第16章 Gaspare Sperandio's Receipt

Sera came up from the station in a taxi on the evening of the day the man from the capital had come and gone, and she had the drawer with her, which is to say she had the three sheets of paper in a folder in her bag and had left the rest of her house in Wendover closed up and dark, because she had told herself she was coming for a week and had known, at the station, that it was a lie. The house on Ferrona Avenue had not changed and it had changed entirely. The two windows were the same windows and the doorway was the same doorway, and the sign over it was a new sign, plain metal, with the name and the word funeral home on it in a font that Rocco had chosen because it was quiet, and there was no hand on it and no sons, and Sera stood on the sidewalk a moment and looked at the sign, and what she felt was not grief and not triumph. It was the strange flat feeling of a person who has come home to a house that has finally agreed with her about something, too late, and without her. Rocco was in the office, in their mother's chair and their grandfather's chair and their father's chair, all three of which were the same chair, and he got up when she came in and did not embrace her and did not offer to, and poured her a cup of the bad coffee he had drunk at that desk for fifty years, and they did the thing they had done all their lives, which was to sit on opposite sides of a table and let the silence do the first hour of the work. Then he told her about Gaspare Sperandio. He told it flatly, the way their family told everything, with the dates and the numbers and no adjectives, and when he was done he opened the keeping book to the page and turned it to her, and there was the line, paid in full, October 1963, in their father's heavy pen, and he laid beside it the letter from the capital and a photocopy of the page from Don Placido's book, which Gaspare had left, and the two pages said different things and had said different things for fifty-six years, and only one of the two men who could have settled it was still alive, and he had been in the ground four days. "So it was never paid," Sera said. "Part of it was paid," Rocco said. "He paid the interest for years and let the principal sit. The principal is nine thousand and change. At the rate in the note, with the term, it is somewhere north of a hundred and forty thousand now. The lawyer from the capital was good enough to write the figure in the letter." "And the Society?" "The Society is a name on a paper. The last of them died in the eighties. There is no association and no plot and no common ground anymore, because we moved the common ground ourselves, in 1963, into numbered lots at Sereno Fields, and we were paid for doing it. Gaspare Sperandio is the last man alive with a claim to that note and he knows it and he has no church and no court behind him, and he came to the house with his grandfather's book because he wants the thing his grandfather wanted, which was not the money. It was to find out what we were." Sera looked at the two pages for a while. Then she said the thing that Rocco had been waiting four days to hear and dreading from the moment he made the telephone call. "There is a second page, Rocco." He did not ask her what she meant. He got up and went to the shelf and took down the third book and put it on the table and turned the pages to the year, and she took the folder from her bag and laid the three sheets beside it, the sheets their mother had left her, in their mother's hand, with the two names and the numbers that did not agree, and the three of them together, the keeping book and the sheets and the page from the old man's safe, made a shape on the table that was not a set of documents. It was a confession that had been sitting in three houses, in three hands, for sixty years, waiting for somebody to put it on one table. "Tell me," Sera said. And Rocco told her the second thing, which he had never told anyone, which he had learned from his father in the office on a night when his father had been drinking a little, and which was that the nine thousand had not gone into the building and had not gone to the Society. It had gone into the ground. It had gone to the clerk at the city office, Natalino Cusumano, in the autumn of 1963, to certify as correct a set of certificates for two graves whose contents the family knew, by then, to be in the wrong places, and the family had paid the clerk with the Society's money and had entered the loan in the book as repaid and had spent the next fifty-six years burying Brackwater out of a house that stood on a lie. Sera sat very still in her aunt's chair, which was also her mother's chair, and looked at the table, and the two of them were quiet for a long time, longer than they had ever managed in a room together, and outside on Ferrona Avenue a car went by and slowed at the door and went on, the way cars slow at the door of a funeral home in a small city, out of habit, even in the evening, even for no reason at all. "Who is in the wrong ground," Sera said at last. "Assunta Milazzo," Rocco said. "And Rosario Trapani. And the Milazzos are still in Brackwater." Sera closed her eyes. When she opened them she was, for the first time since she had got off the train, entirely in the room, entirely at the table, with her hands on the papers, and she was the person the hospice sent into a house when the family had run out of words, and she had come home to a family that had run out of words sixty years ago and had buried the silence under a stone with a name on it that was the wrong name, and she understood, looking at her cousin across the two pages, that she was the only person left who was not going to be able to leave it the way it was. "Then we are not paying a debt," she said. "We are opening a grave." "Yes," Rocco said. "You know what that does to this house." "Yes," Rocco said, and he put his hand flat on the keeping book, the way his grandmother had once put her hand flat on the lid of a small poplar box on Verri Street, and for the first time in fifty years he did not look like a man at a door who knows what to do with his hands. He looked like a man sitting at his own table with nothing left to arrange. ---