Chapter 27
MARINA
Rosa has found me a dress and it is green and I have never worn green in my life.
"It was Teresa's."
"Rosa, I can't"
"You can. It's been in a bag in my room for twenty-one years waiting for somebody with shoulders. Put it on."
I put it on. It is silk, or something that was silk before I was born, and it is the colour of the bottle-glass they used to have in the window at Cassidy's, and it fits the way things fit when somebody has looked at you and decided.
Rosa zips it. She turns me round by the shoulders in the third-floor room and looks at me for a long time with her mouth in a line, and then she puts her hand on my face, once, quickly, and takes it away.
"There," she says. "Now go down and don't let any of them see you swallow."
Forty people.
Salvatore said forty and he meant it. The dining room has had two tables put end to end and the chandelier is on and there are candles again, and the men from the club are there in suits that do not fit, and their wives in things that do, and Carla from Teresa's, and Sonny Fusco with his closed smile at the far end where he cannot see the head of the table, and Matteo, moving, and Luca by the door, and Aldo, whose kiss lands on each cheek and whose whole face says nothing about Thursday.
And Dominic.
Sober. It is Sunday. He is in a black suit in the seat at the head's right hand, and when I come in he stands up.
They all stand up, that is what they do, it is a room of men who stand when a woman walks in and would put her in a ditch on Tuesday, and Dominic stands with them and looks at me in his dead sister-in-law's dress, and his face does something I cannot read.
Then Salvatore comes in behind me and it is over.
He does it before the food.
He stands at the head of the table with his hand on the back of his chair, the way he did the first Sunday, and forty people stop talking at once, and he does not make a speech.
He is not a man who makes speeches. He says, "Marina," and holds his hand out, and I go to him, up the length of the table past forty faces, and I take it, and he turns me round so they can see, and he takes my left hand in his bad one and holds it up.
Just that. His mother's ring in the light of his mother's chandelier.
"Marina Silvestri is going to be my wife," he says. "That's all. Sit down."
Nobody sits down.
Matteo starts it. He puts his hands together, once, hard, and then again, and then Luca, who I have never seen do anything with his hands but fold them, and then Carla, and then the room, all of it, forty people under Teresa's chandelier clapping for the rat's daughter, and I stand there in green with my hand in the air and I look at Dominic.
He is clapping.
Slowly. Both hands. Looking at me. And his face is doing the thing I could not read when I came in, and I read it now, because I have had ten years of faces and I know what a man looks like when he has been given the exact thing he wanted.
The food is Rosa's and it is the best thing she has made and nobody tastes it.
I am at his right. Not Dominic. Me. He put me there when he sat, he pulled the chair out with his bad hand and Dominic moved down one without being asked, and now I am sitting in the chair that Aldo's mouth told me somebody else used to sit in, and I understand whose it was, and I keep my hands in my lap.
Carla leans across the corner of the table. She is sixty and has run Teresa's since before it was Teresa's and she has a voice like gravel in a bucket.
"That's her dress."
"Rosa said."
"I was there when she bought it. Nineteen ninety-one.
Macy's. She tried on eleven and Carmine sat on a chair outside the fitting room with his hat on his knee and said that one to every one of them, and she bought the green because it was the only one he actually looked up for.
" Carla looks at me in it. "He looked up. "
Down the table Sonny Fusco catches my eye and lifts his glass an inch with his mouth shut, and I do not know what that means, and I lift mine back.
Dominic eats. He has said nothing since he stood up.
He cuts his meat into very small pieces and eats them one at a time, and between pieces he looks at the ring on my hand, and then at his nephew, and then at his plate, and he is polite to Rosa when she brings the bread, and he says thank you, Rosa, and Rosa does not answer him.
"You play," he says. To me. Quiet, under Matteo's noise.
"Yes."
"Teresa's piano. Carmine's. Whichever." He cuts.
"It's been sixteen years since anybody played it and now it's every night.
Rosa says. She says the whole house can hear it.
" He puts the piece in his mouth and chews and swallows, and looks at me with the closed-shop face.
"It must be a comfort. Playing his piece in his house. "
I do not answer that. I do not know how he knows it is his piece.
Matteo gives a toast. It is a bad toast, it goes on too long and has a joke in it about a fighter that only Luca understands, and it ends with him looking at me down the table and saying, "I told Dom you didn't look like a rat's daughter.
I'd like to say, for the record, I still don't know what one looks like, but I know what a Vitale looks like, and she's wearing my mother's dress," and sitting down too fast and knocking a glass over, and Rosa hitting him on the arm as she passes with the bread.
Aldo gives a toast. It is short. It is to Enzo, who would have wanted this, and he looks at me while he says it, and his eyes are wet, and forty people who watched Enzo Silvestri's name be spat on at this table for sixteen years raise their glasses to it because the man at the head of the table has raised his, and I drink, and I do not look at Salvatore, because if I look at him I will see the room he has not opened, and I have promised myself I will not look for it tonight.
Then Dominic stands.
Nobody asked him to. Aldo's glass is still in the air. Dominic stands up at the right hand of his nephew with his water glass in his hand and his black suit and his sober Sunday face, and the room, which has been loud, goes quiet the way a room does when it has learned to.
"I'd like to say something," Dominic says.
"Dom." Salvatore, not loud.
"I'd like to say something to the girl. Since she's family now.
" He turns to me. He is polite. He is so polite.
"Marina. You've had a lot of toasts tonight.
Matteo's. Aldo's. All of it very nice. And you've been in this house five weeks and you've heard a lot of things, and I'd like to make sure you've heard all of them, because a woman should know what she's marrying.
My brother would have wanted that. Carmine believed in a woman knowing. "
"Sit down, Dom."
"In a minute." He does not look at Salvatore. He looks at me. "Did he tell you about the basement?"
Nobody moves.
"Sixteen years ago. October. You were nine, I think.
He was seventeen." Dominic turns his glass in his hand.
"Carmine had a thing about what a boy should see.
He thought a boy who was going to sit in that chair should know what the chair costs.
So he took him down. Him and me. Down the back stairs to where the drain is.
And your father was already there, sitting on a chair, with Aldo standing next to him, and Carmine said, Salvatore, this is what we do to rats, and I want you to watch, and he watched. "
The chandelier hums. I did not know a chandelier could hum.
"He didn't say a word," Dominic says. "I stood next to him.
Seventeen years old. Your father looked at him, right at him, for a long time, and said something, I don't know what, and Carmine did what Carmine did, and the boy stood there, and watched, and didn't say one word.
" He puts the glass down. "And then he went upstairs and finished his dinner.
I saw him. He sat where Matteo's sitting and he finished his plate. "
I am looking at Salvatore.
I do not know when I started. I am looking at him at the head of the table with his hand flat on the cloth and the plasters on it and his face doing the thing, the nothing, the gate, and he is looking at me, and he is not looking at Dominic, and he has not said a word.
"So I'd like to raise a glass," Dominic says, "to the happy couple. And to the truth. Since we're all family." He lifts the water. "Ask him. I'm not saying it to be cruel, sweetheart. I'm saying it because he won't. Ask him if it's true."
I ask him.
I do not decide to. My mouth does it. I am standing, I do not remember standing, I am on my feet in Teresa's dress with forty people looking at me and Aldo's hand coming up towards my arm and not reaching it, and I look down the table at the man I said yes to in a room over that basement two days ago, and I say it.
"Say it isn't true."
He doesn't.
He looks at me. He goes on looking, longer than anyone at that table can stand, the way his father looked at him on a sidewalk on Ninth Street with a woman between them, and I watch him do the thing I asked him to do on Friday, I watch him know that I know there is a room, and I watch him stand in the door of it with forty people behind him and not open it, and not shut it, and not say one word.
"Salvatore."
Nothing.
"Say it isn't true. Say Dominic's lying. Say anything."
He opens his mouth. It is the smallest thing.
I see it, I see him try, and I see what it costs him, and it is not enough, and nothing comes out, and the whole table hears him not say it.
Forty people hear it. Sonny Fusco at the far end with his closed smile hears it and Carla hears it and Rosa in the doorway with a dish in her hands hears it, and Matteo has his head in his hands, and Luca has not moved from the door, and Aldo's hand finally reaches my arm.
"Bella"
I take my arm away.
I take my hand off the table, the left one, with his mother's ring on it, and I look at it there, the small stone, the plain band, and I do not take it off.
I want that clear. I do not take it off and throw it at him, I have seen women do that across a bar and it has never once helped.
I leave it on. I put my hand down at my side and I turn round and I walk the length of his mother's table in his mother's dress past forty people who have just watched him not say it, and nobody stops me, and Rosa steps out of the doorway with the dish in her hands and lets me through, and the last thing I hear before the stone hall takes my footsteps is Dominic, sitting down, saying quietly, to nobody:
"Well. Now she knows."