4. Terms #2
Then, near the end, without any change in her voice: “And the estate maintains the widows’ provision. The original one, as written.”
Ferrante flips pages. “I have the current schedule of family provisions here, and there is a widows’ fund, though the language has been amended twice since…”
“The original one,” Valeria repeats. “As written. That is my term.”
Ottavia’s head comes around.
Nobody at this table knows why she wants it. I do not know why she wants it, and I have no intention of buying it in front of eleven people by asking.
“Granted,” I tell Ferrante. “Restore the original language and leave it alone.”
Pelle reads out clause nineteen at 11:40 a.m., in the flat voice of a woman who has read worse, and it proposes that the marriage be consummated within thirty days and the fact recorded by attestation, to defeat any later challenge of annulment.
Valeria does not look up from her copy. “Strike it or notarize it, Rosanna. Which of those two rooms do you want to be standing in?”
“I will witness,” Ottavia offers.
I laugh. It comes up out of my chest without permission, and Valeria’s follows, both of us at a table where our lawyers are drafting the terms of a thing neither of us has been willing to call anything all morning. Ettore Rinaldi does not laugh, and the sound dies where it ought to.
Then he stands up.
“My daughter is thirty-three years old.” His voice is thick, and he does not fix it.
“She has buried three men, and Thursday’s flowers have not gone brown.
On Sunday she puts her hand in a fourth one’s, and the man taking the notes is billing me for it.
I have sat here for two hours doing arithmetic on her.
I am her father, and I have been doing arithmetic. ”
Nobody moves. Valeria reaches over without looking and puts two fingers on the back of his wrist.
“Eat something that is not chalk, Papa.”
He sits down. Fabrizio is already there with the bread.
Pelle calls ten minutes to clean up the schedule, and the table comes apart into chairs and paper.
Ettore takes his daughter to the south window, the one that looks down the lawn to the water, and stands himself between her and the rest of the room with his back to all of us, so that the only thing I am left holding is her face.
He talks for under a minute. His hand comes up twice while he does it: once toward the driveway, once flat and cutting, low, meaning tonight.
I do not need the words. A car at the gate after dark, a bag already packed by somebody in his house who was told not to ask, and Ettore Rinaldi standing in my dining room on Monday morning to eat every consequence of it for the rest of his life.
Her chin comes down. Her hand goes to his forearm and stays there. She shakes her head once, not fast, and she does not take it back. She does not let go of his arm while she refuses him.
He puts his forehead against hers. Then he walks the length of the room without looking at me, and Fabrizio has the door open for him before he reaches it.
We finish at 12:15 p.m. Signatures Sunday, before the ceremony.
Fabrizio is clearing the far end of the table with three saucers stacked up his forearm when I catch him.
“Sunday. Stand with me.”
He does not put the cups down. “Who else would it be?”
Then, with his back still to me: “I have witnessed for this family since your father, and I was never sorry about a single one of them until this year.”
I let him keep his back turned while he says it.
She catches me in the corridor outside the library when the room has emptied, and the elevator stands between us in the air with nobody willing to be the first to name it.
“Tazio is yours,” I tell her.
“My what?”
“Yours. He came to me last night and asked whether he was keeping people out of your room or keeping you in it. I did not answer him, and that was the answer.” My hand wants to go to her face and stays where it is.
“From this morning, he takes his orders from you. Including orders about me. If you tell him to put me out of a room, he puts me out of the room, and if he refuses, he loses the job.”
She takes that the way she takes everything, all the way in, before she moves.
“You could have told me that in front of Corva and made yourself look generous.”
“It would have made you look kept.”
“My father offered me a car tonight.” She is looking at the floor between our shoes. “Gone before Sunday, a border by morning, and he stands in your dining room on Monday and takes whatever walks through the door.”
“I know. I watched him make the offer.”
“I priced it twice, the way I price everything.” Her voice holds level, and her hands do not.
“Column one, I am alive in a rented flat in a country where I have to learn a new name, and both families shoot at each other for ten years over the rumor of where I went. There is no column where I run and nobody dies. There is only the one where I am not standing in the room when it happens.”
Her breath goes out of her. She steps in close enough that I can smell the soap from this house on her. She does not touch me, and I do not touch her, and the corridor is eleven feet long and takes both of us a long time to survive.
“Tomorrow I become your wife,” she states. “Say it back. I have watched three men become a headline about me, and I am not going to walk into a fourth one with everybody at that table calling it a transaction and neither of us calling it anything at all.”
“Tomorrow you become my wife.”
“Good.” Her voice does not hold. “That cost me more than the clause about residency.”
Ottavia is waiting in the hall with Aldo’s glasses pushed up into her hair.
“Four generations of this family have been married at Santa Caterina, and I am not going to a courthouse at eighty-six.” She taps her stick once. “The nave is sealed. The crypt chapel is not. The diocese will release it by tonight, and Emilio will do it with his terrible nose.”
The crypt chapel sits under the sanctuary floor, thirty feet of old Carrara and four generations of D’Amato dead between its altar and the place where I knelt with a needle in my hand on Thursday morning.
“Sunday,” I tell the hall. “4 p.m. Under him.”