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

  When Pasquale and I rose, finally, from Signora Siragusa’s parlor chairs in the middle of that long and difficult night, I was hot in the face and soaked with sweat. I swore and spat into the signora’s spittoon and then reluctantly shook my brother’s hand. Ha! Should I say I shook that stubborn mule’s front hoof? In exchange for his labor on my casa di due appartamenti until its completion, Pasquale had secured for himself two of the seven rooms on my side of the house, free of rent not for one year but for all eternity! One room would be his and Filippa’s to sleep in, the other a playroom dedicated solely to that goddamned shitting monkey’s ricreazione! But what could I do? Pay two or three lazy workers to do what my brother would break his back doing for free?

  After a night’s sleep, I was calm again. Already, a new plan had hatched inside my superior brain. I would continue in private my negotiations with the Iaccois, marry the beautiful cousin, and bring the beautiful half-sister to Three Rivers to stay with us. Nature would take its course. As a happily married husband, I would, as usual, be my younger brother’s good example. The half-sister would surely awaken Pasquale’s sleeping male urges. At long last, my stubborn brother would come to his senses.

  1 August 1949

  All that summer and fall, I worked in the mill by night and labored on my new house by day, stopping only in late afternoon to eat and sleep. Pasquale roofed houses for Werman until four o’clock each day, then worked on Hollyhock Avenue until dark—always with that goddamned monkey chattering nearby or shitting from her place on his shoulder. My brother and I ate cold suppers together in the signora’s kitchen before he went down to the boardinghouse cellar to sleep and I walked to the mill for work. On Sundays, Pasquale and I labored side by side on my house. These were the best days: two strong, young brothers bringing a dream to life, board by board, brick by brick. . . .

  When winter froze the ground that year and stopped construction until springtime, I went with Pasquale to the taverns where the builders drank—not to waste my money on beer or whiskey, but to sit on stools and at tables and pick away at the brains of the workers. Installatori, elettricisti: I got those hibernating builders to talk and draw pictures on paper napkins, to share with me the details of their past victories and mistakes. All that winter, I asked, listened, and learned what I needed to know. And none of it cost me a penny!

  Sometimes, after a night of dyeing wool at the mill, I would walk the long way back to Signora Siragusa’s, up Boswell Avenue and Summit Street to Hollyhock Avenue, where the early morning sun shone on the brick and wood and stone of my half-built house. I would think of Papa’s lifetime of labor in the hot, filthy sulphur mines of Giuliana and imagine him standing beside me in this clean, cold Connecticut air. I would imagine him seeing what I saw—shaking his head with pride and disbelief. But it was not Papa’s blood I felt rushing inside of me as I looked at my house and my land. I felt Ciccia blood—the blood of my mother’s people—landowners like me, Domenico Tempesta, who had been conceived while a volcano rumbled and readied its spew! Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, whom the Vergine herself had selected!

  In December of that year, I received telegramma from the Iaccois in Brooklyn. They wondered when we Tempesta brothers would be coming to claim our brides-to-be. “Our sweet young relatives wait patiently,” the message said, “but it is only a matter of time before ‘Mericano influences begin to turn their heads.” The garment industry in Manhattan cried out for female laborers, the brothers wrote. It was only fair that one or both of the young women begin to bring money into the house, unless Pasquale and I were planning to act soon.

  I sent back telegramma urging the brothers to send both girls to work, by all means, and to put half or more of their wages aside to increase the price of their dowries, which remained to be negotiated. I felt no sense of urgency. I was, after all, a boss dyer and the owner of a spectacular and half-completed casa di due appartamenti. I was also a man who—if the full-length hallway mirror in Signora Siragusa’s front hallway did not lie—cut a dashing figure in a three-piece suit. What was the point of false modesty, after all? It did no harm to keep women waiting; it let them see who was the boss and who was not. Waiting was good for a woman’s constitution. Good for the Iaccoi brothers, too. It would make them better appreciate the gifts Pasquale and I would bestow on their women in our own time. A little nervousness might, besides, raise the price of the dowries. I would ask for seven hundred dollars in exchange for marrying Prosperine and four hundred for Ignazia on my brother’s behalf. (Of course, I would have to negotiate my reluctant brother’s marriage without his knowledge.) The Iaccoi brothers would no doubt balk at the price, but I would remain firm. With all the indoor toilets being flushed in America, those two plumbers could probably afford three times as much.

  In the early spring of 1915, Pasquale and I resumed our work on my palazzo, laying the brick tiers of the second story and hauling into place the granite windowsills, the stoops of Sicilian marble, front and back. We hammered window and door frames and joists, bricked the chimney, partitioned rooms. High into the house’s second-story front wall, I laid brick diagonally in the shape of two three-foot-high T’s for all of the town to see! This I did to honor my father and to raise high the proud name of Tempesta. By the fall of that year, the house’s brick, stone, and wooden skeleton was complete. The roof would be on before wintertime.

  Throughout that building season, other Italians in Three Rivers stopped by to visit and congratulate me on my nearly finished “palace.” Pasquale and I were presented with cakes, cheeses, and jugs of homemade wine for good luck. Ha! Everyone wished to be in the good graces of a successful man.

  I weep to remember what happened next. On 12 October 1915, tragedia struck at 66-through-68 Hollyhock Avenue!

  I was mixing cement in my wheelbarrow for the front sidewalk. Pasquale was seated on the porch steps, finishing his lunch-for-three-workers. “Look, Domenico, two crows,” he grunted, pointing with his chin toward the road. Monsignor McNulty and his little monkey, that skinny Father Guglielmo, stood staring at us in their black robes. Best to ignore them, I told myself, and continued my cement-mixing. If that old monsignor had uncovered another bastardo of Vincenzo’s, what did that have to do with me? Vincenzo was dead and gone, a buon’anima. Whatever brats he had left behind were not my responsibility.

  The two approached; the old priest began with compliments. The building of this impressive house, and my status as a factory boss, had made me a leader in the Italian community. Did I realize that?

  Yes, I realized that, I told him. All my life I had served as a good example for others to imitate. My brother Pasquale chewed quietly on a heel of bread and nodded in agreement.

  Yes, yes, yes, Domenico Tempesta was a man both respected and emulated, the monsignor agreed. He covered his words with so much sugar that the bitter thing he said next took me by complete surprise.

  McNulty came close enough for me to see the veins in his cheeks, the pockmarks in his nose. “Therefore,” he whispered, “yours is the greater sin—this flagrant ignoring of Sunday Mass! This failure to honor the Lord on His given day! This flying in the face of holy law.” Here, Pasquale belched up liquor from his pickled peppers—a long, slow rumble that climaxed like a clap of thunder as it traveled up his throat and out. Little Father Guglielmo’s eyes widened with fear at the distraction and he put a silencing finger to his lips. Attendance at church by the “Eye-talians” of the parish had fallen off, the monsignor said, and both he and God Almighty held me personally responsible. McNulty told me my failure to attend Mass on Sunday had left me with my own sins and the sins of all nonchurchgoers on my overburdened soul. I must put the Holy Spirit before a pile of bricks, confess my transgressions, and return to Mass as a communicant the following Sunday for all to see. At this juncture, Pasquale rose from the steps, walked to the side of the house, and pissed a river. Then he made a kissing sound at Filippa, and prepared to go back to his work.

  At first I tried to be respectful t
o that dog-faced man of the cloth. I smiled and promised I would return to Sunday Mass as soon as the four doors of my house were hung, my twenty-two windows were glazed, and the roof was completed. I pointed a thumb at Pasquale, who was now climbing the ladder to the half-completed roof, Filippa riding atop one shoulder and a bundle of wooden shingles balanced on the other. “And now that Pasquale has his lunch inside of him,” I joked, “he’ll probably have that roof shingled by nightfall, as formidable in size as it is. It is often said that I work like a well-oiled machine and my brother works like a plowhorse. Ha ha.”

  Monsignor McNulty said that pride was perhaps the greatest sin of all and that my revering of worldly possessions over things spiritual was shocking and sacrilegious. He told me he hoped and prayed there would not be some terrible price for me to pay. Then he dropped his voice and made a comment about men and monkeys that made Father Guglielmo blush.

  I stopped my cement-mixing. In my hand, the trowel felt like a weapon of murder. “Vai in mona di tua sorella!” I told him.

  “Translation! Translation!” the old priest demanded of the meek but earnest Father Guglielmo.

  In his stuttering fashion, the nervous young priest said that I had asked them both to please leave now.

  “I told you to get the fuck out of here!” I shouted to Monsignor Dog-Face, this time in English. “I said to go home to your sister’s cunt!”

  Father Guglielmo put up both his hands and attempted to negotiate a peace, but the monsignor reached over and hit him on the head. Then he marched to the road, ordering Guglielmo to follow. When the little priest had joined him, McNulty pointed his finger at me and called back in a public voice meant to dishonor me and all my countrymen. A house from which a man of God was ordered to leave, he said—and ordered in terms only an Italian would be vulgar enough to use—such a house was a Godforsaken place, damned from its peak to its foundation! “You wait and see, Tempesta!” the old monsignor shouted. “You mark my words!”

  As he turned his back, I scooped a clump of the wet cement onto my trowel and flung it. It landed against the monsignor’s back, dripping down his cassock like monkey shit. The old and young priests scurried down the hill, McNulty screaming and striking his little assistant several more times, and kicking him once as well.

  To have my house cursed by a man of God was no small thing, but Pasquale had no understanding of the seriousness of what had just occurred. Up on the roof, his laughter boomed and carried into the trees.

  “Shut up your mouth and go to work!” I yelled, and flung a trowelful of the wet cement at him and Filippa. My action frightened that little monkey-whore of Pasquale’s, and the creature jumped off her master’s shoulder, scurrying along the peak of the roof. With a leap, she hid in the big maple tree.

  Along with his formidable lunch on that horrible day, my brother Pasquale had consumed the better part of a bottle of good-luck wine from Pippo Conti, a fellow roofer who had visited that morning on his way to Sunday Mass. Pasquale was whistling and laying down a row of shingles when he heard, over the sound of his hammering, Filippa’s cries for help. She was seated high in the nearby tree, plagued, suddenly, by angry bluejays. Pasquale rose and ran to the animal’s defense, forgetting about the gap in the roof between himself and the tree.

  He fell.

  I saw it with my eyes.

  Hammer in hand, he fell through the stairwells to the foundation below.

  I saw it all and heard the terrible breaking of my brother’s bones against the dirt floor of my cellar. When I ran to him and cradled his head in my lap, it wobbled like the head of a broken doll. “Dio ci scampi! Dio ci scampi!” I shouted, over and over. If only I had held my tongue with the old priest! If only I had not thrown cement!

  Filippa, who had now rid herself of the bluejays and hurried down the tree, sat huddled on Pasquale’s chest, curling the hair on his head around one small pink finger. Pasquale mouthed, rather than spoke, his last words, “Filippa . . . Filippa.”

  As I watched the precious gift of life leave my brother, mine was the greatest anguish possible! “Filippa . . . Filippa,” his lips kept saying, and I pledged to my dying brother, on the lives of our ancestors and descendants, that I would care for his little monkey. Then Pasquale convulsed and vomited blood and his eyes took on the gaze of holy statues.

  Now, I was alone. . . .

  Pasquale was waked for three afternoons in the boardinghouse parlor. Signora Siragusa wailed for my brother as a mother wails. My position of respect in the town, as well as the scope of the tragedy, brought out most of the Italians of Three Rivers. Flynn, the mill boss, came with his wife to pay respects. Werman, who owned the construction company where Pasquale had worked, showed up with his two sons. At the celebration of the crowded funeral Mass at St. Mary of Jesus Christ Church, that dog-faced monsignor assumed a disdainful attitude that deeply offended me. After my brother was laid to rest in the ground beside Vincenzo, I sat and wrote a letter of complaint to the Pope in Rome. (Never a response.)

  3 August 1949

  Trouble with my bowels since Tuesday. Arthritis afflicts my joints. My body fails me, but not my memory!

  Despite Father Guglielmo’s counsel—the little priest visited me several times after Pasquale’s death—I did not return to church when the snow flew. I vowed never again to cross the threshold of the house of God as long as that no-good monsignor was alive. And I am proud to write that I kept that promise!

  In the wake of her master’s death, Filippa, the spoiled “little queen” who had doomed my brother, sat shivering in a corner of her cage on the boardinghouse porch. Sometimes at night, through the opened window of my room, I heard her strange, chattering lamentation—the agitation of her cage as she threw herself, violently, against it.

  Signora Siragusa, that most superstitious of old women, began to see il mal occhio—the evil eye—in the monkey’s gaze. Young children and grandmothers began to look away from the creature and make the sign of the cross upon entering or leaving the boardinghouse. The signora insisted that I remove the creature’s cage from the front to the back porch. There, the older boys spat at her and poked her with sticks as she sat, hissing and shivering. Americo Cavoli, the signora’s nephew, made a hobby of tormenting that godforsaken creature. I knew this went on, but what could I do? Quit my work? Interrupt my sleep to play policeman for that goddamned monkey?

  As a boss dyer and property owner, I, of course, embraced modern ideas, dismissing as women’s foolishness the growing suspicion of il mal occhio. I regarded Filippa not as a witch but as a nuisance—one more expense in a sea of financial obligations that swirled around me because of my new home and my brother’s funeral expenses. On practical grounds, I began to realize how unfortunate my hasty promise to my dying brother had been. For the sake of economy, I cut back on the expensive mixture of bananas, grain, and honey that Pasquale had provided for her, feeding her now, instead, potato peels and other garbage from Signora Siragusa’s kitchen. The signora began to complain about Filippa’s lice and about the foul-smelling diarrhea with which the monkey’s new diet had afflicted her. Winter was coming. The signora didn’t want that unclean little she-devil living down in the coal cellar, dispensing trouble and bugs up through the heating grates. Soon, the boarders in her house would all be scratching themselves, or packing their bags, or meeting with tragedy like my poor brother! She owned a boardinghouse, not a giardino zoologico. I would have to do something, she warned.

  That same evening, as I reached into Filippa’s filthy cage to dump her nightly swill, that goddamned monkey bared her fangs and bit me savagely on the wrist. I cursed the thing, sucked my hand at the point of the wound, and made a plan.

  The next Sunday morning, I paid young Cavoli a nickel to run to Hollyhock Avenue with a burlap sack, line the bottom of it with broken, discarded bricks, and lug the bag to the Sachem River Bridge. I instructed the boy to wait for me there. Cautiously, I opened Filippa’s cage and leashed the balking monkey.

&nb
sp; We two walked toward the river. At several points, I was forced to drag the creature, who seemed somehow to understand the fate that was about to befall her. And when we arrived at our destination, Filippa held fast to the bars of the footbridge railing and screamed.

  I grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and young Cavoli held open the sack. Between us, we managed to force her inside the brick-weighted bag and cinch the top. Filippa had scratched and bitten us both in the struggle and now she poked and battled with unnatural strength to free herself from the bag. Somehow, we managed to lift that goddamned screaming monkey over the railing and let go.

  The bag sank efficiently.

  What had to be done had been done and now it was over.

  Ha! That’s what I thought!

  36

  “So he drags her to the bridge, shoves her into this bag they’ve weighted down, and throws her over the side. Just drowns her.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Because it was easier to kill the damn thing than to keep his promise.” I was standing by her window, watching the Sachem River rush by behind the trees. We’d had a week or so of warmer weather; the current was traveling at a pretty good clip from the late-winter thaw. “I don’t know, Doc. Maybe I should stop reading the damn thing. Chuck it into the woodstove or something.”

  “Burn your family history, Dominick? Why would you do that?”

  “Because it riles me up. . . . Last night? After I read about all that monkey stuff? I couldn’t even sleep.” I turned and faced Dr. Patel. “We resemble him, you know? Thomas and me.”

  “Your grandfather? Yes? You have photographs?”