Chapter 3 A Sign over the Door

The building at 114 Verri Street had been a stable, then a store that sold secondhand clothes, then nothing at all for four years, and when Nunzia walked past it for the tenth time and counted the money in her head for the hundredth, it was still nothing at all, and that was the thing about it she liked. She wanted the door on the street. Not the yard, not the shed where a customer had to come through the boarding-house hall and past the neighbors' wash, but a door that opened from the sidewalk the way a shop's door opens, so that a person in trouble could walk in out of the weather and find a chair. "You want a shop," Gaetano said, when she told him. "For the dead." "For the living," she said. "The dead leave. It's the living that come and go." He did not have an answer for that and he did not need one, because it was true and he was going to do it anyway. The price was a price. They had, by then, the wages of a digger and the fees of a half-made undertaker and the small hoard Nunzia had brought across the water sewn into the hem of a skirt, which she had not spent on a coat in a cold country and had not spent on a stove and had not spent, in fact, on anything, and which was now, in that way that money has of becoming the only thing about you that other people can see, the entire foundation of a family. They bought it in the summer, with a mortgage from a bank that did not want to lend to them and lent anyway, at a rate that made Gaetano put his hand over his eyes when the man read it out. And over the door, because Nunzia insisted and because he had the boards anyway, Gaetano painted a sign. He wanted a name that was only his own, the way it is done in the old country, a man and his trade and no family to answer for him. She wanted something a person reading it from the street could carry away in their mouth and say to a neighbor. What went up, after the argument and the second coat of paint, was this: G. MARZULLO, UNDERTAKER In white on a dark ground, with a hand drawn below the words, and the hand, which Gaetano had painted from memory and painted three times over, was not his own hand and was not a hand at all, but a shape that meant a hand, one line curving under the last word like a body laid down, and when people asked him what it meant he said it meant the work was done properly, and when people did not ask it meant whatever they needed it to mean. Above the sign, in the window, Nunzia put a lamp. It was a plain glass lamp with a brass base and a red shade, and she lit it in the evening whenever there was a body in the front room, and she left it dark whenever there was not. In the neighborhoods of that city, and in that neighborhood especially, a lit window of a certain color was not a word but a whole sentence, and after a few years there was no one on Verri Street, and no one on the three streets off it, who had to be told the sentence. A child would walk home from the corner and see the red glow behind the curtain and not know what it was, and by the time the child was old enough to be told, the knowing had already gone into the child some other way, the way a language goes into a person, without a lesson. That was the year the boy was born. They named him for Nunzia's father, and they called him Sal for the street and Salvatore for the priest, and he arrived in the winter between the sign and the snow, a large, loud child with his mother's forehead and his father's hands, and he was the first of the family to be born in the new language, which is a different kind of first from the first child, and a harder one to explain to the child later. The boy was three when his uncle died. Cirino had gone over to the mills on the river where the pay was better, and he had gone up on a scaffold with a hundred other men and had come down the way a scaffold brings a man down when it is old, and by the time Gaetano got there through the crowd, his brother was already laid on the ground with his coat folded under his head and his eyes open on the sky and nothing behind them. He was thirty-one. He had never learned to stop talking, right up to the end, and the men who had stood near him on the scaffold said later that he had been telling them, when it went, about a girl he intended to marry. Gaetano buried his brother on the hill the way he had buried men for wages, with a coffin of good oak he had kept in the back of the shed for a year against no particular day, and he did it himself, and he would not let anyone else take the spade. Afterward he came home and sat in the front room and looked at the lamp, which was lit for a stranger that evening and not for his brother, and Nunzia came and sat with him and did not speak, because in that house the saying of things was her husband's work and not hers, and she had learned early that the strongest thing she could do with a hurt was to leave it in the room and not put it away early. That night she opened the keeping book, and under the columns she wrote her brother-in-law's name and the date, and in the place for the amount she wrote the cost of the oak, because it was owed and because the book kept what was owed, and for the first time she was angry with her husband for being a man who would not name a price, seeing that he had named none for the oak and it had cost him something, and he had paid it, and she could not write a price where there was none. So she wrote the cost, and let the rest of it stand open on the page, and the page held it the way a page will, forever, in the patient columns of a cheap school copybook ruled by hand. Outside, the snow came up Verri Street, and the sign over the door with the painted hand took the weather, and the red lamp behind the curtain burned for a stranger, and down the block a man was already telling someone that the Marzullo brothers buried the dead as well as anyone and better than most, which was the first line of a reputation that would outlive them both. ---