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’m not supposed to get off this bed until after my nap. If I get up, Ma is going to tell Ray. Naps make me mad. They’re dumb. I’m rolling and rolling up in my bedspread. I’m a hot dog and my blanket is a hot dog bun. . . . Now I stand up and my bed’s a GIANT TRAMPOLINE! I jump! And jump! All the way up to Heaven where Mrs. Tusia lives. . . . She died. She was old. Some men came and carried her down the steps and drove her away. But I won’t let those men take my Thomas. I’ll shoot them. Pow! Pow! Pow! Ma says Thomas can come out of the spare room in one week, but I don’t know when that is. I think maybe he’s dead. The man on Ma’s opera records is dead and he can sing. “Ladies and gentlemen, Enrico Caruso!” They used to be Papa’s records. Papa is in Heaven, too.

  Why can’t I see Thomas? Why can’t I touch the drawings he’s touched? This nap is making me hot. And thirsty, too. I’m thirsty for some ice cold Canada Dry ginger ale.

  “Ma! . . . Ma-aa?”

  “What?”

  “Can I get up now?”

  “After your nap. Now go to sleep!”

  The brown stain on the ceiling turns into that monster. It’s going to come alive and fly down the hallway and bang the door down and eat my brother. Unless I shoot it.

  My bedroom rug is a giant lake. The flowers in it are stones. They lead to the edge. . . . I can make it. I do make it.

  I’m at the doorway. Sometimes Ma says she’s going to tell Ray when I’m bad and then she doesn’t tell him. The hallway is a boiling river. You can’t swim in it. You have to fly over it in your airplane, the Song Bird. “Hang on, Thomas. I will save you!” I’m Sky King. This isn’t my hand; it’s my radio.

  I fly the Song Bird over the boiling river to Thomas’s door. Stare at it. Listen.

  I put my fingers on the big diamond doorknob. It twists, clicks open. I enter the room. . . .

  It’s dark in here. The shades are pulled down. It smells bad. The fan from Ma and Ray’s room is in the window, blowing a breeze. I walk over to the bed. Stare at my Thomas. I say his name over the whirr of the fan. “Thomas? Thomas Birdsey! . . . THOMAS JOSEPH BIRDSEY!”

  Thomas’s mouth is closed. I want to see his strawberry tongue. Is he asleep or dead? . . .

  He sighs.

  I move closer. His shirt is off. I see the bones beneath his skin. His hands are raised above his head, palms out, as if some cowboy had said, “Stick ’em up!” and then shot him anyway.

  Chattering teeth, a strawberry tongue. . . . Suddenly, I know something I never knew before. Thomas and I are not one person. There are two of us.

  I move closer, bend down to his ear, and whisper my name.

  He twitches. Swats at the sound.

  “Dominick!”

  We are different people.

  Thomas is sick and I am not.

  He’s asleep. I’m awake.

  I can save myself.

  41

  13 August 1949

  My wife and I never discussed what the dottore had said—that another birth could stop her heart. Ignazia moved her clothes downstairs into Prosperine’s bedroom and I made no move to claim that which rightfully belongs to a husband.

  After the night of Prosperine’s story, I refused to eat the food cooked in my own home. I had a little meeting with Signora Siragusa, my former landlady. She agreed to make my meals for four dollars a week and an extra fifty cents to still that wagging tongue in her mouth. Each evening on the way to work, I walked past the signora’s and picked up my dinner pail. Each morning, at the end of my shift, I stopped there again to leave the pail and eat my breakfast in the signora’s kitchen. The third meal I skipped or bought downtown—’Mericana food with no taste, everything drowning in that yellow glue they call gravy. Bread that tasted more like cotton than bread.

  Ignazia was insulted that I would not eat what she cooked. This she told me with her frowns and banging pot lids and her sighs sent up to Heaven—never with her words. We shared no words, either, about all that Prosperine had told, though I was sure those two whispered plenty about it behind my back. If I had been their fool before that night, I was their fool no longer. The Monkey’s drunken confessione had made me dangerous to them both.

  If I had been ‘Mericano, I might have run squealing to the police and repeated what Prosperine had revealed. Maybe the law would have taken that crazy monkey out of my house and sent her back across the ocean. But a Sicilian knows to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut. I wanted no more scandal brought down on the name of Tempesta—no fingers pointing at my casa di due appartamenti as the place where murdering women had gone to hide. Sometimes I told myself Ignazia was not Violetta D’Annunzio, that hellcat who had fouled herself with men and tricked a husband into swallowing glass. Maybe Violetta had paid the price for her sins and been put in the ground in Palermo, as Prosperine had said. But this I could only make myself believe for an hour or an afternoon and then, again, I would know the terrible truth.

  In the first weeks of her life, Ignazia’s harelipped baby suffered from colica and cried during night and day. Ignazia cried, too, and was plagued with female problems. Tusia’s wife told my wife all problems would go away—that mother and child would be at peace—once the girl was baptized.

  “No battesimo,” I told Ignazia. She had come upstairs to my bedroom—to the room where she had once slept by my side—to ask my permission.

  “Why not?” she said. “So that my suffering can continue? So that both my babies can be lost to God’s mercy?”

  I had said nothing to Ignazia about the boy’s purification in the pantry on the morning of his birth and death. My fear was that my action may have angered God—a boy christened with dishwater by a father who had thrown cement at a priest, forsaken Jesus Christ. . . . If I had harmed the soul of my own son with blasphemous battesimo, I would not then send the redhead’s daughter into Heaven.

  “I once ordered two priests off this property,” I told Ignazia. “I will not be ipocrita now and go crawling back to them on my knees.”

  “Then I’ll bring her to them,” she said. I shook my head and told her she would do what I told her to do.

  “What kind of selfish father would keep the gates of Heaven locked against his own child?” she shouted. “Yours is a wicked sin!”

  “Better shut up your mouth about my sins!” I told her. “Worry, instead, about your own—the ones you committed here with that no-good redheaded mick in New York and the ones you committed back in the Old Country.”

  She turned her face away from mine and hurried out of the room. But I followed her down the stairwell and through the downstairs to the back room. She was face down on the bed, sobbing against the pillows. From the doorway, I warned her—made it clear that if she defied me and had the girl baptized in secret, she would pay a high price. “If I discover such a plan,” I told her, “you and your scrawny friend will live to regret it.”

  In spite of all I knew, now, about Ignazia—in spite of the fear and hatred that stood between us—my passione for her was stronger than ever. My eyes could never stop following her around a room. Her face and figura were a constant torment. A hundred times a day, I kissed her mouth, unpinned her hair, ripped away her buttons, and had what was mine, but these actions I took only in my immaginazione. . . . Sometimes I would torture myself by thinking of those filthy pictures the fotografo had taken of her back in the Old Country—see those photographs being passed around from man to man. I would shudder at this, my fingers twitching with the desire to slit the throats of those faceless men. My wife in the hands of every man except her lawful husband! But mixed with the torture of knowing that those photographs existed was the excitement of what they had captured. To have unspent lust for a murderous wife was a terrible thing—a living Hell!

  Sometimes in my dreams she loved me—submitted to me with obedience and desire as a good Sicilian wife surrenders herself to her husband. I would wake from these reveries in a rush of joy and excitement. Then sadness would overtake me and I would clean myself, wipe aw
ay the spilt milk of desire that made children but could make none for me. Once, too, I had a very strange and terrible dream in which Ignazia shared her passione with my dead brother Vincenzo, while I sat on the bed and combed her long hair. In that dream, I was happy, not jealous, and woke only slowly to the humiliation of the story my dream had told me. I could almost hear Vincenzo laughing at me from Hell.

  Sometimes my longing for my wife’s flesh would reach me at work and become an ache so strong that it distracted me. Even the giggles of the homely little spinning girls could excite me . . . even Nabby Drinkwater’s boastful talk of his pleasures at the whorehouse on Bickel Road.

  One morning, my hunger led me past the signora’s and down to that place on Bickel Road where the fat Hungarian woman kept her whores and house cats. The inside of that place reeked of cabbage and cat piss. I paid and she called to a skinny servant girl who was busy polishing the staircase railing. “This way,” the girl said, and I followed her up the stairs. I thought she was taking me to a whore, but when I entered the room, she closed the door behind us. She was no more than fourteen, fifteen . . . did not yet have the meat of a grown woman on her bones. While I did what I did, she looked the same as she had looked polishing that banister. I left that house with a promise that I had gone there for the first and last time. But I went there again and again, each time worrying that I would run into Drinkwater—that that goddamned Indian who worked beneath me would know that I shared his weakness for the flesh. That the devil that had claimed my brother Vincenzo had claimed me, too.

  I always had the same girl. Always, after I finished my business, I made her put on her clothes and leave quickly. I would stare at the wall while she dressed herself, my shame taking over once my ardore had been spent. Then I would rise from that cheap bed, button myself, and walk back to my house where I lived with two murderous women and a redhaired baby whose mouth was split and whose soul remained stained with original sin.

  One day, a little after the war was over, I read in the newspaper that that dog-faced Monsignor McNulty had keeled over and died from a bad heart. The paper said little Father Guglielmo had been named acting pastor of St. Mary of Jesus Christ Church—the church’s first pastore Italiano. I was happy for both McNulty’s death and Guglielmo’s promotion. I had never had quarrel with Padre Guglielmo—he had only been the other one’s whipped dog. In my mind, I wished him well.

  Not a week later, when I went to the boardinghouse for my breakfast, I found Guglielmo waiting for me in Signora Siragusa’s kitchen. The old signora fluttered around in a sweat, making special cakes and frittata and frying dough in her finest olive oil, as if the Pope himself had dropped in. “It’s good to see you again, my friend,” Guglielmo said. “It’s been a while now, hasn’t it? How’s your wife these days?”

  I told him my wife was fed and cared for.

  “And your child? A daughter, isn’t it? Why, she must be walking by now.”

  I nodded. Ambush, I thought. But I told myself I was too clever to be taken in by such imboscata as this. Signora Siragusa could put all the sugar she wanted on that fried dough of hers, but I was not about to let that redhead’s daughter be baptized.

  Two years had passed since the girl’s birth. The war against the Germans had been fought and won and American Woolen and Textile had dyed all the wool for the sailors’ coats. Tusia’s wife and Signora Siragusa had both spoken to me about my refusal to let the child be christened. Even Tusia himself had had the nerve to lecture me one morning while I sat in his barber’s chair getting my free shave. (Tusia thought he was a big shot now—pezzo grosso in both Knights of Columbus and Sons of Italy.) “Scusa, Salvatore,” I told him, right in the middle of his big speech. “You better mind your own business before I decide to raise your rent.” That shut him up, all right. For the rest of my shave, the only sound in the shop was the voice of Caruso coming out of Tusia’s Victrola.

  In the years I had been away from the church, Father Guglielmo’s face had broadened a little and his hair had turned to silver. Now he held out his hand for me to shake it. Signora Siragusa stopped her bustling to watch. The three of us waited to see what that hand of mine would do.

  I shook Guglielmo’s hand. Like I said, I had never had a quarrel with that little priest who had once sat out in the parlor at the signora’s and tried to help me talk sense into my brother Vincenzo. More than just the color of Guglielmo’s hair had changed. He smoked sigaretti now, one after another, and he no longer carried himself like a man afraid of the world. He asked about my health and my work and called me by my first name. I congratulated him on his appointment as pastore and said I hoped the old monsignor had gone to Hell where he belonged.

  Signora Siragusa gasped and slapped at me with her dishcloth, but Guglielmo thanked me for my good wishes. “May I sit and join you for breakfast and have a little talk?” he asked me.

  “Oh, si, padre, of course you can sit with him!” the old signora answered for me. “Sit! Sit and rest yourself! I hope you brought your appetite.”

  “Talk about what?” I asked. “If it’s a baby’s battesimo you want to talk about, then save your breath.”

  The priest shook his head. “I want to talk about masonry,” he said.

  “Masonry? What about masonry?”

  He asked the signora if we might have a word or two alone. She poured our coffee, put plates before us, then hurried out of the room. Guglielmo and I said nothing more until she left.

  I had guessed he was talking in priestly metaphor—that he would now begin a big speech about battesimo, how each “brick” in place was a stairway to God. But he surprised me. He spoke of real bricks, real mortar. St. Mary of Jesus Christ Church would soon break ground for a new parochial school, he said. A parish school had long been his dream, but Monsignor McNulty had consistently opposed the idea as too costly and too much of a headache. The Catholic schoolchildren of Three Rivers had always, by necessity, had to board in New London and separate from their families during the week. Now the archbishop had listened to Guglielmo’s plan and approved it. An architect and builder from Hartford had been hired. But the archbishop had warned the little priest of the trouble he would call on himself if the project failed or became too costly for the church.

  What he needed, Guglielmo said, was a knowledgeable and thrifty parishioner to supervise the construction and represent the interests of the parish. “I have no knowledge in these areas myself,” he said. “And the school, successful or not, will stand as testimony to my stewardship. If my pastorate is to be permanent, Domenico, then the new school must be sound, inside and out. I come to ask your help.”

  I took a bite of frittata, chewed and chewed it. Took another bite. “How much does this job pay?” I asked.

  Pays nothing, he told me. I would have to donate my time and talent. But the school would open in two years, maybe three—in plenty of time for my little daughter to attend. “That’s all I can offer for compensation, Domenico,” he said. “I appeal to the father in you, not the businessman.”

  “Fathers are breadwinners,” I said. “Working for nothing puts nothing on the table.”

  “And yet,” he said, “we have the miracle of the loaves and fishes to guide us.” He told me he asked no more of me than an hour or so each day. Perhaps I could inspect the building site in the morning on my way home from the mill, or in the late afternoon when I had risen from my sleep. He just needed someone to keep an eye on the daily progress of things. “As Jesus is steward of us all, I seek a steward for this school where children will be taught His holy word,” he told me.

  For some crazy reason, his talk about the loaves and fishes made me think of Prosperine’s story: how the witch had made two rabbits from one and killed off the schoolteacher. My head was mixed up with magic and miracles.

  I finished my breakfast and stood. “Too busy,” I told him.

  “Too busy or too angry, still?”

  I looked at his face, then looked away. He asked me to sit back d
own again, to give him just a minute more of my time. So I sat.

  “The day your brother fell from the roof was a terrible day for us all,” he said. “For you. For me. For the monsignor, too. From his deathbed, he spoke with regret about that day and prayed to God for forgiveness for having mocked your poor brother. I, too, have regretted my weakness on that day—my failure to intervene, to act as God would have wanted me to. . . . Look at me, please, Domenico. Let my eyes see your eyes.”

  It was hard to look, but I looked.

  “Here in this kitchen, I hold out the olive branch. It is long overdue, but it is offered in good faith. Let bygones be bygones. Let anger be buried in the ground. Forgive me, Domenico. I appeal to you as a brother would appeal.”

  His mention of brothers made me look away again. “I have no brothers,” I said. “The police shot one and a monsignor’s curse pushed the other off the roof. And as for your school, there are plenty of other bricklayers in the parish. There’s Riccordino or Di Prima. There’s that Polack who lives on—”

  He placed his hand on my hand to stop me. “You once told me,” he said, “that you had to leave a life of priestly study and learn the trade of masonry because of family obligation.”

  “Si,” I said. “I left my books, left the seminary school in Rome, to clean up my brother Vincenzo’s mess. There was no choice. It was what my father ordered.”

  “Everything that happens is a part of God’s plan,” Guglielmo said. “Your beautiful home on Hollyhock Avenue would not stand today if you had no knowledge of brick. Why not let a religious school become the bridge between your early spiritual training and the masonry you learned in obedience to your father?”

  When I closed my eyes against tears, I saw Papa and Sicily and my life as it had been. . . . Saw again the eyes of the Weeping Vergine who had, long ago, beckoned me to be a priest and save souls. Among all the children of Italy, it was I to whom the Holy Mother had revealed her sadness. . . . And now . . . and now I lived an ocean away and dyed wool instead of saving souls. Now I practiced a priest’s celibacy in my own home and walked to Bickel Road to fuck a skinny whore because a baby inside my wife would kill her. Sitting in that kitchen across from Guglielmo, I saw how far my life had strayed from the life I had meant to live, and I wiped away the water in my eyes.