8. Pallbearers
PALLBEARERS
LORENZO
“Eleven names,” Valeria says in the dark.
“Start at my grandmother and go clockwise.”
“Ottavia. My father. Corva.” She counts them off against my sternum.
“Nadia. Rosanna Pelle. Gilda Renzi, who came out on a Saturday with her own seal and a thermos of soup and notarized nine pages without once looking up. Nunzio Farro at the window. Tazio at the door with his radio. Fabrizio at the sideboard.”
“That is nine.”
“You and me.”
I let the two of us sit at the end of her list in the dark, and I do not reach for the lamp.
“Strike me,” I say.
“I know.”
“Say why, out loud, so that you have heard yourself do it.”
Her hand stops on the ring. “Because you were four hundred meters from a window with your own back turned to it, and because you put a needle in your brother’s leg with your own hands, and no man arranges to be the one holding the injector.”
Something in me goes down a step and does not come back up. I have one thing I have told her about that morning that was not true, and I take my hand off her hair for a moment so that she will not feel what the rest of me is doing.
“Now strike yourself,” I tell her.
“You do it. I want to hear you.”
“You had your mouth on him for eleven minutes with four hundred people watching, and you gave me the tower and the Yonkers shell before my own men had them. On Sunday, you found us a rail apron while you were holding a tourniquet.” I put my hand back where it was.
“And you asked for the original language of that fund in front of everybody at that table like a woman with nothing to hide.”
“That is the part that costs me.” Her voice goes down. “I said it out loud on Saturday morning. Somebody at that table heard me ask for the one thing nobody was supposed to look at, and by Sunday afternoon the specimens were gone.”
“Or somebody at that table repeated it to a person who was not in the room.”
“Which widens it to about sixty people and makes me want to be sick.”
We work down the list. Gilda Renzi drove out from Mineola on a Saturday and was in the room for ninety minutes and had never met any of us.
Nunzio Farro put himself between my brother’s body and a Rinaldi gun on Thursday for reasons he would find impossible to explain and has been Ettore’s man since he was seventeen.
“Fabrizio,” she says.
Neither of us writes it down.
He walked into that underpass on foot for the last man, under two rifles, and came out with him over his shoulder. He carried my brother’s medication schedule in his own head for nine years. He is going to be at the front of the casket on Wednesday because there is nobody else it could be.
“No,” I say.
“No,” she agrees, and turns over and puts her face in my neck.
Some time after two, she gets up without putting the lamp on.
I hear the notebook come off the nightstand, and I hear the pen go, on and on, longer than eleven names ought to take.
Then it stops. It does not start again. After a while, it closes, and she comes back to bed, and I do not ask her what is on it or what is not.
Tuesday runs like a tide going out.
Anne Kelleher files at 10 a.m. The finding stands, chemical arrest preceding the gunshot wound, cause of death pending confirmatory analysis that no longer has anything to confirm it with.
By noon, the local station has the phrase inconclusive pending panel in the mouth of a man standing in front of our gate, and by 3 p.m. two of the New York papers have put my wife’s face beside the word again.
I give out the day’s work at the breakfast table.
Ferrante on the state lab and the transfer manifest, two men on Doreen Pyle’s competitor lots in case the courier van was garaged in Queens, Peppe Mazza on the church perimeter with the city, and I hand Fabrizio the New Rochelle plate and the landscaping company behind it, because he is the only man I have who can walk into a garage in another county and come out with a name and a friend.
“I will have something by Thursday,” he says, and takes the coffee cup out of my hand and replaces it with a plate.
Silvio Corva finds me at 4 p.m. in the gun room with his sleeve pushed up.
“The Buick went out Monday at 11:40 a.m. and came back at 5:15 p.m. with ninety-four miles on it. Nobody in this house has an itinerary for that car.”
“No.”
“Don.”
“You have the whole church to hold on Wednesday, Silvio.”
He presses the patch and goes, and Tazio, who has been standing in the hall through all of it with his arm strapped, does not open his mouth.
At 6 p.m., I go to Ciro Tebaldi.
He has a drain in his arm and a chart that says the nerve is gone below the elbow, and his nieces have covered the bed rail with stickers of a cartoon shark. There is a bowl of butterscotch on the tray table that somebody brought from his own car.
“Take one,” he says. “The little one bites, but she is generous.”
Wednesday.
The diocese released the nave on Monday afternoon once the state police finished with it.
Nobody could match 1911 glass in six days, so the north clerestory is boarded with three sheets of plywood.
Down at floor level, four feet from the altar rail, there is a patch of new marble a shade paler than the rest, and I know its dimensions from the inside, because I was lying on top of my brother’s widow when it was made.
I put a man in the bell tower at 6 a.m. Peppe has the rectory roof and the two side streets with city police on the barricades. My father-in-law’s ninety are on the perimeter, and mine are inside. Between us, we have enough bodies to cover four hundred mourners and forty press.
Gus Petrosyan runs the funeral, third generation, and he goes down the center runner ahead of us with a pocket comb, straightening the fringe with the teeth of it.
Valeria walks in on my arm at 10:55 a.m., and every head in that building turns.
Four hundred people who have read the word widow beside her photograph three times, and the cameras behind the barricade shooting through the open doors, and she does not adjust her pace, and her hand on my sleeve does not weigh any more than it did in the car.
Ottavia is already in the front pew. She gets up, in front of all of them, and comes out into the aisle, and takes my wife’s other arm.
She does not say one word. She walks her the length of Santa Caterina like that, an eighty-six-year-old woman in black holding onto the woman the papers have convicted, and by the time they reach the front the sound in the nave has changed.
The casket comes up the aisle at 11:10 a.m. with Fabrizio Serra at the front left.
He has the corner nearest the head and he carries it the whole way with his jaw locked and the tears going down his face and off his chin onto his own lapel.
He does not lift a hand to them once, because both of his hands are on my brother.
I have known this man since I was fourteen, and I have seen him do everything a man can do in this life.
I have never seen him cry, and he cries for four hundred people without any shame at all.
At the rail, he sets his corner down and puts his palm flat on the lid and leaves it there.
Then he steps back and takes his place at my shoulder, and stands like a wall, and holds Nonna’s elbow through the whole of the Mass.
I speak at 11:40 a.m.
I cannot use the word audit in this building.
I cannot say what my brother put in nineteen boxes in Queens or that a fund with a condolence card on it paid for his last nine months.
Four hundred people are waiting for me to be a Don burying his brother, and three of them will hear something else.
One of the three is somewhere in this nave with his hands folded.
“Giulio took three sugars in his espresso,” I say. “Nonna told him for fifteen years that it was an insult to coffee. Every morning, he stirred in the third one in front of her, so that she would have to watch.”
They laugh. It comes up out of them and breaks against the plywood and comes back down.
“He was the only one of us who read the whole document. Every page, both columns, the schedules at the back nobody looks at. When we were boys and my father sent us out with a job, I would be finished in an hour, and Giulio would still be on the second page. I used to think it was slowness.” I have to stop. “It was not slowness.”
Nonna’s hand is over her mouth.
“The last thing my brother said to me was the beginning of a sentence. He did not get to the end of it. I have spent six days on the rest of that sentence, and I am going to keep spending, and when I have it, I am going to do the thing he asked me for.”
Nobody moves anywhere. Four hundred people hear a man promise to honor his brother’s memory, and my wife, eight feet away with her hands in her lap, does not look up at me, because she cannot.
Then I put my hand on the lid, down at the far end where his leg is, and there is a thing I did to that leg on Thursday morning that I have already lied about once out loud.
We bury him at 1 p.m. and come back to the house.
The reception fills three rooms and the terrace, and by 3 the noise in it has turned into the noise a family makes.
Tazio is on the front door in his one suit with his arm strapped under the jacket, refusing every chair anybody carries out to him.
Six nights ago, that boy asked me a question I would not answer.
He has not asked me another one since, and he has not told Corva a thing. My wife signs off on his hours now.
Ottavia holds court from the good chair with the arms, and my father-in-law is beside her working through a roll of antacids. At some point he stands up with a glass in his hand.
“In 2019, we sat across from each other in Newark for nine hours,” Ettore says.
“Your brother had a legal pad, and I watched him draw a boat on it for most of the afternoon. A boat, with a little flag. At 6 o’clock, he turned the pad over and read me my own numbers back for eleven minutes.
I lost every point I came in with, and then he asked me if I liked the boat. ”
The room goes up.
Across the terrace, Valeria’s eyes come to mine over the top of her glass. Neither of us says anything, because there is nothing to say in a room with a hundred people in it about two folders in nineteen boxes in Queens, one marked TAXES (REAL) and one marked TAXES (FILED).
Then a girl from the caterers comes through with a tray and sets a small espresso down on the table beside the good chair, where nobody is sitting, with three paper tubes of sugar in the saucer.
The room does not notice. Ottavia does.
She puts her hand over the cup and leaves it there. Fabrizio goes down on one knee beside her chair with his hand on the arm of it, and the two of them stay like that while the party goes on around them.
At 8:40 p.m. that evening, the last of it clears out, and Valeria takes the condolence mail into the library because somebody has to open four hundred cards and she has decided it is going to be her and not Nonna.
She works through two trays. Mass cards, the diocese, the longshoremen’s local, a Rinaldi cousin in Palermo, a florist’s bill somebody put in the wrong pile.
Then she stops.
The envelope is plain, and the return address is a management company in Providence. She has one hand flat on the desk.
“Read it to me,” I say.
“It is a condolence card. The card is a printed one. It has a bird on the front.” Her voice has gone somewhere I do not like. “Inside there is a check drawn on the custodial account. Payable to Valeria Rinaldi D’Amato. It is the widow’s benefit.”
“For Giulio.”
“For Giulio. My third.” She turns the envelope over and looks at the corner of it for a while. “Postmarked Saturday. That fund put this in the mail while the ink on clause nineteen was still wet.”
She holds the check up into the lamp with two fingers.
“And the date on it, in somebody’s small bookkeeping hand, is the Wednesday before the wedding.”