The End (16 page)

The sun fell into the frame of the window in the opposite wall. The young vineyard leaves were inky blue and still, and she was struck by the resemblance here to the view from her grandmother’s pantry, where a single window had overlooked a monotonous repetition of vineyard rows down a hillside. There was even a stump in the foreground, as there had been years ago, where the old woman’s lemon tree had grown.

Patrizia came in and slipped on her house shoes. Several sickening minutes passed as they did not speak, and Patrizia clapped a heavy knife resoundingly against the chopping board.

Mrs. Marini put down her pencil. She opened and closed her hands to stretch her creaking fingers. Outside, the hypnotizing rows of vines led straight and shimmering from the house, as neat as a typescript, and seemed even to meet under the sun, at the distant end of the woods.

At the train station in 1879, with one suitcase, with one bottle of water, waiting for the train, looking at the vast country, the terraced hills, the vineyards on the plain. If she had told anyone they would have locked her in a room. Running away to marry a man she had talked to three times, the loser of a footrace. I will never see them again. I will never see this place, ever again. Unable to find Ohio on a map, thinking, Maybe he meant Iowa, Iowa is right here, in the middle. Never having looked at the hills with anything but angry boredom, until today. One suitcase. One bottle of water. Never to see her mother or father again.

The silence went on too long, then continued.

Had they been strangers, if Mrs. Marini were lost on a country road and came in to ask directions, there would have been no disconcerting minutes while she thought of what she might say to ease the moment into familiar idleness or to bring about the crisis of saying the hidden thing out loud. With a stranger, one introduces oneself and transacts one’s business plainly.

Waiting at the train station to be a stranger to everyone. Waiting for the train to come and looking at the hills and actually stepping off the platform, back into the weeds. Maybe she could make it home without anyone noticing that she’d left. To have time to linger on the terrace of her father’s house and record each detail of the view, the elephantine limbs of the chestnut trees, the missing roof tiles, a view worth recording. Time to consider. Time to keep the promise she’d made to cut her sister’s hair. The weeds around the platform bending against her legs. What if this man beat her up? Who was she to go to where there was no one who understood the private language of her town, which even he didn’t speak? From inside the station, the eyes of the man who had sold her the ticket peeking out, a man she knew only in passing, who wondered, perhaps, why this girl was standing so still in the weeds around the platform. The expanse of sky. Her sisters would inherit her things. The light sparkling on the slag between the train tracks. With one suitcase.

Maybe Patrizia likes it here. Who knows?

They used to converse with only their eyes, as women will do among young children. Patrizia had had a gift for identifying what Mrs. Marini had eaten last by the way she held her cards during canasta, how often she reorganized her hand.

“You are so exasperating,” she complained to the wrecked crossword.

Patrizia stared spiritlessly into a saucepan.

Mrs. Marini stood to set the table. She had given up. She was through.

She opened the cupboard and recognized the gaudy china she had given away. She said, “I forget. Which glasses do you use?”

Eventually to forget the names of the streets. Leaving now meant never coming back. Wanting to keep in her brain the exact words her mother had used in forbidding her to go to the race but having already forgotten them. Wanting to keep the shrillness of the woman’s voice; though, remarkably, she could not call it to mind even now. One bottle of water. Phrasing the telegram she would send in New York to the man who’d said that he would wait for her, a man she would never have met if his brother had been ever so minutely slower of foot. Stepping on and then back off the platform. Then turning and seeing that nobody else was waiting there for the train. Nobody else was checking the clock. To her right, the opening in the trees from where the train would come; to her left, the opening where it would go away. To leave now meant that this was the last picture she would have of the place in her mind, that she would always think of it as looking the way it did that afternoon, and her mother, father, sisters, brothers, aunts, as looking just the way they had at lunch that day. None of these people would ever die. They would be fixed in Lazio, in time. She would send no address. She would receive no news. To leave now was to keep them.

“Umberto wants to go home,” Patrizia said.

“Marvelous,” Mrs. Marini said. “We’ll make a party. I’ll get all the best things. You can stay with me until you get a house.”

“His brother in Sicily died. There weren’t any children, so Berto inherited the house. I use the ones with the cherries on them,” she said, pointing into the cupboard.

“Which house? In Siracusa? What do you mean?”

“It’s like the last time.”

“Which last time?”

“With me or without me.”

“Oh, I see.”

“With me or without me.”

“And then?”

“Or the teacups. It doesn’t matter.”

“But it’s not our affair,” Enzo said. “It’s not our thing to decide.”

“It’s not, excuse me,” Lina said, “it’s not his to decide, either.”

Umberto cut a leg off the rabbit and passed it to Lina.

Enzo said, “We cannot—”

“You’re a married man, who, therefore—what a burden—can’t just act like he’s eighteen and move to another country because he
feels
that way,” Lina said. “Because—what a
weight,
what a
pity
—he has a wife and a family and a house.”

“But I have another house,” he said.

Mrs. Marini said, “Twenty-four years.”

“Because,” Lina said, “excuse me, but there is a person at this table who never wanted to come to this country in the first place. But
you
said she was coming, so she came. And who never—Mother never wanted to move out to this paradise of donkey labor in the first place, but you said she was going. And she went without a word of complaint. Not a groan. Nothing.”

Enzo stood up and spooned the pasta into the bowls.

“Why don’t you say something, Mother?”

“Donna Costanza, do you want more of this sauce?” Enzo asked.

“Don’t raise your voice to your father,” Patrizia said.

Mrs. Marini put her thumb and forefinger together. She said, “A bit, thank you.”

Umberto said, “Where’s that cheese?”

“Look at your wife seven years ago,” Lina said.

The plate of cheese was passed from hand to hand.

“Things happen between married people that you don’t understand them from the outside,” Enzo said. “As you know.”

“Twenty-four years, Berto,” Mrs. Marini said.

Patrizia chewed. Her hands sat in her lap. She looked at her food.

“Look at Mother seven years ago,” Lina said, “and look at her now.”

Outside, Mrs. Marini could see that the sun had gone down. The vineyard was dim. There was a stripe of pink left in the sky.

“My wife didn’t say why she’s not coming,” Umberto said. “She’s welcome to come. Tell them why, Patrizia, go ahead.”

“Welcome,”
Mrs. Marini said, “is a word you use for strangers who want to come into your house.”

“Tell them. Speak.”

“Will you pass that cheese?” Patrizia asked.

“Answer me.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“That’s it. No other . . . thinking. No ‘I like this here,’ ‘I prefer that here.’ Just ‘I don’t want you to go.’”

“This rabbit came out nice,” Patrizia said, “if I say it myself.”

“If you like rabbits, we can get rabbits.”

“If you prefer for us not to discuss this,” Enzo said, “if it’s a private thing.”

Patrizia swallowed. “It’s a little stringy, but it was the biggest one.”

“If you want me to drop it, Mother—but no, I won’t,” Lina said.

“There is room in my house for both of us and rabbits and visitors,” Umberto said.

Mrs. Marini said, “
My
is what you call your house when you are an unmarried person or your spouse has died.”

“No, go ahead, talk,” Patrizia said. “This cheese is beautiful, or else I’m just deprived.”

“You see? You see what she does?” Umberto said. “It’s good cheese, Vincenzo, thank you.”

“Why should she have to give reasons?” Lina said.

Enzo picked up his loin of rabbit and headed toward the door to the back porch.

Umberto addressed his plate with bewilderment. “This is my own child who speaks in such tones to her father.”

Enzo stopped in the doorway.

“And who’s going to wash your floor,” Lina said, “and cook your supper and trim your beard?”

Umberto tapped a thick steel serving spoon against the table and closed his eyes.

Enzo went back to the table and sat down.

“It’s a natural thing that when a man is old, he wants to go back to his home. Your aunt will have to find someplace else to go. That house has been my property for a thousand years.” He tapped the spoon on the edge of Lina’s plate.

Patrizia fixed her eyes on Umberto, and Mrs. Marini could see, for the first time, something icy in her face.

Lina put her hands under the table and pushed her body into the back of her chair, slowly. She moved her tongue across her teeth.

“You’ll see,” Umberto said. The spoon
tap-tap
ped against Lina’s plate. “This Enzo will want to go back, too. Give him some years. He wants the sea, the
la-de-la
”—the
tap, tap, tap
of the spoon—“the songs, his father’s house that belongs to him.”

Enzo was watching Umberto and his lips disappeared into his mouth. He may have begun to stand up again, because he looked preternaturally tall. He loomed over the table. His right eye strayed to the side. It gave Mrs. Marini the impression that he was watching everything in the room at once.

“Your mother’s dead, Berto, and your father, and your brothers,” Mrs. Marini said. “There’s only your sister-in-law, whom you will unhouse. All of your friends are over here.”

He adjusted his grip on the spoon.

Enzo’s one eye watched Lina’s plate while the other leered out the window.

There was something bare but restrained in the way Patrizia was watching her husband.

Lina didn’t move.

Enzo picked up the dish in which the carcass of the rabbit was sitting and stalked to Umberto’s side of the table. “Say, Papa,” he said, “why don’t you give me that spoon now. I want to soak it.”

It was dark outside. The image in the window had flipped: It was a reflection of the five of them, at the table, waiting.

Waiting for the train, looking behind herself. Thinking that in this way everything would remain as it was on that afternoon, that they would always be there—but knowing that this was a lie and that someday she would admit to it. That she had left her mother and father, that she had allowed them to die or killed them. Then looking at the chestnut trees down the track and around. And, God forgive her, stepping back onto the platform. Then a puff of smoke over the trees, the scream of the train. The train swerving into view.

And later—in her kitchen on Twenty-sixth Street, in the house she’d shared for thirty years with this man who was her consolation, her right arm, her pearl of great price—the timer went off, and she opened the oven door. She called to him in the parlor. She said, “Nico, wheel yourself in here and carve the roast.” Waiting a minute, but he didn’t answer. She didn’t turn to go into the parlor (but she knew he was in there, reading on the sofa). The wet air smelled of cloves and pork. She stood in front of the oven, saying it louder, saying his name, louder, and waiting. From the gaping mouth of the oven, the heat rose to her face.

8

T
hey left the farm.

Everything was radiantly black and oily outside the car. Lina drove, and Enzo directed her incorrectly, and soon they were lost in the southern part of the county, where much of the land was fallow and saplings grew from the gutters of the dark houses. The road was too narrow for the car, which straddled it crookedly, two wheels on the grassy embankment, two in the single rut down its middle. In fact, it was little more than a path fixing the boundary between many miles of adjacent farms. Dung littered it. In places the trees on either side approached so close to it that their branches met in the air overhead, like the arch of a narrow tunnel.

Dogs scattered from the corpse of another dog as the headlights struck them. Lina had no choice but to slow down and run it over.

“Holy Mary, the stench,” Enzo said.

A little while later he was sick, and lay down with his head in her lap.

“You only want to drive,” she said.

His nose in her skirt, he inhaled deeply.

It was one of his peculiarities that he could break a bone without sentiment but when he was nauseated he demanded comforting from her openly.

She touched his hair.

He muttered an endearment into her clothes.

“All I could hope is that I embarrassed him,” she said, meaning her father.

“That spoon,” he slurred, picking at his eyes. He was so miserable.

“The spoon was for show,” Lina said.

Enzo rolled onto his back, looking up at her wretchedly, and pointed at his mouth and pointed at the window, but she knew that he didn’t really want her to stop the car.

He had strained to make his strabismic eye look forward while he ate with her father, and now the muscles needed to be rested. She had learned his system, as Donna Costanza had said she must do. Often she knew what he wanted better than he knew it himself.