The Saint of Lost Things Read online

  The week of this third Christmas together, Maddalena learned of the marriage of her sister Carolina, who had not once traveled to the municipio to take her calls, and from whom there had not been a single letter. The news, and how she learned it, was so unbearable that Maddalena took to her bed for three days. She refused to tell anyone—not Ida, not Mamma Nunzia—what troubled her, and after a while they stopped asking. In the meantime, the women worked twice as hard on the holiday preparations, and Papà Franco wondered—loudly enough for Maddalena to hear, in his booming voice from the bottom of the stairs—what kind of woman Antonio had brought into their house. “If she doesn’t shape up . . . ,” he said, leaving the consequences to her imagination.

  Maddalena wrote Carolina a letter, then tore it up. She wrote another letter to the man Carolina had married, then threw it into the fire. She pretended to sleep when Antonio crept into the room, quietly removed his watch and rings and set them on the night-stand, then slid into bed beside her. She did not flinch when he caressed her shoulder, sighed, and switched off the light. Then, the day before Christmas Eve, Maddalena gathered herself, took a bath, and joined her mother-in-law and Ida downstairs as if nothing had happened. She greeted Antonio’s return from work with the same forced cheerfulness she had always displayed, and he kissed her hand in gratitude. “Women have unexplainable episodes, often caused by hormonal changes,” he had once read to her in the Married Life section of the Wilmington Morning News. “It is best for a husband not to interfere by giving his wife the unhealthy dose of attention she craves. The episode, or fit, will then subside quickly, and the wife will have learned a valuable lesson.”

  “What does it mean, subside?” she’d asked him.

  “Fade,” said Antonio. “Go away. Disappear, little by little.”

  And it did subside, her sudden episode, if not the ache that occasioned it. Carolina’s wedding. Maddalena had seen the actual photograph but could not bring herself to tell anyone where. She had seen the two of them kneeling in the front row of the church, she with the bouquet of flowers, he with the mustache and the satisfied grin. The blurry faces of the Santa Ceciliese behind them, the raging sunlight in the windows. How could it be the two of them, Maddalena thought: her sister Carolina beside Vito Leone, the boy she’d loved, who’d be her own husband if Antonio had not taken her away? Had the bride and groom settled for each other, or was there passion between them? What did it matter anymore, now that Maddalena had abandoned them both?

  That Christmas Eve, she did not even try to make conversation with the other wives, unable to bear their coldness and distance, their secret alliances, for another year. She wore the same dress she’d worn the year before, though the wine stain on the sleeve had not been dry-cleaned. Antonio must have sensed these dramatic changes. As she’d waited at the stove for the coffee to boil, grateful for the few minutes alone in the kitchen, he came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. He pressed his body into hers and rested his head on her shoulder. “Not now,” she’d thought, with the house full of children and relatives, with the knife still being pulled slowly from her heart.

  “Let’s take the car,” he said, to her surprise.

  She turned around. His face was bright as a boy’s, mischievous and eager.

  “We need a vacation, don’t you think?” He was whispering. “The food’s all served. The kitchen’s cleaned up. Ida can make more coffee. They don’t need us anymore.”

  Maddalena gave him all the reasons to stay—it’s not proper, it’s rude, you’ll break your mother’s heart—then stopped herself. The consequences would fall on Antonio, not her. “All right,” she said, untying her apron. Antonio gave her a quick, celebratory kiss on the forehead. As she watched him scribble a note on a napkin, she felt the familiar thrill of collusive disobedience, and until this moment she had not realized how much she’d missed it.

  Antonio grabbed a pair of old coats from the downstairs closet to avoid the crowd in the living room. Maddalena served the coffee just as the guests were assembling at the table for games. When Papà Franco asked her to sit beside him and play, she said, “I have a stomachache,” and he rolled his eyes as if to say, “I give up.”

  Then she snuck onto the back porch, where Antonio was waiting. They rushed down the narrow alley beside the house and into the Chevy. Antonio took a deep breath. Then he steered the car away from the curb, over the patches of snow and ice, and raced down Eighth Street into the empty city. The colored lights blurred past. The bell tower of St. Anthony’s stood proudly against the sky, and the traffic lights blinked and swung in the wind. Every once in a while, the street would be crowded with parked cars around an illuminated house, families visible in the windows, but there was no traffic, no one to prevent their escape.

  “This is nice, isn’t it?” Antonio said. “Nobody on the road but us? All of Wilmington to ourselves.”

  Maddalena nodded.

  He turned on the radio and rolled down the windows halfway, though the air was freezing and neither of them wore hats. “You’re not too cold, are you?”

  “It feels good,” she said.

  Soon they were on 202 headed north into Pennsylvania. Would they end up in Valley Forge, where he had a great-uncle? City Line Avenue, where he used to go to nightclubs with his friends, before she arrived? Was he taking her to that park, somewhere in Philadelphia, where they once had a picnic and watched the ships?

  He turned up the radio. His lips moved silently to the music, as if too shy to sing. “This is fun for you, right?” he asked, his eyes fixed on the road. “Better than staying at home watching me play cards.” Between working the gearshift, he reached his hand across and rested it on her seat.

  Antonio loved nothing more than playing cards late into the night with Gianni and his friends, the men around him cursing and cheating and telling jokes. He looked forward to this all year. And since he’d gotten the new job at Ford and worked double shifts, he’d had no time to see his friends. It occurred to her that he had taken this joyride as a gift to her, even though she had not told him why she’d been troubled the past week.

  “You’re missing your card game,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “We can turn around,” she said. “It’s already been a nice vacation.”

  “You’re not having fun?” he asked, a note of hurt in his voice. The car veered to the right, over the line of the shoulder, as he turned to her.

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “Very much. But—”

  “Then no turning around.”

  They drove another half hour, through the towns of Wawa, Black Horse, and Rose Tree. Route 1 grew wider. A grass divider appeared between the lanes, and the houses alongside—some made of stone—doubled in size. Manicured shrubbery and tall evergreens protected them from the highway, but Maddalena could still see flashes of gold chandeliers, floral wallpaper, staircases that circled up to the second floor.

  They turned off onto a road Maddalena did not recognize, and soon darkened restaurants and department stores replaced houses on both sides. Then a row of car dealerships appeared, one after the other, flooded with light. Were they open? Who shopped for cars at eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve?

  “Here,” Antonio said, as he turned into one of the lots. The sign on the roof of the showroom said CADILLAC in script letters.

  “It looks closed.”

  “Not for us,” said Antonio.

  A chain-link fence separated the parking area and showroom from the rows of cars behind it. Antonio drove slowly along the fence away from Route 1, around the back of the showroom. Here the road turned to gravel. Where the fence disappeared into the woods, he stopped, shut off the ignition, and rolled up the window. No one could see them here. The spotlights, arranged on steel towers, did not aim this far back from the lot.

  “‘Now what?’ you’re asking yourself,” he said.

  “You read my mind.”

  “Button your coat,” he said, with two quick pats on her
thigh. He got out of the car, ran around to the passenger side and opened her door.

  “Tell me where we’re going first?” she asked, taking his hand.

  “Just follow me.”

  He led her into the woods, still covered in an inch of snow. Her heels slipped on the rocky path that ran along the side of the fence. She wore no hat or gloves. Her legs below her knees were exposed to the cold, and her cheeks burned in the harsh wind. Yet she kept pace with her husband. At the top of a small hill, the fence ended, and he pulled her across. They made their way back down the hill on the other side of the fence. Then they stepped from the dark woods onto the brightly lit stage of the car lot.

  Rows of Cadillacs stared them down. They were arranged by model—the larger ones closest to Route 1, convertibles in the middle. Antonio and Maddalena walked hand in hand among them, as if at a zoo or a graveyard. He tried every door handle, smudged his thumbs over the price lists in the windows, and ran his hand along the wings, but Maddalena was afraid to touch those perfect creatures. For a moment she worried the police could trace their fingerprints, then decided trespassing was not a serious enough crime. Still, it was always best to admire from a distance.

  Antonio had come here many times with Mario, he explained. They’d brought the salesmen free pizza from Renato’s and pastries from the Pasticceria Grasso before it went under. It was part of a long process of softening them up, of laying the groundwork for the day when the two brothers would show up with a wad of cash thick enough to pay outright for a new Fleetwood. By then the salesmen would have become friends, and would offer them a friend’s discount.

  “Mark my words,” said Antonio, his palm flat on the hood of a Coupe DeVille. “I’ll be driving one of these before I’m forty.”

  He was twenty-eight, Maddalena twenty-two. It was easy to imagine their lives in nine years: gliding through the wallpapered rooms of their home in New Castle, three kids at play in the yard, Sunday trips to Eighth Street in the shiny Cadillac. They’d build up to this life little by little, with double shifts and borrowed clothes and the fatty cut of meat, but when the life finally commenced it would feel like a stroke of luck—like God appearing at the edge of the ditch to pull them up and out.

  For fifteen minutes they walked among the rows, trying to convince each other they weren’t cold. Maddalena’s earlobes and fingers and the tip of her nose had gone numb. Only her palm, clasped tightly to Antonio’s, felt warm. There was no sound in the lot but the flap flap flap of the American flag that hung above the showroom, and the occasional whoosh of a fast-moving car on Route 1.

  Then Antonio tried the driver’s side door of a convertible and, with a miraculous squeak, it opened. “Oh, baby,” he said, and immediately released Maddalena’s hand. He got in, reached over to unlock the passenger’s side, then got out again.

  “We shouldn’t,” she said, when he held open the door on her side.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  She slid across the soft leather. It was cold at first, but so soothing that she hardly noticed. The seats and floors were beige, the panels and dashboard a pale green, the console a gleaming chrome. Elegance, she thought; amazing how immediately and unmistakably you could smell and feel and taste it. All you needed was money. She settled her shoulders against the seatback, keeping her feet elevated so as not to track in dirt.

  Antonio had no such concern. He stomped into the driver’s side with shoes still muddy from the walk in the woods. He gripped the wheel and steered left and right, pretending to swerve around the trees in the back lot.

  Maddalena’s feet struggled to hover over the floor mat. She had nowhere else to put them. “Be careful,” she said. “If you break anything—”

  “This car is unbreakable,” he said. Then he noticed her feet. “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t want to make it dirty.”

  “It’s brown!” he said, with a big smile in the brilliance of the spotlight. “It won’t show!” There was that eager boyish face again, but this time Maddalena noticed the faint wrinkles in the corners of his eyes. When had they appeared?

  “And this isn’t ours yet,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about cleaning it.”

  “It’s so perfect—”

  He was laughing. “Do it!” he said. He leaned over, grabbed her ankles, and tried to press them down on the mat. “Do it!”

  She fought to keep her legs up, but he was stronger, and the soles of her gold high heels finally soiled the mat.

  “There!” Antonio said. “Now you really did it. You better have three thousand dollars hidden in those drapes.”

  “I wish,” said Maddalena. “Can you imagine?”

  They sat there a while. The wind whistled and shook the cloth top. He said, “You know I would buy this for you, if I could.”

  “I know,” she said. “But you know I don’t pray at night for a Cadillac.”

  He shrugged. “I have too many dreams. I want us to have it all.”

  “We’re not starving,” she said.

  “Sometimes I wonder.” Then he shook his head. “Don’t listen to me, please.” He rubbed his face. “You feel better, though, right? This drive did you some good?”

  “It did,” she said.

  “You won’t be so sad anymore? Not tonight, at least?”

  “I’ll try.”

  He stared into the woods. “Because I love you, Maddalena,” he said. “You still don’t feel the same about me—maybe you never will; maybe that’s why we don’t have a baby yet, I don’t know—but I always loved you. From the beginning.”

  She nodded. It was not the first time he said these words to her. Usually she kept silent and let the moment pass. But tonight she felt the urge to tell him that she might, in fact, have come to love him a little; that it may have started in the kitchen as she undid her apron. Something had happened in that moment. The image of Carolina and Vito in the church, so fixed in her mind that week, had subsided. She’d had her own husband there before her, and they were hatching a plan, an adventure, the way she and Vito used to do in the back room of her family’s store.

  She did not tell him any of this, not in the front seat of the Cadillac on Christmas Eve 1949. She did not have the words then, and either way, how could she be sure? So they drove the hour back to Eighth Street, snuck up to their room to make love under the warm blankets, and hoped God would look kindly upon them.

  FOUR YEARS LATER the guests have gathered again, but this time Antonio offers no plan of escape. The women finish the dishes, the men suspend their games of scopa and briscola, and by ten o’clock they are all playing tombola at a penny a card. Every seat at the table is taken, every inch of floor space jammed with children. Maddalena shares her card with little Nunzia, who bounces on her knee and loudly repeats each number after Antonio calls it. No sooner does Maddalena notice that she needs only forty-two and nine for a win when, miraculously, nine is called. She points to the number, and Nunzia marks it by dropping a lentil on the card. A flutter rises in Maddalena’s chest. She stares at the 42 printed on her card until her eyes cross, willing Antonio’s hand to pull the number from the bag. But this is not her night. Antonio calls twenty-five instead, and everything happens at once: the table booms Natale!, each man kisses the woman closest to him on the cheek (a ritual Ida invented to celebrate the special Christmas number), Signora Fiuma wins the cinquina, and Mr. Gold walks through the door carrying two white poinsettias.

  He is dressed for a funeral: black coat, wool pants, gloves and hat. But he is grinning, the plants like two trophies. He wipes his shoes on the remnant of green carpet used as a mat, lets out a deep breath, and looks proudly around the room. In the commotion of Signora Fiuma’s win, only Maddalena and Ida notice his entrance.

  They rush to him, Ida in front, Maddalena close behind. Ida takes the plants in her arms and thanks him for coming. They stand firmly in front of him to block the view of the men at the table.

  “What a nice surprise!” says Ida.
>
  “I make the effort to visit all my little ladies at least once a year,” he replies, trying to move deeper into the room. “Also, I like to see the customs up close.” He looks over their shoulders. “You’re playing the game now, the one like bingo?”

  “Sì,” says Ida. “You buy as many cards as you can afford. Right now they cost a penny, but the longer the night goes, the more expensive they get.” She goes on explaining, though Mr. Gold already wrote down this information at work. “We divide the money into four kitties, each one bigger than the one before. If you have a number that’s called, you put a lentil on top of it on your card.” She talks so fast that she’s nearly out of breath. “First person to get three numbers in a row wins the terno; four in a row the quaterna, five in a row the cinquina. The fun part is that each number has a little saying that goes with it. We call forty-seven il morto chiparla, the dead man who talks; seventy-seven is ‘an old woman’s legs.’ There are lots more.” With Maddalena at her side, Ida keeps Mr. Gold penned near the door. He cannot step forward without meeting at least one of their elbows. “The first person to get every number on their card wins the tombola—the biggest kitty of all.”