If it were gold, it might make the perfect gift. “You don’t understand,” says Antonio. He cups the locket in both hands and shakes it like dice. He lowers his eyes. “Maddalena—she’s going to have a baby.”

  Renato raises his arms above his head. “Well, grazie Dio!” he says. “We thought the day would never come.”

  Antonio braces himself for the teasing. He’s already prepared his responses: they made love at a different time of day; the pregnancy is a sign from God that Maddalena should not work; the doctor prescribed her a new kind of pill. He has yet to convince himself fully that any of these might be true, that that man in Philadelphia has not made him a cornuto. He keeps the address and phone number of the Golden Hem in his wallet, just in case. And though he believes the impossible can’t be true, he cannot stop imagining the worst. In his mind, he sees the man force Maddalena against the wall of his office. He sees the shame on her face and her desperation to hide the truth from her husband. For this he blames Buzzy, whose stories of Germany and his many women have alerted him to the wickedness of men. Then he blames himself for not making enough money to keep his wife at home where she belongs, where she is protected.

  “When did you find out?” Renato asks.

  “Last night,” Antonio lies.

  “Just in time for Christmas!” He takes Antonio’s hands in his and holds them. “Congratulations, my friend. Always one step ahead of me. Two steps now. I wish you and the beautiful Maddalena all the luck in the world.”

  They sit on the couch, which for some reason Officer Stanley has pulled into the center of the room. The apartment is sparsely decorated: one crucifix on the otherwise bare white walls; a tall lamp in the corner that emits a dull, flat light; a pair of swinging saloon-style doors that lead to the kitchen. The radio spits static at them from the windowsill. The bedrooms consist of one bed, two dressers with the drawers half-open and overflowing, and floors covered with clothes and damp towels. For drapes they use sheets secured to the rods with clothespins. The bathroom, however, is immaculate. Buzzy scrubs the sink, shower, toilet, and wall tiles once a week. He arranges the toothbrushes and soaps neatly on the countertop, a gleaming speckled Formica. As for his skin creams, he hides those in a plastic bag under his bed next to his boots and dirty magazines, but everyone knows they are there.

  “I don’t think I’m a step ahead of anybody,” says Antonio. He leans over and switches off the radio. “This should have happened a long time ago, the way I see it. But what can you do?”

  “If I were you, I’d be singing up and down the street.”

  Antonio shrugs. “A child is a lot of responsibility,” he says. “A lot of money, if you want to do it right.”

  “Money!” says Renato. “Oh, I wish Buzzy could hear you. Money is the first thing on your mind always, Antonio. Everything costs too much. Everyone’s trying to screw you out of a dollar. You want a beautiful present for your wife, but you don’t want to pay for it. You’d rather waste twenty hours of your life washing dishes than write a check to the jeweler.”

  “I don’t want to work as hard as I do for nothing,” he says.

  “Who does?” says Renato. “But you have to live, too. To take pleasure. Why work so hard if you can’t enjoy it? Why have a baby at all?”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” says Antonio. He thinks a moment. They do not face each other. They cross their legs and stare straight ahead, talking to the empty room. “To pass on your name, right? Isn’t that the reason? To play with on the beach. To take care of you when you’re old.”

  “I was teasing, Antonio,” Renato says. “A baby is—is God’s miracle! It’s a blessing from above.” He shakes his head. “I almost had my own once, you know. A long time ago.”

  Antonio turns to him. “When?”

  “With the girl—Angelina—but we got rid of it. I never saw her again.”

  “I don’t know any Angelina,” Antonio says. “Where was I?”

  “You weren’t paying attention,” says Renato. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. I have another chance with Cassie.” He digs between the cushions, pulls out a white sock, and throws it across the room. It lands on the top rung of the coatrack. “You don’t know how good your life is. You walk around here half-asleep most of the time. Buzzy and I see it. Even Cassie sees it. We say to each other, ‘Poor Antonio. So rich and so stupid.’ The only thing that goes wrong in your life so far is that it takes Maddalena a few years longer than usual to have a baby. I don’t call that a tragedy.”

  “Who said tragedy?” says Antonio. “Tragedy is war. Hunger. Poverty. The last twenty years—in Italy, in Germany, in Korea, even here—all tragedy.” Then he lets this go. It is beside the point. He does not say how easy it is to see richness in another man’s life; the trick was to see it in your own. One step ahead of Renato and Buzzy, he knows, means one step closer to Gianni, to old age, to death. Yes, he has wanted a child since the moment he saw Maddalena in the village. He has longed for the baby, imagined again and again the moment he’d first hold him in his arms. But now that the time has come, he feels a gathering fear. “Where’s that pink box?” he asks Renato.

  They stand, and Renato hands him the gift. He kisses him on both cheeks and again wishes him luck and congratulations.

  The fastest route home from the pizzeria is to take Fourth Street down and up the hill to Union, then make a left on Eighth. Two turns. Instead, Antonio cuts across Washington to Pennsylvania Avenue, then zigzags through the neigborhood. Such is life when you’re young, he thinks: taking the long way for no good reason. Then you get old, and one by one the streets close around you, and before long you’re stuck on the same one route from home to work, work to home, with no means or cause to step off track. You wait for your son to live the better life you failed to provide. This is the story of his father, of most of the men at the Ford plant, and soon of the great playboy Renato Volpe.

  He spits onto the sidewalk. At the corner of Clayton and Fifth, he takes Fifth, though it’s in the opposite direction of his house. On this block once lived a family of three brothers, friends of the Grassos, who came from a village in Abruzzo not far from Santa Cecilia. Not one of them saw fifty years of age. At forty-six, the oldest dropped dead on the dance floor at his niece’s wedding. The middle went while throwing a bocce ball; the youngest in his sleep. They had weak hearts, the doctors said, and now their widows live tog
ether in a home paid for by the church, three young single ladies who will never again be kissed or loved or given a locket in a heart-shaped box. In a few years, Antonio will turn thirty-five. He has a good decade to spend not worrying over the strength of his own heart. He is a young American, smarter than his brother and Renato put together. If he reminds himself of this more often, there is no telling how his story will end.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE Christmas Eve, Antonio receives a rare telephone call from Renato. Something has happened. He leaves immediately, after a hurried and unconvincing explanation to his family. If she’d been a different woman—more suspicious, or maybe just less busy—Maddalena might think he had a girl on the side, but, as far as Antonio knows, she trusts that whatever road he takes at night, it always leads back to her. His last glimpse of her on this cold and rainy December evening is from behind: her apron crisscrossing her waist, her elbows thrust back as she kneads dough. She turns her head to the side and ticks it upward as he mumbles his good-byes. There’s a smudge of flour on her cheek as if from a paintbrush, and he feels the urge to wipe it clean.

  Renato has locked the whiskey in the cabinet, put on a pot of espresso, and gathered everyone around the back table. Cassie bounces on his knee, though there’s a perfectly empty chair beside him. Though the air outside is below freezing, she wears a tank top and jeans, her hair in a ponytail. “This girl’s our secret weapon,” Renato says. He kisses her bare shoulder, which is inexplicably tan.

  “We’ve been working on a plan,” Renato says, and explains that this one requires concentration. It is much more serious than stealing necklaces from Wanamaker’s. It is so serious, in fact, that he trusts only Cassie, Buzzy, Antonio, and one other man—whom he hasn’t yet named—to hear the details. He sends little Paolo home early, Marcie upstairs.

  “Should I be nervous?” Antonio asks.

  “Yes,” says Renato. “But don’t worry too much. You won’t be involved. Not completely. But I need your mind. And your brother’s restaurant.”

  “If my brother’s involved, then I’m involved,” says Antonio.

  “Mrs. Stella’s plays a very minor part,” Renato says. “Listen first, ask questions later.” He takes a breath, stirs some sugar into his espresso. “You know what lives next door to my mother now. I can’t stand the sight anymore. Every day I visit her, and every day there they are in the backyard. Talking. Smoking. Throwing a football back and forth. Anything but working. More and more and more of them, like the roaches in Mrs. Stella’s kitchen.” He nudges Antonio with his elbow, but Antonio’s blank expression does not change.

  “This much I know,” he says. “Everybody knows. But what can you do?”

  “You can’t keep track of those people: the big fat ones, the screaming little babies, they go in and out like it’s a hotel. We go into our kitchen, there they are through the windows. Last night we ate in the dining room, and we could hear them like they were sitting in our laps. Yelling at each other, crying, banging on the wall. Like animals. What’s that house going to be worth in twenty years when Mamma’s gone?”

  “Less than dirt,” says Cassie.

  “Less than dirt is right,” says Renato. “If they keep their hands on it. So I have to take steps. Big steps. To protect Mamma. She has nightmares. Thank God Papà didn’t live to see it. But if he was alive today he’d kill me for doing nothing to protect her—and his investment.”

  Cassie cracks a smile. “I told him he should be a good son and move back in with her.” She pinches his cheek. “Then we get married, and I come to live there, too. One big happy family.”

  Renato leans over in his chair. He looks each person in the eye. “I tell you: big steps. Soon. It’s gone on too long already. Here’s the plan. Cassie’s going to stop into the bar at Mrs. Stella’s just before it closes. She’ll drink a little too much—not hard for her, to be sure—and she’ll give the restaurant the name of a taxi. The man next door to Mamma, the head of the family, if you can call him that, works at the taxi company. When he comes to pick her up, she tells him she lives in Marcus Hook, and he drives her to my friend Lino’s house. You don’t know Lino. He used to be a boxer. He has no heart for these mulignani trying to take over. He moved all the way to Marcus Hook to get away from them, and even that’s not far enough these days. So the mulignane drives her to Lino’s house, and when he tells her the fare, she says, ‘I have no money,’ and makes him come inside Lino’s if he wants to get paid.”

  “Gesù Cristo,’” Antonio says. “Then what, you beat him up? My brother can’t be tied to this. Why does it have to be Mrs. Stella’s she came from?”

  “It’s two blocks from my mother’s house. He’s the closest taxi, so there’s a good chance they’ll call him. If they don’t call him, we keep trying different nights until they do. It might take a few tries, but the important thing is to make it look natural.”

  “Keep going,” Buzzy says. “Let’s hear the whole plan before Antonio tells us what’s wrong with it.”

  “We don’t beat him up,” Renato says. “That’s the beauty. Cassie has a much more elegant idea—”

  “We get him inside,” Cassie interrupts. “Lino’s there, right? And Renato, and maybe Buzzy too.” She glances at him. “In front of them, I tell the man, ‘You won’t be getting any money tonight. You drove me all the way to Marcus Hook to try to—’ and then I tear my blouse and slap my face a little. I start to cry. The man is confused. Then he understands and gets nervous. He throws up his hands and tries to leave. Then Renato tells him—”

  “Get out of Seventh Street!” Renato says, standing. He points his finger at Antonio as if he were the colored man. Cassie slides over to the empty seat. “If you and your monkeys aren’t gone in one week, this girl tells the police what you did to her.”

  “I’ve got tears all down my face, and I’m screaming,” Cassie says. She thrashes and musses her hair and runs her nails up and down her neck, making red marks. “I can’t control myself.”

  “You see the quality of actress she is,” Renato continues, still talking to the colored man. “Who’s going to believe you over her?”

  “So much for going straight,” Antonio says, in Italian. He pushes his chair away from the table. “I don’t know why you tell me these things. Stealing bracelets is different than—”

  “What did he say?” Cassie asks. “Anytime you talk Italian, I know it’s about me.”

  “After he’s gone, my uncle from Naples moves in,” Renato says. “He’s been waiting to come here since the war. For a free place to live, he’ll help take care of my mother. Cassie and I will stay here and kick Buzzy out. Everybody’s happy.”

  “Except Buzzy,” Buzzy says. “Where am I supposed to live?”

  “You could buy all of Seventh Street with the cash in your mattress,” says Renato. “You stayed with me this long because you’re a tightwad.”

  “I don’t want them in my neighborhood any more than you do,” Antonio says. “Two of them come to my street. Every morning I sweep up their cigarettes, like I’m their maid. I’m so angry I can take the broom and—” He takes a swing like he’s aiming for a baseball. “But your plan is not right. First of all, it’s sloppy. A hundred things can go wrong. Second of all, it’s dangerous for everybody.”

  “That’s why I called you here,” says Renato. “To give us a better plan. To improve this one. To do what you can for your friends and your people.” He pulls his chair closer to the table and folds his hands. “Now, tell us how to make it work.”

  Antonio rubs his face. “I need to think it over for a few days.”

  “In a few days, ten more of them will move in. We need your help now.”

  “Esagerato,” Antonio says. “Nobody moves this time of year.”

  “I like this plan,” says Cassie. “I don’t understand why Antonio gets to decide. He’s too scared to even be there.”

  “He’s the family man,” Renato says. “His head is on straight. More straight than mine or yours. If h
e could get the beautiful Maddalena to marry him, he must have something upstairs that we don’t.”

  “Can you unlock the whiskey now?” Antonio asks.

  “What, modest all of a sudden?” says Renato. “You walk into your village, pick an eighteen-year-old girl you barely know, and a month later she’s your wife. Smile on your face when you come back here like you won the lottery.” He turns to Cassie. “Even before, when we used to go out together in Wilmington, he would tell me, ‘Renato, let me do the talking,’ and a minute later, two girls come to our table with free drinks and invite us to some private party.”

  “And if my memory serves me,” says Buzzy, “he worked some magic on you, too, Cassie.”

  Renato pretends not to hear this, but Cassie rolls her eyes. “Fine. I’m not going to talk anymore. I do all the hard thinking work, but no one cares about my opinion.”

  “I care,” says Renato and gives her shoulder another smooch.

  Antonio checks his watch. It’s not late enough to use time as an excuse. “There’s an easier way to do this,” he says.

  “Good,” says Renato. “Then come up with one. Otherwise, it’s Cassie’s plan next week. Between Christmas and New Year’s. I’m counting on you. This is bigger than Riverview Drive. It has to do with friendship—loyalty—not money. And who’s to say that, someday, one won’t lead to the other? That a favor now won’t affect a favor later?”

  The two coffees, and now Renato’s threat, have set Antonio’s heart going.

  “You know who else is counting on you?” Renato continues. “My mother, in her bed right now with the covers pulled up to her neck, scared to death.”

  “We should go there this minute,” says Cassie. “Make sure she’s OK.”

  “Don’t tell your brother anything,” Renato says. “It’s better if no one at Mrs. Stella’s knows. Remember: everything natural, and no one gets in trouble.”