The Saint of Lost Things (9 page)

“And so my wish is to live long enough to learn every fact,” says Mr. Gold, the end of a speech Maddalena has missed. He hops down from the table and walks toward the next group of ladies. “Imagine that! Every fact!”

“What a
chiacchierone,”
Ida whispers, when he’s out of earshot. She’s got a pin between her teeth. She fluffs her pile of stockings, and for a moment, it looks as tall as Maddalena’s. Then it deflates. “He talk-talk-talks like this is a party, but he expects us to get done the same work?” She stands, grabs a handful of stockings from Maddalena’s side and transfers it to hers. “I don’t know how you keep up,” she says, shaking her head. “But I’m glad you do.” She kisses Maddalena on the back of the head. “I’ll be in the ladies’ room. All this talking makes me have to go.”

T
HAT EVENING
, M
ADDALENA
and her family stand at the corner of Union and Eighth, gazing at a glorious display. The lampposts on both sides of the street are wrapped with gold garland and strings of colored bulbs. At the top of each lamppost, a plastic Babbo Natale, his white beard illuminated, waves his red-gloved hand and smiles. If they stand in a certain spot and look at him, he grows brighter and blurrier as the street curves out of the city, as if refracted through a mirror. In the twenty years the Grassos have lived in Wilmington, no one has decorated Union Street so elaborately. A few lights on trees here and there, a plastic star atop a chimney maybe, but nothing like this. Maddalena takes it as a sign that her daydreams, which seemed impossible as recently as this afternoon, might come true after all. Amid this beauty, maybe Antonio will forget the crazy game they’re playing.

Maddalena loops her arm through her mother-in-law’s and rests her head on the fur collar of her coat. For a long time they stand motionless, gazing up and down the street. Nobody says anything. Antonio rubs his chin, his eyes wide as a boy’s. Then he reminds them they are already late for dinner, and suddenly he’s rushing everyone across the street to avoid the oncoming cars.

As an early Christmas gift, Mario has invited them to dinner at Mrs. Stella’s. Maddalena is grateful for the night off, if not for the
menu that awaits her: large bowls of overcooked pasta in watery tomato sauce, fatty lamb chops roasted in a brick oven, pizza with a bland, soggy crust, and a few American dishes like French fries and hamburgers that Papà forbids them to order. Most nights Mario works the floor or the kitchen to earn back what he owes Gino Stella, the principal owner. Gino writes the checks for rent and utilities and supplies, and each month pays protection money in cash to a man named Roberto Fante. Every once in a while, Gino brings in his mother to greet the customers and walk among them in her apron. She is here tonight, a round woman no taller than Maddalena’s shoulders. “What a beautiful family you have, Mario!” she says as she takes their coats and leads them to the large table by the window. When she smiles, dimples appear on her cheeks.

Mario can’t sit still. He refills the half-full wineglasses and polishes the unused silver with a linen napkin. Before his father finishes chewing his trout, Mario asks him, “Top quality, Papà, don’t you think? Cooked perfect? You know this afternoon that fish was swimming in the Atlantic?” He wears a tie and has recently clipped his nails. He crouches beside his mother as she brings a forkful of rubbery pasta to her mouth and claps when she proclaims it as good—no, better—than her own. Antonio sits beside Maddalena, but he does not look at her, does not see her move the food around her plate.

“This place will make us a fortune,” Mario says, lowering his voice. “Pretty good, Antonio, don’t you think? Not too bad for your old
fratello.
Soon you’ll come work for me, make this a real family business. I’ll get Grasso in the name if it kills me.”

“I wish you luck,” Antonio says and raises his glass.

He has had too much wine already. He rolls his eyes whenever Mario turns his back, and twice complains to the waiter that the sauce has no taste. Mamma Nunzia kicks him under the table, and for a while he manages a neutral expression.

Mario puts his arm around Maddalena and Antonio. “This meal
is my Christmas gift to all of you,” he says, and squeezes her shoulder. “But if you ask me what I want under the tree this year, what will make me and Ida and my girls the most happy, I’ll tell you: I want my brother and his wife to kiss and make up. Fill this Christmas with joy. What do you say?” He looks back and forth between them. “If not for me, then for the little baby?”

Maddalena lowers her head.

“Sit down, Mario,” Antonio says. “Nobody’s kissing tonight. There’s nothing to make up about.”

“Mind your own business,” Papà tells Mario.

As a sign of comfort, Mamma Nunzia removes her shoe and rubs her foot along Maddalena’s calf. “What’s for dessert?” she asks.

Maddalena excuses herself. In the ladies’ room, she slaps her cheeks to bring back the color, deflate the puffiness. She tugs at the fabric in the waist of her dress. A young woman, thin and pretty, stands beside her, woozily applying lipstick. “Can you tell I’m drunk?” she says to Maddalena’s image in the mirror, and straightens her shoulders.

“A little bit,” Maddalena says, and smiles. Then her stomach growls, loud enough for the woman to hear.

“Your food slow, too, huh? We’ve been waiting an hour. No wonder I’m so light-headed.”

Maddalena nods, washes her hands. Until Antonio speaks to her again, she refuses to eat a healthy meal. Certainly not tonight, here in this tacky restaurant with its cartoon murals of Venice and its chalky bread, with Ida twisting her napkin praying for more customers. In a few days they will have Christmas Eve guests, and Antonio will be forced to put on a better act than the one he’s performing tonight.

“Well, good luck,” Maddalena says to the woman, on her way out.

“Oh, he won’t mind,” she says, still looking in the mirror.

Maddalena returns to find her plate of pasta and veal cutlets—
uneaten but cut-up and rearranged—still on the table after the other plates have been cleared. Gino Stella sits in her chair. “My cooking’s not good enough for you?” he asks her in Italian, with a grin. He does not stand.

“I—”

“Food is like poison to her lately,” says Papà. “Don’t pay any attention.”

“Don’t worry, Maddalena,” Ida says. “The hunger will come.”

She tries to smile. “I’m sorry, Signor Stella,” she says, as Mario rises and offers his chair. “Settimio’s a very fine cook.”

Antonio gives her a quick, empty glance.

“I have good news,” Signor Stella says to Mario. “We have no reservations left in December. Not a single table will be empty. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“You hear that, wife?” Mario says. “You’re going to miss me. You won’t see me at all, not even Christmas Eve dinner. I’ll come home just to drop off the bags of money. Then I’ll leave again.”

“And she’ll spend it all by the time you get back,” says Signor Stella.

Ida crosses herself. “Keep talking like this, then for sure it won’t happen.”

The record player stops in the middle of “Be My Love,” and out of nowhere comes a string of notes from what sounds like a live accordion. The customers turn their heads toward the bar. “Look at this!” says Mamma Nunzia.

Maddalena cranes her neck. A man in the corner wipes his forehead with his sleeve, bows slightly, and starts to play. He’s older, in his forties at least, with a long face and thinning hair. His suit jacket hangs off his shoulders as if he were still expecting to grow into it. She does not know the song, but he plays it beautifully, and before long the crowd nods and sways. Everyone is watching him.
At the next table, a man reaches across to join hands with his wife. When the song ends, the accordion player clears his throat and whispers his name into the microphone, but Maddalena can’t make it out. Everyone claps, and he bows again.

“Not bad, no?” says Gino. “For free this man plays, just so he can spend a few hours in my restaurant and get a good meal. Our Mario here discovered him off the street.”

“I felt sorry for him,” Mario says. He leans forward over the table. “Never married. Father and mother dead. Broke my heart, if you want to know the truth. I think of it as my good deed for the year.” He sits back and takes another drink, closes his eyes as another song begins. “You see what I mean,
fratello?
Life is hard. You should be dancing with your wife, not holding some grudge.”

Antonio stops him with a look.

Maddalena pushes her chair away from the table to get a better view of the man with the accordion. When he plays “Tu Scendi dalle Stelle,” she folds her hands and says a prayer for her family back in Santa Cecilia. They used to sing this song at the end of Midnight Mass, and afterward everyone would spill out onto the streets still singing, repeating the verses over and over. The fire in the torches they carried seemed to flicker to the rhythm of the music, or possibly this was just how she perceived it. She remembers the sadness of finally reaching home, when she had to break from the procession and let the other villagers walk on. She would run to the terrace and listen to the song echo over the hills. Then it would fade, and she’d join her sisters for a game of
tombola.
How little of the world she knew then, to get so excited over a song she could sing any day of the year if she’d wanted! She’ll have to tell Mr. Gold about this, she thinks; he’ll put the torches and the midnight parade in his little book of traditions.

Tonight, only Maddalena and a few customers hum along to
“Tu Scendi dalle Stelle.” It must not be a song familiar to Americans. The accordion player moves his lips to the words. “You don’t let him sing?” Maddalena asks.

“He’s too shy,” Mario says. “Says maybe he’ll join the church choir one day, but that’s it. We tell him he has a good voice—it’s the truth—but he shakes his head. ‘One day,’ he tells us. We’re still waiting. But for now, the accordion is good enough.”

“He wants to sing,” says Maddalena. She notices how he lifts his chin and flutters his eyelids on the high notes. “You can tell.”

“I have an idea,” Ida says. “Another good deed. Let’s invite him to our Christmas Eve.” She turns to Mamma Nunzia. “What do you think? Is there room?”

She shrugs and makes circles with her hand. “What’s one more?”

“Christmas Eve he’s working,” says Mario.

“So, you have to close sometime,” his mother says. “We won’t be awake?”

“I’ll mention it to him,” Mario says, and takes a sip of wine.

“He has no family at all?” Ida asks.

The song ends. During the applause, the accordion player keeps his eyes closed and stands motionless, as if in prayer. After a few moments, he opens his eyes, gives an embarrassed smile, and bows.

“You’re very kind,” he says, so quietly the microphone doesn’t pick it up. But Maddalena can read the words on his lips.

A
FTER DINNER, THEY
walk down Union Street to spend more time among the lights—the women arm in arm, the men in front. They lead them uphill through the neighborhood, where fat red and green bulbs hang from the eaves of the row homes and on the bushes in the front yards. People wave at them from their windows, through the branches of their glittering Christmas trees, all Italians they know from somewhere: Alessandro the produce vendor,
Elena from the bakery, Dellucci the electrician. Whatever a family needs, it can find on this wide hill in the shadow of St. Anthony’s.

Ida shivers and pulls Maddalena closer. “Listen to me,” she whispers. “You have to eat. Antonio is worried about you.”

“He doesn’t look worried.”

“Well, he is.” She guides them over a frozen puddle. “OK, it’s really Mario who’s worried, but Antonio got him thinking.”

“I’m the only one who understands Antonio,” Mamma Nunzia says. “He’s got a problem, that one, and the problem is that his wife is too beautiful. He doesn’t know how to live with it. He thinks he doesn’t deserve you, that someone will steal you. He’s been worried since the day he brought you here.”

“That’s crazy,” says Maddalena.

“And not talking to her, that will help?” Ida asks.

“Yes,” Mamma Nunzia says. “It makes sense to me somehow. If he doesn’t talk, then nothing happens. Everything stays the same until he figures out what to do.”

“The baby will change him,” Ida says. “You should have seen Mario before I had Nunzia—”

“We know,” says Mamma Nunzia. “I was there. And I lived with Mario twenty-two years before you came. No man is the same as another. Maddalena has to plan what she will do if Antonio behaves more like his father. I don’t think he carried Mario in his arms once until he was two years old.”

Ida pinches Maddalena, as if to say, “You see? Never the favorite.”

Maddalena rubs her eyes. She feels dizzy. This is what women do, she thinks. Night after night, we examine our men. We look for patterns in the same stories to predict what they will do next. In the meantime, they play cards and keep secrets, surprise us with a joke when we expect anger, a slap when we lean in for a kiss. After seven
years with Antonio, she has yet to learn all the rules, and the few she’s learned so far have already changed.