Chapter 7 The Second Mortgage

The bank that had lent Gaetano the money for 114 Verri Street sent a man around in the autumn of 1951 to explain, in the way that banks explain things, that the family owed more than the building was worth and that the only reason it had not been called was that the building was a funeral home and the bank did not want it. Salvatore met the man in the front room, on the good chairs, and did not offer coffee, which was the first business decision of his life that he made on his own. He was thirty-one that autumn, married two years to a steady woman from the parish named Concetta, with a boy of his own asleep in the back, and he was the face and the pen of the house while his father sat by the stove and his sister worked the back. He had learned by then what every man learns who runs a small business on a poor street, which is that the business is not the thing you sell, the business is the credit you stand on, and that a man can lose a whole trade not by doing it badly but by running out of the money to keep doing it while it is done well. He walked over to the Society that evening, and this time he did not go round to the room behind the grocery, because Don Placido Sperandio had died in the spring and the room behind the grocery had been given up, and the Society now kept its table in a front parlor two blocks over, and its new men were younger and did not have the old man's way of saying nothing in particular while they thought. The proposal was this. The Society would pay off the bank and take the mortgage itself, at a rate a full point under what the bank had charged, and in exchange the home would do the Society's funerals at a set price for another twenty years, and the building itself would stand as the security. Salvatore had written it out in his own hand on a sheet of the good paper, because he had understood, from watching his father and from watching the older men of the street, that a poor man who comes to ask for money must bring the paper himself, and that the man who brings the paper is not a supplicant. He is the one making the offer. They signed it in the parlor in October with two witnesses and a notary who came over from the avenue. The Society's side was carried by its president, a careful, narrow man named Sperandio also, the old man's son, who had his father's patience and none of his warmth, and who read the whole document twice and asked two questions no one could answer and signed anyway, because the home on Verri Street was the home the Society used and had used since before any of them were born, and because the alternative was a bank that wanted nothing to do with any of them. That night Salvatore sat at the table with the keeping book. His mother's columns had long since outgrown the copybook. There was the first book, ruled by hand; the second, where the entries had turned from a street's gossip into a business's accounts; and the third, bound in black oilcloth with the red stripe, in which every dollar of the house for eleven years had its line. His mother wrote the names. He wrote the money. It had been so for years. The two hands made one book, and the book was the only true history the family had, and the two of them had never once discussed who owned it. He opened it to a clean page and wrote, in English, the way he wrote the money, the entry for the new mortgage. The number was nine thousand and change. He wrote it. He wrote the rate. He wrote the date. Then he did something he had not planned to do, which he would not have been able to explain to his father or his mother or the notary if any of them had asked, and which he did because it was late and the house was quiet and he was, that autumn, tired in a way that only a man who has just kept his family's roof on their heads for another twenty years can be tired. He wrote the name of the Society as the lender and the name of the building as the security, exactly as the document said, and then below the entry, in the column that was supposed to be for the balance, he wrote a line that was true today and which he intended to keep true by paying, and which he understood, even as he wrote it, to be a kind of promise he was making to a page in a book instead of to a person. He did not show it to anyone. There was no one in that house, then, who would have needed to see it. His mother would write the next name at the top of the next page and would not read the money. His father had stopped reading the book in the year the sign went up. His sister read the book the way she read everything, which was completely and without comment, and he told himself that she would understand, and the fact that he told himself so, at the table, at night, with the pen still in his hand, was the first sign that he did not believe it. The next morning he took the bank's papers over to the avenue and paid them off in the Society's check, and on the way home he stopped at the sign shop and had them clean the brass. He stood on the sidewalk and looked up at MARZULLO & SONS and thought that a man who could keep a building and a name and a family afloat was entitled to a small measure of the trade's rough music, and he went in and made the coffee himself, which he had not done in years, and his mother, who noticed everything and said nothing, poured it for the three of them and asked him nothing, and the day went on being an ordinary day, and the ordinary days are where the deepest things get buried, because nobody thinks to watch them. ---