The Saint of Lost Things (2 page)

“This is not fair to us,” Maddalena says.

“Don’t even pretend you’re worried for yourself.”

Maddalena shrugs. “One of the five doesn’t have to be you,” she says, folding a piece of wax paper into a square. She stuffs the paper in her purse to reuse and reaches for the extra piece of fruit that Mamma Nunzia, their mother-in-law, throws in “for health.” Lunch was a few pieces of roasted chicken and spinach between thick slices of bread, eaten without an appetite.

“You have it easy,” Ida says. “We have Nunzia and Nina to worry about. And whatever happens, Papà and Mamma will take care of Antonio. You think they would have given Mario the money to go find a wife in Italy? For the younger son, their pockets are always empty.”

Maddalena listens, though she has heard this song from Ida many times before. She and Mario believe that Antonio, the oldest, is the family favorite. Nothing anyone says can change their minds. Mario has invested in one failed family business after another—the Pasticceria Grasso, the Grasso Grocery, Café Grasso—while Antonio has chosen the steady work of the assembly line at the Ford plant. Maddalena does not dare ask Ida why her husband should be punished for making the safer choice, especially since someone has clearly put a curse on the Grasso name.

For now they all live together in a narrow, three-story row house on Eighth Street, in the city of Wilmington, Delaware. The room on the other side of the wall from Maddalena and Antonio’s bed belongs to Ida and Mario and their two little girls. Down the hall, out of earshot but never far from Maddalena’s thoughts, sleep Mamma Nunzia and Papà Franco. Maddalena has no blood relations on this side of the ocean. For the first eighteen years of her life, she lived in the village of Santa Cecilia, in the mountains of central Italy, with three sisters and three brothers of her own, in a house no smaller than the one that waited for her here. Antonio appeared in Santa Cecilia after the war, started coming around and staying for dinner, sweet-talking. Her mother and sisters told her, “That man will take you to America, stuff your purse with money, and drive you around New York City in a Cadillac,” and Maddalena believed them.

“Look in my purse,” Ida says now, as Maddalena peels a pear. “Only one piece of fruit for me.”

“Don’t worry.” She cuts the pear in quarters and hands one to her. “Between the two of us, we’ll make two hundred. Easy.”

Just to be sure, Maddalena works twice as fast. After Mr. Gold passes their tables, when Gloria and Stavroula aren’t looking, she slides a pile of material over to Ida’s side.

Precisely at three-thirty—the hands of the clock above in
exact position—comes the third sign. A sudden cloudiness fills Maddalena’s head, and before she can bring her hand to her brow a nausea unlike one she’s ever felt bubbles in her stomach. The significance of the time of day strikes her, briefly, as she stands, lets fall the fabric on her lap, and rushes down the aisle to the ladies room. She makes it in time to vomit into the toilet, crouching so the greasy floor doesn’t stain the knees of her stockings. When this happened to her as a child, her mother would kneel beside her, palm her forehead, and smooth her blonde curls around her ear. “Get all the poison out,” she’d say; “this is your body cleaning itself.” Now her mother sends advice in letters a month too late for it to matter. Now it is Gloria, wheezy and fat, who follows Maddalena into the bathroom and squeezes herself into the stall.

“Tutto bueno?
” she asks. “You A-OK?” She flushes the toilet and hands her a wad of tissue.

Maddalena wipes her mouth and gets to her feet, keeping her head down. Her legs shake. She is too happy to look at Gloria. She has a new body now, possessed by something holy and powerful. The joyous transformation numbs her. She wants to keep it to herself for as long as she can. As soon as she reveals it—to Gloria, to Ida, even to Antonio—it will no longer belong to her.

But of course Gloria guesses. “You did not eat bad food, I can be sure. You are—” she places her hands over her belly, then brings them out slowly as if the belly is expanding.

Maddalena nods, then looks up. She has prayed for this moment long before the deer and the plastic daisies, and now, finally, it has come.

“How
bella!”
Gloria says, then bursts into a fit of Spanish that Maddalena cannot follow. She wears a thick coat of makeup on her brown skin, big gold earrings that jangle when her head bobs. She guides Maddalena toward the sink and pulls from her sleeve the
photos of her two boys—Carlos and Eduardo—that she has already shown her a hundred times.
“Morning
sickness,” she says, laughing. “With Carlos it’s sickness all the day long.” Then she wraps her arms around Maddalena and pulls her close.

She rests her head on Gloria’s ample chest. The numbness breaks, and she sobs into her silky blouse, her strong, sweet perfume. Her hunger returns with great force. How she will finish out the day, the week, the next seven months at work, she does not know. Already she is impatient and longs for the baby to hold in her arms and present to Antonio. Already everything has changed.

Gloria strokes her hair. “How much did you sew today?” she asks.

“Sixty-five,” Maddalena answers, though the real number is over eighty, not including what she’s done for Ida.

“Then relax! Say your prayers. Give thanks to God.”

She does. She works the needle slowly and devotes the extra time between stitches to things that, for superstitious reasons, she has not yet allowed herself to consider: the exact words she will use to tell Antonio, names for boys, names for girls, and—at this her hands fail her—the love of someone who belongs to her, someone of her own blood, in this country of strangers.

U
NTIL NOW
, M
ADDALENA
has not found much beauty in America. But this evening, on the 5:55 back to Wilmington, everything charms her. The streets jammed with cars, the smoke gushing from the engines into the drizzle, the rhythm of wipers on windshields—it is all a symphony composed for her pleasure. Rows of brake lights fade from bright to pale red as the traffic lurches forward. She opens her window halfway, for air, and welcomes the spray of cool rain on her face. The men below stare straight ahead over their steering wheels, then—like the deer—suddenly turn and look up at her as if to catch her watching them. They smile and
tick their heads. She wants to know each of them, these hardworking men, and their wives, and their children. She wants to walk across their green lawns. She wants to sit with them at a picnic table under the trees at Lums Pond, bouncing her baby on her lap as they trade stories and jokes and memories of years gone by.

This time of day, Ida can’t sit still. She chats with Gloria, who has agreed to keep Maddalena’s secret until Antonio hears it for himself. After Gloria’s stop, Ida turns all her attention to Maddalena. The Golden Hem is a cage, Ida informs her, and we are birds who need to fly. God did not create women to work in factories; He wants them in the bedroom with their husbands, in the kitchen with their daughters, in the garden with their hands in the soil. Despite this belief, Ida says she will fight to keep her job. If she and Maddalena can’t keep up the system they began this morning, she will tell Mr. Gold that Nina, her younger daughter, is going blind and needs an expensive surgery. “God save my soul for lying,” says Ida. “But I’ll do what I have to do.”

Maddalena half listens. The traffic breaks and they cross into their home state of Delaware, different in not one single way from the state of Pennsylvania. The same little brick houses, squat and square, divided by chain link fences, go on for miles. Tall wooden poles, strung with thick black wires and iron bolts, run alongside. If someone had not put up the sign
WELCOME TO DELAWARE
, nobody would notice a change. In Italy, Maddalena has said many times, every town has its own distinct face. The church and the piazza are the eyes; the streets and houses are the nose and mouth; and each person is a freckle—or a mole, or a sharp tooth, depending on his personality—that makes a village different from its neighbors. Antonio, who’d eat the dirt from the gutters in America and call it delicious, finds this silly. Maddalena has told him it is because he himself is a pimple.

It surprises her how familiar the landscape has become, how the
memories of her village have faded. She reads
albero
in
Il Sogno della Principessa
and sees not an olive tree, but a spruce. Though horses—donkeys, at least—were common as dogs in Santa Cecilia, she takes great delight when a mounted policeman approaches the bus. Any other day, these thoughts of home would sadden her. Until this afternoon, she has felt like the girl on the deck of the ship, weak-kneed and seasick, afraid to let go of the railing.

But that was another autumn evening, colder than this one, seven years ago to the month. October 1946. She watched the sun set on the immense Manhattan buildings and light up the windows bright gold. She longed to share in the joy of the passengers around her, who blew kisses and sang songs, and waved to the shimmering buildings as if they were old friends. Instead she kept silent. She had promised her mother that, no matter how hopeless she felt, she would never let her husband see her cry. They had met less than three months before, and it was still too soon to trouble him.

In New York harbor, Antonio gleefully pointed out landmarks: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, the flurry of names strange and German-sounding. Everything terrified her: the waves licking the side of the boat as it slowed; the birds gathering high in the air then darting down ten at once for the decks. Antonio talked on and on. Look, there was a famous battleship; there was the state called New Jersey; there was the Statue of Liberty on her little island. Maddalena gazed at this statue, the one landmark she recognized from films and postcards. She was like the
Mona Lisa,
she told Antonio a few years later: look at her face when you’re sad, and you see sadness in her expression; look at her when hopeful, and she gives hope back to you.

In the car on the way to Wilmington that first day, Maddalena discovered that her new country was, in fact, a land of green, just as Antonio had described: lawns and fields, hills, thick stretches of
trees, rows of hedges under windows. Every house, no matter how modest, seemed to own a share of grass and tend it like the plot of a grave. The roads were wide and paved, and the cars rolled over them in patient, orderly rows. In Santa Cecilia, Maddalena’s family had owned the only store for miles; here, every block was lined with little shops, each proudly displaying signs with big letters that screamed
S-A-L-E!

As Maddalena passed sign after sign, some large and some small, all announcing the same one product—
sale,
salt—she tried to figure out why a country so wealthy would be this proud of such a common ingredient. Then she grew worried. Was salt very expensive here? If so, how would she cook? Or was salt so cheap that everyone tried to give it away? Did Americans use more salt than Italians? She considered asking Antonio, then changed her mind. After he and Mario stopped laughing at her, Antonio would tell some long story about the history of salt in the United States. It occurred to her that she had no one to ask. She kept silent in the backseat, her head against the glass of the window and her hands folded in her lap, panic rising in her chest, and then, for the first time of many, as the
SALE!
signs flashed by her faster and faster, and Antonio argued with his brother over the best route home, she wept.

“Ecco,”
Ida says now, as the bus makes the turn onto Union Street. She buttons her coat. “So what do you think, then? Peas?”

“Peas?”

“Or spinach? For dinner.”

“Whatever Mamma Nunzia wants,” says Maddalena.

“So it’ll be cauliflower with vinegar again,” she says, with a snort. “One day, it will be me deciding what to cook in my own house. And my Nunzia will have to like it. Don’t you look forward like that?”

“Sometimes.”

They are up and off the bus, sloshing on the pavement toward
Eighth Street. They walk quickly, arm in arm, past the storefronts on Union: the pharmacy, the beauty salon, the shoe repair. At this hour they are all closing, and most of the bread in Lamberti’s Bakery has been sold. If she and Ida time it right, though, Signor Lamberti will offer them a bag of leftover rolls to use for their lunches.

After the old man tells them he has not even a burnt loaf to give them tonight, Maddalena says, “Good for him. Someone should make money.”

“Why him and not us?” is Ida’s reply.

“Him now,” Maddalena says. “Us later.”

Ida shakes her head. “You are too patient.”

Birds circle the bell tower of St. Anthony’s, as if waiting for it to ring the hour. The church sits at the top of a broad hill, no wider than a half mile, and looks down on the ten square blocks that form Wilmington’s Italian neighborhood. In forty years, long after most of the immigrants have left, a group of merchants will officially designate these blocks “Little Italy.” They will commission an archway to demarcate the entrance at Fourth and Lincoln. But in 1953 these blocks are merely a scattering of Italian families who have paid for their relatives to move into the row homes and apartments surrounding them. Antonio calls Wilmington a half city, Philadelphia a real city, New York
the
city.
La Città,
he says, with reverence, never in English. Roma, Milano, Genoa, to him these are dead cities, and Italy the land of dead cities. For the time being, Maddalena finds Wilmington city enough.