The Saint of Lost Things (13 page)

“That’s good?” Antonio asks.

“That’s very good,” says Renato. “That’s the best. It’s like—the same feeling I get when I’m walking around the jewelry store with a gold necklace in my pocket. They can catch me any second. My blood is pumping. I’m short of breath. That’s how it is with Cassie all the time.” He laughs again. “It’s like I can feel her eyes following me, but I think I’m home free; and then just before I walk out the door, she sticks a gun at my back and says, Gotcha.”

Antonio considers this. Maddalena lets him get away with
everything. He is seven years older, has seen more of the world, can speak two languages without much trouble. He reads the newspaper. He can argue his way out of most of their disagreements, sometimes by inventing statistics, historical events, and laws to prove his point. “How can you want to vote?” he said to her last November. “You can’t even spell
Philadelphia.
You think Eisenhower should be president because he has a nicer face, and you’re tired of looking at Truman.” Though this brings on a wave of guilt, it is the quickest way to win their fights. She gives him a fierce look, her eyes welling with tears, and tells him he may have read more books, he may know fancy words and ideas, but she has something he’ll never have:
common sense.
She enunciates this term in English, with great care. She has taken it to heart. She believes common sense is her greatest strength, and she may be right.

Officer Stanley appears on the stairs, the Puerto Rican girl at his side. He kisses her forehead before she slinks out the back door. He tucks in his shirt and checks his face in the cracked oval mirror above the sink. “Thank you, boys,” he says as he approaches. Renato offers him a drink, but he declines. He is on duty.

“How did she take it?” asks Renato.

He shakes his head. “I’m a weak man,” he says. “We’ll be back tomorrow.”

After he leaves, Renato takes Antonio up to the Closet. They are not surprised to find it ransacked, shoeboxes and hangers strewn across the floor. Renato picks up the one empty box and says, “Looks like Prince Charming found his Cinderella,” and Antonio laughs along, though he does not know the reference.

“I need something special this year,” Antonio says. He picks through the hangers one by one, holding up blouses and scarves to the light. In the jewelry boxes are diamond pendants, plain necklaces, Italian horn charms, and gold crosses in various sizes—all of which Antonio has rejected before. He sighs and tosses
a cheap silver bracelet onto the heap. “When’s the next shipment?” he asks.

“Buzzy’s in the clouds with love,” says Renato. Then, after a pause, “Maybe I am, too. Who knows? We don’t have any jobs lined up before Christmas. Not for more gifts, at least.” He stifles a mischievous smile.

“What am I supposed to do, then?” says Antonio, ignoring the smirk on Renato’s face. He sounds like his niece, Nunzia, whining to her father. He sits on the edge of the bed. Last year, he took a gold ring with one bright ruby in the center. He hid it under Maddalena’s pillow after she fell asleep, then woke her an hour later because he couldn’t wait for her to find it. This year he must outdo himself, in honor of the baby.

He is impatient for the Christmas Eve festivities to start, if only to break the silence between him and Maddalena. To reconcile before then would be to admit defeat, to signal a shakiness in his authority. Surrender even a little bit to your wife, he knows, and her voice gets louder and louder until it drowns yours out completely. It happened to Gianni. It was about to happen to Renato. Antonio already allowed Maddalena to return to the Golden Hem, a decision she must consider a victory. She did not know he needed her to make all the money she could—not only for the child, but for the trattoria.

“I’m very sorry the Closet disappoints you,” says Renato. He digs through the pile and uncovers a heart-shaped locket on a chain. He snaps it open and shut. “What about this? It’s real silver. You put a little picture inside—what could be more romantic? Buzzy gave one of these to Marcie, and she fell down on the ground crying. I even have a little pink box for it somewhere—”

Antonio rolls the locket around in his palm. It feels heavy enough. If it were gold, it might make the perfect gift. “You don’t understand,” says Antonio. He cups the locket in both hands and
shakes it like dice. He lowers his eyes. “Maddalena—she’s going to have a baby.”

Renato raises his arms above his head. “Well,
grazie Dio!
” he says. “We thought the day would never come.”

Antonio braces himself for the teasing. He’s already prepared his responses: they made love at a different time of day; the pregnancy is a sign from God that Maddalena should not work; the doctor prescribed her a new kind of pill. He has yet to convince himself fully that any of these might be true, that that man in Philadelphia has not made him a
cornuto.
He keeps the address and phone number of the Golden Hem in his wallet, just in case. And though he believes the impossible can’t be true, he cannot stop imagining the worst. In his mind, he sees the man force Maddalena against the wall of his office. He sees the shame on her face and her desperation to hide the truth from her husband. For this he blames Buzzy, whose stories of Germany and his many women have alerted him to the wickedness of men. Then he blames himself for not making enough money to keep his wife at home where she belongs, where she is protected.

“When did you find out?” Renato asks.

“Last night,” Antonio lies.

“Just in time for Christmas!” He takes Antonio’s hands in his and holds them. “Congratulations, my friend. Always one step ahead of me. Two steps now. I wish you and the beautiful Maddalena all the luck in the world.”

They sit on the couch, which for some reason Officer Stanley has pulled into the center of the room. The apartment is sparsely decorated: one crucifix on the otherwise bare white walls; a tall lamp in the corner that emits a dull, flat light; a pair of swinging saloon-style doors that lead to the kitchen. The radio spits static at them from the windowsill. The bedrooms consist of one bed, two dressers with the drawers half-open and overflowing, and
floors covered with clothes and damp towels. For drapes they use sheets secured to the rods with clothespins. The bathroom, however, is immaculate. Buzzy scrubs the sink, shower, toilet, and wall tiles once a week. He arranges the toothbrushes and soaps neatly on the countertop, a gleaming speckled Formica. As for his skin creams, he hides those in a plastic bag under his bed next to his boots and dirty magazines, but everyone knows they are there.

“I don’t think I’m a step ahead of anybody,” says Antonio. He leans over and switches off the radio. “This should have happened a long time ago, the way I see it. But what can you do?”

“If I were you, I’d be singing up and down the street.”

Antonio shrugs. “A child is a lot of responsibility,” he says. “A lot of money, if you want to do it right.”

“Money!” says Renato. “Oh, I wish Buzzy could hear you. Money is the first thing on your mind always, Antonio. Everything costs too much. Everyone’s trying to screw you out of a dollar. You want a beautiful present for your wife, but you don’t want to pay for it. You’d rather waste twenty hours of your life washing dishes than write a check to the jeweler.”

“I don’t want to work as hard as I do for nothing,” he says.

“Who does?” says Renato. “But you have to live, too. To take pleasure. Why work so hard if you can’t enjoy it? Why have a baby at all?”

“Sometimes I wonder,” says Antonio. He thinks a moment. They do not face each other. They cross their legs and stare straight ahead, talking to the empty room. “To pass on your name, right? Isn’t that the reason? To play with on the beach. To take care of you when you’re old.”

“I was teasing, Antonio,” Renato says. “A baby is—is God’s miracle! It’s a blessing from above.” He shakes his head. “I almost had my own once, you know. A long time ago.”

Antonio turns to him. “When?”

“With the girl—Angelina—but we got rid of it. I never saw her again.”

“I don’t know any Angelina,” Antonio says. “Where was I?”

“You weren’t paying attention,” says Renato. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. I have another chance with Cassie.” He digs between the cushions, pulls out a white sock, and throws it across the room. It lands on the top rung of the coatrack. “You don’t know how good your life is. You walk around here half-asleep most of the time. Buzzy and I see it. Even Cassie sees it. We say to each other, ‘Poor Antonio. So rich and so stupid.’ The only thing that goes wrong in your life so far is that it takes Maddalena a few years longer than usual to have a baby. I don’t call that a tragedy.”

“Who said tragedy?” says Antonio. “Tragedy is war. Hunger. Poverty. The last twenty years—in Italy, in Germany, in Korea, even here—all tragedy.” Then he lets this go. It is beside the point. He does not say how easy it is to see richness in another man’s life; the trick was to see it in your own. One step ahead of Renato and Buzzy, he knows, means one step closer to Gianni, to old age, to death. Yes, he has wanted a child since the moment he saw Maddalena in the village. He has longed for the baby, imagined again and again the moment he’d first hold him in his arms. But now that the time has come, he feels a gathering fear. “Where’s that pink box?” he asks Renato.

They stand, and Renato hands him the gift. He kisses him on both cheeks and again wishes him luck and congratulations.

The fastest route home from the pizzeria is to take Fourth Street down and up the hill to Union, then make a left on Eighth. Two turns. Instead, Antonio cuts across Washington to Pennsylvania Avenue, then zigzags through the neigborhood. Such is life when you’re young, he thinks: taking the long way for no good reason. Then you get old, and one by one the streets close around you, and before long you’re stuck on the same one route from home to work,
work to home, with no means or cause to step off track. You wait for your son to live the better life you failed to provide. This is the story of his father, of most of the men at the Ford plant, and soon of the great playboy Renato Volpe.

He spits onto the sidewalk. At the corner of Clayton and Fifth, he takes Fifth, though it’s in the opposite direction of his house. On this block once lived a family of three brothers, friends of the Grassos, who came from a village in Abruzzo not far from Santa Cecilia. Not one of them saw fifty years of age. At forty-six, the oldest dropped dead on the dance floor at his niece’s wedding. The middle went while throwing a bocce ball; the youngest in his sleep. They had weak hearts, the doctors said, and now their widows live together in a home paid for by the church, three young single ladies who will never again be kissed or loved or given a locket in a heart-shaped box. In a few years, Antonio will turn thirty-five. He has a good decade to spend not worrying over the strength of his own heart. He is a young American, smarter than his brother and Renato put together. If he reminds himself of this more often, there is no telling how his story will end.

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE
Christmas Eve, Antonio receives a rare telephone call from Renato. Something has happened. He leaves immediately, after a hurried and unconvincing explanation to his family. If she’d been a different woman—more suspicious, or maybe just less busy—Maddalena might think he had a girl on the side, but, as far as Antonio knows, she trusts that whatever road he takes at night, it always leads back to her. His last glimpse of her on this cold and rainy December evening is from behind: her apron crisscrossing her waist, her elbows thrust back as she kneads dough. She turns her head to the side and ticks it upward as he mumbles his good-byes. There’s a smudge of flour on her cheek as if from a paintbrush, and he feels the urge to wipe it clean.

Renato has locked the whiskey in the cabinet, put on a pot of espresso, and gathered everyone around the back table. Cassie bounces on his knee, though there’s a perfectly empty chair beside him. Though the air outside is below freezing, she wears a tank top and jeans, her hair in a ponytail. “This girl’s our secret weapon,” Renato says. He kisses her bare shoulder, which is inexplicably tan.

“We’ve been working on a plan,” Renato says, and explains that this one requires concentration. It is much more serious than stealing necklaces from Wanamaker’s. It is so serious, in fact, that he trusts only Cassie, Buzzy, Antonio, and one other man—whom he hasn’t yet named—to hear the details. He sends little Paolo home early, Marcie upstairs.

“Should I be nervous?” Antonio asks.

“Yes,” says Renato. “But don’t worry too much. You won’t be involved. Not completely. But I need your mind. And your brother’s restaurant.”

“If my brother’s involved, then I’m involved,” says Antonio.

“Mrs. Stella’s plays a very minor part,” Renato says. “Listen first, ask questions later.” He takes a breath, stirs some sugar into his espresso. “You know what lives next door to my mother now. I can’t stand the sight anymore. Every day I visit her, and every day there they are in the backyard. Talking. Smoking. Throwing a football back and forth. Anything but working. More and more and more of them, like the roaches in Mrs. Stella’s kitchen.” He nudges Antonio with his elbow, but Antonio’s blank expression does not change.

“This much I know,” he says. “Everybody knows. But what can you do?”

“You can’t keep track of those people: the big fat ones, the screaming little babies, they go in and out like it’s a hotel. We go into our kitchen, there they are through the windows. Last night we ate in the dining room, and we could hear them like they were sitting in our laps. Yelling at each other, crying, banging on the
wall. Like animals. What’s that house going to be worth in twenty years when Mamma’s gone?”