The Saint of Lost Things Read online

  Maddalena loops her arm through her mother-in-law’s and rests her head on the fur collar of her coat. For a long time they stand motionless, gazing up and down the street. Nobody says anything. Antonio rubs his chin, his eyes wide as a boy’s. Then he reminds them they are already late for dinner, and suddenly he’s rushing everyone across the street to avoid the oncoming cars.

  As an early Christmas gift, Mario has invited them to dinner at Mrs. Stella’s. Maddalena is grateful for the night off, if not for the menu that awaits her: large bowls of overcooked pasta in watery tomato sauce, fatty lamb chops roasted in a brick oven, pizza with a bland, soggy crust, and a few American dishes like French fries and hamburgers that Papà forbids them to order. Most nights Mario works the floor or the kitchen to earn back what he owes Gino Stella, the principal owner. Gino writes the checks for rent and utilities and supplies, and each month pays protection money in cash to a man named Roberto Fante. Every once in a while, Gino brings in his mother to greet the customers and walk among them in her apron. She is here tonight, a round woman no taller than Maddalena’s shoulders. “What a beautiful family you have, Mario!” she says as she takes their coats and leads them to the large table by the window. When she smiles, dimples appear on her cheeks.

  Mario can’t sit still. He refills the half-full wineglasses and polishes the unused silver with a linen napkin. Before his father finishes chewing his trout, Mario asks him, “Top quality, Papà, don’t you think? Cooked perfect? You know this afternoon that fish was swimming in the Atlantic?” He wears a tie and has recently clipped his nails. He crouches beside his mother as she brings a forkful of rubbery pasta to her mouth and claps when she proclaims it as good—no, better—than her own. Antonio sits beside Maddalena, but he does not look at her, does not see her move the food around her plate.

  “This place will make us a fortune,” Mario says, lowering his voice. “Pretty good, Antonio, don’t you think? Not too bad for your old fratello. Soon you’ll come work for me, make this a real family business. I’ll get Grasso in the name if it kills me.”

  “I wish you luck,” Antonio says and raises his glass.

  He has had too much wine already. He rolls his eyes whenever Mario turns his back, and twice complains to the waiter that the sauce has no taste. Mamma Nunzia kicks him under the table, and for a while he manages a neutral expression.

  Mario puts his arm around Maddalena and Antonio. “This meal is my Christmas gift to all of you,” he says, and squeezes her shoulder. “But if you ask me what I want under the tree this year, what will make me and Ida and my girls the most happy, I’ll tell you: I want my brother and his wife to kiss and make up. Fill this Christmas with joy. What do you say?” He looks back and forth between them. “If not for me, then for the little baby?”

  Maddalena lowers her head.

  “Sit down, Mario,” Antonio says. “Nobody’s kissing tonight. There’s nothing to make up about.”

  “Mind your own business,” Papà tells Mario.

  As a sign of comfort, Mamma Nunzia removes her shoe and rubs her foot along Maddalena’s calf. “What’s for dessert?” she asks.

  Maddalena excuses herself. In the ladies’ room, she slaps her cheeks to bring back the color, deflate the puffiness. She tugs at the fabric in the waist of her dress. A young woman, thin and pretty, stands beside her, woozily applying lipstick. “Can you tell I’m drunk?” she says to Maddalena’s image in the mirror, and straightens her shoulders.

  “A little bit,” Maddalena says, and smiles. Then her stomach growls, loud enough for the woman to hear.

  “Your food slow, too, huh? We’ve been waiting an hour. No wonder I’m so light-headed.”

  Maddalena nods, washes her hands. Until Antonio speaks to her again, she refuses to eat a healthy meal. Certainly not tonight, here in this tacky restaurant with its cartoon murals of Venice and its chalky bread, with Ida twisting her napkin praying for more customers. In a few days they will have Christmas Eve guests, and Antonio will be forced to put on a better act than the one he’s performing tonight.

  “Well, good luck,” Maddalena says to the woman, on her way out.

  “Oh, he won’t mind,” she says, still looking in the mirror.

  Maddalena returns to find her plate of pasta and veal cutlets—uneaten but cut-up and rearranged—still on the table after the other plates have been cleared. Gino Stella sits in her chair. “My cooking’s not good enough for you?” he asks her in Italian, with a grin. He does not stand.

  “I—”

  “Food is like poison to her lately,” says Papà. “Don’t pay any attention.”

  “Don’t worry, Maddalena,” Ida says. “The hunger will come.”

  She tries to smile. “I’m sorry, Signor Stella,” she says, as Mario rises and offers his chair. “Settimio’s a very fine cook.”

  Antonio gives her a quick, empty glance.

  “I have good news,” Signor Stella says to Mario. “We have no reservations left in December. Not a single table will be empty. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  “You hear that, wife?” Mario says. “You’re going to miss me. You won’t see me at all, not even Christmas Eve dinner. I’ll come home just to drop off the bags of money. Then I’ll leave again.”

  “And she’ll spend it all by the time you get back,” says Signor Stella.

  Ida crosses herself. “Keep talking like this, then for sure it won’t happen.”

  The record player stops in the middle of “Be My Love,” and out of nowhere comes a string of notes from what sounds like a live accordion. The customers turn their heads toward the bar. “Look at this!” says Mamma Nunzia.

  Maddalena cranes her neck. A man in the corner wipes his forehead with his sleeve, bows slightly, and starts to play. He’s older, in his forties at least, with a long face and thinning hair. His suit jacket hangs off his shoulders as if he were still expecting to grow into it. She does not know the song, but he plays it beautifully, and before long the crowd nods and sways. Everyone is watching him. At the next table, a man reaches across to join hands with his wife. When the song ends, the accordion player clears his throat and whispers his name into the microphone, but Maddalena can’t make it out. Everyone claps, and he bows again.

  “Not bad, no?” says Gino. “For free this man plays, just so he can spend a few hours in my restaurant and get a good meal. Our Mario here discovered him off the street.”

  “I felt sorry for him,” Mario says. He leans forward over the table. “Never married. Father and mother dead. Broke my heart, if you want to know the truth. I think of it as my good deed for the year.” He sits back and takes another drink, closes his eyes as another song begins. “You see what I mean, fratello? Life is hard. You should be dancing with your wife, not holding some grudge.”

  Antonio stops him with a look.

  Maddalena pushes her chair away from the table to get a better view of the man with the accordion. When he plays “Tu Scendi dalle Stelle,” she folds her hands and says a prayer for her family back in Santa Cecilia. They used to sing this song at the end of Midnight Mass, and afterward everyone would spill out onto the streets still singing, repeating the verses over and over. The fire in the torches they carried seemed to flicker to the rhythm of the music, or possibly this was just how she perceived it. She remembers the sadness of finally reaching home, when she had to break from the procession and let the other villagers walk on. She would run to the terrace and listen to the song echo over the hills. Then it would fade, and she’d join her sisters for a game of tombola. How little of the world she knew then, to get so excited over a song she could sing any day of the year if she’d wanted! She’ll have to tell Mr. Gold about this, she thinks; he’ll put the torches and the midnight parade in his little book of traditions.

  Tonight, only Maddalena and a few customers hum along to “Tu Scendi dalle Stelle.” It must not be a song familiar to Americans. The accordion player moves his lips to the words. “You don’t let him sing?” Ma
ddalena asks.

  “He’s too shy,” Mario says. “Says maybe he’ll join the church choir one day, but that’s it. We tell him he has a good voice—it’s the truth—but he shakes his head. ‘One day,’ he tells us. We’re still waiting. But for now, the accordion is good enough.”

  “He wants to sing,” says Maddalena. She notices how he lifts his chin and flutters his eyelids on the high notes. “You can tell.”

  “I have an idea,” Ida says. “Another good deed. Let’s invite him to our Christmas Eve.” She turns to Mamma Nunzia. “What do you think? Is there room?”

  She shrugs and makes circles with her hand. “What’s one more?”

  “Christmas Eve he’s working,” says Mario.

  “So, you have to close sometime,” his mother says. “We won’t be awake?”

  “I’ll mention it to him,” Mario says, and takes a sip of wine.

  “He has no family at all?” Ida asks.

  The song ends. During the applause, the accordion player keeps his eyes closed and stands motionless, as if in prayer. After a few moments, he opens his eyes, gives an embarrassed smile, and bows.

  “You’re very kind,” he says, so quietly the microphone doesn’t pick it up. But Maddalena can read the words on his lips.

  AFTER DINNER, THEY walk down Union Street to spend more time among the lights—the women arm in arm, the men in front. They lead them uphill through the neighborhood, where fat red and green bulbs hang from the eaves of the row homes and on the bushes in the front yards. People wave at them from their windows, through the branches of their glittering Christmas trees, all Italians they know from somewhere: Alessandro the produce vendor, Elena from the bakery, Dellucci the electrician. Whatever a family needs, it can find on this wide hill in the shadow of St. Anthony’s.

  Ida shivers and pulls Maddalena closer. “Listen to me,” she whispers. “You have to eat. Antonio is worried about you.”

  “He doesn’t look worried.”

  “Well, he is.” She guides them over a frozen puddle. “OK, it’s really Mario who’s worried, but Antonio got him thinking.”

  “I’m the only one who understands Antonio,” Mamma Nunzia says. “He’s got a problem, that one, and the problem is that his wife is too beautiful. He doesn’t know how to live with it. He thinks he doesn’t deserve you, that someone will steal you. He’s been worried since the day he brought you here.”

  “That’s crazy,” says Maddalena.

  “And not talking to her, that will help?” Ida asks.

  “Yes,” Mamma Nunzia says. “It makes sense to me somehow. If he doesn’t talk, then nothing happens. Everything stays the same until he figures out what to do.”

  “The baby will change him,” Ida says. “You should have seen Mario before I had Nunzia—”

  “We know,” says Mamma Nunzia. “I was there. And I lived with Mario twenty-two years before you came. No man is the same as another. Maddalena has to plan what she will do if Antonio behaves more like his father. I don’t think he carried Mario in his arms once until he was two years old.”

  Ida pinches Maddalena, as if to say, “You see? Never the favorite.”

  Maddalena rubs her eyes. She feels dizzy. This is what women do, she thinks. Night after night, we examine our men. We look for patterns in the same stories to predict what they will do next. In the meantime, they play cards and keep secrets, surprise us with a joke when we expect anger, a slap when we lean in for a kiss. After seven years with Antonio, she has yet to learn all the rules, and the few she’s learned so far have already changed.

  “Think about it like this,” Mamma Nunzia tells her. “If you have Ida and me, you don’t need Antonio so much. Even the good fathers are never much help with a baby. They pick him up, kiss him on the forehead when he has a fever, and say, ‘Wife, you know my son has a fever?’ All you have to worry about is whether Antonio has a good job. And he does. The rest you put up with.”

  They walk to the top of the hill and stop in silence before the presepio at St. Anthony’s. Maddalena’s legs are weak, her stomach hollow. She kneels in front of the statue of Mary and rests her forehead on her folded hands. She closes her eyes and prays again—for a healthy baby, a son if she’s allowed to choose; for Antonio to surprise them all with a change of heart; for the health of her family in the village. In her mind, she sees her mother carrying the wash up the hill from the river. Then a field of olive trees flashes before her, then children running over cracked stone steps. There are torches, a donkey kicking its legs. She smells rosemary and smoke and snow.

  A hand shakes her shoulders. She wakes to a red and green blur, the Christ Child’s chubby face, the stare of the plastic animals. Ida helps her to her feet. But it is not until she says, “I told you—you have to eat!” that Maddalena remembers which country she is in.

  MADDALENA’S BODY IS CHANGING. Once thin and taut, it has softened noticeably in the last month alone. She can do nothing to hide this, she thinks, as she turns from side to side in front of her bedroom mirror. When she was a teenager, people said she could have been an actress or a dancer with legs like hers, but look at them now: trunky and bloated and mannish. Overnight. Even her neck and cheeks are fleshy. Her straw-colored hair has darkened over the years, ordinary as any other Italian woman’s.

  She lies in bed, another night without Antonio, and remembers a time when she knew she was beautiful. There was a Sunday afternoon three years ago, not long after their fourth Christmas together, when Antonio sat in the kitchen reading the newspaper out loud. Maddalena sat beside him and looked over his shoulder, trying to follow the sentences as he spoke them. It was another of Sister Clark’s suggestions, a way to meet new English words “where they lived and breathed,” to get to know them so as not to fear them. It didn’t work. How could it? Maddalena was continually confronted with words like “enough,” at which she stared utterly baffled. Only the n was where it should be, and maybe the u; the other letters existed only to mock her.

  “Pain and Loneliness Only Reward to Hero of Auto Explosion,” Antonio announced and proceeded to read an article about a forty-four-year-old bachelor named Orville, who rescued three strangers from a burning car, then spent eleven days in the hospital without a single visitor. He had burns all over his body, no insurance, and no one to help him, but still, he said, he’d “do it again in a heartbeat.” Antonio admired this. Maddalena wouldn’t have done it in the first place, she said, let alone a second time, but like her husband, she was grateful for the Orvilles of the world, good, selfless people God rarely rewarded on earth but would shower with riches in heaven.

  Her mind wandered as Antonio read, but this Maddalena remembered very clearly: beneath the explosion article was a photo of a pretty young woman with a flirtatious grin, her hair arranged in a bun, her hand resting lightly at her throat. Above the photo was written Bianca—the Italian word—and other words Maddalena didn’t recognize.

  “Who is Bianca?” Maddalena asked. “An actress?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Antonio, and read: “‘Bianca Talent Agency. Think You Have What It Takes to Become a Professional Model? We Will Teach You How to Make It in New York and Hollywood. Free Consultations.’” He snapped the newspaper, folded it over, and set it on the table with the photo facing out. “You’re better-looking than this girl.”

  Maddalena studied her. She had a superior nose (without the bump in the middle that Maddalena had inherited from her grandmother), long lashes, and a slim heart-shaped face. But she did not have Maddalena’s full lips or wide, deep-set eyes. If she received as much help with her hair and makeup as this woman had, it was possible Maddalena could defeat her in a beauty pageant. The race would be close, at least. Still she said to Antonio, “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  “I do,” he said. He pointed to the photo. “Look at her. If she’s the best the Bianca Talent Agency has to offer, they’d faint if they saw you.”

  Maddalena shook her head, dismissing Antonio’s exaggerated fait
h in her beauty, but he went on to explain the meaning of “Free Consultation” and told her nothing would please him more than to show her off to Bianca herself.

  Then, the next day, without telling anyone, he called the number in the newspaper and scheduled a consultation for the following weekend. He told Maddalena that they’d been invited to his friend Giovanni’s house for an early dinner. He bought her a new dress, black with strips of crinkled red velvet at the sleeves and waist, and though she found it overly showy, she agreed to wear it as long as they were only going to Giovanni’s. From the doorway of the bathroom he watched her apply her makeup and remove the curlers from her hair, more anxious than usual about arriving on time.

  She had not paid much attention during the short drive, but when he pulled over and parked on Delaware Avenue, she realized she’d been tricked. There, on the second floor of an office building, between a hair salon and a dentist, was a small sign for the Bianca Talent Agency. Since 1934, it said. Its logo was a pink cartoon of a Greek goddess wearing cat-eye glasses.

  “O Dio!” Maddalena said. She saw Antonio’s grin, shook her head, and gripped the edges of her seat. “I’m not going in there!”

  A group of women in fur coats passed in front of the car. One paused, peered through the windshield, and gave Antonio a curious look before rushing into a dress shop called Minuet.

  His face softened. He reminded Maddalena of the promise he’d made to her parents in Santa Cecilia: that he would take their daughter to the United States and give her the chance to become an actress. Wilmington wasn’t Hollywood, but it wasn’t a nowhere village either; it was still America. Everyone had to start somewhere, and, according to the woman he talked to at the agency, Maddalena would probably start with modeling, for the Sears or Wanamaker’s catalog, or ads in the Wilmington Morning News. In the meantime, she could learn English well enough to read and understand her lines. She was only twenty-three years old, with most of her career ahead of her. The agency girls performed on a regular basis in Philadelphia, for big money, and one of them had emigrated all the way from Russia just to study with Bianca herself. The best part, said Antonio, was that the modeling and acting classes didn’t cost a penny. The agency got a reasonable cut of every dollar their girls made after they finished their training, which seemed like a small price to pay for making them stars.