第6章 Two Hands

Filomena Marzullo had the steadiest hands in the family, and everyone knew it, and no one said it in front of her brother. She was the second child and the only daughter, born two years after Salvatore in the room behind the shop, and she had grown up under the table of the front room the way other children grow up under the piano, listening to the work happen above her head. She had a memory for faces that was almost a disease, and she could tell you, forty years later, the name and the street of every family that had ever sat in that room, and what they had asked for and what they had been too proud to ask for, and which of them had cried and which of them had gone quiet, and she had been told, when she was small, that this was a sin called gossip, and she kept it all the same, and it was not gossip. It was the trade. Her father taught her the work with his hands, because he had no words for it and did not trust words for it, and the lessons happened in the preparation room at the back, which opened off the yard and had a drain in the floor and a window high up that let in a gray light all day. He taught her to wash a body the way she would want to be washed by somebody who intended to do it properly. He taught her to close a mouth with a thread and a needle so that no stranger would ever see the thread. He taught her to set a jaw, to shape a hand around a rosary so that it looked as though the dead had chosen it, to put color back into a face after the color had gone out, with a little pot of red and a rag, without making the face into somebody it had never been. He taught her that the family is in the room and you are not, and that the one unforgivable thing in the trade is to make the dead into a picture of your own idea of them, because the family is going to look into that face for the rest of their lives, and what they need to see is not beauty. It is the person. He did not teach her the words for what she was doing, because he did not have them, and she made her own, in English and in the old language both, and her words were good enough that she could have taught it, if anyone had thought to ask her. The trouble between the brother and the sister started, as such things do, over a small thing that was the visible end of a large thing. Their father, in the year he turned sixty, began to let the boy do the talking. It was not a decision; it was a drift, the drift of a tired man who had spent his life in a wet shed and a gray room and now wanted to sit in the front room of an evening and let somebody else hold the pen. Salvatore had a taste for the front of the house the way their father had a taste for the back. He liked the arranging, the estimating, the meeting of the family in the parlor with the good chairs and the low light and the offered coffee, and he was good at it, better than good, he had the thing that cannot be taught, which is that people in grief will trust a man who is not afraid to sit in the silence with them and let them get to the asking in their own time. The street came to think of him as the face of the house. He came to think of himself that way too, which is a different thing, and from that difference came everything that followed. The sign was replaced in the spring. It was Salvatore's idea and his money and his pride, and he had it made at a shop on the avenue, not painted on a board by his own hand the way his father had done, but cut from metal and enameled, a real sign, the kind a business has when it intends to last. He took the old board down himself. Under the new one, in metal letters that would last longer than any of them, it said: MARZULLO & SONS Filomena was in the doorway when the man from the sign shop hung it, and she read it, and she went inside without saying anything, and she did the evening's work, which was a woman from the three streets over, laid out and waiting and needing her coloring done before the morning, and she did it well, because she always did it well. At supper, their father asked when the sign had gone up. "This afternoon," Salvatore said. "What does it say?" "Marzullo and Sons." The old man ate a while. He had learned, by then, not to be angry in this house; anger was a luxury of people with land. But he put down the fork and looked at the two of them, and he said the thing that would stand in the room for the rest of their lives. "It says sons," he said. "There is one son. There is a daughter who does the real work and a son who has bought a motorcar. If the sign is going to lie, it should at least lie in both languages, so that the people who read it cannot be fooled." Salvatore did not answer. He had an answer, which was that in that country a sign that said and Daughter would have cost the house the business of half the parish, and that a good sign was worth more than a true one, and both of these things were true and neither of them was the reason he had not asked her. The reason he had not asked her he kept for a long time, and when he finally said it out loud, years later, in another argument and about another thing, he said the words without even hearing them. Filomena finished her supper and went back to the prep room, where there was still a body to be finished, and she finished it, and it was the best work of that entire month, and nobody saw it except the family at the viewing, and the family wept, and told the street that the Marzullos could make a person look like themselves right up to the last, and by morning the house had two more calls. She never once signed the sign's name to anything. In the keeping book, which was her mother's, the column that described the work was in her mother's hand, and the entries that described money in her brother's, and the work had no column of its own and did not need one, and on the day her mother died she would look at the book and understand that she had been written into it sideways, in the only place the book had to keep a thing that had no price, and she would think about the sign, and about the word sons, and about her hands, which were the steadiest in the family, and which no one would find in gold on any door. ---