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 let the letter fall. Got to the bathroom and gave up my lunch.

  I drove up to Farmington that Friday. Paid my twenty bucks. They assigned me a confidential number, drew my blood. The woman at the window told me I had to let three business days pass and then call the lab at the end of the third day. Which was Wednesday in my case, she said. The test results usually came back around three, so I should call between four and five-thirty.

  I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t tell anyone. Leo would tell Angie and she’d tell Dessa. What could Dr. Patel say that would make any difference?

  I visited Ray as usual. Brought him his clean laundry, shaved him, chatted with him and his buddies. One afternoon, passing the wheelchair “sentries,” I locked eyes with that shriveled-up human skeleton who sat out there. Princess Evil Eye. She was staring at me something fierce that day—like she knew what was up, what I was waiting to hear about. But this time I stood there and stared back at her. Gave it back to her. . . . It made no sense, really; it was pathetic. Little kids were dying every day from cancer, car accidents, AIDS. The other day in the paper, they’d run a story about a seventeen-year-old boy who’d put up a yearlong fight waiting for a bone marrow match he’d never gotten. But there she sat: a geriatric nuisance, a vegetable with a beating heart. They must have to bathe her, shovel food into her, wipe up whatever came out the other end. What a waste, I thought. What a fucked-up universe. She gets to hang on to life and, meanwhile, over there at that children’s hospice . . .

  “Something bothering you?” Ray asked me.

  “Huh? No. Why?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems like something’s eating you.” I waved away the remark—told him I was fine. What was he, a shrink now?

  Was something eating me?

  The nights were bad; that was when the worst panics fell over me. I slept in fits and starts, sitting bolt upright from noises I thought I heard, from dreams. One night the phone rang at 2:00 A.M. I couldn’t answer it. I was sure it would be Joy. Whatever my test said, I wasn’t doing it—cleaning up her mess for her. She had no right to even ask. I was nobody’s father.

  Tuesday night—the night before I was due to call for my test results: that was when I hit bottom. Crying jags, the shakes. I went out for a drive to calm down and ran right through a red light at Broad and Benson. No one was coming the other way, thank God, but they could have been. That was the point: someone could have been coming. I guess I was a little screwy by then from all that sleep deprivation.

  I admired the irony of it, in a way: the way God had waited all those years and then had finally gotten around to me after all. Had finally zapped me for being the son of a bitch brother. I’d never figured that out: why God had given Thomas schizophrenia and not me. But now I thought I glimpsed the master plan. The Lord Almighty had been saving me for something else. The AIDS virus: the disease you couldn’t win against no matter how well you played defense. And He was a jokester, too: that little scare He’d given me when I thought Thomas had the disease. But that had turned out to be a false alarm. Previews of coming attractions. He’d been saving the HIV card to play on me. . . .

  I kept thinking about that goofy priest—the one at my brother’s burial service. The guy in the sandals. Father LaVie, who’d beaten cancer. The padre with the amazing shrinking tumor. . . . They’d imported him from somewhere else because all the priests at St. Anthony’s were busy that day. He’d told me where he’d driven in from, but I’d forgotten. I opened the phone book to the list of towns. Danbury, Danielson. . . . That was it. He’d said he was pinch-hitting at a rectory up in Danielson.

  It was Father LaVie who answered. Sure he remembered me, he said. And how about this for a coincidence: he’d just read an article that day about twins who survived their siblings and had started thinking about me. How difficult it must be to mourn a twin. So how was I? What could he do for me?

  I rambled on, in no particular order, about Ray’s gangrene, Angela, the weight my brother had put on me. About what a bully my grandfather had been and how I’d bullied Thomas all our lives because I was insecure in my mother’s love. About Joy’s visit, her news. “Every time I take a step forward, I get clobbered,” I told him. “God must really hate me.”

  Father LaVie promised me that there was meaning to be mined from suffering—that God was merciful, whether we understood His ways or not. This is pap, I thought—Hallmark greeting card theology. But when I hung up, I felt calmer. Better. Whatever that test result was going to say, it was beyond my control. All I could do now was hang on. Pray for a merciful, not an ironic, god.

  On Wednesday afternoon, I called the test center. Got busy signals until four-forty-five. The woman had me repeat my number. “Okay, just a second,” she said.

  I closed my eyes. Gripped the receiver. I had it: I knew I did. I’d gotten the virus to pay for the sins I’d committed against my brother, my mother, my wife. . . .

  The phone clunked. “Okay,” she said. “It’s here. Non-reactive.”

  “Non-reactive?”

  That was good, she said. That was what I wanted. Non-reactive.

  I walked around the condo. Took deep breaths. Dropped to the floor and did push-ups. Go to some bar and get shit-faced, I told myself. Go celebrate life.

  I grabbed the keys, got in the car. It took me to the hospital.

  I passed sleeping children, fretting children, empty cribs. Passed those two rabbits that Dessa had told me about. Pet therapy, she’d called it. “You wanna play?” a bald-headed girl asked me. She sat before a TV screen, playing Nintendo. “I’ll let you. There’s two controls.”

  “Can’t now,” I said. “Maybe later.”

  Dessa was in a room off to the left, seated in a rocker, holding and rocking a sprawled boy in feet pajamas. A big bruiser. The two of them, sitting, rocking, made a kind of pietà.

  “Hi,” Dessa said. “What are you doing here?”

  Bob Marley was playing from a kiddie tape recorder: One heart, one love . . .

  The boy was staring at a strange lamp on the table next to them. One of those fiberoptic things—hundreds of strands, a small, fragile tip of light at each end. I squinted at it and it became the night sky in miniature—the heavens themselves.

  “I heard . . . I heard there were kids at this place that need holding,” I said.

  Dessa nodded. “This is Nicky,” she said. “My leg’s asleep. I could use a break.”

  He had black hair, bushy eyebrows, huge brown eyes. “Hey, Nicky,” I said. Reached down and took him from her. Lifted him into my arms.

  All my life, I had imagined the scenario in which my father would, at last, reveal himself to me. As a kid, I’d cooked up cowboy dads, pilot fathers who made emergency landings on Hollyhock Avenue, hopped from their planes, and rescued us from Ray. Later, I had cast gym teachers, shop teachers, the man who owned the hobby shop downtown, and even benign Mr. Anthony across the street as potential fathers: the real thing, as opposed to the intruder who had married my mother and installed himself at our house to make us miserable. I was thirty-six years old and still fantasizing when the doctors told Ma that her cancer would kill her. Over the months I watched her wither, I’d kept romanticizing her death—shaping it, as usual, to my own selfish need. She would pull me close and deliver me to my father, I thought—whisper his name into my ear and then go peacefully, having delivered us both. . . . By then, I had managed to gain, then lose, my grandfather’s “history”—had lost it permanently, I thought. My suspicion at the time had rested on Angelo Nardi, the dashing Italian stenographer my grandfather had hired to help him write his story, his “guide for Italian youth.” They’d been friends, she said. She made him coffee, helped him with his English. She’d hardly ever gone out. Who else could it have been? . . . Later on, after Domenico’s manuscript had come back to me—had dropped thunk! onto my hospital bed—I’d begun the history in hopes that I would find my father within its pages. Hesitantly, with growing difficulty, I had l
et Domenico’s voice fill up my head—had struggled with the ugliness and dread of what I became surer and surer his sorry story would reveal. . . . But in the end, Domenico had left me nothing more than a legacy of riddles and monkeys, cryptic remarks about secret-keeping that neither confirmed nor denied what I had come to fear: that he had taken evil advantage of the harelipped daughter he assumed no other man would want. That he had needed to punish, even in her death, the troubled wife he had always wanted but never really had.

  But in a lifetime of fantasizing—of waiting for my real father to appear—I could not have imagined that I would find him in the exact same place—in the exact same booth—where, ten months earlier, my brother had sat across from me and warned me that, should America launch a holy war against the Nation of Islam, God’s vengeance would be swift and terrible. That he, Thomas, was fasting in preparation for a sacrifice he hoped would short-circuit a Holy War and rescue the children of God. . . . And the last person I had ever expected would deliver me from the pain and confusion of a withheld identity was the man who, I had always felt, had stepped in and stolen my true father’s place. In the end, it was Ray who delivered me—Ray who took me, finally, into his arms and held me and brought me home to the man I had spent a lifetime looking for.

  “So how’s it feel, overall?” I asked him.

  “Feels all right. It’s chafing a little. I probably overdid it.”

  It was Ray’s first foray into the world on his brand-new leg. Things had gone well for a change—better than expected. We’d gone to Benny’s for some batteries. Had stopped back at Hollyhock Avenue to check things out—make sure everything was secure. Now we were at Friendly’s having lunch. Celebrating his new leg.

  “Well, they said they can make some minor adjustments after you’ve taken it for a couple of test runs,” I reminded him. “Make sure you tell them about that chafing.”

  “Okay, Dad,” he quipped. Our waitress approached with menus.

  “Hi, guys. My name’s Kristin. How are you two doing today?”

  “None of your business,” Ray said. He cracked a smile. He was feeling his oats.

  “None of my business, huh? Okay, you old grouch. What can I get for you, then?”

  I recognized her. She’d been a fledgling that day when she’d waited on my brother and me—a trainee. Thomas had treated her to a sample of his religious manifesto and she’d stood there, order pad in hand, speechless. Now, ten months later, the Gulf War had been fought and filed away, my brother was dead, and Kristin here was an old pro at handling cranky customers.

  Ray ordered the potpie; I got one of those “supermelt” things. Kristin asked us if we wanted our coffees right away. If we thought the hurricane everyone was talking about was actually going to come up as far as Connecticut. “Pfft,” Ray said. “Hurricane Bob. Doesn’t sound too scary to me. They just play these things up on the television to jack up their ratings.”

  Kristin told us she and her boyfriend were going out after work to get candles, masking tape for the windows, junk food. She came from Minnesota, she said. This was her first hurricane. She was “psyched.”

  After she was out of earshot, Ray muttered that she wouldn’t be so “psyched” if her roof blew off.

  “Sure she would,” I said. “She’s young, she’s got a landlord to worry about the roof. All she’s got to do is screw her boyfriend by candlelight and pass the potato chips.”

  “Sounds like a good life,” Ray said. “What the hell are you and I doing wrong?”

  I asked him if he’d been following the news about Russia. “Looks like the Communists may be on the ropes over there, huh?” I said. “How do you feel about that?”

  “How do I feel about it?” He said he didn’t feel anything. Why? What was he supposed to feel?

  I reminded him that he’d gone to war to stop the Communists over in Korea. That he’d worked almost forty years building nuclear subs, just in case the Russians decided to drop the bomb.

  “That was all politics,” he said. “I just went to work every day and did my job. . . . You mark my words, though. Day after tomorrow, all those TV guys that are ballyhooing this Hurricane Bob thing will be going ‘Hurricane? What hurricane?’”

  I sat there, baffled by his nonreaction to the teetering of the Soviet empire.

  Our food came. The restaurant emptied out as we ate. Neither of us said too much more and, in the silence, my mind drifted to the phone conversation I’d had that morning with Joy. I couldn’t promise her something like that, I’d told her. She’d be all right; they were coming out with new drugs all the time. How about that AZT stuff I’d just read about? Had she heard about that?

  I’d try to help her out as much as I could, I’d said—help both of them out—but my own life was still up in the air. I couldn’t commit to something as big as that—I just couldn’t. She had to get a grip; there were support services available for people in her situation. It was just a matter of finding out how to access them. I hadn’t meant for it to come out like a speech—like my lecture that time about couch-buying. But that was what Joy accused me of doing: giving her a speech when all she needed was some peace of mind—a promise that her daughter would be taken care of by someone she trusted. Not shipped off to some foster home with perverts or people who only wanted the money. She’d cried more than spoken during that conversation—had finally hung up in my face.

  “I been thinking about something,” Ray said. “It’s been bothering me.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. I took a sip of coffee. I thought we were talking about his leg.

  “Do you remember a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago? About your father? . . . How I said she never told me who he was?”

  I nodded. Held my breath.

  He had had a similar kind of thing pulled on him, he said—the way his family had tricked him into thinking Edna was his sister instead of his mother. That was what he’d been thinking about ever since that conversation we’d had. Our situations were different, of course, but similar in other ways. It had pulled the rug out from under him when he’d found out the truth, he said; he’d had a right to know who his own mother was, for Christ’s sake. Having the wool pulled over his eyes like that—well, in one way or another, he’d paid for that the rest of his life. He’d always felt inferior to other people, he said. Ashamed. And mad—mad at the whole world. Not that my situation and his were the same. Well, in a way they were. They were the same but they were different.

  “What . . . what are you saying?” My heart raced; my breathing went shallow. Now that the moment was finally here, I was afraid to know.

  “I had promised her, you see? Your mother. . . . She only told me a couple months before she passed away. I didn’t know anything about it before then. We didn’t talk about that kind of thing. I was just as much in the dark as you were. But after she got sick, it weighed on her. She needed to tell someone, so she told me. Made me promise not to say anything. But I don’t know. It’s different now. There’s money involved. . . . She couldn’t have seen that coming.”

  What was he talking about?

  “She was kind of ashamed of it, you see? Of what she’d done. Of course, nowadays, they have babies out of wedlock all the time, all colors of the rainbow, and nobody even thinks anything about it. But it was different back then. For the Italians, especially. People didn’t like them, see? They resented them. They’d come over here in droves, up from New York to work in the factories. . . . People used to say they were smelly, greasy, all sexed-up—the same kind of thing you hear about the coloreds.” He looked around, hastily, for blacks. “The Italians needed someone to feel better than, I guess. Lots of them were prejudiced as hell when it came to the coloreds. The Indians, too. Her father, for instance. He would have murdered her if he’d known.”

  I was listening without really hearing him. He’d just mentioned Domenico. He was about to tell me that my grandfather was my father.

  “She told me she’d always worried that if you
two found out—well, not so much your brother as you—that . . . that you’d hate her for it. Or hate yourself. But I don’t know. Things are different now. You have a right to know, same as I had a right. To know about Edna, I mean. And now with that thing down there.”

  I closed my eyes. This was it, then. Just say it.

  “He died four or five months after you two were born. Never knew a thing about you. . . . She was kind of naive, of course—in the dark about a lot of things. She told me she didn’t even figure out she was pregnant until she was almost halfway along. Back then, there was no TV, of course. That kind of subject didn’t get paraded around the way it does now.”

  Ray was wrong. Domenico had died before Thomas and I were born—had had his stroke in August. She had delivered Thomas and me four months after his death.

  “He got killed over in Korea,” Ray said.

  I looked up at him. “What?”

  “He’d been stationed over in Europe. Germany, I think she said. And then, when MacArthur went into Korea, he got shipped right over. Didn’t even get to come home first. Got killed right at the beginning, I guess—during the landing at Inchon.”

  Was this right? My father was . . . ?

  “She read about it in the paper. That was how she found out he’d been killed. Got in touch with some gal she knew—one of his cousins or something—and I guess she filled her in a little more on what had happened. But he never got home. Your father. Never even knew anything about you two guys, she said.”

  “But why . . . how come she . . . ?”

  “He was a colored fella. Well, part colored, I guess. Heinz fifty-seven varieties. But you know how it is. You got some colored blood in you, you’re considered colored, no matter what. Least that’s the way it was back then. People didn’t mix the way they do now. Or have babies out of wedlock, either. . . . Her father would have killed her, Dominick. You see? He probably would have disowned her. Course, the funny thing is, he was the one who introduced them. Your mother and Henry. That was his name. Henry. Your grandfather knew his father.”