The Saint of Lost Things

by Christopher Castellani

  “Look at me,” Maddalena said. “I lived through the war in one country, and now I’m in another. A little girl from nowhere. If you really want to, you can switch.”

  “And the switching made you happy? You wake up every day and say, ‘Thank you, God, for my beautiful life in America, where I work my fingers to the bone?’”

  “I do,” she said, unconvincingly. “I have a good life. Of course we could always have more money, and a house to ourselves, but other than that, what more could I ask for?”

  “You miss your family. You miss your village. Even after eight years, it feels like yesterday you left them. Did you forget I saw you on the stairs Christmas Eve, that I heard you singing through the wall? It was like someone told you they were dead.”

  Maddalena shook her head. “I don’t think about the past. I try to forget everything. Work keeps my mind busy. No one here knew me when I was young. That’s what I want for you: to live in a place where nothing will remind you.”

  “But to forget completely is an insult. A dishonor to the people who loved you—”

  “Not if you don’t have a choice,” she said. She turned her face away. For a while she remained quiet.

  He sat back down beside her.

  “It’s not right,” she said. “But you’re the only person I can talk to like this. She still faced the back of the kitchen: the flaking white paint on the door, the snow settling in the corners of the window-panes. “I have nobody else. No girlfriends, no sisters. Ida wants everything pretty all the time. And I can’t upset my husband. So if you get mad at me and don’t want to see me anymore, I’ll really be alone.”

  He reached over. The tips of two of his fingers touched her sleeve. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m not mad?”

  “You’re going to think I’m crazy,” she said, “but all week before I come here, I plan what I’m going to say to you. All the stupid things tonight, I practiced in my head—at work, on the bus. To make sure we didn’t waste time.”

  “But I do most of the talking,” said Julian, with a laugh. “You make me tell all my stories. I never hear yours. You had a beautiful mother, a father who was smart and kind, a village where the air was cool; your greatest excitement was riding a bike up and down a hill. It sounds like a book to teach young children how to read. Not a real person’s life.”

  “I have no stories,” Maddalena said.

  It was the most obvious lie Julian had ever heard. “You wanted to be an actress,” he said. “That sounds like a story to me. Why don’t you tell it?”

  BY TWO O’CLOCK the next day, every one of Julian’s neighbors had cleared the snow from their steps and sidewalks. The temperature was dropping by the hour, freezing the bottom layer of the snow into a sheet of ice. As hard as Julian bashed it with the tip of his metal shovel, the ice yielded only a few holes and a mess of shavings.

  “You’re too late,” said Renato Volpe, stepping onto the clean concrete in front of his mother’s house. “This morning, it was like scooping up feathers.”

  Julian scattered a handful of sand onto the steps. “Is that right.”

  Renato made good pizza, but Julian never cared much for him. When they’d been altar boys together at St. Anthony’s, he’d skipped out after Mass more than a few times to join his friends, forcing Giulio to do twice his share of the cleanup. Immediately after the recessional, Renato would throw his cassock on the floor of the sacristy, say, “Hang that up, will you?” and run out the back after Gianni Martino and his pack of neighborhood kids. Renato was five years younger, and in his group were the little brothers of the boys who’d ignored Giulio throughout grammar and high school. The one time Giulio found the nerve to complain about Renato’s bullying, Father Moravia, then young and curly-haired, sat him on his lap and asked him to show compassion. Derelict boys had their fun as kids, said the priest, but would be punished when they grew up. And though smart and quiet boys like Giulio suffered in their youth, God rewarded them with happy adulthoods, devoted wives, and more wealth than a boy like Renato Volpe would ever achieve.

  Renato’s car—a long white Pontiac, with a silver streak down the front—had been idling for the past half hour, pumping clouds of smoke onto Seventh Street. He readjusted the chains on the wheels, then sped away over the slick road. He slid and narrowly missed the curb as he careened toward Union.

  Julian was not the only one watching him. Abraham Waters stood, arms folded, on his front porch. He’d driven his taxi through the night and arrived home near dawn. The slam of the door had roused Julian from his post, and then the scrape of his shovel kept him awake.

  Julian walked to the end of his yard, balancing the bag of sand on his hip. He looked around. Rosa Volpe peered at him through the drapes of her front window. “Do you mind if I ask,” said Julian, “is there any news on your son?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I think about him,” Julian said. Who could survive outside in weather like this? “I hope he makes it home soon.”

  “That’s good of you to say.”

  Julian nodded and walked off. He scattered the rest of the sand onto his iceberg of a sidewalk. Patches remained, but what more could he do? If someone slipped, he’d offer him a shot of sambuca and a hot-water bottle and his most sincere apologies.

  “By the way,” Waters said, as he turned toward his front door. He carried the crowbar over his right shoulder. “Thanks for the pot. But my family’s not going anywhere. Not now, not ever.”

  11

  Sad Eyes

  OPEN AND CLOSE YOUR MOUTH, like a fish, like Sister Clark teaching you English, like an old woman who’s lost her mind and sits alone, no longer responsive to light and touch; the sound you’ll make, instinctively, the most natural sound in the world, is ma. Mamma. Mamma. Under God there are no accidents. He gives us answers as clear as letters on a chalkboard. When we are babies, our first reach is for the woman who bore us; eighty years later, in our loneliness, after our husbands and lovers and children have gone, our final cry is for her. This is how Maddalena, in the blackness and silence of her long sleep, outside her daughter’s reach, comprehends human life. It is little more than the opening and closing of mouths—eager for milk, for kisses, for help, protection, explanation—a million hours of talk continuing ceaselessly, until God shuts you up for good.

  She has more to say, but, for now, God presses His sweaty hand to her face, and she struggles to breathe. His palm smothers her mouth and nose; His fingers hold down her eyelids. She is still and speechless under His immense weight. And yet she can sense movement around her, changes in pressure and smell. Bleach, violets, three-day sweat. The steady beat of what could be music, or a foot tapping, or her own heart. Her legs drop away, then reattach; waves of heat ripple up and down the length of her body. Her child is no longer inside her, of that much she is certain, though the knowledge is less a memory than an awareness of lack. What was one is now two. It is the opposite of a wedding. What once belonged only to Maddalena now belongs to the world, and mother and child will have to share each other with strangers for as long as they live.

  UNTIL THAT SNOWY February night at Julian’s, Maddalena had nearly forgotten her interview at the Bianca Talent Agency. She had never spoken of it, not even in her letters home. After Antonio revealed to Julian her dream of becoming an actress, it took her a while—well into her superb impersonation of Mario—to remember that steps had actually been taken to bring her to the stage.

  There was a harmlessness about Julian that led Maddalena to believe he’d keep her secret. The memory of the agency was a source of shame, though she had not sinned—not exactly. She didn’t know what she’d call the sin if Father Moravia asked her: la vanità, maybe. Vanity. Or selfishness. Pride. Whatever name she gave this disease, the priest would pull open the screen and tell her she’d caught it from American movies, on which he blamed every sin. Though he’d absolve her and grant her the serenity that followed confession, the longing for costumes and makeup and those fi
rst steps into the lights would remain.

  She and Antonio had insulted Julian with their meddling, but he refused to admit he was angry at them. Though he did rise abruptly from the table to grab her coat from the hallway, it was possible he felt no anger at all, that he was one of those people who found themselves so undeserving of attention that they took any interest in their lives as flattery. Angry or not, he begged Maddalena for the story. So there, in the safety of his kitchen, she’d relived her donkey-walk down the hallway of the Bianca Talent Agency, the inspection of her non-European teeth, and the silent drive to the suburbs—during which it had dawned on her that Bianca would indeed train a donkey if it could afford the fees. Of the trip to the parking lot she made no mention.

  “So they never called you?” Julian asked, when the story was over.

  “No,” she said. “I knew they wouldn’t, but—” She rubbed the edge of the table with her thumb. “Still.”

  For weeks after that interview, Maddalena stopped cold when the phone rang. Everything around her faded—the clearing of the table, the brushing of Mamma Nunzia’s hair—as the voice of whichever man answered grew louder. But it was always one of Ida’s cousins or the electrician or Gianni who called, leaving her flushed and fumbling to continue whatever she was doing.

  “Cretins,” said Julian.

  Though she did not know that word, Julian had uttered it with sufficient disgust for her to agree with him.

  “If I were you,” he said, “I’d report them to the Better Business Bureau. Hell, I’ll report them myself.” He sat up in his chair. “What we should do is send me down there for an for an interview. If they say they’ve found the next Marcello Mastroianni, we’ll know for sure they’re crooks.”

  She laughed. “You shouldn’t say that.”

  “It’s a shame, though,” he added, quietly. “You’d have made a fine actress. And I could say I knew someone famous.” He paused a moment. “Then again, you can think of it like this: ‘Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.’ I read that once.”

  Maddalena nodded. “My brother Claudio used to read,” she said. “But he never remembered anything.”

  “Words just pop into my head sometimes.”

  “I don’t think my brother was very smart,” said Maddalena. “He always had a book in his hand, but, for all we knew, he could have been illiterate.”

  She hadn’t spoken of Claudio in years. She found herself eager to tell Julian more—about her other brothers, about Il Sogno della Principessa, which she had yet to finish, about whatever popped into her head. But the snow was falling more heavily, and the time had come to wake her husband.

  They talked again the next Friday, and every Friday after that. One week she and Antonio would show up on his doorstep; the next Julian would come to Eighth Street promptly at dinnertime. He planned his visits to avoid Mario, who spent most of the weekend at Mrs. Stella’s. The days grew longer, and soon it was still light when Julian walked Maddalena and Ida home from the bus stop, carrying their bag of Lamberti’s rolls. He’d update them on the stories he’d read in the newspaper that morning—political scandals, weather disasters, tales of crime and misfortune. Out West somewhere, police finally found the body of a millionaire’s missing six-year-old son lying in a shallow grave. What shocked Julian was not only that the grave was on the property of the millionaire’s female gardener, but that this woman had been leading a double life as a gunrunning prostitute. “Who can you trust anymore?” he’d say, and throw up his hands. “Only yourself. And the good Grasso family.” Then he’d move on to the next awful story—a strange disease called “parrot fever” currently spreading from birds to innocent humans; a poor family who’d survived the harsh winter eating garbage; the constant threat of Russia incinerating America with an H-bomb.

  “They shouldn’t print any of that,” said Ida. “All it does is upset people.”

  Maddalena agreed. She’d rather not know the cruelty people could inflict, or what unpreventable disasters might befall them, but she would never say so in front of Julian. Talking about disaster seemed to soothe him, make him less afraid. Maybe he believed that if he had knowledge of a particular type of tragedy, it would avoid him.

  “Occhi tristi,” Antonio called him. Sad eyes. Or, because of his half beard and the shape of his head, “the goat.” He pitied him. No man should live his life alone, not unless he’d intentionally harmed someone, and Julian didn’t seem like the type whom God had punished for some brutal act.

  And yet Antonio’s sympathy didn’t stop him from poking fun when Julian wasn’t around. “There’s a certain kind of man who never gets married,” he said once, a joke everyone at the table but Maddalena seemed immediately to comprehend. Mario chuckled, mentioned something about the army, and then the subject was dropped.

  Julian may have considered himself too old to get married, but Maddalena made it her mission to convince him otherwise. If he ignored her advice to move to Italy, then a wedding here in America would do just fine. He did not lack passion; she saw it in his songs, in his adoration of his parents, in his rage over the catastrophes of the world. Early in life she had learned that passion needn’t be obvious to be real; it could flow like an electrical current just under your skin, live but imperceptible. It needed only a spark. Then came the shudder and the shock, the dizzying spin, the instant craving for the next jolt. This had happened to Maddalena in two countries. Julian deserved it, too—and one of these days she would convince him.

  DR. BARONE HAD PREDICTED the birth for June 25. She was blessed, he told her; she would not have to endure her third trimester in the discomfort of a humid mid-Atlantic summer. She could take the baby to the beach the day of its baptism, let the fresh air heal them both from the trauma of delivery. The doctor was pleased with himself, confident, giddy with plans. Maddalena resembled his daughter, who lived in Canada; when she left his office the final time, he called her by the daughter’s name.

  Ida worried that Dr. Barone was not paying proper attention to Maddalena’s weight, that she was too thin to be as far along as she was. She had a big enough belly, Ida conceded, and a puffiness to her skin in certain light, but her own doctor (a Sicilian who’d treated her family since the first war) had told her a woman needed at least forty extra pounds for a healthy pregnancy. Maddalena had gained less than half that, too little to give the baby a proper cushion.

  Maddalena dismissed Ida’s concern. In the village, girls who’d gained hardly any weight at all gave birth to perfectly normal babies. Plenty more girls transformed overnight from beauties to monsters: buggy eyes, swollen feet, skin so bloated it stretched and left hideous scars. Twenty-five years old, and already these girls had wrinkles. Maddalena had seen no evidence that one sort of mother produced healthier children than the other, so why should she ruin her figure? And since her doctor (whose people came from Bologna, a university town) had no worries, she ate as much or as little as she pleased.

  Mr. Gold kept a closer eye on her as spring came and it became increasingly difficult to squeeze behind the sewing table. He brought a pillow for her back, a wider chair, and a hot-water bottle. Not once, though, did he suggest she quit. In fact, he pressed her to work even harder.

  “You’re sewing for two now, Signora Grasso,” he’d say as he passed her station, tapping his yardstick on the floor like a blind person. “I should see double the results.”

  “Next place you work, you’re joining the union,” said Antonio.

  Business was booming at the Golden Hem. In March, Mr. Gold hired ten new girls and still needed more. He’d tried to reach Gloria, but her phone had been disconnected. When the letter Maddalena sent her (translated into English by Ida) was sent back marked NO SUCH ADDRESSEE, she hoped for Gloria’s sake that she’d gone home to Cuba. Her people lived in shacks, but at least the shacks had belonged to them for generations. Gloria could walk to the town center after all these years away, and the grocer would recognize her.

  She was t
elling all this to Julian one night. They were sitting on the porch at Eighth Street, an early Friday evening a few weeks from Easter. The men wore light jackets and smoked cigars; Maddalena had arranged a white cable sweater over her belly to protect the baby from the lingering chill.

  “Cuba is no place for honest people,” Julian responded. “The government is a bunch of gangsters.”

  “Are they like us? The Cuban people?” Ida asked.

  “They’re Catholics,” said Julian. “So yes, in a way they are.”

  “The Irish call themselves Catholics, too,” Papà Franco said. “I wouldn’t say they’re too much like us.” Like Antonio, he enjoyed disagreeing with Julian.

  “What are we like, then?” asked Maddalena.

  “We’re workers,” Antonio said.

  “The Irish don’t work?”

  “Not like us,” said Papà Franco. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. The porch furniture was new: wide, gray, wrought-iron chairs with high backs and little diamond shapes cut out around the seats. “My first day in this country, I found a job. The next week, I had two jobs: one for the day, one for the night. If I didn’t have to sleep, I’d find one more. ‘What Depression?’ I used to say to people. They never saw me waiting in line for food. Never will. In this country, if you want work badly enough, you’ll find it.”

  “Altro che!” agreed Antonio.

  “Hard work and family,” Papà Franco continued. “The Italians were the first to put those two together; we’re the best at it. Look at me: I’m almost seventy years old. I should sit on the sidewalk all day with the other old men. Play cards, watch the skirts. But I could never turn down a paycheck if I could still work, not with my wife still living, two grandchildren, one more on the way. I tell you: I’ll be working at Bancroft Mill the day I die. I’ll close my eyes and fall into the machines. Good-bye to Franco Grasso; good riddance!”