The Saint of Lost Things (40 page)

Papà shakes his head. “These people need to see both brothers,” he says. “There are two names on that sign.”

“I’m not a speaker,” Antonio says, but he cannot ignore his father’s advice, and Mario has already grabbed his wrist. He leads him to the other side of the room, pulls out two empty chairs, stands on one, and helps Antonio up onto the other.

“Attenzione!
” says Mario, in his booming voice, and the room immediately falls to a hush. “It’s almost time, and I want to welcome you to the best New Year’s Eve party in Wilmington, and the grand opening of the best Italian restaurant in the United States of America!” Everyone claps, and Mario takes an exaggerated bow. “Did you enjoy the food?” he asks.

“Yes!” they yell back.

“Tremendous!” he says. “You can stay a little longer, then. Just be sure to tell your friends and neighbors who fed you so good tonight.”

They love him, Antonio thinks. Look how they laugh and take each other’s hands, hanging on his words.

“For the big moment,” Mario continues, “you each should have a glass of
spumante
on your table. It’s free, so drink it. If you want another, you have to buy it yourself.” He shrugs apologetically. “Now. I’m Mario Grasso. All of you know me, one way or the other, but until tonight maybe you never met my brother, Antonio. He’s the older one, the tall and handsome one—” He holds out his hands, to stop the chorus of boos. “It’s true; I’m not blind. I’m happy to be young and intelligent. But what I want to say is, without this man, there would be no Al Di Là restaurant. My heart would be in pieces on the floor. And worse than that, we’d all have to eat at Trattoria Renato tonight, where I hear the roaches do the cooking.”

Everyone laughs. A waiter rushes over and hands Antonio and Mario two full glasses.

“Many people asked me the past month, ‘Why don’t you call this place Ristorante Grasso, if you’re so proud of it?’ And I can say, too, this is because of my brother. If it were up to me only, Grasso would have been in the name for sure. But Antonio reminded me of something. Back in Santa Cecilia, in the Old Country, the only restaurant in our entire village was called the Al Di Là Café, and he said, ‘Mario, maybe the way to change the luck of the Grasso name is to honor the place we came from.’ So that’s what we did.”

There is applause, and Mario takes another bow. Then, “I’ve already talked too long,” he says. He turns to his brother.
“Fratello,
you want to say Happy New Year to these people who are paying our bills?”

“Eight minutes to go,” someone calls out.

Antonio holds one hand against the wall to keep his balance. Though he has only drunk one glass of wine, he feels dizzy, and the sea of eager faces does not help. Mamma has her hand over her heart, as if to keep it from bursting. Beside her, Papà smokes a cigarette, which he does only when he’s nervous. In the back corner, Signora Fiuma takes the glass from her husband, who has already begun to drink it. Ida’s brother hoists his curly-haired daughter on his shoulders, and, behind him, Giulio Fabbri has one arm around his Irish girlfriend, the other around her daughter. Maddalena, more anxious than Antonio, hides behind Ida. Whoever is not in this room tonight—Renato, Cassie, Buzzy, Mr. Hannagan, Gino Stella—might as well not exist. Lock them in a closet, Antonio thinks, and forget you ever knew them.

“I don’t know what to say,” he begins, as he takes out the prepared speech from his pocket. The crowd laughs, and the laughter immediately relaxes him, though he did not mean this as a joke. “I did have these words written down, yes, but—” He glances at the paper, then stuffs it back in his pocket. “They’re not so great. I’m not the speaker my brother is. I just want to thank every one of you for coming here. And one thing especially. I was outside a few hours ago, and I was looking at this place from the street, with all of you inside. And I was thinking, how did you get so lucky, Antonio Grasso? You come from a nowhere village. You didn’t have much school. All your life you wanted two things. You wanted to open a restaurant for your father, to honor him. And you wanted your beautiful wife, Maddalena, to have a baby. Now look, here are the two things, right in front of your face. If you work twenty-four hours a day for the next hundred years, still you won’t deserve this luck.”

People point and wave at the Grasso table. Papà waves back, lifts his glass. But Maddalena, still half-hidden, covers her face. Ida
pulls her to her side. If Antonio were braver, or more drunk, he’d tell the crowd the full story: how God had tried to take her, and that, if He’d succeeded, there would be no joy left in the world—no reason to eat or drink or welcome any new year. No reason to put hope in a restaurant, or any future at all. But he has already said too much, and, in these heady moments before the great promise of midnight, no one wants to hear a sad story, no matter how happy the ending.

“11:57!” Angelo calls from the bar. He turns up the radio, and they can hear the distant voice of an announcer through the roar of the Times Square crowd.

Ida grabs Maddalena’s hand and leads her toward the front of the room. Maddalena stops, and goes back for the baby. They stand in front of Antonio and Mario, who remain atop the chairs. Nunzia and Nina appear and grab their father around the knees. The crowd rushes back and forth across the room, talking over each other, calling out names, clamoring to find their husbands and wives, reaching for drinks, stuffing bread and pizza and olives in their mouths, finishing off their wine. Mario raises his arms and waves them around like a conductor. “To me, this is the most beautiful music in the world,” he says to Antonio.

“Fifty-eight!”

Antonio rests his hand on Maddalena’s shoulder and, carefully, bends to kiss her. Now that he’s made his speech, his hunger returns. Soon he will sit at the table like a king and have the waiters bring him a feast. “I didn’t embarrass you, did I?” he asks.

Maddalena shakes her head. She wears the new perfume he gave her for Christmas, her first gift paid for with his own money. If he could, he’d buy her ten new dresses, walk her through Wanamaker’s without looking at the price tags. He’d drive her to New York City and spend the night in a hotel. Someday, someday.

“Fifty-nine!”

“You covered your face,” Antonio says. “I thought—I’m sorry to call so much attention.”

“I wasn’t embarrassed,” says Maddalena. She looks at him. There is lipstick on her teeth, and she’s missing an earring. “I was just crying a little.”

Behind her, the throwing of confetti. A group of old ladies forms a circle, as if for a tarantella. They lift their arms above their heads, march around a table, and start counting down from ten.

“I was proud of you,” Maddalena says.

19
Salta!

O
N SUNDAYS IN THE SUMMER,
the Al Di Là is closed and the family drives to Wildwood. Soon they won’t all be able to fit into the Chevy, but for now they make it work: the men and little Nunzia in the front seat; Maddalena, Prima, Ida, and Nina in the back. When Antonio or Mario can’t get away—because, even on its day off, the restaurant is needier and more starved for attention than a baby—Julian comes along. On the days everyone can make it, Julian follows in Helen’s brother’s car, and Maddalena spends most of the trip checking the rearview mirror, thinking how strange it looks for a woman to be driving a man around. Mamma Nunzia always stays home, unwilling to miss church to make the early start to the Jersey shore. She uses the day to cook the tomato sauce for the week, change the linens and tend the garden. If she feels up to it, she will take a few minutes to sit on the porch with Signora Fiuma.

This summer, 1956, is the first without Papà Franco. One night last fall, at dinner, he suddenly turned his bowl of wedding soup into his lap and slumped in his chair. His lower lip drooped to one side. His eyes stayed open and his heart was beating, but he did not move. The ambulance took him to St. Francis Hospital, where he lay pale and unresponsive. Though the doctor offered little hope he
would survive the stroke, no one believed him. They had seen what happened to Maddalena. They had faith. Over four nights at St. Francis, they brought his favorite dishes for when he woke: polenta with butter and sausage, fried eggplant, lasagna with extra hard-boiled eggs. The covered dishes sat untouched on the win-dowsill. On the fifth night, he was gone.

Papà Franco had loved the beach. The summer before, he hadn’t missed a single one of these Sunday trips. Nunzia would ride on his lap, and he’d point out buildings as they crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge. “I helped build that,” he’d say. “In 1932, when I first came over.” Or, “An Italian owns that tall one; can you believe it?” He never went in the water—the motion of the waves upset his stomach, and he couldn’t swim—but he liked to sit on a bench on the boardwalk and watch the girls. He’d smile at the pretty ones, ask their names, and tell them he was the famous Italian singer Ezio Pinza. When the wind kicked up, he’d take out a comb and run it through his thick white hair. “Who needs money, with a free show like this?” he’d say to his sons, when they came to get him at the end of the day. “God knew what he was doing.”

The beach is crowded today, the first Sunday after the Fourth of July. Wildwood seems to grow more popular each week, mostly with teenagers, and Maddalena wonders if they should try the Delaware beaches sometime. Or they could try Atlantic City again, though in recent years its beauty has faded, and the once-thrilling horses diving at the Steel Pier now just make her sad. Maddalena does not enjoy crowds now that she can no longer fit into a regular bathing suit. She is forced to wear this polka-dot tent, with its high waist and long, flowing pleats, to cover her enormous middle.

Ida wears a suit that matches Maddalena’s, though she is two months further along. She spreads an old white sheet on the sand, and Mario weighs it down with shoes and a cooler. He takes out six wineglasses from the pillowcases in which they’ve been wrapped
for the journey and starts pouring. He waves hello to an older couple whom they have seen here many times before. Maddalena arranges her and Antonio’s sheet beside Mario and Ida’s, so that they are between Helen and Julian.

Giulio,
Maddalena keeps forgetting to say. She will never get used to it. Helen has convinced him to change his name back to the one his parents chose, as if that will help soothe his heart. If Helen marries him, Maddalena thinks, then maybe she will have the right to suggest such a thing. Though Helen hasn’t admitted it out loud, she’s one of those women who believes her opinion matters as much as any man’s, and that she’s as aware as Julian of the state of the world. When the beach conversations turn to politics or integration or an article in the Sunday newspaper, she’s the first to make a judgment. And Julian, who once argued with Antonio over the smallest point, never disagrees with her. Maddalena has seen him glance at Helen before taking a stand on an issue and, when she disapproved, immediately take it back. Look at him now: “You’re right, darling,” he says, about the ending of
The Searchers,
which they saw last weekend at the Queen. “I didn’t think of it that way.” All Maddalena can do is shake her head.

I miss you, she wants to tell him. I’ve always had a husband, but you were my first friend in this country. She wants to ask him about this beach: how it got its name, how many miles it stretches, the history of New Jersey compared to Delaware and Pennsylvania. She wants to show him the list of Prima’s first words, which she keeps in the top drawer of her nightstand. But he must think her silly now, her and her questions. So instead she says, “John Wayne must be a millionaire, all those movies he makes.”

For lunch they pass around fresh bread from Lamberti’s—the exclusive baker for the Al Di Là—mortadella and prosciutto from Angelo’s, and a large chunk of
parmigiano.
For dessert there are peaches and watermelon, and a dried-out cake from Helen that is
some sort of Irish specialty. They dunk the peaches in the wine, the cake in a thermos of American coffee.

The outdoors, the beach especially, works magic on Prima. If only Maddalena had discovered this earlier in the child’s life, she might have spared herself and Antonio many sleepless nights. But she’d discovered it only last year, just after Prima’s first birthday, when she’d nursed her on the porch on the first humid evening of the summer. Indoors, Prima always had trouble feeding, but the moment Maddalena stepped into the fresh air of the porch, she’d relaxed. Quickly Maddalena learned that, when the baby woke in the middle of the night, only a walk outside under the grape arbor, or up and down the sidewalk, could calm her. On the beach last summer, Prima never cried when the wind whipped sand at her face; she simply shut her eyes and waited while Maddalena wiped the little granules from her cheek. Now that she has learned to walk, she is fearless. If Maddalena does not watch her at every moment, she will chase a seagull or another child or nothing at all into the waves.

This kind of work—the protection of Prima, the changing and washing of her diapers, the rubbing of cream on her rashes—has come as easily to Maddalena as sewing or greeting guests at the Al Di Là. Those other jobs, though, do not fill her. Only Prima fills her. She can get both of her little hands in her mouth at once and nibble them until Prima laughs so hard the tears come. Her fingers are plump and soft, her nails like perfect seashells. How could Maddalena have thought she had any purpose on earth other than to mother this girl and the children who will come after her? Let the men make the money, she thinks. Let the abandoned Russian girls model dresses in Philadelphia. When Maddalena leaves the Golden Hem each night, she does not miss the angry thrum of the sewing machines, or the musty air, or the ache in her fingers. What’s to long for in Mr. Gold’s barking, his frequent competitions, or even the bus
ride she once loved, when she has this little miracle to feast on at home?