The Saint of Lost Things (41 page)

Antonio swims out far, too far for Maddalena’s comfort. She tries not to panic when she loses sight of him. He teases her by staying underwater for many minutes, swimming off, then reappearing on the opposite side of the rocks that divide the two ends of this stretch of beach. When he reaches the other side, he jumps out of the water, calls her name, and opens his arms for her to join him. Maddalena shakes her head. Like Papà Franco, she has never liked the ocean. She stays on the edge of the surf, cooling her toes, letting Prima pull her along.

Antonio walks carefully toward her over the carpet of broken shells in the sandbar. No matter how many times she has seen him in his blue bikini, or less, she still has to turn away when his body presents itself. She cannot look directly at it—the hair on his upper chest, his long muscular arms, the bulge between his legs that gives everything away—and risk the thrill that pulses through her. Someone will see it on her face. Since Prima, her husband’s beauty has had this effect. Since Prima, she has noticed that, at thirty-five, Antonio can pass for any of these American boys around her, wrestling and hoisting one another onto their shoulders. Only the slight recession in the hair above his forehead, and, if you look close, the delicate crease in the skin between his eyebrows, suggests he might not be twenty years old.

She hands him his towel and stares at the ground as he bends to dry his legs first, then his stomach, chest, arms, and finally his face and hair. “How’s my angel?” he says, and lifts Prima high in the air. He holds her before him, spins her around, and nuzzles his face in hers. “Never says boo, this one,” he says, handing her back. He glances over at Nunzia and Nina, who rarely let anyone but Ida or Mario touch them. “Her cousins could take a lesson.”

“We got lucky,” Maddalena says. “For now. We’ll see in a few years.”

“Does she need a change?” Antonio asks. He holds onto the ends of his towel, which is draped around his neck. “After you do it, I can take her up to the little pool.”

“She’s fine,” says Maddalena. “You should relax. It’s your day off.” She smiles at him. “Go have some wine before Helen finishes the bottle.”

He wraps one arm around her waist and lays a hand on her stomach. “You’re OK in this sun?” he says. “You don’t feel dizzy?”

“No.”

“You ate enough?”

“As much as I could,” she says.

“Good.” He pulls her closer, squeezing Prima between them, though she makes no fuss.

“You can’t worry all the time,” she says. “Dr. Barone says there’s a good chance—”

“Dr. Barone,” he says, and shakes his head. “Because he’s right so much—with Papà, with you the first time. I can’t listen to doctors anymore. They make everything up as they go along.” This is how he gets whenever there is talk of the new baby: his face flushed, his eyes wide. There is no reassuring him. “I won’t stop worrying for one second,” he says. “Not until it’s over. Not even then.”

“I’m not worried,” Maddalena says. She has told this to Antonio many times, since the day they learned she was to have another child, but it is not quite the truth. She senses danger every time the child moves inside her. At any moment she expects the slash of pain, the fall to her knees, the long darkness. For comfort, she turns to Fortunata, the woman in
Il Sogno della Principessa,
which she has finally finished. Fortunata always believes that God will protect her, even at the end of the book, when she learns she is not a princess
after all. Fortunata comes from poor, ordinary parents, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She doesn’t need money, or the castle, or the jeweled robes so cruelly stripped from her by the barbaric guards. She has her young son, and the memory of the slain prince who loved her, and God’s hand in hers as she makes her way alone and barefoot into the thick woods. Maddalena has recounted this story to Mamma Nunzia, who believes in this same sort of God, even in her grief. If she told anyone else, Antonio especially, that this story soothed her, he would think her silly. Ida would give her a blank stare. Helen would laugh. Only Julian, if she could reach him, might understand.

Antonio releases her, gives Prima’s cheeks a gentle pinch, then walks over to his family. He can sit still for maybe ten minutes, and then he will need to walk the boardwalk or find a group of young men with whom to kick around a soccer ball. Used to be, when they took trips to Atlantic City, he’d beg her to play in the waves with him. The one time she agreed, he tickled her thighs underwater and squeezed her behind and put his hand between her legs. She felt no desire for him then. Afraid and embarrassed, she ran out of the water in tears.

Now she walks up and down the length of the beach, smiling politely at the people waving and making funny faces at Prima. She tries to eavesdrop on conversations and pick up new words. Her English is better than it was when she first started at the Golden Hem, but after her weeks in the hospital she forgot much of what she learned. She has made no new friends and speaks mainly to Ida in Italian. At the Al Di Là, her job is to play the part of the young immigrant from the village, to hide the American in her. Sometimes the customers ask her just to talk, say whatever comes to mind in her native language, and she stands there at the table telling stories about Santa Cecilia, though they don’t understand a word.

“You are so
vain,”
a woman says to her friend, as Maddalena passes. It does not sound like a compliment. “What a
travesty,”
says a man, his face blocked by the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
and shakes his bald head. She used to know that word,
Inquirer. Philadelphia
is hard enough, with its strange
ph
s. She will never get used to how it looks, no matter how many times she has taken the bus into the city. What do Americans have against the
f?
In Italian, every letter sounds the same wherever you put it.

She stops to watch two couples standing on the edge of the rocks. The women seem to be in their late twenties, the men quite a bit older. They are having some sort of argument. Maddalena walks up the sandbar. The men speak clear English, but the women have an accent. They wear tight one-piece bathing suits with frilly skirts that don’t cover their knees. They fold their arms across their chests, shivering.

“Salta!
” says one of the men, and claps his girlfriend on the back.
“Salta!
” he repeats. Then, to make sure: “Jump, right?
Salta
is jump?”

“
Sì
!” says the girlfriend.
“Ma abbiamo paura!
We are afraid!”

Italians. Maddalena smiles, looks closer. There is something familiar about the women. She has seen their faces before. On the bus? In a photograph? Though plain, the women are pretty enough to be actresses. Maybe they have escaped New York City for the weekend to join their boyfriends here.

Suddenly one of the men—the bigger one, who has a tattoo on his forearm—grabs his girlfriend from behind and lifts her up by the waist. The rocks look slippery, and, out of instinct, Maddalena grips Prima’s hand more tightly. The woman kicks her arms and laughs as the man carries her toward the edge.

“No!” she screams, and now many heads on the beach turn to watch them.

“In you go!” the man says, and tosses her into the water.

Before her boyfriend can do the same, the other woman leaps off the edge. Midair, she calls out “Silvia!” and immediately Maddalena realizes who they are. Silvia and Sandra Leone. Vito’s sisters, who moved to Philadelphia twenty years ago. They resemble him: the shape of their heads, their skinny arms and legs. One of their faces is Vito’s; the other took after their mother. Though they could not possibly recognize Maddalena, she turns and rushes from the sandbar, pulling Prima along. She stops to look back only once, to watch them splash in the water, happy, it seems, with their American men. She wishes she could go up to them. “We come from the same village,” she would say, and, lowering her head, tell them her name. They’d wrap their arms around her, marveling at their great luck in finding a sister in America. They’d insist that she visit them some Sunday on Market Street. They’d ask questions about her family, and then, all at once, their faces would go dark. They’d remember the story of their brother’s first engagement, that it was Maddalena who’d traded his heart for a trip across the ocean, and the happy reunion would end.

“How long until we go?” Maddalena says, when she finds her family among the patchwork of blankets.

“I’m ready now,” says Mario.

“What’s wrong?” Antonio asks Maddalena. “You don’t look right.”

“I’m just tired all of a sudden,” she says.

“We’re going to stay a bit longer,” Julian says, his eyes on Helen. “Right?”

The hours have gone by quickly. It is pleasant to get away from the city for a while, and Maddalena is always disappointed, even today, when it is time to pack their things. Still, she enjoys the ride home through the New Jersey woods, those miles thick with tall pines and the smell of campfires. The girls will fall asleep across her lap, and allow the grown-ups to discuss why Julian still hasn’t proposed to Helen, and speculate that it is because he is waiting for
Helen to propose to him. Mamma Nunzia will have Sunday dinner waiting for them when they get home, and at seven o’clock they will all gather in the living room to hear the Italian radio program.

As they walk to the car, Antonio starts in on their usual game. “All the way down there,” he says to Maddalena, pointing toward the dunes. “With the sunflowers in the front. That’s the one we’ll buy.”

“The porch is too small,” Maddalena says. “Look further down—the gray one with the veranda.”

“You know I don’t like gray,” says Antonio. “It’s depressing.”

Since he opened the Al Di Là, her husband has become a talker. Not only at the beach, but everywhere: in the morning before he leaves for work, in bed when she is trying to sleep. He walks her back to Eighth Street on Saturday nights, after the dinner rush ends and he no longer needs her to charm the customers. They take the long way home, stopping every few blocks to lean against the streetlamps and gossip about the regulars and the cooks and Bruno the waiter. He tells her his vision of their future, and the light around him changes. A house in Wildwood, a Cadillac, a grandfather clock, Catholic school for the children—they will have all this and more, he says, and Maddalena has come to believe him.

On the boardwalk, he stops before Papà Franco’s old bench. He stands Prima on top of it and asks if she remembers him. Of course she does not. She can only squirm and clap and point at the teenagers hopping barefoot on the hot planks. Still, Antonio tells her about her
nonno,
how he loved this beach, this view. “Be good to me,” Antonio says to the passing teenagers, his arms outstretched, in a perfect impersonation of his father’s voice. “I might not be here next Sunday.” Then he scoops his daughter back into his arms, lifts her over a scatter of broken glass, and sets her down in the shade on the other side.

Soon Prima will be a little lady, and Maddalena will have her to turn to and talk with, like a friend. They will speak English to each
other in public, Italian at home or when they don’t want the Americans to understand. They will have many secrets, precious as rubies. She will help her keep watch over the second child, who, if God chooses, will be the first Grasso son born in the new country.

Rarely does Maddalena allow herself the pleasure of such a thought. A son! But today, with so many ghosts hovering on the beach, she seeks the comfort of the possibility. He will be named Franco, unless Mario and Ida beat them to it; otherwise, they will call him Antonio. Totò for short. The pride of his father, who will teach him to run a restaurant and play
scopa
and drive a convertible. Life will be easy for him, Maddalena thinks, for all the Grasso children. They will lead lives unrecognizable to hers, never longing for stone or mountains or olive trees, knowing only brick and skyscrapers and perfect green lawns. Words will come easily to them. They will marry late and spend their long youths choosing. She wishes them not luck or money; they will have both, as much as they want, or is necessary. Instead she wishes them fearlessness in all things: in love, yes, but also in work, in expectation, in the leap from the high rocks, in looking back, and in forgetting.

Acknowledgments

Mille grazie,
a thousand thanks, to the following:

My wonderful family and friends, for their constant encouragement. I am privileged to have such patient and loving people in my life.

Michelle Chalfoun, my first reader always, for her vision, insight and generosity.

Antonia Fusco, my supremely wise and gracious editor, for seeing into, through, between, and beyond the words I send her.

Mary Evans, the lucky authors’ agent, for never compromising.

Elisabeth, Craig, Peggy, Michael, Ina, and everyone at Algonquin Books, for their hard work and dedication.

Everyone at Grub Street, first and foremost Eve Bridburg, for their glorious friendship, financial support, and for making this trip significantly less lonely.

Francesco Castellano, for his crucial help with the Italian words in this book.

Steve Almond, Jenna Blum, Scott Heim, Michael Lowenthal, and Heidi Pitlor—amazing authors all—for happy hours, scandalous conversations, long lunches, and expert guidance.