The Saint of Lost Things (33 page)

Julian nodded, and all at once her secret revealed itself, as clearly as if she’d written the words on a poster: the lonely Maddalena Grasso had fallen in love with him. With Julian Fabbri. His heart raced. How naive he had been! He folded his hands and set them
gingerly on the edge of the table. Look at her gold necklace and earrings, her perfect hair, her makeup: all of it designed to impress him. Look at her bite her lip, blush, stammer through her stories. Julian had read enough to guess that a girl like her, separated at so young an age from her father, neglected by a distracted husband, might create another father for herself—someone to rely upon, to adore. Julian had become her teacher and treated her with kindness and respect; he’d even serenaded her, stirring up memories of her youth and the family she missed. The poor girl, he thought; now she’d have to sit before him like a schoolgirl and compose herself while the wise adult explained the roots of her infatuation. Julian knew well that this sort of exposure left scars. Exposure made you want to lock yourself in a closet and watch the world go by from two little holes in the door.

“Me and the tailor,” Maddalena said, again in a whisper. “We were in love with each other. Before I was married, before Antonio came.”

“Oh,” Julian said. He let out a deep breath. He covered his neck with his palm, to hide his reddening skin. He had broken out in a sweat just moments before, and now his clammy hands cooled him.

“We made plans for the future,” said Maddalena. “But we were very young.”

“No wonder you wanted Sinatra so loud,” Julian said, managing a smile. “Antonio doesn’t know?”

“He knows,” she said. “Everybody knows. Ida, Mamma Nunzia, Papà Franco, Mario. All the Grassos. Everybody. But nobody talks about it. I have to put it out of my mind, pretend there was no love affair, pretend I had no mother and father of my own.” Her words came faster, but still so quietly Julian had to watch her lips to make them out. “I always lived on Eighth Street, you know. I always had a husband and worked as a seamstress. There was never a boy named Vito Leone who used to kiss me in the back room of the
store, who crossed half of Italy, from here to here”—she slid her finger along the map from Frosinone to Genoa—“to try to stop me from going with Antonio, so he could marry me instead.”

She shouldn’t be telling me this, Julian thought. I am not a priest; I have no way to help her. Besides, it wasn’t proper, not with Antonio in the next room, not anywhere. She was a young woman at the beginning of her life, about to give birth to her first child; he was an old man of forty, so ignorant of marriage and love affairs that he’d thought himself a part of Maddalena’s. At least he had let her speak before admitting how flattered he was by her affections. Instead he put two fingers over his lips to signal that she’d said too much. But she kept talking.

“When I say I’m suffocating, Julian, it’s not that I still love this boy—because that’s what he’ll always be in my mind, a boy—I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I love my husband. He’s a very good man, better maybe than Vito was. Or is. Who can say?” She looked away. “It’s just that the time goes by, and I remember less and less about him, about my family, my home. I’m scared one day I’ll wake up and they’ll be gone, no memories at all, that I’ll have only this life, and not the other one. Tell me: if nobody let you talk about your mother and father, if you couldn’t keep them alive with your stories, what would you do?”

“I’d die,” said Julian, without hesitation.

“Then we are the same.”

She told him more. He’d built that bicycle she told him about, from scraps he found lying around three towns, and let the girls ride it up and down the hill in Santa Cecilia. The bike rides had been her first taste of adventure—the wind in her hair, the danger of crashing—and, when she looked back, the happiest moments of her life. The war had seemed far away, her family and Vito within arm’s reach; if she fell from the bike and cut her leg open, her mother would dress the wound, and Vito would kiss the pain away.
Then the war came closer. She had been forced to flee to her aunt’s farm, while Vito stayed in the village. The Germans vandalized her family home—not with bombs, but their bare hands—and Vito had repaired it from floor to ceiling. He’d patched the walls, restored the electricity, and even saved the portrait of her mother the Nazis had slashed. Despite this act of devotion, Maddalena’s parents still did not consider him a proper husband for their youngest daughter. He had a sick mother, a father who’d abandoned them, and no trade to speak of. He was about to apprentice in Napoli when Antonio arrived, promising the riches of America.

“Now he’s married to my sister,” Maddalena said, matter-of-factly. “And I don’t have to wonder, ‘What would my life be like if I’d married Vito Leone?’ If I wanted, I could write to Carolina, ask her. But I don’t. My mother sends me letters, but she never mentions them. Carolina does not acknowledge me. She might as well be dead, except I know she is not. When I close my eyes, I see her feeding her children or sitting side by side with Vito at the tailor shop or planting flowers in the window boxes.”

She jumped from memory to fantasy, then back again. Julian was not sure which was which. She had three sisters and two brothers—plus one who died in Russia—but the longer Julian listened, the harder it became to keep their names straight. She stopped whispering when the conversation turned less dangerously to tales of the village: the old
strega
who predicted doom for every passing stranger, the soldier who’d stolen her stamp money, the maiden aunt addicted to cigarettes, the beauty of snow on the chestnut trees. Always, though, Maddalena’s stories found their way back to Vito. When they did, the color returned to her face; she’d speak more slowly and deliberately, as if painting a picture. It got so that Julian could almost see the boy—skinny, in wrinkled clothes—stepping shyly into the street the night she returned from the war,
proud of the hard work he’d done on her house, certain the world would now make room for them.

“I have an idea,” Julian said, interrupting her. He held up his hand. “Something for you to think about.” It was past eleven, nearly time for her to wake Antonio. The Sinatra record had been flipped twice, and they’d reached the end of the coffee. Maddalena had stacked and restacked the little espresso cups as she spoke, and now one balanced precariously atop the other two. Many times over the past few months, she had sat across from Julian at this table and appeared happy. She had laughed at his jokes and done imitations of Mario; she had poked fun at Antonio’s drunken lope to the sofa and his inability to stay awake. But all of that had been an act. This, Julian thought, was the real Maddalena: confessing, unburdening, removing her makeup to expose her scars.

“You’re the luckiest person I know,” he said.

She stared at him.

“Do you thank God every day?”

“I do, yes.”

Julian shook his head. “I don’t believe you.” He tried not to appear angry, though a part of him wanted to shake her. “You asked me once if I ever wanted to get married. The answer is yes. Of course I wanted to get married. You might as well ask, ‘Were you ever thirsty?’”

“I—”

“It’s ugly to have nobody,” he said, waving her away. “All my life, until now, I had two people. It was only us, Mamma and Papà, and that was enough. I read my books. Every morning we walked my father to work at Bancroft Mill. We’d spend two weeks every June in Wildwood. The time went by. I looked around at the girls, but none of them looked back.” He shrugged, unable to meet her eyes. “Do you know the Delluccis?”

Maddalena nodded.

“One summer, they brought their niece to our house. Papà arranged it. She was a nice girl, six or seven years younger than me. We sat beside each other at the table, and Mamma made lasagna and roasted peppers and
broccoletti
and
palla di neve
for dessert. She wore glasses, this girl—Amelia was her name—and wrote poetry. That’s what her father said, at least. She hardly spoke at all. She was the oldest of five sisters, all of them married before her. I was her last chance. And even though Mamma called her a snob and noticed a stain on the collar of her blouse, I liked her a little bit, I think. She reminded me of a governess from a British mystery novel. I could see how maybe Papà would buy us a house across the street and we’d all live nice and quiet, have dinner together every Sunday. I’d find a job in a library or a school, and we’d have two or three kids. But—” here Julian took the empty espresso cup from the top of the stack and rolled it between his palms. “She didn’t want me at all. Not even one date. Between me and nobody, she picked nobody.”

“Something was wrong with her, then,” said Maddalena.

“Now she lives in a convent,” Julian said. “But she’s not a nun.”

“You still think about her.”

“Not really,” said Julian. “Not until now. Not until I hear you complain about all this love in your life.” He smiled. “A boy in Italy builds you a bike, rebuilds your house. A man in America thinks you’re Marilyn Monroe. In a few weeks, you’ll have a child, someone else to adore you. This is what I mean by lucky.” He gestured toward the living room. “Look out the window, Maddalena—there’s no woman on the sidewalk waiting for me. No girl who used to watch me from her terrace, waiting for me to notice her. You and Antonio are the only ones who think twice about me.”

“That can’t be true.”

“It is. Come to this house in the middle of the day sometime, when it’s just me, talking to ghosts. See for yourself. I lie in my bed worrying what will happen when I get old and there’s no one to take care of me. I can’t even read anymore; it reminds me how much life I haven’t lived, all the people I’ll never meet. Every noise I hear outside, I think, what did they do to that little black boy? What kind of world is it when someone can just disappear, and nobody cares? I get so sad when you and Antonio leave every week. I don’t even realize it until I start to clean the coffee cups, and then it hits me like a slap in the face.” He looked down. “A man of forty years old, and you’re my only friends. You’d think I’d have more to show for such a long life.”

Tell me to stop whining, thought Julian. But Maddalena was too good a person, too compassionate, and—like most women, he imagined—too easily swayed by a man in pain. This was what had brought them together, after all, on Christmas Eve. He covered his eyes with his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Forget what I just told you.”

She touched his sleeve then, two fingertips on the sheer white fabric of his shirt. Her nails were painted pink, her hands slightly swollen, noticeable only in the snug fit of her wedding ring. “Think how long you had them,” she said. “Your parents.” She drew her hand away. “I’d trade places with you, if I could. I had my Mamma and Babbo only nineteen years. When I left them, I was still a girl. Never once in nineteen years did I think I’d live somewhere else—the next village maybe, but nowhere I couldn’t walk a few miles to find them. When you’re young, you think only little things will change. You don’t plan for a different country. Or a man like Antonio. Or a war.”

Antonio must have heard his name. His right foot, still hanging
over the arm of the sofa, scratched the sole of his left. The springs squeaked as he turned onto his other side. If they trusted history, they had no more than five minutes before he’d wake.

“Forty years you lived here, under the same roof with them,” Maddalena continued. “Do you thank God every day for that?”

14
Easter

W
E HAVE YOUR BOY,
said the note that Abraham Waters held to Julian’s face. The letters, of identical size and spaced evenly apart, were written in black marker on a piece of thin cardboard.
YOU LEAVE HE LIVES.

Julian stood on his porch, the noon sun stinging his eyes. He had just woken. He tied his robe across his middle, conscious of Waters’s wife staring at him from her own porch across the street.

Waters had one foot on the bottom step of his stoop, the other on the walkway. As far as Julian knew, this was the first time Waters had ever come onto his property.

He looked over at Rosa Volpe’s house but could not tell if she was peering through the drapes. The rest of the street was quiet—no cars passing, no wind, just a few robins scurrying across the yard. It was Good Friday, and not even the Lord’s looming death had inspired sympathy in the vandals.

“You see who left this?” Waters asked. “They taped it to my door. Right to my front door.”

Julian shook his head. “No,” he said, looking closer. The letters had been drawn so precisely that at first they seemed machine-made. Then he noticed that the writer had pressed down on the marker more forcefully for some words, more lightly for others, and
that the lines sloped downward at an angle. There was a stain, oil or grease, under the letter
W.
They’d used electrical, not household, tape to affix the paper to the door. These clues led him to no conclusions, but they were clues nonetheless.

“It’s a fake,” Waters said. “Gotta be. You tell me they got him seven months ago and now they bring the sign? It’s bullshit.”

“I didn’t see anybody,” said Julian.

The wife crossed her arms. Julian had never seen her up close, but from this distance she seemed younger than Waters, thinner, certainly, but not by much, with matted hair and cheeks round as a cherub’s.