24. Before
BEFORE
LORENZO
At four o’clock in the afternoon on the day after the funeral, my wife comes into the kitchen, takes a cup off the hook, and sets it upside down on the saucer on my side of the counter.
Then she goes back to work.
She does not look at me while she does it. She does not not look at me either. She does it the way you water a plant that belongs to somebody who has died, and then she walks out, and I stand in my mother’s kitchen for a while with my hands on the back of a chair.
I would rather she stopped.
I want to be honest about that, because I have spent a day and a half being honest with myself for the first time in eleven years.
I would rather Valeria D’Amato came in here and swept every cup in this house off the counter and told me what I am.
Instead she is scrupulous. She hands me information the moment she has it, she asks my opinion and listens to the answer, and last night she slept in our bed with two feet of air between us like a river.
She is keeping the arrangement.
There is nobody in the world I would rather have on my side and I have lost her, and both of those things are going to be true every day for the rest of my life.
Soldo is at the south door again this morning.
Day fourteen. Same mat, same four feet inside the doorway, same tail around the same feet, facing out at a gravel drive with nothing on it.
One of the men has started leaving his coat on the floor beside the cat. Not putting the cat on the coat because he will not be moved. Just laying it down next to him, so that when the animal finally gives up on the doorway there is somewhere warm within reach.
Nobody has told him to do that. I do not know which of them it is.
I make myself walk past it four times a day.
Gilda Renzi is found at half past nine.
Fabrizio finds her, because Fabrizio spent yesterday afternoon after his own eulogy making a list of every person in this thing who could be got at, and started driving to them in order, alone, without telling anybody, which is either the best instinct in this family or the worst discipline.
He calls me from her hallway, and his voice is not right.
“Lorenzo. Do not send men. Send your wife.”
She has been a notary in that house for thirty-one years, and she is at the bottom of her own stairs.
I have seen a great many bodies and I am not going to describe this one, except to say that a woman of seventy-six who goes down a flight of stairs does not look like anything you can put in a sentence, and that Fabrizio has put a cloth over her face before we get there, and that he is sitting on the third step from the bottom with his forearms on his knees, and that his hands are shaking, which in twenty-two years I have not seen.
“She notarized my apprenticeship papers,” he says, without being asked.
“When I was seventeen. Nobody else in this family would put their name to anything for me and she did it in about four seconds and then she gave me a biscuit like I was a child, and I was so angry about the biscuit that I did not thank her, and I have thought about that maybe once a year since.”
“Fabrizio.”
“There is a note on the table,” he says.
Valeria is already past both of us with her coat still on.
She gives it ninety seconds.
She does not touch the note. She stands over it with her hands behind her back and reads it twice, and then she goes and looks at Gilda’s hands under the cloth without moving anything, and then she says, “No.”
“Say it.”
“She had arthritis in the right hand. Bad. It is in every document that woman notarized in the last four years if you know to look, because I have read about nine hundred of them in the last five weeks.” She points at the paper without touching it.
“There is a tremor in her real signature. It is small and it is constant and it is not there in this. This is the steadiest thing that hand has produced since 2021.”
“So she did not write it.”
“Nobody wrote it,” she says. “Somebody made it.”
And then my wife stands in a dead woman’s dining room and says the thing that has been building in her since three o’clock on Wednesday morning.
“That is three. My handwriting on a storage log. Giulio’s on eleven blanks.
Hers on this. Every one of them perfect, every one of them unhurried, every one of them better than the person could actually do it.
” She looks up at me. “He is not hiding. Do you understand? He has never once been hiding. This is a man who signs his work.”
Fabrizio drives back with us as far as the parkway and then peels off, and before he goes he leans down to my window.
“I should have gone to her first,” he says. “I went in the order of who was most useful to him. She was on my list at number nine.”
“That is not…”
“I know it is not.” His jaw does something. “I am telling you so that somebody else knows the number. Nine.”
Then he taps the roof of the car twice and drives away, and Valeria watches his tail lights the whole way down the ramp, and says nothing at all, and I put it down to the day.
We go to Doyle Avenue in the afternoon, because of a question my wife has been carrying since the Vanni house and has not been able to put down.
Forty minutes. That is the whole question. Concetta Vanni lives forty minutes from Renata Alba, and there is no reason on this earth for those two women to be within forty minutes of each other.
Renata Alba is eighty-one and makes us stand in her porch for six minutes while she finishes with the birds.
“They are molting,” she says through the screen, not opening it. “They are unbearable when they are molting. Everyone is.”
“Signora Alba…”
“You are the Don.”
“I am.”
“Your mother stood in this same spot in 1995 and had the manners to admire the birds,” Renata says, and opens the door.
Valeria makes a sound behind me that she turns into a cough.
We do the tea. There is no way around the tea.
And then Valeria puts her cup down and says, “Signora, who asked you to look after Concetta Vanni?”
Renata Alba goes very still with the pot in her hand.
“How do you know about Concetta?”
“I sat in her kitchen seventeen days ago and told her that her husband is dead.”
The old woman puts the pot down.
“Well,” she says. “Somebody had to.”
It has been going on for ten years.
A letter comes. It has always come the same way, in a plain envelope with a Providence postmark, typed, never signed with a name.
It tells her that there is a woman in Woonsocket in a bad way, that a house has been arranged, and asks whether Renata would be so good as to look in on her from time to time and to write back if anything is wrong.
Money comes with it, twice a year, for what the letter calls incidentals.
Renata has been going to Concetta Vanni’s house once a fortnight for a decade.
She has taken her soup. She sat with her the first two Christmases.
Concetta Vanni believes that Renata Alba is a friendly widow from the parish who took an interest, and Renata Alba has never once told her otherwise, because the letters asked her not to.
“And you did it,” Valeria says. “For ten years. On an unsigned letter.”
“They are not unsigned.”
The room changes temperature.
“There is no name on them,” Renata says.
“But every one of them ends the same way. Every single one, for ten years, in the same words.” She gets up and goes to a sideboard and takes out a biscuit tin, which is of course where they are, and she puts it on the table between us.
“The fund thanks you for your discretion. Nothing in this is to be named after anybody.”
I hear Valeria stop breathing.
“That is Isabella,” I say.
“That is your mother’s sentence, word for word, out of her own mouth, in this room, in 1995, when I asked her what the thing was going to be called.
” Renata Alba sits back down and folds her hands.
“So no. They are not unsigned. I have been taking instructions from a dead woman for eleven years and I have known it for eleven years, and I did it anyway, and I will tell you exactly why, since you are both sitting in my house looking at me like that.”
“Signora…”
“Because the instructions were good,” she says. “Every one of them. Not one letter in eleven years ever asked me to do a single thing that was not kind.”
I have to go and stand in the hall.
That is a thing I have not done since I was a boy, leave a room because of a sentence, and I do it in an eighty-one-year-old woman’s house in Rhode Island, and I stand in her hallway between a barometer and a picture of somebody’s confirmation and I put my hand flat on the wall.
Somebody has been running my mother’s fund.
Not stealing it. Not using her name to move money.
Running it. The actual thing, the thing my father and Ettore Rinaldi took apart and turned into a machine for keeping widows quiet, has been operating for eleven years in the dark, in her words, with her rule about naming intact, paid for out of an account in Providence.
And every widow it has ever taken care of was made by the man who is running it.
I think about a woman in Woonsocket who has had soup every fortnight for eleven years.
I think about a man in his socks in my mother’s ballroom saying is there anything I can carry.
And I do not put it together. I want that on the record too.
I stood in that hallway with every piece of it in my hands, and I did not put it together, because the shape it makes is not a shape a human being expects, and because I had spent the morning watching my brother’s hands shake over a dead notary.
Valeria puts it together in the car.
Not all of it. But she does the thing I did not do, and she asks it standing in Renata Alba’s front garden with her hand on the car door.
“Signora. Have the letters ever asked you to get ready for a new one?”
Renata is in the doorway with her arms folded against the cold.
“Twice,” she says.
“When?”