The Saint of Lost Things Read online

  Headlights appeared on New Castle Avenue. Antonio stepped through the window and ducked, praying for the slow-moving car to pass. He kept still, the crowbar quivering in his hand. The temperature had dropped ten degrees since the rain, and he shivered in his wet shirt. Eventually, the headlights faded. He gripped the crowbar with two hands, gave what was left of the sign one last stab, and pulled the blinds.

  He jumped through the window and ran to the empty lot. He crouched in the mud among the thick weeds and tried to catch his breath. His armpits were damp, his underwear twisted and bunched. He must have cut his leg on a nail. He waited in those weeds for a half hour at least, shifting his weight, conscious of every flicker of light on the neighborhood side of the lot, the whoosh of every car as it zoomed down New Castle Avenue on the other side. Finally, when his knees could take no more, he returned the crowbar to his pants and walked to his car with his chin up, at the nonchalant pace of the innocent. He even waved hello to a man setting out his empty milk bottles.

  His hands shook as he put the keys in the ignition. Even after he drove off, removed his shirt, and wrapped the blanket around his naked chest, he could not stop shivering. He circled the neighborhood and passed the trattoria twice—once coming north, once coming south. Unless you looked closely, and you knew a neon sign had been put up two hours before, it was impossible to see any damage from the road. No police would investigate until morning at the earliest, he told himself. By that time, he would be at work, where it was impossible to concentrate on anything but the secure attachment of armrest to seat.

  And yet he finds he cannot go to work. He has not slept at all, not even after the bath he took in the middle of the night, or the change of clothes, or the cup of warm milk he fixed himself in the kitchen. He has pushed the chair closer to Maddalena’s bed and lays his head on her arm. He closes his eyes. People move in and out of the room. He should call Mr. Hannagan, explain his absence, but he doesn’t. He will keep completely still, his muscles throbbing, his bones fragile as chalk. If he moves, as Brenda tries to get him to do—her hands on his shoulder, her cheek against his ear—he will break into a thousand pieces.

  16

  Old Women

  WHEN MADDALENA WAKES, she finds an old woman asleep in the chair beside her. A blanket is pulled up to her neck. She still wears her shoes. Her fingers clasp a rosary. At first, Maddalena does not recognize her. The old woman’s face is turned toward the window, and the light is poor. It must be the middle of the night, but there is no clock on the wall. There are only unfamiliar shadows: squares of lattice, an umbrella shape, an inch-thick line slanted from floor to ceiling. Maddalena tries to lift her shoulders, but they are too heavy. She smells roasted chicken, applesauce, detergent. Beyond the fuzzy glow of the doorway sit a desk and a large metal crate on rollers. A figure passes, then another. They move like women, swaying their hips. Sashaying. One of them stops at the desk. She gestures with her hands. Her mouth opens and closes. She pushes the metal crate away, but the wheels make no noise as they glide across the floor. Her footsteps, too, are silent.

  Maddalena turns to the old woman. Her vision blurs, but the gray hair under the scarf and the knotted hands stay in focus. “Mamma,” she says. She hears only a dull moan in her head, nothing like the word at all. The moan throbs behind her ears. She tries again to wake her, to the same effect. It has been so long since she has seen her face. If only she could make a sound loud enough, Mamma would turn to her. If only she could crawl out of this bed, kneel beside her, and lay her head on her lap. But Maddalena is buried in the sand, like a child at the shore, and no one will come to dig her out; the waves, foamy and swirling and cold, inch closer. If she screams, she will drown.

  She remembers Mamma’s skin, creamy-white and soft as a girl’s. She used to say she had not laughed enough in her life to deserve wrinkles. She has lost the velvet black of her hair, the smoothness of her fingers. Tell me where I am, Maddalena begs, but her mouth no longer moves, and this time not even the moan pulses through her head—just a staticky silence, a low roar, like the beach in winter.

  She does not know if she has slept hours, days, or months, but later, when she wakes again, the silence has broken. A phone rings; voices murmur just out of reach; something beside her clicks and hums. The blanket sits folded on the chair, but Mamma is gone. For the first time, Maddalena notices the vases of flowers. Light pools around them on the windowsill, breaks through the parted drapes. There is a girl standing in the doorway. She wears a white cap, white shoes, white nylon stockings, and a white dress. The girl is a nurse. This is a hospital room. She is in a hospital bed.

  “Mamma!”

  The nurse turns to her. “Mrs. Grasso?” she says, and rushes into the room. “Mrs. Grasso!” She is thin and pretty, her face flat with eyes wide and set far apart. She grips Maddalena’s shoulders and leans down so close to her face that their noses touch. “Can you hear me?” she says.

  Maddalena nods.

  The nurse presses a button on the wall, then reaches for the blood-pressure device that Maddalena recognizes from her many visits to Dr. Barone. She wraps it around Maddalena’s arm and pumps the little black balloon. “Good,” she says. “I’m Nurse Morgan. I’ve been taking good care of you.”

  “C’è Mamma?” asks Maddalena. “L’ho vista.” She tries to point to the chair, but she cannot move her arm. And yet there are no straps restraining her. “L’ho vista nella sedia. Dov’è andata?”

  “I don’t understand,” says the nurse. Her pink cheeks go pinker. “I’m so sorry.” She presses the button again. “We’re going to find someone for you to talk to.”

  “Cosa mi è successo?”

  She ignores her.

  “Il mio bambino. Cos’è accaduto al mio bambino?”

  The nurse bites her lip. “Bam-beeno,” she says. “I know that one.” She looks toward the door over one shoulder, then the other, as if about to steal something. “Baby, right?”

  “Cos’è accaduto al mio bambino?” She feels a tingle in the tips of her fingers and toes, then a sharp pain between her legs, behind her knees and elbows. The sand is giving way.

  “The doctor should be the one to tell you, but—” The nurse looks again, drops her voice to a whisper. “Oh, what the hell. You have a healthy baby girl, Mrs. Grasso. Looks just like you, too. She’s been waiting for you.” She grabbed her hand. “Now, don’t tell anybody I told you, OK? This place would love to fire me as it is.”

  “Una bambina?” Maddalena says.

  “You just hold on,” says the nurse. Her face contorts in great frustration. “Joanne!” she calls, so sharply Maddalena flinches. “Get somebody in here, for God’s sake! She’s waking up!”

  “Mi sento male. Che cos’ho?” Maddalena asks. She searches for and finds the English words, but they don’t come out. “Dov’è la mia bambina? Con Mamma?”

  “What you should do is try to stay calm,” says Nurse Morgan, and smoothes her hair behind her ear.

  More strangers enter the room: a nurse, a young doctor, another nurse, an old doctor. They ask her for her name and address over and over, take her temperature, and rub her arms and legs. They stand on all sides, smiling. Where is my family? she asks, but no one seems to understand. How could they leave me here? All the people can tell her is that her loved ones are on the way.

  “This is a day of great joy,” says the young doctor. “Are you a religious woman, Mrs. Grasso?”

  “You didn’t see the mother-in-law with the rosary?” Nurse Morgan says to him.

  Maddalena has never known exhaustion like this. The talking overwhelms her, and the parade of doctors and nurses, and the swiftly hardening sand. Her hands and feet go numb again. And though she fights to keep her eyes from closing—so she can see Mamma again and her baby girl, just once, before the Lord takes them—she cannot.

  III

  THE LIGHT AROUND HIM CHANGES

  17

  The Viewing

  THE LINE IN FRONT of the Pavan
i Funeral Home extends for a block down Bayard Avenue. Julian arrives alone and later than he intended. He takes his place behind an old couple he does not recognize, greets them with a somber nod, and waits.

  Services are scheduled to end at eight-thirty, but unless this line moves swiftly Dante Pavani will have to keep his doors open past ten. Only a few of Rosa Volpe’s mourners seem familiar, and Julian wonders, with some resentment, where they’d all been last year and the year before, at his parents’ funerals. Have so many new Italians moved to Wilmington since then? When did the old woman make all these friends? In the years after her husband’s death, she rarely left the house. Julian knew her as a disembodied face in the front window, peering between the drapes. She’d come to him once last summer, in the middle of the afternoon, to ask for help with her eulogy, then never spoke to him again. She had Renato for everything else: to bring her groceries and cut her rosebushes and keep her company when she needed it. If she attended Mass at St. Anthony’s, she must have gone in the early morning, then shut herself back in her house before Julian woke.

  It is not until Julian sees Paolo lift a young boy on his shoulders that he realizes who all these people must be: Renato’s regular customers. When you own two successful restaurants, you eventually create a loyal following—not friends, not family, but people who feel close to you because you have fed them, because they have spent birthdays and wedding anniversaries under your roof. At first, Julian is relieved; the turnout at his parents’ funerals now seems respectable. But then he feels a pang of regret. Even this vecchietta—mother of the arrogant Renato, suspicious and angry in her final years—deserves a long line of grief-stricken mourners at her passing. Anyone who lives a decent life deserves as much.

  It is a humid August evening, and Julian can already feel the sweat under his arms. He removes his jacket and shuffles forward in his shirt and tie. When he reaches the entrance, he will put the jacket back on and ready himself for Renato. What will he say to him? You’re never too old to feel like an orphan. Or how about: when the second one goes, you feel five years old again, lost on a busy street, running through the crowd in between cars and buses, screaming for your mother to find you. But instead Julian will say what everyone says: “I’m so sorry,” and “She was a good woman,” before he kneels at the body itself, prays for her soul, and goes home.

  In the stale air of Pavani’s viewing room, Julian finds not only Renato but his fiancée. She stands beside him in a sheer black dress and an oversized diamond ring, her hair pulled tightly back. Julian recognizes her from the early years at Fourth and Orange and his one visit a few months ago to the trattoria, where she complimented Helen on her shoes.

  “I’ve got a house to sell,” Renato says, jovially, after Julian offers his condolences. “You know anyone who’s buying? It’ll cost them a fortune, while I can get it.”

  Julian smells whiskey on his breath, which is not uncommon either for Renato or for the grieving here at the Pavani Funeral Home. Before each wake, Dante invites the loved ones into a private room in the back, where he provides an assortment of liquor.

  His uncle was supposed to come from Italy, Renato explains, but he changed his mind. He and Cassie want to get out of the city before it’s too late, put their money on a house in Collins Park, down the street from the restaurant. They’ll have the house built from the ground up. No more apartments, no more creaky row homes.

  “No more smelling like grease,” Cassie says.

  “Your mother was happy in that house,” says Julian, though he has no evidence of this. “And Seventh is a good street.”

  “Most of it,” Renato says. “Mark my words, Giulio. In ten years, you’ll be surrounded.”

  It is when Cassie pinches Renato’s behind—surreptitiously, and with a purpose more punitive than playful—that Julian first suspects that the vandals might not be teenagers, or kidnappers, or hoodlums from the East Side, but Renato Volpe himself. He looks the man in the eye, for a giveaway, but there is only a watery blank-ness. No guilt. No shame. God will punish the derelict boys, Father Moravia promised. But when?

  If there were not a lifeless body at the front of the room, illuminated by soft lights and surrounded with flowers, no one would guess the sad circumstances of this event. Chattering ladies and families walk among the cushioned chairs facing Rosa Volpe. They wave to one another, shake hands, and trade news of marriages and children. They speak in respectfully muted tones, but the effect in the room is one of a hushed roar, like the one immediately following Mass. “Have you met Maurizio?” Julian hears someone say. “He’s buried three wives already.” There is stifled laughter as the woman beside Maurizio—the fourth wife?—raises her eyebrows and shrugs.

  No one is crying. No one falls on her knees and wails. No one even looks in Rosa’s direction after he makes the sign of the cross over her body and turns toward the audience. Angelo Montale takes the framed picture of young Rosa from the table beside the casket and says to Julian, “This is how she looked when she first came into my store. Francesco Volpe was a lucky man.”

  “And old age is very cruel,” says Angelo’s widowed daughter, who had once been beautiful herself.

  Julian scans the crowd for Maddalena and finds her in the back row, behind the loud and fidgety Dellucci teenagers. Antonio talks with Buzzy Fisher on the other side of the room, but Maddalena sits alone in the aisle seat with her head down and her hands in her lap. As Julian approaches, he sees that her eyes are closed.

  She wears a dark dress and a hat, with a half veil that conceals her eyes. In her fingers she clutches a rosary and one of Rosa’s funeral cards, on which is printed the poem Julian helped compose. She has regained most of the weight she lost after a month in the hospital—eight days unconscious, twenty to recover—and now looks much as she did when she first came to visit him. But she is not the same woman he knew in February. She no longer shows much interest in geography or the newspaper. The few times he visited the Grassos this summer, she talked mainly of her own health and the progress of Prima, and though Julian understood this, he could not help but feel—how can he put it?—unnecessary around her. He has sat across the table from her and thought, I have not survived a threat to my life. I have no child. What is my love story compared to yours?

  He lays his hand on her shoulder. “Wake up, Signora,” he says, gently. “You’re late for work.”

  “O Dio,” she says. She straightens her back and looks nervously around.

  “Don’t worry,” says Julian, smiling. “Nobody saw.” He crouches in the aisle as a little boy runs past. “You remember our little joke, I hope.”

  “Of course,” she says.

  Most of the color has returned to her face, and she has gained weight. “How are you feeling tonight?”

  “No pain, thanks to God,” she says. “Just—I’m so tired. The headaches don’t let me sleep.”

  “Why don’t you go home?”

  She glances at Antonio. “Respect,” she says. “Mamma and Ida left two hours ago, but since six o’clock we’ve been here. I haven’t seen Prima since this morning.” Her eyes brighten. “You wouldn’t recognize her, Julian—what a little cicciotta she is.”

  Four months after her birth, Prima remains in the care of the nurses at Wilmington Hospital. Maddalena visits her every morning, stays through midafternoon, and returns in the evening. For a few hours she is allowed to hold her baby, triple-wrapped in blankets to keep her warm, but then the nurses return her to her incubator or give her oxygen or some other treatment to strengthen her. In Prima’s short life, she has undergone a blood transfusion and more injections than Maddalena can remember. She has gained weight, then lost it, then regained it again; her lungs have fully developed; she has battled and overcome infections, and bleeding in her brain. Still, the doctors want to wait before they release her. September 1, they say, is a possibility. Two weeks from tomorrow. “We’ll throw a little party to welcome her,” Maddalena says. “You’ll come, yes?”

 
; “How could I miss such a happy day?” says Julian.

  When the family in front of Rosa’s casket moves to one side, exposing her body for a moment, Maddalena turns sharply away. “I never look,” she says, and grips her rosary. “I don’t even get close. She can hear my prayers from here.”

  I miss you, Julian wants to say. Instead he folds his arms. “Helen tells me an Irish viewing is very different,” he says. “But she won’t go to one since her husband’s. She doesn’t believe in them.”

  Maddalena nods. She rarely asks about Helen, so he doesn’t press. And yet he needs Maddalena to read her mind, to interpret the signs she’s sending him and keep him from making mistakes. Julian does not even know what to call Helen, this woman who is certainly more than a friend, but not by much. All the many terms—sweetheart, baby, steady, dolly, fidanzata, innamorata— seem too young or too old, too serious or not serious enough.

  Maddalena leans in and whispers, “What did you think of the invitations?”

  “Invitations?”

  “To come here.”

  “There were invitations?” Julian asks, loudly. The woman next to Maddalena shoots him a look.