A year later, the mattress came up again, and this time it was only a mattress.
The old one had been dying by inches for a decade — Vittorio slept, in these new days, deeply enough to wear a bed out, which Aggie pronounced the finest epitaph a mattress could earn. The new one arrived on a Saturday in October, a week before Anna's birthday, wrapped in plastic like a ship in a bottle, on the shoulders of two young men from a firm on Tchoupitoulas Street who had no idea whose house they were in and were paid too well to ask. June met them at the service door with the delivery slip. Benny met them at the stairs with his memory. And Vittorio, who had been informed at breakfast and had waved the whole business away like a man swatting weather, came down the hall at the sound of furniture moving and stood in his bedroom doorway in his shirtsleeves, watching his bed come apart in the daylight.
"Flip that one out first," said the senior porter, nodding at the old mattress, already braced for the wrestle. "Mind the straps or whatever's rigged under— some of these old frames—"
"There's nothing under there anymore," Vittorio said.
He said it easily, the way a man remarks that a road is clear or a debt is closed, and the porters — who had between them carried bedding into half the guarded houses of the Garden District and knew, professionally, what was usually under a rich man's mattress — glanced at each other and then, respectfully, did not glance at June. The old mattress came up off the slats with a sigh of dust. Underneath: slats. Dust. One gray feather, from some pillow of the previous century, which turned slowly in the light from the window and settled. Nothing else. Nothing at all. The most searched-for square yard in Louisiana, bare as a church floor.
"Take it down the back," Vittorio said. "It served." And he turned away before it was through the door, because a king does not watch a throne leave, even an old one — or because, June thought, carrying the delivery slip down behind them, some things a man salutes only in private, and the bed where he had kept his heart for twenty-nine years was permitted its privacy at the end.
That Sunday the gumbo was June's, by royal command and by Anna's request, transmitted down the telephone line three weeks in advance with the specificity of a prescription: the one from the Sunday in June, with the okra fried first, and no, not the cook's, yours. Anna drove down from Baton Rouge in the old blue car with a colleague's borrowed casserole dish on the seat beside her — returning, she announced at the door, a dish she had kept hostage for a year as an insurance policy — and she came up the front steps of the Salerno house in the daylight, past Benny, who touched his cap, past Marco, who had been summoned for gumbo and had brought, bewildered and correct, a bottle of wine and his quarterly figures both, and into a kitchen full of steam and argument about cayenne.
She wore her mother's ring. She wore it on her right hand, where she had worn it, June knew from the Sundays, since the spring — some Sundays mentioned, most not, a fact settling into its place like furniture. She did not call him Papa. She called him Vittorio, mostly, and once, reaching past him for the rice with the ease of a woman in her own kitchen — which stopped every spoon in the room for exactly one second — she called him nothing at all, just caught his eye and nodded at the pot, and he passed it, and the second passed, and the gumbo went on. At the table she told the dinosaur story again for Marco, who laughed in the wrong places and then, surprising everyone including himself, in the right ones. Cesare sent his respects from the lake house by the driver's hand, in an envelope, in handwriting like copperplate: a recipe for stuffed mirliton, and a line — For the young lady's kitchen. Anna read it twice, and put it in her pocket, and said, "Tell him the mirliton at the lake is better. Mom said so. She said he was the only Salerno who could cook." Which was a message, and a thread, and possibly the beginning of another thirty years being quietly undone, and Marco carried it out to the car that evening like a man entrusted with state papers.
Afterwards, when the blue car had gone back up the highway with leftover gumbo riding like a passenger, June went up to Vittorio's study to leave the household accounts on his desk, as she did on Sundays now, in her new and still faintly ridiculous capacity — Benny's phrase — as the only staff member with a desk key who had never wanted one.
The drawer stood unlocked. It always stood unlocked now; it was not a symbol anymore, just a drawer, which is what symbols become when they succeed. Inside, in their two rows, lay the twenty-nine letters, and the crayon drawing on top of them: the house with too many windows, the man too tall for its door. And on top of the drawing, squared to the drawer's edge with a banker's precision, lay a fresh sheet of paper — heavy, cream, the good stock from the locked cabinet that was also, these days, unlocked — with nothing on it yet but the date, in a hand that had written the same date, with one number changed, twenty-nine times before.
Anna's birthday was on Thursday.
June set the accounts down quietly and did not touch the paper, because it was not hers to touch, and because some errands a man must carry himself, all the way to the mailbox, under his own power, in the weather. This year there would be a thirtieth letter. This year it would be stamped, and addressed in a hand that no longer shook, and sent — down the river road to Baton Rouge, to a pediatric nurse who hummed when she cooked, to be opened at a kitchen table on the morning of her birthday and read, twice, the way she read everything that mattered. Beneath the mattress in the great bedroom there was a new mattress, and beneath that there were slats, and dust, and nothing else at all — nothing hidden, nothing strapped down, nothing kept in the dark against a search. A king keeps his gun where he stands and his heart where he sleeps, the old saying went. The heart, these days, lived in a drawer in the light, and in a house in Baton Rouge, and in this house on a Sunday, with gumbo on. It had learned to travel. It had learned to be sent.
June closed the study door softly behind her and went down the stairs, through the quiet house, toward the kitchen and the washing up.
The End