The Saint of Lost Things (28 page)

“Next place you work, you’re joining the union,” said Antonio.

Business was booming at the Golden Hem. In March, Mr. Gold hired ten new girls and still needed more. He’d tried to reach
Gloria, but her phone had been disconnected. When the letter Maddalena sent her (translated into English by Ida) was sent back marked
NO SUCH ADDRESSEE
, she hoped for Gloria’s sake that she’d gone home to Cuba. Her people lived in shacks, but at least the shacks had belonged to them for generations. Gloria could walk to the town center after all these years away, and the grocer would recognize her.

She was telling all this to Julian one night. They were sitting on the porch at Eighth Street, an early Friday evening a few weeks from Easter. The men wore light jackets and smoked cigars; Maddalena had arranged a white cable sweater over her belly to protect the baby from the lingering chill.

“Cuba is no place for honest people,” Julian responded. “The government is a bunch of gangsters.”

“Are they like us? The Cuban people?” Ida asked.

“They’re Catholics,” said Julian. “So yes, in a way they are.”

“The Irish call themselves Catholics, too,” Papà Franco said. “I wouldn’t say they’re too much like us.” Like Antonio, he enjoyed disagreeing with Julian.

“What are we like, then?” asked Maddalena.

“We’re workers,” Antonio said.

“The Irish don’t work?”

“Not like us,” said Papà Franco. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. The porch furniture was new: wide, gray, wrought-iron chairs with high backs and little diamond shapes cut out around the seats. “My first day in this country, I found a job. The next week, I had two jobs: one for the day, one for the night. If I didn’t have to sleep, I’d find one more. ‘What Depression?’ I used to say to people. They never saw me waiting in line for food. Never will. In this country, if you want work badly enough, you’ll find it.”

“Altro che!
” agreed Antonio.

“Hard work and family,” Papà Franco continued. “The Italians were the first to put those two together; we’re the best at it. Look at me: I’m almost seventy years old. I should sit on the sidewalk all day with the other old men. Play cards, watch the skirts. But I could never turn down a paycheck if I could still work, not with my wife still living, two grandchildren, one more on the way. I tell you: I’ll be working at Bancroft Mill the day I die. I’ll close my eyes and fall into the machines. Good-bye to Franco Grasso; good riddance!”

Mamma Nunzia crossed her arms. “I just love when he talks like this,” she said. She sat on the ledge and turned her head toward the street. With her long, white hair unloosened, white nightgown, and white satin slippers, she looked like a weary angel. Papà Franco was not an easy husband, she’d told Maddalena more than once; he had a temper, like both his sons, and blamed her cautiousness for all the failed Grasso businesses. She’d warned him every time he’d sunk more of their savings into a new bakery or café, and each time he lost the money he accused her of putting a curse on him just so she could be right.

“Maybe I’m not really Italian,” Julian said. “Never had a real job, never wanted one, not for long at least. No family either. Not anymore.”

It was an attempt at a joke, but nobody laughed. Maddalena pulled her sweater to her neck. “We’re your family now,” she said.

“You only get one family, though,” Julian said, this time without humor. “Only one that’s flesh and blood.”

“If Italians could stick together,” said Papà Franco, “we’d rule the world. We came close! But you know what? We’re a lazy people too, in one way. We don’t want to fight; we just want to work—for somebody else, usually; that’s why I want my own business—and then we want to come home to our wives and children. Government, military, who cares—let them decide and we follow along.”

Later, as she walked Julian down the steps to the sidewalk, Maddalena admitted she did not know what a union was, or where to find Cuba on a map. She’d wanted to imagine Gloria there, but she had no images to call up. It was an island, Gloria once said, but was it warm there? Green? Was it further away than Italy?

“I should teach you geography,” Julian said. “Remind me. Next Friday we’ll look at the atlas. These days, it’s important to know where people come from.”

“Yes,” Maddalena said. She wanted to learn as much as she could, starting with the meaning of the word
atlas.

O
NCE, JUST BEFORE
M
ADDALENA
left Santa Cecilia, her brother had sung to her from the doorway of her bedroom. She was eighteen years old, standing at her window, memorizing the view of her backyard—the steep, rocky face of the mountain, the scatter of chestnut trees, the chickens circling one another behind the wire of their tiny coop. Claudio had taken her by surprise.
“Terra straniera,”
he sang,
“quanta malinconia, quando ci salutammo e non so perchè”
She kept her back to him, unsure if he sang in sympathy or resentment. Their two older brothers had gone missing in the war, and now Maddalena herself was about to abandon them. Their father’s heavy footsteps ceased midway up the stairs. In the kitchen, their sisters stopped chattering. The house suspended its creaking, the better to hear Claudio’s voice. After he finished the song, he slipped into the hall and slammed his bedroom door. Their father continued up the stairs, and the kitchen chattering recommenced. No one spoke of the serenade. Three days later, as Maddalena stepped into Antonio’s car, her mother begged her to forget she’d ever lived in this village.

“Your new birthday is coming,” she’d said. “You’ll be born in Philadelphia, in the United States of America.” She held Maddalena’s
hand through the window. Then, as the car pulled away, she fell to her knees on the dirt road and covered her face.

Maddalena thought of that song—which she had not heard since, not even on the Sunday Italian radio program—as she brushed Mamma Nunzia’s hair. It was one of the few chores she enjoyed: one hundred strokes on each side to straighten the curls and give the hair its silky shine. The silent, repetitive motion lulled her, different as it was from the roar of a similar motion at the sewing machine.

She sat behind Mamma Nunzia on the sofa in front of the mirrored living room wall so they could look at each other as she brushed. They had just eaten a rare midweek dinner at Mrs. Stella’s to celebrate Ida and Mario’s tenth anniversary—March 17—and afterward Antonio and Papà Franco had gone straight to bed.

“What a beautiful meal,” Mamma Nunzia said, with a long deep breath, as if just having stepped into the fresh air. The faint wheeze in her chest, which often faded by the time Maddalena finished brushing, was not audible tonight. “I have to tell you,” she whispered. “We never thought we’d see Mario so successful. I’m very proud. I can finally say my sons are settled.” She folded her hands on her lap and stared at her reflection. She wore the white nightgown again, buttoned as always to her neck, embarrassed by her wrinkles and sagging skin. In the warmer months she never left the house without a sheer silk scarf tied in a knot under her chin. “Soon Mario will buy a place of his own, Papà and me will be gone, and this house will belong to you and Antonio and your baby.”

“That will be many years from now,” Maddalena said, and smiled. “It won’t be a baby then.” She straightened her head and pointed it forward. “How’s this over the ears?”

“You were sad tonight,” she said.

“Tonight?” Maddalena said, her hands still on her face. I’m
always sad, she could have said, but she didn’t want her to take offense. “A little nervous, maybe. About the baby.”

“That’s natural,” she said. “Antonio didn’t pick another fight with you?”

Maddalena shook her head.

“He talks to you now, at least. Here and there. I’ve noticed. He’s not as stubborn as he wants to be.”

“He has his nights,” Maddalena said. “I’m not an easy wife, either. Always crying, always looking backward.”

“You’ve done better than I would have,” she said. “When Franco and I moved here, our parents had both been dead a long time. We had nothing left in Santa Cecilia, only debts—to your father, mostly, for all the food we couldn’t pay for. If it weren’t for Zio Domenico loaning us money, we’d never have been able to make the trip. It didn’t matter that we knew nobody in Wilmington. But for you—to leave everyone behind, to start a life with a new family—not your flesh-and-blood family, like Giulio said—it’s a miracle you didn’t throw yourself off the roof.” She tilted her head to the side. The wheezing in her chest started, and she undid the top button of her nightgown. “No matter what happens, you’re still young. I’d take your trouble anytime to be twenty-seven again.”

Maddalena smiled. “And I think how nice your age must be. To have that settled feeling—”

“Please, no,” she said. “My sons are settled. Not me. I won’t feel settled until they put me in the grave. And neither will you, I think, not with a Grasso for a husband. My only wish is to live to see what happens to all of you. Twenty years—that’s all I need. Twenty years more than what God has planned for me.”

After the brushing, they cut that day’s loaves of Lamberti’s bread into slices and spread them across the dining-room table. Usually Ida would help, but they gave her the day off in honor of her ten years as Mario’s wife. They topped each slice with cold cuts, lettuce,
and onions, drizzled oil and vinegar on top, then wrapped the sandwiches in foil. They put each sandwich in a brown bag with a paper towel and a different selection of fruit. Everyone at Eighth Street was picky: Papà Franco ate only bananas; Mrs. Stella’s stocked crates of grapes for garnish, so Mario never wanted grapes; Ida must have citrus, especially oranges; Antonio preferred raw tomatoes, sliced in half, with a thick crust of salt. These preferences changed weekly. Just last Thursday, Papà Franco had come home, set his half-f lunch bag on the kitchen counter, and declared he’d never again touch a green apple.

“Remember,” Mamma said, when their work was done and Maddalena walked up the stairs. “A sad face makes a woman look older. Right now I’d put you at sixty-five.”

Maddalena flashed a halfhearted smile and grabbed the banister for support. After every few steps, she stopped to rest. She could not remember a day in the last seven months when she did not feel dizzy—first with fear, then with discomfort. Strange thoughts overtook her and made her nauseous: that the baby had fingernails scraping against her belly, that the baby had hair, that the baby was burping and urinating inside her. Whenever the baby moved, and she felt an elbow or a knee pushing through the skin of her belly, she feared it would poke through and rupture her fragile body.

When she got to the bedroom, she found Antonio on his knees, in his socks, in front of their closet.

“Do you need something?” she asked, startling him. “I thought you were tired.”

“My old pair of shoes,” he said. “The brown ones.”

“They’re in the basement,” she said, and held onto the edge of the dresser. “What do you want those for? They have holes. And they’re out of style.”

“They’re comfortable,” said Antonio. “I don’t like to wear my
good shoes all the time. They get ruined too fast, and then we have to spend money.”

“What size does Mario wear? It might make sense for the two of you to share—”

But he was already halfway down the stairs. Quickly, Maddalena unbuttoned her dress and pulled her maternity nightgown—on loan from Ida—off the hanger. She didn’t like for Antonio to see her in her underwear, not with her body misshapen like this. Other nights, either she waited for him to fall asleep, or she changed clothes in the bathroom.

He came back in the dusty brown shoes.

“You’re going out?” she asked.

“My head feels like it’s full of cobwebs,” he said. “I need the fresh air.”

“But it’s so late—”

He got on his knees again and rearranged the boxes on the floor of the closet. The piles kept falling over because he’d mismatched the tops with the bottoms. In frustration, he smashed one of the boxes against the wall, collapsing it into a useless flat of cardboard.

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” she asked.

“Trouble?” He froze. “No, of course not. What kind of trouble could I be in?” He stood, put his hands on his hips.

“I’m your wife,” she said. “You can tell me.”

He seemed to relax a moment. “Renato Volpe,” he said. His tone was tender, apologetic. “You remember him, from the pizzeria. You don’t like him. But he’s opening a new restaurant, and he needs my help. That’s all.”

“So you
do
still see him,” she said. “That’s beautiful news.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Why do you have to wear old shoes for his new restaurant?”

“I’ve already told you too much,” he said.

“You told me almost nothing!”

He stood and faced her. “I’m not in trouble,” he said, and stepped away, all the tenderness gone. “I’m the one who stops the trouble. That’s all you need to know. When you need to know something else, I’ll tell you.”

“Please don’t walk out,” Maddalena said.