The Saint of Lost Things Read online

  And so Julian wrote a letter. It was the least he could do. When evening came, he crept across the street and left it on the Waterses’ porch beside the gift of a new flowerpot, which he’d bought that morning at DiNardo’s. The letter, signed “A Concerned Neighbor,” asserted at least three times that the author was not the man destroying their house. But the author did see clearly that this was a battle the Waters family could not win. “You don’t know me,” said the Concerned Neighbor, “but you can trust me. I don’t know you, but I care about you and your family the way I care about all God’s children.”

  Julian waited two hours in sentinel position before the taxi pulled up and Waters found his gifts. He paged through the letter—not long enough to read it thoughtfully—stuffed it in his back pocket, and carried the flowerpot inside.

  When Julian heard a knock at his door the next night, he immediately prepared himself for Waters. Should he invite him in? Should he admit he wrote the letter? But it was only Antonio and Maddalena Grasso on his front stoop, jolly as salesmen, with their cookies and wine. He had not even realized the weekend had come.

  “Surprise!” said Maddalena.

  Their shoulders and the tops of their hats were dusted with snow, the first of the season though it was already February. The snow fell delicately around them on that windless evening, settling on the bare trees and telephone lines.

  The Grassos’ visits with Julian followed the same schedule: they’d eat the delicious amaretti and pizzele prepared with love by Maddalena and her mother-in-law, make small talk about politics and weather, and avoid any mention of Mrs. Stella’s. Eventually Abraham Waters would enter the conversation, and they’d argue again over the morality of the vandals—a topic on which they disagreed more in degree than spirit. Both men thought the Waters family would be better off in their own section of the city, but Antonio had more sympathy for the vandals. He was convinced they were a group of Italians who merely wanted to keep their neighborhood safe and had no connection to the missing boy. “I don’t approve of destruction as a means of preservation,” Julian would say. “It’s like setting your clothes on fire . . . ”

  “I don’t understand what that means,” Antonio would reply. “I want you to tell me a better way to protect what we Italians have built.”

  To that Julian would offer a statement such as “It’s a problem with a hundred solutions, and no solutions at all,” which irritated Antonio further. He was not a man who enjoyed the complexities of truth. As hard as Julian tried to wrestle over the Trieste question, the merits of the Korean War, or the recent arrest of Sonny Boy Thompson—sometimes taking positions that he himself did not hold, in the interest of debate—Antonio rarely played along. Most discussions ended with him shaking his head and saying, “Nobody said life was easy,” or “It’s just destiny.”

  Eventually Antonio would drink too much of the strong homemade wine, wander over to the couch, and fall asleep. Julian and Maddalena would remain at the kitchen table, and he’d ask her opinion on the topics Antonio had dismissed. She did not read the newspapers—Julian assumed she did not know how—or listen to the news, but she had gleaned enough to assert that Trieste should belong to Italy and not the Slavs; that communism did not treat fairly people like her, who worked harder than others; and that the mother of Sonny Boy Thompson deserved sympathy for the actions of her son. She never took a position without immediately discrediting herself afterward, which prompted Julian to say, “You’re smarter than you think.”

  Like her husband, Maddalena did not enjoy discussing current affairs. Mostly she wanted him to tell her stories from his childhood, and every once in a while she’d share a memory from her village. At the end of the night, she’d go to the couch, stand above Antonio, shake his shoulder, and say, “Hurry up! You’re late for church!” or “Antonio Grasso! You fell asleep on the job again! This time you’re fired!” He never laughed at these same little jokes, but the ritual delighted her.

  On that first snowy night in February, Maddalena did not remove her scarf, a signal to Julian that he kept his heat too low. In contrast, Antonio rolled up his sleeves and smoked one cigarette after another. “I have a message from my brother,” he began, as he uncorked the wine. “Believe me, I don’t want to get involved, but now that he knows we see you, he begged me to tell you a few things.”

  “Don’t waste your breath,” said Julian.

  “The main thing is that he can’t keep making the same argument to get you to come back to Mrs. Stella’s.”

  “That’s the good news,” said Maddalena.

  Julian could sum up this argument of Mario’s in less than ten words: “More money for us means more money for you.” On each of his visits, he’d offered a small—then incrementally larger—percentage of the profits the nights Julian performed. But 100-percent profit could not erase from Julian’s memory the pity in the eyes of the Christmas Eve guests, the sense that they had seen him not only naked, but on the toilet with his pants around his ankles.

  “I appreciate your brother’s kindness,” said Julian. “But this problem is between him and me.”

  “According to him, he’s seen the light,” Antonio continued. “These are his words: at first I thought Giulio was acting like a big baby, but now I see he has pride. And pride is a quality I admire very much, a quality I share.”

  “Julian,” corrected Maddalena.

  “I was being Mario,” Antonio explained. “Didn’t you see the way I stuck out my chest?”

  Julian laughed.

  “But this pride that makes us,” said Antonio, again with the puffed chest, this time with a fist over his heart. “It also ruins us. We are blind to our own situations. You can’t see how deeply you are loved at Mrs. Stella’s, Giulio Fabbri. Missed, the way you miss your dear mother and father. My customers still ask—so often it’s starting to annoy me—when you will be coming back. We tried a new guy, younger, better-looking if I have to say, but he didn’t have the”—here Antonio searched for the word he clearly already knew—“the passion. He sang in a nice voice and didn’t miss too many high notes, but what we got from him we could have got much cheaper from a record player.”

  “Bravo,” said Julian. “If something ever happens to Mario, you could take his place, no problem.”

  “Can I try?” asked Maddalena. She put her hands flat on the table and leaned in eagerly. “I know the speech, too.”

  Antonio turned to Julian. “She wanted to be an actress once,” he said.

  Julian rubbed his eyes. All this talk of Mrs. Stella’s made him want a drink. If he could pry the bottle from Antonio’s hands, he’d enjoy a glass of wine instead of coffee. If not, he had a case of red in the basement left over from the funerals.

  “I insulted you when I came to your house all those times, with my offers of money,” Maddalena began. She paced from one end of the kitchen to the other with her head bowed and her hands behind her back, the way Mario did when he got nervous. “I understand that now. So today I ask you not in the spirit of your wallet, but in the spirit of truth, of love, of famiglia. And, if I can say—” She cleared her throat. “Because I am concerned.”

  Julian looked up. “Concerned?” He’d grabbed the bottle from Antonio and was reaching for a glass.

  Maddalena’s lips pursed and turned downward. She folded her hands and extended them toward Julian. “Look at how you live,” she said. She walked to the counter and ran her finger along the top. She held up the finger, black with dust. “It’s the middle of the afternoon, my friend, and you’re still in your housecoat. A single man needs purpose. If not la musica, then what? If not a pretty girl who might walk at any moment into my restaurant, fall in love with your voice and your talent, then what? L’amore è la vita, amico mio. Love is life! Life is love! Forgive me if I’m saying too much. I consider myself your friend. If I don’t look out for you, who will? You are still grieving, I know, but you can’t grieve forever.”

  Something passed between Maddalena and Jul
ian then. She may have been repeating one of Mario’s speeches, in a skilled imitation, but her confident performance made it clear she believed every word. She was not so talented an actress that Julian couldn’t see through her charade. Who was she to tell him how to live? How did she know what purpose his life did or did not have? In their talks, she was always trying to get him to reveal something about himself, some secret he might be hiding. The moment Antonio fell asleep, she’d start with the questions. What did Julian think of so-and-so’s widowed sister? Maybe there was a girl from his childhood who still wrote him letters?

  Maddalena went on, but Julian stopped listening. He stared at the silver crucifix on the wall beside the refrigerator. Had he sinned by allowing the tips of the Lord’s hands and feet to tarnish? Of course he’d considered keeping the house a bit tidier. For a few months after his father died, he’d regularly used the broom and dustpan. But before long he’d lost patience for the persistent effort that cleaning required. No sooner would he wipe the coffee table than dust would again settle there, dulling the sheen he’d worked so hard to achieve; no matter how many times he emptied and soaped down the inside of the refrigerator, he could not expel the lingering rotten-vegetable smell. The reason for this trouble eventually occurred to him: his parents wanted the house dirty. A son alone in their house pushing around a wet mop insulted their memory. He needed a woman to bring this place to life, a woman to make him better than the lonely old bachelors on their barstools at Mrs. Stella’s. He needed a wife. So until one fell from the sky, the neat piles of rags in the linen closet, which his mother had kept clean as her own underwear, would remain untouched.

  Mario Grasso clearly did not understand this. After the restaurant closed at night, he returned to the scrubbed floors and walls of his home on Eighth Street, embraced his wife and his daughters, and slept in peace. He did not walk through the rooms of his house like a scared child wishing that—when he turned his head—he’d find his mother standing at the sink, his father dozing in his armchair.

  “Tell me how you live, then, Mario,” Julian said, interrupting Maddalena. At this point, she was in the middle of a list of songs Mario suggested Julian might want to learn.

  “How I live?” she asked.

  “Yes.” Julian crossed his arms. “You people talk like you have all the answers for me. Why not share them? Help a pathetic old man?”

  Maddalena looked at her husband.

  “We’re just repeating information,” said Antonio. “We didn’t mean for you to get angry.” He pushed his chair away from the table. “Maybe we should leave?”

  Julian forced a smile. “No,” he said. “Stay where you are. The truth is, I really want to know the answer. From you, from Mario, whoever the expert is. Tell me what it’s like to have responsibility—for a wife, children, a business. When do you rest?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Maddalena said shyly. “But soon. A few more months.” She sat beside Antonio and put her hand on his shoulder.

  Did she always wear this much makeup when she visited? Her face had gone pale the moment he’d interrupted her, but two circles on her cheeks remained warm and rosy. She’d painted her lips a glossy red, and possibly thickened her eyelashes. Around her neck she wore a heart-shaped locket, and in her hair two rhinestone clips that sparkled even in the dim light of the kitchen. Maybe these trips to Seventh Street were her only chances to dress up, the only entertainment her husband allowed her.

  “I never rest,” Antonio said. “I’m at the plant before the sun comes up. I get on my knees and break my back all day, sweating through my shirt. Look at this—” He held up his right palm, revealing a rash of pink blisters. The biggest, just below his ring finger, was the size of a nickel. “For five hours this hand holds a screwdriver, turning here, turning there. The skin tears off like paper. Then for half an hour I sit on a folding chair and eat a sandwich with thirty other men and shoot the shit. After that, five more hours, me and the screwdriver and the inside of a Ford. I go home, eat some more, and then, if I’m lucky, I get an hour or two to take a nice walk, get some air, visit my brother. Let me tell you, the night I get six full hours of sleep, I’ll throw myself a party.” He glanced at Maddalena. “Soon the baby will come and cry all the time, and then I’ll really be sunk.”

  “Mario doesn’t have it easy, either,” said Maddalena to Julian. “Ida and the girls never see him.”

  “Gino Stella does nothing,” said Julian. “That much I saw for myself.”

  “Gino wouldn’t know work if it bit him in his fat ass,” said Antonio, with a laugh. He refilled his glass, and with it finished off the bottle. “My brother’s his little dog. Without Mario, Mrs. Stella’s would roll over and die. He’s a big talker—too big most of the time—but he works hard for that dump. I give him that.”

  “I agree with you there,” said Julian.

  As if on schedule, Antonio rose and walked to the window, using the furniture to steady himself. The snow was letting up. An inch or two covered the ground, reflecting the moonlight and glow of the streetlamps.

  “I have a secret dream,” Antonio said, without turning from his view.

  Julian and Maddalena waited. They exchanged glances.

  “Are you going to tell us about it?” Julian asked.

  “One day, I’m going to open my own restaurant, right across the street from Mrs. Stella’s. Me and my brother. We’ll put Gino out of business.”

  “That’s brave,” said Julian.

  “And stupid, probably,” he said.

  “Since when do you want to open a business with Mario?” asked Maddalena.

  Antonio shrugged.

  “It’s good to have ideas when you’re young,” Julian said. “When you get to be my age—”

  “I have a hundred ideas,” said Antonio. He described the L-shaped layout of the dining room, the flagstone, the white tablecloths and shiny wood floors. From his wallet he took out a small piece of paper that had been folded over many times; on it was written Trattoria Grasso in the fancy cursive script he’d designed for the marquee.

  Maddalena watched him, her face blank as the snow. Julian guessed that she was hearing all of this for the first time, that Antonio did not talk much to her unless he’d been drinking. By the time he finished—having gone through the new menu from primi to dolci—he’d exhausted himself. “You mind if I rest my eyes for a while?” he asked, as he lay on the couch and propped his feet on the cushions. Every week, this same question preceded the nap he’d never admit he’d taken, not even after Maddalena shook him awake an hour later.

  “Be my guest,” said Julian.

  “I should be the one resting my eyes,” Maddalena whispered, after Antonio’s first snore. “I don’t work nine hours a day? Then come home and cook dinner, and make his lunch and his father’s lunch on top of that? He thinks I have it easy because I sit in front of the sewing machine, and he has to bend over in front of the car. But I don’t complain.” She shrugged, a defeated look on her face. “You know, in my village, I never had a job. A few hours in my father’s grocery once a week, that was it. Just to give me something to pass the time. Now in America all I do is work. All everybody does in this country is work.”

  “Except me,” said Julian.

  “Because you don’t belong here,” Maddalena said, casually, as if this were a point they’d already decided.

  “I don’t?”

  She blushed. “Never mind,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “Don’t listen to me. I want to hear more about what you started to tell me last time. Why you didn’t join the army.”

  Julian narrowed his eyes at her. “No,” he said. “You should tell me what country I belong in. I’d like to know.”

  “Antonio gets mad at me,” said Maddalena. “Because I’ve been planning your life for you, and it’s none of my business. I don’t want you to be mad at me, too.”

  This did not surprise him. “I could never be mad at you,” he said, though her pity had made him want to
throw his wineglass across the room. “So let’s hear it. Or should I get a drink first?”

  “You should move back to Italy,” she said, with an urgency that suggested she’d kept this in for a long time. She leaned her entire body forward and lay her palms flat on the table. “That’s where your blood comes from.”

  “Oh, that’s perfect,” Julian interrupted. “Half of Italy crosses the ocean one way, and Julian Fabbri goes the other. Am I so backward?” He crossed his arms. “What can I do in the Old Country that I can’t do here in the Land of Opportunity?”

  Her face was serious. “You can forget,” she said. “Pretend you never lived in this house, in this little half city. Pretend you never had a father or a mother. You told me one time: ‘Nineteen fifty-four will be the year I change my life.’ But how much can you change here, with all these ghosts?” Julian followed her eyes across the kitchen, half expecting to see the line of Fabbris along the wall: his Nonno and Nonna, his parents cradling a lifeless Caterina, the two cousins he lost in the war.

  “I promise you,” said Maddalena. “Walk into any village and the people will open their arms to you. Relatives or not. They’ll find you a house to live in and a café to play your music. They’ll find a wife for you, too, if you want, sooner or later.” She raised her eyebrows. “You can change your name back to the Italian way, or pick a new one. I like Alessandro or Umberto. But Giulio is good, too.”

  Julian stared at her, disbelieving. How proud of herself this woman was, and what a sad creature he must have painted himself to be. He stood and brushed the crumbs from his lap. “The snow is getting worse,” he said, and checked his watch. “You should wake your husband.”

  “You’re not mad at me, are you?” she said. “The last thing I want to do—”

  “No,” Julian said, though his hands trembled as they reached for the coatrack. He stood in the hallway waiting for her to rise and retrieve her husband. Instead she crossed her legs and stirred some sugar in her coffee. She wanted him to tell her he liked her idea. “I’m an American,” he said. “I know the history, the literature. If I don’t have a life here, I don’t have one anywhere. End of story.”