The Saint of Lost Things (25 page)

He returned to his chair, slapped his cheeks and tightened the laces on his wingtips. He deemed his inability to stay awake as a failure of character. He talked to himself like this: You have a job now, Julian: to guard and protect Seventh Street. Lie around in bed all day if you want to—it’s not like you have to punch a card somewhere else—but don’t sleep while you’re on duty.

A different mind took over at this hour of night. It was as if the Julian who made the decisions the rest of the day vanished and left another Julian to run the graveyard shift. Usually the graveyard-shift
Julian had nothing to do but turn the crank of dreams, but over the past week he had been put to work. These silly thoughts themselves—a man in his head turning the crank of dreams?—Julian might never entertain during regular hours. But here, half-asleep in the three-a.m. darkness, his thoughts made a profound sense. He recorded the more interesting ones on a sheet of paper, which he tucked into the dog-eared copy of
Walden
on his dresser. In the morning or afternoon—whenever he’d wake up—he’d read over the jottings and frequently throw them in the garbage. If he died in his sleep and people found these mad scrawls, half-English, half-Italian, slanted down the page, would they not think he’d gone
pazzo
for real?

This was the closest he’d ever come to defending his country. He’d been too old for Korea and the World War II draft and did not have the stomach to enlist. Besides, he found war distasteful, though he’d yet to develop a moral philosophy around it more sophisticated than Jesus Christ’s, which taught him to turn the other cheek, or Thoreau’s, which might have landed him in jail. When, in 1941, there was a call to replace the deployed Guard with a state militia composed of the overage and the underage, he ignored it. All across Delaware, bright young students and half-deaf postmen and retired cooks signed up to be the last line of defense should the enemy reach our shores, but Giulio Fabbri kept to his house like an invalid, following the progress of the troops on the radio and in the newspaper. He’d ventured outside so rarely during the war years that people still thanked him for his service, thinking he’d been deployed.

It occurred to him now that, had he indeed volunteered for the state militia, he’d at least have learned what to do if he caught the vandals on his street. Maybe he’d charge after them, pointing the long gun at their behinds. Maybe he’d stick his head out from the hole in the middle of the tank and yell, “Stop or you’re dead!”
from a megaphone, his voice clear and incantatory as Mussolini’s, and they’d have no choice but to throw up their arms and surrender. Then Julian would gather them on his porch and patiently explain to them that destroying property in their shared neighborhood was like setting your own clothes on fire—not only did you end up naked afterward, but you had scars and burns that may never heal.

His thoughts jumped to Il Duce himself. Yes, the man had an extraordinary voice, one that, like Julian’s, could probably carry a tune. Maybe he gave up a career as a tenor just so he could run Italy into the ground. It would make a great poem: “Benito’s Serenade.” The idea intrigued Julian, so he wrote the title on the sheet of paper, along with the first two lines that came to him:
You could have stirred us to love, but you chose wrong; you could have saved your country with a song.
At three a.m., it sounded worthy to be read to Maddalena Grasso on her next visit. At three in the afternoon the day after, it sounded worthy only to be shredded into confetti.

For six nights, Julian kept watch. On the seventh, he was woken at dawn, pulled the curtains out of habit, and saw Waters running across his driveway. He carried a crowbar. He had the vandals in his sights. Julian quickly closed the curtains and peeked through the narrow slit in the middle. Waters made surprisingly long strides for a man of his age and size and waved the crowbar over his head as he rounded the corner onto Scott Street.

Strewn across the lawn were bags of garbage torn open and emptied: banana peels, aluminum cans, glass bottles, coffee grounds, rotting tomatoes, and heads of lettuce. One bag had been dumped on the roof of the taxi, and now a yellow liquid—soup? egg yolks?—streaked the back window and dripped onto the driveway.

Minutes later, Waters reappeared, the crowbar over his right shoulder, his other hand on his hip. He walked slowly, breathing hard. He was barefoot. He opened the passenger door of the taxi
and tossed the crowbar in the front seat. He looked up and down the street. Julian froze when his gaze lingered on his window, afraid any movement would give him away. But Waters just shook his head and went inside.

The cruelty of the vandals astonished Julian. He had never witnessed such heartlessness. As he watched his neighbor cross and recross his lawn, scooping another man’s trash into a bag, it occurred to him that the vandals might next harm Waters himself, or another one of his children. Who knew how far they would go? There was the old lady, too, who sat for hours on the porch rocker in the summer in her floppy hat, knitting. Danger hung over them all, and, if recent history were any indication, Julian would not be able to stop it.

If he could talk to Waters, he would advise him to move out of this neighborhood as soon as he could, stay in a motel if he had to. Whoever wanted to force out his family would not stop at broken pots and burnt grass. “I have nothing against you or your people,” Julian would explain, as calmly as he’d lecture the vandals themselves. As evidence, he’d tell him of the nights he’d made himself a sentinel at his bedroom window.

That morning Julian commenced on a trip across Seventh Street, ready not only to express his sympathy to Waters but to ask if there’d been any news about his son. Then, as he waited on the sidewalk for a car to pass, he lost his nerve. He turned toward Union instead, and ended up on a shivering winter promenade around the block. Any personal involvement with Waters would incur all sorts of obligations for which he wasn’t quite prepared. His neighbors would line up outside his door: Rosa Volpe, the Delluccis, even Antonio and Mario Grasso. By the time the promenade was over, Julian convinced himself that Waters did not need him to solve his problems for him. He should have known the day he moved in that Seventh Street was rocky soil, no place for a family like his to plant itself.

And so Julian wrote a letter. It was the least he could do. When evening came, he crept across the street and left it on the Waterses’ porch beside the gift of a new flowerpot, which he’d bought that morning at DiNardo’s. The letter, signed “A Concerned Neighbor,” asserted at least three times that the author was not the man destroying their house. But the author did see clearly that this was a battle the Waters family could not win. “You don’t know me,” said the Concerned Neighbor, “but you can trust me. I don’t know you, but I care about you and your family the way I care about all God’s children.”

Julian waited two hours in sentinel position before the taxi pulled up and Waters found his gifts. He paged through the letter—not long enough to read it thoughtfully—stuffed it in his back pocket, and carried the flowerpot inside.

When Julian heard a knock at his door the next night, he immediately prepared himself for Waters. Should he invite him in? Should he admit he wrote the letter? But it was only Antonio and Maddalena Grasso on his front stoop, jolly as salesmen, with their cookies and wine. He had not even realized the weekend had come.

“Surprise!” said Maddalena.

Their shoulders and the tops of their hats were dusted with snow, the first of the season though it was already February. The snow fell delicately around them on that windless evening, settling on the bare trees and telephone lines.

The Grassos’ visits with Julian followed the same schedule: they’d eat the delicious amaretti and
pizzele
prepared with love by Maddalena and her mother-in-law, make small talk about politics and weather, and avoid any mention of Mrs. Stella’s. Eventually Abraham Waters would enter the conversation, and they’d argue again over the morality of the vandals—a topic on which they disagreed more in degree than spirit. Both men thought the Waters family would be better off in their own section of the city, but
Antonio had more sympathy for the vandals. He was convinced they were a group of Italians who merely wanted to keep their neighborhood safe and had no connection to the missing boy. “I don’t approve of destruction as a means of preservation,” Julian would say. “It’s like setting your clothes on fire . . . ”

“I don’t understand what that means,” Antonio would reply. “I want you to tell me a better way to protect what we Italians have built.”

To that Julian would offer a statement such as “It’s a problem with a hundred solutions, and no solutions at all,” which irritated Antonio further. He was not a man who enjoyed the complexities of truth. As hard as Julian tried to wrestle over the Trieste question, the merits of the Korean War, or the recent arrest of Sonny Boy Thompson—sometimes taking positions that he himself did not hold, in the interest of debate—Antonio rarely played along. Most discussions ended with him shaking his head and saying, “Nobody said life was easy,” or “It’s just destiny.”

Eventually Antonio would drink too much of the strong homemade wine, wander over to the couch, and fall asleep. Julian and Maddalena would remain at the kitchen table, and he’d ask her opinion on the topics Antonio had dismissed. She did not read the newspapers—Julian assumed she did not know how—or listen to the news, but she had gleaned enough to assert that Trieste should belong to Italy and not the Slavs; that communism did not treat fairly people like her, who worked harder than others; and that the mother of Sonny Boy Thompson deserved sympathy for the actions of her son. She never took a position without immediately discrediting herself afterward, which prompted Julian to say, “You’re smarter than you think.”

Like her husband, Maddalena did not enjoy discussing current affairs. Mostly she wanted him to tell her stories from his childhood, and every once in a while she’d share a memory from her village.
At the end of the night, she’d go to the couch, stand above Antonio, shake his shoulder, and say, “Hurry up! You’re late for church!” or “Antonio Grasso! You fell asleep on the job again! This time you’re fired!” He never laughed at these same little jokes, but the ritual delighted her.

On that first snowy night in February, Maddalena did not remove her scarf, a signal to Julian that he kept his heat too low. In contrast, Antonio rolled up his sleeves and smoked one cigarette after another. “I have a message from my brother,” he began, as he uncorked the wine. “Believe me, I don’t want to get involved, but now that he knows we see you, he begged me to tell you a few things.”

“Don’t waste your breath,” said Julian.

“The main thing is that he can’t keep making the same argument to get you to come back to Mrs. Stella’s.”

“That’s the good news,” said Maddalena.

Julian could sum up this argument of Mario’s in less than ten words: “More money for us means more money for you.” On each of his visits, he’d offered a small—then incrementally larger—percentage of the profits the nights Julian performed. But 100-percent profit could not erase from Julian’s memory the pity in the eyes of the Christmas Eve guests, the sense that they had seen him not only naked, but on the toilet with his pants around his ankles.

“I appreciate your brother’s kindness,” said Julian. “But this problem is between him and me.”

“According to him, he’s seen the light,” Antonio continued. “These are his words: at first I thought Giulio was acting like a big baby, but now I see he has pride. And pride is a quality I admire very much, a quality I share.”

“Julian,”
corrected Maddalena.

“I was being Mario,” Antonio explained. “Didn’t you see the way I stuck out my chest?”

Julian laughed.

“But this pride that makes us,” said Antonio, again with the puffed chest, this time with a fist over his heart. “It also ruins us. We are blind to our own situations. You can’t see how deeply you are loved at Mrs. Stella’s, Giulio Fabbri. Missed, the way you miss your dear mother and father. My customers still ask—so often it’s starting to annoy me—when you will be coming back. We tried a new guy, younger, better-looking if I have to say, but he didn’t have the”—here Antonio searched for the word he clearly already knew—“the
passion.
He sang in a nice voice and didn’t miss too many high notes, but what we got from him we could have got much cheaper from a record player.”

“Bravo,” said Julian. “If something ever happens to Mario, you could take his place, no problem.”

“Can I try?” asked Maddalena. She put her hands flat on the table and leaned in eagerly. “I know the speech, too.”

Antonio turned to Julian. “She wanted to be an actress once,” he said.

Julian rubbed his eyes. All this talk of Mrs. Stella’s made him want a drink. If he could pry the bottle from Antonio’s hands, he’d enjoy a glass of wine instead of coffee. If not, he had a case of red in the basement left over from the funerals.

“I insulted you when I came to your house all those times, with my offers of money,” Maddalena began. She paced from one end of the kitchen to the other with her head bowed and her hands behind her back, the way Mario did when he got nervous. “I understand that now. So today I ask you not in the spirit of your wallet, but in the spirit of truth, of love, of
famiglia.
And, if I can say—” She cleared her throat. “Because I am concerned.”