The Saint of Lost Things

by Christopher Castellani

  Antonio feels a great fondness for this doctor. He trusts him, as he does most physicians. Their years in medical school, their seen-it-all nonchalance, win him over. To a doctor like this one, the human body is, in fact, simple as a car engine. Has he not opened the hood of the Chevy a thousand times and examined the same faulty parts, the expected wear-and-tear on the valves? What the Chevy is to Antonio, Maddalena is to this man in the white coat: a machine he will, after a few adjustments, eventually get up and running good as new. And that is how it should be: the dispassionate relationship between mechanic and machine, devoid of mystery, independent of faith. He finds this comforting. And, though he won’t admit what he and Brenda have done, he trusts the doctor’s instincts about the power of the maternal bond.

  Until Dr. McMenamin tells Antonio he has never seen a case like Maddalena’s before—and so far, he has not said any such thing—he will wait patiently, as he would if the Chevy needed a new transmission. He will keep reminding himself that his wife is still young, a farm girl healthy and strong as a horse. Women might still die in childbirth in the Old Country, but only because the calendar was stuck on a page a hundred years back. Here, Americans already lived in the future; and in the future, good health was not luck or even one of God’s hard-won rewards. It was an expectation. A right.

  None of this explains why you won’t give your daughter a name, Mario might say. If you’re so sure Maddalena will wake up, why not prove it?

  Because, for all his faith in doctors, for all the calm he maintains, Antonio is far from sure. When he leaves the hospital at night, he no longer knows his destination. He has not slept in his own bed since Maddalena was taken here. He has slept alongside her on the hospital mattress, in the comfortable chair by the window, or he has not slept at all—just kept walking until the sun rose and it was time to make his way to the Ford plant.

  Once, he walked all the way to the neighborhoods across from Wanamaker’s and lay on the grass of a corner lot. The foundation of a new house had just been dug, the concrete perimeter of the basement set in a large square. He gazed into the dark hole and imagined the concrete floor being poured, the wooden beams multiplied and nailed together, the slathering of mortar between the red bricks. Now came the flowered wallpaper, the kitchen tile, Maddalena in velvet gloves and a sequined dress, opening the front door to greet the Christmas Eve guests. How cursed he has been with dreams! This little brick box, the trattoria, the son to carry his name, the blonde Hollywood wife who modeled in Philadelphia and earned per show twice the restaurant’s monthly take. How greedy all these dreams seem now, when his only wish is for Maddalena to do what she’s done every day of their seven years together: open her eyes, say “Antonio,” lay her warm hand on his face.

  There is something else he won’t tell Mario, won’t tell anyone. The baby already has a name. During that recent car ride, when he’d passed Riverview Drive so many times that Maddalena asked why he was driving in circles, they had decided. Primo, they would have called him, had she borne a son. The girl: Prima. Either way, it meant “the first.” It was both the break from tradition—no Antonio Jr., no Franco, no Chiara, after her mother—and the bold declaration of hope that led them to the name. It thrilled them. But how could he bestow such a name upon the girl now, as hope faded, and she faced the possibility of being the only, the last?

  13

  An Unfortunate Romance

  THOUGH JULIAN HAD BOUGHT the atlas with his own money and even scheduled the order of continents to cover, Antonio insisted on teaching the geography lessons. At first.

  He liked to explain the history behind why each country maintained its particular borders. The problem was that most of the time he’d invent the reasons—a war that never occurred, a treaty that had never been signed—and give Julian a look that dared him to say he was wrong. Julian never dared, of course, though it pained him to hear this man tell his wife that Italy had been one unified power since the fall of Rome, that Belgians spoke Belgian, and that the vastness of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans protected them from the threat of the H-bomb. “Look at this,” Antonio said, tracing his finger eastward, then westward, from Moscow to D.C.; “by the time the bomb got here, we’d be halfway to Chicago in the Chevy.”

  “What if they bomb Chicago, too?” she asked.

  It wasn’t long before he grew tired of her questions. He spent ten minutes explaining the varied topography of the western United States, and she looked at him blankly, pointed to the Rockies, and said, “So those are mountains?”

  Antonio shook his head. “Stick to sewing,” he said.

  After spilling wine on Australia—which Maddalena thought bordered on Germany—Antonio declared the lessons pointless and excused himself for the couch. Julian took over.

  “I’m not a very good student,” Maddalena said.

  “Sure you are,” said Julian. “It just takes time. The world is very big.”

  “Maybe having a baby makes you stupid,” she said. “Lately my head gets fuzzy, like I just woke up, even though it’s the middle of the day.”

  “It’s nothing,” Antonio said, matter-of-factly, from the couch. “It’s just your nerves.”

  Julian could not find Santa Cecilia on the map, but Rieti and Avezzano—where Maddalena had traveled many times with her father and sisters—did appear as small dots north and east of Rome. He showed her Foggia and Lucera, the towns closest to the village near Pietrafitta, where he had spent the first four years of his life. He remembered little of the village, he said, only the sheep. His father used to hold him on the backs of the ewes and pretend they were horses. When he thought of Italy, Julian could still feel that tickle of wool on his bare legs.

  Though Maddalena claimed to want to learn about other countries, she spent most of her time on pages 80 and 81: Italy-Sicily-Switzerland. With Julian’s help, she traced the route she took to America: from an unmarked pocket of the Appenines near Sora, southwest to Frosinone, north to Rome, and up the coast to Genoa, over land she was seeing for the first and, in her mind, last time. From Genoa she’d taken the ship three thousand miles to New York City, then traveled 120 more to Wilmington. It surprised her that the distance from her village to Genoa was not much greater than the distance from New York to Wilmington. That second trip, gazing upon the endless expanse of fields and highway, had seemed much longer. When Julian flipped the pages to show the United States and Italy side by side, she drew back; “It’s so small!” she said. Her eyes darted back and forth between the two. “If you compare, you think the people in Italy must be suffocating. But we didn’t know any different. Santa Cecilia never once felt small to me.”

  Julian opened his hands as if to say, “Of course.”

  “Now when I tell people ‘My village had three streets,’ I can’t believe it myself. It doesn’t seem possible.” She closed her eyes. “I’ve seen too much already, more than any of my sisters. Sometimes I think, if I went back, I’d feel like I was suffocating, too.”

  “Could be,” Julian said. “But still you want to send me back there. You think I could breathe just fine.”

  “You,” she said. “You’re different.” And while he waited for her to tell him why, she turned the page of the atlas back to Italy. Slowly she ran her finger up the Adriatic from Puglia to Abruzzo, then down the Atlantic side from Lazio to Calabria. “I had a friend who moved to Napoli. That’s, what, a hundred miles?”

  “A little less,” said Julian.

  She had mentioned this friend before, in the same breath as her family. He’d gone south to apprentice with a tailor, then returned to Santa Cecilia. His father and two sisters lived in Philadelphia, but Maddalena had never contacted them.

  “Do you hear from him—the tailor?”

  She looked over at the couch, where Antonio lay sleeping. “Oh, no,” she said, sitting up straight. “Of course not.”

  Julian nodded. He saw in the way she tilted her head—forward and just slightly to the side—that she had a story about hi
m, one she knew she shouldn’t tell. Maybe this tailor had disgraced his family, and because of his actions the father did not open his Philadelphia house to him. Maybe he was the best tailor in Italy but felt he had to do his penance in the village. Julian imagined the Santa Ceciliese spitting on his shop window when they walked by but secretly paying him to mend their clothes. It seemed in Maddalena’s nature to forgive and take pity on this man, who may have been a deserter or a thief but did not deserve the humiliations of scandal.

  “Those villages can be cruel,” said Julian. “Make one mistake, you pay for it the rest of your life.”

  Maddalena looked at him. “What kind of mistake?”

  “I don’t know,” said Julian, surprised by her defensive tone, the accusatory crease between her eyebrows. “Anything. Desperate men in desperate times, crimes of passion, foolish choices. Take your pick.”

  Her face softened. “You made a mistake, then?”

  “Me? No. I was thinking of your tailor. From the way you talk but don’t talk about him, it sounds like he did something very wrong.”

  Again her eyes went to Antonio. His feet, in sheer black stockings, hung over the arm of the sofa. In the past few minutes, he’d begun to snore.

  She thought a moment, walked over to the record player, and turned up Sinatra. Facing her husband, she brushed crumbs from her dress and straightened the waistline. By the time she sat back down, her face had changed again. Gone was both the crease and the softness; a shadow had fallen across her, as it had that first Friday night in this house. It seemed she’d either just been told sad news, or was about to deliver it.

  “I said something to upset you,” offered Julian.

  “We talk about suffocating,” she began, her voice a whisper over the music and the snores. “I’m suffocating right now, right here. When you don’t say what you feel, what’s in your heart—”

  Julian nodded, and all at once her secret revealed itself, as clearly as if she’d written the words on a poster: the lonely Maddalena Grasso had fallen in love with him. With Julian Fabbri. His heart raced. How naive he had been! He folded his hands and set them gingerly on the edge of the table. Look at her gold necklace and earrings, her perfect hair, her makeup: all of it designed to impress him. Look at her bite her lip, blush, stammer through her stories. Julian had read enough to guess that a girl like her, separated at so young an age from her father, neglected by a distracted husband, might create another father for herself—someone to rely upon, to adore. Julian had become her teacher and treated her with kindness and respect; he’d even serenaded her, stirring up memories of her youth and the family she missed. The poor girl, he thought; now she’d have to sit before him like a schoolgirl and compose herself while the wise adult explained the roots of her infatuation. Julian knew well that this sort of exposure left scars. Exposure made you want to lock yourself in a closet and watch the world go by from two little holes in the door.

  “Me and the tailor,” Maddalena said, again in a whisper. “We were in love with each other. Before I was married, before Antonio came.”

  “Oh,” Julian said. He let out a deep breath. He covered his neck with his palm, to hide his reddening skin. He had broken out in a sweat just moments before, and now his clammy hands cooled him.

  “We made plans for the future,” said Maddalena. “But we were very young.”

  “No wonder you wanted Sinatra so loud,” Julian said, managing a smile. “Antonio doesn’t know?”

  “He knows,” she said. “Everybody knows. Ida, Mamma Nunzia, Papà Franco, Mario. All the Grassos. Everybody. But nobody talks about it. I have to put it out of my mind, pretend there was no love affair, pretend I had no mother and father of my own.” Her words came faster, but still so quietly Julian had to watch her lips to make them out. “I always lived on Eighth Street, you know. I always had a husband and worked as a seamstress. There was never a boy named Vito Leone who used to kiss me in the back room of the store, who crossed half of Italy, from here to here”—she slid her finger along the map from Frosinone to Genoa—“to try to stop me from going with Antonio, so he could marry me instead.”

  She shouldn’t be telling me this, Julian thought. I am not a priest; I have no way to help her. Besides, it wasn’t proper, not with Antonio in the next room, not anywhere. She was a young woman at the beginning of her life, about to give birth to her first child; he was an old man of forty, so ignorant of marriage and love affairs that he’d thought himself a part of Maddalena’s. At least he had let her speak before admitting how flattered he was by her affections. Instead he put two fingers over his lips to signal that she’d said too much. But she kept talking.

  “When I say I’m suffocating, Julian, it’s not that I still love this boy—because that’s what he’ll always be in my mind, a boy—I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I love my husband. He’s a very good man, better maybe than Vito was. Or is. Who can say?” She looked away. “It’s just that the time goes by, and I remember less and less about him, about my family, my home. I’m scared one day I’ll wake up and they’ll be gone, no memories at all, that I’ll have only this life, and not the other one. Tell me: if nobody let you talk about your mother and father, if you couldn’t keep them alive with your stories, what would you do?”

  “I’d die,” said Julian, without hesitation.

  “Then we are the same.”

  She told him more. He’d built that bicycle she told him about, from scraps he found lying around three towns, and let the girls ride it up and down the hill in Santa Cecilia. The bike rides had been her first taste of adventure—the wind in her hair, the danger of crashing—and, when she looked back, the happiest moments of her life. The war had seemed far away, her family and Vito within arm’s reach; if she fell from the bike and cut her leg open, her mother would dress the wound, and Vito would kiss the pain away. Then the war came closer. She had been forced to flee to her aunt’s farm, while Vito stayed in the village. The Germans vandalized her family home—not with bombs, but their bare hands—and Vito had repaired it from floor to ceiling. He’d patched the walls, restored the electricity, and even saved the portrait of her mother the Nazis had slashed. Despite this act of devotion, Maddalena’s parents still did not consider him a proper husband for their youngest daughter. He had a sick mother, a father who’d abandoned them, and no trade to speak of. He was about to apprentice in Napoli when Antonio arrived, promising the riches of America.

  “Now he’s married to my sister,” Maddalena said, matter-of-factly. “And I don’t have to wonder, ‘What would my life be like if I’d married Vito Leone?’ If I wanted, I could write to Carolina, ask her. But I don’t. My mother sends me letters, but she never mentions them. Carolina does not acknowledge me. She might as well be dead, except I know she is not. When I close my eyes, I see her feeding her children or sitting side by side with Vito at the tailor shop or planting flowers in the window boxes.”

  She jumped from memory to fantasy, then back again. Julian was not sure which was which. She had three sisters and two brothers—plus one who died in Russia—but the longer Julian listened, the harder it became to keep their names straight. She stopped whispering when the conversation turned less dangerously to tales of the village: the old strega who predicted doom for every passing stranger, the soldier who’d stolen her stamp money, the maiden aunt addicted to cigarettes, the beauty of snow on the chestnut trees. Always, though, Maddalena’s stories found their way back to Vito. When they did, the color returned to her face; she’d speak more slowly and deliberately, as if painting a picture. It got so that Julian could almost see the boy—skinny, in wrinkled clothes—stepping shyly into the street the night she returned from the war, proud of the hard work he’d done on her house, certain the world would now make room for them.

  “I have an idea,” Julian said, interrupting her. He held up his hand. “Something for you to think about.” It was past eleven, nearly time for her to wake Antonio. The Sinatra record had been flipped tw
ice, and they’d reached the end of the coffee. Maddalena had stacked and restacked the little espresso cups as she spoke, and now one balanced precariously atop the other two. Many times over the past few months, she had sat across from Julian at this table and appeared happy. She had laughed at his jokes and done imitations of Mario; she had poked fun at Antonio’s drunken lope to the sofa and his inability to stay awake. But all of that had been an act. This, Julian thought, was the real Maddalena: confessing, unburdening, removing her makeup to expose her scars.

  “You’re the luckiest person I know,” he said.

  She stared at him.

  “Do you thank God every day?”

  “I do, yes.”

  Julian shook his head. “I don’t believe you.” He tried not to appear angry, though a part of him wanted to shake her. “You asked me once if I ever wanted to get married. The answer is yes. Of course I wanted to get married. You might as well ask, ‘Were you ever thirsty?’”

  “I—”

  “It’s ugly to have nobody,” he said, waving her away. “All my life, until now, I had two people. It was only us, Mamma and Papà, and that was enough. I read my books. Every morning we walked my father to work at Bancroft Mill. We’d spend two weeks every June in Wildwood. The time went by. I looked around at the girls, but none of them looked back.” He shrugged, unable to meet her eyes. “Do you know the Delluccis?”

  Maddalena nodded.

  “One summer, they brought their niece to our house. Papà arranged it. She was a nice girl, six or seven years younger than me. We sat beside each other at the table, and Mamma made lasagna and roasted peppers and broccoletti and palla di neve for dessert. She wore glasses, this girl—Amelia was her name—and wrote poetry. That’s what her father said, at least. She hardly spoke at all. She was the oldest of five sisters, all of them married before her. I was her last chance. And even though Mamma called her a snob and noticed a stain on the collar of her blouse, I liked her a little bit, I think. She reminded me of a governess from a British mystery novel. I could see how maybe Papà would buy us a house across the street and we’d all live nice and quiet, have dinner together every Sunday. I’d find a job in a library or a school, and we’d have two or three kids. But—” here Julian took the empty espresso cup from the top of the stack and rolled it between his palms. “She didn’t want me at all. Not even one date. Between me and nobody, she picked nobody.”