The Saint of Lost Things (37 page)

17
The Viewing

T
HE LINE IN FRONT
of the Pavani Funeral Home extends for a block down Bayard Avenue. Julian arrives alone and later than he intended. He takes his place behind an old couple he does not recognize, greets them with a somber nod, and waits.

Services are scheduled to end at eight-thirty, but unless this line moves swiftly Dante Pavani will have to keep his doors open past ten. Only a few of Rosa Volpe’s mourners seem familiar, and Julian wonders, with some resentment, where they’d all been last year and the year before, at his parents’ funerals. Have so many new Italians moved to Wilmington since then? When did the old woman make all these friends? In the years after her husband’s death, she rarely left the house. Julian knew her as a disembodied face in the front window, peering between the drapes. She’d come to him once last summer, in the middle of the afternoon, to ask for help with her eulogy, then never spoke to him again. She had Renato for everything else: to bring her groceries and cut her rosebushes and keep her company when she needed it. If she attended Mass at St. Anthony’s, she must have gone in the early morning, then shut herself back in her house before Julian woke.

It is not until Julian sees Paolo lift a young boy on his shoulders
that he realizes who all these people must be: Renato’s regular customers. When you own two successful restaurants, you eventually create a loyal following—not friends, not family, but people who feel close to you because you have fed them, because they have spent birthdays and wedding anniversaries under your roof. At first, Julian is relieved; the turnout at his parents’ funerals now seems respectable. But then he feels a pang of regret. Even this
vecchietta
—mother of the arrogant Renato, suspicious and angry in her final years—deserves a long line of grief-stricken mourners at her passing. Anyone who lives a decent life deserves as much.

It is a humid August evening, and Julian can already feel the sweat under his arms. He removes his jacket and shuffles forward in his shirt and tie. When he reaches the entrance, he will put the jacket back on and ready himself for Renato. What will he say to him? You’re never too old to feel like an orphan. Or how about: when the second one goes, you feel five years old again, lost on a busy street, running through the crowd in between cars and buses, screaming for your mother to find you. But instead Julian will say what everyone says: “I’m so sorry,” and “She was a good woman,” before he kneels at the body itself, prays for her soul, and goes home.

In the stale air of Pavani’s viewing room, Julian finds not only Renato but his fiancée. She stands beside him in a sheer black dress and an oversized diamond ring, her hair pulled tightly back. Julian recognizes her from the early years at Fourth and Orange and his one visit a few months ago to the trattoria, where she complimented Helen on her shoes.

“I’ve got a house to sell,” Renato says, jovially, after Julian offers his condolences. “You know anyone who’s buying? It’ll cost them a fortune, while I can get it.”

Julian smells whiskey on his breath, which is not uncommon either for Renato or for the grieving here at the Pavani Funeral
Home. Before each wake, Dante invites the loved ones into a private room in the back, where he provides an assortment of liquor.

His uncle was supposed to come from Italy, Renato explains, but he changed his mind. He and Cassie want to get out of the city before it’s too late, put their money on a house in Collins Park, down the street from the restaurant. They’ll have the house built from the ground up. No more apartments, no more creaky row homes.

“No more smelling like grease,” Cassie says.

“Your mother was happy in that house,” says Julian, though he has no evidence of this. “And Seventh is a good street.”

“Most of it,” Renato says. “Mark my words, Giulio. In ten years, you’ll be surrounded.”

It is when Cassie pinches Renato’s behind—surreptitiously, and with a purpose more punitive than playful—that Julian first suspects that the vandals might not be teenagers, or kidnappers, or hoodlums from the East Side, but Renato Volpe himself. He looks the man in the eye, for a giveaway, but there is only a watery blank-ness. No guilt. No shame. God will punish the derelict boys, Father Moravia promised. But when?

If there were not a lifeless body at the front of the room, illuminated by soft lights and surrounded with flowers, no one would guess the sad circumstances of this event. Chattering ladies and families walk among the cushioned chairs facing Rosa Volpe. They wave to one another, shake hands, and trade news of marriages and children. They speak in respectfully muted tones, but the effect in the room is one of a hushed roar, like the one immediately following Mass. “Have you met Maurizio?” Julian hears someone say. “He’s buried three wives already.” There is stifled laughter as the woman beside Maurizio—the fourth wife?—raises her eyebrows and shrugs.

No one is crying. No one falls on her knees and wails. No one even looks in Rosa’s direction after he makes the sign of the cross
over her body and turns toward the audience. Angelo Montale takes the framed picture of young Rosa from the table beside the casket and says to Julian, “This is how she looked when she first came into my store. Francesco Volpe was a lucky man.”

“And old age is very cruel,” says Angelo’s widowed daughter, who had once been beautiful herself.

Julian scans the crowd for Maddalena and finds her in the back row, behind the loud and fidgety Dellucci teenagers. Antonio talks with Buzzy Fisher on the other side of the room, but Maddalena sits alone in the aisle seat with her head down and her hands in her lap. As Julian approaches, he sees that her eyes are closed.

She wears a dark dress and a hat, with a half veil that conceals her eyes. In her fingers she clutches a rosary and one of Rosa’s funeral cards, on which is printed the poem Julian helped compose. She has regained most of the weight she lost after a month in the hospital—eight days unconscious, twenty to recover—and now looks much as she did when she first came to visit him. But she is not the same woman he knew in February. She no longer shows much interest in geography or the newspaper. The few times he visited the Grassos this summer, she talked mainly of her own health and the progress of Prima, and though Julian understood this, he could not help but feel—how can he put it?—
unnecessary
around her. He has sat across the table from her and thought, I have not survived a threat to my life. I have no child. What is my love story compared to yours?

He lays his hand on her shoulder. “Wake up, Signora,” he says, gently. “You’re late for work.”

“
O Dio
,” she says. She straightens her back and looks nervously around.

“Don’t worry,” says Julian, smiling. “Nobody saw.” He crouches in the aisle as a little boy runs past. “You remember our little joke, I hope.”

“Of course,” she says.

Most of the color has returned to her face, and she has gained weight. “How are you feeling tonight?”

“No pain, thanks to God,” she says. “Just—I’m so tired. The headaches don’t let me sleep.”

“Why don’t you go home?”

She glances at Antonio. “Respect,” she says. “Mamma and Ida left two hours ago, but since six o’clock we’ve been here. I haven’t seen Prima since this morning.” Her eyes brighten. “You wouldn’t recognize her, Julian—what a little
cicciotta
she is.”

Four months after her birth, Prima remains in the care of the nurses at Wilmington Hospital. Maddalena visits her every morning, stays through midafternoon, and returns in the evening. For a few hours she is allowed to hold her baby, triple-wrapped in blankets to keep her warm, but then the nurses return her to her incubator or give her oxygen or some other treatment to strengthen her. In Prima’s short life, she has undergone a blood transfusion and more injections than Maddalena can remember. She has gained weight, then lost it, then regained it again; her lungs have fully developed; she has battled and overcome infections, and bleeding in her brain. Still, the doctors want to wait before they release her. September 1, they say, is a possibility. Two weeks from tomorrow. “We’ll throw a little party to welcome her,” Maddalena says. “You’ll come, yes?”

“How could I miss such a happy day?” says Julian.

When the family in front of Rosa’s casket moves to one side, exposing her body for a moment, Maddalena turns sharply away. “I never look,” she says, and grips her rosary. “I don’t even get close. She can hear my prayers from here.”

I miss you, Julian wants to say. Instead he folds his arms. “Helen tells me an Irish viewing is very different,” he says. “But she won’t go to one since her husband’s. She doesn’t believe in them.”

Maddalena nods. She rarely asks about Helen, so he doesn’t press. And yet he needs Maddalena to read her mind, to interpret the signs she’s sending him and keep him from making mistakes. Julian does not even know what to call Helen, this woman who is certainly more than a friend, but not by much. All the many terms—sweetheart, baby, steady, dolly,
fidanzata, innamorata—
seem too young or too old, too serious or not serious enough.

Maddalena leans in and whispers, “What did you think of the invitations?”

“Invitations?”

“To come here.”

“There were invitations?” Julian asks, loudly. The woman next to Maddalena shoots him a look.

From her purse, Maddalena pulls a small envelope addressed in slanted and shaky handwriting to La Famiglia Grasso, 2121 W. 8th Street, Wilmington, Del. Inside is a card made of thick ivory paper, the kind used in wedding invitations. Printed at the top of the card in fancy script is Rosa’s name and date of birth, followed by the inked-in date of her death. Below that:

See Rosa One Last Time
___th _______________, 19 _____
6–8 p.m.
Pavani Funeral Home
Bayard and Lancaster Avenue

Rosa and Francesco are Reunited!
Time to Celebrate!
____th ______, 19 ______
______a.m.
St. Anthony of Padua Church
901 N. DuPont Street
Wilmington, Delaware

Reception Immediately Following
Trattoria Renato
3 Riverview Drive
New Castle, Delaware
Be Happy and Love Life
“For You Know Neither the Day nor the Hour” (Matthew 25:13)

“You didn’t ask yourself, ‘Who are all these people?’” Maddalena says. “She must have sent these to the whole city. Not just Italians, either.”

“But not to me.”

She thinks for a moment. “Must be a mistake,” she says, and shrugs. “Or it got lost in the mail. Or she just forgot. You always forget the people right in front of you.”

Julian turns over the envelope. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he says. “So these people are mostly strangers?”

“I think so. They probably still wonder how they knew her.”

“When my time comes,” Julian says, “I hope I’m as ready as she was.”

The woman next to Maddalena stirs. “Whatever’s next,” she says, “it can’t be worse than here.” She clutches her purse to her chest and stares straight ahead.

“I’ll never be ready,” says Maddalena, turning away from the woman. “Not anymore. There’s too much I want to see.” She leans in toward Julian, and for a moment he feels as though they are alone again in his kitchen, and the snow is falling, and she is about to confide in him. Instead she says, “You can’t bring a baby into this world and not want to live a hundred years.”

“Just you wait,” says the old woman. She puts her hand on Maddalena’s knee and laughs.

By ten o’clock, the crowd has thinned, and Dante Pavani stands beside a slouching Renato at the front door. “See you tomorrow,” people say, on the way out. Julian, Maddalena, and Antonio leave
together. They walk briskly so that Antonio can get home and drive Maddalena to the hospital. She will sleep there tonight, she says, on the chair in the hallway outside the glassed-in room, to make up for the four hours wasted at Rosa Volpe’s viewing. She will wake early, attend the funeral, but skip the interment and the lunch. She refuses to celebrate anyone’s death, even Rosa’s, while her child fights for life. Antonio does not argue.

They stop to part at Eighth and Bancroft. “We’ll see you at the party,” Maddalena says, as she kisses his cheek. “Mamma loves to cook for you.”

“Leave him alone,” Antonio says. He winks at Julian. “Don’t you know he’s a busy man these days? What’s he want with our parties?”

They turn down Eighth. Watching them, Julian finally remembers to say, “I’m praying for little Prima!” but they are already a half block off, rushing arm in arm toward the car.

I
N THE THREE MONTHS
since Julian’s first date with Helen, they have seen two movies, shopped for produce on Union, and drunk wine many evenings with her family in the living room of their home on Franklin Street. He has sat beside her on the piano bench as she played, though he has yet to sing along. Her son, Michael, still eyes him coolly, but this Julian understands. He has better luck with Abigail, who calls him Mister Fabbri and shows him her schoolwork. They play checkers, and she giggles when he says, “Go ahead and king me” in an Irish brogue.