26. Nobody Asked
NOBODY ASKED
LORENZO
“Yes,” I say.
Then I stand in the hall outside my own study and do not move, because I have run this family for eleven years and I do not know where my mother’s boxes are.
I turn Giulio’s ring around my finger, and I go down to find Tazio.
He is at the counter with his shoes off and a bowl of cereal at half past eleven at night and does not apologize for either.
“Above the ballroom. Old sewing room, where the Christmas things live.” He puts the bowl down. “Boss. Do you want me to come up?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to not come up in a way where I am still on the stairs?”
“Yes.”
The door has swollen into the frame and takes my shoulder three times, and I open the skin across two knuckles on the edge of it.
Valeria comes up behind me with a lamp and a roll of clean paper and says nothing about the door or the blood.
The room comes out of the dark in pieces. A dressmaker’s dummy under a sheet. And against the far wall, in two rows, a dozen boxes with my mother’s handwriting on the sides.
WINTER THINGS. DO NOT DAMP. And under it, smaller, because she could never leave a thing alone: this means you.
I put my hand flat on the wall.
“Take your time,” Valeria says.
“I am fine.”
“I did not ask.”
She lays the paper over the floorboards and sets out her gloves and two pencils that are not hers.
The string on the first box is knotted twice with a loop pulled through. Somebody stood in a warm room thirty-one years ago and tied that knot and went downstairs and made dinner and died ten weeks later, and nobody has untied it since.
I untie it. I do not cut it. I put the string in my pocket.
The fund is in the second box, and it is a shoebox inside a bigger box, thirty or forty index cards under an elastic band, every one of them blank, and clipped to the top card a hardware receipt from Atwells Avenue with a note on the back in pencil: eggs, thread, ask R about the machine, it is eating the small e.
Valeria goes very still.
“That is Renata’s typewriter. She is asking about it in 1995.”
“She never had it repaired.”
“No.” She turns the receipt over twice. “Lorenzo, there is no office. She founded nothing. She ran it out of a kitchen drawer and did the shopping list on the back of it.”
We work. It is one in the morning, and then it is past two. The boxes are not sorted; somebody, my father probably, swept a life into cardboard in an afternoon.
At half past two I find my mathematics book from second form, my name on the cover with the L done backwards out of laziness, and down the margin of a page of long division, in red, in hers: You have not shown me how you got here. I do not care that it is right.
I put it down face down.
At a quarter past three I lift a folded square of paper out from between two ledgers. A receipt from a shop on Broadway, December 1995, for a boy’s winter coat and a pair of shoes and six pairs of socks.
The sizes are two years too small to have ever been mine.
“What have you got?” Valeria says.
“Give me a minute.”
Here is the hour I have not let myself look at in thirty-one years.
A Tuesday in December, and the boiler knocking under the house the way it did before they replaced it, and I am fourteen and on the stairs in my socks because a car has come up the gravel at eleven at night and cars do not come up the gravel at eleven at night.
My mother comes in first with her coat still buttoned, and behind her there is a boy.
He is holding a plastic bag by a handle that has stretched out long, and his jacket is not a winter jacket, and he stops exactly one step inside the door and does not come further in.
“Lorenzo. Come down here.”
“This is Fabrizio. He is going in the blue room at the end. He has had a very long day and he is not going to want to talk to you, so do not make him.”
“Hello,” I say.
He looks at me. Then past me at the door to the dining room, then back over his shoulder at the front door, then at me again.
I thought he was shy.
He was counting the ways out.
My father comes through from the back with a glass in his hand.
“Whose is he?”
“Mine,” my mother says. “For the moment.”
“Isabella.”
“It is eleven o’clock and he is nine years old and he has not eaten, and you and I are going to have this conversation tomorrow when it is not standing in front of him.”
My father drinks. Then he laughs, one note, and says something about her collecting things, and goes back through, and the door knocks against the stop twice.
She puts a plate in front of the boy and he does not eat it. He sits with both hands flat on the table on either side of it and watches the door to the yard.
“He is not hungry,” I say.
“He is starving. He is not going to eat until he knows how this house works.” She hangs the cloth back on the rail. “Take him round. Every door. Do not skip any and do not be clever about it.”
So I did.
I took a boy round my own house at midnight and showed him the front and the yard and the south door with the bolt you have to lift before you slide it. He did not say one word. At every door he stopped and put his hand flat on it before we moved on.
Halfway round I took two biscuits out of the tin and gave him one.
He looked at it.
“It is not a trick,” I said.
“I did not say it was.”
He took it then, and held it, and did not eat it, and carried it in his left hand through every remaining door in that house.
Because at the end, on the landing, he said the first thing he had said inside those walls.
“When do I go back?”
“What?”
“When do I go back? You should tell me now. It is better if I know the day.”
God forgive me, I laughed, because I was fourteen and had never been sent anywhere I did not want to go, and I said, “Nobody goes back from here. You are my brother now. That is how it works.”
He looked at me a long time.
“All right,” he said.
Then, “Is your mother going to die?”
“No.”
“All right,” he said, and went into the blue room and shut the door, and in the morning I found he had moved the chair to the window, and he sat in it for three weeks.
I come up out of it, and Valeria is watching me.
“Whatever you have just been sitting in for four minutes with a receipt in your hand.” She takes her gloves off. “I am too tired to be managed.”
“I have eaten nine thousand meals with that man, and I have never said the words tell me about your mother.” My voice does something.
“I did not ask because somewhere behind my back teeth at fourteen years old I already knew the answer would have my father in it. And as long as nobody said it out loud, the story stayed the good one.”
“The one where you saved somebody.”
“Yes.”
“That is the same thing,” she says.
“What is?”
“You did not ask him. You did not ask me.” She is not looking at me.
“There is a version of you that is a man who has one bad night in a dining room, and I have been trying very hard for three days to believe in him, because it would be easier to stay in a house with him.” Her jaw goes.
“And you have just handed me the other version, which is a man who has been not asking since he was fourteen, and it is a habit, and habits do not have one bad night.”
“Valeria.”
“Do not.” She holds up a hand. “I have been deciding whether to leave since Wednesday. You knew that.”
“Yes.”
“Say what you have been doing about it.”
“Nothing,” I say. “I have been very carefully doing nothing, in case doing something looked like handling you.”
And she laughs, one note, with no humor in it at all.
“That is the cleverest cowardice I have ever heard,” she says, “and I cannot even tell you it is wrong.”
Silvano Rinaldi comes to the house at five in the morning.
Keane telephoned him at two after reading Ettore’s third tab, and my wife’s eldest brother has driven from Rye in the dark by himself, and he sits down at my mother’s kitchen table in his coat and does not take it off the entire time he is under this roof.
He is fifty-one and he has his sister’s mouth and none of her stillness.
“Where is she?”
“Upstairs.”
“Good.” He sets the glass down and does not pick it up again. “Daniel Orsi.”
I do not say anything.
“He was nineteen. He went through a guardrail on the Saw Mill fourteen years ago and everybody said the road was wet.” Silvano is looking at the table.
“There was a list in a fraternity and my sister was on it and there were going to be photographs, and she was nineteen and she thought that boy had chosen her, and she was so pleased. She had never been chosen for anything in her life that was not arranged first.”
“And you sent somebody?”
“I sent the one man in this world who has never said no to anybody.”
“I said frighten him. Put a scratch on the car. Make him understand there is a family.” His jaw works. “Those are the words I used, and I have said them to myself every day since.”
“He did not ask you anything?”
“Not one question. Not one.” Silvano’s hand comes up over his mouth and goes down again. “He said yes, and he went, and four days later that child was dead, and he came back and told me it had gone further than he meant. He sat in my car and cried and apologized to me, and he said…”
He stops.
“Say it.”
“He said, nobody has ever asked me for anything before.”
“He was twenty-six years old,” Silvano says.
“Twenty-six, in that house since he was nine, and he had been given orders his entire life and not one person had ever come to him and asked, and when somebody finally did he was so glad about it that he did not think to find out what he was agreeing to.”
“You knew,” I say. “Domenico. Sandro. You knew, and you said nothing for nine years.”
“I suspected.” He does not look up. “Because if it was him, it started with me, and the day that comes out I am not the eldest son. I am the man who killed his sister’s first love with a telephone call.”
“And Giulio?”
“I stood in a cathedral five weeks ago and watched him go down and did nothing.”