The Saint of Lost Things (34 page)

Waters shook the sign at him. “How much more can we take?” he said. His face contorted with a jolt, and his knees buckled, as if someone had just stabbed him in the leg.

“He won’t tell you,” the wife called out. “Will he?”

“Take this to the police,” said Julian, taking a step back. “They can do fingerprints. They can’t let this go on. It’s against the law.”

“No police care,” Waters said. He walked off, the cuffs of his pants dragging on the concrete.

“I’ve been watching for them,” said Julian. “From my window there.”

Waters turned around.

“It’s got to be teenagers. But I haven’t seen anybody. If I had, I’d—” He searched his mind for the course of action he’d likely have taken, then said something less likely: “I’d have chased them down. Wrung their necks. Or called the cops right then.”

“It’s not teenagers,” said Waters. “It’s two men. A woman, too. I saw all three of them, from the back. They’re lucky I don’t know their faces.”

The old lady—Waters’s mother? Mother-in-law?—appeared on the porch in her wide-brimmed straw hat and handed the wife a screaming baby. It was the first time Julian had seen her since last
summer, when she’d sat knitting in her rocker all hours of the afternoon. She must have been making booties or a blanket for this new child.

“Jesus Christ,” said Waters. “That one never stops.”

“Your youngest?” Julian asked.

“Yeah.”

“How many do you have?”

“Four. With Abie.”

A car approached, slowed, then continued on. One of the Lamberti brothers. Waters stood in the driveway, watching him go.

“I don’t believe in it,” Julian said. “What those people are doing. I just want you to know. It’s my neighborhood, too.”

“You’re right,” said Waters. “It’s your neighborhood. That’s absolutely right.”

Back in his living room, with the drapes drawn and the newspaper before him on the coffee table, Julian tried to count the Waters children. There was Abe, of course. There was the new baby. He’d seen a girl once, too; she had braided hair, shiny shoes, and an unremarkable face. He could not recall setting eyes on a fourth child, but it was possible there were two girls close in age, and he had simply never seen them together. One of them, the younger perhaps, may have grown too afraid to attend school, so she stayed at home to help the mother with the new baby and the old lady. Julian imagined the girls lying beside each other at night, worried that if their brother could be kidnapped, so could they. Whenever they heard a noise—the egg against the window, the wind, the creak of their father’s pacing across the floorboards—they clutched each other and promised never to separate. Then, when morning came, one caught the bus for school, and the other pulled the covers up over her head.

L
ATE AFTERNOON THE
next day, Holy Saturday, Julian spotted a familiar-looking woman at the deli counter of Angelo’s
Market. He hid behind a tall display of lemonade cans and watched her. She squatted in front of the assortment of cold cuts, pointed to the turkey, and asked for a half-pound. “As thin as you can get it,” she said, enunciating every syllable, as if Angelo’s teenaged son did not speak English. It was Helen, from Mrs. Stella’s. In profile, she looked older than Julian remembered from the nights he played for her. She had heavier eyes, and fine streaks of gray in her hair. He’d last seen her on Christmas Eve, when the lights in the restaurant were playing tricks, and the candles flickered between her and that bearded man she’d brought to dinner.

Today she wore slacks, a formfitting black sweater, and a light jacket. A gold pin in the shape of a musical note was affixed to the jacket. She pointed to the boiled ham, requested a half-pound, and consulted her shopping list. As she read, she bit the tip of her thumbnail. Julian hoped she was planning a big Easter dinner, just so he could watch her stand there, ordering, for a while.

He sneezed, but Helen did not turn around. He cursed Angelo Montale for his dusty store. If the man owned a rag or a broom, Julian never saw him or any of his employees use it. He relied on the heavy foot traffic and high turnover to keep his grocery store looking fresh, but the quarter-inch layer of dust on the less popular items—jars of mayonnaise, bottles of maple syrup, the lemonade cans behind which Julian crouched—told the tale all too clearly. There was such a thing as loyalty, though, and Angelo had run this store for as long as Julian had been alive. The five separate times in the ‘30s when he’d been laid off from Bancroft Mill, Julian’s father had even worked here part-time at the meat counter. There was no other Italian-run grocery in the neighborhood, unless you counted the fruit vendors who pushed their carts up and down Union, or Arienzo’s Fish Market, or Three Little Bakers on Lancaster Avenue. The prices at the A&P were a few cents lower, but you had to risk the chance someone would catch you and curse
you for patronizing the place. Once you crossed the line into the A&P, what would stop you from getting your bread from anyone but Lamberti? Your cigarettes from anywhere but Arturo Cozzi’s Smoke Shop? You could not plead poverty as a defense, since Angelo was known to offer half-price to any Italian immigrant who’d lost his job, or found himself with a new baby, or gambled away his savings.

Julian’s mother had taught him to bring his own dust rag to this market. When no one was watching, he’d wipe off the packages of dried pasta, the tops of the orange juice bottles, the cans of tomatoes. He put these in the wire basket, which he’d also cleaned. A trip to Angelo’s took a great deal of time, as Julian always felt obliged to stop and talk with one or another of his parents’ friends. They’d ask the same question—“How are you getting along?”—and he’d offer the same answer:
“Bene, bene.
Just fine.” They’d say they heard he was playing the accordion at Mrs. Stella’s, and he’d answer with a lie he’d told so many times that he almost started to believe it: he’d broken two fingers shoveling snow that winter, and they still hadn’t healed.

“What a shame!” they’d say. “My nephew told me you played very nice.”

“Time heals all wounds,” Luigi Dellucci liked to say, in reference to the fingers. He’d offered the same condolence at both his parents’ funerals. He might have said the same thing to Julian as an apology for the daughter who’d rejected him.

“Signor Giulio Fabbri!” said a voice behind him.

Ida Grasso.

This time, Helen immediately looked over at Julian, and expressed—he was almost sure—an unannoyed surprise. The surprise may have even been called pleasant, if he’d had the time to consider it. Instead he had to contend with Ida, who’d grabbed his arm and slipped hers through it. She talked on and on in her
throaty Napolitana dialect: Did he want to meet them at nine o’clock Mass tomorrow morning, or was he going to the
vigilia
tonight? Did he prefer cauliflower or broccoli with his roast? Did he like the wine her brother had brought him week before? It was expensive Chianti, triple the price of the kind they normally drank; the only problem was it stained her teeth and gave her gas. She wondered if maybe she just wasn’t used to the good kind.

“Could be,” said Julian.

Helen tilted her head at him, smiled, and walked toward the other end of the store. She picked up an onion, examined it, and put it back on the pile.

Ida’s basket held only her purse. “You want to hear something funny?” she asked. “I forgot why I came here. We need two things for tomorrow, but I can’t remember which two. I never write anything down.”

“If you walk around a little, maybe it will come to you,” said Julian.

“That’s what I was doing,” she said.

“Well,
buon fortuna!
” Julian said. “Good luck!” He broke free, patted her shoulder, and kissed her on both cheeks. “I need onions.”

“Oh, we have plenty of onions,” Ida said, and headed in the opposite direction.

Ten steps and there was only a bin of potatoes between him and Helen. “Excuse me, Signora,” he began.

She turned to him.

“I meant to say good afternoon before, but—you know Ida Grasso, don’t you? Her husband is the owner of Mrs. Stella’s—she was talking to me first, and now—I didn’t want you to think me rude, or that I didn’t recognize you, so—” He bowed slightly. “Good afternoon. Happy Easter.”

She nearly succeeded in returning the greeting, but Julian interrupted her. “I didn’t know you shopped here. I never saw you anywhere
but the restaurant. Do you live in this neighborhood? I thought for some reason you had a house maybe in the suburbs? Somebody told me that, I think?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I live in Forty Acres.”

The Irish neighborhood. Just a few blocks east, the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, but a land foreign as Cuba. “And you come here for—” Julian looked in her basket. In addition to the ham and turkey, she had bought ground beef and a pound of lamb shoulder.

“I don’t like our butcher,” she explained. “Henderson’s, on Delaware Avenue. Don’t ever go there. He cheated my husband out of money once. I tell everybody I meet not to give him any business.”

“Well, my heart belongs to Angelo,” Julian said, his hand on his chest. In his mind he had a picture of the bearded man with whom Helen had eaten Christmas Eve dinner. They did not seem like husband and wife, though; they spoke too formally with each other, like boss and secretary. And the girl—Abigail, he remembered—looked nothing like him.

She smiled, balanced her basket on the pile of potatoes, and folded her arms. “So why don’t you play anymore? We all miss you. They didn’t fire you, did they?”

Julian scanned the aisle for Ida. No sign of her. He nearly told Helen the lie about his fingers, then stopped himself. “I wasn’t fired,” he said. “I just—”

“It took too much out of you.”

“Yes.”

“I could see that.”

“You could?”

She pointed to the gold pin on her sweater. “I’m a music teacher. Piano, violin, some guitar. To kids mostly, and a few adults. I can see when someone feels every note. Never tried the accordion, though.”

Julian said, “It’s not a lady’s instrument.”

“No, I guess not,” she said, and laughed. “I miss hearing you, though.” She looked over his shoulder. “We go to Mrs. Stella’s quite often, and I always tell Abigail—she’s my daughter—wasn’t it much nicer when that man was playing?”

“That’s very kind,” said Julian.

“I’m a terrible cook, you see. And Abigail deserves to eat well once in a while. She turned twelve last month. March 14.”

“I met her,” said Julian. “You probably don’t remember. On Christmas Eve. She pulled on my jacket.” He smiled.

Helen covered her mouth. Up close, Julian could now see that every one of her fingernails had been bitten down. She wore only one ring—an emerald on her right hand. “I’m sorry about that,” she said, and picked up her basket. “You have a good memory.”

“She’s a beautiful young lady,” said Julian.

He helped her find the right onion and advised her against the smallish and bruised tomatoes. They were the last of a bad bunch, and besides, the vendors on Union always had the freshest produce. The difference was night and day. But she was too timid to bargain with the vendors, she explained. Half the time she didn’t understand them; the other half they flirted with her.

“I can help you some weekend,” said Julian, head down, eyes fixed on an almond that had fallen into the barrel of walnuts. “I know how they work. I can get you a good deal.”

She didn’t say anything. Not yes, not no.

They got in line. She set her items on the counter beside the cash register, and at that moment Julian decided he, too, had finished his day of shopping. He would walk her out, gentleman-like, to her car or the bus or maybe all the way to Forty Acres.

He could feel Angelo and his nephew watching him from the deli, on the opposite end of the store. They had their arms around each other, snickering. Ida had disappeared. Helen’s purchases,
which included a lot of meat, a carton of cigarettes, and a swirled candy stick, came to $6.33; his purchases—a can of grapefruit juice, a box of pretzels—to forty-eight cents.

“That’s all you’re getting?” Helen asked.

Julian shrugged. “It’s all I need.”

“You should talk to my mother,” said Helen, as he escorted her out of Angelo’s. It was a warm evening, and Fifth Street was crowded with people. The men wore short-sleeved shirts; the women carried their fur wraps on their arms. “‘You spend too much money,’ she says—on food, on restaurants, on clothes. She’ll be happy you helped me save a few pennies. I don’t mind it, either.”

“They have the good stuff on Sundays,” said Julian, which was not a lie.

They talked for a while on the corner of Fifth and Union, near the bus stop. She was to wait here for her brother to pick her up. The streetlamps were lit, and the shopkeepers stood in their doorways with their hands on their hips, waiting for six o’clock so they could close. Julian shook his head “no,
grazie”
at Rocco Lamberti, who held up a small bag of rolls for him. His arms were growing tired from carrying Helen’s groceries, but he wasn’t yet ready to give them up.