The Saint of Lost Things

by Christopher Castellani

  “A small audience here at Café Grasso,” Mario says. “Compared to the restaurant. But look: just as happy.”

  “And your sister-in-law?” Julian asks. “Didn’t you say she—”

  “Maddalena?” asks Mario, in a low voice. “Stomachache.” He nods toward the upstairs, then turns to the crowd. “If I can have your attention, Signore e Signori!”

  He succeeds only in waking his uncle. He kicks off his shoes, pulls his sport coat up to his neck like a blanket, and repositions himself on the couch.

  “Signore e Signori!” Mario says again, loudly, and knocks on the coffee table with his palm. “Attenzione!” This time they hush. “Welcome to the grand opening of the Grasso Cabaret!”

  Antonio stares expressionless at his brother while the women in the doorway smile amid the clapping and laughter.

  “Ida,” Mario continues. He ticks his head toward his wife. “Tell them if I’m lying. Don’t I say to everyone: The day Signor Giulio Fabbri came into Mrs. Stella’s was the best day since I became a partner?”

  “That’s the truth,” Ida says.

  Mario pats Julian on the back then checks his watch. His thick gold and diamond ring sparkles in the light. “Now that it is officially Christmas Day, in the Year of our Lord 1953, I want to give you all a very special gift. Those of you who have heard Signor Fabbri play know his beautiful music; those of you who have not heard him”—here he stops, puts on a puzzled expression—“Why haven’t you heard him? Why aren’t you at Mrs. Stella’s?”

  The crowd laughs.

  “Too expensive!” someone calls out.

  “Sauce is too sweet!” says someone else.

  “Silenzio!” says Mario, with a grin. “We don’t want you cafoni anyway. But seriously—”

  A shadow appears at the top of the stairs. As the floorboards creak, the shadow dips and stretches along the wall. The sister-in-law. Maddalena. It must be. But why is she hiding? Maybe she is dying, Julian thinks, and the stomachache is the symptom that confirmed it. This would explain the stricken Antonio, the grim Ida. Or maybe Maddalena has just learned that her husband took up with one of the fast girls at Renato’s Pizzeria. Now she must martyr herself in her room and leave Antonio to explain her absence.

  “If we’re lucky,” Mario is saying. He pinches Julian’s arm. “I believe Signor Fabbri will even sing a few verses.”

  “I’ll leave the singing to Mr. Como,” Julian says, lowering his head. His shoes are scuffed and dull. A thread sticks out from his right pant leg. Then he finds his courage. “The songs are for you to sing, not me,” he says. “You will know all the words.”

  He slides his finger the length of the accordion keys. He’s not prepared for how loud the instrument sounds in this room, which is less than half the size of Mrs. Stella’s. “Sing along!”

  They clap. Julian bows and begins the first verses of “Tu Scendi dalle Stelle”—the easiest and most famous song he knows—and immediately they join in. Mario crosses the room to stand beside his father. The old man is in his seventies now—older than Julian’s father had been—but his skin is smooth and his hair thick, moon-white, and carefully parted in a rolling wave. He seems a decade younger than Ernesto Fabbri, who had been wrinkled and bald the last fifteen years of his life.

  Julian plays “Some Enchanted Evening” and, as best he can, “Come on-a My House.” Ida and Signora Grasso gaze at him eagerly, their smiles unflinching as statues’. The shadow at the top of the stairs does not move. Julian has fixated on it. Once, an arm reaches down and pinches the ear of one of the little boys, who is pulling the hair of the girl who sits in front of him. On the arm are gold bracelets. During the refrain of “Mona Lisa,” when a leg slips below the line of the ceiling, he holds the final note longer than he should. She wears not a sick person’s housecoat or a mourner’s black, but a ruffled blue dress and heels. Possibly someone is punishing her, Julian thinks, and again finds Antonio’s troubled face.

  It is getting late, and the energy of the sing-along is waning. “I have one more song for you,” says Julian to the crowd. “The finale!” They perk up. The problem is that he has not yet decided on the song. A full minute passes in awkward silence as he searches his mind for the perfect close. It is not until he sees Signora Grasso untie her apron that he decides.

  “This beautiful song is for our hostess and spectacular cook,” he says, extending his hand to her. “Because of you, Signora, tonight I am ten pounds heavier and a hundred times happier.” He plays a flourish on the keys.

  Mario raises his glass to his mother, and Ida rushes around the table to pour refills. Julian waits for their full attention before he begins. He knows this song, “Mamma,” so well that his fingers and arms move more by memory than will. He slows the pace of the first verse to extend the emotion. Everyone sings along with their full voices, which rise and fall more gloriously than the church choir’s. At the chorus, Julian, too—unconsciously, at first—joins in. Once the words are out of his mouth, though, floating out over the table, to the ceiling, up the stairway, he cannot stop himself. Someone calls out, “Bravo, Giulio! Finally!”

  Mario’s mouth opens and closes and his arms reach across his brother’s shoulders. It is the last thing Julian sees before the room blurs. He shuts his eyes. The tree lights become little stars. By the time he reaches the second verse, everything else has fallen away: the voices of the singers, the syncopation of their fingers on the table, the children giggling. He is alone with the music and the words:

  Mamma, I miss the days when you were near to guide me,

  Those happy days when you were here beside me.

  Safe in the glow of your love

  Sent from the heavens above,

  Nothing can ever replace

  The warmth of your tender embrace

  Mamma, until the day when we’re together once more

  I live in these memories . . .

  Maybe he sings the song all the way through twice, maybe three times. Or it could be just once. He cannot be certain. Whether he sings in Italian or English is also unclear to him.

  Time passes, and he opens his eyes. Gradually the blur comes into focus: the candles flicker in their sconces; the brass pendulum swings on the wall clock; tilted heads watch him, their eyes wide and glassy. Concerned. Mouths set in flat lines. Maddalena, now fully visible on the stairs among the pack of children, holds her hands over her face.

  When Julian reaches the final, desperate cry of “Mamma!” the applause begins. He abandons the remaining notes and releases his grip on the bellows of the accordion. Waving a white handkerchief, Signora Grasso leads the pack that comes toward him. She dabs the handkerchief at his eyes. Apparently he has been crying. Still dizzy, his cheeks flushed and wet with tears, he shakes hands with the rush of strangers: bright flashes of lipstick, wide noses, a beard, voices declaring, “Bravo! Bravissimo!” They thank him over and over. One says, “I’m very sorry.” An arm rubs his sweaty back. He tries to keep his balance. He glances up at the stairs again, but Maddalena is gone. The children point at him.

  “Thank you” is all he can say. “Grazie tanto.” Politely he pushes through the crowd toward the kitchen, his eyes fixed on his frayed pant leg and the wavy pattern in the wood floor. The guests are reaching for their coats.

  Antonio recognizes the look on his face. “It’s upstairs,” he says.

  Julian steps over the children and is grateful when he sees that the door to the bathroom is open. He shuts and locks it. Everything is white and clean as a hospital—the stacks of towels, the cabinets, the small porcelain sculpture of Venus on the ledge of the tub. In the lights from the bulbs around the mirror, his skin appears a sickly yellow. But maybe his skin is and has always been a sickly yellow. Maybe he is as old and sad and foolish as he looks.

  He runs a towel under cold water and covers his face. Still the tears come. They are not for himself, for his humiliating display, but for his parents, Maria and Ernesto Fabbri. They are not alive. They are n
ot at peace. They are not standing by the window in their little house on the other side of Union Street. They are anxiously wandering heaven, their eyes cast down, waiting for their son to make a life for himself. Never will Julian find their proud, familiar faces in a crowd of strangers. If only he’d been braver, less content, less lazy, while they lived, they might now be able to rest.

  They pity him, those people downstairs knocking around, kissing each other, slinging their children over their shoulders. That poor lonely man, they’re whispering, don’t we know a girl who might let him take her on a date, someone plain and lonely herself, with a fondness for music? Surely the neighborhood has been talking like this since his first days at Mrs. Stella’s, asking, Doesn’t he have other family, in Italy, or Philadelphia? Doesn’t he have anyone?

  But Julian has never asked a woman on a date, nor does he have other family who matter—not in the Old Country, not anywhere. Only the dark angels, so far removed from his father’s line that no one remembers how they earned the titles of aunt and cousin. Both his father’s brothers, and at least one great-uncle, joined the priesthood. Julian’s mother had been an orphan, raised by nuns outside Naples. His baby sister is long dead. If he invited all his friends in the world to dinner, he could seat them at the card table in Mario Grasso’s kitchen and still have chairs left over.

  He sits on the toilet, the face cloth cooling his skin. He asks his parents’ forgiveness for the freedom he has felt the past three months—for the hours he passed on the porch in the pleasant late summer or at Renato’s and Mrs. Stella’s, without a single memory of them invading his thoughts. Once, he stood at their graves and worried about a character in the book he’d brought along for the walk. How could he have conceived of a happy life—playing “Santa Lucia” in a tacky restaurant!—in a world without them? His behavior has been shameful. When he gets back to Seventh Street, he will cover with black tape the new name he scratched into the back of his accordion. He will never play again for the customers at Mrs. Stella’s. He will never play for anyone.

  From the window, he watches the cars pull away from the curb. Mario and his father stand on the sidewalk, smoking cigars and waving to their friends. The house has gone quiet. Someone runs the kitchen sink. Julian hangs the wet towel on the rack and is about to turn off the light when he hears movement in the room next door. He waits, his hand on the switch. Someone walks from one side of the room to the other, singing to herself in Italian, opening and closing drawers. Maddalena. She comes closer to the wall they share, and he recognizes the song:

  Mamma, solo per te la mia canzone vola

  Mamma, sarai con me, tu non sarai più sola ...

  It is slow, mournful, more of a prayer or a confession. She lingers, as if she knows he is listening through the thin barrier of wood and plaster. He pictures her shoulders pressed against her side of the wall, her head turned toward the window. She has removed her blue dress, her bracelets and high-heeled shoes, and wrapped herself in a blanket. She is remembering Christmastime from her childhood, maybe, when she lay between her parents in their bed waiting for La Befana to fly in on her broomstick. She is not dying, Julian decides. It is not as simple as that. She is lonely. She has lost someone she loves, and cannot imagine how she will face the years ahead.

  II

  PRIMA

  9

  Epiphany

  THROUGH THE WINDSHIELD, Antonio sees Ida rushing down the front steps of their house, waving what appears to be a wooden spoon. He gets out of the car and carefully approaches her. She is a sleepwalker and has been known to wake in a bewildered rage. Once, she walked all the way to the flower shop in the middle of the night, rang the doorbell, and smacked Fran DiNardo across the face.

  “Antonio!” Ida says, when he steps into the light of the street-lamp. It is May, the air warm and fragrant. She runs toward him, barefoot, waving the spoon. “Where have you been? The baby is coming!”

  He shakes his head and smiles. “It’s too early,” he says, and lays his hand on her shoulder. At arm’s length, he gives her a gentle shake. “Wake up.”

  “I’m not asleep!”

  Antonio looks at her. She wears an apron, not a nightgown. Her hair is not up in pins. “She has another month to go, at least—”

  “Tell that to her.”

  He rushes into the house, precious time already lost, but still thinking there must be some mistake. “It’s too early,” he repeats. “What’s going on? Is Maddalena all right?”

  “I don’t know anything,” says Ida. “Everyone’s at the hospital, but do you think they call me? It’s been over an hour.”

  He takes the stairs two at a time. He hears her ask, “Where have you been, anyway? It’s one o’clock in the morning.”

  Quickly Antonio removes his clothes and grabs one of his good long-sleeved dress shirts from the closet. As he’s buttoning, he reconsiders. Maddalena would want him to save this shirt for church. So he puts the first shirt back on. “Finish making it dirty,” she would say.

  He gets to Wilmington Hospital in five minutes. He doesn’t remember the roads he takes or where he parks. He pushes through the glass doors, past the women in white gathered at the reception desk. They must notice his grease-stained work pants, the mud he’s tracked onto the marble floor. After one of them pleasantly directs him to the maternity ward “on three,” he breaks into a run, nearly colliding with a gurney left in the middle of the hall. Repeatedly he presses the up arrow on the elevator, then takes the stairs.

  The maternity nurse is less agreeable. Possibly she smells the liquor on his breath, the foul odor steaming from his armpits. Can she blame him for sweating? Does she not know his baby came too early? If he’s here now, how can it matter what he’s been doing the past few hours?

  “Grasso,” he repeats for her. “G-R-A—” She flips through a thick stack of clipboards. Is every woman in Wilmington having a baby tonight? Then Antonio sees his father emerge from a room at the far end of the hall. He goes to him.

  His father’s face is serious, his hands deep in his pockets. The room from which he has come is not one in which Maddalena lies on a bed, cradling their baby at her breast. It is a waiting room. His mother sits in the corner, eyes closed, lips moving, her rosary pinched between two fingers. Strangers are scattered around her reading newspapers, arms folded, asleep, staring.

  “What’s going on?” Antonio asks. His mouth has gone dry. “Where is she?”

  His father takes his arm and leads him away from the room, down the narrow hallway. Up here the floors are cheap linoleum, speckled ivory and tan. It is a gloomy place, unfit to welcome new life. They lean against a closet door beside a piece of chrome medical equipment the size of a safe, with an octopus of plastic tubes sticking out from the top. Antonio shudders. What use could there be for this contraption in a maternity ward?

  “You have a healthy daughter,” his father says. But there is no joy on his face.

  A daughter. A girl. A healthy baby girl so desperate to see the world that she came four weeks before her time. He lets out a deep breath and steadies himself. He grabs the back of his head with his hand, squeezes, and looks down. “And Maddalena?”

  His father is silent. Then he clears his throat. Antonio raises his head.

  “Not so good, figlio mio.” he says. “After the baby came, there was some kind of problem. Bleeding inside. Could be a small problem or a big one, but the doctor doesn’t know for sure. He doesn’t know how to stop it.”

  God forgive me, Antonio thinks. Everything is my fault. If I’d been with her, there would be no problem, big or small. If I’d been a better husband, she’d be safe.

  “The baby came too fast, is what I think. Less than an hour and it was over. The doctor said Maddalena was very brave. But now—”

  His mother emerges from the waiting room, tucks her rosary in her dress pocket, and comes toward Antonio with her arms outstretched. She has never looked so irreversibly old. Even her palms are streaked with wrinkles. “
O Dio!” she says, clutching his face.

  “She won’t wake up,” says his father.

  ANTONIO BEGAN THAT YEAR, 1954, in darkness. On New Year’s Eve, all of Eighth Street lost electricity, and for three nights he and his family wandered like mummies through the candlelit house. Arms out, they tripped and collided with each other, and before it was over they sent crashing to the floor two wine decanters, a lamp, and a vase of silk flowers. The kids huddled with Ida on the couch, whimpering, afraid of every ghostly shadow that appeared on the wall.

  “It’s only Zia,” Ida would say, as Maddalena creaked slowly down the stairs. She had trouble sleeping. One of the nights, as she tossed and turned, she said, more to herself than to Antonio: “I miss the radio. The voices calm me down.”

  “I’m not an electrician,” Antonio told her.

  Secretly, he was in no hurry for the power company to rescue them. A generator provided heat and hot water; the gas oven cooked their food. Why did they need to see one another? So his mother could tell him he looked tired, or ask, “What’s bothering you, anyway?” As if one simple answer could explain his troubles.

  Antonio no longer worried about Milty Gold. It was clear the moment he met him that the man was no Buzzy, not with that bush of hair in his ears, his feminine chattering with the women, his dainty fingers fumbling for the pocket notebook. Antonio almost felt sorry for him. But he’d been forced to make a point, and the point had been made. He and Gianni had had a good laugh about it afterward, remembering the captive look on Gold’s face, his mad dash out the door, his near-tumble down the icy stone steps.

  The day after Christmas, Antonio had sent Maddalena back to work armed with a bottle of Chianti as a gift, though Gold had not taken a sip of the very same wine two nights before. It mattered little to Antonio whether Gold saw the Chianti as a peace offering or as a reminder of his rudeness in leaving a full glass on the table. In fact, Antonio wanted Milty Gold to puzzle over the gift, just as he had wanted him to puzzle over the avalanche of kindness he showed him on Christmas Eve. The way to control people like him—most people, actually—was to keep them guessing whether you loved or hated them. You had to give them an equal number of reasons to think either way. People were cautious in such circumstances; they went back and forth as they weighed the evidence; and in the meantime, you got what you needed from them. You failed only if you let on too soon how you truly felt. Then they had something on you—your love or your hate for them an easily exploitable weakness—and could play you for all you were worth.