May 2, 2012
Leah put the old proof back beneath the scissors, then changed her mind and laid it beside the corrected introduction. The two sheets had traveled through three folders and one move of my desk. I had never found a satisfactory reason to separate them.
“These should stay together,” she said.
“That's what I think.”
At sixty-three, I was still pleased when my daughter and I agreed without either of us having to pretend the agreement was larger than it was.
She had come to help me photograph some of the archive for a small family record. No public exhibit this time. We would start with the pieces whose makers we knew and ask before including anyone's private material. The uncertain birds were still uncertain. Nobody had suffered because we left their label unfinished.
On the desk beside us was a court opinion I had opened that morning. It was dated May first, the day before, and concerned the Family Secrets defendants whose trial had been in the news when we closed the shop. I had read the beginning and the relevant later pages slowly, returning to the headings whenever I lost track of who was arguing and who was deciding.
The opinion recounted the sentences imposed: life imprisonment for Frank Calabrese Sr., James Marcello, and Joseph Lombardo; twenty years for Paul Schiro; twelve for Anthony Doyle. Those were sentences, not an account of how much time anyone had actually served. The pages in front of me did not tell me their present circumstances, and I did not pretend they did.
At the end of the majority's discussion, the court preserved the judgments except for Doyle's restitution component, which it reversed. I wrote that distinction on a scrap of paper because the short phrase about affirming in part and reversing in part was so easy to carry away without remembering which part.
“So one of them was cleared?” Leah asked when I tried to summarize it.
“No. That's what I almost said too. The reversal here concerns that restitution part, not his conviction.”
I showed her the page rather than asking her to trust my shorthand.
Another passage distinguished the accusation about Schiro and Vaci's killing from the jury's refusal to find Schiro involved in that killing. The opinion still discussed his conspiracy liability. I could not reduce those different things to a single sentence about everyone being guilty of everything alleged.
Then came Judge Wood's partial dissent, disagreeing with the majority on the double-jeopardy issue affecting Calabrese and Marcello. Her disagreement was in the same document, but it was not the court's controlling result. Reading both did not require me to pretend they had equal force as the decision.
I closed the document. We were not equipped to reconstruct every proceeding from a handful of pages, and this was not an excuse to spend another morning avoiding the boxes we had actually agreed to sort.
“I would have made a terrible headline writer,” I said.
Leah glanced at the old exhibit proof. “You used to be fairly confident.”
“Confidence wasn't the problem with the type.”
She laughed and moved the desk lamp so it would not throw a reflection across the first photograph.
I did not think our shop dispute was a small version of the violence described in those public records. The scale, the harms, and the consequences were not ours to borrow. What the case had unsettled in me was narrower: my habit of hearing the word family as the end of a question. In our own ordinary life, that habit had allowed me to choose an easy label over a person standing beside me.
Leah placed the production notebook under the camera.
“Do you want this page included?”
My instruction about the credit was plainly visible. A.H. on publicity copy, as requested.
“Yes. With the note about what I changed later.”
“And not as proof that you got everything right after that.”
“Especially not that.”
We photographed the page, then checked the image before moving on. Peter had sent permission to include his recollection of our mother. Ruth had approved the workroom photograph and the border design, but not her letters. We made a list of those decisions, with dates, so neither of us would have to rely on remembering that someone had probably said yes.
After an hour, Leah put the camera down.
“There's enough here for today.”
I looked at the remaining boxes. Once I would have heard disappointment in the unfinished work. Now I heard a person telling me how much time she had offered.
“Lunch?” I asked.
“I can stay for lunch.”
As I went to the kitchen, she called me back. She had found a blank page at the end of Peter's account and wondered whether we should ask him about another photograph next month.
“We can ask,” I said.
She wrote his name in the margin, leaving room for his answer.
I put water on for soup. Behind me, paper moved softly across the table. There would be more to learn, and some things we would never know. The work we had promised each other was finished for the morning. My daughter was staying, not because she owed me the time, but because she had chosen it.