Chapter 18 The Cousins' Quarrel

The man from Vescor came back on the Thursday, and this time he came with a number, and the number was large enough that Rocco, who had spent his whole life in a trade where the largest number he ever handled was the cost of a funeral, sat with it in the office for an hour after the man had gone and could not make his hands behave. The offer was for the business, the name, the building, the records, the goodwill, and the cemetery pre-need contracts, which were the only part of the trade that still carried any value at all, and it was, as such offers go, a fair one, and it was more money than Rocco had ever expected to see in his life, and it came with a promise, printed on good paper, that the Marzullo name would remain on the door for a period of not less than five years. He showed it to Sera that night, and the quarrel began the way their quarrels had always begun, which was not with the offer and not with the money. "You have known since you were fifteen," Rocco said. He said it flatly, and he said it as an accusation, though it was not one, and he knew it was not one, and he said it anyway, because he had been carrying the other half of the same knowledge for fifty years and had never once been able to put it down. "You found the sheets when you were a girl and you went to your mother and she closed the book on you and you never said a word to me, and then you left, and you took the sheets with you, and you kept them in a drawer for thirty years, and you did not come home, and every year I sat at the desk and read that line and I could have asked you and you could have told me and neither of us did, because we are the same, Sera, we are exactly the same, and the only difference between us is which side of the door we decided to stand on." "I did not leave because of the book," Sera said. "You left because of the book." "I left because of the silence," she said, and she was not raised in that house for nothing, and she did not raise her voice, and the calm in it was the worst thing she could have brought into the room. "The book was never the trouble, Rocco. The book was honest, in the beginning, and the book was honest for forty years, and it was honest the night your grandmother wrote a stranger's child into it and left the amount empty as a gift, and it was honest the day your father wrote one false line into it because he was frightened. You want to know what I could not live in. I could not live in a house where the truth comes with a door on it, and you open it for the families who pay and you close it for the family that lives inside. The Milazzos get a funeral with a man at the door who knows what to do with his hands. I got a mother who washed the dead all day and would not say one true thing at the supper table, and you got a father who told you the book was a lie and called it a trust, and the two of us sat at the same table with them every night of our childhood and no one ever once said out loud the one thing that was true." Rocco stood up. He went to the window and stood with his back to her and looked at Ferrona Avenue, which was going quiet for the evening, and the shingle lights coming on down the block, and the answering service would be routing the night calls by now, and somewhere in the city a person was going to die before morning and the phone would ring and it would ring in his pocket and not at the house anymore, because that was the kind of house it had become. "If I sell," he said, "they will keep the name for five years and take it down, and every family that ever came to my grandmother's front room will be sent to a room on the highway. I will have turned a hundred years of the house into a folder on a young man's table. My grandfather dug four winters in a frozen hill above the river so that a man with his name on a sign could be trusted with the worst hour of a stranger's life, and I would be the one who sold it, and there is no line in any book that says I am allowed to do that, and there is a line in my father's hand that says the opposite, and I read it every night, and I cannot do it, Sera. I cannot be the one." "Nobody is asking you to sell the name," Sera said quietly. "I am asking you to open a grave." "It is the same thing," he said, to the window. "It is not the same thing," she said, "and you know it, because you are the one who taught it to me, when I was nine years old and you were the boy in the chapel who told me what the light was for. You told me the room was built so that the light falls on the people who come and not on the box, and you told me it was so that no one would ever have to be shown a coffin first. You were teaching me the whole trade in one afternoon at nine years old, and you were right, Rocco, you were right, and the reason we have to open that grave is the exact reason you told me the light goes at the back. Because the people who come are the Milazzos, and they have been sitting in the front for sixty years without it, and the only way to fix a thing like that is to put the light on it, all of it, and let the family see." Rocco did not answer for a long time. Then he turned around, and his face had gone the way it went at the grave of a person he had known, and he looked at his cousin, whom he had not spoken with in four years and had not understood in fifty, and he asked her the only question that had ever mattered between them, which was the one he had been too proud to ask on the day she left. "If we open it, and we pay the old man's grandson, and we tell the Milazzos and the Tapanis what our father did, then the house is smaller and poorer and maybe it is not a house at all. Do you stay?" Sera looked at him across the table, across the keeping book, across sixty years and two languages and a door neither of them had walked through. "I will stay through the summer," she said. "And I will not lie to you about the fall." ---