Chapter 19
Serafina
Iwoke in my coat.
The wool collar had pressed a line into my cheek that I could feel before I opened my eyes. I did not open them for a long time. When I did, I lay on my left side on the narrow bed of my childhood and I cataloged it.
The room had not changed in twelve years.
The same pale yellow walls. The same crucifix above the door that my grandmother had hung when I was seven.
The same wardrobe with the brass key in the lock that I had never once turned.
The white curtains on the window that faced the drive.
The desk in the corner with the small green-shaded lamp my mother had bought for me the autumn before she died.
The lamb was on the pillow beside my head, where I had put it the night before. It felt like an artifact from another life—from someone else’s life.
I had been in the room for twenty-four hours and change. I had not eaten. I had not undressed. I had drunk a glass of water from the bathroom tap at some point in the night.
I sat up.
The coat was twisted around my hips. I straightened it without taking it off. I put my feet on the cold tile and I sat on the edge of the bed.
I knew the announcement would have been made.
I knew it because my father had told me, in the study, that he was going the other way, and my father did not say a thing he did not then do.
I knew the photographs were in a manila folder on his desk.
I knew my phone was somewhere in Gianni’s office and my laptop was beside it.
I knew Marco had sent two messages by now, and probably a lot more.
I knew Marco would understand, by now, that something was wrong.
I heard a key turn in the door.
I did not stand up. I did not turn my head. I heard the small metallic click of the bolt drawing back and the older softer sound of the iron handle dropping under the weight of a hand on the other side, and the door opened, and Gianni came in.
He was carrying a tray.
He walked to the desk and set the tray down on the green blotter where I had done my homework as a girl, and he set it down with the care of a man who had decided in advance that he would not spill anything.
A small espresso in a white cup. A piece of bread from the bakery in the village, sliced.
A bowl with two figs and a clementine. A linen napkin folded in a triangle.
He arranged the napkin square to the corner of the tray.
He sat on the edge of my bed.
Not the edge near my feet. The edge near my hip. The edge where, when I was nine, he had sat sometimes after our mother died and told me stories about the saints because he had not known what else to give a sister whose mother had just gone.
“Piccola.”
I did not answer.
“It has gone out on the wires. Half an hour ago. The joint statement was drafted last night and Papa signed it before dinner and the office released it at nine-thirty Italian time. La Repubblica has it. Reuters has it. It will be in every newspaper in Italy by morning and in the American papers soon.”
He paused. He let me have the silence to absorb it.
“Enzo is on a plane. He will be in Palermo by two and at the house by four. Papa would like you to be at the table when he arrives. Tomorrow there will be a luncheon. The Commission representatives will fly in from Naples in the morning. Papa would like you presentable.”
That word.
I felt it land. Presentable. He had used it the way a man uses a word he has been told to use, the way an emissary says the lines of the message he has been sent to deliver, and I understood that the word had come from my father.
“Eat something, piccola. You haven’t eaten since the plane. Maria made the bread herself this morning. The figs are from the tree behind the kitchen. Your favorite to climb.”
He looked at me for the first time.
His face was tired. The skin under his eyes was dark and his mouth was set in the small tight line of a man who had not slept either, and for one second the part of my brain that had been built by the same mother as his made the small involuntary movement of pity.
I closed it down. I closed it down with the deliberation of a hand turning a key in a lock.
He stood up.
“He won’t see you today,” he said. “He thinks it’s better. Tomorrow. After Enzo arrives. You will sit at the table the way a daughter sits at the table, and you will smile when you are introduced, and you will not speak unless you are spoken to. Do you understand.”
I did not answer.
He waited a beat. He nodded once, as if my silence were the answer he had expected, and he walked to the door. He paused with his hand on the handle.
“It is finished, Sera. I am sorry. I know you don’t believe that I’m sorry. But I am.”
He went out.
The key turned again.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time after the sound of his footsteps had gone down the corridor. The espresso on the desk sent up a small thin curl of steam that thinned and disappeared. The figs sat in the bowl. The bread sat on the plate. I did not move.
After a long time I stood up.
I walked to the window. I drew the white curtain back with two fingers.
The drive was empty. The orange trees along the front.
The fountain in the courtyard running. The gate at the bottom of the drive was closed, and beyond the gate the road went down through the olives toward the coast, and I could not see anyone on it.
I let the curtain fall.
I went back to the bed. I picked up the lamb. I held it against my chest with both hands the way a child holds a small animal it does not want to drop, and I sat on the edge of the bed in my coat and my boots, and I did not cry.
The light moved across the tile.
I watched it. A single rectangle of sun that came through the gap between the curtain and the window frame in the late afternoon.
It moved now. Slow. The same speed it had always moved.
It crossed the foot of the bed and went up the wall toward the wardrobe, and the air in the room warmed by half a degree, and I lay on the bed in my coat with the lamb against my chest and I watched the rectangle go.
I had not eaten. The figs had bruised slightly where they had been touching the side of the bowl. Maria had not come to take the tray.
Grief had a shape.
It was not what I had expected. It was not loud.
It was a slow drag at the breastbone and a tiredness in the hands, and a thinning of the will, and at some point in the early afternoon I had understood that the thinning of the will was the dangerous thing, the thing that would let me sit at the table tomorrow and smile when I was introduced and not speak unless I was spoken to.
I held the lamb tighter when I noticed it.
The gate.
I heard it, loud and clear. It was the heavy iron one—the ceremonial gate, the one at the front of the house, not the work gate at the side of the drive that the staff and the suppliers used. The ceremonial gate was on rails. It made a particular long groan when it swung.
I sat up.
A car. The sound of tires on gravel coming up the drive, slowing, stopping in the courtyard at the front of the house. A door. Two doors. The deeper sound of a heavier door being closed by a man, not a driver.
For the millionth time, I cursed that my room didn’t overlook the front drive. Instead of checking the window, I went to the door and put my ear to the wood.
The corridor outside my room was on the second floor and the entry hall was on the ground floor below it, and the entry hall had a high ceiling and a tile floor and an open mezzanine that ran above it, and any voice in the entry hall would carry up through the mezzanine into the corridor outside my room.
I had learned this as a child eavesdropping on my father’s late dinners.
I pressed my ear to the painted wood and I listened.
The front door opened.
I heard the steward—Pasquale, who had been with the house since my father’s father—greet someone with the small formal courtesy he used for anyone above the rank of supplier. A man’s voice answered him in Italian.
The Italian was good. The grammar clean. The vowels American at the edges, but only at the edges, and the accent shaped under the vowels was Sicilian—Monreale Sicilian, the accent of an old man on a hill above Palermo who had drunk grappa with him and sold him cuttings at the end of two weeks.
Marco.
I closed my eyes.
I pressed my forehead to the door and I closed my eyes and I listened, because if I had gone to my knees the way my body wanted to go to my knees I would not have been able to hear, and hearing him was the thing I had to do.
“Don Arturo Scordato, per favore.”
Pasquale said something polite and refusing. The Don was not receiving today. There had been an unexpected change in the schedule. If the gentleman would be so kind as to leave a card, the Don’s office would be in touch in the coming week.
A pause.
“Tell him Marco Caruso has come from Chicago. And that I will wait in the courtyard until he is received.”
Pasquale’s voice came back, slower. The polished refusal had developed a small crack in it. Signor Caruso was, of course, welcome, but the Don was—
“I will wait in the courtyard, Pasquale. I have flown for nine hours. I am in no hurry. Tell him.”
His voice.
I had not heard it in thirty-six hours. It was the voice from the kitchen on Saturday morning, the one that had said pack a bag, the same low calm Italian he used with Rosa in his mother tongue, and it was here, in this house, in the entry hall under my feet.
I felt my whole body register him the way a body registers warmth after cold.
I leaned my weight against the door because my knees had decided, after all, to do the thing I had been holding them off from doing.
Footsteps. Pasquale, fast. Down the long corridor on the ground floor, the soft soles of his slippers on the tile, the small cough he made when he was nervous. The study door opened. Closed.
Silence.