第17章 Agata Milazzo's Grandmother

Father Serafino, the chancery priest, came to the house the next morning with a laptop and a folding table and the patience of a man who has spent three years in the burial registers, and he and Sera worked at the front of the office for two days, and Rocco, who could not sit still for it, came and went and made coffee and stood at the window and said almost nothing. The priest was the one who found the Milazzos. The parish list for the removals of 1963 had an entry for Assunta Milazzo, died 1941, removed from the old parish ground in lot eleven and reinterred in the new section at Sereno Fields, and the cemetery's own record had the same plot number and the same date, and the city certificates, signed by Natalino Cusumano, had the same. On paper the woman was exactly where she was said to be. That was the whole trouble with a lie kept by a clerk for a fee: it was perfect paper, and paper is a thing you can clean, and cleaning is not the same as curing. But the priest had also been given, by a retiring sexton at the cemetery, the sexton's own working notebooks from the years when the new section was being filled, and the sexton's notebook, which was written in pencil by a man who did not expect anyone to read it, had the two crates for the February removals logged going into the new section on the same afternoon, one after the other, in a rain, and the sexton had written, in the margin, in a small hand, that the tags had been off the crates on arrival because the rain had driven the men under the trees, which was the kind of detail a sexton puts in a book because it is the kind of detail that one day matters. It had taken sixty years for the day to come. But the sexton's margin note and the mother's three sheets and the two names and the numbers that did not agree were enough, between the three of them, to make a case a family could be told the truth about without any of them having to be certain in a court of law, which was what Sera had wanted from the beginning, because she was not in the business of winning and she had never once in her life been in the business of winning. They found Agata Milazzo living in a house in the north suburbs of Brackwater, four streets from where the new section of Sereno Fields had been laid out, which was a coincidence of the kind that a family like the Marzullos had learned, over a hundred years of burying their neighbors, never to be surprised by. She was seventy-eight and she had been a schoolteacher and she lived alone with a dog and a garden, and she listened to Sera at her own kitchen table with her hands around a cup of tea and did not interrupt once, which Sera recognized as the training of a woman who had spent her working life in front of a room and had learned to let a person get to the end of the difficult thing before she said anything at all. When Sera was done, Agata Milazzo sat for a while. Then she said the thing that Sera had not prepared for and could not have. "My grandmother died before I was born," she said. "I never knew her. What I know is that my mother went out to that grave every year of her life, in June, with a jar of flowers, and she would stand there and talk to her mother for an hour, and I used to think it was a quiet, unremarkable thing, a woman talking to a stone. And now you are telling me the stone has a name on it and my grandmother is not under it, and that my mother spent sixty Junes talking to a stranger." Sera did not say any of the things she had prepared. She had prepared the apology and the offer of the cost of the removal and the offer to do the work herself, in the family's own hands, and she said none of them, because there is no answer to a sentence like that, and she had spent twenty years learning that the only honest thing to do with a sentence like that is to stay in the room with it. Agata Milazzo got up and went to the window and looked out at her garden for a long moment. Then she turned around. "Where is he," she said. "The other one. Trapani." "The other family," Sera said. "The Tapanis. They left Brackwater in the seventies. We have not been able to find them yet. We will." "Find them," Agata said. "And when you open my grandmother's ground, I want to be there, and I want you to open the other one the same day, so that the two of them do not have to lie apart in the dark one night longer than is necessary." She sat back down and picked up her tea and looked at Sera over the rim of it with the directness of a woman who had made her living being looked at. "You are the niece. The one who left." "Yes." "Then you are the one who came back. I have watched this city all my life and I could tell you a great deal about the ones who came back and the ones who did not, and it would not be worth the telling. What I want to know is only this. Are you doing this to make your family clean, or are you doing it for my mother, who is dead, and for my grandmother, who is in the wrong ground?" Sera sat with the question the way she would have sat with a dying patient, and did not dress it up. "For your grandmother," she said. "The clean part is a side effect." Agata Milazzo looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and the nod was the whole verdict, and Sera, who had been braced for thirty years against a door she was sure would never open, felt it open, a crack, in a kitchen in the suburbs, on an ordinary Tuesday, over a cup of tea that had gone cold. ---