The House at the Edge of Night (35 page)

But Sergio, in some obscure way, still clearly felt that his destiny hung upon his brother's. The two of them were separate now, Maria-Grazia saw; they had undergone some irreversible schism the summer of the almost-drowning, so that now they merely coexisted under the roof of the House at the Edge of Night, no longer really brothers. And now, too late, Sergio wanted Giuseppino back; now it was he who roamed about disconsolately with their slingshots and marbles, hoping Giuseppino would leave his books and join the games in the piazza, desperate for some friendly word.

“Did I do something wrong?” Maria-Grazia murmured in her husband's ear the night after this disagreement. “Should I have been with them more as children? Was it a mistake to put so much of myself into the bar?”

But how could she have given them more? She had felt herself stretched thin as wire in the boys' first years, torn between the demands of the business and the demands of her children until hardly a scrap remained of the girl who had once presided over the counter of the House at the Edge of Night, who had gone fearlessly about the island in pursuit of justice for Flavio, who had been the only island girl to win Robert Esposito's heart.

“But what if I'd been the one in the bar?” reasoned her husband now. “What if I'd been the one putting aside the money in the cashbox to buy them new bicycles, saving to send them to university? And you'd been the one to care for them as babies? What then? What difference would it have made?”

“It would certainly have been more usual,” said Maria-Grazia, who had endured her share of scolding from the island's widows, and the incomprehension of the fishermen who wondered why she stood at the counter while Robert wandered about the island with a baby carriage.

“Do you love them?” Robert asked her now, a little stern.

“
Sì, caro.
Of course.”

“Well, then.”

“You know what the widows say in the bar.”

“Oh, to hell with the widows in the bar!”

She laughed, and he seized her around the waist, as though they were still fresh lovers, as they had been during the war. “What they need,” said Robert, “is love. I didn't have it, and I know that. Anything else is just incidental.”

And yet—though she never could have brought herself to articulate such a feeling out loud, or even in her own mind—she had never loved her sons as much as she had loved Robert. It had been her initial, guilty thought, on seeing the infant Sergio, that the suspicion she had held during her pregnancy was now confirmed: Yes, she loved her son, but no rush of affection had displaced Robert from his place of honor in her heart. Nothing had: no absence, no humiliation. Not her children's births. As she watched the boys grow up, this secret had become blacker and more awful to her, a thing she felt certain her sons must sense, that was perhaps responsible for their constant warring, their dissatisfaction with everything. “It will all come right,” murmured Robert, as though he understood.

Amedeo woke one morning in 1971 to find Pina turned away from him a little, one hand gripping the blanket. Ordinarily, her side of the bed would be abandoned before seven, her hobbling footsteps audible in another corner of the great house, moving about her early morning tasks. Now Amedeo touched her and found her cool. His cry woke the rest of the house. The others came running, and Maria-Grazia held before her mother's face the spotted mirror from the bathroom shelf. The mirror remained clear.

All that day, the House at the Edge of Night was full of weeping. Amedeo wandered from room to room, his head bowed, his hands searching the walls, inconsolable. The death notices were put up, pasted with their black borders to every flat surface in the town, and mourners came to sit with Amedeo on the veranda. No one had been as loved on the island as Pina Vella.

The poet Mario Vazzo returned for the funeral; so did Professor Vincio and a handful of archaeologists, and those emigrants of Castellamare origin who remembered the schoolmistress from their humbler days: sons and daughters of the island who now wore loud foreign clothes and drove foreign cars. The church was so full that Father Marco was obliged to open both doors and shout the funeral Mass over the heads of the congregation to reach the crowd outside. Afterward, Pina was buried in a plot not far from Gesuina's grave, and the islanders fought decorously for space to lay their particular flowers. The florist Gisella had been up all night winding funeral wreaths of trumpet vine and bougainvillea and blue plumbago, Pina's favorites. Always, Pina had loved the native flowers of the island, for never in her life had she lived away from it.

That evening as the sun set, Maria-Grazia roamed alone about the island, limping in the uncomfortable shoes purchased from Valeria's hardware store for the funeral, gathering more flowers. For, as decked as her mother's grave was, it still did not seem enough to her. Maria-Grazia wandered until nightfall, allowing herself to weep, seeking greater and greater armfuls of plumbago and oleander. At eight o'clock, when she had piled the grave with a hundred boughs, she saw Robert coming to meet her across the fields. He stopped before her, and rubbed the tears from her face with his thumb. Bending, without speaking, he helped her arrange the boughs about Pina Vella's grave until every one was used, a great canvas of island colors. “Is that enough?” asked Robert at last.

“
Sì, amore,
” said Maria-Grazia. “That's enough.”

Now she composed herself a little, took a handkerchief from her pocket, and wiped the tears from her cheeks and the pollen from her hands. Robert put his arm about her, and together they returned to the bar to meet the crowd of mourners.

That night, Mario Vazzo sought out Amedeo, and sat beside him at the edge of the veranda. Amedeo clung to a bottle of
arancello.
The poet was to return to the mainland tomorrow. “I don't know if I'll come back here again,” said Mario Vazzo. “I'm getting old. But I wanted to be present today—for Pina—to honor her. A great woman, she was, a woman unlike any other I've met….” Mario Vazzo attempted a few more words about Pina, then fell into a contemplative silence, massaging his chin.

Amedeo anchored himself with both hands by the bottle of
arancello
. He had never said anything to Pina regarding his suspicions about the poet. Now he accosted Signor Vazzo instead, eyebrows bristling: “You loved my wife, didn't you?”

The poet, elderly and stiff of motion, drew forward a little toward the doctor. He thought for a long time, watching the lights of a liner ply the horizon in search of some other, larger island, and eventually decided to remain silent.

This maddened Amedeo. Eyes puffed with weeping, gripping the bottle of
arancello
by the neck, he spoke at length about Pina—the grace of her, the strength—until the poor poet was reduced to tears. There had never been a better woman born on the island, persisted Amedeo. By Sant'Agata and Holy Gesù, how could she be gone? “And you loved her, too, Signor Vazzo,” he declared, some coldness in him making him repeat the accusation. “You're weeping for her right now, and yet you won't admit it. All that stuff in your poetry book about making love with an island woman in the caves by the sea. An island woman making love with Odisseo in the caves by the sea. An island of black water and many stars. You meant Pina, and that's what you did with her, and you won't do me the decency of admitting so.”

Mario Vazzo swept this accusation away with one fierce motion. Rising from the table, he left, and departed from the House at the Edge of Night, never to return.

Now Maria-Grazia, who had witnessed this altercation, sat down beside her father. “Mamma told me all about her friendship with Mario Vazzo,” she said. “They used to walk about the island. They sat on the cliff above the caves by the sea and read poetry. Nothing more than that. You have been an old fool, Papà, to brood on it all these years.”

“Did they love each other?” asked Amedeo.

“Not the way Mamma loved you. It wasn't a matter of rolling about in the caves by the sea, if that's what you mean. No wonder Signor Vazzo left like that.”

“But why didn't you tell me so? If she talked to you about it,
cara
.”

“She asked me not to. Not until after her death.”

An innocent liaison, then, or innocent enough—walking about the island, reading poetry. Had a part of Pina wanted him to believe in the truth of the affair all these years, to believe she was as capable of betrayal as he, just once, had been? “And that's all?” he said.

“That's all.”

So, in the end, she had been better than him. He had always suspected it to be the truth; now he saw it confirmed. Tears of remorse stung the corners of Amedeo's eyes, mingling with those of grief. “We can remedy this,” consoled Maria-Grazia. “I know where Mamma used to keep his address.”

AMEDEO WROTE TO MARIO VAZZO
the following week, begging his pardon for the offense he had caused. Mario wrote back, and for the rest of that year he and Amedeo found themselves corresponding, mailing each other twice-weekly letters in which they extolled the virtues of Pina: her beauty, her fierceness, her grace. From this, oddly, Amedeo derived a vestige of comfort. Otherwise, for several weeks after Pina's death, he was as lost, as constantly searching, as he had been when he was a foundling, or when his sons were first missing in the war. He walked each morning to the cemetery, taking a child's camping stool that had been Sergio and Giuseppino's. On it, he installed himself at the foot of Pina's grave. There, his white eyebrows blown by the sea winds, his hands calcifying around the end of his walking stick, he would address Pina, exhort her, murmur expressions of tenderness. From the graveyard he moved restlessly on to her other haunts, and it was in vain for Maria-Grazia to try to persuade him home. The path Pina had taken to Mass each Sunday, the schoolhouse, her old chair under the bougainvillea, the stone room by the courtyard where she had loved him, brought forth their children, and at last died. This place was her, its air, its light. He spoke constantly to her as he crossed and recrossed the island. Then, one day, as though Pina had at last spoken back from the faraway world she now inhabited, Amedeo gained a kind of resolve.

That night, Maria-Grazia found him sorting his belongings, stowing the most important in the old Campari liquor case where he had kept his medical instruments during the war. He became irritable when questioned, though previously he had sought out her company whenever he was in the house, unable to bear her leaving him alone. “I'm tidying, that's all,” he said. “Now shouldn't you be minding the bar, Mariuzza
cara
?” He could still be heard thumping about behind the door when the bar closed, muttering to himself as he deliberated over each object before either packing it in the liquor case or setting it aside.

Once his belongings were in order, he became careless about the ones that had not made it into the liquor case, as if they were no longer his. Sometimes he would come upon some object in the house with a start of scientific interest—the bloodstained statue of Sant'Agata, say, or a lesser family photograph not consigned to the box—examining them as though they were new to him. Soon after, he began to go through his book of stories and his other papers, discarding some pages and annotating others, pausing to note in the margin the circumstantial details of the records: “Tale recounted to me in widow Agata's house, autumn 1960,” or “An interesting truth-comes-to-light narrative belonging to my time as a
medico condotto
in Bagno a Ripoli.” Those pages that were discarded he burned, with serene abandon, in an old tin can in the courtyard, and as he poked the flames with a stick he, too, seemed aflame, and almost happy.

During these weeks, his grandsons abandoned the aloofness of their late teenagehood and became small boys again, tearfully following him about the house. Sergio even took the much-abused copy of
The Two Brothers
and repaired it with tape, and Maria-Grazia found him in a corner of the veranda one day after school, poring over its pages. “Read to us again,
nonno,
” Sergio begged his grandfather. But Amedeo merely wandered up to his room at the top of the house to continue his packing. “If you want a job to do, Sergio,” he said, a little sternly, “you can help me transcribe these stories. I've a few about the place on scraps of paper that want copying into the book.” This Sergio did, hunched over the desk that had once been the old doctor's, adding his scratchy handwriting to his grandfather's elegant script. While Sergio was engaged in this labor, Amedeo hauled his old medical periodicals off the shelves and threw them away. “Nothing is now true that was true when I studied as a doctor,” he announced. “So I might as well get rid of this old stuff.”

The following evening, he called both Sergio and Giuseppino up to his study. The boys stood before him, keeping an arm's length apart. Sergio was bowed, a little awkward. Giuseppino tapped one foot against the lion's foot of the mangy sofa and frowned at the floor.

“Boys,” said Amedeo. “I want to talk to you about my will.” Though the plan had been forming in him since the beginning of the boys' enmity, he was nervous now in bringing it forth, and found himself puffing for breath, delaying a little.

Giuseppino kept looking at the floor; Sergio raised his head in respectful attention.

“When I die,” said Amedeo at last, “I'm going to leave you two things. Don't tell your mother or father. This is only for you to know. Firstly I'm leaving you my book of stories, and secondly the bar. You're to take good care of both.” Amedeo heaved himself upright in his chair, and tapped Giuseppino's knee with the end of his walking stick. “Do you hear me, Giuseppino?”

For Giuseppino was still sullen, kicking the lion's foot. But when he raised his head, his grandfather saw that he was staving off tears. “You aren't to die,” Giuseppino said. “You aren't to die,
nonno.
Stop talking about it.”

Fear united the boys, temporarily. “He's right,” said Sergio. “You mustn't die. You mustn't talk to us like this about dying. We'll bring you to the hospital.”

Amedeo raised his hand. “I'm ninety-six,” he said. “I'm not about to go to the hospital. To tell them what? That I'm dying. That will be news to them, I'm sure, that a man of ninety-six years is dying. Ha!”

“You aren't to die,” continued Giuseppino, kicking and kicking at the lion's foot until the varnish was all scuffed away.

“The two of you have a duty, when I leave you the bar,” said Amedeo, endeavoring to steer the conversation back in a sensible direction. “Your Mamma and Papà can't run the place on their own forever. One day they, too, will be old. Then what's going to happen to this business we've all tended for fifty years? That's why I'm leaving it to you now. To ensure its future. Do you understand?”

“But which one is to run it?” said Sergio.

“Both of you,” said Amedeo. “I'm dividing it between you evenly.”

Sergio felt a little light-headed, picturing the two of them condemned to spend eternity on either side of the counter, fat island men like Filippo and Santino Arcangelo, perpetually tethered one to the other.

After that day, neither brother spoke about the conversation with their grandfather. But Giuseppino became more tightly wound, Sergio more bowed and hunched, more endlessly apologetic.

By the time Sant'Agata's festival came round, Amedeo had cataloged and parceled up his life. Without farewell, he went to sleep on the sofa, and was found that night, long after dark, resting on his back with hands folded, as though to save his family even the trouble of positioning him for the grave. He had waited just four months to follow Pina, and since no other islander had died in the interim, he had the victory of being buried—in the giant coffin specially made for him—in the adjacent grave.

In the hollowed-out grief that followed the passing of her mother and father, Maria-Grazia felt weightless, as though the ceiling had been ripped off the House at the Edge of Night, leaving her pitifully exposed. Besides, a second wound had opened in her heart after her father's passing, a wound that she would allow herself to admit to no one but Robert: that after all the years she had tended the bar in his honor, her father had not left it to her. The boys did not want the place. This matter of the will would cause nothing but trouble. Pina would never have allowed it. And now once again she, Maria-Grazia, felt herself at the helm of a wayward ship, obliged to steer carefully on others' behalf, while only rough waters lay ahead.

Robert, to her surprise, agreed in some respect with Amedeo. “He's forcing them to bring this enmity of theirs out into the open,” he said. “Perhaps it's for the best. We're both of us more than forty. Every other business has some younger relative lined up, and how could your father have chosen between Sergio and Giuseppino? How could any one of us have done that?”