Chapter 19 #2
I stood at the door.
I did not move. I counted my breath. I counted my pulse against the wood. I let the lamb fall to the floor at my feet because my hands had to be free for something, though I did not know what, and I stood there and I waited.
The study door opened.
Pasquale’s footsteps coming back up the corridor. Up the stairs to the mezzanine. Down the corridor toward my room. Not Pasquale. Two pairs of feet—the soft slippers, and behind them the slower heavier tread of an older woman in flat shoes.
The key turned in the lock.
The door opened.
Maria.
She was eighty-one. She had been in this house since my father was a boy.
She had washed my mother’s hair the week before my mother died, and she had cut my hair on the kitchen stool every September from age six to age twelve.
She stood in the doorway in the black dress she wore for serving, and her eyes were wet, and she had the small white handkerchief she always carried balled in her left hand.
She looked at me on my feet at the door with the lamb at my feet on the floor and the coat creased where I had slept in it, and she did not say anything for a second, and then she said:
“Vieni, signorina. Tuo padre ti vuole nello studio.”
Her voice broke on the last word.
He wanted me.
I bent. I picked up the lamb. I put it in my coat pocket. I followed her out into the corridor.
Maria walked ahead of me. She did not turn.
She kept the small white handkerchief in her left hand and she walked the corridor at the pace of an old woman who had decided to walk with dignity because dignity was the only thing she could give me, and I followed her, and the walls of the corridor went past in the slow careful way walls go past in a dream when you are not sure whether the dream is the good kind or the other kind.
Down the stairs. The marble smooth underfoot.
Across the entry hall, where Pasquale stood by the front door with his eyes lowered and did not look at me.
Down the long ground-floor corridor toward the study.
Maria stopped at the door. She put her hand on my arm.
She did not say anything. She squeezed once, the small fierce squeeze of a woman who had been told the rules and was breaking one of them inside her own ribcage, and then she stepped aside.
I opened the door.
My heart nearly exploded.
I saw it the way I saw everything—fast, in pieces, before my brain put the pieces together.
My father at the desk in the chair I had sat across from yesterday morning.
His posture too straight. His hands flat on the blotter on either side of a small velvet box that had not been there yesterday.
Gianni in the second chair, the chair I had not sat in, the chair Gianni had sat on the arm of yesterday and was now sitting properly in, white-faced and rigid, his hands gripping the wooden ends of the chair arms in a way I had not seen since he was nine.
Marco in the center of the rug.
I saw the hand in the pocket first.
It was the left hand. It was sunk into the pocket of his coat the way a man sinks his hand into his pocket when he wants the room to know that the hand could be holding anything.
The coat was the long charcoal one I had not seen him wear before, the formal one, the one he must have packed in the small hours.
No tie. The white shirt open at the collar.
The hair pushed back the way he pushed it back when he had not had time to arrange it.
Then I saw the other hand.
It was at his side. It was wrapped in white gauze from the knuckles to the wrist, and the gauze was clean but not new—a corner of it had begun to fray—and the knuckles inside the gauze had the small swollen shape of knuckles that had been recently broken on something hard.
He had done that to his hand sometime between the airport and now.
He did not greet me.
His eyes came to my face for one second when I came in—the airport look, the look from the rope dividers at O’Hare, the one that had said go and come back and had carried me across an ocean—and then his eyes left mine and went back to my father.
I understood, in the second they were on me, that he was working.
That he had taken a position in the center of the rug, that he had calibrated everything—the distance from the desk, the distance from Gianni’s chair, the angle of his body to the door—and that he had not greeted me because greeting me would have broken the position.
I closed the door behind me.
I stood with my back to it. I did not move into the room. Maria had stayed in the corridor. I heard her footsteps recede slowly toward the kitchen.
My father spoke first.
“Signor Caruso has come from Chicago,” he said, in Italian, “to discuss what he calls a misunderstanding, figlia. He has not yet told me what he intends to do about it.”
His voice was the quiet voice. The one from yesterday. The dangerous one. He did not look at me when he said it. He kept his eyes on Marco.
Gianni said, “Papa, he is here to make threats. He is here because he was made a fool of and he wants—“
“Silenzio, Gianni.”
My father had not raised his voice. He did not need to. Gianni’s mouth closed on the half-word. His hand on the chair arm tightened and then loosened.
Marco had not moved.
He had not looked at me again. He stood in the center of the rug with the hand in the pocket and the bandaged hand at his side, and he waited for the room to belong to him before he took it.
I had watched him do this twice before in his own house, with men he was managing, and I recognized the pause.
He was letting my father finish before he began. The courtesy of it was the first move.
Then he spoke.
“Don Scordato.”
His Italian was the old-country Italian he used with the men in Monreale. Formal. Slow. Each consonant given its full weight.
“I have flown across an ocean today. My brother sits in Chicago waiting for word. He has the resources of our family at his hand and he will use them on my signal. I want you to understand that before I say anything else.”
The room went colder.
I felt it in my own skin. It was not metaphor.
The temperature of the air at the back of my neck, the air in the foot of space between the door and my coat, dropped by a measurable amount, the way the temperature drops when a window opens in a closed room.
Gianni’s hand on the chair arm went tight again.
My father’s eyes did not leave Marco’s face.
Marco did not raise his voice.
“I am not here to threaten you. I am here to tell you what is true, and what is true is that the alliance announced on the wires this morning is built on three pieces of false intelligence, two of them produced by the man sitting to your right, and the third produced by his employer. I am here to tell you that the report your daughter sent you on Friday is the correct analysis of your strategic position, that your daughter is, by any standard a serious man would apply, a brilliant strategic mind, and that the alliance you announced this morning destroys her, your house, and the future of this name, in that order.”
He paused.
“I am also here to tell you,” he said, “that I am in love with her.”
My breath went.
I did not move my back from the door. I did not let my face do anything.
I had been trained not to let my face do anything in rooms where men were transacting, and the training held, but the breath went out of me, and I stood at the door with no breath in me, and Marco did not look at me when he said it.
“And so,” he said, “I have come to ask three things. With your permission, I would like to ask the first of them in front of your daughter.”
He took his hand out of his pocket.
There was no weapon in it. There was a small velvet box. The box was old—the velvet had gone slightly grey at the corners with age, the small brass clasp at the top tarnished.
He stepped forward two paces.
He set the box on the edge of my father‘s desk. He did not open it. He set it down with the small precise care of a man laying a card on a table at the end of a long hand, and he stepped back.
“That,” he said, “is what I came with. That, and a request. With your permission, Don Scordato, I would like to say the rest in front of her.”
My father’s eyes had not left Marco’s face the entire time.
He did not look at the box. He did not look at me. He looked at Marco for a long second, the kind of second that contained a number of small calculations the rest of us could not see, and then he said, in Italian, the single word:
“Parli.”
Speak.
Marco crossed the rug to me.
He stopped a meter short of where I stood at the door.
He did not touch me. He looked at me for the first time since I had come into the room, and his eyes were the eyes from yesterday morning at the airport, and they were also different, because they had something in them now that had not been there in the terminal, which was the certainty of a man who had decided in the air over the Atlantic what he was going to do and had spent the descent making peace with it.
“Sera.”
His voice went down. The lower register. The one he used in the dark.
“I came here to do something I had planned for the farmhouse on Sunday. I’m going to do it here instead, with your father watching, because that’s how it should be done.”
He turned. He took two steps back to my father’s desk. He picked up the velvet box. He came back to me.
He went down on one knee on the rug.