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

  I was suddenly cold and hungry . . . and so tired that I was afraid I might weep in the presence of the four of them. The small weight I clutched to my chest was suddenly an armload of brick.

  I saw Tusia’s wife looking out her kitchen window. Saw the sadness in her eyes. She was a good woman, Tusia’s wife. Her love for her husband and children was sweet and pure. Undirtied. She had stayed with Ignazia all night and through the morning. It was to her that I pointed—to Tusia’s wife.

  “Have Signora Tusia come out,” I said. “You others go wait in front.”

  The signora came out of the house and up into the garden. “May God bless this child,” she whispered, taking him from me. Tears fell from her eyes. “And may God bless you, too, Domenico, and show you His mercy.”

  “Save your prayers, signora,” I told her. “God spends none of His mercy on Tempesta.”

  For the rest of that afternoon I sat like a stone in my garden—too tired, even, to stand up and go inside.

  Sometime near dark, Prosperine came outside with a bowl of hot farina.

  “Is she asleep?” I asked.

  “They’re both asleep,” she said. “In my room in the back. Go on, eat. Put something in your stomach before you go to work.”

  I took a bite of the cereal. Its warmth inside my mouth was a comfort. “To hell with work,” I heard my voice say. “I hope that goddamned mill goes up in flames and all the bosses with it! Give me a match and kerosene and I’ll do the job myself!”

  The Monkey stood in the cold, her breath a thing I could see. “It should have been the girl who died,” she said, finally. “Bad enough to be born female. Worse to be born female and have the rabbit’s lip. Hers will be a hard life.”

  I squinted up at her, studied her in what was left of the day’s light. She was wearing her nightgown and long coat. Her hair was down—black braids, as skinny as knitting needles. “It’s cold,” she said. “Come inside.”

  “Ignazia is glad it’s the girl who lived,” I said. “My wife cares only about that one with its rabbit-face and orange hair.”

  “It’s what she has to do,” Prosperine said. “Or else the grief would kill her. She’d die in her bed from the loss of the boy.”

  “Bah!” I said.

  “Give her time, Tempesta. Let her heal.”

  I stood up and went inside.

  Got myself dressed.

  Walked to work.

  12 August 1949

  The next morning was Saturday. When I got back to the house, I sat in the kitchen, eating and listening to Ignazia coo and sing to the baby from behind the Monkey’s half-opened bedroom door. I rose and stood in the doorway. When Ignazia saw me, she told me to come and see. “Do you want to hold her?” she asked.

  I shook my head. Stared at it. Lying in the sheets, it stuck out its tongue. Waved its fist at me. “Maybe this one will grow up to be a boxer,” I said.

  Ignazia smiled at my little joke, and then began to cry. “What do you think of Concettina for her name?” she said.

  “Concettina?” I said. “That was my mother’s name.”

  “Si. I remember. It’s a pretty name.”

  “Concettina,” I repeated.

  “You need to get some rest, Domenico,” she told me. “Then you have to go and see the priest. Arrange for the boy’s burial Mass and for Concettina’s battesimo.”

  I shook my head. “No priest,” I said. “No battesimo.”

  Tears came into my wife’s eyes. For the boy, there had been no time, she said, but she wanted to make sure this child was cleansed of sin.

  I stood up. This child was made from sin, I wanted to shout at her. Domenico Tempesta was too wise to be a fool! But all I said was, “No battesimo.”

  All that day I slept the sleep of the dead, and when I woke again, it was nighttime. I went downstairs. Prosperine sat at the kitchen table with a glass and a jug of my wine from the cellar. “She and the baby have just gone to sleep,” she said. “Sit down. Pour yourself some wine.”

  “I don’t want wine,” I said. “I just woke up.”

  “Pour me some more then,” she ordered, as if she were master of my house and I were the servant.

  Usually, that one snuck around with a burglar’s silence—a word here, a grunt there. But on that strange night, wine and circumstance unhinged the Monkey’s tongue. For hours we sat in that kitchen. She drank and smoked her pipe and talked, rapping her empty glass against the tabletop when she wanted more. Half a jug she drank that night, maybe more.

  That was the night she told me her story. The night the Monkey drank my wine and revealed to me the truth of what she was—what they both were. . . .

  38

  I closed the door on the pounding rain, the wind. It was blowing like a son of a bitch out there. The newspaper was sopping wet. Goddamn it. I’d told that delivery kid: when it’s raining, put the paper inside the screen door.

  I tried the TV again: static and snow. The cable wasn’t coming back until this storm was over.

  So I had three options: go out in a downpour, read a wet newspaper, or read some more of the Old Man’s history. I flopped back down on the couch and reached for the waterlogged Daily Record.

  100,000 defy gorbachev, flood red square—ask end of soviet regime. From the looks of things over there, the “Evil Empire” was on the respirator. I thought about all those submarines Ray and the boys had built in preparation for the Soviet attack, all those bomb shelters people had sunk into their backyards. Duck and cover! they had taught us back in grade school. If the Russians drop the bomb . . . And so all us Mickey Mouseketeers had grown up ready for the end of the world, the big meltdown, courtesy of the Communists. . . . Weird the way everything was shifting, changing. Breaking up. They’d sledgehammered the Berlin Wall. The Ayatollah had keeled over. Saddam had been driven back to his bunker. Jesus, if we weren’t careful, we were going to run out of bad guys. . . .

  IDENTIFY L.A.P.D. BEATING VICTIM.

  Except for ourselves, maybe. Except for the bad guy in the mirror. . . .

  The victim looked up at me from the front page of the wet, limp Daily Record. He was black, of course; it was always a black man. He had a name now—Rodney King—and a battered, lopsided face, a slit for an eye. . . . Hey, man, in a way, I was glad the cable was out—grateful for the reprieve. For three days now, they’d been showing that grainy video. The cops hammering this guy—kicking him, clubbing him, zapping him with their stun guns. They’d hog-tied him, busted his legs, his jaw, his eye socket. Had paralyzed the left side of his face. Over and over and over, they’d shown it: America’s real home videos. And the repetition had already begun to lull me, numb me—make me feel the blows a little less each time they savaged him. . . .

  Except Rodney King wasn’t cutting anybody any slack. He’d looked directly into that camera’s lens and now, on page one, he met me, face to battered face, eye to bruised and busted eye. And won. . . . I blinked first. I was the one who had to look away.

  I put the paper down, got up, paced around the living room. . . . It had been the second straight day of hard rain with more expected tomorrow. If this kept up, all the stores downtown would be bailing the Sachem River out of their basements. . . .

  Oppression, man: the “haves” kicking the “have-nots” in the teeth, kicking them while they were down. Might was right, eh, Domenico? You had to rough her up a little. Show her who owned who—who was the boss in your house. Right, Big Man? . . . Well, at least that monkey-faced little housekeeper had restored a little of the balance of power over there on Hollyhock Avenue. The power of the peeling knife. Touch her again and I’ll make you a woman. . . .

  God, I was tired. Wired up and exhausted, both. Unable to sleep the night before, I had reached under the bed for the Old Man’s story. Stupid move, Birdsey, no matter what your shrink says. . . . Run away from your past, Dominick? I thought the past was what you were looking for. . . . But Dr. Patel was right. I needed to face him whether I wanted to or not. N
eeded to hear his voice because . . . because that goddamned manuscript existed. Because before she died, Ma had come down the stairs lugging that strongbox. This is for you, honey. . . . Because I’d fallen off that roof and landed in a hospital room with Nedra Frank’s fiancé. Weird how I’d mourned the loss of that thing—Domenico’s story—and then it had come back to me.

  How much of it did you know, Ma? Did you know you were a twin, too? Did Papa ever tell you about your dead baby brother? . . .

  DOMENICO ONOFRIO TEMPESTA, 1880–1949 “THE GREATEST GRIEFS ARE SILENT.”

  I pictured his gravestone out there at the Boswell Avenue Cemetery. And hers—my grandmother’s—that small, forgotten stone that Thomas and I hadn’t even known about until the summer we’d worked for the Public Works. It was way the hell over on the other side of the cemetery from his, I remember. Why hadn’t they been buried together? Why hadn’t Ma ever taken us to see her mother’s grave? . . . And that ornate granite monstrosity of his: seven or eight feet tall, those cement angels, their faces contorted in pain over his passing. Ma had said he’d made his own burial arrangements ahead of time. It figured. Who else would have chosen something that grand-scale but the “great man from humble beginnings”? . . . The greatest griefs are silent. So why’d you hire a stenographer then, Papa? Hire him, fire him. . . . Why’d you rent a fucking Dictaphone to be your confidante? Why did you have to burden me?

  He hadn’t been working on any “guide for Italian youth,” that much I’d figured out. That had only been the “official” excuse for whatever the hell it was he was trying to do. And what was that? Stroke his ego a little more before he kicked off? Exonerate himself for being such a prick? . . . It was weird: when we were kids, Ma would take us out to the cemetery with her, decorate his grave, and not even mention her mother’s. . . . How old had she been when her mother died? I couldn’t remember the dates. I had to get out there to the cemetery one of these days—look for that stone, check Ignazia’s dates.

  I saw, again, the way she had looked in that weird dream. Ignazia, my drowned grandmother. Halloween night, it was—the night I’d totaled my truck. In the dream, I was standing on the ice, looking down at all those lost limbo babies floating beneath me. And then . . . what was the word for grandmother? Nonna? Why did you come to me, Nonna? What did you want? . . .

  She’d drowned, Ma said—had fallen through the ice at Rosemark’s Pond. Had she been skating? Taking a shortcut over thin ice? I had never really gotten the details.

  The greatest griefs are silent. . . .

  In that dream, Ignazia’s eyes had looked up at me from beneath the ice—she had found me, had looked me right in the eye. What were you trying to tell me, Nonna? What?

  Keep reading your grandfather’s history, Dominick. . . .

  But all it ever did was confuse me. Make me feel worse. . . .

  Life is a river, Dominick. . . .

  Well, fuck it. You could drown in a river. . . . I saw myself going down to the Falls. Throwing the Old Man’s manuscript over the edge. Watching it flutter, page by page, into the water. I saw Domenico’s story float away.

  The thing was I hated the son of a bitch—the way he’d treated his daughter. His wife. Wouldn’t even leave work to get the goddamned doctor. . . . The “big man from humble beginnings.” The “chosen one” who’d been conceived the night a volcano blew—who’d seen some stupid statue cry. . . . He’d paid for it, though—all that arrogance of his. I saw him up there in his garden, clutching his stillborn son, refusing to hand him over. Even when they brought in the big boys—the cops, his boss from the mill. . . . Well, we had that much in common, Domenico and me. We both knew what that felt like: holding your dead child in your arms. Facing just how powerless you were. . . .

  Stop it, Dominick. Don’t go there. Do something.

  I picked up the paper again—flipped to the local news. wequonnocs pray to ancestors, break ground at casino site. Good, I thought. More power to ’em. I hoped they made millions down there. Hoped they emptied the pockets of every friggin’ paleface whose ancestor-oppressors had screwed them over and left them for dead.

  And then I noticed him: front and center in the oversized picture they’d run with the article. Ralph Drinkwater, whooping and hopping around, in full Indian dress. He was into it, I guess. And, hey, why not? If that casino took off like everyone said it was going to, it’d probably make him a millionaire. He’d be able to tell Hatch Forensic Institute to take its mops and brooms and toilet brushes and shove ’em. Ralph Drinkwater: part black, part Indian, and dancing up a storm. . . .

  Life had hog-tied Ralph, that was for sure—had kicked Ralph in the head more than once. We’d all taken a crack at him: the teachers at school, Dell Weeks and his wife, me sitting there that night in the police interrogation room. And here he still was, dancing and celebrating. Praying to his ancestors.

  His name was Swift Wolf, according to the caption, not Ralph Drinkwater. He was the tribal pipe-keeper of the Wequonnoc Nation, not the screwed-up little boy who’d posed for all those dirty pictures. . . . I saw Ralph at his desk in Mrs. Jeffrey’s class, a fourth- grader, looking away while I passed the cardboard collection bucket so that we could “honor” his strangled sister. Saw him later, in Mr. LoPresto’s history class, smirking in self-defense while LoPresto declared that the Wequonnocs had been annihilated, every last one of them wiped out in the name of progress. Manifest Destiny. He’d been true to himself—had tried to claim his heritage all along. His blackness, his Wequonnoc blood. “Read Soul on Ice!” he kept telling us that summer we worked together. “That book tells it like it is!” And Leo and I had laughed—turned it into a joke. . . . Well, good for you, Ralph. Enjoy the last laugh, man. I hope you make millions down there. . . .

  Maybe the world really was changing, I thought. The Berlin Wall was down, the Russians hadn’t blown us up after all, and the Indians were rising up from the ashes. . . .

  I don’t know how long I dozed. Long enough for it to turn from day to night. “Yeah, yeah, wait a minute,” I told the ringing telephone. Went stumbling in the dark toward it, trying to wake up.

  Just what I need, I thought: me tripping over something and falling—racking up my foot all over again. I reached for the receiver. “Yup?”

  “Birdsey?”

  “Maybe. Who’s this?”

  “Is this Dominick Birdsey or isn’t it?” I knew the voice but couldn’t place it. I waited.

  “You wrote your number down. Asked me to call if I saw anything.”

  Drinkwater? Ralph was calling me? “Hey, man, I was just looking at your picture in the—” Then, it hit me: something was wrong with my brother.

  “And I don’t want to get caught in the middle of anything,” he was saying. “Understand? That’s the last thing I need right now. You keep my name out of it.”

  “What is it?” I said. “What’s happened to him?” I was standing there, getting the shakes, same as always when I got a call about Thomas.

  “Get him tested,” Ralph said.

  “Tested? Tested for what?”

  “HIV.”

  39

  12 August 1949

  That was the night the Monkey told me her story . . . the night my enemy drank my wine and revealed to me the truth of what she was—what they both were.

  “Once, many years ago,” the Monkey began, “I witnessed some very strange magic. It changed my life. And now, what I saw that day long ago has come back to me with the birth of the two . . . and because the one that lived is cursed with the rabbit’s lip.” She was whispering—confiding to me in the manner of a criminal. “The magic I speak of involved rabbits,” she said.

  At the time, she told me, she was a girl of fourteen, living in her native seaside village of Pescara.

  “Pescara?” I interrupted. “I thought you were siciliana.”

  “You thought that because it’s what those two plumbers wanted you to think. You thought I was their cousin, too. I am not.”

&
nbsp; “Don’t be stupid, woman,” I said. “Why would they have sponsored a creature as homely as you, taken on the burden of marrying you off to boot, if not because of obbligo di famiglia?”

  “Why does anyone do such things?” she said, and stroked her thumb against her fingers. “Lying was profitable for those two plumbers, that’s why. They played you for a fool, Tempesta.”

  I leaned toward her and grabbed her arm, demanding that she explain herself.

  “I begin at the beginning,” she said. “But not with you squeezing my arm like it’s a chicken’s neck. And not with an empty glass, either. Let go of me and pour the wine! And don’t be cheap about it.”

  Her father was a poor macaroni-maker cursed with bad luck, she said. Typhoid had taken his wife and son and left him with three daughters to raise. Prosperine was the oldest of these, forced by circumstance both to serve as mother to the other two and to make macaroni all day long. Ripetizione rapida was everything in that work, she said, and those repeated movements lived still in her hands. Sometimes when her mind wandered, she told me, she still caught her fingers making macaroni. Even now, even here, an ocean away from her sisters and the life she had been forced to leave.

  As soon as each was able, the sisters were put to work at the wheels and mills and bowls in the macaroni shop. They began each morning before dawn, their father turning semolina into dough, his three daughters pressing, cutting, and shaping the strings and strips with their knives and machines, their thumbs and fingers. Flour would fly in the air, the Monkey said, making a paste in their mouths as they breathed and dusting their hair and skin, turning each sister into a pale, gray-haired nonna by the time the sun had climbed to its full height in the sky.

  In Pescara, she said, the noon hour was her favorite time of day. While her papa took his nap and the macaroni sat drying on racks and trays, Anna and Teodolina and she were free to roam through the busy square. Often, they were joined on these daily walks by another motherless girl, a fishmonger’s daughter named Violetta D’Annunzio. She was younger than the Monkey—closer in age to Teodolina. A saucy thing, she was! Violetta’s friends, the three sisters, were plain, but she herself was beautiful. She had dark eyes and hair and skin like cream. Her eyebrows grew in an upturned direction that gave her the tortured look of saints.