Chapter 20 #2
“Ti ho già perdonato, Papa.”
I have forgiven you already.
He did not answer.
He walked the rest of the way up the row with his eyes on Marco at the top and his arm under mine, and at the wall he stopped, and he turned to me, and he kissed me on each cheek in the formal Sicilian way, and he placed my hand in Marco’s hand, and he stepped back.
Marco’s hand closed around mine.
The officiant was a woman from the county.
She had married three couples in this part of Wisconsin that month and she had a calm face and a soft voice and she had told us at the rehearsal that she would say the minimum because we had asked for the minimum.
She said the minimum now. The words went past me.
I did not register them. I registered Marco’s hand in mine and the warm of his palm and the small steady pulse at the pad of his thumb where his thumb pressed against the back of my hand.
Then it was the vows.
I had written mine on the train back from Milan. I had written them in Italian because Italian was the language of the rooms my body had been built in, and the language of the kitchen of my grandmother, and the language of the wall behind Marco’s head, and I had not translated them.
I read them now.
I take you. I take you as you are. I take you for your patience with me.
I take you because you saw me when no one was looking.
I take you for the house you built alone, for the fire you lit yesterday, for the coffee you will make tomorrow.
I take you, and I do not let you go, until they bury me in the dirt of this hill.
His face did the thing.
He had a folded piece of paper in his hand and he did not look at it. He read mine without translation and he had understood every word. He took a breath. He read his in English.
“I take you. I’m not good at this part. I’ve talked my way into a thousand rooms and I cannot find the words for this one.
So I’ll say what I know. You came to my country and you let me bring you home.
You sat at my table and you ate my food and you let me warm you when you were cold.
You said yes when I asked. You said yes when I asked the second time, this morning, when I asked if I could have you forever.
I will spend the rest of my life saying yes back. ”
He paused.
“Ti prendo,” he said, in Italian, the consonants slow and weighted in the Monreale accent the old men had given him. “E non ti lascio, mai.”
I take you. And I do not let you go, ever.
He kissed me.
It was a long kiss. It was the kiss of a man putting a stone on top of a thing he has built, and I kissed him back, and the wind moved on the slope below us, and somewhere in the front row my father was crying without trying to hide it.
Midge barked.
We laughed against each other’s mouths.
We turned to face the chairs. We turned to face the future.
In the courtyard, the olive trees were thriving.
He had brought four cuttings home from Monreale at the same time as the vines.
He had planted them in half-barrels because they could not survive a Wisconsin winter in the ground, and every October he had wheeled the half-barrels into the barn and every May he had wheeled them back out, and the four trees were now twelve feet tall and producing a small handful of olives a year, and the fairy lights moved in their leaves above our heads in the warm dusk.
Rosa had cooked for a week.
She had brought four other women she worked with and she had set up in our kitchen on Monday.
She had done not let anyone but Maria into her kingdom for the duration, and the food had come out tonight in a slow steady procession that had been going for two hours and was not finished.
Caponata. Arancini. Pasta alla Norma with eggplant from the garden.
A whole roasted lamb on a board carried out by Santo and Tonio together.
A cassata the size of a small wheel that had taken her two days.
I sat at the center of the long table beside Marco.
My father was on Marco’s other side. Dante on mine.
The rest of the table arranged itself in the slow ordering of any Sicilian table—older to the center, younger to the ends, the cousins together, Rosa still appearing periodically from the kitchen to refill water glasses with the small impatient gesture she used when she had decided someone was not drinking enough.
The toasts started after the lamb.
Dante stood first.
He did not raise his glass right away. He buttoned the middle button of his suit jacket the way he did before he spoke in any room, and he looked down the table once, and he looked at Marco beside me, and he said:
“My brother.”
He paused.
“People say he’s all talk. They’re right.
” Everyone laughed. “But, I will admit, reluctantly, that there’s more to him than that.
” I felt a pang of love. “I watched him become the man he is. I watched him build himself from nothing but our father’s doubt and our mother’s worry.
I watched him better himself, watched him charm the world, watched him never let me down.
But I didn’t watch him build this place, plant these vines.
He kept it for himself. Because the things he cares most about, he doesn’t talk about.
And then—“ Dante’s voice softened. “I watched my brother fall silent the first time he saw Serafina. I watched him become patient in a way I never thought possible. I watched him learn to listen instead of charm. I watched him find purpose beyond ambition. I am proud of the man he was. I am prouder still of the man she has helped him become.”
He raised his glass higher. “To Marco. To Serafina. To the family they are starting tonight.”
He sat down.
Marco was looking at his plate. His hand under the table found mine and held it, and I felt the small flex at his jaw that he did when he was holding a thing in, and Dante on my other side reached across me and squeezed his shoulder once, and Marco nodded once without looking up.
Santo stood second.
He had his glass in one hand and a folded piece of paper in the other, which was startling, because no one in the family had ever seen Santo with a folded piece of paper.
“I wrote this down,” he said. “Cora made me write it down. Cora said if I didn’t write it down I’d get to the third sentence and call Marco a coglione in front of his father-in-law, and she’s not wrong, so.”
He unfolded the paper.
“My brother. Marc. Marco. Pretty boy. Golden boy. The one our father told us would never make it in this life because he was too easy to look at and too easy to like. The one our mother used to call piccolo angelo until he was twenty-eight. The one who learned five languages before I’d finished one.
The one who built a vineyard in Wisconsin because he missed home.
The one who flew across an ocean by himself because the woman he loved was in trouble, and who came back with her, and with her father, and with her father’s blessing, and with three of her father‘s nephews, which honestly Dante and I are still figuring out, but okay, fine.”
There was laughter down the table. The cousins laughed. Tonio raised his glass.
“What I want to say is this. I spent a long time thinking I was the brother who knew how to fight. Marco was the one who knew how to love. I’ve come around.
Loving is the harder fight. He’s been doing it longer than any of us.
He waited his whole life for the right person to do it for, and he found her, and he did the thing nobody in our family had the courage to do, which was let himself want it openly.
Sera. Welcome to the family. We don’t deserve you. He does. Well—almost! Salute.”
He drank. He sat down. He muttered, Cora, was that okay, and Cora reached over and kissed the side of his head.
Donatella stood third.
She did not have paper. She had her glass and she had a smile that I knew from a year of dinners meant she was about to say something that would make Marco want to die.
“I want to say one thing about my brother.”
She paused.
“He has been bringing women home for ten years. None of them stayed for breakfast. Not one. Sera came over for a meeting, and she stayed for breakfast, and she stayed for lunch, and she stayed for dinner, and she has been staying for breakfast every day since. So. Brava, cognata. Whatever you did, the rest of us would like the recipe.”
The table laughed.
Then my father stood.
The laughter stopped. It did not stop because anyone shushed it. It stopped because a Sicilian table knew, the way a Sicilian table knew everything, that an old man had stood and the old man was the bride’s father and the old man was about to speak.
He did not have paper either.
He stood at the long table in his pale linen suit with his glass in his right hand and his left hand flat on the linen, and he looked down the table at Marco, and at me, and at the brothers, and at the cousins he had sent to watch us, and then his eyes came back to me and stayed.
He spoke in Sicilian.
My daughter is the best thing I have made in my life.
I made her with her mother, who was a better person than me, and for many years I believed the good part came only from her mother. I was wrong. The good part is hers. It has always been hers. I did not see it, because I was a man looking in the wrong direction.
I hurt her. I did it for many years. Not with my hands. With silence. The silence of a father is a longer weapon than the hands, and she carried it on her back for twenty-eight years.
Tonight I give her to a man who saw her before I did. Who saw her when I was not looking. Who crossed an ocean to bring her home when I had locked her in her childhood bedroom. I am grateful to this man. I am in his debt for the rest of my days. Marco.
He raised his glass.
“Alla mia figlia. Alla mia figlia migliore di me. E al figlio che ho appena ricevuto.”