Chapter 20 #3
To my daughter. To my daughter who is better than me. And to the son I have just received.
I did not look at Marco.
I had decided, when my father started, that I would not look at Marco.
I looked at my father. I looked at him across the linen and the candles and the small flickers of light moving in the olive leaves above his head, and I did not move my face into composure, and I did not blink to clear my eyes, and I let him see what twenty-eight years of his silence had done and what one year of speaking had begun to undo. I let him see all of it.
He met my eyes.
He did not look away.
The dancing started after the cassata.
Marco had set up speakers on the low stone wall at the edge of the courtyard, and the playlist was one we had made together over a long Sunday afternoon, half Italian standards and half jazz and three Wisconsin folk songs Marco had insisted on as a joke that had stayed in seriously.
He had pulled me up first. We had danced to Sinatra under the olives with my hand on the back of his neck and his hand at the small of my back, and then he had spun me out and Dante had stepped in with the small formal bow he used when he was being a brother-in-law, and after Dante had been Santo, and after Santo had been my father.
My father had not danced in fifteen years.
He danced one song with me. He held me at the formal distance, his right hand at my shoulder blade, his left hand around mine, and he led the way he had been taught at sixteen, and he did not speak.
At the end of the song he kissed my forehead and he handed me back to Marco and he sat down at the edge of the courtyard with Maria and Tommaso and did not get up again.
The music changed.
A slower one. Italian. Something my mother had loved.
Marco’s hand was at my back when I felt the small change in the air at my left shoulder, the change a body in a Sicilian room makes when one of the men has stepped close and is waiting to be noticed.
It was Pietro.
He was twenty-six. He was the youngest of my uncle Beppe’s three sons, and he had my father’s chin, which was my chin, and he had my mother’s mouth, which was my mouth, and standing two feet from me in his charcoal suit at the edge of the dance floor in Wisconsin he looked more like me than my own brother had ever looked, and I had been refusing to register it for a year because registering it would have meant registering what my father had been doing when he sent the three cousins.
He bowed slightly toward Marco.
“Cugino. With your permission. One dance with my cousin.”
Marco’s hand on my back flexed once. He looked at Pietro. He looked at me. He smiled, the small open smile he used in public, and he stepped back and took my hand off his shoulder and placed it in Pietro’s hand.
“Of course.”
Pietro led me onto the flagstones.
He took the same formal hold my father had taken.
The right hand at the shoulder blade. The left hand around mine.
The distance between our chests was the distance an old uncle held a young niece, the careful distance of a Sicilian man dancing with a woman from his own line, and he led the way he had been taught at sixteen also, because all of us had been taught at sixteen, by the same dance teacher in the same room above the same café in Palermo.
We turned.
The music went on.
He did not speak for the first minute. He turned me through the small clean steps of the song with his eyes over my shoulder, and the lights moved in the olive leaves above us, and on the second turn, when his mouth was near my ear, he spoke.
His voice was very low.
“Cugina.”
“Pietro.”
“Tomorrow I take instructions from your husband.”
He turned me again. He did not pause. The dancing did not stop. He spoke into the small space between his mouth and my ear in the slow even cadence of a man delivering information that had been written down by someone older than him and rehearsed in front of a mirror.
“From tomorrow I work for him. His name is my name. His house is my house. I tell you this to be clear”
He turned me a third time.
“But today I am still your father’s nephew.”
I did not stop dancing. My right hand on his shoulder. My left hand in his. My face composed in the small composure my own dance teacher had taught me in the same room above the same café.
“I tell you this not as a threat. Not as a warning. As information. Your father does not yet fully trust. Your father loves you, and he trusts your husband halfway, and he is at peace for the first time in ten years, and these three things together do not yet let him take his eyes off. I am not here to hurt you. I am not here to hurt your husband. I am here to watch, and to go home, and to tell your father what I have seen. Do you want to know what I will tell him?”
I nodded.
“I will tell him you are happy. I will tell him your husband has built you a house that looks like our house, and that he cooks pasta better than I do, and that he speaks to the old men of Monreale like one of them. I will tell him he loves you. I will tell him to leave you alone. That is what I will tell him, cousin. I wanted you to know.”
The song was nearing its end.
“Pietro.”
“Sì.”
“Grazie.”
“Niente.”
The last bars came. He turned me a final time, the small clean turn that brought me back to the edge of the flagstones, and Marco was where he had been when we had started, hands in his pockets, watching with the small open smile, and Pietro slowed and stepped back from me and he placed my hand in Marco’s hand, and he bowed once to Marco, and he walked off across the flagstones to the cousins’ corner without looking back.
Marco looked at me.
“Everything okay?”
“Everything is okay.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He pulled me into him for the next song. He did not press. He had read the room enough to know there had been something, and he had read me enough to know I would tell him in my time, and he just held me and we danced.
It was an hour later, when the music had gone slow and the candles on the long table had burned to nubs, that he asked me.
“What did Pietro say.”
I did not lift my head from his shoulder.
“Family.”
He was quiet for one full turn.
“Family good or family bad?”
“Family good.”
“Okay.”
He kissed the top of my head.
We danced.
Family good.
He closed the door behind us.
The latch caught with the small soft sound the bedroom door had been making for a year, the door I had stopped registering the sound of in March, and the music from the courtyard came up through the open window in a thinned-out version of itself, the bass gone, the melody drifting up through the leaves of the olive trees and the screen of the window and into the warm quiet of the room.
He turned the key in the door.
He did not say anything. He did it the way he locked any door at night, the small economical motion of a man doing the last small thing before going to bed, and the click of the bolt was the click of every bolt he had thrown in this house in the year I had been living in it.
He turned to me.
I was standing at the foot of the bed. Still in the dress.
The veil had come off two hours ago, and Donatella had taken the pins out of my hair at the table during the cassata so I could shake it loose, and my hair was down now around my shoulders the way it had been on the morning of the anklet, the morning he had told me he liked it down.
He came to me.
He did not hurry. He crossed the floor in his shirtsleeves—the grey jacket already hung in the wardrobe, the tie gone half an hour ago—and he stopped in front of me, and he put his hands on my hips through the silk of the dress, and he stood there for one second with his forehead against mine.
He breathed out.
A long slow breath, the breath of a man who had been holding a day on his shoulders and was now in a room with a door that locked.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
He kissed me.
This was the slow attention of a man who had nowhere to be, who was not performing, who was the husband now, and the kiss went on for a long time, and his hands moved on my hips through the silk, and at some point I understood that we had crossed without speaking from the entrance to the room into the long part of the room where things happened.
He turned me around.
He did it gently, his hands at my waist, and he drew my hair forward over my shoulder, and he found the small fabric-covered button at the top of the dress between my shoulder blades, and he undid it.
There were thirty-two buttons.
I had counted them in Milan. I had stood in the dressing room while the seamstress pinned them and I had counted them and I had thought, this is going to take him a long time, and I had thought, good.
He undid them now one at a time, slow, the small soft pull of each fabric loop coming free of each fabric button, and I felt the back of the dress open down my spine in a long slow line, and I felt the warm of the room come in at the small of my back, and I felt his breath at the back of my neck.
He kissed the back of my neck.
He did it once at the hairline. He did it again two inches lower.
He worked his way down my spine button by button, his mouth following his hands, and by the time he reached the small of my back the dress was open from my shoulders to the dip above my hips, and he stood up behind me, and he slid the dress off my shoulders.
It pooled at my feet.
He looked at me. Not the way he had looked at me on the morning of the report. Not the way he had looked at me on the balcony. The new way, which I had been learning all spring. The way he looked at me when he was simply seeing his wife.
I undressed him.