The Saint of Lost Things (29 page)

The slam of the front screen door. The heels of his old, dusty shoes on the porch.

12
Riverview Drive

W
HEN HE THINKS BACK
on that spring, Antonio can’t remember once worrying about Maddalena’s health. In fact, he considered pregnancy itself a symptom of durability, and pregnant women stronger—more vigorous, more resilient—than nonpregnant ones. How else to explain the village women who toiled in the fields up to the last push, then delivered their babies in the mud? Pregnant women fattened, their cheeks took on a ruddy glow, their nerves calmed, and they settled into a state of focused serenity—all signs of potency and robustness. Yes, they felt some discomfort sleeping and the occasional upset stomach, but these seemed merely reminders to take care of themselves, to nurture the life inside them.

Maddalena’s pregnancy set Antonio’s life on one definite track, at least, and for that he was grateful. The weekday routine—work by seven a.m., dinner no more than a half hour after he returned, sleep by ten—pleased them both now that a reward waited at the end of the monotonous nine months. Only when Renato needed him did Antonio sneak off to Fourth and Orange, and of those nights he and Maddalena seldom spoke. Better just to turn up the music on the radio, Antonio thought, and pretend she could not hear him creak down the stairs.

Weekends, he slept late and spent the first hours of the afternoon
in the bathroom. He grew accustomed to waking at eleven to find the newspaper neatly folded on a tray beside two empty coffee cups. The moment Maddalena heard his footsteps on their bedroom floor, she’d climb the stairs to fill one cup with a shot of espresso, the other with brewed Maxwell House the way he liked it: no sugar, lots of cream. Antonio didn’t want to speak to anyone—including Maddalena—until he’d taken care of his business in the bathroom and caught up on the state of the world. He lied to his family about having digestive problems, and while they whispered about his eating habits, he enjoyed the safety of the close quarters behind the locked door, the comfort of his naked thighs against the porcelain, the sterilized quiet. He read slowly and always regretted reaching the final section, for he’d soon be forced to rejoin the chaos of the house. This was relaxation, he thought; the rest of you can waste your money on resorts and trips to Wildwood, but two hours alone up here is enough vacation for me.

Late March surprised everyone with a stretch of warm sunny days, and Antonio saved the final section of the weekend edition—classifieds, radio and television listings—for the less-reliable solitude of the back porch. By that time of year he was starved for light, catching only a glimpse of it on the early-morning ride to the plant, missing it by an hour on winter evenings. The weekend was his only chance to feel the sun on his face. So he sat in his shirtsleeves just outside the shade of the grape arbor.

The arbor ran the length of the back porch and half its width. Under it sat two wooden picnic tables painted red, at which the Grassos ate most of their meals in the summertime. At the end of the season, the tables will be blotched with squished purple grapes, staining many a pair of trousers. The fruit will fall on their heads or into the bowls of pasta they are eating; more than once, Mario will shake one of the vines and send a shower onto the heads of his wife and children.

The other half of the porch was part concrete slab and part vegetable garden, where the women grew lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, green beans, and a few carrots. Behind the garden, a wire cage held live chickens. The chickens would live a while as Grasso pets, delighting Nunzia and Nina with their frantic clucks and old-ladylike waddling; and then, one at a time, Mamma would stretch them across a board and take a cleaver to their necks. The girls never witnessed this, never noticed there were different chickens each week; they were too busy playing in the pile of feathers Mamma left for them by the back door.

It was onto the concrete slab that Antonio dragged a chair and sat in the unexpected late March sun. Bunches of hard, green pearls were just beginning to appear on the vines. The fruit would ripen in just a few months, when Antonio and his father would again argue over whether or not to crush them for wine this year. Didn’t it always turn out either thickly sweet or bitter as vinegar, good only to bring to someone like Giulio Fabbri and drink with a plate of cookies? Why bother trying, when they could get a case of Chianti wholesale from Ida’s brother’s store? Besides, there were worms. Antonio had seen a few already, squeezing in and out of the tight clusters. Ida let the girls eat the grapes once they were ready, even though they always complained of stomachaches afterward.

Kids chased one another across the lawn of the Presbyterian church next door, enjoying the break from six harsh months of cold. The air smelled damp and loamy, like freshly turned earth. The budding trees rushed to clothe themselves now that spring had come early, and people like Antonio had taken notice.

He narrowed his eyes at his paper. “
KITCHEN EMPLOYEES
for Concord Country Club,” he read. “Experienced, sober men only.” He was not looking for a new job but liked to know what was available just in case. He even read the “For Coloreds Only” ads, if just to make sure they didn’t offer a better salary. He wondered why this
particular ad called specifically for “sober men.” He had never been to the Concord Country Club and imagined it must be grand—white pillars, rolling hills, valet parking—but was it so hard to find good help that they had to warn applicants not to show up drunk?

He looked up at the second-floor windows of the house and caught Maddalena watching him.

The kids on the lawn, a trio of out-of-breath boys in shorts and bare feet, staggered closer toward the chain-link fence that marked the border between the church and Grasso property. Antonio could distinguish their movements through the dead vines that webbed the fence. The boys tackled each other, rolled around for a while, then sat panting with their legs outstretched, hands on the ground behind them.

“Two-Ton Tessie, that’s your type,” one of the boys said. Antonio leaned forward to hear them better. When he looked up at the window again, the drapes were drawn.

“So she’s got a little extra,” said another boy. “So what? Least I—”

“More cushion for the pushin’,” interrupted the third boy, and they erupted in laughter.

Antonio covered his smile with the newspaper, remembering how he used to gather like this with his own friends back in the village. Their favorite spot was the hill in the woods behind the spring, a steep, muddy incline that became a safe hideout from their parents and anyone else looking to busy them with chores. One summer, his last in Santa Cecilia, a group of older boys cleared a line of sight from a certain rock up high, so that when they sat on the rock they had an unbroken view of the women bending down to fetch water. Oh, the thrill of that flash of skin! The breasts falling against the sheer fabric, the delicious possibility they might escape the cruel confines of the blouse! How rare and wonderful to witness this unguarded moment, the one time of day this girl thought no one was watching. And if she threw her hair over her
shoulder and bent lower to sip directly from the source—eyes closed, lips parted—a hush would sweep across the village; the sparrows would stop midflight, the leaves would cease to flutter; and the boys would harden into statues with their mouths dropped open, certain that life offered nothing more magnificent than this.

As that final summer wore on, the woods grew thicker and the boys took turns climbing the trees to reclip the leaves, pull the branches off, and maintain the line of sight. In September, on the boat to the United States, Antonio thought less of the country he might never see again than of the rush of beating his friends to the rock each morning, of not knowing which girl would bow before him.

Since then, when has he felt such a rush? Upon his return to Santa Cecilia thirteen years later, as an old man of twenty-six, when he saw Maddalena standing on the steps of the church. He’d felt rich then, his pockets full with profits from the early success of the Pasticceria Grasso. Maddalena had been a child when he and his family left Italy, and now there she was: one of the young women he’d have longed to catch at the spring. And he was not a boy anymore, but a worthy suitor with an entire country to offer, and blind faith that the
pasticceria
would bring his family great wealth. He invited himself to her house for dinner, purchased chocolate and wine in her family’s store, and soon found himself on the terrace with her father discussing the business of marriage. Two decades before, Antonio’s family could not afford to shop in that grocery; now Aristide Piccinelli was promising Antonio the hand of his youngest daughter. According to Aristide, Maddalena was involved in an unfortunate romance—less an engagement than a teenage infatuation; puppy love, they’d call it here—and in need of quick rescue. “You came at the perfect time,” Aristide had said to him, and they drank a toast to the future. Less than a month later, Antonio was a married man.

He rarely thought of Maddalena’s first love, and of course never
spoke of him to anyone. Though they’d grown up together in the village and Antonio once lost to him in a footrace, he attempted to scrub his name and face from his memory. He was not Vito Leone with the oval head, hairless chin, and surprisingly quick legs; he was merely the Infatuation. At first Antonio counted him among the many village soldiers who’d died in the war, though he’d somehow managed to avoid the draft. An ocean separated Maddalena from this man, but he did have family in Philadelphia—a father and two sisters—and no good reason, as far as Antonio knew at the time, to stay in Santa Cecilia. Who could say when he might show up on their doorstep?

In his darker moments, Antonio used to imagine the Infatuation crossing the water to work in his father’s tailor shop and live close to the woman he’d lost. Once a year for the first three of his marriage, Antonio drove to the shop—a dingy little place on Market Street—and peered into the front window. No one resembling Vito worked behind the counter, only his elderly father and one of his sisters. Was he off on a delivery? Putting out the garbage? Just in case, Antonio walked around and around the block for the better part of the afternoon, casually strolling past the store, convinced he’d catch Vito walking hand in hand with Maddalena, back from the sort of midday rendezvous he himself had once enjoyed with lonely American housewives. Sometimes he blamed the Infatuation—the memory of him, mostly—for Maddalena’s inability to conceive and wondered how long it would take for the curse of him to lift.

Then came the letter from Zio Domenico, the Grassos’ last living relative in Santa Cecilia. Buried in the pages of sentences praising the virtues of Communism was the news that the Infatuation had married Maddalena’s older sister. After a brief apprenticeship in Naples, he’d returned to Santa Cecilia and remained there. If he’d had any desire to follow Maddalena to America, he had not indulged it.

Antonio did not know what to do with this information. He had to communicate it to Maddalena, but he did not want to say the words himself. Surely she still felt something for the man. Separation, he knew, only fueled puppy love; it certainly did not kill it. Possibly Maddalena even entertained a secret wish for him to appear at her window and coax her down. It was the stuff of her novels—young girls shimmying down trellises, undernourished paupers who reveal themselves as princes—and Antonio had no illusions about a woman’s enduring need for romance, or the revenge she might want to take on a poaching sister. The American wives had taught him some of that. But now that the book was closed on the Infatuation, her fantasies should come to an end. It was time for Maddalena to let go of the past and devote her full heart to her husband.

Just reading the name
Vito Leone
in Zio Domenico’s elderly script and being reminded of the flesh-and-blood existence of a man who once had been his wife’s
fidanzato
made Antonio want to smash his fist against the wall. Instead, he stuffed the letter in Ida’s pocket and asked her to read it to Maddalena. “Take an afternoon,” he’d said, handing her fifteen dollars, nearly half of his weekly salary. “Bring her to Merchandise Mart. Make her buy something nice for herself.” Ida had given him a stunned look. But Antonio knew no other way to tell Maddalena that not only had Vito Leone married, but that, after a brief courtship, he had chosen Carolina.

According to Ida, Maddalena had little reaction to the news. They’d sat across from each other in the restaurant inside the Five and Ten, two young wives out Christmas shopping. As Ida read Zio Domenico’s letter aloud, Maddalena had nodded and closed her eyes. Her hands shook a bit, nearly spilling her soda, but nothing more. She read the letter to herself, folded it, and handed it back to Ida without a word. Maybe she had prepared herself for this long in advance or knew already from one of her mother’s letters, and the ink on the page merely confirmed a loss she’d already
grieved. That night, and throughout the weeks leading up to the holiday, she showed no sign that anything had changed.

But, in Antonio’s mind at least, something had changed. For the first time in his marriage, he needed Maddalena to declare her devotion to him, to say she no longer felt the infatuation for Vito Leone. Hadn’t enough time gone by for her not only to forgive Antonio for taking her from her village, but to fall in love with him the way he had done with her? He was no longer the stranger watching her on the steps of the church, threatening to steal her from her family. He was the patient husband who’d indulged her the nights she turned away from him in sadness and rage, who’d comforted her through the locked bedroom door when he heard her sobbing. He’d proven himself again and again: by arranging expensive telephone calls to Italy, by trying to earn enough money to one day return for a visit, by taking her to costly doctors and specialists. He’d hidden his disappointment when, month after month, she held her hands over her stomach and shook her head. What more could be asked of a husband he did not know.