I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  For our second jaunt, we went to Friendly’s for lunch. When I asked him where he’d like to go for field trip number three, his answer surprised me.

  “How about the movies?” he said.

  “The movies? Yeah?” Ray had been on record since back when Thomas and I were kids: movies were nothing but a waste of time and money.

  I held the Daily Record’s entertainment ads in front of him. Figured he’d probably pick Dances with Wolves, which I’d already suffered through once. Naked Gun and some Arnold Schwarzenegger thing were both playing over at Center Cinema.

  “How about this thing?” he said, his finger tapping against an ad for The Little Mermaid.

  “That’s a Disney cartoon, Ray,” I said. “It’s a kids’ movie.”

  He knew goddamned well what it was, he said. They ran ads for it every five seconds on the TV, didn’t they? What did I want to see, then? What the hell had I even asked him for?

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “The Little Mermaid. We’re there.”

  In the theater lobby, people stared at his crutches, his flapping pant leg—kids and adults. By the time he’d finished up in the men’s room, the movie had already started. I was a nervous wreck helping him down the sloping aisle in the dark. But after we’d gotten seated, after my heartbeat had gone back to normal and I’d recovered enough to pick up the gist of the story, I saw the logic of Ray’s choice. He’d needed to see a story about a feisty mermaid who wanted what she couldn’t have—wanted legs—and then had gotten both what she wished for and what she hadn’t. At one point, I looked over at Ray, studying his movie-lit profile: locked jaw, scowl. What I was looking at, I realized, was his courage.

  “Well, how’d you like it?” I asked him on our way back to Rivercrest. “Not bad,” was his emotionless two-word review. Back at the home, the wheelchair brigade was stationed at the front door as usual. “Excuse me. Are you, by any chance, my son, Harold?” Maizie asked me, right on cue.

  Ray answered before I could. “His name’s Dominick Birdsey!” he snapped. “He’s my kid!” Heading down the hallway, not quite out of earshot, he mumbled something about “old coots” and “goddamned nuisances.”

  Somewhere during that first month at Rivercrest, Ray made a couple of friends: Stony, a retired roofer who’d once fought Willie Pep in the Golden Gloves, and Norman, who’d fought in World War II at Bataan. Back in the old days, Norman claimed—when he was a kid working at his father’s horse-drawn lunch wagon in downtown Three Rivers—he had served Mae West a piece of rhubarb pie. Free of charge. She was passing through town in vaudeville. There was a lot of kidding back and forth about that. What else had he served her? What had she served him? Maybe that new one—what’d she call herself? Madonna? Maybe she liked a little of Norman’s rhubarb pie, too.

  Norman, Stony, and Ray: “the Three Musketeers,” someone on the staff dubbed them. They ate their meals together in the dining room. Played pinochle in Stony’s room. (Only Stony’s radio could pull in that Big Band station from New Haven.) “Your father’s doing much, much better,” the social worker told me. Ray decided he might as well try that fake leg. See how it felt. What the hell—his insurance paid for it. No sense them getting a free ride.

  We watched baseball sometimes, Ray and me. Played a little cribbage. Usually the TV did more talking than we did. One day, he started complaining about the crummy shaves the orderlies gave him. They had to use electric razors—there was some kind of house rule about it—but an electric razor never shaved him right.

  “Shave yourself,” I said.

  He told me he couldn’t—his hands shook. He held them up to demonstrate.”You’d probably come in here someday, find my head on the floor. Why don’t you shave me?”

  I resisted at first—let it drop the first couple of times he mentioned it—but he kept it up. “All right, all right,” I finally said, wheeling him into the cramped little bathroom adjacent to his room. “We’ll try it.”

  It felt weird that first time—unnatural—lathering him up, holding him by the chin and scraping the stubble off his neck, his slack cheeks. We’d never touched one another much in our family, Ray and me least of all. But I got used to it. After the first couple times, it didn’t seem so strange. Probably more than anything else, it was shaving Ray that broke down the final barriers between us. . . .

  Because getting shaved made him talkative. Made him open up. I learned more about Ray during those shaves than I had ever known before. He’d lost both his father and his older brother to influenza in 1923, the same year he was born. At least he’d been raised to believe they were his father and brother. When he was ten years old, the woman Ray had always been told was his mother took sick with rheumatic fever. On her deathbed, she let out the truth: that she was really his grandmother. That his “sister” Edna had given birth to him.

  As I listened, I thought about that framed photograph he kept on his bureau back at the house on Hollyhock Avenue: pictured the woman Thomas and I had laughed at behind his back—had called Ma Kettle. Now she had a name: Edna.

  After it was just the two of them—just Edna and him—they drifted from place to place. Someone would hire Edna as a housekeeper, everything would be hunky-dory for a while and then, the next thing Ray knew, they’d have to move again. . . . She’d meant well enough, he said; she wasn’t a bad person. But she was weak. “Weak to temptation. In plain English, she was a tramp, I guess. And a drunk.”

  The worst of it came when Edna got them a room above one of the taverns downtown. “Tavern row,” they called it—plenty to pick from. Edna would make the rounds—bring home riffraff, one plug-ugly drunk after another. One night he’d been awakened right out of a sound sleep by some guy sitting there, trying to start something funny with him. After that, he’d slept with a ball-peen hammer in his bed. “It would have been okay if the others had lived,” he said. “But it had come down to just her and me.”

  He’d gotten out as soon as he could, he said—had quit school and joined the Navy. Edna had had to sign a paper. “At first she wouldn’t sign it,” he said. “I was always working odd jobs, see? Bringing in a little money.” But she’d signed it, finally, one night when she was “good and soused” and he’d gotten the hell out of there. He’d only gone back to Youngstown once since then, and that was to bury her. December of 1945, it was; he remembered because he’d just gotten out of the Navy. Had just bought his black DeSoto. Drove it all the way out to Ohio and back without a spare tire. Edna had died from liver problems, he said—from drink. Forty-one years old and she’d looked about sixty-one, lying there in that coffin. Other than that one trip, he’d left Ohio behind him at seventeen and never looked back.

  In the war, he’d been stationed in France and then, later on, in Italy. It-ly, he pronounced it. The Italians were good people, he said—hospitable people, even in the middle of war. When he got out, he sold vacuum cleaners for a while. He’d dated a gal up in Framingham, Massachusetts, but it hadn’t worked out. Olga, her name was. Ukrainian gal. Too bossy. When Korea started up, Ray had reenlisted. He didn’t have to go—not by any means. He was only a couple of years from the cutoff age for enlisted men by that time. But he’d always felt a duty to his country, right or wrong. He didn’t even question right or wrong. That was for the big shots and the politicians to decide. And besides that, he still had the fight left in him. Plenty of “piss and vinegar” that he might as well spend on the North Koreans as on the guy at the barstool next to him, or the jerk that had just cut in front of him while he was driving along, minding his own business.

  “Then, after I got out of that one, that was when the job with Fuller Brush came along. It was just a stopgap thing until I could get something better. But that was how I met your mother, of course. Lets me in over there at the house, and I start unpacking my samples, and all of a sudden she bursts into tears. Just burst right into tears. At first, I didn’t know what the hell had happened. I thought she’d hurt herself or something.

  “S
he had her hands full with you two, of course. Both of you had earaches that first day I stopped in, I remember; you’d both been running her ragged. And, of course, she was all alone. She’d lost her father the year before—was just barely scraping by on what he had left her. I kind of felt sorry for her. She was in way over her head. . . .

  “Course, I was kind of sweet on her, too. She had some nice curves to her. And that mouth of hers—that never bothered me. ‘Just as kissable as anyone else’s,’ I used to tell her. I knew right away she was a good woman. Kind of shy, maybe, but I didn’t mind that. I’d come to like Italians, see? Because of my experiences in the war. . . . She was nothing like Edna—your mother. She’d just made a mistake, that was all. Anyone can make a mistake. You think I was an angel when I was in the Navy? I’d stuck my dipstick into plenty of places I shouldn’t have. Plus, I kind of got a kick out of you kids. ‘Double trouble,’ I used to call the two of you. You were both a couple of hellions.”

  His presence in your life has been a constant, I heard Doc Patel tell me. He has been there, borne witness.

  “I know I made mistakes with you two,” he said. “With him, especially. That day of the funeral, there? Afterward—back at the house? You weren’t accusing me of anything that I hadn’t already accused myself of. . . . I just never understood that kid. Me and him, we were like oil and water. . . . I hadn’t grown up with a father, see? All I knew was that it was a tough world out there. I figured that was the one thing I could do for you two: toughen you up a little, so that you could take whatever sucker punches life was going to throw at you. . . . ‘They’re just little boys, Ray,’ she used to say to me all the time. But I didn’t see it. I was pigheaded about it, I guess. And, of course, I knew neither of you two liked me that much. Had me pegged as the bad guy all the time. The guy who wrecked everyone’s fun. Sometimes you three would be laughing at something, and I’d walk into the room, and bam! three long faces.”

  “It was your temper,” I said. “We were afraid of you.”

  He nodded. “I have a bad temper. I know I do. It was because of what I’d come from. I was mad at the world, I guess. . . . But Jesus, I’d get so mad at her when she tried to run interference for him all the time. That used to drive me up the ever-loving wall. . . . And, of course, that day I come home and found the two of them up there, him in that foolish hat, those high-heel shoes . . .

  “I failed him—I know that. Probably failed the both of you. Right?”

  I couldn’t answer him. Jesus, he’d been brutal to us. But he’d been there. . . . He’d told Ma her mouth was just as kissable as anyone else’s.

  “Things get clearer when you’re older,” he said. “Of course, by then it’s too late.”

  I’d finished shaving him. Wheeled him out of his bathroom and over by the bed. I sat down next to him. “It wasn’t just you,” I said. “We were all a little screwed up, Ma included.”

  “She had her quirks like everyone else,” he said. “But she was a good woman.”

  My heart thumped in my chest. I almost couldn’t get it out.

  Almost couldn’t ask it.

  “Before?” I said. “When you said that neither of you were angels? Did you . . . did she ever tell you who he was? Our father?”

  We looked each other in the eye. I waited, not even breathing. My whole life rode on his answer.

  “We never talked about that kind of stuff,” he finally said. “Had kind of an unspoken deal, I guess. All that was water under the bridge. . . . We just let the past lie, her and me.”

  47

  Leo’s racquet scooped low for the shot. Thwock! The ball skidded up the back wall, arced high across the court, and grazed the front wall six inches from the floor.

  “And I am,” he shouted, “the King of Racquetball!”

  “Nice shot,” I conceded. “Okay, that’s it. Your game.”

  He’d just whipped me three in a row—something he’d never been able to do before. Soaked with sweat, out of breath, we headed for the rain room.

  “Hey, Birds,” Leo called over, midshampoo. “You got time for a beer?”

  I told him I didn’t—that I had to get dressed and get out of there.

  “Yeah? What for? You got a hot date or something?”

  I cut the water, grabbed my towel. “Hot date with Ray’s social worker,” I said. “We’ve got to go over his Medicare stuff.”

  It was a lie. Joy had called, out of the blue, the night before. She was in Three Rivers visiting friends, she’d said; she wondered if she could come over and see me before she went back. Just to say hello, show me the baby. I’d said no at first. What was the point? But she’d kept pushing: we hadn’t seen each other in almost a year, there was so much that she wanted to tell me about. Had I gotten the picture she’d sent of Tyffanie?

  That hospital mug shot: for some stupid reason, I’d stuck it on my refrigerator door. Joy promised she wouldn’t stay long. A fifteen-minute visit and she’d be on her way.

  “Must be a bummer, huh?” Leo said. “All that convalescent-home bullshit?”

  “It’s doable,” I said. “Especially now that Ray’s mellowed out a little.” If I had told Leo about Joy, I would have gotten a lecture about how I didn’t owe that bitch anything. How, after what she’d tried to pull, I should have just told her to go to hell and hung up on her. I knew it was stupid, meeting her; I didn’t need Leo to point that out. But fifteen minutes was all she’d asked for. You could live through anything for fifteen minutes.

  “Hey,” I said. “Let me see your deodorant, will you? I was in a rush getting over here. Forgot all my shit.” The truth was that I’d been distracted—nervous about Joy’s visit.

  “Geez, I don’t know, Birdsey,” Leo said. “I’m not sure I want to make that big a commitment to you yet.” His Dry Idea came flying at me. “Hey, Dominick. Guess what I heard today? From Irene?”

  When I looked over at him, he was pulling up a pair of jazzy boxer shorts. “Whoo-ee,” I said. “Where’s my sunglasses? When’d you start wearing those things?”

  “Since I read what jockeys do to your sperm count,” he said. “But listen to me. I’m serious. She said that Big Gene told her—”

  “Who said?”

  “Irene. Their accountant. She says Gene told her he’s thinking about retiring at the end of the year. Doing some traveling with Thula. I think that tumble she took over at the house kind of scared them a little. Forced them to reevaluate things or whatever. . . . End of this year, Birdsey. Nobody knows yet.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. “They’re not going to have to carry him out of there?”

  I laced up my sneakers, went over to the mirror to calm my hair down a little. I’d forgotten my hairbrush back at the house, too. If I’d known that seeing her was going to get me this bent out of shape, I’d have stuck to my guns. I raked my fingers through my hair. That was all she was getting: a quick finger-comb. I didn’t even owe her that much.

  “Hey, Dominick?” Leo said. He had that anxious look on his face that he gets sometimes. I was pretty sure I knew what was coming. “Let’s say he does pack it in. I mean, I’ll believe it when I see it, too, but let’s say he does. . . . You think I’d have a shot at General Manager?”

  Poor Leo: he was the Rodney Dangerfield of Constantine Motors. All those years down at that place, and all he’d ever really wanted was a little respect from his father-in-law. That, and his own office—a desk parked off the showroom floor. But, sure as hell, the partnership was going to bypass him and name Costas’s son, Peter, as General Manager. Big Gene would kick Leo in the balls one more time. Break his daughter Angie’s heart by breaking her husband’s agates. No doubt about it.

  “I think you got a shot at it if the partners have half a brain among them,” I said.

  “You think I could handle it?”

  I looked at his face in the mirror, behind my face. My answer was important. “You kidding me?” I said. “You’d do a great job.” That was the thing w
ith Leo: for all his bullshit, all his bluster, he’d always registered a little low in the self-esteem department. He should have left that dealership years ago.

  He nodded, pleased with my answer. “Yeah, my time has come, I think. I’ve had their best sales the last four months in a row. Did I tell you that?” He knotted his tie, banged his locker door shut. “I’m freakin’ forty-three years old, man. I’m the father of his grandchildren.”

  “Hey, speaking of which,” I said. “What the fuck you worrying about your sperm count for?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Us sex machines just worry about shit like that.”

  We left the gym, headed toward our cars. I was easing out of the parking lot, stewing again about Joy’s visit, when Leo tooted, motioning me to wait. I braked, rolled down my window. He pulled up beside me. “Hey, I heard something else today,” he said. “I’m not supposed to say anything. Angie would kill me. It’s about her sister.”

  My hands gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. I waited.

  “She and Danny? They’re splitting up.”

  I just sat there, nodding, unable to think.

  “It’s not another woman or anything. It’s one of those stay-friends-but-go-their-separate-ways deals. He wants to move back to Santa Fe and she wants to stay here.”

  “It’s definite?”

  “Far as I know. At first she was going with him, but then she did an about-face. Hey, don’t call her or anything, Dominick. Okay? Angie would murder me. The Old Man and the Old Lady don’t even know about it yet.”

  I said I wouldn’t say anything.

  “So anyway, about that other thing? You really think I got a shot at it?”

  “What? . . . Yeah. Absolutely.”

  “You think I could handle it, though? Right? Be honest. It’s not like I majored in business or anything.”

  “You majored in acting,” I said. “That’s better training for that place. And anyway, you had their best sales the last four months in a row, you just swept me in racquetball. You’re fuckin’ invincible, Leo.”