Chapter 11
MARINA
Rosa is making a sauce that takes six hours and she has decided I am going to learn it, which means I have been standing at her stove since eleven with a wooden spoon and instructions.
"Not like that."
"You said stir."
"I said stir. I didn't say attack. It's not your brother."
I stir slower. The kitchen is hot and the windows are steamed and the cat that is not supposed to be in the house is on the chair by the radiator with its eyes shut, and it is Sunday, and there is a dinner tonight, and I have been told about the dinner the way you are told about a storm. It is coming. Wear something.
I have not seen him since Friday.
That is not true. I have seen him. I have seen him in the hall going out, and in the drive from my window getting into a car, and once at the end of the corridor by the study with Luca, both of them turning to look at me and then turning back, and every time it has been like seeing somebody across a bar you have been to bed with.
Except I have not. Except all I did was hit him and then put my mouth on his in front of his housekeeper, and he has not touched me since, and I have not gone near enough to be touched, and the house is very big and we are both very good at being in different parts of it.
"You're stirring like that again."
"Sorry."
Rosa takes the spoon off me. She tastes. She puts a hand out without looking and I put the salt in it, because I have learned that much, and she salts, and she gives me the spoon back.
"He was twelve," she says.
I keep stirring.
"You'll hear it tonight from somebody, and they'll tell it wrong, so you'll hear it from me first. His mother.
Teresa. She was the loveliest thing that ever walked into this house and I include the Pope's cousin who came for a wedding in 'eighty-eight.
" She wipes her hands. "Twenty-one years ago June.
They were outside the club on Ninth Street.
Carmine went in for something, two minutes, he said, and the car was sitting there with her in the front and Salvatore in the back, twelve years old, and a car came down the street the other way. "
The spoon stops.
"Keep stirring."
I keep stirring.
"Nine shots, they said. I wasn't there. I was here.
Carmine came home at four in the morning with the boy, and the boy had his mother on him, all down his front, and his hands were cut to pieces from the glass where he'd tried to.
Where he'd." She stops. She looks at the sauce.
"He didn't cry. Twelve years old. He sat at that table and let me take the glass out of his hands with the tweezers and he didn't make one sound.
I've never forgiven him for that. I've never forgiven Carmine for making him the kind of boy who could. "
I do not say anything. There is nothing to say to that. I stir.
"There's not been a woman sleep in this house since," Rosa says.
"Not one. Twenty-one years. Carmine wouldn't have it and then Carmine was gone and Salvatore wouldn't have it, and the men think it's a rule, and it's not a rule.
It's a house that's afraid." She takes the spoon again.
"And then you walked up the drive, and he put you on the third floor. So."
"So what."
"So wear something tonight. And don't let Dominic see you flinch."
I wear the black dress.
It is the only dress I own. It is the one I wear to funerals and to job interviews and it has done a lot of both, and I put it on in the third-floor room with Benny on the other side of the door and my hair up, and I look at myself in the window because there is no mirror, and I look like a bartender in a funeral dress.
Good. That is what I am.
The dining room has been set for six. The chandelier is on. Rosa has put out the white cloth and the good glasses and there are candles, actual candles, and From the door it is a beautiful room, and it is a room where men decide things, and I am about to sit in it.
Luca is there already. He nods at me. He does not say anything, and he never does, and I have started to find that restful.
Then a man comes past me in the doorway at speed with a bottle in each hand and stops and turns and looks at me from about two feet away with a grin already going.
"You're her."
"I'm her."
"Matteo. I'm the brother. The good-looking one.
" He has a face I know, because it is Salvatore's with all the weight taken out of it, the same black hair and something lighter in the eyes, and he is twenty-seven and moves like he has never once been told to sit still.
"I told Dom you didn't look like a rat's daughter.
I want you to know that. I said it to his face. Do you drink red?"
"I drink whatever's open."
"I like her," he says, to Luca. "Luca. I like her."
"Sit down, Matteo."
"I'm sitting."
He does not sit. He eats an olive standing up from a dish on the sideboard and Rosa comes in with a tray and hits him on the arm without breaking step, and he sits.
Aldo comes in and kisses me on both cheeks and says bella, and asks about my hand, and holds my chair.
And then Dominic.
I have not met him. I have heard him, through a floor, through a door, and I have seen the back of him going down the drive, and now he is in the room, and he is not what I expected.
He is smaller. He is fifty-eight and thick through the middle in a good grey suit and he has a face like a closed shop, and he comes in and looks at the table, and looks at the six places, and looks at me, and there is nothing in it.
Not hate. Nothing. He looks at me the way you look at a chair that is in the wrong place.
"The Silvestri girl," he says.
"Marina."
"I know what your name is."
He sits. He sits at the right hand of the empty chair at the head, and I understand from the way Aldo's mouth moves that he has sat there for a long time and that somebody else used to.
Salvatore comes in last.
He does not look at me. He comes in and stands behind the chair at the head of the table and puts his hands on the back of it, and the room goes quiet, and he looks round it once, at each of them, and then he sits, and everyone sits, and Rosa brings the food.
The first hour is Matteo.
He carries it. I have seen it done, I have done it myself behind a bar, and he does it well: he talks about a fighter of Luca's who cannot take a punch, and about a car he wants that Salvatore will not let him buy, and about a woman in Bensonhurst who is either his girlfriend or is not depending on which day you ask her, and he asks me questions.
Real ones. What is the worst thing a drunk has ever said to me.
How do you know when a bartender is stealing. Is it true I cut off Sal Buonocore.
"It's true."
"He's been coming to Teresa's since before I was born."
"He'd had four."
"Nobody's ever cut him off."
"Then nobody was doing their job."
Matteo laughs with his whole body. Luca does something with his mouth that might be a smile. Aldo, beside me, pats my hand on the cloth.
Salvatore says nothing. He eats. He is at the head of the table and I am halfway down the left side with Aldo between us, and he does not look at me, and I have counted, and he has not looked at me once in an hour, and it is the loudest thing in the room.
Dominic has not spoken either. He eats slowly and drinks water, because it is Sunday, Rosa told me, he does not drink on Sundays, and he watches. He watches Matteo. He watches Salvatore. He watches me, when I talk, with that closed-shop face, and I feel every one of them.
Then Rosa clears the plates and brings the meat and Matteo runs out of things to say, and it is Dominic's table.
"You play," he says.
It takes me a second to understand he is talking to me.
"Piano."
"Yes."
"Your father played."
"Yes."
"In this house. That piano. Every Sunday for nine years, and Carmine would sit where the boy's sitting and close his eyes." He cuts his meat. "Aldo used to sing. Didn't you, Aldo."
"Badly," Aldo says.
"Badly. And Enzo would play whatever you asked, and he never once needed the music.
He had it all up here." Dominic touches his temple with the handle of his knife.
"That was Enzo. All of it up here. Every number, every name, every account.
A man who never needed to write anything down.
" He chews. "You'd think a man like that would know better than to keep a second set of books. "
Nobody moves.
"Dom," Salvatore says.
"I'm making conversation."
"Make different conversation."
"She's sitting at Teresa's table. She should know what she's sitting on." He turns to me. He is polite. That is the worst of it. He is a polite man asking a polite question. "Did they ever tell you what he did? Your mother, anybody? What he actually did?"
"Dominic," Aldo says, and his hand is on my knee under the table, and it squeezes, once, hard. "Enough."
"I'm asking her."
"And I'm telling you enough."
"He gave them everything." Dominic says it to me, not to Aldo.
Quietly. "The Bureau. Four years of it. Names.
Routes. The port. He sat at this table on a Sunday and ate Teresa's food and played her husband's piano and on Monday morning he sat in a car in a parking lot in Jersey and told a man with a badge what we'd said over the meat.
Four years. And when Carmine found out, he did what you do.
" He picks up his water glass. "So I'll say what Carmine would have said, if he was here, and you were sitting there. "
He stands.
"To Enzo Silvestri," Dominic says, and raises the glass. "Who taught us all what happens to rats."
There is a sound.
It is not loud. It is a crack, and then something wet, and I look up the table past Aldo's shoulder and Salvatore is sitting very still with his right hand closed on the tablecloth and the stem of his wine glass standing up out of his fist and the bowl of it gone, in pieces, on the white cloth, and red spreading out from under his hand across the linen.
Wine. And then not wine. Darker, coming from between his fingers, and he does not open the hand.
Matteo laughs.
It is too loud and it is too late and it is the bravest thing I have ever seen anyone do at a dinner table, and it fills the room for exactly as long as it needs to, and then Luca is up and round the table with a napkin and Rosa is in the doorway, and Dominic is still standing with his glass in the air, looking at his nephew's hand.
"Sit down, Dom," Salvatore says.
He does not say it loudly. He says it the way goodnight was said to me across this table on the first night, as if it were a small thing, as if it did not matter at all, and Dominic holds his look a beat too long, and then sits.
Luca puts the napkin over the hand. Salvatore lets him. He does not look at the napkin, or at Luca, or at the blood coming through the white, and he does not look at his uncle.
He looks at me.
Down the length of Teresa's table, past Aldo, past the candles, with his hand bleeding into a napkin and his face doing nothing at all, he looks at me, and he does not stop.