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

  Next morning, I came home from the plant and lifted Ignazia’s gown while she slept in our bed. I saw.

  I saw, as well, that the scowl Ignazia wore in my presence was gone when she slept. Was this the peace of mind she had had as a child in Sicily? In the arms of that redheaded Irishman? When her eyes opened and she saw me, her frowning returned.

  “What’s this, eh?” I asked, my hand patting her belly.

  For her answer, she burst into tears.

  “Eh?” I repeated.

  “What do you think it is with that thing of yours always poking inside of me?”

  “When is it coming?” I asked her.

  “How should I know?” she shrugged, pushing and hurrying herself out of the bed. “Those predictions are never exact. Maybe February. Maybe March. . . . What are you staring at me for?”

  “Are you glad about it?” I asked.

  She shrugged again, pulling on her dress. She twisted her braid into a knot and pinned it at the base of her neck. “These days, I take what comes. What other choice have you left me?”

  I brought Ignazia to Pedacci, who was a shoemaker on the East Side and presidente of Figli d’Italia. Pedacci could tell boy or girl by having the mother walk up and down on the sidewalk in front of his store.

  He stood in his doorway while Ignazia walked back and forth, back and forth, three, four times. Each time she got back to the front of the store, she stopped, but Pedacci waved his hand for her to walk some more.

  Our request for a prediction had interrupted Pedacci’s game of pinochle in the back room. The other card players—Colosanto (the baker) and Golpo Abruzzi (brass factory)—watched Ignazia walk, too. From all that walking and watching, Ignazia became red-faced. She stopped and motioned me to her side, complaining in a voice loud enough for Pedacci and the others to hear. “All this staring! What am I—a statue in the museum?”

  “Don’t be disrespectful,” I warned her. “If Pedacci says walk, then walk!”

  A couple more trips to the stop sign and back, Pedacci rubbing his chin, squinting his eyes. Then he put up his hand to stop her.

  My wife’s pregnancy was extremely difficult to predict, he whispered to me—one of the most difficult he had ever seen. The baby did not hang in the usual way. Tuscan women sometimes carried their children in this manner. Was Ignazia by any chance from Tuscany?

  “No, no,” I told him. “Siciliana.”

  Well, he said, with this one, it would be necessary to lift the tette to decide. Strictly for the purpose of accurate prediction. I understood, didn’t I?

  “Of course, Don Pedacci, of course,” I said. “I am a modern man, after all, not some jealous, unschooled peasant from the Old Country. Let me just tell my wife.”

  I approached Ignazia cautiously. That woman’s temper could sometimes blow like the shift whistle at American Woolen and Textile and it would not do for her to show me her usual disrespect in front of these men.

  “It will be necessary for you to step inside for a minute with Signore Pedacci,” I whispered. “To make an accurate prediction, it is necessary for him to lift the tette.”

  “What?” she shouted. “Mine? No, no, no, no! Go tell that old goat to lift his own wife’s tette!”

  “Please to keep down your voice,” I said, more firmly this second time. “The poor man is a widower.”

  “Tell him to go feel the melanzana at the fruit market then and to keep his dirty hands off of me! I won’t be handled like a pair of shoes in his shop!”

  I took my wife’s wrist, gave it a little twist to show her I meant business. “Show some proper obedience to your husband,” I warned her. “Do as I say.”

  “Bah!” she said. But the twisting put fear in her eyes and she obeyed.

  They were inside for four, five minutes. “Congratulations, Domenico!” Pedacci said when he emerged again. “A son!”

  Ignazia stood behind him. The news had brought no joy to her face. Tears, it brought, and a frown I still see this morning, sitting in this garden, so many years later. Ignazia was, from the beginning, a wife to break a man’s heart.

  “Come in back for a little drink,” Pedacci said. “Golpo and Colosanto and I want to toast your bambino.” He turned to Ignazia. “Just a small drink, Signora Tempesta. Then I’ll send him back out again. Sit down, ha ha. Tell my customers to come back in an hour, hour and a half.”

  Ignazia locked her jaw and blew air out of her nose. She did not sit.

  In Pedacci’s back room, I had a little drink and then another one and then Pedacci and the others invited me to play some cards. Was it a crime for a man who broke his back with factory work year in, year out, to sit with a paisano or two and have a simple game of cards? My wife thought so! I had just been dealt a beautiful hand when Abruzzi laughed and nodded his head toward the doorway.

  There she stood.

  I stood up and walked over to her. “What’s the matter with you, eh?” I whispered.

  “Mi scappa la pippi!” she whispered back. Her feet did a little dance. Her hands made fists.

  “Don’t speak such vulgarity in the presence of other men! Where’s your dignity? Hold it until we get home.”

  “I can’t hold it!” she protested. The other three smiled at their cards. Pedacci began to whistle.

  “Piss on yourself then, woman,” I said. “And piss on your disobedience, too!”

  She banged the door. Behind it, out in the shop, I could hear her shouting at the shoes.

  “That’s telling her,” Abruzzi said. “A king is a peasant in a castle where the woman rules.”

  “Si,” Pedacci nodded and agreed. “Women, like horses, have to have their spirits broken or else they’ll make bad wives. Eh, Domenico?”

  “Si, signore, si,” I said. “Breaking their spirit is the only way.”

  When I came back out into the shoe shop—not more than two, three games later—Ignazia was nowhere. That goddamned Abruzzi made a joke that my poor wife had either defied me or floated out the door from her “little problem.”

  When I got home, Ignazia was in the kitchen, soaking her blistered feet in warm water and salts. Her eyes were red. She had run the three miles back home.

  The other one was at the sink, washing out Ignazia’s dress and underclothes. “Go to your room,” I told Prosperine. “I want to speak to my wife alone.”

  But the Monkey just stood there, staring defiantly at me and wringing out Ignazia’s underclothes as if it was my neck in her hands.

  “Go!” I commanded, clapping at her. “Hurry!”

  She left the room slowly, watching me as she entered the pantry.

  I began sweetly, as sweet as sugar. “So, you’re growing a boy inside you, eh? In a little while, you and I will have a son.”

  “May God help any son who grows up as inhuman as you are,” she said.

  “Inumano? Why am I inumano?”

  The water in the basin sloshed and jumped over the sides. Her whole body shook from her sobbing.

  “There, there,” I told her from across the room. “It’s the child that brings on this nervous condition of yours.”

  Then Prosperine came out of the pantry again with two big onions. She began slicing them, staring not at the job but at me. She used a knife far too big for the job of onion-slicing. Chop chop chop. Hack hack hack. She worked and watched, eyeing me, butchering onions with her big knife.

  On the night of 2 December 1916, I was at work, busy supervising the dyeing of wool for pea jackets, U.S. Navy. Earlier that week there had been problems on first shift—two bad dye runs that the second shift boss (goddamned French Canadian named Pelletier) had let get by him. The mistake had cost money to American Woolen and Textile, and Pelletier had been demoted. Janitore he was now, third shift.

  “Have the Top Wop supervise the next runs,” Baxter, the owner’s son-in-law, had ordered Flynn. “If the Top Wop’s in charge, it’ll get done right.” It was Flynn who told me what Baxter had said. “He doesn’t mean anything when he
calls you a wop,” he said. “Take it as a compliment. Just make sure you don’t fuck up any of the dye runs.”

  I lost sleep that week and, in my sleeplessness, thought about my first work in America. It had been years now since I’d swept the main lobby of the New York Public Library or scrubbed men’s and women’s filth from those long rows of toilets, but as I lay awake, the stink and ache of that miserable work came back to me—the look of all those self-important New Yorkers walking past a lowly janitore, congratulating themselves and thinking how much better they were than I was. I had traveled far, had seized opportunity and been rewarded for my seriousness of purpose. But one misstep could turn me from a boss back to a toilet scrubber.

  On that same night of 2 December, I was reexamining and rematching samples with a magnifying glass and a special lamp I had bought for better illumination—making sure one more time before approving the run. Flynn called out my name.

  “Eh?” When I looked up, I saw Prosperine walking toward me with Flynn.

  “Better come with me,” she said. “It’s her time.”

  “What? How could it be her time already?”

  She looked over at Flynn, who looked away. “Her water burst,” she whispered. “The pains have started. Maybe a problem, maybe not.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  She shrugged.

  “You left her alone then?”

  The Monkey shook her head. “Signora Tusia from next door is with her.”

  I looked from the Monkey’s face to Flynn’s, and then back again. I saw Baxter watching us through the glass wall of his office. “Go home,” I said. “Let women fix women’s problems. What do you think—that I can drop everything and run? Stop interrupting a man at his workplace.”

  Prosperine ignored the order. “She needs dottore,” she said. “Signora Tusia thinks so, too. Better fetch him on your way home.”

  I leaned my face close to her face. “Doctors reach into the pockets of honest workers,” I said. “Go home and midwife her instead of walking around town. Earn your keep for once, you lazy mingia.” If I didn’t get her out of there, I might end up janitore.

  I walked back to my samples. Flynn stood staring at me. Baxter, too.

  “Figliu d’una mingia!” her voice screamed. “You’ll save a penny and lose your wife!”

  My workers stopped their tasks to stare at that skinny bitch who dared to raise her voice to me that way. What could I do but grab her by the collar and coat sleeve and throw her out of that goddamned mill? I had work to do! The earnings of a janitore could not support a home such as mine—could not feed and clothe a wife and son, let alone a goddamned monkey with murder in her eye!

  For the rest of that shift, I could not concentrate. I looked again and again at the clock. Had my son come into the world by now? Should I beat Prosperine for her public defiance? Should I fetch Quintiliani, the Italian dottore, on my way home from my shift? Each hour that went by was a week. But the dyeing went successfully. Baxter was right: if you wanted the job done right, put Domenico Tempesta in charge—even on the nights when his head was full of worry!

  At dawn, I left the mill and hurried to the home of Quintiliani. His housekeeper said he was still out from the middle of the night, boy with burst appendix. She said my hired girl had come looking for him earlier and that she’d sent her on to Yates, the Yankee dottore.

  When I got home, Yates’s roadster was parked in front of the casa di due appartamenti. My heart boomed inside my chest like a drum in a parade. I opened the front door and followed Ignazia’s screams to the back of the house.

  She was lying on the kitchen table, wrapped in blankets and shivering. Tusia’s wife wiped at her face and neck and hair. Yates was working on her down there.

  Prosperine was the first to notice me. “Figliu d’una mingia,” she mumbled under her breath.

  Then Ignazia saw me. “Out! Get out, you!” she shouted. “See what your filthy business has brought down on me!”

  The Yankee dottore told me to wait in the front room—that he and I needed to talk but not at this crucial time.

  “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Ignazia wailed.

  “Avanzata!” Prosperine commanded my wife. “Avanzata!”

  I went into the pantry, not the front room as the Yankee dottore had told me to do. Who was he to tell me where to go inside my own house?

  “Come on, Mrs. Tempesta! Don’t stop! Come on, now!”

  “Good, Ignazia, very good, keep going,” Tusia’s wife encouraged. Their directions, Ignazia’s screaming and shouting, became a quiet murmur in the distance.

  It was on the sideboard, next to the pump. . . .

  A small bundle, wrapped hastily in a bloody sheet. I knew what it was before I lifted the cloth.

  Blue feet, he had, and blue fingers. Black eyelashes. Black hair on his head, still wet from the birth. His thing was a little button. So perfect, he was, but blue.

  I leaned closer. Smelled his smell. Touched his lips. He was neither cold nor warm. His soul was still in the pantry. . . .

  I used what was there—soapy dishwater, olive oil shaken from the bottle into my hand. A worker’s hand it was—rough and used, stained with blue dye. Not the smooth white hand of a priest. Not a hand worthy of touching perfezione. I used what was there.

  With my thumb, I traced an oily cross on his forehead, one on each small eyelid as well. With my cupped hand, I dribbled the water onto his tiny head. “I baptize thee, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” I whispered it in English, not Italian, for this dead, unnamed son of mine was ‘Mericano. His futura would have been a great one, but he had no life.

  Was it sacrament or sacrilege, what I did? Battesimo performed by a man who had soiled a monsignore with a trowelful of wet cement and caused the death of a brother? Had I saved my son’s soul or damned it to hell in that pantry? That was the question I asked myself a thousand sleepless nights after that impromptu baptism . . . the question I have asked a silent God ever since.

  Always from Him, silenzio. . . .

  I kissed my son’s small hand, covered him again with the cloth. Picked him up and held him close to me.

  “Aieeh!” Ignazia wailed and then the second one bleated its complaints to the world. From the pantry doorway, I held the dead firstborn and watched Yates cut the cord of the one that lived.

  “Girl!” Prosperine croaked.

  “Capiddi russo!” Tusia’s wife announced.

  “She’s a redhead, all right,” the Yankee dottore said. “She’s got a harelip, too.” Ignazia strained to see her. “Oh oh oh,” she whimpered, staring at that squalling thing, hungry for her, with love in her eyes.

  “Bambina mia . . .”

  I held my son tighter.

  “Bambina mia,” Ignazia kept chanting. “Bambina mia.” She kept kissing its face, its head, its tiny broken mouth. At that moment it was clear to me: she had not been vergine when she married me. She had opened her legs not only to her husband but to that Irishman she loved. Her belly had filled up with not one but two bambini. And now it was clear: she had no love for the dead boy that had been mine. She loved only the flawed, living girl—the child of that goddamned redheaded mick.

  After he had finished with Ignazia, the dottore came out into my cold, brown garden. We needed to talk, he said.

  Talk then, I told him. I was still holding the dead boy.

  Why didn’t I give that poor child to the women inside so that they could clean it up? He was going to have to take him to the city coroner when he left. It was the procedure in cases such as these. Ignazia and I would get him back for the burial. He presumed I was going to call a priest, right?

  No coroner, I told him. No priest.

  “Well, what you do about the religious business is your own decision, Mr. Tempesta, but the law’s the law concerning the coroner. Say, you should look on the bright side of things. You were lucky this time.”

  “Lucky?” I asked. Was he mocking me? Spitting on my loss?


  “What I’m saying is, you could have lost the both of them, and your wife to boot. This little fella here had breached. He was blocking the birth canal. It was a tricky business making things come out as well as they did. Don’t worry about that harelip of hers. There’s no cleft palate, far as I can tell. She’ll be okay. She won’t talk funny.”

  He waited before he said the rest.

  “Mr. Tempesta, your wife could have died last night. Her heart’s weak. Had the fever when she was a girl, she says. Sometimes disease leaves the heart damaged, see? The two births put that ticker of hers under a terrible strain.” He talked in a loud, slow voice, as if I was deaf or stupid. “Another tricky delivery like this one could kill her, understand? Even a normal delivery—a single birth with no complications. To be on the safe side, you and her have to stop practicing intercourse. Either that, or I can fix her before I leave.”

  I cupped my hand to the top of the boy’s head, looked out at nothing.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying, Mr. Tempesta? I better say it plain. Either I fix her or you have to stop fucking her.”

  I closed my eyes, caressed the top of the boy’s cold head. “No need to talk gutter talk,” I said. “No need to speak filth in the company of my son.”

  “Say, look now, don’t get uppity with me. I’m just telling you, that’s all. Knock that chip off your shoulder, why don’t you? Count your blessings.” He stood and put his hands out for the boy, but I did not hand him over.

  Whatever tears I have shed, I have shed them in the privacy of this garden. Never in the house itself. Never in front of women. Even in the middle of winter nights, it is here where I have always come to cry.

  Later that day, Yates came back with the coroner, a policeman, and Baxter from the mill. Baxter did the talking. “You’re a valued worker, Domenico,” he said. It was the first time he had ever called me by my name—first time he had called me anything but Top Wop. “And I can certainly appreciate your sadness. I have children, too, you know—I know what it’s like. But damn it, man! The company looks bad if something like this makes it into the papers, see? We don’t like trouble. We can’t keep lawbreakers on the payroll, it’s as simple as that. Don’t bring trouble down on your head, man. The child’s dead. Give it up.”