The Saint of Lost Things Read online

“Then relax! Say your prayers. Give thanks to God.”

  She does. She works the needle slowly and devotes the extra time between stitches to things that, for superstitious reasons, she has not yet allowed herself to consider: the exact words she will use to tell Antonio, names for boys, names for girls, and—at this her hands fail her—the love of someone who belongs to her, someone of her own blood, in this country of strangers.

  UNTIL NOW, MADDALENA has not found much beauty in America. But this evening, on the 5:55 back to Wilmington, everything charms her. The streets jammed with cars, the smoke gushing from the engines into the drizzle, the rhythm of wipers on windshields—it is all a symphony composed for her pleasure. Rows of brake lights fade from bright to pale red as the traffic lurches forward. She opens her window halfway, for air, and welcomes the spray of cool rain on her face. The men below stare straight ahead over their steering wheels, then—like the deer—suddenly turn and look up at her as if to catch her watching them. They smile and tick their heads. She wants to know each of them, these hardworking men, and their wives, and their children. She wants to walk across their green lawns. She wants to sit with them at a picnic table under the trees at Lums Pond, bouncing her baby on her lap as they trade stories and jokes and memories of years gone by.

  This time of day, Ida can’t sit still. She chats with Gloria, who has agreed to keep Maddalena’s secret until Antonio hears it for himself. After Gloria’s stop, Ida turns all her attention to Maddalena. The Golden Hem is a cage, Ida informs her, and we are birds who need to fly. God did not create women to work in factories; He wants them in the bedroom with their husbands, in the kitchen with their daughters, in the garden with their hands in the soil. Despite this belief, Ida says she will fight to keep her job. If she and Maddalena can’t keep up the system they began this morning, she will tell Mr. Gold that Nina, her younger daughter, is going blind and needs an expensive surgery. “God save my soul for lying,” says Ida. “But I’ll do what I have to do.”

  Maddalena half listens. The traffic breaks and they cross into their home state of Delaware, different in not one single way from the state of Pennsylvania. The same little brick houses, squat and square, divided by chain link fences, go on for miles. Tall wooden poles, strung with thick black wires and iron bolts, run alongside. If someone had not put up the sign WELCOME TO DELAWARE, nobody would notice a change. In Italy, Maddalena has said many times, every town has its own distinct face. The church and the piazza are the eyes; the streets and houses are the nose and mouth; and each person is a freckle—or a mole, or a sharp tooth, depending on his personality—that makes a village different from its neighbors. Antonio, who’d eat the dirt from the gutters in America and call it delicious, finds this silly. Maddalena has told him it is because he himself is a pimple.

  It surprises her how familiar the landscape has become, how the memories of her village have faded. She reads albero in Il Sogno della Principessa and sees not an olive tree, but a spruce. Though horses—donkeys, at least—were common as dogs in Santa Cecilia, she takes great delight when a mounted policeman approaches the bus. Any other day, these thoughts of home would sadden her. Until this afternoon, she has felt like the girl on the deck of the ship, weak-kneed and seasick, afraid to let go of the railing.

  But that was another autumn evening, colder than this one, seven years ago to the month. October 1946. She watched the sun set on the immense Manhattan buildings and light up the windows bright gold. She longed to share in the joy of the passengers around her, who blew kisses and sang songs, and waved to the shimmering buildings as if they were old friends. Instead she kept silent. She had promised her mother that, no matter how hopeless she felt, she would never let her husband see her cry. They had met less than three months before, and it was still too soon to trouble him.

  In New York harbor, Antonio gleefully pointed out landmarks: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, the flurry of names strange and German-sounding. Everything terrified her: the waves licking the side of the boat as it slowed; the birds gathering high in the air then darting down ten at once for the decks. Antonio talked on and on. Look, there was a famous battleship; there was the state called New Jersey; there was the Statue of Liberty on her little island. Maddalena gazed at this statue, the one landmark she recognized from films and postcards. She was like the Mona Lisa, she told Antonio a few years later: look at her face when you’re sad, and you see sadness in her expression; look at her when hopeful, and she gives hope back to you.

  In the car on the way to Wilmington that first day, Maddalena discovered that her new country was, in fact, a land of green, just as Antonio had described: lawns and fields, hills, thick stretches of trees, rows of hedges under windows. Every house, no matter how modest, seemed to own a share of grass and tend it like the plot of a grave. The roads were wide and paved, and the cars rolled over them in patient, orderly rows. In Santa Cecilia, Maddalena’s family had owned the only store for miles; here, every block was lined with little shops, each proudly displaying signs with big letters that screamed S-A-L-E!

  As Maddalena passed sign after sign, some large and some small, all announcing the same one product—sale, salt—she tried to figure out why a country so wealthy would be this proud of such a common ingredient. Then she grew worried. Was salt very expensive here? If so, how would she cook? Or was salt so cheap that everyone tried to give it away? Did Americans use more salt than Italians? She considered asking Antonio, then changed her mind. After he and Mario stopped laughing at her, Antonio would tell some long story about the history of salt in the United States. It occurred to her that she had no one to ask. She kept silent in the backseat, her head against the glass of the window and her hands folded in her lap, panic rising in her chest, and then, for the first time of many, as the SALE! signs flashed by her faster and faster, and Antonio argued with his brother over the best route home, she wept.

  “Ecco,” Ida says now, as the bus makes the turn onto Union Street. She buttons her coat. “So what do you think, then? Peas?”

  “Peas?”

  “Or spinach? For dinner.”

  “Whatever Mamma Nunzia wants,” says Maddalena.

  “So it’ll be cauliflower with vinegar again,” she says, with a snort. “One day, it will be me deciding what to cook in my own house. And my Nunzia will have to like it. Don’t you look forward like that?”

  “Sometimes.”

  They are up and off the bus, sloshing on the pavement toward Eighth Street. They walk quickly, arm in arm, past the storefronts on Union: the pharmacy, the beauty salon, the shoe repair. At this hour they are all closing, and most of the bread in Lamberti’s Bakery has been sold. If she and Ida time it right, though, Signor Lamberti will offer them a bag of leftover rolls to use for their lunches.

  After the old man tells them he has not even a burnt loaf to give them tonight, Maddalena says, “Good for him. Someone should make money.”

  “Why him and not us?” is Ida’s reply.

  “Him now,” Maddalena says. “Us later.”

  Ida shakes her head. “You are too patient.”

  Birds circle the bell tower of St. Anthony’s, as if waiting for it to ring the hour. The church sits at the top of a broad hill, no wider than a half mile, and looks down on the ten square blocks that form Wilmington’s Italian neighborhood. In forty years, long after most of the immigrants have left, a group of merchants will officially designate these blocks “Little Italy.” They will commission an archway to demarcate the entrance at Fourth and Lincoln. But in 1953 these blocks are merely a scattering of Italian families who have paid for their relatives to move into the row homes and apartments surrounding them. Antonio calls Wilmington a half city, Philadelphia a real city, New York the city. La Città, he says, with reverence, never in English. Roma, Milano, Genoa, to him these are dead cities, and Italy the land of dead cities. For the time being, Maddalena finds Wilmington city enough.

  She knows the route from the bus s
top to the house on Eighth Street, from the house to the church, from the church to Angelo’s Market, from the market to the butcher and the produce stand, and home again. She has never set eyes on the four other blocks in this neighborhood, but she imagines they do not differ much from the six she’s familiar with: long brick buildings on both sides of the street, each divided into tiny row homes with white wooden columns and concrete stoops. Dormers peek up from the roofs of the nicer houses. The view from Union Street to the church is one unbroken line of red brick. If she wants to see a stone house, Antonio must drive her to Rockford Park, where a wealthy American family has constructed a mansion with a terra-cotta roof. Sometimes, while they sit out front in the parked car with the engine running, admiring the stonework, the American lady comes onto the terrace for a cigarette and waves to them.

  But Antonio has not taken Maddalena on a drive for many months, not since she started at the Golden Hem. Her failure to become a mother changed him. He has talked less and less—to everyone, not only to her—and worked longer hours at the plant to earn overtime. When he does talk, it is mostly to argue with his father over how little money he has managed to save. An hour after dinner, Antonio is either asleep or out for one of his long walks. Though she knows where these walks lead—to Renato’s Pizzeria, to play cards and drink whiskey—she also knows how important it is for men to have their secrets. So she plays along. She even went so far as to sew extra padding into his shoes. “So your feet don’t hurt,” she told him.

  She decides to wait until they are alone to tell Antonio the news. She wants the privacy of their bedroom and the rest of the house asleep. He won’t arrive home for another hour, but still Maddalena’s heart races as she and Ida shake out their rain bonnets on the porch. She walks through the door, and already her mother-in-law is calling her to the kitchen. She has enough time to run upstairs, throw her purse on the bed, then rush back down to help prepare dinner.

  The next few hours pass quickly with the night’s work. This is the beginning of happiness, Maddalena thinks, as she ladles the minestrone and slices the day-old bread and sweeps up the onion skin that has fallen onto the floor. She says little. Her secret is like a ruby in her pocket; if she looks at her family or her husband too long, she will give it away. And so she is too distracted to notice that Antonio is not himself tonight. Before she can clear his coffee cup and ask him to come to bed early, he is gone.

  2

  Dirty Eyes

  SO THE GIRL, CASSIE, has returned to Fourth and Orange. She sits barefoot on the counter of the pizzeria in a pair of shorts and one of Renato’s white T-shirts. No brassiere. When she sees Antonio, she lifts her leg and wiggles her toes hello.

  Just what I need, Antonio thinks. He considers turning back. But it’s too late, and he has nowhere else to go.

  “Look who it is,” he says, and kisses her on both cheeks. She has not changed at all in two years: same skinny frame, lips thin and pale, stringy red hair to her shoulders, those strange V-shaped indentations—like bird tracks—on her neck. The T-shirt covers most of the tracks, but Antonio and Renato and at least two other men who work here have seen how far south the bird has hopped. More than once, Antonio has traced the pattern down to her navel with his tongue.

  “I’m back for good this time,” Cassie says. “Right, Renato?” She swings around and catches him between her legs. He flicks some flour at her face, then kisses her.

  “Open up,” he says, with a laugh. He still wears his apron. “I have work to do.”

  Cassie releases him, but not without a playful kick to his behind. Renato walks to the front, flips the sign to CLOSED, and locks the door. It is 9:30. On his way up the aisle, he shrugs and raises his eyebrows at Antonio as if to say, “I’m as surprised as you are.”

  I give it a week, Antonio thinks, and flashes Cassie a friendly smile.

  Antonio does not want Maddalena to know he still comes here. It means little to her that Renato Volpe has been his best friend for more than ten years, that he trusts the man more than his own brother. According to Maddalena, Antonio does not need a friend who still lives with a roommate at thirty-five, refuses to get married, and spends Saturday nights driving up and down Market Street in his big white car. “Lucky for you those days are over,” she has told him, matter-of-factly, on more occasions than he cares to remember. “You need more friends like Gianni Martino.”

  But Gianni Martino is asleep by nine o’clock, about the time Antonio finishes his dinner and announces that he’s going out for some air. Gianni is in bed with his wife, snoring and getting fat, as Antonio passes his little brick duplex on the way to Fourth and Orange. Gianni will not pour Antonio a shot of whiskey and tell him stories about the three Polish sisters who share a house in Brown-town. He will not have a new girl every week to remind Antonio how it felt to be twenty-three and single, when, in charmingly broken English, he’d convinced more than a few of them to follow him up the back stairs of the pizzeria. It is not a crime, at thirty-two, after a long day at work, to talk and drink with your friends and tease the girls for a few hours. If it costs him no money and settles his nerves, if it does not diminish his love for Maddalena, he sees no harm in it.

  “Cassie has a job now,” Renato says. “She’s learning the cash register.”

  “The first Irish girl to work in this place, to be sure,” she says. “Downstairs, at least,” says Buzzy, under his breath. Buzzy is a German Jew brought over by the Federation after his parents were killed in the camps. Antonio and Renato met him at Wilmington High School, where they took night classes in English. Now he works half-time at Kaminski’s Furniture on Route 13 and the other half in the pizzeria doing the books. He splits the rent on the upstairs apartment with Renato.

  “She’s going straight,” Renato says, from behind a stack of trays he’s wiping down behind the grill. “As of tonight, so am I.”

  “It’s a new era for us all,” Buzzy says. “Just last Saturday I was telling the three girls in my car, ‘One of you lucky ladies might be the first Mrs. Bernard Fisher,’ and for most of the night I actually believed it. We all want to be family men like you, Antonio.”

  Buzzy is short, with perfect curly hair. According to Renato, he spends an hour each morning trimming his beard and fingernails. Once, Renato caught him applying some sort of cream to his knees and elbows. No one has ever called Buzzy handsome, but he has had more women than Antonio can count. One—whose name might be Marcie—stands beside him now, taller by a head, and gently rubs the back of his neck as he speaks. Somehow, Buzzy has convinced Marcie they have a future together.

  Antonio has never cheated on his wife. Maddalena’s body—her skin smooth and unblemished; her shy compliance, which, with just a little encouragement, gives way to a restrained eagerness—still thrills him. Next to her, American women are cheap and loud; there is something coarse about them. They sit backward in their chairs, smoke cigarettes between their thumb and forefinger, swing their arms too wide when they walk. They are like horses, Antonio has said, while Maddalena—most women from Italy, but Maddalena in particular—is graceful as a deer. Elegant is the word. He has an elegant wife. She has made it easy these seven years to honor the vows he made to her in the church of Santa Cecilia. They had both been born in that village, seven years apart, and whenever he’s tempted by another woman he reminds himself that Maddalena alone has tasted the mountain air of his boyhood. No American girl, however pretty, has eaten olives from the grove outside his bedroom window or played hide-and-seek among those silvery leaves; she has not climbed to the top of the chestnut tree to snicker at old Don Paolo sunbathing in the wheat field; she does not know anything at all about where he came from. Most of the time, these reminders are enough.

  Lately, though, a restlessness has plagued him. His trips to the pizzeria three or four times a week, once a luxury, have become necessary. He does not want to admit his pang of disappointment upon seeing Cassie back with Renato. He worries about what he might have done if Cassi
e offered herself to him instead, what he might still do one night if he drinks too much and one of Buzzy’s girls puts her hand on his knee.

  He traces the start of this restlessness—the quick temper, the sleepless nights, the lure of girls he’d once dismissed—to the day he sent Maddalena to work. It seemed wrong from the first, his wife on a bus with strangers and coloreds, in a factory taking orders from another man. None of this bothered Mario, whose wife had been finding and losing jobs for years, but it weighed on Antonio. He applied for the late shift at Bancroft Mill so Maddalena could quit, but the job was not offered to him. Mr. Hannagan, his supervisor at Ford, refused to give him additional overtime. It was then when he began to dread those useless hours between dinner and sleep, caged in the living room with his father, the only sound the kitchen chatter and the drone of the radio. When he could escape his father’s constant questions—what did he think of Eisenhower? this year’s new Chevrolet models? the price of gasoline?—he’d rest his elbow on the counter beside Maddalena as she dried dishes and tell her with his eyes to come upstairs. He’d make love to her with an aggressiveness he had not shown in the past, as if to convince her that he was doing more than his part to make a baby. Afterward, while she resumed her work in the kitchen, he’d lie on his back with his arms behind his head, wearing only his socks and shirtsleeves, and blame himself. After all, it could be his own defect that prevented the pregnancy, since Dr. Barone had conducted a series of tests and found nothing wrong with Maddalena. Antonio would examine his body, bring the hand mirror to the curious discoloration on his inner thigh for closer inspection, and wonder fearfully why he had been put on this Earth if not to bring forth children.

  He could take little more of this, so that summer he paid his first visit in three years to Renato and Buzzy. They welcomed him back with a seat at their card table and tales of the single life in Wilmington. Their greatest joy came from picking fights—over politics, family, girls, anything to get Antonio’s blood to boil. It didn’t take much, and Maddalena was their favorite target. They teased him for setting her loose in a city full of men, asked him how often she mentioned her Jewish boss, how long she took to put on her makeup before she left for work. “You think Italian men are bad with women,” Buzzy told him, “but the Jews are worse. We can’t get enough. It’s like a sickness. If I ever get married, I won’t let any Jew near my wife.”