Raised a Roman Catholic, I never found my mother’s prayer directory of saints and archangels the slightest bit strange. The time she lost her engagement ring and the whole family crawled on our hands and knees in search of it? Mama recited in Italian her prayer request to St. Anthony, who not only came from the Italian town of Padua but was the renowned patron saint of lost articles. “Will you do us this little favor, St. Anthony? Would you open our eyes so we see plain as day the ____ (here she would insert the name of the lost article) “engagement ring” we mislaid?” At least five or six times she’d repeat the prayer, then suggest we stop looking behind the sofa or in the nap of the living room rug or under the bed or–“Stop!” she’d say. “Let St. Anthony do the rest!” We would all go back to whatever we were doing before Mama realized her ring had been lost. And Mama, a woman with total faith in her saints, was certain St. Anthony would do his little miracle.

Growing up, I never recall a lost article that wasn’t recovered Eventually. It didn’t matter when. Mama never pushed her saints to work on a schedule. It was quite enough they performed miracles. “Everything in good time,” she would remind us, and then one ordinary afternoon she found her engagement ring behind the bedroom door, in the crease between the door jamb and the floor board. “Thank you, St. Anthony! Thank you! Thank you!” He had found the ring Papa had given her in the summer of 1931 and this time she’d be more careful wearing it or better yet, this time she’d retire it, locked for safekeeping, in her metal box where she kept important family documents like birth certificates and the good and bad report cards of all their children.

On St. Lucy’s Day in December Mama would eat absolutely no wheat or flour. It was her sacrifice to a martyred saint who had lost her eyes to the infidels. Mama said that if we observed the wheatless, flourless St. Lucy’s Day, she would talk God into restoring our eyesight. (My mother will be ninety years old in December and except for reading glasses, her eyesight is better today than ever before.)

We were a happy family. We knew how to laugh and make the best of every day. Our parents taught us with stories and proverbs the way Jesus taught with His parables. They did their best to help us grow up with pride and decency always our first considerations. We had free will like the rest of the world to break God’s commandments, but we try hard not to. Papa and Mama were strict task masters; they expected us to tow the line and most often we did. So can you blame me if I say that it is with some degree of shame I tell the story of Saint Pantaleone and Mama’s purse?

Saint Pantaleone was another of Mama’s Italian saints. Of course, to hear her mention them, they were all Italian! San Rafaelo was really Archangel Raphael. Even the mother of Jesus was not Mary but Maria Santissima: Most Holy Mary. But Saint Pantaleone was truly Italian and the closest to my mother–except for St. Jude who was always there when nothing else worked and our causes were rated ten on a scale of possible to impossible.

Saint Pantaleone was the patron saint of the lottery! I am not kidding you. This saint’s intercession was the one millions of Italians desired in their dream of winning some money in Italy’s lottery. They would ask the saint to visit them in dreams, leave numbers for them on a scrap of paper they could read while asleep, remember, and upon waking, rush out to play at the local lottery office. Some would even buy dream interpretation manuals that provided numbers for certain dream themes. For example, somebody dreams of his dead grandfather, bald in the dream, riding into town on a mule. A dead grandfather might be number 40. The fact that he’s bald refers to number 54. The old village might be a 03. And the mule, well, let’s call that 86. So the dreamer wakes up, checks the manual, and races out to play 03-40-54-86, and strangely enough, some dreamers would win and be dreamers no more.

Back in 1937 my parents had been married only five years. They were living in New York City, on the Eastside of 3rd Street. Papa was working hard nights at an Italian bakery for very little pay. They already had three children and money was tight. So each night before going to bed Mama would say her little prayer: “St. Pantaleone, give me the grace to come into some money, not just for me but for all of my family, Amen.” Then one night while she lay in bed she heard a sound in the small apartment. She awoke, looked to see if one of the children needed her, but they were all fast asleep. As she settled herself back into bed she saw the shadow of a man in the kitchen across from the bedroom. “He had dark, curly black hair,” she told Signora Cortesa the next morning. “He was very tall and handsome.” But seeing him there in that darkened apartment, she was suddenly afraid, threw the blanket and sheets over her face and lay there some heart-pounding moments, praying directly to God for some quick assistance. When she lowered the covers, exposing her eyes squinting in the darkness, the man was gone! “That was St. Pantaleone,” said the old Signora Cortesa. “The one you were praying for to bring you an answer. He was coming with the numbers and you scared him away!”

The St. Pantaleone story was told and retold at least a hundred times that I can remember. Papa said he never won the lottery because Mama chased the saint away. “Maybe he was a burglar, Pa,” I once said. He laughed. “A burglar? To steal what? We were poor. We were looking to win the lottery and move out of that cold-water flat into a big palace but the saint, he figured out your mother really wasn’t that interested in getting rich! He would laugh then to show us, especially Mama, he wasn’t genuinely disappointed but rather found it all humorous, one of the oddities that happens in life.

Fifteen years after the near appearance of St. Pantaleone, my father was out of work for about two months. Daily he would pound the proverbial pavements but all the shops at which he’d apply for work turned him away. No jobs available. Financially 1952 was the worst year they’d ever endured so far. And by now there were five children’s mouths to feed besides their own. Times were desperate. We realized Papa was out of work. We saw the worry on their faces, but they never sat us all down to show us the poor hand of cards they’d been dealt. Whatever discussion they had about it took place in Italian, which we kids called “the secret language” because it was the one they spoke when they did not want us to understand. It was their way of shielding us from the fear of having no money to pay for school supplies and new clothes. Food and shelter? Who thought of that back then! We were kids in our little kids' world. They took care of us and we were certain they’d continue to do so.

One day, however, Papa slipped and spoke to Mama in English. He said how he would go out there again and look for work as he’d done everyday, but he could not guarantee he’d find a job. “We need to pray something happens,” Mama said. And Papa said, “Sure, we’ll pray.”

I kept myself hidden behind the door until the two of them stopped talking. Then I slammed it loud enough to let them know I’d just walked in. They smiled at me, asked about school, and I told them everything was fine, but I could hardly contain myself with an idea that was brewing in my head. St. Pantaleone! Of course, who else to the rescue!

I reviewed in my head the story of the lottery saint. The one who brought hope to all those poor Italians who hardly had bread to eat, let alone meat and potatoes. (Never mind that I did not question how they could afford to pay for the lottery ticket.) My parents were desperate. My father was unable to find a new job after the welding shop he worked at closed its doors. He could weld and he could bake Italian bread, but there were no openings anywhere.

First I waited for the apartment to be empty. Days later on a Saturday afternoon my parents took to the backyard and sat together out there talking. My sisters Anna and Joanie had taken the youngest of us, the baby Sarah, for a stroll. Al was at the library. And I was all alone upstairs digging deeply into the pockets of my father’s dark coat that hung in the closet beneath his gray hat on the shelf, the one I’d try on occasionally when I wanted to see what I’d look like as a grownup man. I was an eleven-year-old with a remarkable idea. I felt proud, even as I rummaged through Papa’s pockets–all of them!–to find some change; though all I came up with was a small broken pencil and some lint.

I needed money. Not a lot but at least ten or fifteen coins, preferably dimes and quarters and ma ybe a half dollar or two. I made sure Papa’s coat appeared as I’d found it, with its pocket flaps neatly out and nothing removed from inside the pockets.

Then as I stepped away from the closet, I accidentally kicked Mama’s purse that must have fallen from the shelf when the closet door had been opened. Or perhaps it had somehow been freed from the confines of the two carton boxes that had hemmed the purse between them. I stooped down and lifted it up. It did not feel heavy. Would I snap open the fastener that kept its contents secret and march onward with my plan to bring hope and joy to my parents again or would I walk away? You guessed it. I snapped open the fastener and saw inside a few zippered compartments and opened each one in its turn in my search for coins. Isn’t this exactly what Papa and Mama had taught us never to do? To steal? To touch what did not belong to us? But I did my best to keep the whole picture in sight: I was not stealing for the sake of stealing. I was stealing–actually borrowing–for a bigger and nobler reason. I would be the one to bring back Mama and Papa’s faith in St. Pantaleone! I would reinstate that holy man who brought money to the poor and who in the world at that moment were poorer than we! I felt that if Mama’s fervor at praying for that saint’s intercession could somehow be revived, he would appear again, if not in person to scare her again, and then at least in her dream he could drop a crap of papers with hastily written numbers on it that Mama could pick up and bring back to the waking world. Papa could then play the numbers on the street and we could all become so rich that Papa could stop hunting for a job, we could all start enjoying life, maybe become so rich we could quit school and ride horses all day on our new ranch.

One compartment held a pair of rosary beads wrapped in a handkerchief. I rolled it back up, placed it inside and zippered that pocket closed. The next compartment held some letters my grandfather in Sicily had written Mama. I did not–could not!–read them. Without shuffling the order of them I returned them to where they’d lain and zippered it closed again. The third and last compartment was my last hope. If it did not contain coins, I would have to think of another plan and I knew it wouldn’t be easy. None of my friends would give me the coins I needed, not even on loan. Very slowly I moved the zipper tab down the length of the teeth and prayed to hit pay dirt. At one point I heard my sister Anna’s voice but she was not climbing the stairs. She was outside screaming at Joanie. My jaw set tight as a drum, I yanked the long zipper open and voila! There were coins, lots of coins. Half dollars. Quarters. Dimes and nickels. A few pennies I’d leave behind. I gathered up about six dollars worth and dropped them into my pocket. There were enough coins in there that it would not make an obvious difference unless Mama decided to count them and then I would be in the deepest trouble I’d ever been in since the local movie house accused me of stopping up the men’s room during a Saturday matinee.

My heart was beating away and it sounded to me like rounds of applause. “You did well, Sal,” my heart seemed to be saying. “You did real well.” Ok, I stole or borrowed Mama’s money and that’s not good, but if it works out the way I planned it and St. Pantaleone does his share, which’s to worry? I gave the black leather purse about five once-overs to make certain nothing seemed out of place–a fastener unfastened, a zipper unsupported. It looked good. I placed it back at my feet on the closet floor the way I had found it. I considered wiping away fingerprints, but I knew if push came to shove and this whole get-rich-quick idea of mine exploded in my face, there was no way I would not do the honorable thing and step forward. I would be a thief but not a thief who lied. I would come clean with everything, if I had to. But I was confident I would be the one to save the day. They would all love me too much to ask what I was doing in Mama’s purse and in Papa’s pockets.

That evening as soon as it was dark I volunteered to throw out the garbage. Usually Mama had to remind me a dozen times before I jumped up from the TV or my homework to do my twice-weekly chore. This time I surprised her with, “Let me get rid of the garbage before the commercials are over,” and dashed down the stairs with it tight in my arms. Once outside I shoved the brown bag of garbage into the can, snapped down the lid, and headed for the yard.

It was a beautiful night. Up there was heaven and of course they were watching me. Soon they’d be getting those stars to twinkle extra brightly because here was a smart kid who loved his parents and loved St. Pantaleone too and all the saints and angels whose only reason to be was to bring happiness to those who believed in the power of miracles. I took each coin and tossed it into the green grass. I spread each one so they would not be found in one spot, betraying perhaps that someone had a hole in his pocket and had inadvertently dropped them. I threw each coin like a farmer sowing seeds. I flipped a couple into the air, not caring about heads or tails but about saving my folks.

Finally when all the money was gone, I raced back upstairs to watch TV. I can still recall sitting there looking at the old Phil co and seeing nothing at all because my mind was back at one of the scenes of the crime. I carefully reviewed each detail from the first moment the idea came to me. I reveled in the power it seemed to give me, knowing I had done it all single-handedly so far. The rest was up to St. Pantaleone. If he wanted to help out, the way he had almost helped out back in 1937, here was his opportunity. I had laid the groundwork–literally!–and he’d have to do the rest if my plan were to succeed.

The following day I waited for Papa or Mama or Joanie or Anna to go out in the yard, find some coins and run upstairs to report the event to the rest of us. But no one went to the yard and I started worrying that maybe one of the kids in the neighborhood would trespass, find and keep Mama’s stolen-borrowed coins. So I raced down myself and started gathering up as many of the coins I had the previous night laid down. My hands were filled with mostly silver and they clanked in my hands as I ran screaming up the stairs and into the apartment.

“Look! Look! I found all this in our yard! It’s a sign,” I said, because nobody else was saying it.

“A sign of what?” Anna asked.

“Of what?” I said, wondering if I would have to be the one to not only devise the plan but also explain it before it even worked out.

“Yeah, a sign of what?”

Papa walked over to the coins I had presented on the table. Mama knitted her eyebrows and stood beside him. Joanie asked if she could have a half dollar. Anna said no because it wasn’t our money and Joanie said Sal found it and I said, “Then I guess it’s mine.”

Papa gave us all a stern look. “That’s enough,” he said. Then to me, “So you found money in the yard. What do you think it means? Somebody give it to us or somebody lost it?”

“Ma,” I said, “maybe it’s that saint you used to pray to.” Was I supposed to give everybody the right answers to say? It was getting ridiculous. “You know, Ma. The Italian saint.”

“They’re all Italian,” Anna said. “Even St. Patrick and the apostles.”

“Jesus too,” said Joanie. “Gesu! Gesu!”

Papa scratched his head and it got quiet again. He lifted a quarter and played with it from finger to finger the way magicians do when they do one of their tricks. But Papa was not the trickster here; it was me and it was one I saw falling apart at the seams. Then Mama saved me.

“San Pantaleone,” she said in a voice that seemed rooms away. “Give me the grace to come into some money, not just for me but for all of my family.”

I went to the table and scooped up half the coins with both my hands and carefully let them clunk onto the table again. “St. Pantaleone strikes again!” I said. “He saved the day! We’re gonna to be rich!” But Papa put his hand on my shoulder as if to say, not so fast.

“Somebody dropped the money,” he said. “Pretty soon they’ll come around and want to know who found it. Maybe some woman’s purse fell open and all this money dropped out.” Close, Pa, I thought, real close. “So we’ll keep it in a safe place till the owner comes and claims it,” Papa said. Joanie returned to the pile the two coins she had taken. Anna asked him, “Can we keep one coin apiece?” but Papa shook his head. “These coins belong to the person they belong to, not us.”

It was my turn to say something. I had initiated my plan, got it rolling, and it appeared to be at a dead stop. “You think the lottery saint put it all out there to let us know we’ll be ok?” I asked Papa.

He smiled at Mama first, then back at me. “Could be,” he said, “but you know what? We are all ok. There’s nothing we need to worry about. What does your mother say about God and his angels and saints? They always take care of us. We just need to have a little faith.” I nodded my head and hoped he was right. Then Mama took all of the coins and put them in a fat jar. “I’ll keep this in the pantry,” she said. “When the owner comes looking for it, we’ll give him the jar too.” We laughed. It was all too funny for words.