Chapter 14 The Keeping Book

Rocco Marzullo was sixty-nine in the spring the diocese wrote to him, and he was, by then, the last Marzullo who came to the front door of the house on Ferrona Avenue, and he knew it, and he had stopped being proud of it in about the year he turned fifty, which is the year a man who loves his work stops being proud of the work and starts being afraid of the day it stops. The house was smaller than it had ever been. There had been a time when the phone rang at four in the morning and again at noon, and a time when he had two men on payroll and a woman who answered the phone, and by that spring there was Rocco and a part-time man and an answering service, and the trade that came in was the trade the corporations did not want, which was the poor and the complicated and the families who had been coming to the Marzullos for three generations and would not have known how to go anywhere else. Respect, and respect pays in a smaller coin. He had made his peace with the coin. He had not made his peace with the rest of it. The letter from the diocese was about the old registers. There was a priest in the chancery office, a young man with a good degree who had been set to writing a history of the parish and its grounds for the hundredth year of the church, and he had found that the burial records from the expressway years, the removals of 1963 and 1964, did not reconcile with the cemetery's records and with the city's certificates. It was not, the letter said, a matter of blame. It was a matter of history, and of a set of graves that could no longer be trusted, and the chancery would be grateful for any account books, lists, or memoranda the house of Marzullo had kept from that year. Rocco read the letter twice at the office desk and then sat for a while with his hands on the arms of the chair and looked at the wall, on which his grandfather's second sign hung, the one his father had taken down in the winter of 1964 and had carried to Ferrona Avenue and hung in the office because he could not bear to leave it to the wreckers. MARZULLO & SONS, in white on a dark ground, with the painted hand under it, dulled and cracked, and under the office light it looked the way a relic looks, which is to say it looked like a thing that had once been alive and had been kept by someone who did not know why. He got up and went to the shelf and took down the third keeping book, the one bound in black oilcloth with the red stripe, and he opened it on the desk and turned the pages, in his mother's handwriting first and then in his father's, and he found the year, and he found the line. It said the Society loan was paid in full in October of 1963, out of the removal contract, and the two lines under the total were drawn in his father's pen, which was a heavier pen than his mother's, and pressed hard enough to ridge the paper. Rocco had known about the line since he was nineteen. His father had told him, once, in this office, on a night when he had been drinking a little, in a single flat sentence that had ended the conversation before it began: the book is not the truth about the Society and it never was, and it will not be the truth about anything until I am dead, and then it is yours. Rocco had understood at nineteen that this was a trust. He had understood at forty that it was a burden. He was sixty-nine, and what he understood now was simpler, and he had been avoiding it for years, which was that a thing is not made true by being written in his father's hand, and that his whole life's work, and his mother's and his grandfather's and his grandmother's, was in the first three books on that shelf, and one line in the third book was a lie, and he had spent fifty years in an office where that book was kept, and had kept it, and had inherited it, and had never once put down the pen, and had gone on adding names to a book that was, in one line, false. That evening he telephoned his cousin. He had not spoken to Sera in four years, not since the argument at his father's eighty-fifth birthday, which had been about whether the family should sell then and which had ended, as their arguments always ended, with the two of them standing on either side of a door neither of them would walk through. He dialed the number from memory. He did not think about what he was going to say, which was unlike him, and when she answered he said the only honest thing he had, and then he heard her go quiet on the other end, which was her way, and she did not say yes and she did not say no, and after a while she hung up. Three days later a letter came to the house on Ferrona Avenue, and it was not from the diocese and it was not from his cousin. It was from a lawyer in the capital, on paper with a firm's name at the top, and it said that the writer represented one Gaspare Sperandio, the grandson of the late Placido Sperandio, of Brackwater, who had been president of an association called the San Callisto Society, and that among the effects of the late Placido Sperandio, lately examined, there had been found a book of accounts kept in the hand of the deceased, and a note, dated in the autumn of 1951, in the amount of nine thousand dollars, and that Mr. Sperandio would be in Brackwater in the last week of the month and would welcome the opportunity to speak with the family about the sum. Rocco put the letter down on the desk and looked at the office wall. On the wall hung a bookcase, and on the bookcase were three books, and in the third book was one line, and outside the window, on Ferrona Avenue, the spring light was coming down on a street on which every third house had an undertaker's shingle or a doctor's sign or a room with a machine in it, and Rocco Marzullo, who had buried more of that city than any living man, sat in his mother's chair and his father's office and understood that the arithmetic of his family, which had kept four generations dry in hard weather, was finally going to be paid by the only hands his grandfather had ever trusted with a whole night's work. ---