The House at the Edge of Night

by Catherine Banner

  “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 pitiful
ly 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?”

  “But why,” she wept, feeling like a slighted girl, “didn’t he leave it to me?”

  And yet, as winter passed over, her father’s presence began to hang about the bar on cool nights, overseeing the adding of the accounts, guiding her hands as she plied the levers of the coffee machine, stepping in with a clearing of the throat as though it could settle the debates between the fishermen and the elderly scopa players once and for all, if only it could make itself heard. In deference to this new household spirit, Maria-Grazia hung a photograph of Amedeo above the counter. She chose the first picture that had ever been taken of him, by his bride, Pina Vella, his medical bag in one hand and his book of stories under one arm. Thus her mother was present, too, by implication, in the glance of startled love the young Amedeo directed beyond the lens. The picture, spotted now with age, followed Maria-Grazia with its eyes about the room like a Cristo Pantocrator, fixing her with that same look of blindsided love he had once bestowed on his young wife. Now she thought she understood. If her Papà had left the bar to her, the time would have come when she herself would have been forced to choose between the boys, and she never could have done it. “Papà,” Maria-Grazia prayed, forgiving him, “watch over this place.”

  V

  The boys kept peace just long enough to bury their grandfather. Then they made bitter war—first over the bar, which neither of them wanted, then over the book of stories, which both of them coveted. Now, in the face of their grandfather’s absurd, good-hearted gift, the unrest that had simmered for years inside the walls of the House at the Edge of Night at last came forth into the open. Maria-Grazia, climbing from the courtyard to the top of the house with a bundle of dry sheets, pausing to dry her eyes on one corner of a pillowcase (for she allowed herself to cry for her Mamma and Papà a little as she went unobserved about the household chores, though never in the bar), heard them hissing imprecations at each other behind the door of Sergio’s room, and feared this intense, private war they were waging. For days the boys remained locked in battle, pursuing each other through the house whose air was still thick with the scent of Amedeo’s funeral flowers, until Concetta confiscated the book of stories and carried it away to her house on Via Cavour.

  The following Monday, Concetta’s front window was found shattered in the early hours. Nothing was missing but the book, which had been taken from the old cashbox in the bottom of the dresser. Il conte’s land agent Santino Arcangelo, her brother, attended the scene and wrote everything down in a notebook as though he were a real poliziotto. Whoever the criminal might be (here Santino held up a shard of glass shrewdly, as he had seen a detective do once on the television), he had clearly known Concetta well enough to understand where to search for the book. It was the first robbery to take place on the island in living memory. To everyone but Maria-Grazia and Robert, it was evident that the younger Esposito boy had done it, especially when Sergio came running to report that his brother could not be found. Maria-Grazia and Robert, for their part, closed the bar and searched the island.

  In the House at the Edge of Night, nobody slept.

  Giuseppino called them three days later from Uncle Flavio’s house in Surrey, a place that had always been mythical to Maria-Grazia, now made oddly real by the tinny, insubstantial voice of her younger son calling from the other end of its English phone line. The voice that reached her was small and a little frightened. “I’m here with Uncle Flavio,” he said. “Yes, yes, I’m fine. Mamma, you don’t need to worry. Only, I’m not coming home for a while.” A pause, a crackle. “I’ll find work in London, yes. Or study at university. Uncle Flavio’s helping me with all that. I’ve got my English passport—I’ve finished school—why shouldn’t I?” Another pause. “I’ll be home for Christmas, if I can.”

  “And what about the book of stories?” said Maria-Grazia, trying to speak to him calmly, as Robert did. Giuseppino took a long time to answer, and when he did his voice came a little stronger. “Oh, that. Don’t worry, it’s safe and sound. I’ll mail Sergio a copy.”

  Sergio, throwing himself facedown on his bed, wept and wept with rage.

  Sure enough, a parcel arrived with an English postmark, addressed to Sergio. Giuseppino had made a photocopy of their grandfather’s book. The copies were smudgy and rippled as though they had been written underwater. Maria-Grazia knew that Giuseppino was ridiculing his brother; it was the original book that both of them wanted.

  She watched with concern as Sergio steeled himself, determined to claim the sour victory that was left to him, the victory of being the better son. “You can leave, too, if you want to,” she told him. “You’ve always known that. There’s no problem with the two of you leaving, both at once, and our managing the bar.”

  The islanders had always muttered darkly about Sergio, since the summer of the almost-drowning of his brother, but now the tide of opinion had turned in Sergio’s favor. “That Giuseppino always thought he was too good for Castellamare,” said the elderly scopa players. And Agata-the-fisherwoman: “If Sergio really did try to drown Giuseppino when they were children, at least I’m beginning to understand why.”

  —

  MEANWHILE, SERGIO SURPRISED EVERYBODY by refusing to leave. That autumn, he went to the Castellamare Savings and Loan Company with ambition, for the first time, in his heart. He wore the suit he had worn for his grandfather’s funeral, already straining at the crotch and stomach after his latest growth spurt, flapping comically at the ankles. He carried in his hand an old attaché case of Amedeo’s with the bar’s accounts copied out in neat pencil on five sheets of school graph paper. Inside the bank, he waited on a carpet-covered sofa, hoping no neighbor would spot him through the great glass windows. An assistant from the mainland called him into the little box of an office where Gesuina’s kitchen had once been, and poured him mainland coffee.

  “I’d like a loan,” Sergio said, when he had explained the workings of the bar’s accounts.

  “To modernize your business?” asked the mainland assistant, running a pencil down the figures, nodding in approval.

  “To buy my brother’s share.”

  “How much do you own now?”

  “Half. But I’m going to be the one who runs it from now on—he’s left—and look at the way our profits have been rising, year on year.” For Sergio had drawn a graph for the years 1960 to ’71, with an arrow marked “projected growth” shooting beyond, into the future, full of tightly coiled promise.

  The assistant made a calculation on a sheet of watermarked notepaper and nodded in satisfaction. “We won’t offer a loan without security,” he said. “My advice would be to mortgage your share and pay your brother off with that. We’d value your business at about six million lire. We could offer you a mortgage for half that sum, plus a little extra for refurbishments or a new car.”

  “Extra?”

  “Yes. Say three and a half or four million total. Wouldn’t a van be convenient, like the other business owners have?”

  “And when would I repay?”

  “Over the next thirty years. At a rate of seven percent.”

  Sergio leaned forward and cleared the gravel from his throat. “Wh
o owns the bar if I do that?” he said.

  “You,” said the assistant, “own it all.”

  The assistant drew up the papers. Sergio carried them back to the House at the Edge of Night. The irony of mortgaging one-half of the bar to pay off the other did not escape him. And yet the thought of Giuseppino’s face at the news was a grim kind of satisfaction in itself.

  Giuseppino, on the other end of the telephone, indeed exploded with such loud rage when the plan was announced to him that it was as though he were back on the island for an instant, filling the house with his noise. But Sergio spoke over him with quiet persistence. “I’ve valued the business for you. I’ve done it fairly, based on the rule the bank gave me—the value of half the house plus half of three years’ profits. You’d get a lot of money, Giuseppino. Millions of lire. You could go to university, like you wanted. You could do whatever you liked with it.”

  “You’re driving me off the island!” cried Giuseppino. “You mean to get rid of me! I didn’t say when I went to see Zio Flavio that I was leaving for good!”

  “You left! You took the book, you ran off, you didn’t want the bar.”

  Giuseppino, in a small contrary voice said, “I might want to come back. How can I know?”

  “Then come back,” said Sergio, “if you want to.” All at once, his chest was a barrel of longing—for what, he did not know at first, until it came to him from a long way off that what he missed was his brother. “Come back,” said Sergio, a little pleading. Giuseppino huffed in tears or anger, and put down the phone.

  The bar was mortgaged. Giuseppino sent back the papers fully signed. It was Maria-Grazia who opened them, and wept in rage when she got out of Sergio, by slow degrees, the whole sorry story of what he had done. “You’ve risked the future of the House at the Edge of Night,” she cried, as fierce as her mother Pina, “mortgaged it to the d’Isantus, your grandfather’s old enemies, and for what—some schoolboy feud, some quarrel with your brother? Seven percent? Do you think interest rates have always been at seven percent, Sergio? Do you think they’ll be so for the next thirty years? Is this the kind of mortgage a good businessman would ever take out?”