by Wally Lamb
She had been brave after all. Brave enough to go on—to raise us as best she could. And earlier: the sober girl in those photographs, standing next to her father in a starched pinafore, her fist to her face to cover her disfigured mouth. A brave eight-year-old girl, dragged that night into the bitter cold by a mother who’d been starved of hope. Made crazy from despair. . . . There’d been evidence of a struggle out there, the Old Man had written. A story told in footprints. But that brave, serious girl had kept her mother’s terrible secret—had said nothing to the police, or to her father. It was the footprints that had told. In her anger or her crazy despair, Ignazia had meant to take her with her—take her daughter’s life. But Ma had struggled. Had saved herself. Had hidden in the shack and survived the night and then gone home and lived with her father. . . .
Had she loved Papa as much as she’d always claimed? Hated him? Had my brother and I been conceived in evil? . . . “The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta” had turned out to be just another hall of mirrors, just one more maze inside the maze. Because by the end of his story, the Old Man had confessed everything and nothing. Like father, like daughter, I thought. They had both known how to keep their secrets. . . .
I reached down, pulled a page from the garbage bag. Flattened it and read. “I have always had that small satisfaction, at least: the memory of that moment when I won my battle against the Monkey, when I used my God-given cleverness to punish that she-devil for the sins she had committed against Domenico Tempesta. . . .”
I shook my head at his hopelessness, his isolation out there on that last day of his life. Domenico had starved to death, too.
“I’m not saying it’s impossible, Dominick,” Dr. Patel said. “I’m saying it’s highly improbable. You’re not retarded. You don’t suffer from hemophilia or any of the other myriad complications. If you are, as you fear, the product of incest, you seem to have come away remarkably unscathed.”
Unscathed? I reminded her that my brother had been a schizophrenic, that my daughter had died in the fourth week of her life.
A specious argument, she said. As far as she knew, there was no scientific evidence linking father-daughter incest to either schizophrenia or SIDS. I was welcome to research the topic, of course, but she doubted I would find anything. That left me with what she saw as a somewhat neurotic fear and one vague remark in my grandfather’s book: that my mother had known how to keep secrets. It could mean anything, she said. Secrets her mother told her, secret recipes. And, of course, the terrible secret that the mother who had given her life had tried, that night, to take it away.
Father-daughter incest: Dr. Patel’s giving it a name, a label, somehow confined it. Put a cage around it and made me feel safer. What had she just accused me of? A “somewhat neurotic” fear?
From what I’d told her, she said, my grandfather had been a terribly unhappy and misguided man—cruel, self-serving, paranoid, perhaps—although she was always reluctant to diagnose the dead. But none of what I had told her meant, necessarily, that he had raped his daughter and fathered my brother and me.
“Then I’m exactly where I was before I read the damn thing,” I said.
“And where is that, my friend?”
“Fucked up. . . . Fatherless.”
She said she begged to differ on a couple of counts. First of all, I was certainly not fatherless, provided I was willing to think beyond sperm and egg. If one defined one’s father as the male elder who attended one’s passage from childhood to adulthood, then my father was lying in a hospital bed over at Shanley Memorial, recovering from surgery. Whatever Ray’s parental shortcomings had been, whatever trauma he had caused me and my brother, his presence in my life had been a constant. He had borne witness.
Nor did she feel that the completion of my grandfather’s history had left me exactly where I had been. “Indulge the anthropologist in me, please, Dominick,” she said. “Let’s think for a moment of the manuscript not as a mystery with a maddeningly inconclusive ending, but as a parable. Parables instruct. One reaches the end of an allegory and confronts the lesson it offers. And so I ask you: what does your grandfather’s story teach you?”
“What does it teach me?” I shifted in my seat. Looked away. “I don’t know. Watch out for thin ice? Steer clear of monkeys?”
She clapped her hands together like a fed-up schoolteacher. “Seriously, please!”
Our eyes met. I leaned forward. “That I should stop feeling so goddamned sinned against,” I said. “That I have to let go of grudges.”
She smiled. Nodded. Clapped again, this time in applause.
Intentionally or not, Dr. Patel said, my grandfather had given me a valuable gift: the parable of his failure. And I should not forget who had been the conduit of that story. It had come to me by way of a mother who, Dr. Patel suspected, had loved me deeply—a woman who, despite her meekness, had been quite courageous. In fighting for her life out there at the pond that night, she had made possible mine and Thomas’s lives. She had made mistakes along the way—yes, yes, there was no denying it—but she had nevertheless raised her two sons in good faith. Had done her best. And it was to me, personally, that she had bequeathed her father’s story.
“Use your gift, Dominick,” Dr. Patel said. “Learn from it. Let it set you free.”
“Is he finished yet?” the dietary aide asked me, a little huffy this time. She’d been in twice before to collect Ray’s untouched lunch tray. At the nurses’ station, they’d told me he’d woken up around eleven, been given another shot of morphine, and then drifted back to Dreamland.
“He’s still out,” I told the aide. “Go ahead. Just take it.” It was three-thirty. Who the hell had been prescribing his painkillers, anyway—Dr. Kevorkian?
I watched the aide attempt the impossible: balancing Ray’s tray atop her already overflowing cart. It slid clattering to the floor, and the two of us bent to sop up soup, reconstruct his sandwich, locate a runaway apple. By the time I looked back at Ray again, his eyes were open. “Who are you?” he said.
I told him I was Dominick. Asked him how he was feeling.
“Who?”
“Dominick,” I said. “Connie’s son. One of the twins.”
“Oh,” he said. “I thought you were the hall monitor.”
The hall monitor? I asked him if he knew where he was. He surveyed the room, studied the hallway outside and then looked back at me. “The hospital?”
I nodded. Reminded him he’d had an operation the day before. He asked me when the football game was starting.
Football game? I glanced up at the ceiling-mounted TV. I’d been watching it without sound while I waited for him to wake up. “There’s no football on now, Ray,” I said. “It’s May. Baseball season. Basketball playoffs.”
He leaned forward, looking down at his amputation without any observable understanding of loss. “Has Edna been here to see me?” he asked.
“Edna?” I said. “Who’s Edna?”
“Edna,” he said. “You know. My sister.” He shook his head, disgusted. “What’s this?” He had picked up the tethered TV remote.
“Changes the channels,” I said. “On your TV up there. Go ahead, try it. The blue button, not the red one. The red one calls the nurse.” He pressed the red button, then the blue. Held his thumb down on it. Channels whizzed by: soap operas, CNN, the Maytag repairman. He stopped when he got to Oprah.
“Yes?” a staticky voice said. “How may I help you?”
“Oh,” I said. “He . . . we just pushed the wrong button. Sorry.”
Click.
“What time is the football game starting?” Ray asked again. When I reminded him that it wasn’t football season, he interrupted me to lead a cheer.
Strawberry shortcake! Huckleberry pie!
V-I-C-T-O-R-Y!
Can we do it? Yes, yes, yes!
We are the students of the B-G-S!
I glanced out into the hall. Up at Oprah. “What’s the, uh . . . what’s BGS?”
“The BGS!” he said. “The BGS! The Broadway Grammar School! What are you, slow or something?”
“I don’t know. I guess there probably is a God. There has to be.”
Dessa dangled the tea bag in and out of her cup. Looked up at me.
“He’s not merciful, though. That’s a crock. He’s more into irony than mercy. He’s a gotcha! kind of god. A practical jokester. Because this is just too perfect to chalk up to random coincidence.”
Dessa said she wasn’t following me.
“Well, think about it,” I said. “First my brother dies. Then my stepfather loses an appendage, starts talking crazy. Stump II: the Sequel. It’s perfect.”
Dessa said she was pretty sure that God dealt in challenges, not practical jokes.
We were seated at a back table in the hospital cafeteria. An hour earlier, I’d held open the elevator door for hurrying footsteps that had turned out to be my ex-wife’s. Now, with the exception of the white-haired woman at the cash register and a couple of whispering candy stripers two tables over, we had the place to ourselves.
“And anyway,” she said, “didn’t they say he was probably just disoriented from the pain medication? Didn’t you just tell me that you woke up disoriented after your surgery?” A few minutes earlier, I’d alluded to my strange morphine dream without going into the details: suffocating my brother as he hung from that tree, cutting him down and lugging him to the river. Kind of funny, in a way: in my morphine hallucination, I’d been a murderer. Ray had become head cheerleader in his.
Neither of us said anything for a minute or so. I finished my coffee. Began unraveling the Styrofoam cup, apple-peel style. We both sat there, watching the long, continuous spiral. “You still go to church?” I said.
It was weird I was asking, she said. She hadn’t been—had stayed away for years—but she’d just started going again.
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Because of this place, partly.”
When I’d run into her on the elevator, I’d assumed that something else was wrong with her mother, but Dessa had said no—she’d started volunteering in the children’s hospice. “You should see some of these kids I’m working with, Dominick,” she said now. “They’re so sick, so brave. They all seem like miracles to me.”
She told me about a six-year-old girl with a brain tumor and a giggle so infectious that she could start a whole room laughing. About the AIDS babies with their string of infections, their need to be held and rocked. About Nicky, a seven-year-old boy with an enzyme disorder that had gradually robbed him of speech, balance, the ability, even, to swallow. Nicky was her favorite, she said. “You should see the way music lights up his eyes. And lights. Remember those lava lamps everyone used to get stoned and stare at? Nicky will just stare and stare at one of those things, as if it makes sense—explains something to him that the rest of us don’t get. He’s got such beautiful brown eyes, Dominick. That’s one of the places where I see God, I think. In Nicky’s eyes.” She laughed, embarrassed suddenly. “It’s hard to explain. I must sound so New Age.”
I poked my foot against her foot. “Well, there’s probably still hope,” I said. “You haven’t bought any Yanni tapes yet, have you?”
The AIDS kids had the hardest struggle, she said. They didn’t want to eat, because eating made them sicker. So on top of everything else the poor little guys were contending with, there was the real danger of malnutrition.
Starve something long enough and it dies, I thought.
“So what do you do for these kids?”
She said she read to them, rocked them. Did a little pet therapy.
“Pet therapy?” I said. “What’s pet therapy?”
The kids really responded to animals, she said. There was a cool dog named Marshmallow that visited once a week. They had fish. And rabbits—Zeke and Zack. “We’ve got to be really careful because of infection—there’s all kinds of restrictions and regulations—but the kids love animals so much.”
Mostly she just held the kids, she said. That was probably the most useful thing she did. “Kids this sick want physical closeness more than anything else. They just want to be held.”
“You sure this is good for you?” I asked. “You sure this doesn’t cost you too much?”
She smiled, shook her head. She knew it sounded depressing, she said, but it wasn’t. That was the miracle. It made her happy to be around these kids—to be a part of their precious days. She felt more at peace with herself than she had in years.
I smiled. Said I thought she’d kept her promise after all.
“What promise?”
“Clapton’s kid? The little dude who fell from the window? I think you caught him after all.” I watched her confusion turn into remembrance of that dream she had told me about. Watched her eyes fill up with tears.
Did she want to go up? Say hello to Ray?
She checked her watch. She’d like to, she said, but she was running late—meeting Dan for dinner. But, okay, she’d just stop in and say hello. She couldn’t stay, though.
Riding the elevator back to the fourth floor, I realized that she’d just mentioned her boyfriend’s name without me wanting to punch a wall. Progress of some kind, I figured. All that therapy had been good for something. “So how’s Sadie?” I said.
“Oh. Dominick . . .” She reached for me. “She died.” Her hand fell back to her side. “I had to have her put to sleep. I’m sorry. I should have called you.”
I shrugged. Told her it was okay—she’d been her dog, not mine.
“She was our dog,” she said.
The elevator stopped on the third floor, opened its doors to nobody, then closed again. We continued up. “She died peacefully, Dominick.” She took a step toward me. Leaned, a little, against me.
When we got to Ray’s room, he was sitting up, having himself a nurse-assisted sip of juice. “Brought you some company,” I said.
“Hi, Ray,” Dessa said. He stared at her blankly.
“You remember who this is?” I asked him.
He took another sip of his juice. Gave us a grin so slight I almost missed it. “Hot Lips Houlihan,” he said.
By the third day after his surgery, Ray was lucid again. His “craziness” had been caused by the painkillers, just like they’d said. Twelve days after the amputation of his right leg, Ray was deemed steady enough on crutches to be transferred to a subacute rehabilitation center.
Rivercrest Convalescent Home had cheerful wallpaper, a cheery staff, and an earnest daily schedule of physical therapy, occupational therapy, and sing-alongs. Each day I visited, I ran a gauntlet of wheelchair-bound “sentries”—old geezers who spent their whole day parked at the front entrance, watching the ebb and flow of visitors, employees, and delivery men. Hoping, I guess, for news of life beyond the parking lot. Some of them I got to know by name: Daphne, the vamp of the group in her Technicolor housecoats; Maizie, who always asked me coming and going if I was her son, Harold; Warren, whose universal greeting was “Hello, Cap’n Peacock!”
Sitting among the sentries, slumped and wizened, was a nameless old woman I came to think of as Princess Evil Eye. Everyone down there made a big deal about the Princess; pushing one hundred, she was Rivercrest’s oldest resident. She and I never exchanged words, the way I did with the rest of them, but she seemed, always, to train her beady eyes on me when I entered the home—to follow my progress down the corridor to Ray’s room. I know this because sometimes I stopped and looked back and it freaked me out a little: the way she’d watch me. . . . “The Crew” I called them. Daphne, Warren, the Princess. The welcoming committee at the way station between life and whatever the hell was coming after it. Rivercrest was purgatory, with wheelchairs.
Ray was sullen and quiet his first week or so, and what his social worker called “semicooperative” after that. At the end of a two-week campaign to enlist him in her programs and special activities, the recreation director abandoned him as a project and let him
stay in his room and sulk. He wavered in his decision about whether or not to get an artificial leg. “If I was a horse, they’d just take me out and shoot me,” he said one day.
“Your father’s depressed,” they told me. They said he sometimes cried in private in his room. It was to be expected. These things took time.
I began visiting him almost every day. Began taking his dirty laundry home after Laundry Services lost his favorite shirt. He didn’t have that much; I had the time. By then, I had sold my painting equipment to Sheffer’s buddy or partner or whatever’s the politically correct way to say it these days. I’d gone up to Hartford and taken that test for my teaching reinstatement. Signed up for that refresher course you had to take. I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to go back to the classroom, but I figured I’d get my ducks lined up, just in case. I had until the end of the summer before I’d become “economically challenged.” Sometimes schools needed teachers at the last minute. By then, Ray would be home and, hopefully, self-sufficient again.
I brought him the New York and Boston papers when I visited—the Post, the Herald. Brought him a hamburger from The Prime Steer once or twice a week because all of Rivercrest’s meat was “like shoe leather.” Because they even screwed up meat loaf. “Jesus, what’d you do this again for?” he’d say, when I’d hand him his take-out food. “Don’t waste your money. I don’t even have an appetite.” Then he’d dig in—devour the damn thing in six or seven minutes flat.
The staff thought getting out for a couple of hours might lift Ray’s spirits a little, so I took a lesson from the physical therapist on how to help him in and out of the car, what to do when he needed to get to the toilet. We were both nervous the first time. I took him for a drive around Three Rivers, out past the big casino construction. “Jesus Christ Almighty,” he said. “This thing’s going to be huge. Well, what the hell. More power to ’em.” His position on the Wequonnocs surprised me a little; it seemed to me that he’d spent a lifetime begrudging anyone good fortune.
