Chapter 11 Ferrona Avenue

Rocco Marzullo was twelve in the year his father bought the building on Ferrona Avenue, and he remembered the day the way you remember the day a house gets a new address, which is to say he remembered the smell of the paint. Ferrona Avenue was north of the old streets and a mile closer to the river, and the building had been a dry-goods store that had failed, and it was wider than 114 Verri Street and had a proper storefront with two windows and a doorway in the middle, and the family took the whole of it and turned the back half into the preparation room and the office and the apartment where they lived, and the front half into what his father had decided, that winter, to call the chapel. His father had a plan for the chapel, and Rocco learned the plan by living in it. The old front room on Verri Street had been a room with a lamp, and the families had come to it like people coming to a kitchen, because it was a kitchen, more or less. The chapel on Ferrona was going to be something else. There were to be no rugs with patterns in them and no photographs over the mantel and nothing that could remind a person of a house, because a person in the chapel was going to be reminded of enough as it was. There were to be plain walls in a color his father called mist and his mother called gray. There were to be two low lamps at the back and no light at the front, so that the light fell on the people who came and left the coffin in the half-dark, and there were to be enough chairs, and they were to be good chairs, and they were to be arranged in a way that allowed a family to sit together or to sit apart, whichever the family needed, and no one was ever to be told which. Rocco thought the chapel was the most beautiful room he had ever been in, and he thought this for the rest of his life, and the fact that it became, in time, the whole of his pride and his whole excuse, was a thing that neither he nor anyone else in the family saw coming. His grandmother Nunzia did not live to see the chapel. She died in her sleep in the winter before the move, at the age of sixty-seven, in the room behind the old shop where she had slept for fifty years. She had outlived her husband by five years, and she had gone on keeping the book almost to the last, though the hand had begun to wander in the summer, and the entries in that last year were hard to read, and there was one page near the end where she had written a name and then, in the margin, a date that did not belong to the name and a small drawing of a lamp, and nobody ever worked out what it meant. She was buried from St. Anselmo, and the whole four blocks came, and even the men who had never set foot in the church in their lives stood on the sidewalk with their hats in their hands, because she had buried their mothers and their children out of her front room and had never once charged them wrongly and had never once told the street who had paid and who had not, and there is no reputation in a poor neighborhood higher than that. Rocco was thirteen. He stood with his father at the door of the church and shook hands with the crowd, which was what the men of the family did, and he felt, for the first time, the thing that would define his life: the way a whole street looks at a boy when they can see the grown man he is going to be, standing in the place where his grandfather once stood, under a sign with a hand on it. He liked it. He has never claimed otherwise. He was drawn to that front door the way other men are drawn to a pulpit or a podium, and he spent the rest of his working life there, and if you had asked him why, on any given day, he would have told you it was the trade, and the answer would have been close enough to the truth to be dangerous. After the move, Filomena took the prep room on Ferrona the way a cat takes a house, which is to say she rearranged nothing and sat where she liked and made it hers by being there. Her daughter Sera was nine when they moved and had grown up in the back of the old place the way Rocco had, under the table and in the hallway, and the two children ran the length of the new building that first spring and hid from each other in the empty chapel and pretended the chairs were a train, and they were, for one season, as close as a brother and sister, though they were cousins, and they were the only two children in a family that had spent its whole life up to then being run by adults for the benefit of adults, and nobody had thought to tell them what they were, and so they invented it. Rocco remembered that spring better than any other year of his life. The first family served in the new chapel was an old man from the four blocks who had known his grandfather, and the family came up Ferrona Avenue in three cars and stood in the doorway and did not know where to put themselves at first, because the room did not look like any room they had ever buried anyone out of, and Rocco, who was twelve and had been told to stay out of the way, watched from the office door as his father took the widow's arm and walked her to a chair and sat down beside her without a word and let her have the silence until she was ready. That was the whole method, and it was older than the building and older than the sign, and Rocco understood for the first time that the chapel was not the room and not the light and not the chairs. The chapel was a man at a door who knows what to do with his hands. Which is a way of saying that the thing the family lost was lost long before either of them could name it, and that the two of them would spend the rest of their lives standing on the two sides of a door, each remembering the same room and disagreeing about what had happened in it. ---