Chapter 5 The Society

By the time Salvatore was nineteen the world had gone the way the world goes, which is badly for a while and then badly in a new direction, and the four blocks of Little Roccalba had learned to bury their own through a thing called the San Callisto Society, which had begun as a dozen men putting two dollars a month in a coffee tin and had become, in the course of a generation, the second most powerful institution on the street, after the church. The Society did one thing, and did it well. For a dollar and a half a month, every member's funeral was paid for, in full, at the end. It kept its own records, owned its own plot in the ground at Sereno Fields where the poor of the parish were laid in together under one stone, and hired a funeral home by the year to serve its members at an agreed price. For thirty years that home had been the one on Verri Street, because the men who ran the Society and the man who ran the home had the same accent and the same memories and had, in the same bad winter, buried each other's children. Arrangements like that are stronger than contracts. Contracts you can read. Accents you cannot. The Society's books were kept by its president, who was old now and whose name everyone said with the first word in front of it, the way that neighborhood said the names of the men it trusted. His name was Placido Sperandio, and to the street he was Don Placido, and to Gaetano Marzullo he was the boy who had carried the second coil of rope the day they raised the cross on St. Anselmo in the year everything was new. Salvatore went to see him on a hot afternoon in June, alone, without telling his father. He walked in past the grocery at the corner and around to the room behind it, where the Society kept a table, two chairs, and a safe that had been bought at an auction of the estate of a failed bank and had never been opened by anyone who did not have the right to open it. Don Placido was there, and he was old, and he was doing what he had always done, which was nothing in particular in a room that was never empty. "You are the boy," Don Placido said. He did not say which boy. Everyone from that street was somebody's boy. "I am the son," Salvatore said, because he had planned this and had decided to open with the correction. The old man thought about it. Then he laughed, one short breath of a laugh, and told him to sit down and say what he had come to say, and Salvatore said it. He said the arrangements with the Society were set at a price that was fair in the year it was agreed and had not moved since, while the price of everything else had moved a great deal, and that the family was doing the Society's funerals at a loss. He said the home needed a new preparation room and a cold board and a hearse with an engine that did not wake the block at four in the morning. He said that his father would never in his life come to this room and ask for anything, and that was exactly why the things that needed asking for had gone unasked for a decade, and that if the Society wanted the home on Verri Street to still exist in ten years for its members to be buried from, then the Society and the home were going to have to be something other than two rooms of the same poor street. He said all this in English, because he was trying to teach himself to conduct business in English, and it came out harder and simpler than he meant. Don Placido listened with his hands folded. Then he asked, in the old language, what Gaetano wanted, and Salvatore had to answer in the old language, and answering in the old language made him a boy again, and he felt the room do to him what the old country did to all of them eventually, which was to reach up and take the new words out of the mouth and put the old ones back. "My father wants to bury people well," Salvatore said. "He does not think about what it costs to be able to do it." "Then he is a craftsman," Don Placido said, "and you are something else." "I am his son." "Both can be true." The old man got up and went to the safe and opened it, and Salvatore, who had never seen inside it, saw for the space of the opening a shelf of paper: receipts, ledgers, letters tied with string, the whole memory of a street that had never learned to write anything down except in rooms like this one. Don Placido took out nothing. He had opened it only to show him that he could. "You want a loan," he said. "I want a partner," Salvatore said, and this he had not planned, and it was true, and it was the beginning and the whole shape of him, all at once, and the old man heard the truth in it and did not smile. "No," Don Placido said. "You want money and you want to call it a partnership. Every young man does. I will give you the money. Not much. Enough for your cold board and your engine. And you will sign for it, and it will be owed, and one day, when I am gone and you are older, you will decide that a debt owed to a dead man is owed to no man, and then you will find out whether you are the kind of person this street can afford. I have watched that lesson arrive in men twice your age. I will watch it arrive in you." Salvatore signed. He was nineteen, and he did not hear the second half of what the old man said for another twenty-five years, and when he finally did hear it, he heard it from the other side of a table, in a different room, with a page missing from a book, and he knew that Don Placido had told him the entire story of his life that afternoon and had told it for free. He walked home along Verri Street with the Society's money folded into the inside pocket of his jacket, and the street looked the same as it had looked in the morning, and he was already, though he did not know it, planning the day he would take the sign down and paint a new one, and what it would say. ---