The Saint of Lost Things (15 page)

Maddalena and Ida leave work at noon on Thursday the twenty-fourth. On the bus they share a roasted red pepper sandwich, three apples and—a rare treat—a can of soda from the factory vending machine. Meat is forbidden until midnight. “Finally,” says Maddalena, as she slides down the vinyl seat and stretches her legs. She closes her eyes. To her, the bus rides are like little vacations, an hour of guilt-free rest. There is nothing to clean or cook here, no one’s hair to brush, no windows to clear of grime—though these could certainly use it. As darkness falls, an old woman at the back of the bus hums “Silent Night,” and soon the other voices fade. Maddalena drifts off to sleep with a vision of Jesus’ manger filling with snow, the baby shivering, Mary in her blue veil beside Him.

By six o’clock, the house is full. Ida’s brother arrives with his family of boys carrying toy cars; Signora Fiuma from next door brings her niece and her new baby; Antonio’s friends, Gianni among them, show up with their families in shifts through the night, one man with his tall American wife who drinks beer; before they sit down to eat, Father Moravia—who came over with Papà Franco in ‘31—blesses the table and wishes everyone a year filled with the love of Christ; Papà’s widower friend, who might be a distant cousin if a certain photograph can be verified, sings “Tu Scendi dalle Stelle” out of key for the women putting away the dishes, and when the men hear how bad his voice is, they gather at the doorway to join in and rescue the melody.

On his own, Antonio has chosen to wear a coat and tie with the white shirt and gray pants Maddalena set out for him. He has even tucked a handkerchief in the front pocket of the coat. He keeps to his mother’s side in the kitchen, helping to dry the good silverware before it is returned to its velvet-lined case. Maddalena catches him
watching her, and for once he does not avert his eyes. He gazes at her, expressionless, unblinking, until she turns away. She cannot read him, but she senses that—one way or another—the silence game is about to end.

Mario shows up after dinner, stays an hour, and talks of nothing but the crowd at Mrs. Stella’s. Ida and the girls gather around him as if he’s Babbo Natale himself. He bounces Nina on his lap and twirls one of her dark curls around his fingers as he tells her how badly he’s needed “on the floor.”

“I’m on the floor, Babbo!” Nunzia says, and rolls around in front of the stereo.

“Get up!” says Ida, pulling on her arm. “You’re wrinkling your dress.”

Maddalena sets aside a plate for the man with the accordion. “Do you think Signor Fabbri could play a little bit while he’s here?” she asks Mario. “Or will he be too tired?”

“Who?” he replies, the tail of a smelt between his lips. “Oh yes, Giulio. The Music Man. What do you think, should I invite him?”

“You didn’t do it yet?” his mother says, from the other side of the kitchen. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I guess I forgot,” says Mario. “First thing when I get back, though, I’ll ask him. If I remember. I’ll tell him to bring the accordion if he wants.”

“Make sure he comes,” Maddalena says. “Nobody should be alone tonight.”

After dinner, Ida brings a large gold tray stacked with espresso cups. Mamma Nunzia follows behind her with the
panettone
and cookies. Maddalena carries two pewter pots of coffee, still steaming. As she walks around the table to serve the guests, Ida and Mamma disappear into the kitchen. They return a moment later with two bottles of Asti and another gold tray, this one crowded with tall flute glasses.

Maddalena blushes. She rests her hand on the shoulder of Ada Martino, Gianni’s wife. Please don’t, she thinks. But they do.

“Attenzione!
” Ida shouts. She hands one of the bottles to Mario and taps a glass with her fork. “Time for happiness!”

Antonio lowers his head.

Mario stands and takes his place beside Ida. He will do the talking now. “My wife and I just want to say that, for Christmas, God has given the Grasso family some very good news.” The crowd quiets to a hush. Nunzia jumps up and down. Mario looks back and forth from Maddalena to Antonio. “After seven years of marriage,” he says, “my brother and my sister-in-law are finally going to have a baby!” Upon uttering the word “baby,” he pops the cork of the bottle, and the Asti spills out onto his hands and the tablecloth. The cork hits the ceiling, ricochets against the banister, and lands in Papà’s coffee cup.

Everyone laughs. There is much clapping, and suddenly the supple arms of Ada Martino are wrapped around Maddalena. She kisses her cheek, and the cheeks of the parade of mothers who squeeze behind the table to congratulate her. The fervor with which they pinch her belly and tug her ear is sure to leave bruises. They point to their respective children across the room, and say, “Would you believe my Gabriella was only four pounds when she born?” and “Doesn’t Stefano look just like his father?” as if Maddalena is seeing them for the first time. On the other side of the table, the men shake Antonio’s hand and clap him on the back.

As Maddalena clinks her glass with Ida’s, then downs it quickly, she cannot help but feel triumphant. These women, all Antonio’s people in one way or another, have been cold to her from the day she arrived in Wilmington. “Because you have movie-star looks and they do not,” Antonio explained, but Maddalena knew that was only half the reason. She had yet to prove herself to them, to give a satisfactory answer to their unspoken questions: are you good
enough for the Grasso family or just a prima donna? Do you refuse to have a baby because you are looking for someone better? Did you marry Antonio just for the free trip across the ocean?

Maddalena has wanted to answer them with these words: “I walked onto that ship seven years ago like a mourner to her own funeral. I gave up everything for a man I barely knew and did not yet love. You should be comforting me.” But she could not embarrass Antonio, who turned their arrangement into a romance—
The Dream of the Village Girl,
it might be called. “She was so sweet, so innocent,” he used to say upon introducing her. “I picked her like a flower from the rocky soil of Italy, and now here she blooms.”

After this sort of introduction, Maddalena can hardly blame them for disliking her, for taking a not-so-secret pleasure in her failure to become a mother. By a certain age, don’t all women give up on romance and resent the young girl who still feels entitled to it? If only they knew that Maddalena no longer feels entitled. She believes in romance, yes, in the man charging across the drawbridge to burst through the castle doors—but not for her. For her nieces, or her own child, or the American girls with their un-chartable futures ahead of them. It is almost enough for Maddalena to live through someone else’s love story; it frees her, at least, from the disquiet of her own decisions. Then, when the romance fades—as it always will; she knows this much about the world—she’ll feel no guilt, no responsibility, only a vicarious and manageable heartbreak.

“I have some top-quality maternity dresses,” whispers Elena, one of Signora Fiuma’s daughters-in-law. “But you’re probably too tall for them.”

In the commotion, Maddalena and Antonio manage to avoid each other, and before long the room returns to normal. With nearly as much fanfare as he announced the pregnancy, Mario informs the guests that the time has come for him to return to Mrs.
Stella’s. He stands at the door, his coat thrown over his shoulder, and gives the crowd a big wave. The moment he’s gone, Antonio pours himself a shot from the liquor cabinet. He drinks it in one gulp, then pours another.

Maddalena watches him from the kitchen. He stares into his whiskey the way a woman stares into a lake, as if seeking an honest answer from the reflection. If she dared, she could give him that answer, but even such knowledge will not settle him. For many years now Maddalena has been aware of Antonio’s secret affliction, the poison in his blood that will never allow him the pure, peaceful health of men like Gianni or Mario. At first she called it ambition—to have more money, to drive a Cadillac, to own a three-bedroom house in Westover Hills. But ambition is a simple hunger. The demands of jealousy, though, can never be met. A green eye, she has heard it called; if that’s true, Antonio has two. The eyes see everything he wants in the lives of other men but are blind to the joys of his own life. And yet these same eyes are fiercely protective of what he has, Maddalena above all, and see threats coming from all directions.

Antonio’s jealousy of Mario is obvious to everyone—except, maybe, Mario and Ida, too busy with their own jealousy to notice—but Maddalena believes it has nothing to do with the success of Mrs. Stella’s. If Mario lost the restaurant and got locked up in debtor’s prison, Antonio would find something to envy in his desperate circumstances: his vacation from the daily aggravations of wife and family, the attention and help he’d get from their father, the challenge to rebuild his life from scratch. Antonio is jealous of men with five children, but surely he longs just as ardently for his bachelorhood—why else does he lie about the nights at the pizzeria with Renato? Why else did Maddalena’s good news not soothe him?

She once resented Antonio for his affliction; now—in spite of
the way he has treated her—she feels mostly compassion. Look at him: a man lost in his own house, afraid to ask for directions from the one person he can trust. He grips his whiskey glass, walks hesitantly toward the stairs, stops, rubs his face, turns back for a moment, catches her standing there, spins around again, and heads for the porch. Other women fear their husbands will strike them; Maddalena fears the damage Antonio might do to himself.

Strange that the first glimmer of love Maddalena felt for Antonio started in this room, on this same holiday, their third as a married couple. At the time, she still thought of him less as a husband than a friendly uncle, a grown-up for whom she had to behave like a lady so as not to displease her parents. She used to fix her hair and makeup early in the morning, so that when he woke he’d find a good young wife tidying up the bedroom, pulling back the drapes. He never saw her naked, as their lovemaking was accomplished in the dark, hastily, in decorous silence, and with her nightgown tucked under the pillow so that she could slip it on immediately afterward. She learned to separate this part of her life from the rest, often forgetting it occurred at all. Then she’d get her monthly bleeding and relive all the nights Antonio pulled the nightgown up over her head.

Antonio protected her, supplied her with enough money for groceries, and every few months surprised her with a new dress or a coat from John Wanamaker’s to lift her spirits. Dutifully he mailed her weekly letters to Santa Cecilia, paid for photographs to be taken and sent over, and arranged scratchy, expensive transatlantic phone calls during which Maddalena could muster only an anguished weeping.
“Cara, cara di Mamma,”
chanted her mother across the thousands of miles, with her sisters’ voices echoing from the interior of the
municipio
where they had traveled to take the call. Her brother serenaded her, drunkenly, with old songs like “Madonna Fiorentina” and “Il Primo Pensiero”; her father described
the snow and the rot that had withered their row of chestnut trees. During the precious two minutes they had together, each Piccinelli desperately repeated his or her own name—
“Sono io, Teresa!
It’s me, Teresa! Teresa!”—as if to confirm with the unquestionable authenticity of voice that they still lived, they had not forgotten her. For Maddalena, the phone calls were torturous, a penance for the crime of abandoning them. She’d lay in the upstairs room for hours afterward with a cold towel on her forehead, and Antonio would knock gently on the door to check on her. He promised to take her back to Italy someday, once they had the money, but Maddalena knew she’d never see her family again in this life, and she couldn’t promise her husband she could leave them if she did.

The week of this third Christmas together, Maddalena learned of the marriage of her sister Carolina, who had not once traveled to the
municipio
to take her calls, and from whom there had not been a single letter. The news, and how she learned it, was so unbearable that Maddalena took to her bed for three days. She refused to tell anyone—not Ida, not Mamma Nunzia—what troubled her, and after a while they stopped asking. In the meantime, the women worked twice as hard on the holiday preparations, and Papà Franco wondered—loudly enough for Maddalena to hear, in his booming voice from the bottom of the stairs—what kind of woman Antonio had brought into their house. “If she doesn’t shape up . . . ,” he said, leaving the consequences to her imagination.

Maddalena wrote Carolina a letter, then tore it up. She wrote another letter to the man Carolina had married, then threw it into the fire. She pretended to sleep when Antonio crept into the room, quietly removed his watch and rings and set them on the night-stand, then slid into bed beside her. She did not flinch when he caressed her shoulder, sighed, and switched off the light. Then, the day before Christmas Eve, Maddalena gathered herself, took a
bath, and joined her mother-in-law and Ida downstairs as if nothing had happened. She greeted Antonio’s return from work with the same forced cheerfulness she had always displayed, and he kissed her hand in gratitude. “Women have unexplainable episodes, often caused by hormonal changes,” he had once read to her in the Married Life section of the
Wilmington Morning News.
“It is best for a husband not to interfere by giving his wife the unhealthy dose of attention she craves. The episode, or fit, will then subside quickly, and the wife will have learned a valuable lesson.”