What had once been precious, and in her mind should be preserved as it was for all time, was now going to be divided, carted away, and disassembled in pieces, which would never be as strong as the whole. Her mother’s lamp would never be as lovely as it had been in the front window, where it spilled light out onto the porch, turning the old wood to silver from gray. The clock taken from her father’s desk would never again remind him that it was time to go to rehearsal. The tiered crystal plate would never again hold her mother’s biscotti, better than any professional baker’s in South Philly. The fine china, stacked on the kitchen counter that held the meal that fed them at every holiday and special occasion, washed and dried with such care, would be shipped to her sister’s house, where Calla was certain it would be placed in a closet and forgotten, along with their memories.
Calla climbed the steps to her bedroom. She wanted to crawl into her bed and sleep for as many days as it would take to make her feel like herself again. When she reached the top of the stairs, instead of going into her own room, she found herself walking down the hallway to the master bedroom. On her way, she passed her sisters’ old bedroom, which had become a guest room for their visits. Calla poked her head inside. Helen, the fastidious one, had stripped the beds; the sheets were in a laundry basket, waiting to be laundered. The tops of their dressers had been cleared of the framed photographs that had been placed there since they were girls. Even though the photographs belonged to Helen and Portia, their absence gave Calla a feeling of abandonment, a signal her sisters had decided never to return home again.
Calla opened the master bedroom door. She stood in the dark and inhaled the scent of the room. Her father had left a window open, as was his habit year round, regardless of the weather. The lilacs that twisted up the drainpipe outside the window were in bloom, filling the room with their sweet scent. She grinned, remembering her father calling them “nun flowers,” because his wife would cut bunches of them, wrap them in wet newspaper, and deliver them to the convent, to be laid at the feet of the statue of the Blessed Mother.
Calla flipped the light on. She didn’t remember making the bed, but she had. The closet door was open. She went inside, pulled the string of the overhead bulb. The contents were neat, but there was a space where she had removed her father’s best suit so he might be buried in it. The wooden shoe trees that had been placed in his dress shoes lay on a shelf. The funeral home had given Calla a list of items they needed, which read exactly like a list of what her father wore to any of his opening nights: pressed shirt, handkerchief, silk tie, dress socks, undergarments, braces for the socks, dress shoes, belt, suit. They asked for his brush and comb, and his shaving supplies. Calla had provided all of it.
In the course of a year, Calla had lost her mother and her father. When she was a girl, her sisters used to talk at night, thinking their baby sister was asleep, but Calla was listening. Helen and Portia would wonder which parent would die first, and what they would do if the worst happened. They gossiped a lot, about boys and school, but Calla remembered how they complained about the things they didn’t have. They wanted things that other girls had, things that in their home were impossible to obtain because they cost too much money. Helen and Portia dreamed of a fancy family car, a maroon Duesenberg like the one the Fiorios owned; of faille dresses from the window of Harper’s Dress Shop, and red patent leather shoes from Wanamaker’s department store.
Calla remembered when Helen and Portia insisted on getting permanent waves in their hair at the beauty salon. Their friend Kitty Martinelli had gotten her hair done, and they wanted to look just like her. The process was expensive, but their mother had figured out a way to get the girls what they wanted. They got the perms and came home in tears: their thick, wavy hair looked like dandelion puffs. Never once did her sisters think that coveting Kitty’s lustrous curls was the problem, not the ingredients in the permanent wave.
Calla sat down in her father’s reading chair and leaned back. The chair’s sage-green velvet, piped in black, was worn at the arms and seat. There was a lace doily on the back of the chair, which had been there since she was a girl. When her father had a wild head of black hair in his youth, he used Macassar oil to slick his hair back, so Calla’s mother had placed doilies on all the backs of the chairs in the house to preserve the slipcovers.
The table next to the floor lamp had a few books stacked upon it. Most of Sam’s books had already made their way into Calla’s room; her father had given them to her as she needed them for her work at the theater. Like a good professor, Sam had introduced Calla to Shakespeare through the sonnets, graduating to the comedies, and eventually the tragedies. Sam’s Riverside Shakespeare was held together with a wide grosgrain ribbon because the binding threads had dissolved from age and use. Calla didn’t have the heart to untie the ribbon, knowing that inside, her father’s margin notes would break her heart all over again. She didn’t need clues to understand her father, but instead reveled in the layers and depths of his thought process. No matter how many times Sam had read a play, directed it, or seen another company’s production, he had found something new in the text. He called reading an act of discovery. Calla was too exhausted to discover anything new.
A stack of letters from Sister Jean Klene, with the return address Saint Mary’s College, South Bend, Indiana, were bound with a rubber band. Sister Jean was Sam’s favorite American Shakespeare scholar and the two had exchanged letters for years. Sam had met the nun when a theater troupe he worked with traveled through Indiana. Sister Jean offered insight on the text and information about productions she had seen around the world.
Calla lifted the book on the top of the pile on his side table. Life in Shakespeare’s England had been her father’s bible. He referred to it a lot, recommended it to his actors, and shared it with Calla. Sam often quoted John Dover Wilson as though he were Shakespeare himself. Calla thumbed through the book, stopping to read what her father had been thinking about in the days and hours before his death.
Sam had an odd habit of marking the places in books he read with matchsticks, strips of newspaper, old bills, even collar stays. Through the years his daughters had given him fancy bookmarks, but they remained unused in the top drawer of his dresser, next to his good cuff links.
John Dover Wilson’s book had been read so often, the spine was shot, so the pages lay open flat like a map. Sam often used Italian in his notes, and just as his nickname for his wife had been Bella, he added it to each of his daughters’ names as a term of endearment. Calla found a note written to her on the front of the monthly electric bill envelope. Her father had drawn a monocle on the cartoon of the mascot, Reddy Kilowatt, along with this message:
Calla Bella—page 288
Calla’s hand began to tremble as she turned the pages. Her father had drawn an arrow to indicate a passage. He had also doodled small triangle flags around it, like an Elizabethan banner.
Death