Chapter 20
Serafina
Five Months Later
The dress was on the back of the door.
It was on a wooden hanger Marco had made me.
He had made it. He had gone into the barn in February and chosen a piece of pale ash from the stack he kept for small things, and he had cut it and shaped it and sanded it down, and he had carved my initials into the underside of the crossbar where no one would see them but me.
He had given it to me one Sunday morning in March without ceremony, the way he gave me everything. Here. For the dress.
The dress on the hanger was ivory silk, simple, bias-cut, no train. I had chosen it in Milan in January with Donatella holding my purse and saying nothing for three hours. It had taken supreme effort from her—in fact, how had she managed it?
The door opened.
Rosa came in first. She had the small velvet pouch in her hand that I had given her a week ago and asked her to keep. She crossed the floor in her flat black shoes and she sat beside me on the bed.
“Tesoro.”
“Rosa.”
“Lift your hair.”
I lifted it.
She drew the chain out of the pouch with careful fingers.
The chain was thin, the gold gone soft yellow with the years, the small medal at the end of it the size of a thumbnail.
Saint Lucia. My grandmother had worn it from the day of her first communion to the day she died, and my mother had worn it from the day after that to the day she died, and it had sat in a velvet box in a drawer in Palermo for fifteen years until I had asked for it three months ago and a courier had brought it across an ocean.
She fastened it at the back of my neck. The clasp was old. Her fingers were patient.
“Bella.”
She kissed the back of my head once, and she stood up, and she went to the window and opened it because Rosa believed weddings happened with the windows open.
Donatella came in with a brush in her teeth.
“Move.”
I moved. She sat down where Rosa had sat. She had her own kit in a small leather case, and she opened it on the bed beside me and went through it the way a doctor goes through a tray of instruments. She tilted my chin up with two fingers. She looked at me for one long second.
“You’re not going to cry.”
“I might.”
“You’re not. I’m doing your eyes and you’re not crying until after the photographs. After the photographs you can cry as much as you want. Go nuts. A waterfall is fine. I’ll personally hand you a towel.”
“Yes, Donatella.”
“Good girl.”
She did my eyes. She did them the way she did everything, fast and exact, and she narrated the whole thing under her breath in a low stream of half-Italian half-English that was somewhere between a prayer and a complaint about my eyelashes.
She finished the second eye and she pulled back and she looked at her work and she nodded once.
“Okay. Now don’t blink for forty seconds.”
“I have to blink.”
“Forty. Seconds. Don’t make me get the match-sticks.”
The door opened again.
Cora came in with a tray. She was barefoot. Midge followed dutifuly behind. The tray had four glasses on it and a bottle of prosecco already open, and she set the tray down on the dresser. Midge immediately went under the bed to do whatever Midge did under beds, and Cora poured.
She poured carefully. The four glasses filled to the same line.
She brought one to me and one to Donatella and one to Rosa at the window, and she kept the last one in her hand, and she did not toast. We did not toast yet.
She just stood in the middle of the floor in her bare feet with the glass in her hand and she looked at me.
“You look like yourself.”
“I do?”
“You do.”
I drank.
Gemma was in the corner. She came across the floor and held out a small thing, wrapped in tissue.
The tissue was old—the kind of tissue that came from a drawer in a house that had been opened only once a year for a long time—and the small ribbon around it was a pale grey silk that had gone slightly to one side from its years in the drawer.
“For something old.”
I took it.
I unwrapped it on my lap. The tissue came away.
Inside was a linen handkerchief. White. Hand-hemmed.
A single small letter embroidered in the corner in blue silk thread, faded almost to grey now—a G, my mother’s initial, Giovanna—and the hand of the embroidery was a hand I knew because I had a tablecloth from the same hand at my apartment in Chicago.
My grandmother had embroidered it.
I looked up at Gemma.
“How—“
“Your father.”
She said it very quietly, so the others could not hear. She had bent down to say it, her hand on my knee.
“He sent it to Dante. He asked Dante to give it to me to give to you. He didn’t want to send it directly. He thought you might—he thought it should come from a woman.”
I closed my hand around the handkerchief.
The linen was very soft. It had been washed many times. It smelled, faintly, of the cedar drawer it had lived in for thirty years.
“Gemma.”
“He loves you, Sera.”
“I know.”
I cried.
It was one short hard cry, the kind that came up out of my chest in a single wave and broke on the linen of the handkerchief in my hand, and Donatella did not say a word about my eyes—although she did get ready with the makeup again—and Rosa came over from the window and put her hand on my shoulder, and Cora sat down on the floor at my feet without spilling her glass, and Midge came out from under the bed and put her chin on my ankle.
I cried for thirty seconds.
Then I stopped.
I lifted the handkerchief and I pressed it to my face the way my mother had pressed handkerchiefs to her face in a thousand photographs I had stared at as a child trying to learn the gesture, and the linen came away dry on the side I had pressed because it was the kind of linen that knew its job.
Donatella took the glass out of my hand. She set it on the dresser. She sat back down beside me with the brush.
“Okay. Touch-up. Then the dress.”
“Okay.”
“You’re allowed one more cry after the vows. One. I‘m counting.”
“Yes, Donatella.”
Rosa was already at the door, taking the dress down from the hanger.
The slope was green.
The vines that had been bare and knuckled in Winter had broken into leaf in April and were now, in the second week of May, a long unbroken pale green that ran down the hill.
The leaves were small. They were the soft new leaves of the year, the ones that still had the slight curl at the edge where they had only just come out of the bud, and they moved on the breeze in the same direction all together, the way a field of new things will.
I stood at the top of the porch steps with my father.
He had flown in two days ago. He had come on the family plane with Tommaso driving him from Milan to Linate to O’Hare, and he had walked into the courtyard of the farmhouse on Friday afternoon in a pale linen suit he had bought in Palermo for the occasion and had pressed himself in the room at the local inn, because he did not trust the inn to press it.
He had embraced Marco at the door. He had embraced me.
He had walked through the house slowly, room by room, with his hands clasped behind his back, and he had stopped in the kitchen and looked at the cup on the drainboard and the oiled table and the books on the shelves and the coat on the iron hook, and he had said, very quietly, in Sicilian: Ah. He is one of us.
He held out his arm now.
I took it.
We came down the steps together. He did not hurry. He had set the pace at the top and he kept it all the way down the path through the courtyard and out past the fountain Marco had built last summer, the small one with the single jet, and out around the corner of the house to the head of the slope.
The chairs were on the grass.
Two short rows. White linen. Twelve on each side.
The aisle between them was the row of vines I had knelt in with Marco in November, and the wall at the top of it was the wall he had laid his coat against and had laid me down on, and the arch above the wall was new—he had built it in March from oak from the property and he had not painted it because he had said the wood needed no help.
It was wound with white roses.
I looked at the people in the chairs. Maria in the second row on my side, in her black dress, her hands folded over her bag.
Tommaso beside her. Cora and Santo. Gemma and Dante.
Marco’s old contacts from Monreale who had flown in.
The cousins—Tonio and Salvatore and Pietro—in the back row in suits, hands clasped, the polite faces I had taught Marco to read.
A handful of staff from the vineyard. Rosa at the end of the front row with a handkerchief already in her hand.
Marco at the wall.
He was in grey. The grey of the suit he had worn in the photograph at Margie’s Candies, the suit I had loved on him then, and on him now in a way I had no language for.
His brothers behind him. Dante on his right, taller, watchful.
Santo on his left, hands clasped in front, the blunt face going slightly soft at the edges in a way only the people who knew Santo would have caught.
Midge was tied to the leg of the arch.
She had a white ribbon around her neck. The ribbon had a small bow that Cora had tied.
Midge had been instructed to behave and Midge had decided in the first thirty seconds of the ceremony that she would not, and she was now pulling against the ribbon with her tiny chest puffed out at a passing bee, and Cora in the front row had her hand half-raised to retrieve her and then had decided, visibly, to let it happen.
My father felt my hand tighten on his arm. He did not look at me.
“Piano, figlia. Piano.”
We started up the row.
The grass between the vines was short. He had cut it that morning. The leaves on the vines moved on the breeze and the small new tendrils curled out toward the wire from the trunks I had touched in November, and I walked up the row.
Halfway up, my father spoke.
“Mi perdoni un giorno?”
Will you forgive me one day.