CHAPTER NINE
SALVATORE
I have not been in a room with her since Saturday morning.
It is a house with fourteen rooms on the ground floor and I have managed it without difficulty.
I leave at seven. I come back after one.
I take the front stairs and she has been given the east wing and on Wednesday I ate standing up in the pantry like a man robbing his own kitchen, and Bruna watched me do it and said nothing at all, which is the worst thing she has ever done to me.
Thursday evening I come up the drive at ten past six and she is in the garden.
Frankie slows down without being told.
"Keep going."
"Boss."
"Keep going, Frankie."
He puts the car in the garage and I sit in it for a minute and then I go up to the landing window on the half turn of the stairs, which is the one that looks down the length of the east wall, and I stand there in the dark of a house I own and watch my wife work.
She is deadheading.
She has found the secateurs. They live on a nail inside the door of the potting shed and they have lived there since 1998 and there is no possible way she could know that except by looking for them, which means she went into the shed, which means she has been in there and seen the seed tins and the labels in my mother's handwriting.
She is doing it properly.
Down to the second five leaflet, on the angle, away from the bud.
Not snapping the heads off, which is what people do.
She works along the wall from the south end and she is quick and she does not stand back to admire anything, and every so often she puts a hand in the small of her back the way you do at the end of a long shift, and then she carries on.
She does forty feet of wall in about fifty minutes.
Then she picks up the bucket and carries it to the compost at the bottom and tips it, and knocks it out on the side twice, and puts the secateurs back on the nail.
She has been doing this every evening.
I have not asked anybody. I know because the wall has changed and I know that wall the way I know the inside of my own hands, and somebody has been through it with a pair of secateurs three times this week.
"You could go out there," Bruna says.
She is on the stairs below me. I did not hear her come. She has been doing that for thirty-nine years and I have never once caught her at it.
"I'm working."
"You are standing at a window."
"Bruna."
"There is a girl in your mother's garden with a bucket," she says, "and you are standing up here in the dark like the landlord."
She goes down the stairs.
I stay at the window until Adelina comes up the path and in through the boot room door, and then I go the other way, into the study, and shut it.
Saturday morning at half past eight, Vincenzo Barone's gift arrives.
Two men bring it. They are polite. They are extremely polite, and one of them is Barone's nephew, which means it is not a delivery, it is a visit with a parcel in it.
Tommaso takes it in the hall.
It is a box about two feet by one, wrapped in brown paper, tied with string that has been tied by somebody who knows how, and the card on it is thick and cream and hand written.
"Do you want to."
"Open it."
He cuts the string.
Inside is tissue paper, and inside the tissue paper there is a christening gown.
It is white and it has gone ivory the way linen does, and it is about three feet long from the neck, and the whole of the bottom third is worked in cutwork embroidery so fine that when Tommaso lifts it out of the box the morning light comes through it and puts a pattern on the hall floor.
Neither of us says a word for a moment.
"Nineteen sixty-one," Tommaso says. He has the card. "Sicily. It says the nuns at Monreale, and it says his mother, and then it says his wife, and then it says his son."
"And then what."
Tommaso reads the rest of it twice before he says it out loud, which is how I know.
"For the first one," he says. "With the Council's blessing. We will want to see him."
The hall clock does the thing it does before it strikes.
"Put it back in the box," I say.
"Salvatore."
"Put it back in the box, fold the paper, and put it in the safe in the study, and don't let Bruna see it, and don't let my brother see it, and if my wife asks what came this morning it was glass."
Tommaso lays the gown back in the tissue.
He does it carefully. He has two girls of his own and he handles it the way a man handles a thing that has had children in it, and that is somehow the thing that gets me, standing in my own hall at twenty to nine on my wedding day.
"He's telling you he's dying," Tommaso says.
"I know what he's telling me."
"He's telling you he's dying and he wants the line settled before he goes."
"I said I know."
Tommaso closes the box.
"That's not a gift," he says. "That's a lien."
At ten past nine I go out to the east wall with a pair of secateurs and cut one rose.
I have done this seven times. Seven Octobers, seven roses, and every one of them cut from the same four feet of that wall, because that is the stock my mother put in and the rest of it is newer and the colour is wrong.
This one is not one of those. This one is the first I am going to hand over.
I take my time about it. There are three that would do and I stand there in a suit in the cold with a bucket of water at my feet and I look at all three like an idiot for a while, and I take the one in the middle, on the angle, long stem, and I put it in the water.
"So it's you," Nico says.
He is sitting on the wall.
He has been sitting on the wall the entire time, about thirty feet along, in yesterday's shirt, with his shoes off and his feet hanging down the inside, and he is holding a cup of coffee and looking at me with the most terrible delight I have ever seen on a human face.
"Get down off the wall."
"Seven years," Nico says.
"Nico."
"Seven years, and I said to Bruna, I said, somebody is taking one rose off that wall every October, and Bruna said it was rabbits.
Rabbits. With a knife." He drinks his coffee.
"I want you to know that I defended you.
I said Bruna, there is no possible way that my brother, who does not have feelings, who once fired a man for saying happy birthday to him. "
"That's not why I fired him."
"You fired him in October."
I pick up the bucket.
"Sal."
"What."
And my brother stops doing the voice. He puts the cup down on the wall beside him and he looks at the house, and my brother is twenty-six years old and has never once been serious for longer than about eleven seconds, and this is one of them.
"Does she know," he says.
"No."
"Are you going to tell her."
"No."
"Salvatore."
"She is getting married in two hours," I say, "to a man she met nine days ago, because her father sold her. That is what she knows and it is the worst thing that has ever happened to her, and she is managing it. She is managing it very well. Today is not the day I hand her a second thing."
Nico picks his coffee back up.
"There's never going to be a day," he says.
I take the bucket and the rose and I go inside, and my brother stays sitting on my mother's wall with his shoes off in October, and I do not answer him, because he is right, and because I have known he is right since about 2021.
The chapel behind the house has eleven seats.
It was built for a family that had five people in it and it has not had eleven people in it since before the war.
There is a bell in the top that has no rope on it.
There is a window on the east side with nothing in it but plain glass, because whatever was in it went in 1944 and nobody ever replaced it.
Tommaso stands at the back with his hands folded.
Bruna is in the second row in a black coat with a hat that has not been out of tissue paper since my mother's funeral, and Nico is next to her with his shoes on and his hair flat, and Frankie is at the door because Frankie is always at the door.
Father Dominic is seventy-eight and has buried everyone I have ever loved.
He does my mother in 2002 and my father in 2006 and he does not make either of them into something they were not, which is the only reason he is still coming out here.
He comes and stands next to me at the front with his hands behind his back.
"Eleven seats," he says.
"I know how many seats there are."
"Four of them have got people in."
"Five. The boy's walking her in."
"Then four." Father Dominic looks down the empty chapel.
"Salvatore. You have two hundred men in this state who would come out here on an hour's notice and stand in the rain for you, and you have put your wedding in a room with four chairs used, and I want you to tell me why, because I have known you since you were an altar boy and I have an idea, and I would rather be wrong. "
"Because it isn't a wedding."
"Then what is it."
"It's a wall," I say.
He is quiet for a moment.
"And what's on the other side of it."
"Her."
"Mm," says Father Dominic.
He goes and puts his book on the rail and squares it up, which is what he does instead of arguing, and then he says, with his back to me, in the tone of a man discussing the weather:
"Your mother married your father in this room with sixty people in it and a choir, and she cried all the way through it, and afterwards I asked her why and she said it was because they were all watching and none of them were going to help.
" He straightens the book a second time.
"I have thought about that sentence for twenty-four years, and I still don't know if the problem was the sixty people or the fact that she was right. "
"Father."
"I'm only saying that an empty room is not the same thing as a safe one."
"Where's the boy," I say.
"With her," says Nico.
"He should sit."
"He wants to walk her in."
I look at the back of the chapel.
"Sal," Nico says. "He asked. He asked me this morning, he came down the back stairs at seven o'clock in his socks and he said, who does it, and I said the father does it, and he said, and if there isn't one."
The door at the back opens four inches and stops.
I put my hands at my sides.
There is a rose in her hands that I cut ninety minutes ago and there is a nine year old in a borrowed jacket holding her arm the way somebody has shown him in the last twenty minutes, and the light through the plain window is on both of them, and I have been standing in front of men with guns and felt less than I feel in this room.
Father Dominic clears his throat.
"Salvatore," he says. "You have to turn around."