The Saint of Lost Things

by Christopher Castellani

  “And afterward, you make soup from the lentils,” says Mr. Gold.

  “On New Year’s Eve,” Ida confirms. “You have a good memory. The lentils are supposed to bring money.”

  “We rinse them first,” Maddalena says. She rubs her arms and glances around the room.

  “I’m watching our cards, Zia!” declares Nunzia, but Antonio has stopped calling the numbers. He rises slowly and walks toward the front, still holding the bag of wooden chips, shaking it like an instrument.

  “Is that who I think it is?” Maddalena hears him ask.

  A hum of anticipation fills the room, as more than a few players realize how close they are to victory. “Call the next number, Antonio!” Signora Fiuma yells. “I feel lucky tonight!”

  “You’ve won enough,” says Ida’s brother. “Give us poor men a chance.”

  There is nowhere to move without stepping on the children lying on their stomachs in front of their cards. Maddalena takes one of the poinsettias from Ida, thanks Mr. Gold again, and kicks one of Nina’s cards by mistake. Then she hears her name.

  “Maddalena,” Antonio says, for what seems like the first time in years. There is no anger or pleasure in his voice. He could be reading from the front of an envelope.

  “Mr. Gold, this is my husband,” says Maddalena. “Antonio Grasso.”

  “Pya-chaireh,” Mr. Gold says, a word Maddalena taught him last week, and which he wrote phonetically in his notebook. He sticks his hand through the narrow space between the two women.

  Antonio fixes his eyes on Mr. Gold’s face. He does not shake his hand. He sways for a moment, drunkenly. Then he drops the bag of numbers onto Nina’s head. The wooden chips spill down her back and roll in all directions on the floor.

  “Ow!” says Nina. “Zio Antonio!”

  “Did I use the wrong word?” Mr. Gold says to Ida. He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out the little notebook. The kids scramble around him on all fours to retrieve the numbers.

  Signora Fiuma leaps to her feet. “Make sure thirty-three’s in there,” she says. “That’s my number! Gli anni di Cristo.”

  “No, no,” Ida says to Mr. Gold. “You said it perfect.”

  Perry Como sings through the radio, as he has been doing since nine o’clock, but the rest of the room has gone quiet. Mr. Gold shifts his weight from one leg to the other, then ticks his head toward the console. “WAMS,” he says. “I had this on in the car.”

  “Perry Como is Italian,” says Ida.

  Antonio leans in closer to Mr. Gold. “So, you’re the man my wife works for.”

  “Well, it’s my name on the paychecks,” he says, with a laugh. “It’s very good to meet you, by the way. That’s what I was trying to say in Italian. Mrs. Grasso is one of my best seamstresses.”

  “That’s good news,” Antonio says, nodding. He pauses a moment. His neck is flushed red. “Let me ask you. Are you a married man?”

  “I am.”

  “So, where’s your wife now?”

  “She’s at home.” Mr. Gold narrows his eyes, gives Antonio a bemused look. “Maybe you don’t realize, but tonight is not our holiday. Otherwise I would not be here. Tonight is like any other Thursday to us.”

  “And your wife,” Antonio says, a big grin on his face. “She knows you bring flowers to other women?” He nudges him gently in the ribs.

  Gianni walks over and stands behind him. “The game is waiting, uaglio,” he says.

  “The plants are for all your family,” says Mr. Gold, evenly. “Not just the women.” He turns to Ida. “Maybe I’m not welcome here?”

  Everyone at the table stands simultaneously, as if in church. The men start to walk toward Antonio and Mr. Gold. The kids scatter and assemble themselves on the stairs, balancing their cards for when the game resumes.

  Whatever happens next, Maddalena will have to suffer the consequences. Better not to watch. Better to take a step backward against the brass banister, lower her head, and brush her chin against the white petals of the poinsettia. Antonio once insisted these plants could kill a cat or a small child if eaten, but she doubts this. He takes as fact every article in the newspaper, every secondhand story from the men at Ford.

  “Why wouldn’t you be welcome?” says Antonio, with a fake confused look. He comes toward him and throws his arms around his shoulder. “It’s your money that keeps the roof over our heads, right? Take your coat off, stay a while. We’re in the middle of a game right now, but the next round you’ll play.” His voice is friendly but unnatural and overloud. “Maddalena, get Mr. Boss Man a glass of wine.”

  Maddalena looks up.

  “Oh, I can’t stay—” says Mr. Gold.

  “Don’t insult us now,” Antonio says. He tightens his grip on Mr. Gold’s shoulder and pulls him close. He leads him past Maddalena, across the crowd of standing men, and installs him in his own seat at the head of the table. “You watch my father’s cards with him. He’ll teach you how it works.” Then he turns to the rest of the table. “Let me introduce you to Maddalena’s boss, Mr.—” He stops. “What’s your first name?”

  “Milton.”

  “Mr. Milton Gold! Uncle Milty!”

  The guests sit, polite smiles on their faces. Mr. Gold raises his right hand in a tentative wave.

  “Who’s got the numbers?” Antonio says, brightly. “Maddalena, Ida, we’re waiting for you.”

  Maddalena sets a glass of red wine in front of Mr. Gold, then resumes her place at the table with her niece. If Antonio calls forty-two, she doesn’t notice, and Nunzia is too young to recognize the number. Instead she watches her boss look intently over Papà’s shoulder, whisper questions in his ear, and not touch his drink. He appears comfortable, relaxed even, but surely Antonio is not fooling him. “Ante up, Uncle Milty,” he says when a new game begins, and Maddalena breaks into a sweat. “You’re on your own now.”

  Mr. Gold makes a fist whenever he gets a number. Then he loses the terno to Ida. “It’s all luck, then?” he asks. “Am I wrong to say there’s no strategy?”

  “No, that’s right,” Antonio says. “The only trick is to keep your eye on your cards.”

  Mr. Gold plays one complete game. Then he pushes his chair away from the table and declares it time to go. “I have other ladies to see, from here to New Jersey,” he explains, and gives a slight bow to the guests. “They might not all be night owls like you.”

  “You’re insulting us,” says Antonio, again in the overloud voice. “You play one little game, then leave without tasting our food or drinking a glass of wine? We’re not good enough for you?”

  Mr. Gold smiles politely and rubs the inside of his palm. “Of course you are, Mr. Grasso. But I really do have to go. Business, you know.”

  “We understand,” says Ida, from across the room.

  “One more game,” says Antonio, his voice more insistent. “That’s all I ask. Then I leave you alone. I’ll loan you the penny for the card, if you need it. You can pay us back, no interest, next paycheck.”

  Nobody laughs. Slowly Mr. Gold sits back down and suffers through another set of numbers. He tries to make eye contact with Maddalena between the two red candles of the centerpiece, but immediately she looks away. Under the table her legs are shaking. Ida sits beside her and rests her hand on her knee. The guests whisper and stare and hide their grins in their wineglasses.

  It would be much easier if Antonio just threw a punch; at least then someone would know what to do. Gianni would hold Antonio back and give Mr. Gold time to run for the door. He’d pour his friend another shot, then return to the game as if nothing happened. Instead Antonio has put everyone in this in-between place, just so he can show Mr. Gold who the real boss is and still keep Maddalena’s job.

  Though no words of accusation have been spoken, Maddalena feels the eyes of the men and the wives on her in judgment. It takes only one insinuation, false or true, to give people ideas, to turn them against you. On the way home, they’ll giggle over Antonio’s show. They’ll del
ight in the scandal that would befall the Grasso family if he were right about the handsome Jewish boss. “Poor Antonio,” they’ll say, shaking their heads. “We could have told him from the beginning she’d be trouble.”

  Late into the third game, Antonio goes upstairs to the bathroom, and Mr. Gold sees his chance. It is eleven o’clock. He stands, quickly grabs his coat and hat from the rack, and waits at the door for his host to return. Maddalena stands beside him.

  “I’m sorry we kept you so long,” she says. “Will you take some food home to your wife?”

  “No, thank you,” he says, the irritation obvious in his voice.

  “Milty!” says Antonio, rushing down the steps. “You weren’t going to sneak out, were you?”

  “I wouldn’t leave without saying good-bye,” Mr. Gold says. “Thank you for the games. And the wine and the delicious pastries.”

  “My pleasure,” Antonio says. He slaps him on the back. Then, just before Mr. Gold turns to go, Antonio grabs Maddalena’s hand and brings it to his lips.

  “Merry Christmas to you both,” says Mr. Gold.

  Antonio glares at him, still kissing Maddalena’s wrist, as the door slams and the man is gone. Behind them, the impatient Signora Fiuma has taken over the game.

  “Twenty-two!” she says.

  “La carrozzella!” booms the crowd. “The carriage!”

  “Are you happy now?” Maddalena asks. With the women watching from the table, she pulls her hand away and rushes up the stairs.

  Alone in her room with the door closed, she waits for Ida and Mamma Nunzia to check on her. She will explain her humiliation, and they will make excuses for Antonio. They’ll beg her to forget about it, to remember her husband could always be worse. “Antonio’s jealousy comes from love,” they’ll say. “You should feel lucky he still thinks another man might want you.”

  Through the floorboards Maddalena can hear the call of the numbers, the disappointed groans, the coins jingling in the hands of the winners. But there are no footsteps on the stairs, no shadows outside the door. Eventually, someone approaches. Maddalena lifts her head. But it is just a guest who needs the bathroom. She turns out the light, slips off her shoes, and climbs into bed still wearing her dress.

  Under her pillow she finds a small, wrapped box. She draws back for a moment, as if it’s a cockroach or a stain or some other unwelcome thing. But written in marker in the left corner of the striped red paper are the words Per Maddalena. Con Affetto, Antonio.

  She should wait. She listens until the end of the song playing on the downstairs radio, then can wait no longer. She slides her finger under the tape, folds the paper for reuse, and carefully opens the box. Inside is an oval-shaped silver locket on a little cloud of cotton. She unclasps the locket, and a folded-up note falls out. “I due amori della tua vita” it reads. The two loves of your life. In the left frame, Antonio has inserted one of the few precious photos of her mother. Its small size can hold only her face—the ringlet of black hair that falls against her cheek, her hopeful eyes, her lips in a thin, cautious smile—but it is enough. The comfort of the face is what Maddalena misses most. In the right frame, Antonio has inserted another folded-up slip of paper. It says, in tiny meticulously scripted letters, “nostro bambino.” Our baby.

  Maddalena holds the locket open in her palm, the chain laced through her fingers. This is how life with Antonio will continue to be, she thinks. Her mother might have told her as much. He will torment her with silence and spite from an impassable distance, and then, just when her fragile love for him begins to crack, when she considers giving up on him completely, his good heart will show. The game they are playing will end, and they will never speak of it, never admit there was a game at all.

  She can see it as clearly as if it is happening now. She will have her baby not in a hospital, but here in her marriage bed, on the humid third floor, with Antonio between her legs waiting for the little Jewish face. He will rejoice only when the baby peeks through the muck with his father’s eyes, the wide Grasso nose, the almond-shaped birthmark on the back of his neck. There will be no trace of her family at all, no link to her past—only the picture beside the child’s in the locket. For a time, joy will return to Eighth Street, and Maddalena will rest. Antonio will rush home from work to sit beside her. They will forget the months he ignored her and acted crazy and slept through her sicknesses, and she will be his beloved again, mother of his perfect child.

  8

  Mamma

  JULIAN SPLASHES AFTERSHAVE on his cheeks and neck. He examines his skin in the bathroom mirror. The mole on his left nostril, which has tormented him for years, seems almost charming. He tests his left profile, then his right, declares it a draw.

  He flicks the light switch off and on rapidly. “All the world’s a stage,” he says aloud, on his way into the hall. He can’t remember if he read this line in a Shakespeare play or an Italian poem, but for the first time he thinks he understands it. Since starting at Mrs. Stella’s, he feels at every moment—in the bath, at the kitchen table, in the yard raking leaves—the eyes of an invisible crowd upon him. Songs run through his head in an endless set, commanding his fingers to play the notes on the porcelain tub, a plate, the rake.

  Even this house could be a stage, he thinks. It is sparse enough and absent of decoration: dark wood paneling, brown carpet, mud-colored sofa, cherry coffee table. Only his poster of Manhattan—black and white save the blue tint to the sky—interrupts the blankness. If he remembers, he will buy a plant, add a flourish of green. Or a red slipcover to hide the holes in his father’s leather chair.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t see it,” he says to the smiling man in the framed photo. “Their eyes glow, these customers. They stop talking. They listen and sway. Listen and sway! I take them to a heavenly place.”

  He talks to his parents every day, as he has since their deaths, reporting developments like an anchor on Midday Headlines. Little Abraham has still not come home, he tells them, but—“Calm down, Papà”—he has begun to include him in his nightly prayers. Maybe that is why he invades Julian’s otherwise happy dreams, floating on his back in the water, always naked, always dead. Sometimes he appears in the public pool, sometimes in a bathtub, but never without the same ghoulish bloodshot eyes staring up at nothingness. For this reason, Julian now keeps the hallway lamp lit through the night.

  Even in death, his father cannot keep silent. “Don’t forget the electricity bill,” he says. “You’re paying for that, too.”

  The Delluccis took out a loan, Julian says, eager to change the subject. They expanded their business to double the size, and bought a van painted with DELLUCCI ELECTRONIC REPAIR in big letters across both sides. Dellucci makes one delivery in the morning, then spends the rest of the day driving the van around the neighborhood to show it off.

  Julian has learned six new songs just from playing them over and over on the phonograph. The notes have come easily, as if they’ve waited for years in the tips of his fingers, eager for release. He tells his parents about the woman who approached him at Mrs. Stella’s last week. She’d crossed a bar full of customers just to talk to him. “You play with all your heart,” she said, squeezing his elbow. “Your music fills me up—more delicious than any dinner.” Then she offered her hand. “My name is Helen,” she said, before disappearing into the crowd.

  “You’re doing this for a woman, then?” his father asks. “You can’t make money and find a fidanzata at the same time? That cheapskate Mario Grasso’s taking advantage of you.”

  But Julian does not care that his wages are in meals. Soon he will propose that he perform Fridays as well as Saturdays and holidays, and maybe one of the slower weeknights to attract more business. Then maybe—if he finds the nerve—he will negotiate a different price with Mario. Not for himself, but to satisfy his father. And yet his careful explanation of this does not please the old man.

  “Working for food,” he says, with disgust. “In the Old Country maybe, but not here. Your
grandfather did not come all the way to America so you could barter.”

  “Maybe I would have been better off in Italy,” Julian counters. “You could have opened a little café. Our family could have run it. You could have passed it down to me and my children. What do the Fabbris own here, anyway, besides this house and this old furniture?”

  “I don’t see any children,” says his father.

  With his mother Julian does not argue. He rarely summons her voice. He cannot bear it. Only in moments of jubilation, or during a particularly happy dream, does he risk it, and even then he fears that his longing to share his joy with her might overwhelm him. It was she who used to walk him to the library and wait outside as he picked out the books that interested him, her to whom he read stories on the many nights his father spent at the racetrack. She would iron or sew or wipe down the inside of the refrigerator, and Giulio would sit on the arm of the couch and read aloud an entire mystery novel start to finish. She’d stop him every few minutes at first to posit a theory. By the middle of the book she’d announce, “I know who did it!” and not interrupt him again until the end, when the detective would often prove her right. If, at some point in her life, someone had told her she was a smart woman, she would have assumed she was being mocked. Giulio himself—to his shame—never told her. And yet he has never met anyone with as quick a mind.

  Today, his conversation with his father ends the same as it always does. Julian turns away from the photograph, walks out onto the porch for air, and smokes a cigar. Then he remembers the date. He rushes back inside, rights the frame, kisses his two fingers, and presses them to the faces of his parents. “Buon Natale,” he says.

  He arrives early for his shift at Mrs. Stella’s. The place is glittering. Gold garland covers the molding from one corner of the dining room to the other, and makes an X across the ceiling; it wraps every painting and spirals around the wooden columns that divide the restaurant from the bar. In the center of each table, a tall, red candle sits on a bed of plastic holly leaves splashed with silver confetti. Shiny glass ornaments hang from the coatrack and on the branches of two small trees set up on either side of the columns. Julian, anticipating this festiveness, wears his father’s red tie with his dark suit. When no one is looking, he plucks a sprig of holly and threads it through the buttonhole of his lapel.