The Saint of Lost Things (18 page)

Maddalena holds the locket open in her palm, the chain laced through her fingers. This is how life with Antonio will continue to be, she thinks. Her mother might have told her as much. He will torment her with silence and spite from an impassable distance, and then, just when her fragile love for him begins to crack, when she considers giving up on him completely, his good heart will show. The game they are playing will end, and they will never speak of it, never admit there was a game at all.

She can see it as clearly as if it is happening now. She will have her baby not in a hospital, but here in her marriage bed, on the humid third floor, with Antonio between her legs waiting for the little Jewish face. He will rejoice only when the baby peeks through the muck with his father’s eyes, the wide Grasso nose, the almond-shaped birthmark on the back of his neck. There will be no trace of her family at all, no link to her past—only the picture beside the child’s in the locket. For a time, joy will return to Eighth Street, and Maddalena will rest. Antonio will rush home from work to sit beside her. They will forget the months he ignored her and acted crazy and slept through her sicknesses, and she will be his beloved again, mother of his perfect child.

8
Mamma

J
ULIAN SPLASHES AFTERSHAVE
on his cheeks and neck. He examines his skin in the bathroom mirror. The mole on his left nostril, which has tormented him for years, seems almost charming. He tests his left profile, then his right, declares it a draw.

He flicks the light switch off and on rapidly. “All the world’s a stage,” he says aloud, on his way into the hall. He can’t remember if he read this line in a Shakespeare play or an Italian poem, but for the first time he thinks he understands it. Since starting at Mrs. Stella’s, he feels at every moment—in the bath, at the kitchen table, in the yard raking leaves—the eyes of an invisible crowd upon him. Songs run through his head in an endless set, commanding his fingers to play the notes on the porcelain tub, a plate, the rake.

Even this house could be a stage, he thinks. It is sparse enough and absent of decoration: dark wood paneling, brown carpet, mud-colored sofa, cherry coffee table. Only his poster of Manhattan—black and white save the blue tint to the sky—interrupts the blankness. If he remembers, he will buy a plant, add a flourish of green. Or a red slipcover to hide the holes in his father’s leather chair.

“Don’t tell me you don’t see it,” he says to the smiling man in the framed photo. “Their eyes glow, these customers. They stop talking.
They listen and sway. Listen and sway! I take them to a heavenly place.”

He talks to his parents every day, as he has since their deaths, reporting developments like an anchor on
Midday Headlines.
Little Abraham has still not come home, he tells them, but—“Calm down, Papà”—he has begun to include him in his nightly prayers. Maybe that is why he invades Julian’s otherwise happy dreams, floating on his back in the water, always naked, always dead. Sometimes he appears in the public pool, sometimes in a bathtub, but never without the same ghoulish bloodshot eyes staring up at nothingness. For this reason, Julian now keeps the hallway lamp lit through the night.

Even in death, his father cannot keep silent. “Don’t forget the electricity bill,” he says. “You’re paying for that, too.”

The Delluccis took out a loan, Julian says, eager to change the subject. They expanded their business to double the size, and bought a van painted with
DELLUCCI ELECTRONIC REPAIR
in big letters across both sides. Dellucci makes one delivery in the morning, then spends the rest of the day driving the van around the neighborhood to show it off.

Julian has learned six new songs just from playing them over and over on the phonograph. The notes have come easily, as if they’ve waited for years in the tips of his fingers, eager for release. He tells his parents about the woman who approached him at Mrs. Stella’s last week. She’d crossed a bar full of customers just to talk to him. “You play with all your heart,” she said, squeezing his elbow. “Your music fills me up—more delicious than any dinner.” Then she offered her hand. “My name is Helen,” she said, before disappearing into the crowd.

“You’re doing this for a woman, then?” his father asks. “You can’t make money and find a
fidanzata
at the same time? That cheapskate Mario Grasso’s taking advantage of you.”

But Julian does not care that his wages are in meals. Soon he will propose that he perform Fridays as well as Saturdays and holidays, and maybe one of the slower weeknights to attract more business. Then maybe—if he finds the nerve—he will negotiate a different price with Mario. Not for himself, but to satisfy his father. And yet his careful explanation of this does not please the old man.

“Working for food,” he says, with disgust. “In the Old Country maybe, but not here. Your grandfather did not come all the way to America so you could barter.”

“Maybe I would have been better off in Italy,” Julian counters. “You could have opened a little café. Our family could have run it. You could have passed it down to me and my children. What do the Fabbris own here, anyway, besides this house and this old furniture?”

“I don’t see any children,” says his father.

With his mother Julian does not argue. He rarely summons her voice. He cannot bear it. Only in moments of jubilation, or during a particularly happy dream, does he risk it, and even then he fears that his longing to share his joy with her might overwhelm him. It was she who used to walk him to the library and wait outside as he picked out the books that interested him, her to whom he read stories on the many nights his father spent at the racetrack. She would iron or sew or wipe down the inside of the refrigerator, and Giulio would sit on the arm of the couch and read aloud an entire mystery novel start to finish. She’d stop him every few minutes at first to posit a theory. By the middle of the book she’d announce, “I know who did it!” and not interrupt him again until the end, when the detective would often prove her right. If, at some point in her life, someone had told her she was a smart woman, she would have assumed she was being mocked. Giulio himself—to his shame—never told her. And yet he has never met anyone with as quick a mind.

Today, his conversation with his father ends the same as it always does. Julian turns away from the photograph, walks out onto the porch for air, and smokes a cigar. Then he remembers the date. He rushes back inside, rights the frame, kisses his two fingers, and presses them to the faces of his parents.
“Buon Natale,”
he says.

He arrives early for his shift at Mrs. Stella’s. The place is glittering. Gold garland covers the molding from one corner of the dining room to the other, and makes an X across the ceiling; it wraps every painting and spirals around the wooden columns that divide the restaurant from the bar. In the center of each table, a tall, red candle sits on a bed of plastic holly leaves splashed with silver confetti. Shiny glass ornaments hang from the coatrack and on the branches of two small trees set up on either side of the columns. Julian, anticipating this festiveness, wears his father’s red tie with his dark suit. When no one is looking, he plucks a sprig of holly and threads it through the buttonhole of his lapel.

When Mario asked Julian to perform on Christmas Eve, he did not hesitate to answer yes. He needed an excuse to turn down his widowed great aunt, who’d invited him to the house in Philadelphia she shares with her widowed daughter. The women are short and humorless, with powdery skin and a fondness for jangly gold bracelets. Over time they have taken on each other’s features—a sinking chin, bruiselike smudges under their eyes, white hair—and now it is impossible to tell which one is thirty years younger than the other. Julian knows the widows only from the four funerals they’ve attended together—their husbands, his parents—and so in his mind they are inextricably linked with death. He is too superstitious to risk a holiday with those dark angels.

At Gino Stella’s request, Julian steps out from his usual spot behind the microphone and does a turn among the tables. Tonight there are mostly big parties of ten or more enjoying pasta, fish, and vegetables served family-style in oversized white bowls. The fourtops
have been arranged into long rows that span the length of the dining room. The dessert cart has been rolled into the center of the room, covered with an iridescent gold linen, and transformed into a display of elaborately iced cakes and cookies. At the round table by the window, beside a tower of poinsettias, sits the most dazzling decoration of all: Helen. She wears her hair pulled back and a green velvet dress that bares her shoulders. She drinks red wine, laughs, folds her hands under her chin. With her is a bearded man roughly Julian’s age, two grandmotherly women, and a young girl in a dress identical to hers.

Julian maneuvers through the narrow spaces between the chairs, keeping his eye on her table. He plays more softly than at the microphone and holds the accordion high so as not to smack the customers in the head. They applaud as he passes. At Helen’s table, he flubs the refrain of “Inamorata,” but she doesn’t seem to notice. The girl reaches out and tugs on his jacket.

“Abigail!” Helen says, and slaps the girl’s knuckles.

“It’s all right,” says Julian.

She does not love the bearded man, Julian imagines. He is the brother of her best childhood friend, Abigail, who died in a fall from a horse. Though they have named the child after her, she is mean-spirited, nothing like the dead girl at all. Now only Julian’s music soothes Helen’s troubled heart.

The hours pass quickly. Julian’s mind returns again and again to his brown, empty house—no tree, no lights, no one to start a game of cards or
tombola.
Christmas Eve should be loud and drunken late into the morning. It should not end at eleven o’clock, as the celebration at Mrs. Stella’s must, so the waiters and cooks can join their families. At that point, Helen will take Abigail and the bearded man home; the parties of ten will reconvene at another long table in someone else’s living room; even the dark angels might still be detailing their various illnesses for their guests in the
gloomy Philadelphia walk-up. The Delluccis or Rosa Volpe across the street would happily take in Julian for the night, but he cannot bear to show up uninvited, to throw himself across their doorstep like a beggar.

Julian plays until his hunger forces him to take a twenty-minute break. Marcello—the teenaged waiter, who has just arrived from Naples and speaks not a word of English—appears with his dinner. He sets the bowl of pasta and the plate of a plate of fish on Julian’s little table by the window, lights his candle, and smiles.

“Have time to sit?” Julian asks in Italian, but the boy dashes off, his hands behind his back.

He hasn’t twirled his first forkful of pasta before Mario pulls up a chair. “Leave plenty of room,” he says. “After we close, you come to my house. My mother’s cooking for you.”

“Oh!” Julian says, his delight obvious. He blushes. “That’s—
grazie,
Mario.” He thinks a moment, rubbing the corner of the table with his thumb. Clearly the Grassos feel sorry for him. They presume he has nowhere else to go. “But of course I have to offer my regrets. To have another guest so late—it’s too much work for your mother.”

“What work?” Mario waves the idea away. “Your plate’s already prepared. You’ll be the one working,
uaglio.
My sister-in-law says, ‘Tell that man not to come unless he brings his accordion.’ She wants a private concert for the Grasso family.”

“Your brother’s wife?” asks Julian. “The one from Italy?”

“The blonde.”

Julian waits the appropriate few seconds. “How can I say no to a blonde?”

“Perfetto,”
Mario says. He dips a napkin in Julian’s water glass and blots a spot on his tie.

“You must be tired of my same old songs,” Julian says, moving the rubbery fettuccine around the bowl. “You sure you want to hear any more of me?”

“No offense,” says Mario. He dabs again at the tie. “But I’m too busy to pay attention anymore.” He smiles. “You could be playing with your feet and I wouldn’t notice.”

Julian nods.

“But not tonight,” says Mario. “I promise. Tonight I’ll hear every note.” He shifts in his chair. “I was thinking, though, and listen to me now. You know what would make this Christmas even more tremendous?”

“What?” says Julian, though he knows what’s coming.

“If the accordion player did a little singing—just a little—to get us in the spirit. My brother and the blonde—they’re not getting along so good right now. A song might bring them together.”

“I’m sorry, no,” Julian says, firmly, though his mouth is full. “I would like to help, but—I told you a hundred times I’m not ready. Not yet. I mean no disrespect, but—”

“I heard your voice,” Mario interrupts. He leans in closer. “Last week, when you took a piss, that was me in the next stall. I sat there with my eyes closed, asking myself: is Mario Lanza in the toilet with me?”

“Everyone sounds good in the bathroom,” Julian says. “It’s something about the tiles.”

“I’m serious,” says Mario. “Think about it. Think how nice it would be for these customers. Most of them are drunk anyway. If you sound bad, which you won’t, they won’t remember a thing.” He pauses. “But if not here, then in the living room of my house. That’s a must.”