The Saint of Lost Things

by Christopher Castellani

  They offered no such explanation for their visit. They sat at his kitchen table and passed around the tray of cookies. Maddalena and Julian drank coffee while Antonio drained the jug of homemade wine he’d brought. For the first awkward hour, Julian and Maddalena did most of the talking, trying to fill the painful silences, as Antonio sat back in his chair with his glass resting on his chest. Maddalena had a heavy accent that made each verb sound present tense, and often unconsciously replaced the English word with the Italian. Neither she nor Antonio mentioned Mrs. Stella’s. They complained about the patches of ice on the sidewalk, the plumbing in city houses compared to what it must be in the new suburban neighborhoods, and the new priest with the whiny voice who’d just been brought in to assist Father Moravia. St. Anthony’s parish was growing fast, and the old pastor couldn’t handle the needs of his congregation alone.

  Not until Julian brought up the vandals did Antonio come alive.

  “I heard about this,” he said. “I didn’t realize you lived somewhere with a front-row view. Did you see who did it?”

  “I sleep through everything,” said Julian. “If they drop a bomb on the house, I won’t notice until the morning.”

  “That could be next,” Antonio said. He thought a moment. “If you did see something, what do you think you would do?”

  Julian shrugged. He had asked himself this same question several times. “Honestly? I don’t know.”

  Maddalena leaned forward. “What is it like? Living so close to them?” She was whispering, as if Abraham Waters and his family could hear her through two brick walls and across a windy street.

  Immediately Julian thought of the boy, still unfound, still invading his dreams. But how much of his fixation on little Abraham, his sympathy for Waters, did he want to admit to the Grassos on their first visit to his house? Surely they already thought him pazzo at best after that display at Christmas and had come here not for Mario but on a sort of charity mission to comfort the lonely. “I don’t think about them anymore,” he said. “To me, they’re invisible.”

  “They won’t be around much longer,” Antonio said. He stood and, hands in his pockets, walked to the front window. He parted the curtains and gazed into the street.

  “I never knew what they looked like until I came to this country,” said Maddalena. “We used to hear about the Ethiopians all the time back in the village. Selvaggi, savages, they called them—the people on the radio and the soldiers who came back from the war. They made them sound like monsters: skinny arms, big, round eyes, skin so dark they could hide two feet in front of you at night and you wouldn’t know they were there. But I never saw a picture of one. Not once. And now look at me!”

  “Mussolini was an embarrassment,” Julian said, with greater conviction than he intended to convey. “What did he want with Africa, anyway? To go against America and the entire world for a piece of desert—and then to lose. To retreat in shame!”

  “I agree with you on that,” said Antonio, from the living room. He was sitting on the couch now, alone, his back to them. He’d left the curtains parted about two inches.

  “We loved him at first,” said Maddalena, dreamily. “That voice he had—it was like music, so strong and feroce. I knew nothing, really, about the war or what he was doing in Africa. I didn’t even know where Africa was on the map. Just that voice. Una voce incantevole, my mother used to say.” She looked away. “There was a man in the next town who got captured in Africa, spent four years a prisoner in Addis Ababa—I’ll never forget that name—and when he got back to Italy, you know what he said? ‘For Il Duce, it was worth it.’ It was shocking to me, how he could still love a man like that after what happened.”

  “And you wonder why we moved here,” Antonio said. “The Italians have no sense. They believe the last thing they hear.”

  “Sometimes I think . . . ,” said a still-dreamy Maddalena. She cast her eyes over his shoulder, and Julian could see she was thousands of miles away. “What would my mother do if she had to live like me, seeing the neri all the time on the bus, in the stores, and now down the street from my own house, mixed in with the Italians? She would run screaming back to Italy, I think. When she put me on that boat, she had no idea this is the America waiting for me.”

  Julian smiled at her. “It’s a very different life, that’s for sure. Two lives, really.”

  “It is,” she said. She looked over at the back of her husband’s head. She lowered her voice. “Sometimes when I remember something that happened to me in the village, it’s like I’m remembering one of my romance books. Or a radio song. Then I think: that was you, Maddalena! You used to make up plays in the olive grove, not the peasant girl in your book.”

  “I know what you mean, in a way,” said Julian. “There is the life when my parents were alive, and the life after.” He looked down.

  Antonio had no comment on any of this. The three of them were quiet for a while. Julian stacked the espresso cups and brushed the crumbs from the table. After Maddalena rubbed her arms, he excused himself to turn up the heat. On his way, he noticed that Antonio had closed his eyes. Julian took the empty glass from his hand, and he sunk deeper into the couch. “Should I wake him up?” he mouthed to Maddalena.

  Maddalena shook her head. “You have to excuse him. He worked all day.”

  Julian put on more coffee and sat with Maddalena at the table, waiting for it to boil. Her husband falling asleep did not seem to bother her, and he wondered if he did this often. “Can I tell you something?” he asked her.

  “OK.”

  “I changed my name,” he said. “After my father died, I was not the same person, like I told you. My name is Julian Fabbri now—the American way, with the J—not Giulio.” He shrugged. “But nobody calls me Julian. It’s like they’re afraid to. Or maybe they don’t realize.”

  “I didn’t realize,” she said.

  “I used to think: maybe the new name will help me forget. Make my life easier. But it didn’t work.”

  “I wish I could forget,” she said, and again traveled far from Julian’s little kitchen, with the squeaky faucets and the rivers of cracks in the tile. When she came back moments later, her eyes brightened. “But I have so much to look forward to.” She put her hands over her belly. “That’s what I tell myself every day. You should say it, too, Julian, believe me. After a while, you can get used to anything.”

  The coffee was bubbling. Julian reached over to switch off the burner.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  Julian nodded, ready for the Mrs. Stella’s conversation she’d been building up to all night. It was a smart tactic: send in the blonde to do your dirty work. He poured the steaming espresso into two cups. From under the sink he pulled out a bottle of anisette. “You want a shot first?”

  “No, grazie” she said. “Two glasses of that wine . . . it’s very strong.”

  “It is.”

  She folded her hands in her lap. “I was just wondering,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me, but—”

  “It’s OK,” Julian said, ready to explain that he still could not—and would never—be able to put the embarrassment of Christmas Eve out of his mind. It was hard enough just to sit and talk with her, who’d seen him make a fool of himself. “What is it?”

  “Did you ever want to get married?”

  This he did not expect. And though he’d asked himself that same question many times, the answer he gave Maddalena surprised him. It was something he did not know about himself until the moment the words left his mouth. He said, “I’m not what you’d call a passionate person.”

  Maddalena had no verbal response, but on her face was a look of great concern, as if he’d just told her he had an incurable disease.

  He thought a moment. “Maybe I should say it like this: Giulio was not a passionate person. And for Julian, it’s probably too late.”

  He sat back in his chair. Because such statements deserved a laugh, he gave her one. How else to avoid allowing her to
indulge the self-pity of a grown man, the blatant plea for sympathy? Maddalena should have shrugged him off, said, “How silly you are, Signor!” Instead her silent concern hung like a shadow across her face.

  So he put a Jerry Vale record on the turntable, and they made it through the first side before Antonio woke.

  Good-byes were said, plans made for the next visit, and still the shadow lingered on Maddalena’s face. It followed her out the door, down the steps onto the sidewalk, and when she turned to wave to Julian there it was again, dark and grave as a veil over her eyes.

  TWO MORNINGS AFTER Maddalena and Antonio’s first visit, Julian walked onto his front porch and gazed upon destruction. This time the vandals had scorched the Waterses’ tiny plot of dead grass, smashed the flowerpots, and splattered black paint across the driveway and sidewalk. The activity must have been witnessed or heard by someone on the block, but not a single man had been brave—or awake—enough to run out and stop it.

  Waters walked around his yard, dropping shards of terra-cotta into a grocery bag. He’d parked his taxi at an odd angle in the driveway, as if he’d been in a rush to jump out. Like most days, he wore his enormous brown coat, overlong dress pants that trailed on the ground, and cowboy boots. He worked wearily, stopping every few minutes to catch his breath. He tried to put out the smoldering patch of black grass with the hose, but the pipes had frozen. He got on his knees, the wind whipping his hair, and poured some sort of chemical solution over the paint on the sidewalk. He scrubbed with a wire brush, and after a few minutes the stain faded.

  Julian—in his slippers, housecoat, and layers of pajamas—held the newspaper under his arm and watched from behind the glass door. The spell of frigid weather would not break on this day, with the wind so strong it bent the antennae on the cars parked along Seventh Street. The few birds who’d remained for the winter had disappeared. It was too cold for snow, the newsman said, prompting Julian to wonder how that could be possible. What happened to the moisture in the clouds in this situation? It couldn’t freeze up there in long, heavy sheets of ice. There was so much he didn’t understand about the world. His most pressing question now, though: why, in the darkest and harshest hours of the night, had someone mustered the energy to inflict this damage?

  It had to do with little Abraham, Julian decided. The boy must be in some sort of deep, complicated trouble he was too naive to comprehend, and this second attack must signal that the trouble would not end anytime soon. But did it mean the boy was alive or dead? Julian’s mind raced. Usually he delighted in making up stories for the lives of his fellow humans, but for this boy only the same gruesome images kept surfacing. The harder he tried to imagine a happy ending, the less likely a possibility it seemed.

  A fog came over the glass, then froze into a starry film of ice crystals that obscured his view. He breathed and rubbed two little circles with the balls of his fist, making himself a set of peepholes. But Waters was nearly finished. He stepped into his car. Now, except for the circle of dead grass and the taxi warming up for a day’s work, his house looked as ordinary as the one beside it. A stranger walking by, on his way to the market in this gray early morning light, might not even wonder who lived there. It was not until Waters backed the taxi into the street that Julian saw the reason a stranger might stop, look closer, then hurry along. Visible on the concrete driveway, under the oddly parked taxi, was the faint but unmistakable outline of the words DIRTY NIGGERS.

  Quickly Julian shut the door, as if the vandals had shouted the words at his face. “I live here, too, you know!” he said, to the empty hallway.

  JULIAN WOKE IN HIS ARMCHAIR, sure he’d heard a noise, but when he pulled open the bedroom curtains he found no commotion on the street. The Waters house seemed the same as the last time he’d checked, the view from the window flat and still as a photograph: telephone wires, parked cars, shrubs and grass seared with frost. He checked his watch. He’d nodded off again. But over the past two hours he’d missed nothing.

  He returned to his chair, slapped his cheeks and tightened the laces on his wingtips. He deemed his inability to stay awake as a failure of character. He talked to himself like this: You have a job now, Julian: to guard and protect Seventh Street. Lie around in bed all day if you want to—it’s not like you have to punch a card somewhere else—but don’t sleep while you’re on duty.

  A different mind took over at this hour of night. It was as if the Julian who made the decisions the rest of the day vanished and left another Julian to run the graveyard shift. Usually the graveyard-shift Julian had nothing to do but turn the crank of dreams, but over the past week he had been put to work. These silly thoughts themselves—a man in his head turning the crank of dreams?—Julian might never entertain during regular hours. But here, half-asleep in the three-a.m. darkness, his thoughts made a profound sense. He recorded the more interesting ones on a sheet of paper, which he tucked into the dog-eared copy of Walden on his dresser. In the morning or afternoon—whenever he’d wake up—he’d read over the jottings and frequently throw them in the garbage. If he died in his sleep and people found these mad scrawls, half-English, half-Italian, slanted down the page, would they not think he’d gone pazzo for real?

  This was the closest he’d ever come to defending his country. He’d been too old for Korea and the World War II draft and did not have the stomach to enlist. Besides, he found war distasteful, though he’d yet to develop a moral philosophy around it more sophisticated than Jesus Christ’s, which taught him to turn the other cheek, or Thoreau’s, which might have landed him in jail. When, in 1941, there was a call to replace the deployed Guard with a state militia composed of the overage and the underage, he ignored it. All across Delaware, bright young students and half-deaf postmen and retired cooks signed up to be the last line of defense should the enemy reach our shores, but Giulio Fabbri kept to his house like an invalid, following the progress of the troops on the radio and in the newspaper. He’d ventured outside so rarely during the war years that people still thanked him for his service, thinking he’d been deployed.

  It occurred to him now that, had he indeed volunteered for the state militia, he’d at least have learned what to do if he caught the vandals on his street. Maybe he’d charge after them, pointing the long gun at their behinds. Maybe he’d stick his head out from the hole in the middle of the tank and yell, “Stop or you’re dead!” from a megaphone, his voice clear and incantatory as Mussolini’s, and they’d have no choice but to throw up their arms and surrender. Then Julian would gather them on his porch and patiently explain to them that destroying property in their shared neighborhood was like setting your own clothes on fire—not only did you end up naked afterward, but you had scars and burns that may never heal.

  His thoughts jumped to Il Duce himself. Yes, the man had an extraordinary voice, one that, like Julian’s, could probably carry a tune. Maybe he gave up a career as a tenor just so he could run Italy into the ground. It would make a great poem: “Benito’s Serenade.” The idea intrigued Julian, so he wrote the title on the sheet of paper, along with the first two lines that came to him: You could have stirred us to love, but you chose wrong; you could have saved your country with a song. At three a.m., it sounded worthy to be read to Maddalena Grasso on her next visit. At three in the afternoon the day after, it sounded worthy only to be shredded into confetti.

  For six nights, Julian kept watch. On the seventh, he was woken at dawn, pulled the curtains out of habit, and saw Waters running across his driveway. He carried a crowbar. He had the vandals in his sights. Julian quickly closed the curtains and peeked through the narrow slit in the middle. Waters made surprisingly long strides for a man of his age and size and waved the crowbar over his head as he rounded the corner onto Scott Street.

  Strewn across the lawn were bags of garbage torn open and emptied: banana peels, aluminum cans, glass bottles, coffee grounds, rotting tomatoes, and heads of lettuce. One bag had been dumped on the roof of the taxi, and now a yellow liquid—soup
? egg yolks?—streaked the back window and dripped onto the driveway.

  Minutes later, Waters reappeared, the crowbar over his right shoulder, his other hand on his hip. He walked slowly, breathing hard. He was barefoot. He opened the passenger door of the taxi and tossed the crowbar in the front seat. He looked up and down the street. Julian froze when his gaze lingered on his window, afraid any movement would give him away. But Waters just shook his head and went inside.

  The cruelty of the vandals astonished Julian. He had never witnessed such heartlessness. As he watched his neighbor cross and recross his lawn, scooping another man’s trash into a bag, it occurred to him that the vandals might next harm Waters himself, or another one of his children. Who knew how far they would go? There was the old lady, too, who sat for hours on the porch rocker in the summer in her floppy hat, knitting. Danger hung over them all, and, if recent history were any indication, Julian would not be able to stop it.

  If he could talk to Waters, he would advise him to move out of this neighborhood as soon as he could, stay in a motel if he had to. Whoever wanted to force out his family would not stop at broken pots and burnt grass. “I have nothing against you or your people,” Julian would explain, as calmly as he’d lecture the vandals themselves. As evidence, he’d tell him of the nights he’d made himself a sentinel at his bedroom window.

  That morning Julian commenced on a trip across Seventh Street, ready not only to express his sympathy to Waters but to ask if there’d been any news about his son. Then, as he waited on the sidewalk for a car to pass, he lost his nerve. He turned toward Union instead, and ended up on a shivering winter promenade around the block. Any personal involvement with Waters would incur all sorts of obligations for which he wasn’t quite prepared. His neighbors would line up outside his door: Rosa Volpe, the Delluccis, even Antonio and Mario Grasso. By the time the promenade was over, Julian convinced himself that Waters did not need him to solve his problems for him. He should have known the day he moved in that Seventh Street was rocky soil, no place for a family like his to plant itself.