The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  Papa decided he could not tell his story as freely with Angelo in the room—that he would be able to remember things better if he was by himself. “So the next thing you know, he was on the telephone with a bunch of office equipment companies—making all these long-distance calls, which I could hardly believe he was doing, Dominick, because he’d never even call his cousins down in Brooklyn to wish them a Merry Christmas or a Happy Easter. They always had to call us every year because Papa didn’t want to waste his money. But for that project of his, he called all over creation. He ended up renting this Dictaphone machine from some place all the way down in Bridgeport.” Ma shook her head, wonder-struck still. “Jeepers, you should have seen that contraption when it got here! I almost fell over the day they lugged that thing into the house.”

  Two machines sat on rolling carts, she said—one for the person dictating, the other for the stenographer who would turn the recorded sounds first into squiggles and then into typewritten words. They set it up in the front parlor and moved Angelo’s typewriter into the spare room. “Poor Angelo,” Ma said. “I don’t think he knew what he was getting himself into.”

  Neither Angelo nor Papa could figure out how to run the Dictaphone at first, Ma said. They tried and tried. That whole day, Papa swore a blue streak! He finally made Angelo take the bus down to Bridgeport so that he could learn how to operate the foolish thing. “And here the poor guy could just barely speak English, Dominick. He’d just gotten over here from the Old Country. But anyway, when he came back again, he knew how to run it—how to make everything work.

  “Every morning, Angelo would set things up—get everything ready—and then he’d have to leave Papa alone. That was the rule. Papa got so he wouldn’t dictate a word of it until he was alone. Angelo used to come out in the kitchen and wait. So I got to know him a little. He was a nice man, Dominick, and so handsome. I’d make him coffee and we’d talk about this and that—his life back in Palermo, his family. I used to help him a little with his English. He was smart, too; you’d explain something to him and he’d pick it up just like that. You could just tell he was going places.”

  The Dictaphone had red plastic belts, Ma said; that was what the voice was recorded on, if she remembered right. Papa would stay in there for two or three hours at a time and then, when he was finished, he’d call Angelo and Angelo would have to go running. He’d wheel the cart into the back room where the typewriter was. Listen to whatever was recorded on the belts and take it down in shorthand. Then he’d type it up. “But my father hated the sound of typewriting, see? He didn’t want that clickety-clacking all over the house after he’d finished his end of things for the day. All that remembering made him cranky.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why didn’t he just dictate it to him directly?”

  “I don’t know. He was just nervous, I guess.” She reached over and touched the manuscript—passed her fingers across her father’s words. She herself didn’t dare to go anywhere near that parlor when Papa was speaking into the Dictaphone, she said. He was so serious about it. He probably would have shot her on sight!

  Ma told me that the complicated system her father had devised —stenographer, Dictaphone, private rooms for dictator and dictatee—had worked for about a week and then that, too, had fallen apart. First of all, there had been a misunderstanding about the rental price for the recording equipment. Papa had thought he was paying eight dollars per week to rent the Dictaphone but then learned that he was being charged eight dollars a day. Forty dollars a week! “So he told the rental company where they could go, and he and Angelo wheeled the carts onto the front porch. Those machines were parked out there for two whole days before someone drove up from Bridgeport and picked them up. I was a nervous wreck with those contraptions just sitting out there. I couldn’t even sleep. What if it had rained? What if someone had come along and snitched them?

  “But anyway, Papa went back to dictating his story directly to Angelo. But that didn’t go any better than it had the first time. Things got worse and worse. Papa started accusing Angelo of poking around in his business—asking him to clear up this thing or that thing when Papa had told him exactly as much as he wanted to tell him and nothing more. Oh, he could be a stubborn son of a gun, my father. He started accusing poor Angelo of changing around some of the things that he had said—of deliberately trying to portray my father in a bad light. Angelo got fed up, the poor guy. The two of them started fighting like cats and dogs.”

  Somewhere in the middle of July, Papa fired Angelo, my mother said. Then, after a few days, he cooled down and rehired him. But the day after Angelo came back, Papa fired him all over again. When he tried to rehire him a second time, Angelo refused to come back again. “He moved away pretty soon after that,” she said. “Out west to the Chicago area. He wrote me one letter and I wrote back and then that was that. But after all that business with Angelo and the Dictaphone and everything—all that rigmarole—Papa finally just went up to the backyard and wrote the rest of his story himself. He worked on it all the rest of that summer. He’d climb up the back stairs every morning, right after breakfast, unless it was raining or he didn’t feel well. He’d sit up there at his little metal table with his paper and his fountain pen. Writing away, all by his lonesome.”

  I leafed again through the musty manuscript—those pages and pages of foreign words. “You ever read it?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. We lost eye contact.

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Dominick. I peeked at it a couple of times, I guess. But I just never felt right about it. My Italian’s too rusty. You forget a lot of it if you don’t use it.”

  We sat there, side by side on the couch, neither of us speaking. In less than a year, I thought, she’ll be dead.

  “It’s funny, though,” she said. “It was kind of out of character for Papa to do something like that. Write things down. He’d always been so private about everything. Sometimes I’d ask him about the Old Country—about his mother and father or the village where he’d grown up—and he’d say, oh, he didn’t even remember that stuff anymore. Or he’d tell me Sicilians kept their eyes open and their mouths shut. . . . But then, that summer: he hired Angelo, rented that contraption. . . . Some mornings I’d hear him crying up there. Up in the backyard. Or speaking out loud—kind of arguing with himself about something. Papa had had a lot of tragedy in his life, see? Both his brothers who he came over here with had died young. And his wife. All he had was me, really. It was just the two of us.”

  The first page of the manuscript was hand-lettered in blue fountain-pen ink, lots of flourishes and curlicues. “I can read his name,” I said. “What does the rest say?”

  “Let’s see. It says, ‘The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from . . .” Umile? Umile? Humble! . . . ‘The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings.’ “

  I had to smile. “He had a pretty good idea of himself, didn’t he?”

  Her eyes brimmed with tears. “He was a wonderful man, Dominick.”

  “Yeah, right. As long as you ate your eggs. And your cigarettes.”

  Ma stroked the small, coverless dictionary. “I’ve been meaning to give you this stuff for a long time, honey,” she said. “You take it with you when you go. It’s for Thomas, too, if he ever wants to look at it, but I wanted to give it to you, especially, because you were the one who always used to ask about Papa.”

  “I was?”

  She nodded. “When you were little. See this dictionary? This is the one he used right after he came over from the Old Country—the one he learned his English from.”

  I opened the tattered book. Its onionskin pages were stained with grease from his fingers. On one page, I covered his thumbprint with my thumb and considered for the first time that Papa might have been more than just old pictures—old, repeated stories.

  I took my mother into the kitchen and showed her the pencil marks written onto the joist
. “Yup, that’s his writing!” she said. “I’ll be a son of a gun. Look at that! It almost brings him right back again.”

  I reached out and rubbed her shoulder, the cloth of her bathrobe, the skin and bone. “You know what I think?” I said. “I think you should translate that story of his.”

  Ma shook her head. “Oh, honey, I can’t. I told you, I’ve forgotten more Italian than I remember. I never learned it that good to begin with. It was confusing. Sometimes he’d speak the Italian he’d learned in school—up in the North—and sometimes he’d speak Sicilian. I used to get them mixed up. . . . And anyway, it’s like I said. I just don’t think he wanted me to read it. Whenever I’d go out into the yard to hang the clothes or bring him a cold drink, he’d get so mad at me. Shout at me, shoo me away. ‘Stay out of my business!’ he’d say. I’m telling you, he was a regular J. Edgar Hoover about that project of his.”

  “But, Ma, he’s dead,” I reminded her. “He’s been dead for almost forty years.”

  She stopped, was quiet. She seemed lost in thought.

  “What?” I said. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Oh, nothing, really. I was just remembering the day he died. He was all alone out there, all by himself when he had that stroke.” She drew her Kleenex from her sleeve. Wiped her eyes. “That same morning, while he was eating his breakfast, he told me he was almost done with it. It took me back a little—him giving me a progress report like that—because up until then, he had never said one word to me about it. Not directly, I mean. . . . And so I asked him, I said, ‘What are you going to do with it, Papa, once you’re finished?’ I thought he was going to start writing away to some publishers back in Italy. Try to get it made into a book like he’d said. But you know what he told me? He said maybe he’d just throw it into the ash barrel and put a match to it. Burn the whole thing up once he was finished writing it. It just wasn’t the answer I was expecting. After all that trouble he’d gone to to get it down. . . . I heard him sobbing up there a couple of times that last morning—really wailing one time. It was terrible. And I wanted to go up to him, Dominick, but I thought it would have made him mad if I did. Made things worse. He’d been so private about it.

  “And then, later on, when I went out there with his lunch, there he was. Slumped over, his head on the table. These pages were all over the place: stuck in the hedges, stuck against the chicken coop. They’d blown all over the yard.

  “And so I ran back down inside and called the police. And the priest. Your grandfather wasn’t a churchgoer—he had a kind of a grudge against St. Mary’s for some reason—but I figured, well, I’d call the priest anyway. . . . It was awful, Dominick. I was so scared. I was shaking like a leaf. And here I was, carrying your brother and you. . . .”

  I reached over. Put my arm around her.

  “After I made those two phone calls, I just went back out there and waited. Went back up the stairs. I stood there, about ten or twelve feet away from him, watching him. I knew he was dead, but I kept watching him, hoping maybe I’d see him blink or yawn. Hoping and praying that I was mistaken. But I knew I wasn’t. He hadn’t moved a muscle.” She passed her hand again over Papa’s manuscript. “And so I went around the yard, picking up this thing. It was all I could think of to do for him, Dominick. Pick up the pages of his history.”

  The room filled up with silence. The sun had shifted—had cast us both in shadow.

  “Well, anyway,” she said. “That was a long time ago.”

  Before I left, I tapped the wainscoting back into place, covering once again Domenico’s notes and calculations. I walked out the door and down the front porch steps, balancing my toolbox, the strongbox, and several foil-wrapped packages of frozen leftovers. (“I worry about you in that apartment all by yourself, honey. Your face looks too thin. I can tell you’re not eating the way you should. Here, take these.”) At the door of the truck, I heard her calling and went back up the steps.

  “You forgot this,” she said. I put my hand out, palm up, and she opened her fist. The strongbox key fell into my hand. “La chiave,” she said.

  “Come again?”

  “La chiave. Your key. The word for it just came back to me.”

  “La chiave,” I repeated, and dropped the key into my pocket.

  That night, I awoke from a sound sleep with the idea: the perfect gift for my dying mother. It was so simple and right that its obviousness had eluded me until 2:00 A.M. I’d have her father’s life story translated, printed, and bound for her to read.

  I drove up to the university and found the Department of Romance Languages office tucked into the top floor of a stone building dwarfed by two massive, leafless beech trees. The secretary drew up a list of possibilities for me to try. After an hour’s worth of false leads and locked doors, I walked the narrow steps to a half-landing and knocked at the office door of Nedra Frank, the last person on my list.

  She looked about forty, but it’s hard to tell with those hair-yanked-back, glasses-on-a-chain types. As she leafed through my grandfather’s pages, I checked out her breasts (nice ones), the mole on her neck, her gnawed-down cuticles. She shared the office with another grad student; her sloppy desk and his neat one were a study in opposites.

  “Some of this is written in standard Italian,” she said. “And some of it’s . . . it looks like peasant Sicilian. What was he—schizo or something?”

  Okay, bitch, thanks anyway. Give it the fuck back to me and I’ll be on my way.

  “I’m a scholar,” she said, looking up. She handed me back the manuscript. “What you’re asking me to do is roughly the same as trying to commission a serious artist to paint you something that goes with the sofa and drapes.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.” Already, I’d begun backing out of her low-ceilinged office—a glorified closet, really, and not all that glorified.

  She sighed. “Let me see it again.” I handed it back and she scanned several pages, frowning. “The typed pages are single-spaced,” she said. “That’s twice as much work.”

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “The penmanship’s legible, at least. . . . I could do the handwritten material for eight dollars a page. I’d have to charge sixteen for the typed ones. More on the ones where explanatory footnotes were necessary.”

  “How much more?”

  “Oh, let’s say five dollars per footnote. I mean, fair is fair, right? If I’m actually generating text instead of just translating and interpreting, I should be paid more. Shouldn’t I?”

  I nodded. Did the math in my head. Somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand bucks without the footnotes. More than I thought it would be, but a lot less than a kitchen renovation. “Are you saying you’ll do it then?”

  She sighed, kept me waiting for several seconds. “All right,” she finally said. “To be perfectly honest, I have no interest in the project, but I need money for my car. Can you believe it? A year and a half old and the tranny’s already got problems.”

  It struck me funny: this Marian the Librarian using gearhead lingo. “Why are you smiling?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “No reason, really. What kind of car is it?”

  “A Yugo,” she said. “I suppose that’s funny, too?”

  Nedra Frank told me she wanted four hundred dollars up front and estimated the translation would take her a month or two to complete, given her schedule, which she described as “oppressive.” Her detachment annoyed me; she had looked twice at her wall clock as I spoke of my grandfather’s accomplishments, my mother’s lymphoma. I wrote her a check, worrying that she might summarize or skip pages—shortchange me in spite of what she was charging. I left her office feeling vulnerable—subject to her abbreviations and interpretations, her sourpuss way of seeing the world. Still, the project was under way.

  I called her several times over the next few weeks, wanting to check her progress or to see if she had any questions. But all I ever got was an unanswered ring.

  Whenever my mother underwent her che
motherapy and radiation treatments at Yale–New Haven, Ray drove her down there, kept her company, ate his meals in the cafeteria downstairs, and catnapped in the chair beside her bed. By early evening, he’d get back on the road, driving north on I-95 in time for his shift at Electric Boat. When I suggested that maybe he was taking on too much, he shrugged and asked me what the hell else he was supposed to do.

  Did he want to talk about it?

  What was there to talk about?

  Was there anything I could do for him?

  I should worry about my mother, not him. He could take care of himself.

  I tried to make it down to New Haven two or three times a week. I brought Thomas with me when I could, usually on Sundays. It was hard to gauge how well or poorly Thomas was handling Ma’s dying. As was usually the case with him, the pendulum swung irregularly. Sometimes he seemed resigned and accepting. “It’s God’s will,” he’d sigh, echoing Ma herself. “We have to be strong for each other.” Sometimes he’d sob and pound his fists on my dashboard. At other times, he was pumped up with hope. “I know she’s going to beat this thing,” he told me one afternoon over the phone. “I’m praying every day to Saint Agatha.”

  “Saint who?” I said, immediately sorry I’d asked.

  “Saint Agatha,” he repeated. “The patron saint invoked against fire and volcanoes and cancer.” He rambled on and on about his stupid saint: a virgin whose jilted suitor had had her breasts severed, her body burned at the stake. Agatha had stopped the eruption of a volcano, had died a Bride of Christ, blah blah blah.

  One morning at 6:00 A.M., Thomas woke me up with the theory that the Special K our mother ate for breakfast every day had been deliberately impregnated with carcinogens. The Kellogg’s Cereal Company was secretly owned by the Soviets, he said. “They target the relatives of the people they’re really after. I’m on their hit list because I do God’s bidding.” Now that he was on to them, he said, he was considering exposing Kellogg’s—rubbing it right in their corporate face. He would probably end up as Time magazine’s Man of the Year and have to go into hiding. Stalkers followed famous people. Look what had happened to poor John Lennon. Did I remember the song “Instant Karma”? John had written it specifically for him, to encourage him to do good in the world after he’d gone. “Listen!” my brother said. “It’s so obvious, it’s pathetic!” He broke out into a combination of song and shouting.