Chapter 1 - THE HANDS UNDER THE APRON
The first thing my wife asked after I took the apron off her was whether June had eaten.
That was the moment I understood I had walked into the middle of something, not the beginning.
Rosalie stood in my jacket with both hands held awkwardly away from her body. The skin across her knuckles and fingers was angry red, shiny in places from repeated exposure to hot water. Seven months pregnant, face pale with exhaustion, she still looked past me toward our daughter.
June was four. She had called my aunt Beatrice “Grandma Bea” since she learned to speak because Beatrice was the senior woman at Villa Montanari and had encouraged every young child in the family to use the title.
Now June was crying into my waistcoat.
“Did you eat?” I asked her.
She shook her head.
Rosalie whispered, “She had lunch.”
It was nearly nine at night.
The mahogany doors to the adjoining council room remained open behind me. Eleven senior family members sat around the long table where, ten minutes earlier, we had been reviewing legitimate matters involving hotels, distribution contracts, commercial property, and the annual estate operations budget.
Men who still called one another capo out of habit could apparently discuss twelve million dollars in capital improvements without noticing a pregnant woman being worked raw twenty feet away.
That realization belonged to me.
I looked at the kitchen.
No dishwashers.
No kitchen porters.
One cook near the service entrance.
Two young women from the family clearing platters.
Why?
Villa Montanari normally employed a full evening staff for formal dinners.
Beatrice had supervised the residence for years, but she did not own it. The property sat inside the Montanari Residence Trust. My family used it. Professional staff ran it. Beatrice chaired the old House Operations Committee, mostly because everyone had allowed her to keep doing so.
I had mistaken longevity for harmlessness.
“Where is the staff?” I asked.
Beatrice stayed seated.
“You interrupted discipline.”
“Where is the staff?”
“They finished.”
I looked at the clock.
“Before dinner service ended?”
“They had other assignments.”
Rosalie said quietly:
“They left after the second course.”
Beatrice turned on her.
“Enough.”
I stepped between them.
“Do not order her.”
Beatrice stared at me as though I had spoken nonsense.
“She’s in my kitchen.”
“No.”
My voice lowered.
“She’s in a kitchen.”
That distinction made several relatives uncomfortable.
Good.
Then June said:
“Mommy washed all day.”
I looked at Rosalie.
“How long?”
“Nicola, not here.”
That answer told me she was afraid of what would happen if she spoke in front of Beatrice.
My anger changed shape.
I asked Anthony Greco, my security director, to call the family physician and move Rosalie and June into the breakfast room.
Beatrice stood.
“This is absurd.”
“No.”
“You drove a serving cart into me.”
“Yes.”
That was true.
The cart had struck her legs after Rosalie and June were already behind me. I had not needed to do it to protect them.
My problem.
Later.
Then my consigliere, Samuel Pierce, walked into the kitchen.
Sixty-one. Gray hair. Dark suit. Thirty years of telling Montanari men that law was not an insult to family tradition.
He looked at the broken plate.
Then Rosalie’s hands.
Then me.
“What happened?”
I told him.
He looked at Beatrice.
She said:
“Family women have always served family dinners.”
Samuel glanced around the professionally equipped kitchen.
“Then why are we paying forty-one thousand dollars a month for residence staff?”
Silence.
Beatrice’s face changed.
Only slightly.
I saw it.
Samuel saw it too.
Then the council secretary appeared at the kitchen door.
“Mr. Montanari?”
“What?”
He held the evening agenda.
“Mrs. Montanari was supposed to address the council at eight-thirty.”
I looked at Rosalie.
“What?”
She closed her eyes.
The secretary continued.
“Mrs. Beatrice told us Rosalie was resting upstairs because of the pregnancy.”
I turned toward my aunt.
May you like
Rosalie had not merely been kept in a kitchen.
She had been kept out of the room where we were deciding whether Beatrice would continue controlling it.
