Chapter 28: The Drawer
It rained the night they came home from Magazine Street, a long warm rain off the river that drummed the slate roof and filled the gutters, and June, making her rounds with a cloth she did not need, heard the house settling around its king like a ship around its ballast. He had gone up early. The pills, the doorframe mornings, the winter that had moved into his chest and stayed — June kept the ledger of him the way she kept everything, privately and exactly, and she thought he would sleep the way he always slept: an hour here, an hour there, a man lying down the way sentries lie down, within reach of the door.
The request came at midnight, through Benny, standing in the kitchen doorway with his cap in his hands, embarrassed at the hour and the errand both.
"He wants the box brought down," Benny said. "His study. He says you'll know."
She knew. She climbed the stairs to the great bedroom, where the bed had been remade a hundred times since the flood and the mattress lifted by exactly one pair of hands for exactly one purpose, and she slid the cedar box out from its straps in the dark, without the lamp, the way you handle something sleeping. It was lighter than her fear of it and heavier than cedar and paper had any right to be. Twenty-nine letters. A crayon drawing of a house with too many windows and a man too tall for its door. She carried it down against her chest with both arms, past the portraits, past the closed doors, and no one stopped her, because no one ever had: she was the night staff, she was furniture, and the furniture of that house had carried its heart twice now without spilling a drop of it.
Vittorio was at his desk in a dressing gown over his shirt, the desk lamp lit, a drawer standing open — the top drawer on the right side, emptied of the usual tenants: the seals, the old ledgers, the fountain pens like a rank of soldiers. It had been lined, June saw, with a square of dark green baize, cut to fit. Somebody had measured. Somebody had prepared a place in the light of the desk lamp the way you prepare a place at a table.
"Set it down," he said, and she set the box on the desk, and he put his palm flat on its lid for a moment, the way he had once, in a ruined room, checked for a pulse. "Open it."
"You carried it once through my own search," he said, as the lid came up, "in a cart of wet sheets, past men paid to find it. And once up a highway to Baton Rouge. Cedar and paper. It has traveled more in your hands, June, than in thirty years under mine." He shook his head slowly, a man reading his own indictment and finding it accurate. "A thing kept too long in the dark forgets what it was for. Open it. Let it remember."
She lifted the lid. He did not take the letters out one by one; that would have been a ceremony, and the hour was past ceremonies. He lifted the whole stack in both hands — twenty-nine birthdays, twenty-nine nights at this desk, the sealed and the one unsealed — and laid them in the drawer in two rows, the way a man shelves books he intends to reach for. The drawing he laid on top, face up: the house with too many windows, the man too tall for the door, for Papa in a child's red crayon. He looked at it a moment. Then he closed the drawer — not all the way. He stopped it an inch from shut, thought, and instead drew it fully closed and turned the key that stood in its lock, and then, with the deliberateness of a man disarming in front of witnesses, he turned the key back, drew it out, and laid it on top of the desk.
"In thirty years," he said, "nothing in this house has been unlocked at night." He seemed faintly surprised at the sound of it. "The safe is locked. The gates are locked. I am locked." He nudged the drawer with one finger until it stood open a hand's breadth — an invitation, not a carelessness. "Let it be the first thing that isn't. If paper has survived thirty years under my heart, it can survive the fresh air. And if I am to — " he searched for the word and took the plain one — "if I am to have a daughter, June, it will not be one I keep under a mattress like a loaded thing. A drawer. Opened in daylight. Used."
"Yes, sir," June said, because the other answers were too large for midnight.
"Go home," he said. "It's past your shift. Tell your brother — " he stopped. "Tell no one anything. Go and sleep like the young. It is apparently contagious; we shall see."
She went down through the wet garden to the gate, and Benny let her out, and she did not hear the rest of it. The rest of it Aggie told her, in the morning, with the air of a woman reporting a haunting: how she had come in at five with the day keys and found the house wrong — silent in its bones, no lamp in the study, no figure at the high window; how she and Tomas the cook had searched with rising dread for a king taken ill or worse in the night; how they had found him, at last, in the great bed, flat on his back with his hands folded on the coverlet like a man in a painting of a man, asleep. Asleep at five. Asleep at six. Asleep, when Aggie crept in with a tray she had no orders to bring, past dawn entirely, with the rain washed out of the sky and the light coming gold through the shutters across the bed — a bed that was, for the first night in thirty years, only a bed.
"He sleeps like the dead," Aggie whispered, scandalized and awed in equal measure, in her own kitchen. "Sixty years in service and I tell you that house has held its breath since before you were born. Last night it let it out."
June said nothing, and buttered her toast, and kept the ledger of him balanced in its newest column: the drawer unlocked, the key on the desk, the king asleep in the daylight. Some arithmetic, she had learned in that house, you did not say out loud. You just carried it, carefully, with both arms, until it was home.
Chapter 29: Sundays