The Saint of Lost Things (6 page)

“But do I know how to have a baby?” Maddalena says. “Do I know why God waited this long? I think, ‘It’s because you don’t like it enough when you’re in bed together,’ so I try to like it more, but I’m not—” She stops, sure she’s said too much, not sure she means it. On Ida’s face is the look of someone not used to hearing ugly things. In English, Maddalena says: “I love my husband, Ida. I can’t love him more than I already do.”

“Of course.”

Maddalena learned early on that, though Ida is her one sister-in-law and closest friend in this new country, she cannot rely on her for comfort. She can tell Ida half, at most, of what she feels, and hope her dim mind prevents her from guessing the rest. In the House of Ida, Antonio has said, there is no furniture or lights or decoration. Only double-thick walls and a front door that sticks. La Genia, Antonio calls her. The genius. Sometimes Maddalena envies her—this woman who never swims below the surface of life, who believes whatever she is told.

“So I work,” Maddalena continues, “and I calm down a little because it feels good to make some money, and it’s nice to see the city every day and to sit with you on the bus and watch the people go by, and now, all of a sudden, that’s too much for him. When do I have time for another man, Ida? When? It doesn’t make sense!”

“Please keep your voice down.” She looks around the bus. Gloria raises her eyebrows, makes an exaggerated frown. “I believe you, but, as you know, I don’t count.”

“It’s strange,” Maddalena says, her face turned toward the window. “I don’t want to quit my job. I’m used to it. Did you ever think I’d say that?”

At the Golden Hem, Maddalena works as quickly as her hands allow. It is the only way to occupy her mind. The week of competition passes slowly. Mr. Gold walks up and down the aisles, quiet and serious as a judge now that he’s made rivals of his little ladies. He looks twice at the pile on Ida’s table but won’t admit his pleasant surprise. Or maybe it is obvious what they are up to, and he is giving her false hope. Whatever the case, Maddalena does not care. She will play along until he tells her otherwise.

The race ends on Friday, two weeks before Thanksgiving, when word ripples across the rows of tables that Mr. Gold has fired two Polish women, two new Americans on the other side of the room, and Gloria.

He stands at Gloria’s table with his head down, shifting his weight from side to side.

Before she starts to cry, he hands her a tissue from his shirt pocket. “Now I have nothing,” she says. “Now I jump off the Memorial Bridge.”

“My situation could change after Christmas,” Mr. Gold tells her, with a softness he’s not shown in the months Maddalena has known him. His hand rests on her shoulder. “If you’re still looking for work in January, don’t forget me.”

Before she leaves, Gloria writes her phone number and address on a slip of paper, hands it to Maddalena, and wishes her and the baby good health. She makes Maddalena promise to visit her. “Come cheer me up,” she says, “before the little one comes. And after, too. You’ll be fat and I’ll be skinny from starving.” To Ida she says nothing.

“You’ll find a job before December,” Maddalena assures her.

Each morning now, when the bus reaches Gloria’s stop, Maddalena crosses herself and says a prayer. She still expects Gloria to walk down the aisle balancing one of those giant packages on her hip. People disappear so quickly, she thinks, as the strangers take
their seats, the doors snap closed, and the bus charges ahead in a cloud of smoke. She is never prepared for it, though it has happened to her again and again, in two countries, with and without warning. And she never remembers, from one person to the next, how much easier life would be if she didn’t care.

4
Giulio Called Julian

“
G
IULIO!
”
 CALLS
S
IGNORA
S
TELLA
, from his front porch. She carries a pan of lasagna, enough to last him a week. It is just past ten in the morning, and she has woken him from a particularly mysterious dream.

“Giulio Fabbri!” she calls again. She bangs her fist on the door, tries the broken bell, then shakes her head and leaves the pan on the top step. He watches her shuffle down Seventh Street in her winter coat and slippers. Not until she crosses Lincoln will he dare retrieve her gift.

For nine full months he has been an orphan, and still the old ladies bring him food. Now he will have to pay Signora Stella a long, somber visit to return her pan. She will sit him at her kitchen table and brag about her daughter’s house in New Castle and the successful restaurant her son Gino has opened in her honor. “Forty is still young,” she’ll tell him, and point her finger at his face. “Don’t let anybody tell you your life is over.”

To avoid all this, a few days later he writes
Mille Grazie
on a slip of paper, signs it, and tapes it to the empty pan. When the neighborhood goes dark, he sets out for the Stella house, leaves the pan at the front door, and sneaks back home. He wonders if Signora Stella will even notice the new name, Julian, that he has used on
the note. All year he has practiced the bow-tie loops of the American
J,
first on thank-you cards for the guests who’d attended his father’s funeral, then on the checks he mailed to the power company and the government. He wants everyone to see hope—rebirth is the word—in the flourish of the American letter, in the embrace of the new country. Not betrayal. Not a rejection of his parents or the good Fabbri line. He has been a good son. He cannot be accused of disrespect.

No, Julian did not bang his fists on his father’s casket, after the lid was closed and he’d seen his face for the last time. He believes that grief, like love, should be a private thing. Calmly he shook the hands of his family friends, endured the women’s cold, wet cheeks pressed to his face, and invited them all back to the house for lunch, the whole time keeping in mind the words of his favorite American thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.” Impassively Julian listened to Gino Stella’s long, jumbled, half-remembered story of his father’s winning fifty dollars on a horse called Fly Me Home. “Any name that reminded him of an airplane, your father would bet on it,” said Gino, to a chorus of agreement among the other men in the room. “Don’t ask me how much he lost on that stinker Sky’s the Limit. I tell you, the only tragedy in the life of Ernesto Fabbri was that he never saw an airplane from the inside. He had a good wife, a son with intelligence, a decent job, plenty of money—but he’d have given them all up to fly cross-country in a Connie.” Julian nodded and scratched his beard. He put his arms around Gino and thanked him for his words. Not until the last guest departed did he stand at the open refrigerator, rest his head on the cool vinyl door, and weep.

His parents lived long and died painless deaths in their sleep within a year of each other. Julian took some comfort in that. But he vowed not to wear black—inside or out—for the rest of his life, like the widows in his neighborhood. He was grateful for the end
of summer, when they stopped bringing so much food, and he believed he’d finally exhausted their pity. But apparently he still deserved it.

The first months of solitude in his house on Seventh Street, Julian donated his grandparents’ little porcelain sculptures to the church and stocked the bookshelves with history texts and albums and collections of American literature. He moved his accordion and guitar and boxes of sheet music from the basement to what had been his father’s bedroom. He took down the ghostly photos of his mother from the living room wall and hung in their place a poster of the Manhattan skyline. In a gold frame on the end table he displayed a single family photograph: father, mother, and son at Re-hoboth Beach, the man’s arm around the waist of his pretty young wife, the baby named Giulio behind them digging in the sand. All of them were gone now.

“I won’t rest until you’re settled,” his father had once warned him. They’d been sitting at the kitchen table, just a few weeks before his mother’s stroke. “Not for one minute. Not on this earth and not after I’m dead. And your mother won’t, either. If you remember us, think of that.”

“Think of you very tired, you mean?” Giulio replied. “Walking around heaven with bags under your eyes?” He knuckled his father’s bald head.

“You’re like a big kid,” said his father. He slapped his hand away. “No job, no wife, nothing to do all day. What’ll happen to you when I’m gone?”

Every Sunday, Julian visits their graves, side by side in Cathedral Cemetery. He fills the vases with fresh flowers from DiNardo’s on West Eighth Street, the one Italian-owned florist in Wilmington. Afterward, he walks the ten blocks to Renato’s for an espresso, a slice of pizza, and the newspaper, which he reads in the corner booth. Then he sits on his porch. Neighbors walk by and stop to
talk. Sometimes he plays his accordion and sings a little, under his breath, unsure of his voice but overcome with the beauty of “Vivere” or “O Sole Mio.” For dinner he chooses from one of the pans he keeps in the icebox. On the days between deliveries, he cooks pasta and a half-price cut of meat from Angelo’s Market. He can live this way for twenty more years on the money his parents saved for him, longer if he switches to silk flowers, even longer if he sells the house and moves to an apartment. But this is how Giulio would have lived. Julian has promised himself to take a different path. Each night, standing at his bedroom window in his underwear unable to sleep, watching the men walk home from shift work in the city and the lights go out in the streetlamps on Union, he promises to start making good on his new name.

But then he sleeps until eleven, his mind heavy with dreams. He wakes exhausted, and by the time he’s out of bed, shaved, dressed, and has finished his lunch, it’s midafternoon—too late in the day to make even the smallest decision. There is the newspaper to read, the library books to return, the porch to sweep, dinner to worry over. No plan begun at three o’clock can ever succeed; it must be set in motion before noon to have a chance. The months have gone swiftly by, and now it is not only late in the day, but late in the year—November—and Julian feels 1953 slipping away. Better to put off the next stage of rebirth until January, he thinks. A new year for the new man called Julian Fabbri. Better to fill his lungs with the fresh air of 1954 than to contaminate them with the staleness and grief of ‘53.

So he walks up and down the neighborhood, wanders the aisles of the library, or brings his folding chair to sit with the men at the corner of Seventh and Union. With them he argues over the so-called end of the Korean War, which Julian worries is not an end at all. He has read too much history not to see the decades of unrest to follow. The old men, in their camel coats and striped ties,
smelling of cigars and woodsy cologne, disagree. Julian can barely stomach their dangerous optimism, their belief that, slowly but surely, the world is losing its taste for war. Now that their own government has electrocuted the little Jewish couple on no evidence at all, and Russia has exploded the H-bomb, and even Marilyn Monroe has disgraced herself, how can these old men think the world is headed anywhere but disaster? He counts off these examples and more for them, one for each finger on both hands, but they stare back at him blankly. One of them always changes the subject. Leaves blow around in little tornadoes at their feet, and the debate becomes whether or not this November feels warmer than last year’s, whether or not the winter will be snowy. Julian gives up on them.

Instead he watches the people getting off the bus and imagines what compels them to walk so briskly. Who waits at home for the woman in the purple hat? Does the teenaged boy, carrying a bucket and a washcloth, need to earn money after school now that his aging father—in bed with a broken back—can no longer support his family? And what of the man Julian has named Dr. Z, who waits for an hour every day on the opposite corner, checking his pocket watch and digging into his black bag? What does he keep in there? What is he plotting? Julian can entertain himself for hours with these inventions.

On a Sunday morning in mid-November, he wakes earlier than usual and walks to the park to feed the pigeons. It is a chilly, gray day after a week of sun, and Julian fears this may be the last of his walks until spring. His body has always rebelled against cold weather. Itchy red spots form at his fingertips, toes, and neck, no matter how well he covers himself. For the first time this season, he wears the blue scarf his mother knitted for him. It smells like her—her hairspray, at least—and he stops for a moment on the sidewalk to breathe her in. In the last years of her life, her hair had begun to
thin. She used to sculpt the remaining wisps into a hollow bun, then coat the bun with the spray until it hardened. She’d emerge from the bathroom in a mist, and soon she herself took on that chemical smell of wood smoke and wildflowers.

The park is small, less than half the size of a city block. It is all grass and trees except for the wide circle of cobblestones in the center, which will be a fountain if the church raises enough money. Presumably St. Anthony’s spent the bulk of its donated funds—a percentage of which had come grudgingly from Julian’s parents—on the elaborate wrought-iron fence that encloses the park. Atop each slat of the fence sits a sharp spike to keep out visitors after dark. What damage they could do to a bunch of trees, Julian can only wonder—carve their initials into the bark? Make love on the already dying grass? If anything, the church should encourage parishioners to spend time here. Most days Julian sits alone on one of the six wooden benches bolted along the walking path.