第20章 The Next Call

By the end of the summer the new office on the avenue had begun to feel like a house, and Rocco had begun to be at its front door in the mornings the way he had been at the old door on Ferrona Avenue for fifty years, which is to say the way his father had been at the door of 114 Verri Street, and Sera had learned to answer the phone, and the two of them had stopped needing to fill the silences between them, which was the whole inheritance of their family and the only one either of them had ever wanted. Sera did not go back to Wendover in the fall. She did not say, in the end, that she would not lie to him about the fall; the fall simply came, and she was still there, and the argument about it never happened, which was, for that family, the closest thing to a declaration either of them had ever made. The house was smaller and honest and did the work the corporations did not want, and it did it well, and it did it with the third sign on the door and the light at the back of the chapel and two people who knew the names in all three books, and it buried the poor and the complicated and the families who had been coming to the Marzullos for a hundred years, and it made a living, and a living is not the same as a business but it is the same as a life, and it was, that autumn, enough. The funeral that Rocco remembered from that first autumn in the new shop was not a large one. It was a woman of ninety-four, the last of a family whose name was in the first keeping book in his grandmother's hand, and she had outlived a husband and two sons and had been living in a room in a house on the north side, and when she died there was no one to arrange anything but a niece from another state and a neighbor who had known her for forty years. They did the service in the small chapel with the light at the back, and eleven people came, and Rocco stood at the door, and Sera sat with the niece, and afterward the neighbor took Rocco's arm on the sidewalk and told him that the old woman had kept, in a drawer, a card from the family from the funeral of her son in 1971, and had taken it out every year on the anniversary and set it on the table by the window, and that she had told the neighbor once that the Marzullos had buried three generations of her people and had never once made her feel that she was being charged for it. Rocco thanked the man and went back inside and did not tell Sera what had been said until the following week, and when he did tell her, she sat with it for a while and said that this was the whole of it, the card in the drawer and the light at the back and the eleven people, and that a business that had become a life had better be able to carry a sentence like that, because it was going to be the only payment either of them ever got. They had gone through the first two keeping books together, on the slow evenings, the way you go through the letters of a person you have buried, and they had found the child in the first book, the one with the empty amount and the word that meant a gift, and they had found the lamp in the margin of the last page their grandmother had written, and nobody ever worked out what the lamp meant, and the two of them had decided, together, to leave it as it was, because there are things in a family's book that are meant to be kept and not solved. It was the third book that had the last of it. Rocco found it in October, on a night when Sera had gone home and he had stayed late in the office doing nothing in particular, and he pulled the third volume down and opened it to the back, past his own new line, past the empty leaves that the book had always kept for the years it thought it would have, and there, on the last written page, in his father's hand, but gone small, in the way the old man's hand had gone at the end, there was an entry that Rocco had never seen, because his father had kept that book behind a lock in the drawer and had told him, for fifty years, that he could read any line in it that he could read, and this line had been kept facing the back, where no one looks. There was a name on it. Rocco did not know the name, and he had spent his whole life knowing the names of that city. There was an amount beside it, small, and a date, and then another amount the next month and another the next, and the dates ran back three years, and the last of them was a week before his father died, and the word beside the last of them was not a word Rocco could read as an amount or a payment or a debt, and he sat with it for a long time, and he understood only this: that his father had been paying something, quietly, monthly, for three years of a book that Rocco had read every line of and had never once seen that page, and that there is no line in any account that lies unless there is a person on the other side of it who has agreed not to tell. The office telephone rang at four in the morning. Rocco answered it the way he had answered that telephone for fifty years, in the dark, with his coat half on, and on the other end a woman's voice, old and careful, asked whether this was the family of Marzullo, the one that kept the book, and Rocco said that it was, and the woman said that her uncle had died that night, alone, in a room in a house on the north side of the city, and that the only thing he had in his hand when they found him was a folded slip of paper with the family's name on it and a number on it, an old number, from an old book, and that she did not know what the number meant, and she did not know what the name meant, and she had spent all night trying to find someone who did. Rocco stood in the dark office with the telephone at his ear and the third keeping book open on the desk behind him at a page he had never read, and he said the only thing there was to say, which was that he would come, and he asked her address, and he wrote it down, and then he turned on the light behind the little sign in the window, the plain one the family had hung in the new shop, and went out into the dark morning with his coat over his arm, and behind him, in the window, the lamp burned, the way it had burned on Verri Street in the year everything was new, for a person whose name was not yet entered and would have to be entered by hand.