第8章 A Funeral for the Founder

Gaetano Marzullo died in the winter of 1958, at the age of sixty-three, of a bad heart that he had carried for a decade without mentioning it, and Filomena was the one who found him, at the bottom of the yard by the shed where he had gone to check a lock, face up in the snow with his coat over his chest and the key still in his hand. She had been in the prep room and had come out because the yard had gone too quiet. When she saw him she did not cry out. She turned him a little, to see, and then she knelt in the snow beside him for a while, and then she got up and walked back into the house and told her mother first, because that was the order of the house and would be the order of it always, and then she went and telephoned her brother from the corner store, because the house still did not have a telephone of its own, and the man in the store listened to her give the message and had the decency afterward not to tell the street what he had heard. The old man had left no instructions, because a man who has buried half a neighborhood develops a strong superstition about arranging his own death, and so they had to decide everything, and they decided it the way their family decided things, which was separately and in silence and then all at once. Salvatore wanted the whole street. The parish, the Society, the mill, the four blocks, the Society's plot? No, that was for the poor of the parish and his father was not going in the common ground, he was going into the family plot on the hill that they had bought when the business could afford it, and Salvatore wanted a service at St. Anselmo with the whole town invited, and a set of new vestments for the priest, the whole thing, because a founder gets a founder's funeral, and the funeral of the founder is the loudest advertisement a house like theirs will ever have. Filomena wanted none of it. She wanted the front room, the good chairs, the lamp, the family, and the priest, and the street to come in ones and twos the way it always came, and she wanted the work done by their own hands, because nothing in her life had ever been as clear to her as this: the man who had taught her to wash a body would be washed by her, and the hands that had taught her to close a mouth would be closed by hands she trusted, and she was not going to trade any of it for a hundred people in a church. They compromised, which in that house meant that both of them got their way and neither of them said so. The service was at St. Anselmo with the whole street, and Salvatore paid for it and stood at the door and was, all day, exactly the man the street needed, which he always was when he remembered to be, and afterward the whole of Little Roccalba came back down Verri Street to 114 and stood in the front room and out on the sidewalk and in the yard, and the family took them in ones and twos for the rest of the day and into the evening, and Nunzia sat in her chair by the door and received the whole four blocks, and did not leave it, and did not eat, and at the end, when the last of them had gone, she was still there with her hands folded. Filomena was in the back all day. She had begun the work at the hour before dawn, alone, with the light from the high window coming gray across the drain in the floor, and she had washed her father and dressed him in the suit he wore to other people's funerals and set his jaw and closed his mouth with a thread no one would ever see and put the color back into a face that had gone blue in the snow, working slowly, the way he had taught her, with the family in the room and herself not in it, and when it was done she stood back and looked at him for a long time, and what she saw was not a saint and not a stranger. She saw the man who had carried poplar boards up Verri Street on his shoulder and had tapered the shoulders of a box for a stranger's child because it hurt the mother to look at a plain thing. He looked like himself. That was the whole standard she had ever been given and it was the whole standard she ever met, and she met it for him, and then she washed her hands at the drain and went out into the day and let the street in. At the burial, on the hill at Sereno Fields, in a cold bright morning, Father Ilario's successor read the prayers in two tongues, and Salvatore gave the eulogy, and it was good, and everyone said so, and no one remembers a word of it now. What the family remembers is what happened after, in the house, that night. Nunzia took Salvatore and Filomena into the front room and closed the door and sat them down and opened the keeping book on the table, and turned it so that both of them could see the page, and put her finger on the columns, and said the thing that would govern them both for the rest of their lives, and which she said in the old language, and which neither of them ever repeated in English because repeating it would have been a kind of betrayal. She said: this book does not belong to either of you. It belongs to the house. Whichever of you keeps the house keeps the book, and the other one keeps nothing of it, and neither of you is to change a line in it that the other one cannot read. If the two of you cannot keep it together, then one of you will keep it alone, and the one who keeps it alone will answer for every line in it, at the end, to somebody who is not us. Then she closed the book and went to bed, and the two of them sat in the front room with the closed book between them and the lamp dark in the window and did not say anything for a long while, and then Salvatore got up and turned out the light, and the argument that would take thirty years to happen had already begun, the way most of the real arguments in that family did, with nobody saying a word. ---