The Saint of Lost Things (3 page)

She knows the route from the bus stop to the house on Eighth Street, from the house to the church, from the church to Angelo’s Market, from the market to the butcher and the produce stand, and home again. She has never set eyes on the four other blocks in this neighborhood, but she imagines they do not differ much from the six she’s familiar with: long brick buildings on both sides of the
street, each divided into tiny row homes with white wooden columns and concrete stoops. Dormers peek up from the roofs of the nicer houses. The view from Union Street to the church is one unbroken line of red brick. If she wants to see a stone house, Antonio must drive her to Rockford Park, where a wealthy American family has constructed a mansion with a terra-cotta roof. Sometimes, while they sit out front in the parked car with the engine running, admiring the stonework, the American lady comes onto the terrace for a cigarette and waves to them.

But Antonio has not taken Maddalena on a drive for many months, not since she started at the Golden Hem. Her failure to become a mother changed him. He has talked less and less—to everyone, not only to her—and worked longer hours at the plant to earn overtime. When he does talk, it is mostly to argue with his father over how little money he has managed to save. An hour after dinner, Antonio is either asleep or out for one of his long walks. Though she knows where these walks lead—to Renato’s Pizzeria, to play cards and drink whiskey—she also knows how important it is for men to have their secrets. So she plays along. She even went so far as to sew extra padding into his shoes. “So your feet don’t hurt,” she told him.

She decides to wait until they are alone to tell Antonio the news. She wants the privacy of their bedroom and the rest of the house asleep. He won’t arrive home for another hour, but still Maddalena’s heart races as she and Ida shake out their rain bonnets on the porch. She walks through the door, and already her mother-in-law is calling her to the kitchen. She has enough time to run upstairs, throw her purse on the bed, then rush back down to help prepare dinner.

The next few hours pass quickly with the night’s work. This is the beginning of happiness, Maddalena thinks, as she ladles the minestrone and slices the day-old bread and sweeps up the onion
skin that has fallen onto the floor. She says little. Her secret is like a ruby in her pocket; if she looks at her family or her husband too long, she will give it away. And so she is too distracted to notice that Antonio is not himself tonight. Before she can clear his coffee cup and ask him to come to bed early, he is gone.

2
Dirty Eyes

S
O THE GIRL
, C
ASSIE
, has returned to Fourth and Orange. She sits barefoot on the counter of the pizzeria in a pair of shorts and one of Renato’s white T-shirts. No brassiere. When she sees Antonio, she lifts her leg and wiggles her toes hello.

Just what I need, Antonio thinks. He considers turning back. But it’s too late, and he has nowhere else to go.

“Look who it is,” he says, and kisses her on both cheeks. She has not changed at all in two years: same skinny frame, lips thin and pale, stringy red hair to her shoulders, those strange V-shaped indentations—like bird tracks—on her neck. The T-shirt covers most of the tracks, but Antonio and Renato and at least two other men who work here have seen how far south the bird has hopped. More than once, Antonio has traced the pattern down to her navel with his tongue.

“I’m back for good this time,” Cassie says. “Right, Renato?” She swings around and catches him between her legs. He flicks some flour at her face, then kisses her.

“Open up,” he says, with a laugh. He still wears his apron. “I have work to do.”

Cassie releases him, but not without a playful kick to his behind. Renato walks to the front, flips the sign to
CLOSED
, and locks the
door. It is 9:30. On his way up the aisle, he shrugs and raises his eyebrows at Antonio as if to say, “I’m as surprised as you are.”

I give it a week, Antonio thinks, and flashes Cassie a friendly smile.

Antonio does not want Maddalena to know he still comes here. It means little to her that Renato Volpe has been his best friend for more than ten years, that he trusts the man more than his own brother. According to Maddalena, Antonio does not need a friend who still lives with a roommate at thirty-five, refuses to get married, and spends Saturday nights driving up and down Market Street in his big white car. “Lucky for you those days are over,” she has told him, matter-of-factly, on more occasions than he cares to remember. “You need more friends like Gianni Martino.”

But Gianni Martino is asleep by nine o’clock, about the time Antonio finishes his dinner and announces that he’s going out for some air. Gianni is in bed with his wife, snoring and getting fat, as Antonio passes his little brick duplex on the way to Fourth and Orange. Gianni will not pour Antonio a shot of whiskey and tell him stories about the three Polish sisters who share a house in Brown-town. He will not have a new girl every week to remind Antonio how it felt to be twenty-three and single, when, in charmingly broken English, he’d convinced more than a few of them to follow him up the back stairs of the pizzeria. It is not a crime, at thirty-two, after a long day at work, to talk and drink with your friends and tease the girls for a few hours. If it costs him no money and settles his nerves, if it does not diminish his love for Maddalena, he sees no harm in it.

“Cassie has a job now,” Renato says. “She’s learning the cash register.”

“The first Irish girl to work in this place, to be sure,” she says. “Downstairs, at least,” says Buzzy, under his breath. Buzzy is a German Jew brought over by the Federation after his parents were
killed in the camps. Antonio and Renato met him at Wilmington High School, where they took night classes in English. Now he works half-time at Kaminski’s Furniture on Route 13 and the other half in the pizzeria doing the books. He splits the rent on the upstairs apartment with Renato.

“She’s going straight,” Renato says, from behind a stack of trays he’s wiping down behind the grill. “As of tonight, so am I.”

“It’s a new era for us all,” Buzzy says. “Just last Saturday I was telling the three girls in my car, ‘One of you lucky ladies might be the first Mrs. Bernard Fisher,’ and for most of the night I actually believed it. We all want to be family men like you, Antonio.”

Buzzy is short, with perfect curly hair. According to Renato, he spends an hour each morning trimming his beard and fingernails. Once, Renato caught him applying some sort of cream to his knees and elbows. No one has ever called Buzzy handsome, but he has had more women than Antonio can count. One—whose name might be Marcie—stands beside him now, taller by a head, and gently rubs the back of his neck as he speaks. Somehow, Buzzy has convinced Marcie they have a future together.

Antonio has never cheated on his wife. Maddalena’s body—her skin smooth and unblemished; her shy compliance, which, with just a little encouragement, gives way to a restrained eagerness—still thrills him. Next to her, American women are cheap and loud; there is something coarse about them. They sit backward in their chairs, smoke cigarettes between their thumb and forefinger, swing their arms too wide when they walk. They are like horses, Antonio has said, while Maddalena—most women from Italy, but Maddalena in particular—is graceful as a deer.
Elegant
is the word. He has an elegant wife. She has made it easy these seven years to honor the vows he made to her in the church of Santa Cecilia. They had both been born in that village, seven years apart, and whenever he’s tempted by another woman he reminds himself that
Maddalena alone has tasted the mountain air of his boyhood. No American girl, however pretty, has eaten olives from the grove outside his bedroom window or played hide-and-seek among those silvery leaves; she has not climbed to the top of the chestnut tree to snicker at old Don Paolo sunbathing in the wheat field; she does not know anything at all about where he came from. Most of the time, these reminders are enough.

Lately, though, a restlessness has plagued him. His trips to the pizzeria three or four times a week, once a luxury, have become necessary. He does not want to admit his pang of disappointment upon seeing Cassie back with Renato. He worries about what he might have done if Cassie offered herself to him instead, what he might still do one night if he drinks too much and one of Buzzy’s girls puts her hand on his knee.

He traces the start of this restlessness—the quick temper, the sleepless nights, the lure of girls he’d once dismissed—to the day he sent Maddalena to work. It seemed wrong from the first, his wife on a bus with strangers and coloreds, in a factory taking orders from another man. None of this bothered Mario, whose wife had been finding and losing jobs for years, but it weighed on Antonio. He applied for the late shift at Bancroft Mill so Maddalena could quit, but the job was not offered to him. Mr. Hannagan, his supervisor at Ford, refused to give him additional overtime. It was then when he began to dread those useless hours between dinner and sleep, caged in the living room with his father, the only sound the kitchen chatter and the drone of the radio. When he could escape his father’s constant questions—what did he think of Eisenhower? this year’s new Chevrolet models? the price of gasoline?—he’d rest his elbow on the counter beside Maddalena as she dried dishes and tell her with his eyes to come upstairs. He’d make love to her with an aggressiveness he had not shown in the past, as if to convince her that he was doing more than his part to make a baby. Afterward,
while she resumed her work in the kitchen, he’d lie on his back with his arms behind his head, wearing only his socks and shirtsleeves, and blame himself. After all, it could be his own defect that prevented the pregnancy, since Dr. Barone had conducted a series of tests and found nothing wrong with Maddalena. Antonio would examine his body, bring the hand mirror to the curious discoloration on his inner thigh for closer inspection, and wonder fearfully why he had been put on this Earth if not to bring forth children.

He could take little more of this, so that summer he paid his first visit in three years to Renato and Buzzy. They welcomed him back with a seat at their card table and tales of the single life in Wilmington. Their greatest joy came from picking fights—over politics, family, girls, anything to get Antonio’s blood to boil. It didn’t take much, and Maddalena was their favorite target. They teased him for setting her loose in a city full of men, asked him how often she mentioned her Jewish boss, how long she took to put on her makeup before she left for work. “You think Italian men are bad with women,” Buzzy told him, “but the Jews are worse. We can’t get enough. It’s like a sickness. If I ever get married, I won’t let any Jew near my wife.”

“The kind of girl who’d marry you,” said Antonio, with a grin. “I’m sure it won’t be hard to keep them away.”

On only one occasion did Antonio bring Maddalena to Renato’s Pizzeria. It was early in their marriage, not long after she’d arrived in America. She wore a hat, one of her fancier dresses, and a long coat with fur on the collars. She clutched her purse and stood stiffly beside Antonio as he guided her around the tables packed with teenagers in jeans and leather jackets. Renato rushed out to greet them and kissed her hand. “The famous Maddalena,” he said in Italian. “What an honor! Nobody here thinks you can be real, the way Antonio describes you. But now we must apologize for calling
him a liar.” In the corner booth, a group of teenaged girls—Cassie among them—kept whispering and giggling, as Maddalena stared at the floor. Afterward, though Renato fixed them a generous plate of antipasti then insisted they return for a proper dinner in his apartment, Maddalena declared that she did not trust him.

“He has
occhi sporchi,”
she said. Dirty eyes. “Tell me you won’t go back to that place too much, not as long as we’re husband and wife.” He promised he would not and assured her that he had no need for Renato now that he was a married man. He’d taken her to visit the pizzeria only out of respect for their friendship, he explained. They walked arm in arm down Orange Street, had a good laugh at it all, and for a while Antonio believed he’d never see Renato or Buzzy again.

But now here he is, in his usual seat at the table behind the counter. He arranges his coins in neat stacks, Buzzy shuffles the cards, and Renato leans back in his chair with his hands on his stomach like he’s just eaten a juicy steak.

Cassie sets down a whiskey and water for Antonio. “I’ve been looking for you at Mrs. Stella’s,” she says. “Your brother doesn’t give you my regards?”

Mrs. Stella’s is Mario’s latest adventure, an Italian restaurant he opened that spring with two men from the neighborhood. He could not invest enough to get Grasso in the name, and that simple fact may explain its success.

“I don’t go there too often,” Antonio says.

“The food’s not so hot,” Cassie says. “No offense to your brother, but Renato here serves the best Italian food in Delaware. What Mrs. Stella’s does have, though, is a bar.”

“And a crowd,” Renato says. “Makes my heart sick.” He shakes his head and looks at Antonio. “I hate to repeat myself, my friend, but your brother has become the enemy. If he puts me out of business—”

“I hardly go there anymore, baby,” Cassie interrupts. “I’ll tell all my friends about the roaches in the kitchen.”

“There are roaches in the kitchen?” asks Antonio, his eyebrows raised.

“Don’t get too excited,” Cassie says. “I made it up.”