The Saint of Lost Things (21 page)

Quickly Antonio removes his clothes and grabs one of his good long-sleeved dress shirts from the closet. As he’s buttoning, he reconsiders. Maddalena would want him to save this shirt for church. So he puts the first shirt back on. “Finish making it dirty,” she would say.

He gets to Wilmington Hospital in five minutes. He doesn’t remember the roads he takes or where he parks. He pushes through the glass doors, past the women in white gathered at the reception desk. They must notice his grease-stained work pants, the mud he’s tracked onto the marble floor. After one of them pleasantly directs him to the maternity ward “on three,” he breaks into a run, nearly colliding with a gurney left in the middle of the hall. Repeatedly he presses the up arrow on the elevator, then takes the stairs.

The maternity nurse is less agreeable. Possibly she smells the liquor on his breath, the foul odor steaming from his armpits. Can she blame him for sweating? Does she not know his baby came too early? If he’s here now, how can it matter what he’s been doing the past few hours?

“Grasso,” he repeats for her.
“G-R-A
—” She flips through a thick stack of clipboards. Is every woman in Wilmington having a baby tonight? Then Antonio sees his father emerge from a room at the far end of the hall. He goes to him.

His father’s face is serious, his hands deep in his pockets. The room from which he has come is not one in which Maddalena lies on a bed, cradling their baby at her breast. It is a waiting room. His mother sits in the corner, eyes closed, lips moving, her rosary pinched between two fingers. Strangers are scattered around her reading newspapers, arms folded, asleep, staring.

“What’s going on?” Antonio asks. His mouth has gone dry. “Where is she?”

His father takes his arm and leads him away from the room, down the narrow hallway. Up here the floors are cheap linoleum, speckled ivory and tan. It is a gloomy place, unfit to welcome new life. They lean against a closet door beside a piece of chrome medical equipment the size of a safe, with an octopus of plastic tubes sticking out from the top. Antonio shudders. What use could there be for this contraption in a maternity ward?

“You have a healthy daughter,” his father says. But there is no joy on his face.

A daughter. A girl. A healthy baby girl so desperate to see the world that she came four weeks before her time. He lets out a deep breath and steadies himself. He grabs the back of his head with his hand, squeezes, and looks down. “And Maddalena?”

His father is silent. Then he clears his throat. Antonio raises his head.

“Not so good,
figlio mio.”
he says. “After the baby came, there was some kind of problem. Bleeding inside. Could be a small problem or a big one, but the doctor doesn’t know for sure. He doesn’t know how to stop it.”

God forgive me, Antonio thinks. Everything is my fault. If I’d been with her, there would be no problem, big or small. If I’d been a better husband, she’d be safe.

“The baby came too fast, is what I think. Less than an hour and it was over. The doctor said Maddalena was very brave. But now—”

His mother emerges from the waiting room, tucks her rosary in her dress pocket, and comes toward Antonio with her arms outstretched. She has never looked so irreversibly old. Even her palms are streaked with wrinkles. “
O Dio!
” she says, clutching his face.

“She won’t wake up,” says his father.

A
NTONIO BEGAN THAT YEAR,
1954, in darkness. On New Year’s Eve, all of Eighth Street lost electricity, and for three nights he and his family wandered like mummies through the candlelit house. Arms out, they tripped and collided with each other, and before it was over they sent crashing to the floor two wine decanters, a lamp, and a vase of silk flowers. The kids huddled with Ida on the couch, whimpering, afraid of every ghostly shadow that appeared on the wall.

“It’s only Zia,” Ida would say, as Maddalena creaked slowly down the stairs. She had trouble sleeping. One of the nights, as she tossed and turned, she said, more to herself than to Antonio: “I miss the radio. The voices calm me down.”

“I’m not an electrician,” Antonio told her.

Secretly, he was in no hurry for the power company to rescue them. A generator provided heat and hot water; the gas oven cooked their food. Why did they need to see one another? So his mother could tell him he looked tired, or ask, “What’s bothering you, anyway?” As if one simple answer could explain his troubles.

Antonio no longer worried about Milty Gold. It was clear the moment he met him that the man was no Buzzy, not with that bush of hair in his ears, his feminine chattering with the women, his dainty fingers fumbling for the pocket notebook. Antonio almost felt sorry for him. But he’d been forced to make a point, and the point had been made. He and Gianni had had a good laugh about it afterward, remembering the captive look on Gold’s face, his mad dash out the door, his near-tumble down the icy stone steps.

The day after Christmas, Antonio had sent Maddalena back to work armed with a bottle of Chianti as a gift, though Gold had not taken a sip of the very same wine two nights before. It mattered little to Antonio whether Gold saw the Chianti as a peace offering or as a reminder of his rudeness in leaving a full glass on the table. In
fact, Antonio wanted Milty Gold to puzzle over the gift, just as he had wanted him to puzzle over the avalanche of kindness he showed him on Christmas Eve. The way to control people like him—most people, actually—was to keep them guessing whether you loved or hated them. You had to give them an equal number of reasons to think either way. People were cautious in such circumstances; they went back and forth as they weighed the evidence; and in the meantime, you got what you needed from them. You failed only if you let on too soon how you truly felt. Then they had something on you—your love or your hate for them an easily exploitable weakness—and could play you for all you were worth.

These were Antonio’s thoughts as he sat in the living room amid the shadows and flickering candlelight. At the other end of the couch, Ida sang songs with the girls, but their voices might just as easily have come from the radio. The darkness put a comfortable distance between everyone, and suddenly the house seemed larger, almost cavernous. He did not need the long walk to the pizzeria, the adventures of Renato and Buzzy and their girls, to distract him. Maybe all he ever needed was to be left alone—a few days, a few hours, even a short drive up the coast—so he could listen to his own voice.

But the world had become very crowded. Men could not keep to themselves as easily as they used to. Peace and quiet came only at night, when you were too tired to enjoy it, but obligations came at all hours and from all directions. No matter what route home Antonio took, he was bound to run into a coworker, a neighbor, or a face he recognized from the pizzeria. Someone’s cousin from the Old Country was always just arriving, and he’d have to spend the better part of an hour listlessly nodding to the tale of his voyage and his wide-eyed impressions of America. “You’ll come to my house for dinner once you get settled,” Antonio found himself saying, often just for an excuse to walk away. And though he welcomed the boom
in population—it would help turn Wilmington into a real city; it would feed his base of customers once he opened the trattoria—he resented the responsibility he felt for every Italian who stepped off the boat. Most of them came from the South anyway—Naples and Sicily and other places that made his people look like a race of illiterate pickpockets—and lacked even the rudimentary education Antonio had received in Santa Cecilia. It occurred to Antonio that having an elegant wife had turned him into a snob. He sometimes forgot he grew up not in Roma or Milano, not even a northern town, but a central Apennine village of three streets, where they’d stopped turning the pages of the calendar in the middle of the last century. The only virtue of the place was its peacefulness. People drove from all the major cities of the country just to sit in the olive groves, breathe the fresh air, and luxuriate in the silence.

At home on Eighth Street there were his nieces pulling each other’s hair and skittering across the living room like windup toys. There was the newspaper to read. “How to Live with the H-Bomb” was the title of Bill Frank’s editorial, helpfully accompanied by a bull’s-eye map that showed the decimation of much of Delaware if the Big One struck the center of Wilmington. There was Maddalena casting a disapproving eye on his grease-stained fingernails, his mother begging him to take an immediate look at the icebox because it didn’t seem as cold as it did last week. When Antonio did not say much at dinner, there were questions; when he talked more than usual, there were different questions. There were always questions. And little jobs and favors. Requests for advice. Unable to reach his brother, who ate all his meals at Mrs. Stella’s, they all sought Antonio.

Aloneness. That was what his life lacked. No wonder he took the roundabout route home from the pizzeria. No wonder it seemed as though everyone was in his way. If only he had time to sort and plan, to weigh and negotiate, he would stay out of trouble.
He would figure out exactly how to make good on his ideas and dreams.

The power company restored electricity after five days, just in time for the angry phone call from Renato that Antonio had been expecting. With his wife and mother watching from the stairs, he hung up without saying a word, and mumbled, “Mario needs me” and “no emergency.” Then he grabbed his coat and headed to the pizzeria.

“You have some nerve,” Renato said, when Antonio walked through the front door. “I didn’t think you’d show your face in here again.”

He and Buzzy sat smoking cigars at the back table. Cassie was between them, arms folded across her chest, the corners of her mouth turned downward. She shook her head in disgust as Antonio approached. The deck of cards in Buzzy’s hand suggested they were not so angry that they couldn’t play a game or two of
briscola.
He stopped and held out his palms. “I have a good explanation.”

Buzzy and Renato stood.

“Please. Listen to my side.”

They stared at him. Over the spitting and knocking of the radiators, the phonograph played Mario Lanza.

“Yes, I did tell my brother about your plan,” Antonio said, holding the men’s stare. “My gut told me you’d try it anyway, no matter how much I warned you. Turns out my gut was right.” He looked at Renato. “If it was your brother,
uaglio,
you’d have done the same.”

“Someone’s loyal to me, I’m loyal to them,” he said. “End of story.”

“I only told Mario so he’d call me if Cassie ever came to the bar by herself. At first he thought I was playing a joke. Then last night, there she was in her little skirt and all that makeup. At midnight the phone rang. I ran out of the house, but by the time I got to Mrs. Stella’s, the taxi was already at the curb. I saw Cassie on the sidewalk
and tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t listen. So I grabbed her arm. She squirmed like an animal and kicked me in the leg. She pulled my fingers back, I lost my grip, and she ran to the taxi. But I caught her in time. ‘Keep moving,’ I told the driver. ‘I’ll take the girl home—’”

“‘And don’t come back here tonight, no matter who calls you,’” Cassie said, mimicking his voice. “‘If you know what’s good for you.’ He scared him off for good. He ruined everything!”

“My wife is home by herself in the dark—my three-months pregnant wife,” Antonio said, “and I’m running up and down Union Street with a girl? And then afterwards I have to lie to my family about where I’ve been? I took a big risk.”

“For no reason,” said Renato. “Why you didn’t mind your own business, get a good night’s sleep next to your wife, and let us do our work is a mystery to me. You care so much about that
mulig-nane
that you turn your back on us?”

“I was doing you a favor—”

“Look at my arm!” said Cassie. She pulled up her left sleeve to reveal finger-shaped bruises. “Is this what you call a favor?” She lifted her leg and showed a gash just above the ankle, a perfect arc of crusted blood.

“I did not do that,” Antonio said. He turned to Renato and said in Italian: “You know I’d never hurt a girl. Especially yours.”

“You pushed me into the fire hydrant,” Cassie went on. “I tore my leg up. Then I fell in the gutter. You don’t remember. You were the one like an animal. Drunk as a skunk!” She presented her palms, red and swollen.

“I was not drunk,” Antonio said. “I was home in my pajamas. She did this to herself. It’s obvious to me.” But it did not seem obvious to Renato or Buzzy. Renato looked through him, as if at a stain on the wall just behind his head. Buzzy kept shuffling the cards.

“Get the fuck out of my shop,” said Renato calmly, his eyes still fixed on the stain. “From now on, stop by the
nero’s
house after work. Maybe he’ll cook for you.”

Cassie giggled.

“You don’t mean that,” said Antonio. “Come on, pour me a whiskey.” He sat in the empty chair. “We have other things to catch up on. It’s been too long, with all these holidays. And my electricity’s been out. What do you say, Buzzy? You’re quiet tonight.”

“Indigestion,” he said, and downed his shot. “This isn’t helping.”

Cassie pushed away from the table and crossed her arms, as if afraid to sit too close to Antonio. What an actress, he thought. Did Renato really not see? Had her
fica
turned him crazy? It was good enough, Antonio remembered, but nothing special. Their few nights in bed together, he and Cassie had tickled each other for a while before she undid their clothes, climbed on top of him, and straddled his waist. She’d arched her back, and he’d closed his eyes so as not to stare at those bird tracks on her chest.