29. The Fourteenth of March #2
“I counted them,” Renata says. “Every day. I thought I had ruined the only thing I had.” She is very still. “And then in the July I opened the paper.”
I put it down.
“There is a reason underneath the reason,” I say. “My husband found the money in the June. He was going to use it against Lorenzo. Fabrizio knew by the second of July, and Giulio was dead on the nineteenth.”
Renata does not move.
“Then it was not me.”
“I do not know.”
“Say that again.”
“I do not know,” I say, “and neither does he, and I am telling you because you are going to spend the rest of your life deciding which it was, and I would rather you did it with all of it than half.”
“You could have let me have it.” Her voice is bare. “You could have said it was the ledger and I would have believed you and I would have slept tonight.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you not?”
“Because everybody in that house has spent thirty-one years choosing which true thing the women are allowed,” I say, “and I am not going to do it to you at a kitchen table on a Friday morning.”
Renata Alba puts her face in her hands.
It is a long time before either of us speaks.
“You are the third,” she says from behind her fingers.
“Isabella came in ninety-five. Then a boy came in 2011 with a chisel. Then you.” She lowers her hands.
“Three people have come up that path in thirty-one years, and two of them were dead within eight weeks, and the third is a nine-year-old who never learned to stop.”
“Renata.”
“What?”
“I am going to offer you six things,” I say, “in the order she offered them.”
She goes white.
“Papers. A bus. Forty-eight hours. Rent six months in a name that is not yours, somewhere neither family knows of. A place, and the place not told our business.” My voice is steady. “And money in your own hand every month, and not through a man.”
“Valeria.”
“That is the fourth time you have been asked.”
“I am eighty-one years old.”
“That is not an answer.”
“No,” she says.
“All right. Then I am going to ask a fifth time. And before I do, I am going to do the thing nobody has ever done, which is argue with you about the piano.”
Renata’s head comes up.
“She wrote it down. 1995. She will not go because of the instrument, and I have decided not to argue with her about the instrument, because the instrument is not what she means and both of us know it.” I lean forward.
“And she was kind, and she was respectful, and she was wrong. She had six weeks left, and she spent them being tactful. So tell me about the piano.”
“It is a piano.”
“Tell me about the piano.”
“It was my mother’s,” Renata Alba says, and then cannot say anything at all for a while.
“It came off a boat. It is not good, the action is heavy and the bottom octave has been dead since before I was born.” Both hands are shaking.
“It was the only thing in this house for nineteen years that he had not bought. Everything else in these rooms came out of his hand. The bed. He used to tell people. He would stand at a party and list what he had given me, and I would smile and say yes.”
“And if you had gone?”
“If I had gone I would have gone with nothing that was mine, and he would have had it.” Her voice is almost nothing.
“He would have been right about me for the rest of my life and there would have been nobody left to say otherwise. That is what I would not do. Not for a bus. Not for a name. Not for forty-eight hours.”
“That is not a piano,” I say. “That is the whole argument, and you have carried it alone for thirty-one years, and the one woman who could have taken it off you decided it would be rude.”
“So here is the fifth time. I am going to move the piano.”
Renata Alba makes a sound I am not going to write down.
“Four men and a Tuesday, out of my own money, which came from my mother’s people and has never been through that house.
It goes wherever you go. It goes first, before you do, so that when you walk in it is already there.
And if the bottom octave is dead it stays dead, because it is yours and it is allowed to be dead, and the first thing in that room will not be a thing somebody gave you. ”
She reaches across the table. She does not take my hand. She puts two fingers on the back of my wrist.
“Ask me again,” she says. “Properly. The whole thing.”
So I say the whole thing.
And Renata Alba, who said no to Isabella D’Amato in November of 1995 because there was nowhere to put a piano, and who stayed fifteen more years, and who wrote fifteen letters to a man who never wrote back, sits in a kitchen full of other people’s paper and says:
“Yes.”
She holds on to my wrist.
And then, without letting go, she says:
“Now tell me what you are going to do with the letter.”
In one hour and forty minutes I have not thought about it once, and I am a woman who has not put a document down before she was finished with it since she was twenty-four years old.
“I do not know,” I say.
“You do know what it is.”
“Yes.”
“It is a solicitation to murder in writing, signed, dated, in a hand that can be tied to a machine in this room in about a day and a half.”
“And if it goes in the record?”
“You are eighty-one years old and you go to prison and you die there.”
“And if it does not?”
“Then somebody decides what the record holds,” I say.
Renata Alba lets go of my wrist.
She sits back in her chair, and then she says, quite gently, the worst thing anybody has said to me in five weeks.
“Six things and money on the first,” she says, “somewhere nobody in either family knows of, in my own name, not through a man. And a piece of paper that must never come out.” Her head tilts. “Valeria. Say that back to yourself and tell me who I have just been sitting with.”
I cannot speak.
“You are doing it too,” she says.
“Renata.”
“You have offered me exactly what he offers. To the word. In the same order.” Her voice is not cruel.
“I have had that offer twice this morning and the second time it came with a hand on my wrist and I said yes, and I said yes to you, and I have known you four years, and I still cannot tell you what the difference is. Can you?”
The clock in her hall goes.
“You asked me,” I say. “He never asked. He decided and he paid and he never once…”
“He asked Nella Moro this morning,” Renata says. “He is asking her right now. That is what he is doing on Bond Street while you and I sit here.”
I have to hold the edge of the table.
“There is a difference,” I say. “There is. I have had it since six o’clock this morning and I cannot get it into words and if I cannot get it into words, then I am going to walk out of this house being him.”
“Then take your time,” Renata says. “I have got all day. I have had thirty-one years.”
And so I sit in a dead woman’s friend’s kitchen and I make myself do the thing I do, which is turn the page over.
“You wrote that letter for me,” I say slowly.
“Yes.”
“And when you did it, you did not ask me either.”
She goes absolutely still.
“You sat at a Christmas table and you looked at me and you decided,” I say.
“Four years, and then a letter, and you never once picked up a telephone and said, Valeria, I know that thing you are doing with your hands, I did it for nineteen years, do you want help. You went round me to a man, because that was faster and because it did not require me to say yes.” My eyes are streaming, and my voice is completely level.
“And the difference is not that I asked. The difference is that I am going to have to decide what to do with that letter, in front of you, in this room, and you are going to watch me do it, and whatever I decide you will know exactly what it makes me. It is not much. It is all there is.”
She sits there with her hands in her lap in a blue cardigan with the sleeves pushed up, and after a long time she says, very quietly:
“No. It is not much.”
Then, “But it is something. Isabella never let anybody watch.”
I look at the letter on the table between us for a long time.
Then I fold it along the crease she made in March, and I put it in the inside pocket of my coat, and I do not tell her what I am going to do with it, because I do not know.
“I will come on Tuesday,” I say. “For the piano.”
“And the letter?”
“I do not know yet.”
“That,” says Renata Alba, “is the first honest answer anybody has given me in this house in thirty-one years.”