I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

As if promising her would finally put me in first place, even for a minute—for one fucking minute before she died. . . . All my life, I had come in second. Number two in a two-man race. Even now I was, with her gone four years and him locked away at Hatch. Number two in our never-ending two-man struggle.

  And it hurt. It hurt, Ma—being the lookout, the spider monkey—the one you never invited onto your lap. . . .

  It hurt, Ma. It goddamned hurt. . . .

  37

  5 August 1949

  I left Signora Siragusa’s boardinghouse and took residence of my vitrified brick casa di due appartamenti on 1 April 1916. I had been the first Italian at American Woolen and Textile Company to rise to the position of boss dyer. Now I became the first of my countrymen to own his own home in Three Rivers—a home I had built with my own two hands! I welcomed Salvatore Tusia, the barber, and his wife and children to the left-side apartment and received my first monthly rent, eleven dollars and fifty cents, paid to me in cash. I had wanted twelve a month, but Tusia brought me down in exchange for a haircut whenever I needed one and a daily shave. I made Tusia cut my hair every Friday, to make sure I got my money’s worth.

  I wrote to my Brooklyn cousins to say I would honor them with a two-day visit at Easter. Notify the Iaccoi brothers next door, I told them. The trip would allow me to meet, at long last, my bride-to-be, Prosperine. At this time, the Iaccois and I would establish a wedding date and finalize the dowry price. In fairness to myself, I would attach to the asking price the cost of my train ticket to and from New York and a new three-piece suit, which I would wear for the trip and also on my wedding day.

  At my cousins’ table that Easter Sunday, I raised my glass and made a memorable speech about the Old Country and the Tempesta family. I spoke a eulogy to Papa and Mama and made tribute to my two departed brothers. My words brought tears to the eyes of all present, except for Lena and Vitaglio’s youngest brat, who was allowed to rummage beneath the dining room table, tickling ankles and pulling at the stockings of the adults. Shameful, disrespectful behavior! When that little mosquito snapped my garter in the middle of my remarks, I reached under the table and gave him what he deserved. The crying, head-bumping, and wine-spilling that followed ruined the rest of my speech. “Well,” Lena smiled, “let’s make the best of it and eat, then, before the macaroni gets any colder.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “if you and Vitaglio cannot rule your young ones any better than this, then why don’t we ignore the dead and eat?”

  That evening, I excused myself, rose from the table, and went next door to my meeting with the Iaccoi brothers. Finally, I would feast my eyes on my Sicilian bride.

  Fluttering like two pigeons, Rocco and Nunzio Iaccoi met me in the foyer and told me repeatedly what a great honor it was to receive into their home a man who had made himself such a success. They took me to their parlor and offered me the largest of the stuffed chairs, lit me a cigar, and carried the standing ashtray across the room for my convenience. When they were sure I was comfortable, they called to their cousin Prosperine, who was waiting in the kitchen. “Uncap the anisetta, cousin,” they sang out. “Bring three glasses.”

  There was a long wait and then, in the kitchen, the sound of things dropping, glass breaking. “Scusi,” Nunzio Iaccoi said, smiling so broadly that it looked like he had a pain.

  Rocco laughed and shrugged, shrugged and laughed. “In almost two years of living here, this is the first time that dear, sweet girl has broken anything,” he said. “My hotheaded half-sister, Ignazia, she throws things against the wall during temper fits, and is clumsy as well, but little Prosperine is as graceful and sure-handed as any young girl I’ve seen.”

  That goddamned plumber wasn’t fooling me. The girl’s obvious clumsiness is a bargaining tool for me, I thought. Something to drive up the dowry price a bit.

  Nunzio returned to the parlor. “The problem was nothing, ha ha,” he said. “If only all our problems could be swept away with a broom, eh, Domenico? Ha ha ha.” The brothers’ laughter and sighs did little to conceal their nervousness.

  When Prosperine emerged from the kitchen, I attempted to rise, but each of the Iaccois held me down with a hand on my shoulders. “Sit, sit,” Rocco said. “No need to get up. Rest yourself.”

  At first, I could not look at her face but saw, instead, her tiny size. She was no taller than a girl of twelve. No bigger than Mama! My eyes dropped to the floor.

  I looked up from her high-buttoned shoes to her black dress with its small waist. She’d pinned a cluster of artificial flowers there. My eyes rose past the anisetta in their little glasses, which she held on a small tray before her. My glance moved from her flat bosom to a cameo pinned to the high neck of her dress. When I arrived at her faccia, my jaw dropped.

  “Signore Domenico Tempesta,” Nunzio said. “May I present Prosperine Tucci, your sposa futura!”

  “When hell freezes over!” I shouted. Elbowing past the brothers, I made my way to their front door!

  The thing that had made me drop all sense of propriety was the face of Prosperine. For one thing, she was far from the young girl those lying plumbers had promised me. That skinny hag was probably thirty if she was a day! Worse—far worse—her homely, scrawny face bore a shocking resemblance to Filippa, that goddamned drowned monkey that had bewitched my poor brother Pasquale!

  * * *

  That night, I twisted and turned on my cousins’ lumpy divan as if I was back aboard the SS Napolitano! Had my brother Pasquale sent this skinny bitch up from the mundo suttomari as revenge because I had drowned his “little queen”? Had my brother Vincenzo sent her to mock, once again, my chastity? Or had Mama sent a monkey for me to marry because I had forsaken her to seek my fortune in America?

  “Meglio celibe che mal sposato!”*I whispered to myself. Better to die without sons than to have to make them with that!

  Somewhere in the middle of that long night in Brooklyn, a church bell rang three times. Mama, Pasquale, Vincenzo: maybe all three of them had conspired and sent this monkey-woman to me! But a gift sent is not the same as a gift accepted. I decided I would wait until daylight, board the earliest train possible, go back to my big house in Three Rivers, Connecticut, and live my life as a bachelor.

  6 August 1949

  The Iaccois and their monkey-cousin were already in Lena and Vitaglio’s kitchen when I awoke the next morning. It was the brothers’ angry voices that roused me from my pitiful sleep. “Ha! So here’s the man whose promises mean nothing!” Rocco said as I entered the kitchen.

  “Please,” Lena told the Iaccois. “Let my poor cousin eat his breakfast in peace. Shouting is bad for digestione.” She placed before me frittata, sausage and potatoes, coffee, Easter bread. Here was a woman who knew how to take care of men!

  I took a sip of coffee, a mouthful of egg. I made those two goddamned plumbers wait. “A promise collapses when it is made to deceitful men,” I finally said.

  How dare I accuse them of deceit, Nunzio shouted. It was I, not they, who had initiated discussion about a wife—two wives, not one, he reminded me.

  “So what do you think? That I climbed up on that roof and pushed my poor brother off? What do you two fools expect me to do? Marry two women and live the life of a bigamo?”

  “Marrying one of them will do!” Rocco said. “The one you promised to marry. The one who has spent two years waiting for her home to be completed and now has spent the night sobbing into her pillow because you have so grievously wronged her!”

  “Eat, Domenico,” Lena insisted. “Eat your breakfast while it’s hot and then have your argument.”

  As I chewed and swallowed, swallowed and chewed, I took small glimpses of Prosperine. She was seated on a chair by the window. In the morning light, she looked twenty-five, perhaps, not thirty, but she was even uglier than she had been the night before. Today she wore peasant clothes and a kerchief on that shrunken head of hers. She was smoking a pipe!

  “You have falsely represented this creature,”
I told the brothers. “Look at her over there, smoking like a man! She is not beautiful! She is not young!”

  Nunzio stuttered and resorted to proverbs. “Gadina vecchia fa bonu brodo,”* he insisted. And I answered him with a proverb of my own: “Cucinala come vuoi, ma sempre cocuzza e!”**

  “This woman is as pure as the Blessed Virgin,” Rocco argued.

  “If this one is vergine,” I said, “it is due to lack of opportunity. No meat on her bones! No tette! This one would have shriveled the cazzu of my brother Vincenzo!” In reaction to my vulgarity, uttered in the heat of battle, my cousin Lena gave a scream and lifted her apron over her face. Not Prosperine, though. That one was as hard as nails!

  “Beware, Tempesta,” Nunzio Iaccoi warned. “In America, there are courts of law that make sure a man keeps his word. We have saved every letter and telegram you sent.”

  “Don’t try to scare me, plumber!” I shouted back. “What judge with eyes in his head would sentence me to a life with that one? She belongs at the end of an organ-grinder’s leash, not in the marriage bed of a man of property!”

  Of course, I was a proper man and a gentleman and never would have spoken that way in the hag’s presence if those two brothers hadn’t pushed me to it, but now the damage was done. My eyes followed the others’ eyes to Prosperine and a shiver passed through me. Without blinking or turning away, she puffed on her pipe and glared at me with the black look of il mal occhio itself. As I have said before, a modern man such as Domenico Tempesta leaves superstition to foolish old women. But at that moment in my cousin Lena’s kitchen, I longed to clutch a gobbo, a red chili, a pig’s tooth—anything to ward off that monkey-woman’s evil eye!

  My sweet cousin Lena, in an effort to end the impasse before fisticuffs broke out in her kitchen, poured coffee, passed biscotti and Easter bread to the Iaccois, and reminded us all that there had been, since the beginning of our negotiations, not one but two bridal candidates living under the Iaccois’ roof. “Scusa, Signorina Prosperine,” she said, addressing the other one without looking at her. “Scusa me a million times for saying so, but Domenico has changed his mind.”

  Prosperine took the pipe from her mouth and spat out the open window. “Bah!” she said, then clamped the pipe again between her teeth.

  Lena turned to me and took my hand. “Domenico, before you begin your long trip home, wouldn’t you at least like to meet the Iaccois’ pretty sister, Ignazia?”

  “Let them marry off their women to other fools!” I said back. “I’m done with Iaccoi business!”

  At this, Rocco raised his fists, but Nunzio pushed them back down again. “Aspetta un momento!” he said, then whispered to Rocco, who ran out the kitchen door. The rest of us waited and waited for . . . for who knew what? As for my stomach, it felt like I had swallowed the anchor of the SS Napolitano instead of my cousin’s eggs and bread and coffee!

  Ten minutes later, Rocco burst back through the doorway. He had in his hands Ignazia’s immigration papers and a daguerreotype of the girl. The papers established that she had been born in 1898 and thus was truly eighteen years of age. The photograph verified that she was as beautiful as the other one was homely—a girl well suited to be the wife of a property owner. A girl with some meat on her bones.

  I was persuaded to return after lunch to the Iaccois’ front parlor and wait for Ignazia’s arrival back from her friend’s home. As I waited, I stared at the picture of the girl, and fell under its spell. Her flowing hair and full lips stirred me. Her dark eyes looked directly at my eyes. Her full face whispered the promise of a figura as plump and lovely as Venus’s.

  I fell in love with that picture and fell more in love still with the flesh-and-blood girl who walked defiantly through her brothers’ front door an hour later than she was expected.

  “Where have you been?” her brother asked.

  “I’ve been where I’ve been!” she answered boldly.

  She was wearing a woolen coat dyed as red as blood. Such a striking vermiglio had never emerged from the vats at American Woolen and Textile, I tell you! And such a woman had never lived in the tiny village of Giuliana or in Three Rivers, Connecticut. Her hair, black and wild, ended where her buttocks began. Her wide hips were built to bracket a husband and to push forth children into the world. She had cast her spell upon me even before her coat was off! At long last, I was in love!

  “Domenico Tempesta, it is my great pleasure to present to you my half-sister, Ignazia,” Rocco said.

  This is the one, I told myself. This is the woman I have waited for. Here before me, scowling, stands my very own wife!

  But the girl gave me barely a glance. Turning to Prosperine, she asked if she had fed the company all the braciola from the Easter meal the day before. She was as hungry as an elefante, she said, and patted her belly.

  “Please, Ignazia, worry later about your stomach,” Nunzio said. “Sit and visit. Show a little respect for a man of property and a factory boss!”

  Ignazia turned to Prosperine. “Ah, so this is your long-lost innamorato, eh?” she laughed.

  “Bah!” the other one answered, puffing away on her pipe.

  “Never mind your ‘bah,’” Nunzio scolded. “Make us espresso. Quick, before I turn you out of this house!”

  The Monkey slumped into the kitchen; the two brothers’ faces regained their false smiles. They began to ask questions about my casa di due appartamenti and to repeat each of my answers to their half-sister. Ignazia tapped her shoe and sang a little song to herself instead of listening. “I’ll help in the kitchen,” she said.

  I watched her rise and walk from the room. Bad as it was for bargaining, I could do nothing but stare at her exiting figure and then at the doorway through which she had passed.

  “Ignazia’s job at the shoe factory has exposed her to many bad influences,” Rocco whispered after she had left the room. “She has gotten the foolish notion, for example, that, like ‘Mericani, Italian women should marry for love. Ha ha ha ha.”

  “You like what you see, eh, Domenico?” Nunzio noted from across the room. “If she becomes your wife, she’ll soon forget all of these ‘Mericana ways. You’ll make her siciliana again!

  For my part, I could do nothing but swallow and stare—finger her photograph in my hand and anticipate her reentrance from the kitchen.

  The door banged open again a minute later. Ignazia was holding a heel of bread in one hand, a chicken leg in the other. “Oh, no!” she shouted, shaking her head violently. “Oh, no, no, no, no!”

  “Scusa?” one of the brothers said.

  “She just told me in the kitchen what you three old men have up your sleeves,” the girl said. “I’ve told you over and over. I’m going to marry Padraic McGannon and that’s who I am going to marry!”

  “That lazy Irishman with no job?” Rocco shouted. “That redheaded mama’s boy whose mouth still smells of breast milk?”

  I had first laid eyes on Ignazia only moments before, but hearing her profess her intentions to marry another man sank my heart and made me want to find that goddamned Irishman and strangle him! Such was Ignazia’s power over me.

  “Where would you and that lazy good-for-nothing live?” Nunzio wanted to know.

  Ignazia put her hands against her fleshy hips. “With his mother,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “On something old men know nothing about, that’s what. L’amore! Passione!”

  Nunzio shook his head at the folly of it and Rocco made the sign of the cross. In the past few minutes, I had learned much about passione and amore. It was as if Mount Etna’s hot lava now boiled within me where, before, my blood had been cool. Ignazia robbed the room of air. This I knew above all else: that she would be the wife of no one but Domenico Onofrio Tempesta!

  “Scusa, young lady, scusa,” I stood and began. “Your brothers and I have a long-standing agreement—one which will provide richly for you, if I should consent to make you my wife.” Here, I drew a deep breath and expanded my ch
est for her to see, wholly, the man she was getting.

  “If you consent?” she laughed. “If you consent? Who wants to be your wife, old man? Go marry some gray-haired old nonna!” She bit savagely into that chicken leg of hers, ripping meat from the bone, and chewing ravenously as she glared at me.

  The passione with which Ignazia rejected the idea of marrying me only made me desire her more. This impudent girl would be my wife, whether she liked it or not!

  “Young lady,” I said, attempting reason. “Your brothers’ honor is at stake here. I paid good money for a train ride from Connecticut to meet my sposa futura. Trust me when I say that agreements between Sicilian men—which you needn’t bother your pretty head about—are binding!”

  “How much?”

  “Eh?”

  “How much did you pay for your train ride?” she asked me.

  I told her I had paid a dollar, fifty cents.

  Brazenly, she produced a small change purse from a secret place beneath her skirts. She opened it and counted coins. “Here’s your precious money, then,” she shouted, flinging a handful of coins at my feet. Terrible behavior, and yet, it made me want her more—made me want to spank her for her impertinence, to ravage her, to tame her with my ardore! The girl made me short of breath—made me think crazy thoughts. I stood there, drunk with her, and suddenly knew my dead brother Vincenzo better than I had ever known him before.

  “I am marrying Padraic McGannon and that’s who I’m marrying!” she declared again, then stormed from the room.

  “That one has a hellcat’s disposition,” I said to the brothers, “but I suppose she will do. I’ll take her off your hands for a dowry of seven hundred dollars.”

  “Seven hundred!” Rocco shouted. “What do you think—that we two are as rich as you? This girl is a jewel—a diamond waiting to be polished. Once she is cured of this love-foolishness over that redheaded mick—”

  The mention of that boy again was like a scream in my ear. “Five hundred and fifty, then. That is my final offer. The money, after all, will be used to furnish the appartamento where your half-sister will live like a queen. When you two visit, you yourselves will sleep on feather beds her dowry will have purchased.”