Chapter 19 #3
The bandaged hand was at his side. The other one held the box.
He opened it with his thumb. The hinge gave a small dry sound and the lid came up, and inside was a ring I had never seen and recognized anyway because I had seen the photograph of his mother on her wedding day with this box open in her hand.
A small old gold band. A single round stone, not large, set in a low bezel.
I recognized it from Donatella’s hand. The stone had the warm slightly cloudy quality of a stone that had been worn for forty years on a working woman’s hand and had been re-polished only once, and badly.
“This was my mother’s,” he said.
He looked up at me from the rug.
“I’m in love with you, Serafina. I have been since the start.
Since Marchetti’s. I’m asking you to marry me, baby girl.
I’m asking you in front of your father because what I want from you I want him to witness.
I want it on the record. I want there to be no version of this conversation, ever, in which someone says I asked you in private. ”
I looked at him on the rug.
I did not look at my father. I did not look at Gianni.
I looked at the man on one knee in front of me with the bandaged hand and the open box and the ring inside the box and the patience in his face, and I understood that the patience was the patience of a man who had prepared himself, on the plane over, for the possibility that I would not say yes.
I opened my mouth.
The first sound that came out was not a word. It was the small breaking sound that lived behind a word when a word had to come up through twenty-eight years of being told not to want anything for myself. It came up. It broke. I tried again.
“Yes.”
It came out broken. My voice did not hold.
I closed my eyes for one second.
“Yes, Marco.”
Clean this time.
He did not put the ring on my finger.
He stood up. He closed the box—the small dry click of the brass hinge—and he held it in his palm, and he turned, and he walked back to the center of the rug, and he faced my father.
“Don Scordato.”
The Italian came back. The formal weight of it.
“I am asking, separately, for your blessing on this marriage. And I am asking, also separately, for your alliance with my family. I want you to hear those as two requests, not one. They are not conditions on each other. I want your daughter with or without your alliance, and I will respect your decision on the alliance either way, and the marriage will happen in either case because she has just said yes to me in your hearing.”
He paused. The pause was deliberate. He let the words sit.
“But I am asking for both. The terms in her report. The terms my brother and I have already agreed to among ourselves. Signed by the end of the week. The Atlantic non-interference. The Palermo distribution. The Caruso protection of the Scordato shipping lanes through the gulf. All of it, as she wrote it, which is to say correctly.”
Gianni stood up.
The chair scraped back on the tile. He stood in the small fast way a man stands when the room has slipped past the point at which sitting is dignified, and his face had gone from white to something with a high red mark along each cheekbone.
“Papa, this is theatre. He is doing this because he knows the announcement has been made and he has nothing else.
Enzo is on a plane. The Commission has been notified.
The wires have it. If you reverse this now, every family from here to Naples will say you let the American boy walk into your study and change your mind in twenty minutes.
They will say you are a Don who can be moved by a young man with a ring in his pocket. They will say—“
My father did not look at him.
Marco did.
He turned his head, slow, the way he turned his head in the kitchen when Rosa was finishing a thought and he was about to begin one, and he looked at my brother. He did not raise his voice. The voice he used was lower than the voice he had been using with my father.
“They will say,” he said, in Italian, “that the Don changed his mind because his daughter’s strategist gave him the better counsel.
They will say he was wise enough to listen to her in time.
They will say the Scordato Don was the wiser of the two old men in this transaction, because he sat at his desk and read the report and then a young man came from Chicago and brought him the evidence that confirmed it, and he had the courage to act on it before the wires hardened. They will say it because it is true.”
Gianni’s mouth opened.
It closed.
He stood in front of his chair for one more second with his hand on the wooden arm, and the small red marks on his cheeks had gone darker, and then he sat back down. He did not look at me. He did not look at Marco. He looked at the rug between his shoes.
Marco turned back to my father.
He waited.
My father had not moved. His hands were still flat on the blotter on either side of where the box had been, and now the box was in Marco’s hand, and the blotter in front of him was empty. He looked at Marco for a long second. He looked at me. He looked back at Marco.
He said, very quietly, in Sicilian:
“Voglio parlare con mia figlia. Da soli.”
I want to speak with my daughter. Alone.
Then, in Italian, to Marco:
“Aspetta nel cortile, Signor Caruso.”
Wait in the courtyard.
Marco left the study without looking at me.
He bowed once to my father—a small old-world inclination of the head, the kind of gesture his grandfather would have made—and he turned, and he walked past me at the door, and the back of his hand brushed the back of my hand for half a second on his way past, and the brush was the first contact we had made since the airport, and then he was gone.
The door closed.
Gianni stood up from the second chair.
My father did not look at him. He raised his hand off the blotter and he made the small flat downward gesture he had used my whole life to dismiss servants from a room, and Gianni went.
He did not protest. He did not look at me as he passed.
He went out the door behind Marco, and the door closed a second time, and I was alone with my father in the room I had stood in yesterday morning.
I did not move from the door.
He looked at me for a long time.
“Vieni, figlia.”
I went.
I walked across the rug to the cracked-leather chair I had sat in yesterday. I did not sit. I stood behind it with my hand on the back of it, the way I had stood in front of his desk a hundred times in my adult life, and I waited.
He looked at his hands.
“You love him.”
It was not a question.
“Yes, Papa.”
“For how long?”
“Three weeks.”
“Three weeks?”
“Three weeks I have been able to count. Longer than that, I think, in a way I did not have words for.”
He nodded slowly.
He looked at the empty space on the blotter where the box had been. He looked at the photographs—still in their stack to his left, where he had placed them yesterday, the corner of the top one curled slightly where the radiator heat had reached it overnight.
“I did not see him correctly,” he said.
I did not answer.
“I read about him in your reports. I formed a picture. The picture was wrong. The man who walked into this room today is not the man in the picture. I was wrong, figlia. About him. About other things.”
“Papa—“
“I am not asking forgiveness yet. I am telling you a thing I have just learned.”
He pressed his palms flat on the desk. He stood up.
“Go to the entry hall. Wait for me there. I will speak with him in the courtyard, and then I will bring him in, and the three of us will finish this conversation properly.”
“Papa.”
“Go, figlia.”
I went.
I walked the long ground-floor corridor with the light of the late afternoon coming through the green shutters in flat horizontal bands, and I came out into the entry hall, and I stood on the tile in my coat with the lamb in my pocket and my hand in the pocket on the lamb, and through the open front door I could see the courtyard.
Marco was under the orange tree.
He had taken his coat off and folded it over his bandaged forearm.
The white shirt was very white in the late sun.
The closed velvet box was in his bandaged hand.
He stood under the tree at the edge of the courtyard near the fountain, not pacing, not looking at the door, looking at the fountain.
The fountain was running. The water made the small constant sound that I had heard through every window of my childhood and had stopped noticing the year I turned eleven.
I watched him through the open door.
He did not know I was watching. He had decided, I understood, that he would not look at the door until the door produced a person, because looking at the door before that would have been performing patience and he was not performing.
My father walked past me.
He did not stop. He went out the front door into the late sun.
I saw him from behind, his shoulders set in the dark suit, his hands loose at his sides, and he crossed the courtyard at the slow even pace of a man who had decided what he was about to do and was walking the distance because the distance was part of it.
Marco saw him coming.
He turned. He took the closed box into his other hand, the unbandaged one, and he stood with his coat over his arm and the box in his palm and he watched my father cross the courtyard. He did not move toward him. He let my father come to him.
My father stopped a foot from him.
He looked at Marco for a long second. The angle of his head. The small set of his mouth that I had not seen in twenty years and that my mother used to call his blessing-face, because she said it was the face he wore the rare times he had decided to give a thing he had been withholding.
He embraced him.
Once. The Sicilian embrace. The right hand on Marco’s right shoulder, the left hand on his left shoulder, the formal weight of it held for the length of a slow breath, and then released. He kissed him on each cheek. He stepped back.
“Vieni dentro,” he said. “Mia figlia ti aspetta.”
Come inside. My daughter is waiting for you.
Marco came.
He came across the courtyard with his coat over his arm and the box in his palm, and he came up the three stone steps, and he came through the open front door, and he stopped in front of me on the tile of the entry hall, and the late sun was at his back and his face was in shadow, and he reached for my left hand.
He did not say anything.
He opened the box.
He took the ring out with his bandaged hand and he held it between his thumb and his forefinger, and the gauze was a little stained at the edge of the bandage where the knuckles had bled through, and he slid the ring onto my fourth finger.
It fit.
It fit the way a thing fits when it has been waiting for you.
There was no resistance at the knuckle and no looseness past it, and the warm slightly cloudy stone caught the late light and held it, and he closed my fingers around the band with his other hand and he held my closed hand for one second between both of his.
My father had come up behind him.
He stood at the threshold of the entry hall with his hands clasped in front of him in the formal way, and he watched Marco put the ring on my hand, and he did not interrupt.
When Marco let go of my hand my father spoke.
“The announcement on the wires this morning will be retracted at eight tomorrow morning, by my office, with a correction. The correction will state that the joint statement was issued in error, that no agreement between the Scordato and Valenti families has been concluded, and that the Scordato family’s strategic posture remains under review.
Enzo Valenti will be turned away at the airport.
He will not be received at this house. The Caruso alliance will be signed by Friday on the terms in my daughter’s report. ”
Marco inclined his head. He did not speak. He understood that my father had not finished.
“There is one condition.”
Marco waited.
“I am sending three of my nephews to Chicago. They will travel on the same flight you take back. They will assist with the family business in whatever capacity your brother sees fit to use them. They will be given housing, work, and a place at your table. Tonio. Salvatore. Pietro.”
Marco looked surprised for just a moment, then said, “We will receive them with honor.”
I did not say anything.
I had gone very still inside my coat. The ring on my finger had gone from the warm temperature of Marco’s palm to my own body temperature, and the warmth of it was a small constant fact at the base of my hand, and I held the fact in my hand and I did not let my face do anything.
I knew the three cousins.
I knew which three my father had chosen and what it meant.
Tonio was twenty-nine and a soldier. Salvatore was thirty-one and ran the eastern shipping office, which was a polite description of what he ran.
Pietro was twenty-six and the youngest of my uncle Beppe’s sons, and he had been in Catania for two years doing a thing nobody at the family table named.
My father was not sending three young men to Chicago for housing and work.
He was sending three young men to Chicago to watch me, to watch Marco, and to bring information back across the ocean to a house that had just publicly retracted an announcement and had a great deal of face to recover.
They would be polite. They would be charming.
They would call me cousin and Marco brother and they would sit at our table and they would write down, in the small careful Sicilian way, every door that opened and closed in the Caruso footprint for as long as my father needed them to.
Marco did not know.
He had accepted them with the open face of a man who had won a thing he had flown across an ocean for and was not going to argue over the small print.
My father was smiling.
He had the smile he reserved for victories.
The small tight one at the corner of his mouth.
He looked at me with it, and he looked at Marco with it, and he opened his arm in the gesture that said come and sit and we will eat now, and Marco’s hand settled on the small of my back, warm through the wool of my coat, and we walked into the dining room with my father.
I will tell him about the cousins on the plane home, I thought.
The ring caught the late light.
I closed my hand.
We kissed. The smell of oranges.