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

  “Your lights!” I kept yelling at her. “Put on your lights!”

  By March, the oncology team at Yale had begun to sound like snake oil salesmen. Ma was in near-constant pain; what little comfort she was getting was coming from an old Polish priest and the hospice volunteers. Painting season had begun, jump-started by an early spring that I couldn’t afford not to take advantage of. It was mid-April before I got the time and the stomach to drive back to the university and walk the steps up to Nedra Frank’s little cubicle. Finished or not, I wanted my grandfather’s story back.

  Nedra’s office buddy told me she’d withdrawn from the degree program. “Personal reasons,” he said, rolling his eyes. Her desk was a clean slate, the bulletin board behind her stripped to bare cork.

  “But she’s got something of mine,” I protested. “Something important. How can I get ahold of her?”

  He shrugged.

  The head of the department shrugged, too.

  The head of humanities told me she would attempt to locate Ms. Frank and share my concerns, but that she couldn’t promise I’d be contacted. The agreement we had made was between the two of us, she reminded me; it had nothing whatsoever to do with the university. Under no circumstances could she release Nedra Frank’s forwarding address.

  My mother slipped out of consciousness on May 1, 1987. Ray and I kept a vigil through the night, watching her labored, ragged breathing and thwarting, until the very end, her continual attempts to pull the oxygen mask from her mouth. “There’s a strong possibility that someone in a coma can hear and understand,” the hospice worker had told us the evening before. “If it feels right to you, you might want to give her permission to go.” It hadn’t felt right to Ray; he’d balked at such an idea. But ten minutes before she expired, while Ray was down the hall in the men’s room, I leaned close to my mother’s ear and whispered, “I love you, Ma. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him. You can go now.”

  Her death was different from the melodramatic versions I’d imagined during those final months. She never got to read her father’s history. She never sat up in her deathbed and revealed the name of the man with whom she’d conceived my brother and me. From early childhood, I had formed theories about who our “real” father was: Buffalo Bob; Vic Morrow from Combat; my seventh-grade shop teacher, Mr. Nettleson; Mr. Anthony from across the street. By the time of Ma’s death, my suspicions had fallen on Angelo Nardi, the dashing, displaced courtroom stenographer who had been hired to transcribe my grandfather’s life story. But that, too, was just a theory. I told myself it didn’t really matter.

  After the hospital paperwork had been gotten through, Ray and I drove to the funeral parlor to make final arrangements, then drove back to Hollyhock Avenue and drank Ray’s good Scotch. The old photo album was out, sitting there on the dining room table. I couldn’t open it up—couldn’t look inside the thing—but on impulse, I took it with me when we went down to the hospital to tell my brother the news.

  Tears welled up in Thomas’s eyes when he heard, but there was no scene—no difficult overreaction, as I’d imagined. Dreaded. When Ray asked Thomas if he had any questions, he had two. Had she suffered at the end? Could Thomas have his god = love! collage back now?

  Ray left after half an hour or so, but I stayed behind. If Thomas was going to have a delayed bad reaction, I told myself, then I wanted to be there to help him through it. But that wasn’t entirely true. I stayed there because I needed to—needed on the morning of our mother’s death to be with my twin, my other half, no matter who he had become, no matter where my life—our lives—were careening.

  “I’m sorry, Thomas,” I said.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said. “You didn’t give her the cancer. God gave it to her.” With grim relief, I noted that he was no longer blaming the Kellogg’s Cereal Company.

  “I mean, I’m sorry for blowing up at you. That time we visited her? In the car on the way home? I shouldn’t have lost my cool like that. I should have been more patient.”

  He shrugged, bit at a fingernail. “That’s okay. You didn’t mean it.”

  “Yeah, I did. I meant it at the time. That’s always my problem. I let stuff eat away and eat away inside of me and then—bam!—it just explodes. I do it with you, I did it with Ma, with Dessa. Why do you think she left me? Because of my anger, that’s why.”

  “You’re like our old TV,” Thomas sighed.

  “What?”

  “You’re like our old TV. The one that exploded. One minute we were watching a show and the next minute—ka-boom!”

  “Ka-boom,” I repeated, softly. For a minute or more, neither of us spoke.

  “Do you remember when she came running out of the house that day?” Thomas finally said. He reached over and grabbed the photo album, touched its leather cover. “She was holding this.”

  I nodded. “Her coat was smoking. The fire had burned off her eyebrows.”

  “She looked just like Agatha.”

  “Who?”

  “Agatha. The saint I prayed to while Ma was sick.” He got up and took his dog-eared book from the bottom drawer of his nightstand. Lives of the Martyred Saints. Flipped through the lurid color paintings of bizarre suffering: the faithful, besieged by hideous demons; afflicted martyrs gazing Heavenward, bleeding from gaping Technicolor wounds. He found Agatha’s full-page illustration and held it up. Dressed in a nun’s habit, she stood serene amidst chaos, holding a tray that bore two women’s breasts. Behind her, a volcano erupted. Snakes fell out of the sky. Her body was outlined in orange flame.

  Thomas shuddered twice and began to cry.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right. It’s all right.” I reached back for the scrapbook. Opened it. We looked in silence, together.

  When Ray had repaired my mother’s broken book, he’d made no effort to restore the loose pages to their proper chronological order. The result was a book of anachronisms: Instamatic snapshots from the sixties opposite turn-of-the-century studio portraits; time shuffled up and bolted. Here were Thomas and I in front of the Unisphere at the 1964 World’s Fair; Ray in his Navy uniform; Papa in a greased handlebar mustache, arm in arm with his young bride who, later, would drown at Rosemark’s Pond. Though my grandfather had died several months before Thomas and I were born, in Ma’s book we met him face-to-face. Stupidly, carelessly, I had lost Domenico’s dictated story, but my mother had entered the fire and rescued his image.

  Thomas unfolded the old newspaper clipping of the two of us in our sailor suits, saluting the camera and flanking Mamie Eisenhower. Despite my sadness, I had to smile at those two bewildered faces.

  Thomas told me he had no recollection whatsoever of that day when the Nautilus, America’s first nuclear submarine, eased down the greased ways and into the Thames River to help save the world from Communism. As for me, my memories are fragments—sounds and sensations that may have more to do with my mother’s retelling of the story than with any electrical firings in my own brain. What I seem to recall is this: the crack of the water as the flag-draped submarine hits the river, the prickle of orange soda bubbles against my lip, the tickle of Mamie’s mink.

  3

  When you’re the sane brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your hands—the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you’re into both survival of the fittest and being your brother’s keeper—if you’ve promised your dying mother—then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman’s gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the indifference of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin—the guy who beat the biochemical rap.

  Five days after my brother’s sacrifice in the public library, Dr. Ellis Moore, the surgeon who had grafted the flap over Thomas’s wound, declared him out of the woods infection-wise and stable enough to be released. That same
day, Dr. Moore filed a Physician’s Emergency Certificate with the judge of probate, stating in writing that he found Thomas to be “dangerous to himself and/or others.” This set into motion a mandatory fifteen-day observation period at the Three Rivers State Hospital complex. At the end of those fifteen days, one of three things would happen to my brother: he would be freed to face the breach of peace and assault charges that had been brought against him; he could commit himself voluntarily to the hospital for further treatment; or, if the treatment team evaluating Thomas felt that his release might be harmful to himself or to the community, he could be held involuntarily at the state hospital for a period of six months to a year, by order of the probate court.

  By the time the paperwork was signed and the police escorts had arrived for the transfer, it was after 8:00 P.M. They put one of those Texas belts around Thomas’s waist, then handcuffed him, taking care to snap on the left cuff six inches or so above his stump. When they locked the cuffs to the belt, it had the effect of making my brother slump forward in a posture of surrender. While an aide was getting Thomas into a wheelchair, I pulled the cops aside. “Hey, look. This handcuff stuff is totally unnecessary,” I told them. “Can’t you let the guy have a little dignity while he’s being wheeled out of here?”

  The younger cop was short and brawny. The other was tall and tired and baggy-looking. “It’s standard procedure,” the older guy shrugged, not unsympathetically.

  “He’s potentially violent,” the younger cop added.

  “No, he isn’t,” I said. “He was trying to stop a war. He’s nonviolent.” I followed the guy’s eyes down to my brother’s missing hand.

  “It’s procedure,” the older cop repeated.

  Thomas led the parade out of the hospital, the aide pushing his wheelchair down the hall, the two cops and me pulling up the rear. Everyone walking toward us risked sneaky little glances at my brother’s restraints. I was holding Thomas’s stuff for him: a get-well plant from my ex-wife, duffel bag, toiletry bag, his Bible.

  The trip across town from Shanley Memorial to the state hospital is about five or six miles. Thomas asked me to ride in the cruiser with him; I could tell he was scared. At first, the younger cop hassled me about going with them, but then the older guy said I could. They made me ride shotgun up front. The older cop rode in back with Thomas.

  At first nobody said anything. In between squawks from the police radio, the AM station was giving updates on Operation Desert Shield. “If you ask me,” the cop in back said, “Bush ought to show that crazy Hussein who’s boss the same way Reagan showed ’em down in Grenada. Flex some muscle. Nip it in the bud.”

  “That was Carter’s whole problem with those tent-heads in Iran,” the younger guy agreed. “He made the U.S. look like a bunch of wimps.”

  Thomas had been given some kind of Valium cocktail for the road, but I was afraid their talk would rile him. I hunched toward the driver and mumbled a request that he change the subject. He gave no response except for a pissy look, but he did shut up.

  Riding through downtown, we passed the McDonald’s on Crescent Street where Thomas had worked briefly and the boarded-up Loew’s Poli movie house where, once upon a time, my brother and I had shaken hands with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans during the town’s three-hundredth anniversary celebration. We passed over the Sachem River Bridge. Passed Constantine Motors, the car dealership my ex-in-laws own. Passed the public library.

  “Dominick?” Thomas called up to the front.

  “Hmm?”

  “How much longer?”

  “We’re about halfway.”

  Three Rivers State Hospital is on the southern border of town, a left turn off the John Mason Parkway, the four-lane state highway that runs to the Connecticut shoreline. Once part of the hunting and fishing grounds of the Wequonnoc Indians, the sprawling hospital property is bordered behind by the Sachem River, on the north by the town fairgrounds, and on the south by the sacred burial grounds of the Wequonnocs. Back in the summer of ’69, Thomas and I mowed and trimmed that little Indian graveyard. We were seasonal employees, home from our freshman year at college. By then, Thomas’s illness had already started flirting with him in little ways I couldn’t or didn’t want to see. Nine months later, there’d be no avoiding it: March of 1970 was when Thomas’s brain dropped him to his knees.

  It was hard to believe over twenty years had gone by between that crazy summer and this ride in the police cruiser. I’d graduated from college, taught high school history for a while, and then started my painting business. Ma had died, and the baby. Dessa had left me; I’d hooked up with Joy. Now here I was, after all that water under the bridge, still riding back with my brother to the state hospital. There’d been two decades’ worth of shifting diagnoses, new medications, exchangeable state-appointed shrinks. We’d long since given up on miracles for Thomas, settling instead for reasonable intervals between the bad spells and ugly episodes. Seventy-seven and ’78 were good years, I remember. That’s when they decided Thomas wasn’t manic-depressive after all, took him off lithium, and started him on Stelazine instead. Then Dr. Bradbury retired and Thomas’s new guy, that fucking little Dr. Schooner, decided that if six milligrams of Stelazine a day was good for my brother, eighteen milligrams a day would be even better. I can still feel that little quack’s tweed coat lapels in my fists the day I went down to see Thomas and found him sitting there paralyzed and glassy-eyed, his tongue sticking out of his mouth, his shirt front sopping with drool. Schooner had meant to check in on my brother, he told me after I let him go, but it had been so busy. He’d had to cover for another doctor; his in-laws were in town. One of the nurses told me they’d called that slimeball and left messages about Thomas all weekend long.

  There was a pretty good stretch in the early eighties. Dr. Filyaw started Thomas on Haldol in 1983. My brother began doing so well that they transferred him to a group home and got him that maintenance job at McDonald’s. (Thomas had me photocopy his first paycheck before we cashed it, I remember. He kept it framed on his bedroom wall at the group home, along with a ten-dollar bill that somebody stole later on to buy cigarettes.) Thomas even had himself a girlfriend back then, this bride-of-Frankenstein chick named Nadine. Nadine was a holy roller like him but not nuts in any official way. Not categorized as crazy. They met in a Bible study group. She was in her midforties, a good ten years older than he was at the time. Don’t ask me how they squared it with God and their holy roller group, but my brother and Nadine were doing it. I should know. I’m the guy who had to buy Thomas his Trojans. It was Nadine who convinced him that if his faith was strong enough, he didn’t have to rely on medication—that what God wanted from him was a test of faith.

  It’s tempting to delude yourself when your screwed-up brother becomes gainfully employed and starts acting less screwed up for a while. You begin to take sanity for granted—convince yourself that optimism’s in order. Thomas had a girlfriend and a job and was living semi-independently. If the signs were there, I guess I overlooked them. Let down my guard. Big mistake.

  Nobody except Thomas and Nadine knew he’d stopped taking his Haldol. Or that he’d begun to wear a ring of aluminum foil around his head every night when he went to bed because it somehow let God’s voice through but scrambled the messages of his enemies. My brother: the human radio receiver pulling in the Jesus frequency. Mr. Tinfoil Head. I mean, it’s not funny, but it is. If I didn’t laugh about it sometimes, I’d be down in the bughouse in the bed next to his.

  The new drive-thru window at McDonald’s had been installed only about a week or two before Thomas cracked. Later on, he blamed his assistant manager, who had balked that morning when Thomas showed up for work wearing his aluminum foil hat. Thomas had tried to explain to the guy that Communist agents were ridiculing him through the outside speaker—calling to him as he emptied the garbage or swept the parking lot, encouraging him to go inside and eat the rat poison in the utility closet. By the time the police got there, Thomas, wielding his floor
polisher, had already knocked off Ronald McDonald’s life-sized fiberglass head and wasted the restaurant’s brand-new drive-thru speaker. The cops found him sobbing away behind the Dumpster, bees hovering all around him. Thomas had to check out of the group home, of course—check back into the hospital. About a month after that, he got a postcard of the Grand Ole Opry from Nadine and Chuckie, this other high-on-Jesus buddy of theirs. Chuckie and Nadine had eloped, were honeymooning in Tennessee. I was worried the news from Nadine was going to set Thomas back further, but he took it like a stoic and held no grudges.

  “Read me something from my Bible, Dominick,” Thomas ordered me now in the cruiser, midway between Shanley Memorial and the hospital. He’d been making demands for four days: get him this, check on that. Ordering instead of asking, the way he always did when he was in bad shape. I turned around and looked back at him. The lights from a passing car illuminated his face. Despite the Valium, his eyes looked clear, hungry for something. “Read to me from the Book of Psalms,” he said.

  The binding on Thomas’s Bible is broken, its loose pages nearly translucent from finger oil. The whole thing’s held together with rubber bands. “The Book of Psalms?” I said. I pulled off the elastics, flipped through the tissuey pages. “Where are they at?”

  “In the middle. Between the Book of Job and the Book of Proverbs. Read me the Twenty-sixth Psalm.”

  In the confusion at the library five days earlier, my brother’s Bible had been left behind, then scooped up by the police detectives assigned to the case. Later, in the recovery room, Thomas had bubbled up from the anesthetic calling for it. He called for it all the next day, too. Clamored for it. A substitute wouldn’t do—it had to be his Bible—the one Ma had given him for his confirmation back when we were in sixth grade. (She’d given us each one, but mine was long gone. Gone where is anyone’s guess.) After several hours of listening to his bellyaching, I’d finally gone down to police headquarters and told the guy behind the glass that we needed that Bible over at the hospital a lot more than they needed it at the station. I’d repeated my request to his supervisor, then to that guy’s supervisor. It was Jerry Martineau, the deputy chief, who finally cut through all the “official police investigation” bullshit and ended the impasse. Martineau and I had played hoops together in high school. Well, to be accurate, we’d mostly kept each other company on the bench while the hotshots played. Jerry was the comedian type—the kind of kid that could get you laughing so hard, you couldn’t breathe. He did this imitation of Jerry Lewis from The Nutty Professor that still makes me crack a smile when I think of it. Martineau could do anybody: Elmer Fudd, President Kennedy, Maxwell Smart. One time, our coach, Coach Kaminski, walked into the locker room and caught Jerry imitating him. Martineau was doing laps for about the next three months.