I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

In the early spring of 1915, Pasquale and I resumed our work on my palazzo, laying the brick tiers of the second story and hauling into place the granite windowsills, the stoops of Sicilian marble, front and back. We hammered window and door frames and joists, bricked the chimney, partitioned rooms. High into the house’s second-story front wall, I laid brick diagonally in the shape of two three-foot-high T’s for all of the town to see! This I did to honor my father and to raise high the proud name of Tempesta. By the fall of that year, the house’s brick, stone, and wooden skeleton was complete. The roof would be on before wintertime.

  Throughout that building season, other Italians in Three Rivers stopped by to visit and congratulate me on my nearly finished “palace.” Pasquale and I were presented with cakes, cheeses, and jugs of homemade wine for good luck. Ha! Everyone wished to be in the good graces of a successful man.

  I weep to remember what happened next. On 12 October 1915, tragedia struck at 66-through-68 Hollyhock Avenue!

  I was mixing cement in my wheelbarrow for the front sidewalk. Pasquale was seated on the porch steps, finishing his lunch-for-three-workers. “Look, Domenico, two crows,” he grunted, pointing with his chin toward the road. Monsignor McNulty and his little monkey, that skinny Father Guglielmo, stood staring at us in their black robes. Best to ignore them, I told myself, and continued my cement-mixing. If that old monsignor had uncovered another bastardo of Vincenzo’s, what did that have to do with me? Vincenzo was dead and gone, a buon’anima. Whatever brats he had left behind were not my responsibility.

  The two approached; the old priest began with compliments. The building of this impressive house, and my status as a factory boss, had made me a leader in the Italian community. Did I realize that?

  Yes, I realized that, I told him. All my life I had served as a good example for others to imitate. My brother Pasquale chewed quietly on a heel of bread and nodded in agreement.

  Yes, yes, yes, Domenico Tempesta was a man both respected and emulated, the monsignor agreed. He covered his words with so much sugar that the bitter thing he said next took me by complete surprise.

  McNulty came close enough for me to see the veins in his cheeks, the pockmarks in his nose. “Therefore,” he whispered, “yours is the greater sin—this flagrant ignoring of Sunday Mass! This failure to honor the Lord on His given day! This flying in the face of holy law.” Here, Pasquale belched up liquor from his pickled peppers—a long, slow rumble that climaxed like a clap of thunder as it traveled up his throat and out. Little Father Guglielmo’s eyes widened with fear at the distraction and he put a silencing finger to his lips. Attendance at church by the “Eye-talians” of the parish had fallen off, the monsignor said, and both he and God Almighty held me personally responsible. McNulty told me my failure to attend Mass on Sunday had left me with my own sins and the sins of all nonchurchgoers on my overburdened soul. I must put the Holy Spirit before a pile of bricks, confess my transgressions, and return to Mass as a communicant the following Sunday for all to see. At this juncture, Pasquale rose from the steps, walked to the side of the house, and pissed a river. Then he made a kissing sound at Filippa, and prepared to go back to his work.

  At first I tried to be respectful to that dog-faced man of the cloth. I smiled and promised I would return to Sunday Mass as soon as the four doors of my house were hung, my twenty-two windows were glazed, and the roof was completed. I pointed a thumb at Pasquale, who was now climbing the ladder to the half-completed roof, Filippa riding atop one shoulder and a bundle of wooden shingles balanced on the other. “And now that Pasquale has his lunch inside of him,” I joked, “he’ll probably have that roof shingled by nightfall, as formidable in size as it is. It is often said that I work like a well-oiled machine and my brother works like a plowhorse. Ha ha.”

  Monsignor McNulty said that pride was perhaps the greatest sin of all and that my revering of worldly possessions over things spiritual was shocking and sacrilegious. He told me he hoped and prayed there would not be some terrible price for me to pay. Then he dropped his voice and made a comment about men and monkeys that made Father Guglielmo blush.

  I stopped my cement-mixing. In my hand, the trowel felt like a weapon of murder. “Vai in mona di tua sorella!” I told him.

  “Translation! Translation!” the old priest demanded of the meek but earnest Father Guglielmo.

  In his stuttering fashion, the nervous young priest said that I had asked them both to please leave now.

  “I told you to get the fuck out of here!” I shouted to Monsignor Dog-Face, this time in English. “I said to go home to your sister’s cunt!”

  Father Guglielmo put up both his hands and attempted to negotiate a peace, but the monsignor reached over and hit him on the head. Then he marched to the road, ordering Guglielmo to follow. When the little priest had joined him, McNulty pointed his finger at me and called back in a public voice meant to dishonor me and all my countrymen. A house from which a man of God was ordered to leave, he said—and ordered in terms only an Italian would be vulgar enough to use—such a house was a Godforsaken place, damned from its peak to its foundation! “You wait and see, Tempesta!” the old monsignor shouted. “You mark my words!”

  As he turned his back, I scooped a clump of the wet cement onto my trowel and flung it. It landed against the monsignor’s back, dripping down his cassock like monkey shit. The old and young priests scurried down the hill, McNulty screaming and striking his little assistant several more times, and kicking him once as well.

  To have my house cursed by a man of God was no small thing, but Pasquale had no understanding of the seriousness of what had just occurred. Up on the roof, his laughter boomed and carried into the trees.

  “Shut up your mouth and go to work!” I yelled, and flung a trowelful of the wet cement at him and Filippa. My action frightened that little monkey-whore of Pasquale’s, and the creature jumped off her master’s shoulder, scurrying along the peak of the roof. With a leap, she hid in the big maple tree.

  Along with his formidable lunch on that horrible day, my brother Pasquale had consumed the better part of a bottle of good-luck wine from Pippo Conti, a fellow roofer who had visited that morning on his way to Sunday Mass. Pasquale was whistling and laying down a row of shingles when he heard, over the sound of his hammering, Filippa’s cries for help. She was seated high in the nearby tree, plagued, suddenly, by angry bluejays. Pasquale rose and ran to the animal’s defense, forgetting about the gap in the roof between himself and the tree.

  He fell.

  I saw it with my eyes.

  Hammer in hand, he fell through the stairwells to the foundation below.

  I saw it all and heard the terrible breaking of my brother’s bones against the dirt floor of my cellar. When I ran to him and cradled his head in my lap, it wobbled like the head of a broken doll. “Dio ci scampi! Dio ci scampi!” I shouted, over and over. If only I had held my tongue with the old priest! If only I had not thrown cement!

  Filippa, who had now rid herself of the bluejays and hurried down the tree, sat huddled on Pasquale’s chest, curling the hair on his head around one small pink finger. Pasquale mouthed, rather than spoke, his last words, “Filippa . . . Filippa.”

  As I watched the precious gift of life leave my brother, mine was the greatest anguish possible! “Filippa . . . Filippa,” his lips kept saying, and I pledged to my dying brother, on the lives of our ancestors and descendants, that I would care for his little monkey. Then Pasquale convulsed and vomited blood and his eyes took on the gaze of holy statues.

  Now, I was alone. . . .

  Pasquale was waked for three afternoons in the boardinghouse parlor. Signora Siragusa wailed for my brother as a mother wails. My position of respect in the town, as well as the scope of the tragedy, brought out most of the Italians of Three Rivers. Flynn, the mill boss, came with his wife to pay respects. Werman, who owned the construction company where Pasquale had worked, showed up with his two sons. At the celebration of the crowded funeral Mass at St. Ma
ry of Jesus Christ Church, that dog-faced monsignor assumed a disdainful attitude that deeply offended me. After my brother was laid to rest in the ground beside Vincenzo, I sat and wrote a letter of complaint to the Pope in Rome. (Never a response.)

  3 August 1949

  Trouble with my bowels since Tuesday. Arthritis afflicts my joints. My body fails me, but not my memory!

  Despite Father Guglielmo’s counsel—the little priest visited me several times after Pasquale’s death—I did not return to church when the snow flew. I vowed never again to cross the threshold of the house of God as long as that no-good monsignor was alive. And I am proud to write that I kept that promise!

  In the wake of her master’s death, Filippa, the spoiled “little queen” who had doomed my brother, sat shivering in a corner of her cage on the boardinghouse porch. Sometimes at night, through the opened window of my room, I heard her strange, chattering lamentation—the agitation of her cage as she threw herself, violently, against it.

  Signora Siragusa, that most superstitious of old women, began to see il mal occhio—the evil eye—in the monkey’s gaze. Young children and grandmothers began to look away from the creature and make the sign of the cross upon entering or leaving the boardinghouse. The signora insisted that I remove the creature’s cage from the front to the back porch. There, the older boys spat at her and poked her with sticks as she sat, hissing and shivering. Americo Cavoli, the signora’s nephew, made a hobby of tormenting that godforsaken creature. I knew this went on, but what could I do? Quit my work? Interrupt my sleep to play policeman for that goddamned monkey?

  As a boss dyer and property owner, I, of course, embraced modern ideas, dismissing as women’s foolishness the growing suspicion of il mal occhio. I regarded Filippa not as a witch but as a nuisance—one more expense in a sea of financial obligations that swirled around me because of my new home and my brother’s funeral expenses. On practical grounds, I began to realize how unfortunate my hasty promise to my dying brother had been. For the sake of economy, I cut back on the expensive mixture of bananas, grain, and honey that Pasquale had provided for her, feeding her now, instead, potato peels and other garbage from Signora Siragusa’s kitchen. The signora began to complain about Filippa’s lice and about the foul-smelling diarrhea with which the monkey’s new diet had afflicted her. Winter was coming. The signora didn’t want that unclean little she-devil living down in the coal cellar, dispensing trouble and bugs up through the heating grates. Soon, the boarders in her house would all be scratching themselves, or packing their bags, or meeting with tragedy like my poor brother! She owned a boardinghouse, not a giardino zoologico. I would have to do something, she warned.

  That same evening, as I reached into Filippa’s filthy cage to dump her nightly swill, that goddamned monkey bared her fangs and bit me savagely on the wrist. I cursed the thing, sucked my hand at the point of the wound, and made a plan.

  The next Sunday morning, I paid young Cavoli a nickel to run to Hollyhock Avenue with a burlap sack, line the bottom of it with broken, discarded bricks, and lug the bag to the Sachem River Bridge. I instructed the boy to wait for me there. Cautiously, I opened Filippa’s cage and leashed the balking monkey.

  We two walked toward the river. At several points, I was forced to drag the creature, who seemed somehow to understand the fate that was about to befall her. And when we arrived at our destination, Filippa held fast to the bars of the footbridge railing and screamed.

  I grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and young Cavoli held open the sack. Between us, we managed to force her inside the brick-weighted bag and cinch the top. Filippa had scratched and bitten us both in the struggle and now she poked and battled with unnatural strength to free herself from the bag. Somehow, we managed to lift that goddamned screaming monkey over the railing and let go.

  The bag sank efficiently.

  What had to be done had been done and now it was over.

  Ha! That’s what I thought!

  36

  “So he drags her to the bridge, shoves her into this bag they’ve weighted down, and throws her over the side. Just drowns her.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Because it was easier to kill the damn thing than to keep his promise.” I was standing by her window, watching the Sachem River rush by behind the trees. We’d had a week or so of warmer weather; the current was traveling at a pretty good clip from the late-winter thaw. “I don’t know, Doc. Maybe I should stop reading the damn thing. Chuck it into the woodstove or something.”

  “Burn your family history, Dominick? Why would you do that?”

  “Because it riles me up. . . . Last night? After I read about all that monkey stuff? I couldn’t even sleep.” I turned and faced Dr. Patel. “We resemble him, you know? Thomas and me.”

  “Your grandfather? Yes? You have photographs?”

  I nodded. “My mother used to keep this big scrapbook—all her family pictures. God, she was always dragging that thing out. She even rescued it once.” I saw Ma burst from the burning house, screaming—that scrapbook clutched to her chest.

  “Rescued it?”

  “We had a fire at our house. When Thomas and I were kids. . . . You know what’s weird about reading that thing? The more I get into it, the less I can stand the son of a bitch—the way he treats people, the way he thinks he’s better than everyone—but at the same time, I can sort of recognize him, you know? Relate to him, on some level.”

  “You’re talking about more than physical resemblance then?”

  “I guess. Yeah. . . . Last night? After I read how he drowned the monkey? I started thinking about how I’d gotten trapped by a promise, same as him. Same as Papa. . . . That was the last thing I ever said to her, you know? I ever tell you that?”

  “The last thing you said to whom?”

  “My mother. I promised her I’d take care of him. Keep him safe—her ‘little bunny rabbit.’ . . . It was the very last thing I said to her before she died.” I locked my arms across my chest. Watched two boys hike along the bank of the rushing river.

  “Do you think you relate to your grandfather in some respects because—?”

  “Because we both welshed on our promises. Went back on our word.”

  Dr. Patel said she didn’t see how I had arrived at that conclusion. Hadn’t I campaigned tirelessly—aggressively, for better or worse—on my brother’s behalf? What made me feel that I had failed to honor my word to my mother?

  The question made me laugh. “Look where he is,” I said. “Locked in his cage down there. A year, minimum, with an option to renew. Rubbing elbows with every goddamn psychopath who . . . Yeah, Doc, I did a great job of keeping him safe for her, didn’t I?”

  “Dominick, we’ve been over this before. For you to take responsibility for circumstances beyond your control is both counterproductive and—”

  “Look, you can say whatever you want to try and make me feel better or whatever, but the truth is I blew it for him. Fell off that freakin’ roof over there, missed his hearing, and then bam! He ends up long term at the Hatch Hotel.”

  Dr. Patel shook her head. In the first place, she said, she doubted whether my appearance at Thomas’s hearing would have changed a course of action that was most likely inevitable. And second, the pledge I had made to my mother while she was dying—merciful and well-intentioned as it might have been—had exacted a very high personal cost. Too high a cost, in her opinion. It had made me unhappy, unwell—suicidal, even, for a brief period last fall. Certainly, my mother would not have wanted me to sacrifice my own well-being in a futile attempt to secure the well-being of my brother.

  “That’s debatable,” I mumbled.

  “Yes? Why do you say that?”

  I shrugged, looked away. “No reason. Never mind.”

  I could feel, rather than see, her watching me. Neither of us said a word.

  “Dominick,” she finally said. “In talking about your grandfather, you’ve been quite critical of what you see as his del
usions of grandeur. I ask you to consider if that is, perhaps, another of the resemblances you share.”

  I let out a one-note laugh—asked her what that was supposed to mean.

  “It means that Thomas became schizophrenic and you did not because God or fate or random selection made it so. It means that your brother is at Hatch for the next year because the state thinks that is where he best belongs. You cannot control these things, regardless of what promises you made, or to whom.”

  “Yeah, well, if I ever need a lawyer to help me beat a rap, I’ll call you, Doc. But the truth is, I could have gotten him out of there. I know I could have.”

  She disagreed, she said.

  “Okay, fine. We agree to disagree.”

  She stood up and walked toward the window. Stood beside me, looking out. “I’ve watched you stare out this window many times now,” she said. “What are you always looking at so intently?”

  Nothing, I told her. Just the river.

  “Ah,” she said. “Well, do me a favor, please. Give me a demonstration of these great powers you have to direct the course of things. Throw open the window, please, and call to the river. Tell it you want it to stop flowing in its present direction and reverse itself. Let me see this power of yours.”

  I looked into her mischievous eyes. “I suppose you’re trying to make a point?”

  “A little point, a little joke,” she said. “Would it not be futile for you to make such a command? To assume that the river would ignore its inevitable course and bend to your wishes? You are limited, my friend, in what you can and cannot control, as are we all. If you are to become healthy, you must acknowledge the ineluctability of your brother’s course. Acknowledge your limitations in directing it, Dominick. And that will free you. That will help to make you well.”

  I looked from her smile down to the one on Shiva’s face. “So what am I supposed to do?” I said. “Shove him in a burlap bag? Drag him down there and throw him off the bridge?”

  She reached out and touched the small of my back. Looked out at the river with me. “Is that what you’d like to do, Dominick?” she asked. I closed my eyes and saw, again, my morphine dream: saw and felt myself strangle my brother, cut him down from the tree, carry him toward this same damn river. “Answer my question, please,” she said. “Do you sometimes want to destroy your brother?”