11. Useful
USEFUL
VALERIA
“Start with the last line.”
The last line is nine years old. E. RINALDI. Placement consideration. Four hundred thousand dollars, five weeks before I married Domenico, when I was twenty-four and finishing a thesis on tail risk and everybody kept telling me how lucky I was.
I read it three times to be sure the payee column is what it is.
Then I go up the page, which is how you read a schedule anyway, oldest first. The week my second engagement was announced. Four days after Domenico’s funeral. Six days after they pulled Sandro out of the water off City Island.
Nothing for Giulio. Not yet.
I put the page flat and square it against the edge of the table with two fingers.
“Who sourced it?”
“Renata Alba. She typed for that trust for twenty-four years, and when she retired, she took her copies home, because paper is loyal and systems are not.”
“Did anybody see you?”
“No query was run in any building. She copied it for me at the parish machine, forty cents a page, into the poor box, and the originals have not left her house.”
“How many copies exist?”
“One. In front of you.”
“Who else has seen it?”
“Tazio drove and did not read it. Your father, at 7:40 p.m. this evening, in his study.”
My hand is flat on the table beside the paper, and my right hand has not shaken since Tuesday. I would like it back.
“You went to him first.”
“I did.”
“Good.” I turn Ottavia’s ring around my finger once, and then again, and I make myself stop. “Ask me what I want to know, and I will tell you honestly, because if you ask me how I am, I will lie to you.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Whether he can still be used.”
I work for forty minutes with a mechanical pencil and Priya’s rate tables and the trust’s own benefit schedule out of box 9, and Lorenzo sits across from me with his hands around a glass he does not drink from and lets me.
The schedule pays a widow’s benefit at one and a half percent of the covered block per event. Every payout in nine years of file computes at one and a half. It is not a negotiable number, it has been one and a half since 2001.
Everything my father took out of that fund, all four rows, comes to nine hundred and forty thousand dollars.
The account in Zurich holds nine hundred and ninety-one thousand and has not been touched since it was opened.
I check it twice because the first answer is stupid.
The extra fifty-one thousand is not interest and it is not a rounding error.
Fifty-one thousand dollars is exactly what three widow’s benefits gain when you move the rate from one and a half percent to two, and there is no two percent anywhere in this instrument or in any instrument I have read this week.
“He gave back every dollar they paid him,” I say, “and then he put in fifty-one thousand more.”
Lorenzo does not move.
“It does not help him.”
“No. It is worse.” I set the pencil down.
“A man who takes money and spends it is a man with an appetite. A man who takes money and reserves against it at a better rate has done the arithmetic on his own daughter, and then improved it in her favor, and gone on taking. He put it in a drawer and paid interest on it in his own body.”
Then I go upstairs and get my bag.
The founding page has been in the inside pocket since Monday afternoon in Queens, and it has been the only thing in nine days I have not shown him, and I have taken it out four times in four days and put it back.
I put it on the table on top of the schedule.
“This was in box 14, under the settlement instructions. I found it on Monday and I did not tell you.”
He picks it up by the edges.
Thirty years old, brittle at the fold, the founding instrument of the widows’ provision as it was originally written, before either amendment.
Four signatures at the bottom. The fourth has been gone over by hand in ink, again and again in tight overlapping strokes, until there is nothing underneath but a black oval the size of a thumbprint.
He reads the whole page before he speaks.
“Why not Monday?”
“Because you had just given me your brother’s ledger and your family’s throat and I wanted one thing that was mine.” My voice stays level. “It is a bad reason. That is why it is the true one.”
He puts it down. “Thank you for the true one.”
“There is more.” I turn the page over and hold it to the lamp. “Look at the lowercase e. The crossbar is filled in on every single one of them. I saw that e an hour ago, at the top of this schedule, in the word Beneficiary.”
Lorenzo pulls the photocopies toward him and finds the sheet with a shopping list on it in a small looping hand, milk, bird seed, lemons, coffee, and an account number and a Zurich routing written sideways in the margin in the same pen.
“Milk, bird seed, lemons, and a Zurich routing,” I say. “She did the fund’s banking on the back of her shopping.”
“She told me one more thing she did not have to,” he says. “She typed the second amendment under protest, and initialed the protest, and kept that copy in a box.”
I look at the black oval on the founding page.
“She would know whose signature that was.”
“She typed it.”
His thumb finds his brother’s ring and turns it once, and I take it for grief, and I let it go.
At 12:40 a.m. I sit on the edge of the bathtub with the door shut and the light off and do the last piece of arithmetic in private.
The notebook is open on my knees and I cannot see a thing and I write in it anyway, because there is a version of tomorrow in which I am the only one who still has this written down.
The fund sent me a check three times with a bird on the card and I cashed all three.
My father took four rows off the same account and reserved against them at a rate that flattered me.
For nine years the two of us have been drawing out of the same custodial account in Providence and neither of us ever once asked out loud what the money was for, and the only difference between us is that he knew and I did not, and I am not sure that difference does as much work as I need it to at 12:40 a.m.
Five years I called the quiet years, between Sandro’s headstone and Giulio’s first dinner. A rented office on Weybosset with my name alone on the glass, estates and probate, widows’ work, which I chose, and never once heard myself choose.
When I come out he is sitting up against the headboard with the lamp off and his hands empty, not reaching for me.
“Come here,” I say, and he does, and we lie there like two people holding a rope.
Ottavia is at the door on Saturday at 9:20 a.m.
“You are going to your father.”
“I am.”
“Take the Mercedes.” She hands me a set of keys off the hall table. “If you are going to ruin a man, do not arrive in a station wagon with birdseed in the trunk.”
Tazio drives. Twenty minutes in, he clears his throat.
“Sunday lunch is at 1 o’clock. Her mother has made a lasagna and her father repairs boilers and my mother has told them I am the Don’s driver, which is a lie of scale.”
“What is the girl’s name?”
“Livia. She sang at the funeral.”
“What do you have to talk about?”
“Nothing.” He grips the wheel. “I have thought about it since Thursday, and I have nothing. I know cars, guns and the parkway.”
“Then do not talk. Ask her what she thinks about when she is falling asleep, and then be quiet for as long as it takes her to answer.”
“Is that what works?”
“I have no idea. I have been married four times.”
Tazio’s head comes around, and then he laughs, horrified, and I laugh with him in the front seat of a car on the Northern State on my way to take my father apart.
Nunzio Farro opens the gate himself.
“Va…” He stops with the name half out of his mouth, the one he has used since I was four years old and used to ride the gate open on the crossbar while he pretended not to see me. “Signora D’Amato.”
He holds the gate and does not look at me, and he does not search the car, and I have to sit still for a moment before I can walk up the drive.
My father is in the back study with the television on and no sound and a glass of milk at his elbow.
I put the schedule on the desk between us and take the chair.
“I am going to ask questions in order,” I tell him. “If you cry, I will wait, but I will not stop.”
“Yes.”
“Nine years ago. Who brought you the proposal?”
He looks at the milk.
“Gaetano Presti.”
The name goes through me like a hand through water. Thirty years my father’s closest man, every Sunday of my childhood at that table with a white box of sfogliatelle under his arm, and he never once ate one, he just liked to watch the rest of us do it.
“When did he die?”
“June of 2019. In his kitchen, on a Tuesday, with the radio on.”
Every road out of this thing ends inside a dead man. The tower ends in a rooming house in Yonkers. The plate ends in a hospice in March. The proposal ends in a kitchen in 2019 with a box of pastries nobody ate.
“Did he say where the money came from?”
“He said it was the fund. He said it the way you would say the coffee is from Naples.” My father’s hands are flat on the desk.
“It was a consideration on a marriage. My father took one in 1971. I did not think I was doing anything that had not been done to every woman in this life since we came off the boats.”
“And after Domenico?”
“I asked one question.”
“Of him.”
“Of Gaetano. He gave me an answer and it was a good answer and I took it and I put it in a drawer and I did not open the drawer again.” He picks up the milk and does not drink it.
“Six days later there was a payment coded as an adjustment on the terminal accounts, and I understood the coding, and I did not make a telephone call.”
“And Sandro?”
“By Sandro I did not ask anything at all.”
“Why do you eat chalk?”
“Since the week we buried Domenico.” He puts the glass down. “I have never been to a doctor about it. I did not want to be given a name for it.”
I let that sit in the room for as long as it needs.
“You reserved at two percent,” I say. “The schedule pays one and a half. You put fifty-one thousand dollars of your own money into that account so the number would be bigger than what they gave you.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because one and a half was what they thought you were worth.”
And there it is, the thing he has been carrying under the antacids for nine years, and if he had spent the money on a boat, I would know exactly what he was.
“Mamma,” I say.
He goes the color of the wall.
“The only luck I have had in my life,” my father says, “is that your mother died before I did this.”
Neither of us says anything for a while. The television changes to a weather map.
“Here is what happens now,” I tell him. “The money in Zurich stays in Zurich. You do not send it to me, you do not make a gesture. A gesture is a way of finishing something and you are not going to be finished.”
“Then what do you want?”
“You.” I put my hand flat on the schedule.
“Thirty years of who sat where and who owed what and whose father was at which table in 2001. Your ninety men. Your name on doors that will not open for a D’Amato.
Every question I ask, answered the same day, in writing, and nothing to Corva and nothing to anybody.
You work for me now, and the terms are mine, and you do not get to know why I am asking. ”
“Valeria…”
“I am not finished. You are going to want to hear this as forgiveness, so hear this instead.” I lean in.
“Being used is something that happened to me. Being useful is something you do. I am not handing you the second one to make the first one hurt less. It is going to hurt considerably more, and you are going to do it anyway, for as long as I need it, and at the end of it I still may not have anything for you.”
“When she is done hating me,” he says, to nobody, “she will check my math.”
“I checked it last night. You rounded up.” I stand and pick up the schedule and fold it into my bag. “It does not buy you one thing. It only tells me you are worth conscripting.”
He sits there for a long moment with his hands on the arms of the chair.
Then he gets up and takes the roll of antacids off the desk, and the one off the arm of the chair, and reaches behind his head for the open box on the shelf with the four more standing in it, and he gathers all of it against his chest and carries it around the desk and puts every piece into the bottom drawer, and closes the drawer.