Joe my brother says, spitting smoke toward the ceiling.  Another long story.

Joe I say. Joseph.

Guy is a year and a half younger.  We’re both Joe.  Another long story.  He tips back in the recliner.  We sit watching football in the parlor of our youth,  monk-bald  middle aged men sinking into furniture.   I am back for the wail and wallow of an Italian  funeral.  No need to be coy; it’s my  mother’s, she whose legacy was to withhold all the Italian except the swears.  Let them be American.   So at eighteen I left to be a real American, go to college in another city in the dead center of the country.   You can’t (or at least you don’t often ) go home again.  A very American story.  Lots of reasons, all the usual and maybe a few unique, none particularly defensible—Tale of the Worse-than-Prodigal Son, he doesn’t call, such a busy writer, somehow he forgets to write home.   But I’m here now, in this living room.  You do different things at different times.  A mile away my mother lies in a blond casket thrown open to the gelatinous professional grief of the Della Dropo funeral home.

On the drive up my wife’s anxiety has taken the form of  procedural and religious detail.  Tell me again about the reason for the open casket she says.  Andrea is Jewish. 

I don’t know anything about it I say.  And I really don’t. All that matters about the church I left behind at fourteen is that I somehow escaped the attention of the priests, thank god.  

At the funeral home there is a long line out the door, shocking until I get inside and learn the grande dame of one of the local crime families has died.  There are about fifteen of us.           

A distant cousin, six, stands on tiptoe peering into the casket.  Is she sleeping?

Yes says Arthur Della Dropo. He runs the place now. In junior high when my brother beat him up behind LaCascia’s bakery, Arthur cried and ran home to his mother.

Why don’t they close the door so she can sleep? the child says .

This way here it’s easier for God to tuck her in says Arthur Della Dropo. 

At the house the TV burbles on but my brother and I do not, our silence fragile as ash or the chatter of the aunts and others in the next room.  I haven’t watched an entire football game since I was seventeen.  I forget how long one is; by halftime I am half mummified myself from the relentless chipper unpacking of the infinite details surrounding colorful sportive corporate violence.

What was it finally? I say, trying to face things, an adult.  I’m at a disadvantage having given up smoking–no dramatic punctuation,  no way to sublimate.  My hands feel like seal flippers on sea rock, useless, flopping, hanging off at odd angles.

Finally? Finally what was it?  Guy lowers his head with pity for all the ignorance of all the older brothers down through all the Biblical ages who were geniuses but couldn’t find their ass in a barnyard with either hand.  Finally you’re asking?  He punishes me with the dome of his skull for a few seconds, an imaginary head butt, enjoying it.  He looks up, another pull on the cigarette. What it was finally, Joe, was everything. 

We move from television to table, the Via Dolorosa of family traffic.

The TV yacks on though no one watches. At table The Aunties are in charge, a  phalanx of dark and puffy women some of whom are actually related to us by blood and all of whom have sacrificed their voices in vivid and individual ways, some by yawping at now departed or subsided husbands, others simply to a hundred thousand cigarettes. The Aunties smoke Camels,  placidly hasping through the days in each other’s kitchens, where they let the coffee boil over in percolators, creosote in the cup.  Auntie Rose sounds like Mercedes McCambridge, while Auntie Nucia has more of the downshift lilt of an eighteen-wheeler on a 10% grade. 

The Aunties have constructed a holidays-of-old motif:  the bathtub of lasagna in a heaving, bubbling homage to the dead,  waves of the red sauce my mother always called gravy flooding in a blood tide over the table from dish to dish–the cacciatore, the eggplant, the steaming piles of meat.  The braggiola is imprisoned in furlongs of twine and piled high as Babel.  Death is a pounding hunger in Italians.  In our teens my brother and I were expected to eat our way toward redemption, or at least low tide.  Friends and even girlfriends I brought home were judged solely on their trenching capabilities.  About my first wife, expressing reservations than which nothing could have been more profound,  Aunt Rose once said Seems like a  nice girl; she didn’t eat much. Uncle Bunny, whom I haven’t seen in eight years and whose relation to the family I have never been able to parse, puts a single meatball on a plate and asks if I’m playing any ball, then lurches heavily into tears on my shoulder.   

Over antipasto in the face of mortality’s feast The Aunties conduct their timeless repartee.  Auntie Theresa ladles out more escarole soup while Aunt Rose cocks her head and projects her neckwattle in chirping small talk I know so well.

This is good water she says, thumping the glass on the table as if she’s covering a bet.

O, Malden does have good water. 

Ever taste the water up to Peabody? Terrible.

Peabody? No.

I don’t care for it. They turn to me.

You prolly have good water down to Connecticut, eh William?

Everything’s nice down there reproaches Auntie Josie.  You been down there, what’s the name William, I can’t for the life of me.

A small town, nobody’s heard of it, I say. And then Andrea says, It’s a sweet village.

Oochie coochie my brother says, with swiveling his hips in the chair.

I am saved from having to say the precious name of a Connecticut town in the presence of my brother by Aunt Rose’s cracked segue.

See the number tonight? she says.

I didn’t have it rumbles Auntie Nucia, her mouth full of cavatelli.

If that seven had been a nine and that three had been a six–

I always play the kids’ birthdays, but for some reason I didn’t.  But it didn’t come out anyway, so I’m lucky.

If that two had been a seven. If that nine had been a four. It was that close.

After dessert the women roll around the dining room clinking cups and small plates while the men retire to—madonn’!– more football, the Patriots on television, faceless faraway inflatable figures in bright colors zigging into each other, mice in the maze.  You can’t see their heads. During commercials Guy brandishes the remote with a bored, savage authority, misanthropic cashier  punching in the charges. He lets a cigarette burn down halfway in his hand before making three or four quick pulls and stubbing it out.

We both pretend not to notice that part of the flourish of the funeral is that I am back. The Aunties have made a fuss, which further darkens my brothers mood.  He wields his recent past like a politician with a withered hand, a weapon, a test.  Staring straight at the television, he refers pointedly to someone he knows from his time up the farm–Billerica, minimum security. I realize with rush of shit to the heart I can’t remember exactly how long he’s been out.   B&E turned out to be one way to keep yourself at home. Sort of.

So where you been Joe? my brother says.  Five friggin years.

Where I’ve always been I say, with the old, wooden shame. 

What, Connecticut? He pronounces the name as if it were Pluto or a turd. It aint friggin Siberia Joe.

I don’t know whether he means where we are now–the house of our childhood–or Connecticut.  For a second I think of it as the place our mother has gone to, as in the Khruschev years.  Through the venetian blinds I can see the snow layered along the asphalt of the streets like strips of gauze.

You gotta do something, make a little effort now and then.

I nod, a futile effort to wait out the inevitable.

You could of come once in five years.

It’s not that simple Joe I say, always at a loss in the face of powerful primitive conviction, though my own gorge, now rising, will not give way to words.

Yah,  another long story he snorts.  Smoke comes out his nose in two narrow tines.

He jabs again with the remote.  We watch in silence a scene from a black and white movie about the Titanic, the old one from the fifties;  the ship has already hit the iceberg. The long shots show the film’s clumsy model slanting comically into the black studio tank.  The scene cuts to the deck where a shipboard band sets up on a severe slant in what appears to be white plastic K-Mart lawn furniture. The bandleader directs them hastily to play the Londonderry Air.

That’s actually Danny Boy I say, idiotically.

The band plays, swelling to crescendo.  There is no vocalist.  I sing the words to show my brother.  It’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow. See? Danny Boy.

Why don’t they do something, go somewhere?  my brother says.

Where should they go, Joe?

I dont know Joe, my brother says, pounding out a new cigarette in our dead mother’s ashtray, but give it a chance. Use some imagination.

– Harry Bauld