I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  I didn’t respond to him. Couldn’t speak at all. Couldn’t look at his self-mutilation—not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained housepainter’s hands. Watched the left one clutch the right at the wrist. They seemed more like puppets than hands. I had no feeling in either.

  2

  One Saturday morning when my brother and I were ten, our family television set spontaneously combusted.

  Thomas and I had spent most of that morning lolling around in our pajamas, watching cartoons and ignoring our mother’s orders to go upstairs, take our baths, and put on our dungarees. We were supposed to help her outside with the window washing. Whenever Ray gave an order, my brother and I snapped to attention, but our stepfather was duck hunting that weekend with his friend Eddie Banas. Obeying Ma was optional.

  She was outside looking in when it happened—standing in the geranium bed on a stool so she could reach the parlor windows. Her hair was in pincurls. Her coat pockets were stuffed with paper towels. As she Windexed and wiped the glass, her circular strokes gave the illusion that she was waving in at us. “We better get out there and help,” Thomas said. “What if she tells Ray?”

  “She won’t tell,” I said. “She never tells.”

  It was true. However angry we could make our mother, she would never have fed us to the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room, rose to his alarm clock at three-thirty each afternoon, and built submarines at night. Electric Boat, third shift. At our house, you tiptoed and whispered during the day and became free each evening at nine-thirty when Eddie Banas, Ray’s fellow third-shifter, pulled into the driveway and honked. I would wait for the sound of that horn. Hunger for it. With it came a loosening of limbs, a relaxation in the chest and hands, the ability to breathe deeply again. Some nights, my brother and I celebrated the slamming of Eddie’s truck door by jumping in the dark on our mattresses. Freedom from Ray turned our beds into trampolines.

  “Hey, look,” Thomas said, staring with puzzlement at the television.

  “What?”

  Then I saw it, too: a thin curl of smoke rising from the back of the set. The Howdy Doody Show was on, I remember. Clarabel the Clown was chasing someone with his seltzer bottle. The picture and sound went dead. Flames whooshed up the parlor wall.

  I thought the Russians had done it—that Khrushchev had dropped the bomb at last. If the unthinkable ever happened, Ray had lectured us at the dinner table, the submarine base and Electric Boat were guaranteed targets. We’d feel the jolt nine miles up the road in Three Rivers. Fires would ignite everywhere. Then the worst of it: the meltdown. People’s hands and legs and faces would melt like cheese.

  “Duck and cover!” I yelled to my brother.

  Thomas and I fell to the floor in the protective position the civil defense lady had made us practice at school. There was an explosion over by the television, a confusion of thick black smoke. The room rained glass.

  The noise and smoke brought Ma, screaming, inside. Her shoes crunched glass as she ran toward us. She picked up Thomas in her arms and told me to climb onto her back.

  “We can’t go outside!” I shouted. “Fallout!”

  “It’s not the bomb!” she shouted back. “It’s the TV!”

  Outside, Ma ordered Thomas and me to run across the street and tell the Anthonys to call the fire department. While Mr. Anthony made the call, Mrs. Anthony brushed glass bits off the tops of our crewcuts with her whisk broom. We spat soot-flecked phlegm. By the time we returned to the front sidewalk, Ma was missing.

  “Where’s your mother?” Mr. Anthony shouted. “She didn’t go back in there, did she? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

  Thomas began to cry. Then Mrs. Anthony and I were crying, too. “Hurry up!” my brother shrieked to the distant sound of the fire siren. Through the parlor windows, I could see the flames shrivel our lace curtains.

  A minute or so later, Ma emerged from the burning house, sobbing, clutching something against her chest. One of her pockets was ablaze from the paper towels; her coat was smoking.

  Mr. Anthony yanked off Ma’s coat and stomped on it. Fire trucks rounded the corner, sirens blaring. Neighbors hurried out of their houses to cluster and stare.

  Ma stank. The fire had sizzled her eyebrows and given her a sooty face. When she reached out to pull Thomas and me to her body, several loose photographs spilled to the ground. That’s when I realized why she’d gone back into the house: to rescue her photo album from its keeping place in the bottom drawer of the china closet.

  “It’s all right now,” she kept saying. “It’s all right, it’s all right.” And, for Ma, it was all right. The house her father had built would be saved. Her twins were within arm’s reach. Her picture album had been rescued. Just last week, I dreamt my mother—dead from breast cancer since 1987—was standing at the picture window at Joy’s and my condominium, looking in at me and mouthing that long-ago promise. “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.”

  Sometime during Ma’s endless opening and closing of that overstuffed photo album she loved so much, the two brass pins that attached the front and back covers first bent, then broke, causing most of the book’s black construction paper pages to loosen and detach. The book had been broken for years when, in October of 1986, Ma herself was opened and closed on a surgical table at Yale–New Haven Hospital. After several months’ worth of feeling tired and run down and contending with a cold that never quite went away, she had fingered a lump in her left breast. “No bigger than a pencil eraser,” she told me over the phone. “But Lena Anthony thinks I should go to the doctor, so I’m going.”

  My mother’s breast was removed. A week later, she was told that the cancer had metastasized—spread to her bone and lymph nodes. With luck and aggressive treatment, the oncologist told her, she could probably live another six to nine months.

  My stepfather, my brother, and I struggled independently with our feelings about Ma’s illness and pain—her death sentence. Each of us fumbled, in our own way, to make things up to her. Thomas set to work in the arts and crafts room down at the state hospital’s Settle Building. While Ma lay in the hospital being scanned and probed and plied with cancer-killing poisons, he spent hours assembling and gluing and shellacking something called a “hodgepodge collage”—a busy arrangement of nuts, washers, buttons, macaroni, and dried peas that declared: god = love! Between hospital stays, Ma hung it on the kitchen wall where its hundreds of glued doodads seemed to pulsate like something alive—an organism under a microscope, molecules bouncing around in a science movie. It unnerved me to look at that thing.

  My stepfather decided he would fix, once and for all, Ma’s broken scrapbook. He took the album from the china closet and brought it out to the garage. There he jerry-rigged a solution, reinforcing the broken binding with strips of custom-cut aluminum sheeting and small metal bolts. “She’s all set now,” Ray told me when he showed me the rebound book. He held it at arm’s length and opened it face down to the floor, flapping the covers back and forth as if they were the wings of a captured duck.

  My own project for my dying mother was the most costly and ambitious. I would remodel her pink 1950s-era kitchen, Sheetrocking the cracked plaster walls, replacing the creaky cabinets with modern units, and installing a center island with built-in oven and cooktop. I conceived the idea, I think, to show Ma that I loved her best of all. Or that I was the most grateful of the three of us for all she’d endured on our behalf. Or that I was the sorriest that fate had given her first a volatile husband and then a schizophrenic son and then tapped her on the shoulder and handed her the “big C.” What I proved, instead, was that I was the deepest in denial. If I was going to go to the trouble and expense of giving her a new kitchen, then she’d better live long enough to appreciate it.

  I arrived with my toolbox at the old brick duplex early one Saturday morning, less than a week after her discharge from the hospital. Ray officially disapprov
ed of the project and left in a huff when I got there. Looking pale and walking cautiously, Ma forced a smile and began carrying her canisters and knickknacks out of the kitchen to temporary storage. She watched from the pantry doorway as I committed my first act of renovation, tamping my flatbar with a hammer and wedging it between the wainscoting and the wall. Ma’s hand was a fist at her mouth, tapping, tapping against her lip.

  With the crack and groan of nails letting go their hold, the four-foot-wide piece of wainscoting was pried loose from the wall, revealing plaster and lath and an exposed joist where someone had written notes and calculations. “Look,” I said, wanting to show her what I guessed was her father’s handwriting. But when I turned around, I realized I was addressing the empty pantry.

  I was thirty-six at the time, unhappily divorced for less than a year. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d still reach for Dessa, and her empty side of the bed would startle me awake. We’d been together for sixteen years.

  I found my mother sitting in the front parlor, trying to hide her tears. The newly repaired photo album was in her lap.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She shook her head, tapped her lip. “I don’t know, Dominick. You go ahead. It’s just that with everything that’s happening right now . . .”

  “You don’t want a new kitchen?” I asked. The question came out like a threat.

  “Honey, it’s not that I don’t appreciate it.” She patted the sofa cushion next to her. “Come here. Sit down.”

  Still standing, I reminded her that she’d complained for decades about her lack of counter space. I described the new stoves I’d seen at Kitchen Depot—the ones where the burners are one continuous flat surface, a cinch for cleaning. I sounded just like the saleswoman who’d led me around from one showroom miracle to the next.

  Ma said that she knew a new kitchen would be great, but that maybe what she really needed right now was for things to stay settled.

  I sat. Sighed, defeated.

  “If you want to give me something,” she said, “give me something small.”

  “Okay, fine,” I huffed. “I’ll just make you one of those collage things like Thomas’s. Except mine will say life sucks. Or jesus christ’s a son of a bitch.” My mother was a religious woman. I might as well have taken my flatbar and poked at her incision.

  “Don’t be bitter, honey,” she said.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, I was crying—tears and strangled little barks that convulsed from the back of my throat. “I’m scared,” I said.

  “What are you scared of, Dominick? Tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m scared for you.” But it was myself I was scared for. Closing in on forty, I was wifeless, childless. Now I’d be motherless, too. Left with my crazy brother and Ray.

  She reached over and rubbed my arm. “Well, honey,” she said, “it’s scary. But I accept it because it’s what God wants for me.”

  “What God wants,” I repeated, with a little snort of contempt. I dragged my sleeve across my eyes, cleared my throat.

  “Give me something little,” she repeated. “You remember that time last spring when you came over and said, ‘Hey, Ma, get in the car and I’ll buy you a hot fudge sundae’? That’s the kind of thing I’d like. Just come visit. Look at my album with me.”

  Tucked in the inside front cover pocket of my mother’s scrapbook are two pictures of Thomas and me, scissored four decades earlier from the Three Rivers Daily Record. The folded newsprint, stained brown with age, feels as light and brittle as dead skin. In the first photo, we’re wrinkled newborns, our diapered bodies curved toward each other like opening and closing parentheses. IDENTICAL TWINS RING OUT OLD, RING IN NEW, the caption claims and goes on to explain that Thomas and Dominick Tempesta were born at the Daniel P. Shanley Memorial Hospital on December 31, 1949, and January 1, 1950, respectively—six minutes apart and in two different years. (The article makes no mention of our father and says only that our unnamed mother is “doing fine.” We were bastards; our births would have been discreetly ignored by the newspaper had we not been the New Year’s babies.) “Little Thomas arrived first, at 11:57 P.M.,” the article explains. “His brother Dominick followed at 12:03 A.M. Between them, they straddle the first and second halves of the twentieth century!”

  In the second newspaper photo, taken on January 24, 1954, my brother and I have become Thomas and Dominick Birdsey. We wear matching sailor hats and woolen pea jackets and salute the readers of the Daily Record. Mamie Eisenhower squats between us, one mink-coated arm wrapped around each of our waists. Mrs. Eisenhower, in her short bangs and flowered hat, beams directly at the camera. Thomas and I, age four, wear twin looks of bewildered obedience. This picture is captioned first lady gets a two-gun salute.

  The President’s wife was in Groton, Connecticut, that winter day to break champagne against the USS Nautilus, America’s first nuclear-powered submarine. Our family stood in the crowd below the dignitaries’ platform, ticket-holding guests by virtue of our new stepfather’s job as a pipe fitter for Electric Boat. EB and the Navy were partners in the building of the Nautilus, America’s best hope for containing Communism.

  According to my mother, it had been cold and foggy the morning of the launch and then, just before the submarine’s christening, the sun had burned through and lit up the celebration. Ma had prayed to Saint Anne for good weather and saw this sudden clearing as a small miracle, a further sign of what everybody knew already: that Heaven was on our side, was against the godless Communists who wanted to conquer the world and blow America to smithereens.

  “It was the proudest day of my life, Dominick,” she told me that morning when I started, then halted, the renovation of her kitchen and sat, instead, and looked. “Seeing you two boys with the President’s wife. I remember it like it was yesterday. Mamie and some admiral’s wife were up there on the VIP platform, waving down to the crowd, and I said to your father, ‘Look, Ray. She’s pointing right at the boys!’ He said, ‘Oh, go on. They’re just putting on a show.’ But I could tell she was looking at you two. It used to happen all the time. People get such a kick out of twins. You boys were always special.”

  Her happy remembrance of that long-ago day strengthened her voice, animated her gestures. The past, the old pictures, the sudden brilliance of the morning sun through the front windows: the mix made her joyful and took away, I think, a little of her pain.

  “And then, next thing you know, the four of us were following some Secret Service men to the Officers’ Club lounge. Ray took it in stride, of course, but I was scared skinny. I thought we were in trouble for something. Come to find out, we were following Mrs. Eisenhower’s orders. She wanted her picture taken with my two boys!

  “They treated us like big shots, too. Your father had a cocktail with Admiral Rickover and some of the other big brass. They asked him all about his service record. Then a waiter brought you and your brother orange sodas in frosted glasses almost as tall as you two were. I was scared one of you was going to spill soda all over Mamie.”

  “What did you and she have to drink?” I kidded her. “Couple of boilermakers?”

  “Oh, honey, I didn’t take a thing. I was a nervous wreck, standing that close to her. She ordered a Manhattan, I remember, and had some liver pâté on a cracker. She was nice—very down to earth. She asked me if I’d sewn the little sailor suits you and Thomas were wearing. She told me she knitted some still when she and the President traveled, but she’d never had a talent for sewing. When she stooped down to have her picture taken with you two boys, she told you she had a grandson just a little older than you. David Eisenhower is who she was talking about. Julie Nixon’s husband. Camp David.”

  Ma shook her head and smiled, in disbelief still. Then she pulled a Kleenex from the sleeve of her bathrobe and dabbed at her eyes. “Your grandfather just wouldn’t have believed it,” she said. “First he comes to this country with holes in his pockets, and then, the next thing you know, his two li
ttle grandsons are hobnobbing with the First Lady of the United States of America. Papa would have gotten a big kick out of that. He would have been proud as a peacock.”

  Papa.

  Domenico Onofrio Tempesta—my maternal grandfather, my namesake—is as prominent in my mother’s photo album as he was in her life of service to him. He died during the summer of 1949, oblivious of the fact that the unmarried thirty-three-year-old daughter who kept his house—his only child—was pregnant with twins. Growing up, my brother and I knew Papa as a stern-faced paragon of accomplishment, the subject of a few dozen sepia-tinted photographs, the star of a hundred anecdotes. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went.

  He had emigrated to America from Sicily in 1901 and gotten ahead because he was shrewd with his money and unafraid of hard work, lucky for us! He’d bought a half-acre lot from a farmer’s widow and thus become the first Italian immigrant to own property in Three Rivers, Connecticut. Papa had put the roof over our heads, had built “with his own two hands” the brick Victorian duplex on Hollyhock Avenue where we’d lived as kids—where my mother had lived all her life. Papa had had a will of iron and a stubborn streak—just the traits he needed to raise a young daughter “all by his lonesome.” If we thought Ray was strict, we should have seen Papa! Once when Ma was a girl, she was bellyaching about having to eat fried eggs for supper. Papa let her go on and on and then, without saying a word, reached over and pushed her face down in her plate. “I came up with egg yolk dripping off my hair and the tip of my nose and even my eyelashes. I was crying to beat the band. After that night, I just ate my eggs and shut up about it!”

  Another time, when Ma was a teenager working at the Rexall store, Papa found her secret package of cigarettes and marched himself right down to the drugstore where he made her eat one of her own Pall Malls. Right in front of the customers and her boss, Mr. Chase. And Claude Sminkey, the soda jerk she had such an awful crush on. After he left, Ma ran outside and had to throw up at the curb with people walking by and watching. She had to quit her job, she was so ashamed of herself. But she never smoked again—never even liked the smell of cigarettes after that. Papa had fixed her wagon, all right. She had defied him and then lived to regret it. The last thing Papa wanted was a sneak living under his own roof.