by Wally Lamb
“No battesimo,” I told Ignazia. She had come upstairs to my bedroom—to the room where she had once slept by my side—to ask my permission.
“Why not?” she said. “So that my suffering can continue? So that both my babies can be lost to God’s mercy?”
I had said nothing to Ignazia about the boy’s purification in the pantry on the morning of his birth and death. My fear was that my action may have angered God—a boy christened with dishwater by a father who had thrown cement at a priest, forsaken Jesus Christ. . . . If I had harmed the soul of my own son with blasphemous battesimo, I would not then send the redhead’s daughter into Heaven.
“I once ordered two priests off this property,” I told Ignazia. “I will not be ipocrita now and go crawling back to them on my knees.”
“Then I’ll bring her to them,” she said. I shook my head and told her she would do what I told her to do.
“What kind of selfish father would keep the gates of Heaven locked against his own child?” she shouted. “Yours is a wicked sin!”
“Better shut up your mouth about my sins!” I told her. “Worry, instead, about your own—the ones you committed here with that no-good redheaded mick in New York and the ones you committed back in the Old Country.”
She turned her face away from mine and hurried out of the room. But I followed her down the stairwell and through the downstairs to the back room. She was face down on the bed, sobbing against the pillows. From the doorway, I warned her—made it clear that if she defied me and had the girl baptized in secret, she would pay a high price. “If I discover such a plan,” I told her, “you and your scrawny friend will live to regret it.”
In spite of all I knew, now, about Ignazia—in spite of the fear and hatred that stood between us—my passione for her was stronger than ever. My eyes could never stop following her around a room. Her face and figura were a constant torment. A hundred times a day, I kissed her mouth, unpinned her hair, ripped away her buttons, and had what was mine, but these actions I took only in my immaginazione. . . . Sometimes I would torture myself by thinking of those filthy pictures the fotografo had taken of her back in the Old Country—see those photographs being passed around from man to man. I would shudder at this, my fingers twitching with the desire to slit the throats of those faceless men. My wife in the hands of every man except her lawful husband! But mixed with the torture of knowing that those photographs existed was the excitement of what they had captured. To have unspent lust for a murderous wife was a terrible thing—a living Hell!
Sometimes in my dreams she loved me—submitted to me with obedience and desire as a good Sicilian wife surrenders herself to her husband. I would wake from these reveries in a rush of joy and excitement. Then sadness would overtake me and I would clean myself, wipe away the spilt milk of desire that made children but could make none for me. Once, too, I had a very strange and terrible dream in which Ignazia shared her passione with my dead brother Vincenzo, while I sat on the bed and combed her long hair. In that dream, I was happy, not jealous, and woke only slowly to the humiliation of the story my dream had told me. I could almost hear Vincenzo laughing at me from Hell.
Sometimes my longing for my wife’s flesh would reach me at work and become an ache so strong that it distracted me. Even the giggles of the homely little spinning girls could excite me . . . even Nabby Drinkwater’s boastful talk of his pleasures at the whorehouse on Bickel Road.
One morning, my hunger led me past the signora’s and down to that place on Bickel Road where the fat Hungarian woman kept her whores and house cats. The inside of that place reeked of cabbage and cat piss. I paid and she called to a skinny servant girl who was busy polishing the staircase railing. “This way,” the girl said, and I followed her up the stairs. I thought she was taking me to a whore, but when I entered the room, she closed the door behind us. She was no more than fourteen, fifteen . . . did not yet have the meat of a grown woman on her bones. While I did what I did, she looked the same as she had looked polishing that banister. I left that house with a promise that I had gone there for the first and last time. But I went there again and again, each time worrying that I would run into Drinkwater—that that goddamned Indian who worked beneath me would know that I shared his weakness for the flesh. That the devil that had claimed my brother Vincenzo had claimed me, too.
I always had the same girl. Always, after I finished my business, I made her put on her clothes and leave quickly. I would stare at the wall while she dressed herself, my shame taking over once my ardore had been spent. Then I would rise from that cheap bed, button myself, and walk back to my house where I lived with two murderous women and a redhaired baby whose mouth was split and whose soul remained stained with original sin.
One day, a little after the war was over, I read in the newspaper that that dog-faced Monsignor McNulty had keeled over and died from a bad heart. The paper said little Father Guglielmo had been named acting pastor of St. Mary of Jesus Christ Church—the church’s first pastore Italiano. I was happy for both McNulty’s death and Guglielmo’s promotion. I had never had quarrel with Padre Guglielmo—he had only been the other one’s whipped dog. In my mind, I wished him well.
Not a week later, when I went to the boardinghouse for my breakfast, I found Guglielmo waiting for me in Signora Siragusa’s kitchen. The old signora fluttered around in a sweat, making special cakes and frittata and frying dough in her finest olive oil, as if the Pope himself had dropped in. “It’s good to see you again, my friend,” Guglielmo said. “It’s been a while now, hasn’t it? How’s your wife these days?”
I told him my wife was fed and cared for.
“And your child? A daughter, isn’t it? Why, she must be walking by now.”
I nodded. Ambush, I thought. But I told myself I was too clever to be taken in by such imboscata as this. Signora Siragusa could put all the sugar she wanted on that fried dough of hers, but I was not about to let that redhead’s daughter be baptized.
Two years had passed since the girl’s birth. The war against the Germans had been fought and won and American Woolen and Textile had dyed all the wool for the sailors’ coats. Tusia’s wife and Signora Siragusa had both spoken to me about my refusal to let the child be christened. Even Tusia himself had had the nerve to lecture me one morning while I sat in his barber’s chair getting my free shave. (Tusia thought he was a big shot now—pezzo grosso in both Knights of Columbus and Sons of Italy.) “Scusa, Salvatore,” I told him, right in the middle of his big speech. “You better mind your own business before I decide to raise your rent.” That shut him up, all right. For the rest of my shave, the only sound in the shop was the voice of Caruso coming out of Tusia’s Victrola.
In the years I had been away from the church, Father Guglielmo’s face had broadened a little and his hair had turned to silver. Now he held out his hand for me to shake it. Signora Siragusa stopped her bustling to watch. The three of us waited to see what that hand of mine would do.
I shook Guglielmo’s hand. Like I said, I had never had a quarrel with that little priest who had once sat out in the parlor at the signora’s and tried to help me talk sense into my brother Vincenzo. More than just the color of Guglielmo’s hair had changed. He smoked sigaretti now, one after another, and he no longer carried himself like a man afraid of the world. He asked about my health and my work and called me by my first name. I congratulated him on his appointment as pastore and said I hoped the old monsignor had gone to Hell where he belonged.
Signora Siragusa gasped and slapped at me with her dishcloth, but Guglielmo thanked me for my good wishes. “May I sit and join you for breakfast and have a little talk?” he asked me.
“Oh, si, padre, of course you can sit with him!” the old signora answered for me. “Sit! Sit and rest yourself! I hope you brought your appetite.”
“Talk about what?” I asked. “If it’s a baby’s battesimo you want to talk about, then save your breath.”
The priest shook his head. “I want to talk ab
out masonry,” he said.
“Masonry? What about masonry?”
He asked the signora if we might have a word or two alone. She poured our coffee, put plates before us, then hurried out of the room. Guglielmo and I said nothing more until she left.
I had guessed he was talking in priestly metaphor—that he would now begin a big speech about battesimo, how each “brick” in place was a stairway to God. But he surprised me. He spoke of real bricks, real mortar. St. Mary of Jesus Christ Church would soon break ground for a new parochial school, he said. A parish school had long been his dream, but Monsignor McNulty had consistently opposed the idea as too costly and too much of a headache. The Catholic schoolchildren of Three Rivers had always, by necessity, had to board in New London and separate from their families during the week. Now the archbishop had listened to Guglielmo’s plan and approved it. An architect and builder from Hartford had been hired. But the archbishop had warned the little priest of the trouble he would call on himself if the project failed or became too costly for the church.
What he needed, Guglielmo said, was a knowledgeable and thrifty parishioner to supervise the construction and represent the interests of the parish. “I have no knowledge in these areas myself,” he said. “And the school, successful or not, will stand as testimony to my stewardship. If my pastorate is to be permanent, Domenico, then the new school must be sound, inside and out. I come to ask your help.”
I took a bite of frittata, chewed and chewed it. Took another bite. “How much does this job pay?” I asked.
Pays nothing, he told me. I would have to donate my time and talent. But the school would open in two years, maybe three—in plenty of time for my little daughter to attend. “That’s all I can offer for compensation, Domenico,” he said. “I appeal to the father in you, not the businessman.”
“Fathers are breadwinners,” I said. “Working for nothing puts nothing on the table.”
“And yet,” he said, “we have the miracle of the loaves and fishes to guide us.” He told me he asked no more of me than an hour or so each day. Perhaps I could inspect the building site in the morning on my way home from the mill, or in the late afternoon when I had risen from my sleep. He just needed someone to keep an eye on the daily progress of things. “As Jesus is steward of us all, I seek a steward for this school where children will be taught His holy word,” he told me.
For some crazy reason, his talk about the loaves and fishes made me think of Prosperine’s story: how the witch had made two rabbits from one and killed off the schoolteacher. My head was mixed up with magic and miracles.
I finished my breakfast and stood. “Too busy,” I told him.
“Too busy or too angry, still?”
I looked at his face, then looked away. He asked me to sit back down again, to give him just a minute more of my time. So I sat.
“The day your brother fell from the roof was a terrible day for us all,” he said. “For you. For me. For the monsignor, too. From his deathbed, he spoke with regret about that day and prayed to God for forgiveness for having mocked your poor brother. I, too, have regretted my weakness on that day—my failure to intervene, to act as God would have wanted me to. . . . Look at me, please, Domenico. Let my eyes see your eyes.”
It was hard to look, but I looked.
“Here in this kitchen, I hold out the olive branch. It is long overdue, but it is offered in good faith. Let bygones be bygones. Let anger be buried in the ground. Forgive me, Domenico. I appeal to you as a brother would appeal.”
His mention of brothers made me look away again. “I have no brothers,” I said. “The police shot one and a monsignor’s curse pushed the other off the roof. And as for your school, there are plenty of other bricklayers in the parish. There’s Riccordino or Di Prima. There’s that Polack who lives on—”
He placed his hand on my hand to stop me. “You once told me,” he said, “that you had to leave a life of priestly study and learn the trade of masonry because of family obligation.”
“Si,” I said. “I left my books, left the seminary school in Rome, to clean up my brother Vincenzo’s mess. There was no choice. It was what my father ordered.”
“Everything that happens is a part of God’s plan,” Guglielmo said. “Your beautiful home on Hollyhock Avenue would not stand today if you had no knowledge of brick. Why not let a religious school become the bridge between your early spiritual training and the masonry you learned in obedience to your father?”
When I closed my eyes against tears, I saw Papa and Sicily and my life as it had been. . . . Saw again the eyes of the Weeping Vergine who had, long ago, beckoned me to be a priest and save souls. Among all the children of Italy, it was I to whom the Holy Mother had revealed her sadness. . . . And now . . . and now I lived an ocean away and dyed wool instead of saving souls. Now I practiced a priest’s celibacy in my own home and walked to Bickel Road to fuck a skinny whore because a baby inside my wife would kill her. Sitting in that kitchen across from Guglielmo, I saw how far my life had strayed from the life I had meant to live, and I wiped away the water in my eyes.
“I could ask Di Prima or Riccordino to help me, Domenico,” Guglielmo continued. “I will ask one of them if you refuse. But it is you I have chosen to come to first. It is you whose guidance I seek.”
We talked for over an hour that morning—never once about the girl’s baptism, but only about buildings and bricks. We ate more of the signora’s cooking and drank more of her coffee, then cleared the table and had a look at the blueprints Guglielmo had brought along. By the time we left that kitchen, I had agreed to help him. Passing through the parlor on my way out the front door of the boardinghouse, Guglielmo and I took all of Signora Siragusa’s hugs and kisses and God-blessings; she had been sitting and praying her rosary all the time we were in the other room. Praying for me, she said—the son she always wished was her own, even though she had four sons already.
Guglielmo was right to trust my guidance the most—and lucky to have me. Di Prima laid brick crooked—what help would he have been? And Riccordino was pazzu. Without Domenico Tempesta watching, those Yankee builders from Hartford would have robbed the church blind and built a school that the wind would knock over. As for that poor priest, he didn’t know what a joist was for or which part of a trowel scooped the cement! But I knew, all right. Those Yankee builders would do the job right and they would not overcharge the church for a single nail as long as Domenico Onofrio Tempesta was watching.
My supervision of the construction meant daily inspections and then a visit to the rectory or the building site with Guglielmo. One afternoon, a Saturday, he took out his pocket watch during our meeting and said he had to go next door to hear confessions. Did I, perhaps, wish to join him there?
I shook my head. “I’m beyond all that,” I said.
“Beyond absolution, Domenico? No, no—never beyond God’s forgiveness. Jesus loves all His flock, even the lamb that strays.” He said he often prayed that peace would come to my home—that he hoped his prayers would someday light a candle in my heart.
I told him to save his prayers and candles for lambs whose houses had not been cursed by an unholy monsignore.
“But your home can be a peaceful one,” he said. “The key to serenity is forgiveness.”
I stood and watched him walk toward that church where sinners waited for him, but I did not follow him there. He knew nothing of women—murderous or otherwise. He knew as little about my home as he did about building a brick schoolhouse.
But all that next week—at home, at American Woolen, even in the upstairs room on Bickel Road—I thought about what that priest had said—that he had prayed for peace to come to 66-through-68 Hollyhock Avenue. That peace was possible.
I was the first one inside the church the following Saturday. I got there early, hoping to go in quickly and leave. I didn’t want to make confession—none of that. Too busy. I wanted only to ask Guglielmo a question or two, the kind of questions I could not ask from ac
ross his desk at the rectory, or walking along the periphery of the new school’s foundation. Like pebbles inside my shoe, these questions plagued me. The further I went, the more they let me know they were there.
Guglielmo was late getting to the church that afternoon. Someone else came in—DiGangi, it was, I remember. Street sweeper. Then another man and his wife, a group of schoolgirls. The door creaked open again and again. We all sat in the pews and waited.
Father Guglielmo came in through the back of the church and lit the lights. He cleared his throat as he passed me but did not look or say hello. He went inside the confessional and closed the door. The others stood and formed a line. Not me. Let this line of sinners pour out their guts to him, I told myself. I’m not here to confess. I’m here only to ask my two questions.
For hours, sinners came and went. A few I recognized. Many I did not. I had stayed away from that church for six years. By four o’clock, the church was empty again, except for Guglielmo and me. He sat in his box, waiting. I sat in the pew, telling myself to stand, to walk in there, kneel, and ask Guglielmo my questions. But finally, when I did stand, I turned and walked the other way, slowly at first and then faster, up the aisle and out through the vestibule. I pushed open the heavy wooden doors—escaped into the cool air. I was out of breath, even though I had wasted the afternoon just sitting.
That next week, all through our meetings about the school, I waited for Guglielmo to bring up my presence inside the church the Saturday before—to ask me why I had gone to confession but not confessed. No doubt he would have known my voice, would have been waiting to hear what sins the supervisor of his beloved school had on his soul. I had my answers ready for him—I was busy, he had been late. I didn’t want to confess anything, anyway—what was on my soul was my business. But he did not mention my being there. Maybe he hadn’t seen me after all. I kept my mouth shut and so did Guglielmo.
At work one night, Nabby Drinkwater—that goddamned Indian who worked for me—kept dropping the bolts of wool. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked him.
