The Saint of Lost Things

by Christopher Castellani

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

It is 1953 in the tight-knit Italian neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware. Maddalena Grasso has lost her country, her family, and the man she loved by coming to America; her mercurial husband, Antonio, has lost his opportunity to realize the American Dream; their new friend, Guilio Fabbri, a shy accordion player, has lost his beloved parents.

In the shadow of St. Anthony’s Church, named for the patron saint of lost things, the prayers of these troubled but determined people are heard, and fate and circumstances conspire to answer them in unforeseeable ways.

With great authenticity and immediacy, The Saint of Lost Things evokes a bittersweet time in which the world seemed more intimate and knowable, and the American Dream simpler, nobler, and within reach.

Release date: September 30, 2005

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

FOR A TIME, MADDALENA knew so few English words that each carried memories from the day she’d learned it. The words were common and unrelated: vacuum, headlight, mouthwash. “Take an umbrella,” her husband, Antonio, would advise, and suddenly she found herself back on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, making her first purchase with American money. “One uhm-brell-ah, please,” she’d repeated as she approached the vendor, a fistful of dollars in her hand, Antonio a few steps away, guiding her with his eyes. The vendor had taken her money with a disinterested nod, not seeming to notice her accent. To celebrate this success, she and Antonio had spread a blanket on the sand and watched the storm clouds gather over the pier. When the rain came, they’d huddled under the umbrella until the lightning scared them off.

With the word apple came the opening and closing mouth of Maddalena’s night-school teacher, Sister Clark, a woman so committed to training her students in proper pronunciation that she offered free private tutorials at the convent. Ah-po is the sound of the immigrant, Sister Clark had said, her lips in an exaggerated O; until you master your speech, no one will show you the respect you deserve. That’s all it takes, she’d said: your tongue in the right spot between your teeth, a little concentration, and practice practice practice. Then America will smile and open her arms, loving as a grandmother.

Seven years have passed, and Maddalena has mostly forgotten the histories of the English words that come to her. On the bus today she thinks, Why do we keep lurching? then wonders where she learned this verb. Did she see it in a magazine? On a billboard? She practices, in honor of the recently deceased Sister Clark: I lurch; you lurch; the bus never stops lurching. Unlike most words, this one at least sounds like its definition. There are no extra letters, silent for no reason, to confuse her. In Italy, the country in which she was born, they’d pronounce the word “lurk,” but lurk means something different here. Lurk is what the men do in the alleys near the bus stop, what Antonio does in the doorway at night before he leaves her.

The driver brakes hard and jolts Maddalena forward again. She looks up from her book, grabs the armrest, and snaps back against the seat. Her stomach has gone sour, and a dull ache spreads like a stain from one side of her abdomen to the other. She holds her breath. Ida, her sister-in-law, dozes beside her. Ida can sleep on these morning rides, but Maddalena cannot, even though she has lain awake most of the night. She can never sleep when she is keeping a secret.

She tries to determine whether the sourness in her stomach feels different from the everyday sourness caused by the lurching. Her skin looks puffier than normal, of that she is certain, but maybe the recent drop in temperature—Indian summer to crisp fall in twenty-four hours—bears responsibility. Among these extreme changes she seeks the third sign, the one that will convince her she is finally carrying a child.

The first sign occurred this past Sunday, when two deer strayed into the empty lot across from her house. The bigger one—the mother, Maddalena guessed—chewed on a white paper cup as her baby nuzzled at her side. They’d stood together in peace, content with the trash and the dead patches of grass at their feet. Then suddenly the mother looked up at Maddalena in the window. She stared at her for a long moment, cocked her head, nodded twice, then dashed back into the woods. The baby, lighter in color, its legs delicate as matchsticks, trotted after her in no hurry to catch up—as if it wouldn’t have minded lingering a while. Until that morning, Maddalena had not seen a single deer in that lot.

The second sign occurred just yesterday, the start of the sixth week since her last monthly bleeding. She heard music in the factory, sweet chimes in the tune of a lullaby. Ida and the other ladies kept sewing unaware. Minutes later, their boss, Mr. Gold, walked past carrying a mobile of plastic daisies, which played the lullaby when he pressed a button on one of their golden eyes. A gift for his newborn niece, he explained. But since when did Mr. Gold walk around showing off baby gifts? And why was Maddalena the only one who’d heard the lullaby over the chattering women and the din of the machines?

Despite all this evidence, Maddalena will not allow herself to be sure. She and Antonio have been wanting a child for the seven years she has lived in America, and the signs have failed her again and again. All she knows of babies is the What that makes them; for the How and the When and the Why Not she must guess. She and Antonio have tried the What so many nights, followed always by his assurances, “We are becoming mother and father, my beautiful Maddalena; I feel it this time.” As they lay beside each other, he’d tuck her hair behind her ear with trembling fingers and promise they would not be childless much longer. He repeated what Dr. Barone told them: you are both young and perfectly healthy; it is just a matter of time; the woman’s body will act only when it is ready. Then, four months ago, without a good explanation, Antonio gave up hope. He decided that if Maddalena wasn’t going to bring in a child after all, she could at least earn some money. And so, since early summer, he has cashed her paychecks from her hours in Mr. Gold’s factory. They hide the bills in a pocket she sewed into the cornice of the drapes.

The bus stops in Chester, where dark-coated women wait in line in the rain. Maddalena waves good morning to Gloria, the Cuban, as she steps on clutching an enormous package wrapped in brown paper. If Maddalena feels chatty—today she does not—she can struggle through a conversation with Gloria, who speaks an unpredictable jumble of Spanish, English, and half-guessed Italian. Instead she closes her eyes and pretends to nap. As the bus nears Philadelphia, she puts her book—an Italian romance called Il Sogno della Principessa—in her purse and elbows Ida awake. It is 7:20. They have ten minutes to punch their cards.

The streets are more crowded than usual as the three women make their way. The late October air blows gusty and cold, shaking the half-naked solitary trees in their square grates along the sidewalk. Children in blue and white uniforms race past them, the girls with ribbons in their hair, the boys’ shirts untucked and hanging below their sweaters. The rain has coated all the stone and asphalt in a slick sheen. Red and yellow leaves stick to their shoes, and Maddalena skids, nearly falls, as she makes the right onto Passyunk Avenue. Ida, in her clear plastic bonnet, yawning, takes her arm.

With three minutes to spare, they stand outside the front door. THE GOLDEN HEM, EST. 1948, says the newly painted sign above the arch. Ida refuses to enter the building until the second hand on her watch reaches 7:29. Maddalena finds this dangerous. If Mr. Gold sees them, he might think they do not value their jobs or need the money. The other ladies—not Gloria, who is on their side—shoot them looks on their way in. Maddalena makes no protest. After her husband, Ida is the most stubborn person she knows.

They work at adjoining tables, Ida and Maddalena in one row, Gloria and a Greek woman named Stavroula across the aisle. Stavroula, in her miniature black glasses and white hair, arrives on an earlier bus from New Jersey and rarely speaks. They are four of fifty women, arranged in rows on the first floor of an enormous windowless warehouse. They sew blouses and robes mostly, fashionable garments sold in stores they rarely visit, and make seventy-five cents an hour no matter how many they finish.

Maddalena and Ida have just switched on their machines when Mr. Gold appears for his morning promenade among the tables. Bits of thread cling to his pants. He wears his short-sleeved shirt buttoned to his neck and carries the yardstick that he rarely uses or puts down. He has a thick mustache, hairy arms, and a kind face with wrinkles on his forehead and around his eyes. But you can never count on his mood. Maddalena once saw him charge up and down the aisles, slap each woman’s table with the yardstick, and screech, “Wake up!” Then, not a minute later, he was speaking sweetly again. This explains the wrinkles on a man no older than forty.

“Good morning, my little ladies,” he says.

“Good morning, Mr. Gold,” they say in unison, keeping their heads down.

“Let’s do eighty today, yes?” he says, and holds up a piece of paper with the numbers 8–0 written in black marker. “What do you think, Ida? Yesterday I asked for seventy and you did thirty-six.”

“I’m trying,” she says, a pin between her lips.

Maddalena will have no trouble with eighty. Unlike the English language, sewing has come easily to her, and often she must slow her pace so as not to shame Ida or Gloria.

“I’m telling all my ladies some news,” Mr. Gold says.

Ida looks up.

“Keep working while I talk,” he continues, “and if you don’t understand me”—here he glances at Maddalena, who loses track when he speaks too quickly—“make sure someone explains it to you.” He sighs and rubs his forehead. “The sad truth is that I must let go of five of you by the end of next week. Business is not so good. The five who produce the least I must lose. This does not make me happy, believe me, but it is what I am forced to do.”

“But I need the money more than anyone!” Ida says. She pushes herself away from the table and looks at him. “I have two little girls at home. Some of these ladies have no children at all.”

“I have babies in two countries!” Gloria says.

“Then do the work of two women,” Mr. Gold tells her, as he moves to the next set of tables.

Maddalena has followed most of this. At lunch Ida fills her in on the details. They talk low, though the other Italian women—snobs from the North, who would like nothing more than to see Maddalena and Ida sent away—sit far across the other end of the room. “Mario will kill me if I lose another job,” Ida says. She has been dismissed from four places before the Golden Hem. At the most recent dress shop, she set a bridal gown on fire after leaving the iron on it too long. “Mario and I make just enough as it is, and we have to pay back all that money from the restaurant.”

“This is not fair to us,” Maddalena says.

“Don’t even pretend you’re worried for yourself.”

Maddalena shrugs. “One of the five doesn’t have to be you,” she says, folding a piece of wax paper into a square. She stuffs the paper in her purse to reuse and reaches for the extra piece of fruit that Mamma Nunzia, their mother-in-law, throws in “for health.” Lunch was a few pieces of roasted chicken and spinach between thick slices of bread, eaten without an appetite.

“You have it easy,” Ida says. “We have Nunzia and Nina to worry about. And whatever happens, Papà and Mamma will take care of Antonio. You think they would have given Mario the money to go find a wife in Italy? For the younger son, their pockets are always empty.”

Maddalena listens, though she has heard this song from Ida many times before. She and Mario believe that Antonio, the oldest, is the family favorite. Nothing anyone says can change their minds. Mario has invested in one failed family business after another—the Pasticceria Grasso, the Grasso Grocery, Café Grasso—while Antonio has chosen the steady work of the assembly line at the Ford plant. Maddalena does not dare ask Ida why her husband should be punished for making the safer choice, especially since someone has clearly put a curse on the Grasso name.

For now they all live together in a narrow, three-story row house on Eighth Street, in the city of Wilmington, Delaware. The room on the other side of the wall from Maddalena and Antonio’s bed belongs to Ida and Mario and their two little girls. Down the hall, out of earshot but never far from Maddalena’s thoughts, sleep Mamma Nunzia and Papà Franco. Maddalena has no blood relations on this side of the ocean. For the first eighteen years of her life, she lived in the village of Santa Cecilia, in the mountains of central Italy, with three sisters and three brothers of her own, in a house no smaller than the one that waited for her here. Antonio appeared in Santa Cecilia after the war, started coming around and staying for dinner, sweet-talking. Her mother and sisters told her, “That man will take you to America, stuff your purse with money, and drive you around New York City in a Cadillac,” and Maddalena believed them.

“Look in my purse,” Ida says now, as Maddalena peels a pear. “Only one piece of fruit for me.”

“Don’t worry.” She cuts the pear in quarters and hands one to her. “Between the two of us, we’ll make two hundred. Easy.”

Just to be sure, Maddalena works twice as fast. After Mr. Gold passes their tables, when Gloria and Stavroula aren’t looking, she slides a pile of material over to Ida’s side.

Precisely at three-thirty—the hands of the clock above in exact position—comes the third sign. A sudden cloudiness fills Maddalena’s head, and before she can bring her hand to her brow a nausea unlike one she’s ever felt bubbles in her stomach. The significance of the time of day strikes her, briefly, as she stands, lets fall the fabric on her lap, and rushes down the aisle to the ladies room. She makes it in time to vomit into the toilet, crouching so the greasy floor doesn’t stain the knees of her stockings. When this happened to her as a child, her mother would kneel beside her, palm her forehead, and smooth her blonde curls around her ear. “Get all the poison out,” she’d say; “this is your body cleaning itself.” Now her mother sends advice in letters a month too late for it to matter. Now it is Gloria, wheezy and fat, who follows Maddalena into the bathroom and squeezes herself into the stall.

“Tutto bueno?” she asks. “You A-OK?” She flushes the toilet and hands her a wad of tissue.

Maddalena wipes her mouth and gets to her feet, keeping her head down. Her legs shake. She is too happy to look at Gloria. She has a new body now, possessed by something holy and powerful. The joyous transformation numbs her. She wants to keep it to herself for as long as she can. As soon as she reveals it—to Gloria, to Ida, even to Antonio—it will no longer belong to her.

But of course Gloria guesses. “You did not eat bad food, I can be sure. You are—” she places her hands over her belly, then brings them out slowly as if the belly is expanding.

Maddalena nods, then looks up. She has prayed for this moment long before the deer and the plastic daisies, and now, finally, it has come.

“How bella!” Gloria says, then bursts into a fit of Spanish that Maddalena cannot follow. She wears a thick coat of makeup on her brown skin, big gold earrings that jangle when her head bobs. She guides Maddalena toward the sink and pulls from her sleeve the photos of her two boys—Carlos and Eduardo—that she has already shown her a hundred times. “Morning sickness,” she says, laughing. “With Carlos it’s sickness all the day long.” Then she wraps her arms around Maddalena and pulls her close.

She rests her head on Gloria’s ample chest. The numbness breaks, and she sobs into her silky blouse, her strong, sweet perfume. Her hunger returns with great force. How she will finish out the day, the week, the next seven months at work, she does not know. Already she is impatient and longs for the baby to hold in her arms and present to Antonio. Already everything has changed.

Gloria strokes her hair. “How much did you sew today?” she asks.

“Sixty-five,” Maddalena answers, though the real number is over eighty, not including what she’s done for Ida.

“Then relax! Say your prayers. Give thanks to God.”

She does. She works the needle slowly and devotes the extra time between stitches to things that, for superstitious reasons, she has not yet allowed herself to consider: the exact words she will use to tell Antonio, names for boys, names for girls, and—at this her hands fail her—the love of someone who belongs to her, someone of her own blood, in this country of strangers.

UNTIL NOW, MADDALENA has not found much beauty in America. But this evening, on the 5:55 back to Wilmington, everything charms her. The streets jammed with cars, the smoke gushing from the engines into the drizzle, the rhythm of wipers on windshields—it is all a symphony composed for her pleasure. Rows of brake lights fade from bright to pale red as the traffic lurches forward. She opens her window halfway, for air, and welcomes the spray of cool rain on her face. The men below stare straight ahead over their steering wheels, then—like the deer—suddenly turn and look up at her as if to catch her watching them. They smile and tick their heads. She wants to know each of them, these hardworking men, and their wives, and their children. She wants to walk across their green lawns. She wants to sit with them at a picnic table under the trees at Lums Pond, bouncing her baby on her lap as they trade stories and jokes and memories of years gone by.

This time of day, Ida can’t sit still. She chats with Gloria, who has agreed to keep Maddalena’s secret until Antonio hears it for himself. After Gloria’s stop, Ida turns all her attention to Maddalena. The Golden Hem is a cage, Ida informs her, and we are birds who need to fly. God did not create women to work in factories; He wants them in the bedroom with their husbands, in the kitchen with their daughters, in the garden with their hands in the soil. Despite this belief, Ida says she will fight to keep her job. If she and Maddalena can’t keep up the system they began this morning, she will tell Mr. Gold that Nina, her younger daughter, is going blind and needs an expensive surgery. “God save my soul for lying,” says Ida. “But I’ll do what I have to do.”

Maddalena half listens. The traffic breaks and they cross into their home state of Delaware, different in not one single way from the state of Pennsylvania. The same little brick houses, squat and square, divided by chain link fences, go on for miles. Tall wooden poles, strung with thick black wires and iron bolts, run alongside. If someone had not put up the sign WELCOME TO DELAWARE, nobody would notice a change. In Italy, Maddalena has said many times, every town has its own distinct face. The church and the piazza are the eyes; the streets and houses are the nose and mouth; and each person is a freckle—or a mole, or a sharp tooth, depending on his personality—that makes a village different from its neighbors. Antonio, who’d eat the dirt from the gutters in America and call it delicious, finds this silly. Maddalena has told him it is because he himself is a pimple.

It surprises her how familiar the landscape has become, how the memories of her village have faded. She reads albero in Il Sogno della Principessa and sees not an olive tree, but a spruce. Though horses—donkeys, at least—were common as dogs in Santa Cecilia, she takes great delight when a mounted policeman approaches the bus. Any other day, these thoughts of home would sadden her. Until this afternoon, she has felt like the girl on the deck of the ship, weak-kneed and seasick, afraid to let go of the railing.

But that was another autumn evening, colder than this one, seven years ago to the month. October 1946. She watched the sun set on the immense Manhattan buildings and light up the windows bright gold. She longed to share in the joy of the passengers around her, who blew kisses and sang songs, and waved to the shimmering buildings as if they were old friends. Instead she kept silent. She had promised her mother that, no matter how hopeless she felt, she would never let her husband see her cry. They had met less than three months before, and it was still too soon to trouble him.

In New York harbor, Antonio gleefully pointed out landmarks: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, the flurry of names strange and German-sounding. Everything terrified her: the waves licking the side of the boat as it slowed; the birds gathering high in the air then darting down ten at once for the decks. Antonio talked on and on. Look, there was a famous battleship; there was the state called New Jersey; there was the Statue of Liberty on her little island. Maddalena gazed at this statue, the one landmark she recognized from films and postcards. She was like the Mona Lisa, she told Antonio a few years later: look at her face when you’re sad, and you see sadness in her expression; look at her when hopeful, and she gives hope back to you.

In the car on the way to Wilmington that first day, Maddalena discovered that her new country was, in fact, a land of green, just as Antonio had described: lawns and fields, hills, thick stretches of trees, rows of hedges under windows. Every house, no matter how modest, seemed to own a share of grass and tend it like the plot of a grave. The roads were wide and paved, and the cars rolled over them in patient, orderly rows. In Santa Cecilia, Maddalena’s family had owned the only store for miles; here, every block was lined with little shops, each proudly displaying signs with big letters that screamed S-A-L-E!

As Maddalena passed sign after sign, some large and some small, all announcing the same one product—sale, salt—she tried to figure out why a country so wealthy would be this proud of such a common ingredient. Then she grew worried. Was salt very expensive here? If so, how would she cook? Or was salt so cheap that everyone tried to give it away? Did Americans use more salt than Italians? She considered asking Antonio, then changed her mind. After he and Mario stopped laughing at her, Antonio would tell some long story about the history of salt in the United States. It occurred to her that she had no one to ask. She kept silent in the backseat, her head against the glass of the window and her hands folded in her lap, panic rising in her chest, and then, for the first time of many, as the SALE! signs flashed by her faster and faster, and Antonio argued with his brother over the best route home, she wept.

“Ecco,” Ida says now, as the bus makes the turn onto Union Street. She buttons her coat. “So what do you think, then? Peas?”

“Peas?”

“Or spinach? For dinner.”

“Whatever Mamma Nunzia wants,” says Maddalena.

“So it’ll be cauliflower with vinegar again,” she says, with a snort. “One day, it will be me deciding what to cook in my own house. And my Nunzia will have to like it. Don’t you look forward like that?”

“Sometimes.”

They are up and off the bus, sloshing on the pavement toward Eighth Street. They walk quickly, arm in arm, past the storefronts on Union: the pharmacy, the beauty salon, the shoe repair. At this hour they are all closing, and most of the bread in Lamberti’s Bakery has been sold. If she and Ida time it right, though, Signor Lamberti will offer them a bag of leftover rolls to use for their lunches.

After the old man tells them he has not even a burnt loaf to give them tonight, Maddalena says, “Good for him. Someone should make money.”

“Why him and not us?” is Ida’s reply.

“Him now,” Maddalena says. “Us later.”

Ida shakes her head. “You are too patient.”

Birds circle the bell tower of St. Anthony’s, as if waiting for it to ring the hour. The church sits at the top of a broad hill, no wider than a half mile, and looks down on the ten square blocks that form Wilmington’s Italian neighborhood. In forty years, long after most of the immigrants have left, a group of merchants will officially designate these blocks “Little Italy.” They will commission an archway to demarcate the entrance at Fourth and Lincoln. But in 1953 these blocks are merely a scattering of Italian families who have paid for their relatives to move into the row homes and apartments surrounding them. Antonio calls Wilmington a half city, Philadelphia a real city, New York the city. La Città, he says, with reverence, never in English. Roma, Milano, Genoa, to him these are dead cities, and Italy the land of dead cities. For the time being, Maddalena finds Wilmington city enough.

She knows the route from the bus stop to the house on Eighth Street, from the house to the church, from the church to Angelo’s Market, from the market to the butcher and the produce stand, and home again. She has never set eyes on the four other blocks in this neighborhood, but she imagines they do not differ much from the six she’s familiar with: long brick buildings on both sides of the street, each divided into tiny row homes with white wooden columns and concrete stoops. Dormers peek up from the roofs of the nicer houses. The view from Union Street to the church is one unbroken line of red brick. If she wants to see a stone house, Antonio must drive her to Rockford Park, where a wealthy American family has constructed a mansion with a terra-cotta roof. Sometimes, while they sit out front in the parked car with the engine running, admiring the stonework, the American lady comes onto the terrace for a cigarette and waves to them.

But Antonio has not taken Maddalena on a drive for many months, not since she started at the Golden Hem. Her failure to become a mother changed him. He has talked less and less—to everyone, not only to her—and worked longer hours at the plant to earn overtime. When he does talk, it is mostly to argue with his father over how little money he has managed to save. An hour after dinner, Antonio is either asleep or out for one of his long walks. Though she knows where these walks lead—to Renato’s Pizzeria, to play cards and drink whiskey—she also knows how important it is for men to have their secrets. So she plays along. She even went so far as to sew extra padding into his shoes. “So your feet don’t hurt,” she told him.

She decides to wait until they are alone to tell Antonio the news. She wants the privacy of their bedroom and the rest of the house asleep. He won’t arrive home for another hour, but still Maddalena’s heart races as she and Ida shake out their rain bonnets on the porch. She walks through the door, and already her mother-in-law is calling her to the kitchen. She has enough time to run upstairs, throw her purse on the bed, then rush back down to help prepare dinner.

The next few hours pass quickly with the night’s work. This is the beginning of happiness, Maddalena thinks, as she ladles the minestrone and slices the day-old bread and sweeps up the onion skin that has fallen onto the floor. She says little. Her secret is like a ruby in her pocket; if she looks at her family or her husband too long, she will give it away. And so she is too distracted to notice that Antonio is not himself tonight. Before she can clear his coffee cup and ask him to come to bed early, he is gone.

SO THE GIRL, CASSIE, has returned to Fourth and Orange. She sits barefoot on the counter of the pizzeria in a pair of shorts and one of Renato’s white T-shirts. No brassiere. When she sees Antonio, she lifts her leg and wiggles her toes hello.

Just what I need, Antonio thinks. He considers turning back. But it’s too late, and he has nowhere else to go.

“Look who it is,” he says, and kisses her on both cheeks. She has not changed at all in two years: same skinny frame, lips thin and pale, stringy red hair to her shoulders, those strange V-shaped indentations—like bird tracks—on her neck. The T-shirt covers most of the tracks, but Antonio and Renato and at least two other men who work here have seen how far south the bird has hopped. More than once, Antonio has traced the pattern down to her navel with his tongue.

“I’m back for good this time,” Cassie says. “Right, Renato?” She swings around and catch. . .