The Saint of Lost Things (26 page)

Julian looked up. “Concerned?” He’d grabbed the bottle from Antonio and was reaching for a glass.

Maddalena’s lips pursed and turned downward. She folded her
hands and extended them toward Julian. “Look at how you live,” she said. She walked to the counter and ran her finger along the top. She held up the finger, black with dust. “It’s the middle of the afternoon, my friend, and you’re still in your housecoat. A single man needs purpose. If not
la musica,
then what? If not a pretty girl who might walk at any moment into my restaurant, fall in love with your voice and your talent, then what?
L’amore è la vita, amico mio.
Love is life! Life is love! Forgive me if I’m saying too much. I consider myself your friend. If I don’t look out for you, who will? You are still grieving, I know, but you can’t grieve forever.”

Something passed between Maddalena and Julian then. She may have been repeating one of Mario’s speeches, in a skilled imitation, but her confident performance made it clear she believed every word. She was not so talented an actress that Julian couldn’t see through her charade. Who was she to tell him how to live? How did she know what purpose his life did or did not have? In their talks, she was always trying to get him to reveal something about himself, some secret he might be hiding. The moment Antonio fell asleep, she’d start with the questions. What did Julian think of so-and-so’s widowed sister? Maybe there was a girl from his childhood who still wrote him letters?

Maddalena went on, but Julian stopped listening. He stared at the silver crucifix on the wall beside the refrigerator. Had he sinned by allowing the tips of the Lord’s hands and feet to tarnish? Of course he’d considered keeping the house a bit tidier. For a few months after his father died, he’d regularly used the broom and dustpan. But before long he’d lost patience for the persistent effort that cleaning required. No sooner would he wipe the coffee table than dust would again settle there, dulling the sheen he’d worked so hard to achieve; no matter how many times he emptied and soaped down the inside of the refrigerator, he could not expel the lingering rotten-vegetable smell. The reason for this trouble eventually
occurred to him: his parents wanted the house dirty. A son alone in their house pushing around a wet mop insulted their memory. He needed a woman to bring this place to life, a woman to make him better than the lonely old bachelors on their barstools at Mrs. Stella’s. He needed a wife. So until one fell from the sky, the neat piles of rags in the linen closet, which his mother had kept clean as her own underwear, would remain untouched.

Mario Grasso clearly did not understand this. After the restaurant closed at night, he returned to the scrubbed floors and walls of his home on Eighth Street, embraced his wife and his daughters, and slept in peace. He did not walk through the rooms of his house like a scared child wishing that—when he turned his head—he’d find his mother standing at the sink, his father dozing in his armchair.

“Tell me how
you
live, then, Mario,” Julian said, interrupting Maddalena. At this point, she was in the middle of a list of songs Mario suggested Julian might want to learn.

“How
I
live?” she asked.

“Yes.” Julian crossed his arms. “You people talk like you have all the answers for me. Why not share them? Help a pathetic old man?”

Maddalena looked at her husband.

“We’re just repeating information,” said Antonio. “We didn’t mean for you to get angry.” He pushed his chair away from the table. “Maybe we should leave?”

Julian forced a smile. “No,” he said. “Stay where you are. The truth is, I really want to know the answer. From you, from Mario, whoever the expert is. Tell me what it’s like to have responsibility—for a wife, children, a business. When do you rest?”

“We don’t know yet,” Maddalena said shyly. “But soon. A few more months.” She sat beside Antonio and put her hand on his shoulder.

Did she always wear this much makeup when she visited? Her
face had gone pale the moment he’d interrupted her, but two circles on her cheeks remained warm and rosy. She’d painted her lips a glossy red, and possibly thickened her eyelashes. Around her neck she wore a heart-shaped locket, and in her hair two rhinestone clips that sparkled even in the dim light of the kitchen. Maybe these trips to Seventh Street were her only chances to dress up, the only entertainment her husband allowed her.

“I never rest,” Antonio said. “I’m at the plant before the sun comes up. I get on my knees and break my back all day, sweating through my shirt. Look at this—” He held up his right palm, revealing a rash of pink blisters. The biggest, just below his ring finger, was the size of a nickel. “For five hours this hand holds a screwdriver, turning here, turning there. The skin tears off like paper. Then for half an hour I sit on a folding chair and eat a sandwich with thirty other men and shoot the shit. After that, five more hours, me and the screwdriver and the inside of a Ford. I go home, eat some more, and then, if I’m lucky, I get an hour or two to take a nice walk, get some air, visit my brother. Let me tell you, the night I get six full hours of sleep, I’ll throw myself a party.” He glanced at Maddalena. “Soon the baby will come and cry all the time, and then I’ll really be sunk.”

“Mario doesn’t have it easy, either,” said Maddalena to Julian. “Ida and the girls never see him.”

“Gino Stella does nothing,” said Julian. “That much I saw for myself.”

“Gino wouldn’t know work if it bit him in his fat ass,” said Antonio, with a laugh. He refilled his glass, and with it finished off the bottle. “My brother’s his little dog. Without Mario, Mrs. Stella’s would roll over and die. He’s a big talker—too big most of the time—but he works hard for that dump. I give him that.”

“I agree with you there,” said Julian.

As if on schedule, Antonio rose and walked to the window,
using the furniture to steady himself. The snow was letting up. An inch or two covered the ground, reflecting the moonlight and glow of the streetlamps.

“I have a secret dream,” Antonio said, without turning from his view.

Julian and Maddalena waited. They exchanged glances.

“Are you going to tell us about it?” Julian asked.

“One day, I’m going to open my own restaurant, right across the street from Mrs. Stella’s. Me and my brother. We’ll put Gino out of business.”

“That’s brave,” said Julian.

“And stupid, probably,” he said.

“Since when do you want to open a business with Mario?” asked Maddalena.

Antonio shrugged.

“It’s good to have ideas when you’re young,” Julian said. “When you get to be my age—”

“I have a hundred ideas,” said Antonio. He described the L-shaped layout of the dining room, the flagstone, the white tablecloths and shiny wood floors. From his wallet he took out a small piece of paper that had been folded over many times; on it was written
Trattoria Grasso
in the fancy cursive script he’d designed for the marquee.

Maddalena watched him, her face blank as the snow. Julian guessed that she was hearing all of this for the first time, that Antonio did not talk much to her unless he’d been drinking. By the time he finished—having gone through the new menu from
primi
to
dolci
—he’d exhausted himself. “You mind if I rest my eyes for a while?” he asked, as he lay on the couch and propped his feet on the cushions. Every week, this same question preceded the nap he’d never admit he’d taken, not even after Maddalena shook him awake an hour later.

“Be my guest,” said Julian.

“I should be the one resting my eyes,” Maddalena whispered, after Antonio’s first snore. “I don’t work nine hours a day? Then come home and cook dinner, and make his lunch and his father’s lunch on top of that? He thinks I have it easy because I
sit
in front of the sewing machine, and he has to
bend over
in front of the car. But I don’t complain.” She shrugged, a defeated look on her face. “You know, in my village, I never had a job. A few hours in my father’s grocery once a week, that was it. Just to give me something to pass the time. Now in America all I do is work. All everybody does in this country is work.”

“Except me,” said Julian.

“Because you don’t belong here,” Maddalena said, casually, as if this were a point they’d already decided.

“I don’t?”

She blushed. “Never mind,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “Don’t listen to me. I want to hear more about what you started to tell me last time. Why you didn’t join the army.”

Julian narrowed his eyes at her. “No,” he said. “You should tell me what country I belong in. I’d like to know.”

“Antonio gets mad at me,” said Maddalena. “Because I’ve been planning your life for you, and it’s none of my business. I don’t want you to be mad at me, too.”

This did not surprise him. “I could never be mad at you,” he said, though her pity had made him want to throw his wineglass across the room. “So let’s hear it. Or should I get a drink first?”

“You should move back to Italy,” she said, with an urgency that suggested she’d kept this in for a long time. She leaned her entire body forward and lay her palms flat on the table. “That’s where your blood comes from.”

“Oh, that’s perfect,” Julian interrupted. “Half of Italy crosses the ocean one way, and Julian Fabbri goes the other. Am I so backward?”
He crossed his arms. “What can I do in the Old Country that I can’t do here in the Land of Opportunity?”

Her face was serious. “You can forget,” she said. “Pretend you never lived in this house, in this little half city. Pretend you never had a father or a mother. You told me one time: ‘Nineteen fifty-four will be the year I change my life.’ But how much can you change here, with all these ghosts?” Julian followed her eyes across the kitchen, half expecting to see the line of Fabbris along the wall: his Nonno and Nonna, his parents cradling a lifeless Caterina, the two cousins he lost in the war.

“I promise you,” said Maddalena. “Walk into any village and the people will open their arms to you. Relatives or not. They’ll find you a house to live in and a café to play your music. They’ll find a wife for you, too, if you want, sooner or later.” She raised her eyebrows. “You can change your name back to the Italian way, or pick a new one. I like Alessandro or Umberto. But Giulio is good, too.”

Julian stared at her, disbelieving. How proud of herself this woman was, and what a sad creature he must have painted himself to be. He stood and brushed the crumbs from his lap. “The snow is getting worse,” he said, and checked his watch. “You should wake your husband.”

“You’re not mad at me, are you?” she said. “The last thing I want to do—”

“No,” Julian said, though his hands trembled as they reached for the coatrack. He stood in the hallway waiting for her to rise and retrieve her husband. Instead she crossed her legs and stirred some sugar in her coffee. She wanted him to tell her he liked her idea. “I’m an American,” he said. “I know the history, the literature. If I don’t have a life here, I don’t have one anywhere. End of story.”

“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.”