I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  “Non-reactive?”

  That was good, she said. That was what I wanted. Non-reactive.

  I walked around the condo. Took deep breaths. Dropped to the floor and did push-ups. Go to some bar and get shit-faced, I told myself. Go celebrate life.

  I grabbed the keys, got in the car. It took me to the hospital.

  I passed sleeping children, fretting children, empty cribs. Passed those two rabbits that Dessa had told me about. Pet therapy, she’d called it. “You wanna play?” a bald-headed girl asked me. She sat before a TV screen, playing Nintendo. “I’ll let you. There’s two controls.”

  “Can’t now,” I said. “Maybe later.”

  Dessa was in a room off to the left, seated in a rocker, holding and rocking a sprawled boy in feet pajamas. A big bruiser. The two of them, sitting, rocking, made a kind of pietà.

  “Hi,” Dessa said. “What are you doing here?”

  Bob Marley was playing from a kiddie tape recorder: One heart, one love . . .

  The boy was staring at a strange lamp on the table next to them. One of those fiberoptic things—hundreds of strands, a small, fragile tip of light at each end. I squinted at it and it became the night sky in miniature—the heavens themselves.

  “I heard . . . I heard there were kids at this place that need holding,” I said.

  Dessa nodded. “This is Nicky,” she said. “My leg’s asleep. I could use a break.”

  He had black hair, bushy eyebrows, huge brown eyes. “Hey, Nicky,” I said. Reached down and took him from her. Lifted him into my arms.

  All my life, I had imagined the scenario in which my father would, at last, reveal himself to me. As a kid, I’d cooked up cowboy dads, pilot fathers who made emergency landings on Hollyhock Avenue, hopped from their planes, and rescued us from Ray. Later, I had cast gym teachers, shop teachers, the man who owned the hobby shop downtown, and even benign Mr. Anthony across the street as potential fathers: the real thing, as opposed to the intruder who had married my mother and installed himself at our house to make us miserable. I was thirty-six years old and still fantasizing when the doctors told Ma that her cancer would kill her. Over the months I watched her wither, I’d kept romanticizing her death—shaping it, as usual, to my own selfish need. She would pull me close and deliver me to my father, I thought—whisper his name into my ear and then go peacefully, having delivered us both. . . . By then, I had managed to gain, then lose, my grandfather’s “history”—had lost it permanently, I thought. My suspicion at the time had rested on Angelo Nardi, the dashing Italian stenographer my grandfather had hired to help him write his story, his “guide for Italian youth.” They’d been friends, she said. She made him coffee, helped him with his English. She’d hardly ever gone out. Who else could it have been? . . . Later on, after Domenico’s manuscript had come back to me—had dropped thunk! onto my hospital bed—I’d begun the history in hopes that I would find my father within its pages. Hesitantly, with growing difficulty, I had let Domenico’s voice fill up my head—had struggled with the ugliness and dread of what I became surer and surer his sorry story would reveal. . . . But in the end, Domenico had left me nothing more than a legacy of riddles and monkeys, cryptic remarks about secret-keeping that neither confirmed nor denied what I had come to fear: that he had taken evil advantage of the harelipped daughter he assumed no other man would want. That he had needed to punish, even in her death, the troubled wife he had always wanted but never really had.

  But in a lifetime of fantasizing—of waiting for my real father to appear—I could not have imagined that I would find him in the exact same place—in the exact same booth—where, ten months earlier, my brother had sat across from me and warned me that, should America launch a holy war against the Nation of Islam, God’s vengeance would be swift and terrible. That he, Thomas, was fasting in preparation for a sacrifice he hoped would short-circuit a Holy War and rescue the children of God. . . . And the last person I had ever expected would deliver me from the pain and confusion of a withheld identity was the man who, I had always felt, had stepped in and stolen my true father’s place. In the end, it was Ray who delivered me—Ray who took me, finally, into his arms and held me and brought me home to the man I had spent a lifetime looking for.

  “So how’s it feel, overall?” I asked him.

  “Feels all right. It’s chafing a little. I probably overdid it.”

  It was Ray’s first foray into the world on his brand-new leg. Things had gone well for a change—better than expected. We’d gone to Benny’s for some batteries. Had stopped back at Hollyhock Avenue to check things out—make sure everything was secure. Now we were at Friendly’s having lunch. Celebrating his new leg.

  “Well, they said they can make some minor adjustments after you’ve taken it for a couple of test runs,” I reminded him. “Make sure you tell them about that chafing.”

  “Okay, Dad,” he quipped. Our waitress approached with menus.

  “Hi, guys. My name’s Kristin. How are you two doing today?”

  “None of your business,” Ray said. He cracked a smile. He was feeling his oats.

  “None of my business, huh? Okay, you old grouch. What can I get for you, then?”

  I recognized her. She’d been a fledgling that day when she’d waited on my brother and me—a trainee. Thomas had treated her to a sample of his religious manifesto and she’d stood there, order pad in hand, speechless. Now, ten months later, the Gulf War had been fought and filed away, my brother was dead, and Kristin here was an old pro at handling cranky customers.

  Ray ordered the potpie; I got one of those “supermelt” things. Kristin asked us if we wanted our coffees right away. If we thought the hurricane everyone was talking about was actually going to come up as far as Connecticut. “Pfft,” Ray said. “Hurricane Bob. Doesn’t sound too scary to me. They just play these things up on the television to jack up their ratings.”

  Kristin told us she and her boyfriend were going out after work to get candles, masking tape for the windows, junk food. She came from Minnesota, she said. This was her first hurricane. She was “psyched.”

  After she was out of earshot, Ray muttered that she wouldn’t be so “psyched” if her roof blew off.

  “Sure she would,” I said. “She’s young, she’s got a landlord to worry about the roof. All she’s got to do is screw her boyfriend by candlelight and pass the potato chips.”

  “Sounds like a good life,” Ray said. “What the hell are you and I doing wrong?”

  I asked him if he’d been following the news about Russia. “Looks like the Communists may be on the ropes over there, huh?” I said. “How do you feel about that?”

  “How do I feel about it?” He said he didn’t feel anything. Why? What was he supposed to feel?

  I reminded him that he’d gone to war to stop the Communists over in Korea. That he’d worked almost forty years building nuclear subs, just in case the Russians decided to drop the bomb.

  “That was all politics,” he said. “I just went to work every day and did my job. . . . You mark my words, though. Day after tomorrow, all those TV guys that are ballyhooing this Hurricane Bob thing will be going ‘Hurricane? What hurricane?’”

  I sat there, baffled by his nonreaction to the teetering of the Soviet empire.

  Our food came. The restaurant emptied out as we ate. Neither of us said too much more and, in the silence, my mind drifted to the phone conversation I’d had that morning with Joy. I couldn’t promise her something like that, I’d told her. She’d be all right; they were coming out with new drugs all the time. How about that AZT stuff I’d just read about? Had she heard about that?

  I’d try to help her out as much as I could, I’d said—help both of them out—but my own life was still up in the air. I couldn’t commit to something as big as that—I just couldn’t. She had to get a grip; there were support services available for people in her situation. It was just a matter of finding out how to access them. I hadn’t meant for it to come out lik
e a speech—like my lecture that time about couch-buying. But that was what Joy accused me of doing: giving her a speech when all she needed was some peace of mind—a promise that her daughter would be taken care of by someone she trusted. Not shipped off to some foster home with perverts or people who only wanted the money. She’d cried more than spoken during that conversation—had finally hung up in my face.

  “I been thinking about something,” Ray said. “It’s been bothering me.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. I took a sip of coffee. I thought we were talking about his leg.

  “Do you remember a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago? About your father? . . . How I said she never told me who he was?”

  I nodded. Held my breath.

  He had had a similar kind of thing pulled on him, he said—the way his family had tricked him into thinking Edna was his sister instead of his mother. That was what he’d been thinking about ever since that conversation we’d had. Our situations were different, of course, but similar in other ways. It had pulled the rug out from under him when he’d found out the truth, he said; he’d had a right to know who his own mother was, for Christ’s sake. Having the wool pulled over his eyes like that—well, in one way or another, he’d paid for that the rest of his life. He’d always felt inferior to other people, he said. Ashamed. And mad—mad at the whole world. Not that my situation and his were the same. Well, in a way they were. They were the same but they were different.

  “What . . . what are you saying?” My heart raced; my breathing went shallow. Now that the moment was finally here, I was afraid to know.

  “I had promised her, you see? Your mother. . . . She only told me a couple months before she passed away. I didn’t know anything about it before then. We didn’t talk about that kind of thing. I was just as much in the dark as you were. But after she got sick, it weighed on her. She needed to tell someone, so she told me. Made me promise not to say anything. But I don’t know. It’s different now. There’s money involved. . . . She couldn’t have seen that coming.”

  What was he talking about?

  “She was kind of ashamed of it, you see? Of what she’d done. Of course, nowadays, they have babies out of wedlock all the time, all colors of the rainbow, and nobody even thinks anything about it. But it was different back then. For the Italians, especially. People didn’t like them, see? They resented them. They’d come over here in droves, up from New York to work in the factories. . . . People used to say they were smelly, greasy, all sexed-up—the same kind of thing you hear about the coloreds.” He looked around, hastily, for blacks. “The Italians needed someone to feel better than, I guess. Lots of them were prejudiced as hell when it came to the coloreds. The Indians, too. Her father, for instance. He would have murdered her if he’d known.”

  I was listening without really hearing him. He’d just mentioned Domenico. He was about to tell me that my grandfather was my father.

  “She told me she’d always worried that if you two found out—well, not so much your brother as you—that . . . that you’d hate her for it. Or hate yourself. But I don’t know. Things are different now. You have a right to know, same as I had a right. To know about Edna, I mean. And now with that thing down there.”

  I closed my eyes. This was it, then. Just say it.

  “He died four or five months after you two were born. Never knew a thing about you. . . . She was kind of naive, of course—in the dark about a lot of things. She told me she didn’t even figure out she was pregnant until she was almost halfway along. Back then, there was no TV, of course. That kind of subject didn’t get paraded around the way it does now.”

  Ray was wrong. Domenico had died before Thomas and I were born—had had his stroke in August. She had delivered Thomas and me four months after his death.

  “He got killed over in Korea,” Ray said.

  I looked up at him. “What?”

  “He’d been stationed over in Europe. Germany, I think she said. And then, when MacArthur went into Korea, he got shipped right over. Didn’t even get to come home first. Got killed right at the beginning, I guess—during the landing at Inchon.”

  Was this right? My father was . . . ?

  “She read about it in the paper. That was how she found out he’d been killed. Got in touch with some gal she knew—one of his cousins or something—and I guess she filled her in a little more on what had happened. But he never got home. Your father. Never even knew anything about you two guys, she said.”

  “But why . . . how come she . . . ?”

  “He was a colored fella. Well, part colored, I guess. Heinz fifty-seven varieties. But you know how it is. You got some colored blood in you, you’re considered colored, no matter what. Least that’s the way it was back then. People didn’t mix the way they do now. Or have babies out of wedlock, either. . . . Her father would have killed her, Dominick. You see? He probably would have disowned her. Course, the funny thing is, he was the one who introduced them. Your mother and Henry. That was his name. Henry. Your grandfather knew his father.”

  They’d worked together at the mill, Ray said. After Henry’s father died, Connie’s father had more or less kept up with the family. Had sent the mother a little money from time to time because the kids were still young. It was unusual for her father to do that, Connie had said. “Her old man was pretty tight with his dough, I guess. But he helped Henry’s family out here and there. For some reason. He really ruled the roost, you know—your grandfather. Over at the house. What he said went.

  “He worked at the store where they traded, you see? Henry. So she got to know him that way. Saw him every week when she did the shopping. That was how it started—because her father had known his father and because she saw him all the time at the store. They were just friends at first, for a long time. For years, I guess. He used to sneak over to the house and visit her. Her father worked nights, you see? Then, I don’t know, I guess one thing just led to another. They were human, same as everyone else. And like I said, she was kind of naive—didn’t know too much even by the time I come along. Kind of in the dark, still, even after she’d had two babies. . . . Her father would have killed her, you see? If he knew she’d fallen in with a colored guy? If he had lived, he probably would have put her out of the house. Sent her over there to live with his folks.”

  “You guys save any room for dessert today?” Kristin asked. Man, I jumped. “Oops, sorry. Did I scare you?”

  “No,” I said. “No thanks. We’re right in the middle of something.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I can take this whenever you’re ready. Or if you want, you can—”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. Thank you.”

  We finished our coffee. Sat there, for a few minutes, in silence. Then Ray reached across the table and patted my hand. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s like I always say. Mongrels make damn good dogs.”

  “Henry what?” I said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Henry what?”

  “Drinkwater.”

  I drove out to the Indian graveyard first. Walked right up to him. Henry Joseph Drinkwater 1919–1950. In service to his country . . . I stood there, unable to feel much of anything. He was just a carved rock. A name and two dates. Up the path, over the rise, I could hear the Sachem River, the never-ending spill of the Falls.

  At a pay phone, I looked up the address of the Wequonnoc Tribal Council office. Drove up to a dilapidated two-story house with trash in the yard. Following the sign, I climbed the fire escape stairs to the second-floor office. The door was locked; the inside empty. relocated to wequonnoc boulevard, wequonnoc reservation (route 22), the hand-lettered sign said.

  I drove down to the reservation—past the bulldozers and cement mixers, the land that had been cleared and stumped. The coming casino. The tribe’s new headquarters sat at the end of a rutted road, the beginning of the woods—an impressive three-story building made of cedar and glass. Brand new, it was. Drilling and hammering echoed inside.
>
  I entered. Asked an electrician if he knew where I could find Ralph Drinkwater.

  “Ralphie? Yeah, sure. Second floor, all the way down. I think he’s still here. That suite that looks right out onto the back.”

  He was hand-sanding a Sheetrock seam, lovingly, it looked like to me. I stood there, undetected, and studied him. He’d sand a little, blow on it, pass his fingers across it, sand a little more. RALPH DRINKWATER, TRIBAL PIPE-KEEPER, the plaque on the door said.

  The office was handsome. Huge. Cathedral ceiling with exposed beams, floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace that faced an entire wall of glass. Jesus, what a life he’d had. His sister gets murdered, his mother goes off the deep end. And then that scummy business out at Dell Weeks’s house—posing for dirty pictures just so’s he’d have a place to stay. But he had declared who he was all the way through: Well, I’m Wequonnoc Indian. So I guess not all of us got annihilated. . . . You guys ought to read Soul on Ice! Really! That book tells it like it is! . . . He’d been crapped on his whole life—had scrubbed toilets down at the psycho-prison for a living . . . and had still managed to be a good man. To rise up out of the ashes. And now, he’d arrived at this big, beautiful room. This big, brand-new building. He’d come, at long, long last, into his own.

  “This going to be your office?” I said.

  He pivoted, spooked a little by my voice. Stared at me for three or four seconds more than was comfortable. The dust he’d raised from sanding gave him a frosted look.

  “What can I do for you?” he said.

  I told him I wasn’t sure—that I had just needed to find him, talk to him if he had a minute. “I found something out this afternoon,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That my father’s name was Drinkwater.”

  I watched the surprise flicker in his eyes. Watched them narrow with well-earned distrust. He nodded, leaned against the wall for a couple seconds. Then he turned his back to me and faced his wall of glass. Faced the woods. A crow flying past was the only thing that moved.