The Saint of Lost Things (5 page)

Antonio seems surprised—happy, even—to find her awake. He kisses her forehead and sits beside her on the edge of the bed, still in his coat and hat. She wears her best nightgown, an ivory satin to
which he immediately pays attention. He runs his hand over the sheer fabric, then under it, from her knee to her thigh. “How can it be that every day you get more beautiful?” he says.

“Because you’re getting old,” she says. “Your eyesight’s not so good.”

As he disrobes—throwing his shirt in one direction, his pants in another—he declares the weather too cold for October, the bedroom too drafty, and the city asleep too early. Even in the village, he says, the Al Di Là Café stayed open for hours past midnight, and the people kept coming.

He repeats the same story he told at dinner, about a man he works with at the Ford plant. The man was joking around with a blowtorch, waving it above his head as if it were a flag, and by the end of the joke he’d burnt off his left earlobe and half an eyebrow.

“I tell you,” Maddalena says, thinking, this is one of his talking nights. “Americans have no common sense.”

He climbs into bed and immediately starts another story, this one about his boss, Mr. Hannagan, who took his wife to Mrs. Stella’s last week for her birthday dinner. After the wife spent the rest of the night with her head in the toilet, Mr. Hannagan demanded his money back. Mario refused, saying it was not his fault his wife had an “overdelicate constitution.”

“Whatever that means,” Antonio says. “So now I have to pay the whole bill myself and pretend Mario changed his mind. Just to keep in good with a boss at a stupid going-nowhere job.” He turns to Maddalena. “You know, if I ran a place like Mrs. Stella’s, we’d get one complaint only: not enough tables. Or: the food’s so good, I can’t eat at home anymore. Sometimes I wonder how my brother got so lucky.”

Before he can start another story, Maddalena takes his hand. “You don’t wonder why I waited up?” she asks.

He looks at her. “You missed me?” he says, and laughs. “You
thought, ‘I want to hear that story about the blowtorch again?’” Then his face changes. “Nothing happened, did it?”

“Yes,” she says. “Something good. Mario is not the only lucky one.” She squeezes his hand, guides it to her stomach, and nods. “We don’t have to worry anymore.”

A flash of joy, the corners of his mouth in an immediate smile. His eyes brighten. The room, too, seems to fill with light.

Then his face freezes. He narrows his gaze at her and sits up against the wrought-iron bars of the headboard. “Now?” he asks.

She hesitates. “I’m almost sure.” She starts to recount the signs, the most recent one first. The bathroom. Gloria. The lullaby. But they sound silly, unconvincing. She stops before she gets to the deer.

He turns his face toward the opposite wall. For a long time, he does not move or speak. Maddalena focuses on the birthmark on the back of his neck, a pink blotch in the shape of an almond. When he’s angry, the blotch turns red.

He is angry.

“You’re my wife for seven years, and no baby,” he says. “Then you go to work for the Jew and
poof!
there’s a baby now?”

Maddalena pulls the sheet up to her waist. “What do you—” she starts to ask, then stops herself when she realizes the implication. She almost laughs, but Antonio’s face has gone dark. “I think I’m more relaxed,” she says, remembering what her mother told her in her letters:
every nail you bite is one more month without a child.

Antonio does not wrap his arms around her the moment he hears the news. He does not throw open the window and sing to God and wake the neighbors. He does not run downstairs to get the bottle of
spumante
they have kept in the refrigerator for just this occasion. Instead he stands in his shirtsleeves and underwear and paces from the bed to the window, hands on his hips. “I have to think,” he says. “I wasn’t ready for this. Not tonight.”

“I don’t understand,” she says. “How can you not be ready?”

He puts his fingers to his temples as if to stop a sharp pain.

“Whatever idea you have, I can tell you right now it’s crazy.” She laughs. “If this is one of your jokes—”

“Do I look like I’m joking?”

“But it doesn’t make sense.”

“You’re right,” he says, standing against the far wall. “It doesn’t at all. For so many years we want a baby, and there is no baby. Then, just when we give up, when we think, ‘maybe it’s not meant to be,’ and we start to dream of something else, a different kind of life, here comes the baby.”

He has not slapped her. In fact, he has kept his distance and spoken barely above a whisper. But she feels as though his hand has struck her face.

“I didn’t know you gave up,” she says. “What kind of life are you dreaming about? What kind of life doesn’t have a child in it?”

“Never mind,” he says. “What’s done is done.” He goes to the drapes, stands on his toes, and pulls out the wad of bills wrapped in a rubber band. He divides the bills into stacks on the dresser. “All this—we’ll need every dollar—more—”

“That’s what we decided,” says Maddalena. “Right? We save enough for the baby, and then whatever is left we use on a house.”

He counts the stacks again. “I don’t remember anything being decided,” he says. “Except now I decide you’ll never step foot in that factory again. You’re staying home like a normal wife. Ida will tell the Jew tomorrow.”

Until this threat to keep her from the Golden Hem, Maddalena has never considered that she might miss it. She thinks of the competition, which Ida will surely lose without her. Then, evenly, she says, “I have to work.” She looks up at him. “Ida needs me. And we need the money. And I’m good at it.”

He stands motionless at the foot of the bed, looking down at
the length of her body the way he looks at meat when she under-cooks it. Antonio likes everything burnt through, with a charcoal crust, and when it doesn’t turn out right, he glares at it until it is taken away.

“Tell me what kind of life you’re dreaming about,” she says, but he does not respond. His gaze pins her in place. “Talk to me.” After a while, she adds, “Please.”

But Antonio, like most men, fights best with silence. In recent years, Maddalena has worked up the courage to scream at him, call him
disgraziato
and slam the door just as he approached it. She has locked herself for hours in this bedroom and cried. She has even caught the shoe he pitched at her from across the kitchen, thrown it back at his face, shaken her fists; but she has never won the silence game once he began it. She has only outlasted it. And now it begins again.

He puts on his pants. His belt jingles. He puts on his shoes without sitting down, and keeps his back to her. He kicks a pillow out of the way to get to the door.

“Where are you going this time?” she says. “Back to that dirty pizzeria?”

She closes her eyes and listens to his footsteps on the stairs and the slam of the front screen door. She hurries to the window to see which direction he’s walking, but she sees only the two colored boys. They have taken their usual spot on the curb, where Antonio sat not long before, and pass a cigarette back and forth. She waits at the window until it grows too cold, then returns to the bed and wraps herself in the covers. It is past midnight. In five hours, she will have to rise and dress for work.

If she were back in Santa Cecilia, if this joy had happened there, her mother and sisters would be sitting around her, weighing down the bed, not letting her sleep. They would put on some music. Teresa would feed her beef from her husband’s butcher shop, for
strength; Celestina would say how much better men liked their wives once they got fat. Her mother would refuse to admit she’d felt pain delivering any of her seven children, and remind Maddalena of the beauty of bringing life into the world. Now her mother and sisters exist only in letters, in the few photographs they send after weddings and baptisms.

She reaches over and switches off the lamp. What good do comparisons do her—the new country, the old; his family, hers? She is cursed with comparisons. She has one country now, one family. She does not even have memories anymore, only these fantasies of what might have been if Antonio had never come for her. It no longer matters that she had another man—a boy really—in Santa Cecilia, someone who loved her and whom she loved in return. It no longer matters that, had she chosen him, she would not be here, alone in a bed by a drafty window, longing to hear his footsteps on the stairs. She has prayed to God to wipe her mind clean of the boy and every memory of the village—to give her a moment, at least, of rest—but so far He has not answered. Now, maybe, the child will help.

As husbands go, she reminds herself, she is lucky with Antonio. He works hard. He does not beat her, unlike many husbands she knows here and in the Old Country. Once this storm ends, he will make a devoted father. He knows about things of which she is ignorant: politics, geography, the price of electricity and heating oil. She cannot even write a check or remember their phone number. Most of the time, Antonio has a calming, confident voice, which he frequently uses to brag about her beauty. Just last week his friend Gianni described Maddalena as an Italian Marilyn Monroe, and Antonio had blushed with pride. (She has to admit a resemblance, in the hair and face at least; God has not been as generous with the chest.) Then later, after too much wine, Antonio called her “my Marilyn” and grabbed her by the waist as she cleared the dishes.
“Don’t go back to Hollywood, Signora Monroe,” he begged, and buried his face in the small of her back. She stood trapped at the table with her hands full, smiling, and shook her head at his family gathered around them. “Stay with me in this humble house.”

She calls that evening to mind, then, here in her satin nightgown: shimmying free of his hands on her hips, her quick flirtatious look back, catching his eye as she turned the corner into the kitchen. She replays this scene until sleep takes her, and when she wakes she will join in the silence game for as long as she can bear it.

A
NTONIO MOVES SOUNDLESSLY
through the house. He does not insist that Maddalena stay home from work. He does not say anything to her at all. She sets out his clothes as usual, but does not ask him which shirt he prefers. He dresses and undresses without a glance in her direction. With the rest of the family they act as if nothing has changed, and for two days no one seems to notice the wall of ice between them.

“When did you plan to tell me?” Ida asks Maddalena on the third day, as the bus turns off Union, and suddenly everything is out in the open. “I’m not the smartest lady in the world, but I think I’d notice sooner or later. Maybe when you started stealing my maternity clothes?”

“I’m sorry,” Maddalena says. “How did you—”

“Last night Antonio went to the restaurant and kept Mario at the bar for an hour, talking and asking questions. Then this morning, when you were downstairs, he asked me, out of nowhere: ‘How tall is this Jew boss of yours? Where does he live?’ He asked me how much he talks to you, and I said ‘not much.’ He thinks if he asks me enough times I will slip up, that I know what’s going on but won’t tell him.”

“What’s going on,” says Maddalena, with a roll of her eyes. “Nothing is going on! When I tell him that, he looks right through
me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I can’t stop him from thinking something so crazy.”

Ida shakes her head.

“He sends me to work, but doesn’t trust me,” Maddalena continues. “And Papà is on his side, I’m sure. He always thinks the same as his son, and even if Mamma Nunzia disagrees, she can do nothing. So I’m all alone.”

“You’re not alone,” says Ida. “You just don’t know what it’s like for him. When he sees his son or his daughter, he will change. You wouldn’t believe it was the same Mario before I had my Nunzia. I was like one of his hats—if you didn’t remind him he had one, he’d get all wet. Believe me, sooner or later Antonio will talk to you again, and you’ll remember the days when he didn’t talk, and you’ll think, that wasn’t so bad after all. He’s just embarrassed now.”

Maddalena removes her coat and settles it on her lap. She is sweating in the overheated bus and the glare of the window seat. The morning is bright and cold, and the last leaves of the season cling to the roadside trees. The frost crusted along the bottom edge of the windows begins to melt.

When they reach her stop, Gloria enters with another large package addressed to her mother in Cuba. She takes a seat across from them, looks quizzically at Maddalena and asks,
“Tutto bueno?
”

“
Sì, sì,”
Maddalena says, with a wave of her hand. She nods toward Ida. “She knows.”

“Finally!” Gloria says. “It’s bad luck to hide happy news.”

Ida turns her back to Gloria. “He wrote to us from Genoa,” she continues in Italian, “when you were on your honeymoon. He said that when you finally came to live with us, you’d be carrying the baby you made in the Old Country. He wanted the baby more than the wife—excuse me for saying the truth. And he still believed there was a baby, even when you stayed skinny. He told everyone at
his work. For six years they’ve been teasing him, ‘Antonio, where is this son of yours? You still hiding your daughter from us?’ Men get embarrassed easy; you’re smart enough to know that.”