I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  I’m not sure, but I might put in an application at Disneyland. To be a cast member. Maybe that woman is still there who told me I’d make a perfect Cinderella. I still remember her name. Mrs. Means. Maybe by some miracle, she still works there. Still remembers me. Maybe I’ll end up waving at little kids in the Festival of Lights parade and they’ll go, “Look! It’s Cinderella!” Thad thinks I should do it. It might be a stepping stone, he says, and he could be my manager.

  Dominick, I know you’re going to get better, and that you’ll find someone who’ll make you happy, because it’s what you deserve. I’m sure you hate me right now, which is totally understandable. I hate myself. But no matter what you think of me, I’ll always be glad we were together for those almost two years. I was watching this program once? About Paul Newman? And someone on that show said how Paul Newman was a “real quality person,” and that’s what you are, Dominick. A real quality person. Just remember that we had some good times, too. Especially in the beginning. I’m so sorry I betrayed you. And that I had to lay all this on you while you’re so sick. But when you told me the baby couldn’t be yours, I didn’t know what else to do. . . . I’m probably the last person you’re gonna want to talk to once you listen to this, but if you want to get ahold of me, I’ll be at the condo for a few more days and then, by the end of next week, I’ll be driving out to my mother’s, which the number is in that Rolodex thing of yours.

  If . . . if you’re worrying about AIDS or HIV because of Thad—his lifestyle or whatever—don’t worry. He’s very careful about things. Aaron’s a fanatic about not taking any chances. So that’s one less thing you have to worry about.

  Dominick? I’m sorry I always acted so jealous about your brother. If I ever had a brother or sister, I’d want them to be as loyal as you are. In my personal opinion, you’re fighting a losing battle, but that’s your business, not mine. Don’t forget to take care of yourself instead of everyone else.

  I love you, babe. Just don’t . . . please don’t hate me. Okay?

  I didn’t hate her. I didn’t even hate him. I just lay there, looking at my ugly purple foot, which should have hurt but didn’t. I didn’t feel a thing.

  “You know what kills me about this show?” Felice said from across the way. “Wherever she goes, someone’s always getting knocked off.”

  I reached up and pulled off the Walkman’s earphones. I’d listened to that tape twice, hoping it would make some kind of sense, but it didn’t. I wasn’t outraged, though. I wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t anything. “I’m sorry. What’d you say?”

  Felice pointed up at the wall-mounted TV. “Jessica Fletcher there. Murder, She Wrote. She goes shopping; there’s a stiff. She goes to visit some friend of hers; there’s another one. She goes off on vacation. Boom! When’s the last time you went out someplace and ran into a corpse? She’s like the Grim Reaper or something.”

  I’d wait until I got home, I decided. I’d have to. And I wouldn’t leave any mess—something someone would have to clean up afterward. Leo, or Ray, or some poor slob on the rescue squad. . . . Because I wasn’t angry like that bastard, Rood. I was just tired—just wanted to stop fighting and give in. Go with it. . . . I could hobble out to the garage, stuff rags in the cracks on the sides of the door.

  Gentlemen, start your engines. That’s when I remembered about the truck. I couldn’t carbon monoxide myself out of existence. I’d totaled the truck.

  Pills, then. They’d send me home with painkillers, right? I could take them all at once with a bottle of . . . what did I have in the house, anyway? I still had that Christmas bottle—that Scotch one of the wholesalers had given me? Booze and pills. That would do it. Rid the world of Dominick Birdsey, the loser’s loser. The bad twin.

  “She’s like a corpse magnet,” Felice said. “I tell you one thing. If you ever see Angela Lansbury coming toward you, start running the other way quick.”

  Was the fact that the Duchess had hidden in her closet and watched us make love any more weird than the fact that my brother had hacked off his hand in the name of peace? Any more strange than the fact that the Wequonnocs were about to ascend—rise from the ashes? Any more fucked up than the fact that America was getting ready to fight another war with gung-ho kids too young to remember anything about Vietnam except Rambo? . . .

  That was the big joke, wasn’t it? The answer to the riddle: there was no one up there in Heaven, making sure the accounts came out right. I’d solved it, hadn’t I? Cracked the code? It was all just a joke. The god inside my brother’s head was just his disease. My mother had knelt every night and prayed to her own steepled hands. Your baby died because of . . . because of no particular reason at all. Your wife left you because you sucked all the oxygen out of the room, so you pretended she was the one in bed with you while you screwed your girlfriend and her boyfriend hid in the closet, watching. . . . Hell, why couldn’t she go out there and become Cinderella? . . . Let go of my ankle, Ray. I’m ready to float away. Ready to cut my brother down from that tree and carry him to the Falls and throw him over the side. Jump in headfirst, after him. Because it didn’t matter. It was all just a joke. Riddle me this, Batman. What’s the point? And the answer was: there was none. Pain pills and Scotch—that was how I’d do it, because there was just no point at all. . . .

  “Hey, here she is,” Felice said.

  Who? Angela Lansbury? Had she come for the corpse already? But when I looked over at him for clarification, he was staring at the doorway. Beaming.

  She was wearing a turquoise suede jacket with fringe, a tan cowboy hat, tan boots. I didn’t recognize her for a second or two and then, Jesus Christ, I did.

  “Get over here, Annie Oakley,” Felice said. “Give your old hound dog a kiss.”

  Instead, she approached the foot of my bed. “Long time no see,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Been years, hasn’t it? How’s my grandfather doing?”

  She lifted up a bulky plastic bag—the head of John the Baptist, except it was rectangular. “He’s all yours,” she said.

  “Is he? And now I suppose you’re going to tell me I owe you—”

  “No charge beyond what you’ve paid me already,” she said. “And by the way, you have my condolences.”

  She held Domenico’s bulky manuscript in front of her, at arm’s length, and let go. It thudded onto my bed, just missing my injured foot.

  31

  The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings

  8 July 1949

  I, Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, was born sixty-nine years ago in the mountain village of Giuliana, Sicily, lu giardino dello mondo! I am the descendant of great men and many would say that when I look into the mirror, greatness looks back! Nonetheless, my life has been marred by sadness and tragedy. Now old age afflicts me with aching in my joints and rumbling bowels and weakness in my knees. But my mind remembers!

  My beloved wife, Ignazia, a buon’anima, gave me one daughter but failed to honor me with sons. My daughter, Concettina Ipolita Tempesta, is too homely to marry (harelip) and so she stays home to be an old man’s nuisance. From that red-haired girl with the rabbit’s face, Tempesta blood spills wasted to the ground, like wine from a cracked jug. The proud name of Tempesta dies when I die.

  If God has not blessed me with sons, He has at least given me the gift of keen memory. I tell my life story to keep alive the name Tempesta and to offer myself as a model for Italian youth to imitate! May the Sons of Mother Italy who read these words learn from them the path to prosperity and may they never be cursed, as I have been, with frightened rabbits underfoot or with skinny, goddamned monkeys!

  As a boy, I grew up in the fearful shadow of Mount Etna, the great and terrible vulcano that brought my grandparents to ruin. Alfio and Maricchia Ciccia, my maternal grandparents, were proud landowners. Their hazelnut and almond groves were destroyed in the year 1865 when lava spewed from the western rim, choking life from the trees that had provided their livelihood. Four days l
ater, the earth itself cracked open, killing my grandfather and his three sons. As Etna’s cursed vomit cooled, it armored the Ciccia land with porous black rock. Worthless! My grandmother, crazy with grief, ended her life with poison soon after.

  The only surviving member of the Ciccia family was the youngest child, Concettina. She had been playing alone in a field with her rag dolls when the lava began rushing down the hill after her. Scooping up the dollies in her arms, she ran to a nearby cedar tree to save herself from the vulcano. As she climbed up amidst the leaves and branches, she dropped one of her little dolls. With foolish bravery, the girl came down again, intent on saving her little friend made of rag and sawdust, but as she reached into that hateful hot stew from hell to rescue the popa, little Concettina burned the skin of her right hand severely, dropping once again the foolish doll, which sank back into the lava and was carried away. Somehow, Concettina held on and managed to elbow and claw and climb the tree again. From the highest branches, she screamed and screamed until it was safe to descend. For the rest of her life, Concettina wore on her right hand the reminder of her foolish attempt to rescue that worthless toy—a pink, shiny scar like a glove. As a child, I would stare at that scarred hand as I heard, over and over, the story of how little Concettina had saved her life but lost her popi di pezza. That damaged hand, with its more normal twin, held and fed and slapped me as I grew. Concettina, a buon’anima, was my beloved mother.

  Orphaned at the age of eight after her own mother’s self-poisoning, Mama was given to an old widow, a seamstress and lacemaker whose duty it was to dress the altar and the statuary at the little village church, including the famous Statue of the Weeping Vergine, famous throughout all of Sicily. The old woman taught my mother her painstaking craft and Mama herself became a skilled lacemaker. Sadly, as she grew to womanhood, she was often seized with screaming fits and strange dreams. She claimed, as well, that she could hear the voices of moths—those fluttering creatures which, she believed, were the souls of the dead who had failed to attain heavenly light. Instead, they swarmed around the counterfeit light of earthly things. The moths spoke to her—pleaded with her—Mama insisted, so endlessly that she sometimes had to lock herself in her room with the window bolted and the candles extinguished to be rid of their begging.

  In 1874, Concettina Ciccia became the wife of my father, Giacomo Tempesta, a sulphur miner. Papa’s work took him away each week from Giuliana to the mines, nine or ten kilometers into the foothills of Etna. With his fellow miners, he would travel back each Saturday to the village, where he would bathe and feast, then lie beside his wife on their finely embroidered sheets. It was on such a Saturday night in the year 1879 that my humble father became a hero.

  According to the story first whispered by my mother to the village women and then repeated by those loose-tongued crones, Papa was lying awake after sharing a passione with his wife that was to result in my fortuitous conception! Etna had been asleep for several years, but that night Papa heard the faint first rumbling and hissing of the awakening vulcano. He rose from his bed and ran to the home of the buck-toothed magistrato, the richest man in Giuliana. There, Papa unfastened the bell from the magistrate’s cow and ran through the village, ringing and shouting, awakening the citizens of Giuliana so that they could rescue themselves. Some say my mother, too, saved lives that night. She ran to the nearest tree and screamed like a siren!

  For his heroism, my father received a medaglia from the King of Italy. It arrived by way of the magistrato’s official mail. Even before Papa could hold it in his hands, that goddamned buck-toothed magistrato bit the medal and determined it was solid gold, marking it forever with the impression of his horse-like teeth. Later, he presented the marred medaglia to my father at a formal ceremonia in the village square. At the time of this great honor, I was merely a seed in the melon of my mother’s belly, but the village women agreed that the alignment of my conception with Mount Etna’s eruption indicated that my destiny was to be a great and powerful man! I was now, in addition, the unborn son of a hero!

  My mother presented her husband with three sons. Sons of Italy, marry wisely! Male heirs are the greatest gifts a woman can bestow! I, Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, came into this world on 11 May 1880 and my brother Pasquale was born two years later under more ordinary circumstances. My brother Vincenzo was born in 1883.

  My father’s heroism made him, after the village padre and the magistrato, the most respected man in our little village. As a young boy, I remember Papa leading parades and processions at holiday times and presiding with dignity at village festivals. At these times, he would take his medaglia from its keeping place and wear it proudly against his breast. I remember, too, that medal, with its likeness of the King on horseback and the magistrate’s big teeth marks embedded in the horse’s golden flank.

  When I was six, the Virgin Mary herself confirmed the suspicions of the village women that, amongst the children of Giuliana, I was speciale!

  Sent by my mother to deliver a new goose-down pillow to the padre, I looked for him inside the small limestone church and then out in the grotto made famous years earlier by the Statue of the Weeping Vergine. It was there that I—Domenico Onofrio Tempesta —witnessed a miracle! After a drought of seventy-seven years, tears were falling once again from the eyes of the statue! Of all the villagers—men, women, and children—it was I to whom the Weeping Vergine chose to reveal herself!

  The statue cried for a week. Its precious tears were collected and applied to the sores of the afflicted, the eyes of the blind, the legs of the lame. The miracle became the subject of many theories about past sin and predictions of coming doom. News of the Weeping Vergine had kept the village priest at his station by the grotto day and night, saying prayers for the faithful and listening to the emergency confessions of newly repentant siciliani! It was only after the statue’s eyes had dried and the number of pilgrims had dwindled that the padre was able to have a minute’s peace and to interpret the meaning of the miracle. The good priest visited our home the following Sunday and told Mama and Papa that my discovery of the Virgin’s tears had been a sign from Blessed Mary herself. I had been called to the priesthood, the padre said.

  Believing, as most siciliani believe, that it is dangerous business for a father to educate his sons beyond himself, my father at first resisted the idea of my priestly studies. Papa had already spoken many times of my eventual work in the sulphur mines, first as his caruso and later as a miner myself. Papa’s fellow miners shook their heads and warned him against allowing me to be sent away and taught to read and write. Yet my mother supported the priest’s campaign to make me a man of God. Her status in the village had already been elevated because she had given birth to the boy to whom the Vergine had revealed her tears. As the mother of a priest, her standing would be raised higher still.

  The padre wrote a letter to Rome concerning my religious calling and campaigned amongst the villagers to hand over their coins on behalf of the room, board, and travel expenses that would be required to turn me into a priest. When my father protested, my mother resumed once again her screaming fits on behalf of my education and circulated in the village the news of an ominous dream she had had. In the dream, God Almighty took the form of a black falcon and pecked out the eyes of my father for flouting His will. In the end, Papa surrendered.

  And so I was sent on my seventh birthday to the convent school in Nicosia, run by the good Sisters of Humility. There, over a period of six years, I learned first the rudiments and then the subtleties of the Italian language. I learned, too, the hard and bitter lessons of jealousy and snobbery which my fellow students were happy to teach to the school’s poorest but most gifted student, Domenico Onofrio Tempesta! The wealthy city boys would laugh at me as I scratched out my lessons on the cheap slate provided me. They, of course, had been handed the best supplies—quill pens, fine paper, and oceans of India ink with which to do their shoddy work! They, of course, had famiglia who paid the extra for confections on Saturday
afternoon and musical shows and other distractions and ricreazioni while I had only my considerable native talents with which to entertain myself. But if I was the least well provided for amongst the boys at the convent school, I was the best loved by the good Sisters of Humility, who marveled at my intellectual gifts and only occasionally boxed my ears or yanked my nose for small acts of temper or venial sins of pride—petty transgressions at most. I was, in truth, the sisters’ favorite.

  Back at home, my younger brother Pasquale took my place in the mines and became my father’s caruso. It was Pasquale’s job to carry the excavated rock up from the shaft and the makeshift stairway to the kiln at the mouth of the mines. There, the rock was melted and the essenza di solforoso extracted. It is the caruso’s lot in life to do the miner’s dirty work—to work like a mule—and for that, my simple brother was well suited, just as I was well suited to the elevated and intellectual life of a boy destined for greater things.

  With Papa, Pasquale, and me away from home, my youngest brother, Vincenzo, grew wild. Mama could not make him obey or help her, no matter how many blows she visited on his head or his culo with her big wooden cooking spoon. Vincenzo’s theft of a lemon cake from the window of old Signora Migliaccio became a minor village scandal. “My firstborn serves God, my secondborn serves his father, and my youngest serves the devil!” Mama would lament.