by Wally Lamb
Sometime during our visit with the photo album that morning, my mother told me to wait there. She had something she wanted to get. With a soft sigh of pain, she was on her feet and heading for the front stairs.
“Ma, whatever it is, let me get it for you,” I called out.
“That’s okay, honey,” she called back down the stairs. “I know right where it is.”
I flipped quickly through the pages as I waited—made my family a jerky, imperfect movie. It struck me that my mother had compiled mostly a book of her father, Thomas, and me. Others make appearances: Ray, Dessa, the Anthonys from across the street, the Tusia sisters from next door. But my grandfather, my brother, and I are the stars of my mother’s book. Ma herself, camera-shy and self-conscious about her cleft lip, appears only twice in the family album. In the first picture, she’s one of a line of dour-faced schoolchildren posed on the front step of St. Mary of Jesus Christ Grammar School. (A couple of years ago, the parish sold that dilapidated old schoolhouse to a developer from Massachusetts who converted it into apartments. I bid on the inside painting, but Paint Plus came in under me.) In the second photograph, Ma looks about nine or ten. She stands beside her lanky father on the front porch of the house on Hollyhock Avenue, wearing a sacklike dress and a sober look that matches Papa’s. In both of these photos, my mother holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth.
It was a gesture she had apparently learned early and practiced all her life: the hiding of her cleft lip with her right fist—her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she’d had no control. The lip, split just to the left of her front teeth, exposed a half-inch gash of gum and gave the illusion that she was sneering. But Ma never sneered. She apologized. She put her fist to her mouth for store clerks and door-to-door salesmen, for mailmen and teachers on parents’ visiting day, for neighbors, for her husband, and even, sometimes, for herself when she sat in the parlor watching TV, her image reflected on the screen.
She had made reference to her harelip only once, a day in 1964 when she sat across from me in an optometrist’s office. A month earlier, my ninth-grade algebra teacher had caught me squinting at the blackboard and called to advise my mother to get my eyes tested. But I’d balked. Glasses were for brains, for losers and finky kids. I was furious because Thomas had developed no twin case of myopia—no identical need to wear stupid faggy glasses like me. He was the jerk, the brownnoser at school. He should be the nearsighted one. If she made me get glasses, I told her, I just wouldn’t wear them.
But Ma had talked to Ray, and Ray had issued one of his supper table ultimatums. So I’d gone to Dr. Wisdo’s office, acted my surliest, and flunked the freaking wall chart. Now, two weeks later, my black plastic frames were being fitted to my face in a fluorescent-lit room with too many mirrors.
“Well, I think they make you look handsome, Dominick,” Ma offered. “Distinguished. He looks like a young Ray Milland. Doesn’t he, Doctor?”
Dr. Wisdo didn’t like me because of my bad attitude during the first visit. “Well,” he mumbled reluctantly, “now that you mention it.”
This all occurred during the fever of puberty and Beatlemania. The summer before, at the basketball courts at Fitz Field, a kid named Billy Grillo had shown me and Marty Overturf a stack of rain-wrinkled paperbacks he’d found out in the woods in a plastic bag: Sensuous Sisters, Lusty Days & Lusty Nights, The Technician of Ecstasy. I’d swiped a couple of those mildewed books and taken them out past the picnic tables where I read page after faded page, simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the things men did to women, the things women did to themselves and each other. It flabbergasted me, for instance, that a man might put his dick inside a woman’s mouth and have her “hungrily gulp down his creamy nectar.” That a woman might cram a glass bottle up between another woman’s legs and that this would make both “scream and undulate with pleasure.” I’d gone home from basketball that day, flopped onto my bed and fallen asleep, awakening in the middle of my first wet dream. Shortly after that, the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. Behind the locked bathroom door, I began combing my bangs forward and beating off to my dirty fantasies about all those girls who screamed for the Beatles—what those same girls would do to me, what they’d let me do to them. So the last person I wanted to look like was Ray Milland, one of my mother’s old fart movie stars.
“Could you just shut up, please?” I told Ma, right in front of Dr. Wisdo.
“Hey, hey, hey, come on now. Enough is enough,” Dr. Wisdo protested. “What kind of boy says ‘Shut up’ to his own mother?”
Ma put her fist to her mouth and told the doctor it was all right. I was just upset. This wasn’t the way I really was.
As if she knew the way I really was, I thought to myself, smiling inwardly.
Dr. Wisdo told me he had to leave the room for a few minutes, and by the time he got back, he hoped I would have apologized to my poor mother.
Neither of us said anything for a minute or more. I just sat there, smirking defiantly at her, triumphant and miserable. Then Ma took me by complete surprise. “You think glasses are bad,” she said. “You should try having what I have. At least you can take your glasses off.”
I knew immediately what she meant—her harelip—but her abrupt reference to it hit me like a snowball in the eye. Of all the forbidden subjects in our house, the two most forbidden were the identification of Thomas’s and my biological father and our mother’s disfigurement. We had never asked about either—had somehow been raised not to ask and had honored the near-sacredness of the silence. Now Ma herself was breaking one of the two cardinal rules. I looked away, shocked, embarrassed, but Ma wouldn’t stop talking.
“One time,” she said, “a boy in my class, a mean boy named Harold Kettlety, started calling me ‘Rabbit Face.’ I hadn’t done anything to him. Not a thing. I never bothered anyone at all—I was scared of my own shadow. He just thought up that name one day and decided it was funny. ‘Hello there, Rabbit Face,’ he used to whisper to me across the aisle. After a while, some of the other boys took it up, too. They used to chase me at recess and call me ‘Rabbit Face.’ “
I sat there, pumping my leg up and down, wanting her to stop—wanting Harold Kettlety to still be a kid so I could find him and rip his fucking face off for him.
“And so I told the teacher, and she sent me to the principal. Mother Agnes, her name was. She was a stern thing.” Ma’s fingers twisted her pocketbook strap as she spoke. “She told me to stop making a mountain out of a molehill. I was making things worse, she said, by calling it to everyone’s attention. I should just ignore it. . . . Then more boys got on the bandwagon, even boys from other grades. It got so bad, I used to get the dry heaves before school every morning. You didn’t stay home sick in our house unless you had something like the measles or the chicken pox. That’s the last thing Papa would have stood for—me home all day long just because some stinker was calling me a name.”
I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice—to see the way she was twisting that pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything. “I don’t see how any of this sob story stuff has anything to do with me,” I said. “Are you planning to get to the point before I die of old age?”
She shut up after that, silenced, I guess, by the fact that her own son had joined forces with Harold Kettlety. On the drive home from the optometrist’s, I chose to sit in the backseat and not speak to her. Somewhere en route, I drew my new glasses from their brown plastic clip-to-your-pocket case, rubbed the lenses with the silicone-impregnated cleaning cloth, and slipped them on. I looked out the window, privately dazzled by a world more sharp and clear than I remembered. I said nothing about this, spoke no apologies, offered no concessions.
“Ma’s crying downstairs,” Thomas informed me later, up in our bedroom. I was lifting weights, shirt off, glasses on.
“So what am I supposed to do about it?” I said. “Hold a snot rag to her nose?�
��
“Just try being decent to her,” he said. “She’s your mother, Dominick. Sometimes you treat her like s-h-i-t.”
I stared at myself in our bedroom mirror as I lifted the weights, studying the muscle definition I’d begun to acquire and which I could now see clearly, thanks to my glasses. “Why don’t you say the word instead of spelling it,” I smirked. “Go ahead. Say ‘shit.’ Give yourself a thrill.”
He’d been changing out of his school clothes as we spoke. Now he stood there, hands on his hips, wearing just his underpants, his socks, and one of those fake-turtleneck dickey things that were popular with all the goody-goody kids at our school. Thomas had them in four or five different colors. God, I hated those dickeys of his.
I looked at the two of us, side by side, in the mirror. Next to me, Thomas was a scrawny joke. Mr. Pep Squad Captain. Mr. Goody-Goody Boy.
“I mean it, Dominick,” he said. “You better treat her right or I’ll say something to Ray. I will. Don’t think I wouldn’t.”
Which was bullshit and we both knew it.
I grabbed my barbell wrench, banged extra weights onto the bar, lifted them. Fink. Pansy Ass Dickey Boy. “Oh, geez, I’m nervous,” I told him. “I’m so scared, I’ll probably shit my p-a-n-t-s.”
He stood there, just like Ma, his look of indignation melting into forgiveness. “Just cool it, is all I’m saying, Dominick,” he said. “Oh, by the way, I like your glasses.”
When Ma came back down the stairs on that day of failed kitchen renovation, she was carrying a gray metal strongbox. I put down the picture album, stood, and walked toward her. “Here, honey,” she said. “This is for you. Phew, kind of heavy.”
“Ma, I told you I’d get it.” I took it from her. “What’s in it, anyways?”
“Open it and see,” she said.
She had masking-taped the key to the side of the box; I kidded her about it—told her it was a good thing she didn’t work for Fort Knox. She watched my fingers peel the key free, put it in the lock, and turn. In anticipation of my opening the strongbox, she didn’t even seem to hear my teasing.
Inside the box was a large manila envelope curled around a small coverless dictionary and held in place with an elastic band that broke as soon as I touched it. The envelope held a thick sheaf of paper—a manuscript of some kind. The first ten or fifteen pages were typewritten—originals and carbon copies. The rest had been written in longhand—a scrawling, ornate script in blue fountain-pen ink. “It’s Italian, right?” I asked. “What is it?”
“It’s my father’s life story,” she said. “He dictated it the summer he died.”
As I fanned through the thing, its mildewy aroma went up my nose. “Dictated it to who?” I asked her. “You?”
“Oh, gosh, no,” she said. Did I remember the Mastronunzios from church? Tootsie and Ida Mastronunzio? My mother was always doing that: assuming that my mental database of all the Italians in Three Rivers was as extensive as hers was.
“Uh-uh,” I said.
Sure I did, she insisted. They drove that big white car to Mass? Ida worked at the dry cleaner’s? Walked with a little bit of a limp? Well, anyway, Tootsie had a cousin who came over from Italy right after the war. Angelo Nardi, his name was. He’d been a courtroom stenographer in Palermo. “He was a handsome fella, too—very dashing. He was looking for work.”
Her father had been saying for years how, someday, he was going to sit down and tell the story of his life for the benefit of siciliani. He thought boys and young men back in the Old Country would want to read about how one of their own had come to America and made good. Gotten ahead in life. Papa thought it might inspire them to do likewise. So when he met Tootsie’s cousin one day over at the Italian Club, he came up with a big idea. He would tell Angelo his story—have Angelo write it all down as he spoke and then type it up on the typewriter.
The project had begun as something of an extravaganza, according to my mother. “Careful with his money” his whole life, Papa now spared no expense at first on his inspirational autobiography. He cleared some of the furniture out of the parlor and rented a typewriter for Angelo. “Things were hunky-dory for the first couple of days,” Ma said. “But after that, there were problems.”
Papa decided he could not tell his story as freely with Angelo in the room—that he would be able to remember things better if he was by himself. “So the next thing you know, he was on the telephone with a bunch of office equipment companies—making all these long-distance calls, which I could hardly believe he was doing, Dominick, because he’d never even call his cousins down in Brooklyn to wish them a Merry Christmas or a Happy Easter. They always had to call us every year because Papa didn’t want to waste his money. But for that project of his, he called all over creation. He ended up renting this Dictaphone machine from some place all the way down in Bridgeport.” Ma shook her head, wonder-struck still. “Jeepers, you should have seen that contraption when it got here! I almost fell over the day they lugged that thing into the house.”
Two machines sat on rolling carts, she said—one for the person dictating, the other for the stenographer who would turn the recorded sounds first into squiggles and then into typewritten words. They set it up in the front parlor and moved Angelo’s typewriter into the spare room. “Poor Angelo,” Ma said. “I don’t think he knew what he was getting himself into.”
Neither Angelo nor Papa could figure out how to run the Dictaphone at first, Ma said. They tried and tried. That whole day, Papa swore a blue streak! He finally made Angelo take the bus down to Bridgeport so that he could learn how to operate the foolish thing. “And here the poor guy could just barely speak English, Dominick. He’d just gotten over here from the Old Country. But anyway, when he came back again, he knew how to run it—how to make everything work.
“Every morning, Angelo would set things up—get everything ready—and then he’d have to leave Papa alone. That was the rule. Papa got so he wouldn’t dictate a word of it until he was alone. Angelo used to come out in the kitchen and wait. So I got to know him a little. He was a nice man, Dominick, and so handsome. I’d make him coffee and we’d talk about this and that—his life back in Palermo, his family. I used to help him a little with his English. He was smart, too; you’d explain something to him and he’d pick it up just like that. You could just tell he was going places.”
The Dictaphone had red plastic belts, Ma said; that was what the voice was recorded on, if she remembered right. Papa would stay in there for two or three hours at a time and then, when he was finished, he’d call Angelo and Angelo would have to go running. He’d wheel the cart into the back room where the typewriter was. Listen to whatever was recorded on the belts and take it down in shorthand. Then he’d type it up. “But my father hated the sound of typewriting, see? He didn’t want that clickety-clacking all over the house after he’d finished his end of things for the day. All that remembering made him cranky.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why didn’t he just dictate it to him directly?”
“I don’t know. He was just nervous, I guess.” She reached over and touched the manuscript—passed her fingers across her father’s words. She herself didn’t dare to go anywhere near that parlor when Papa was speaking into the Dictaphone, she said. He was so serious about it. He probably would have shot her on sight!
Ma told me that the complicated system her father had devised —stenographer, Dictaphone, private rooms for dictator and dictatee—had worked for about a week and then that, too, had fallen apart. First of all, there had been a misunderstanding about the rental price for the recording equipment. Papa had thought he was paying eight dollars per week to rent the Dictaphone but then learned that he was being charged eight dollars a day. Forty dollars a week! “So he told the rental company where they could go, and he and Angelo wheeled the carts onto the front porch. Those machines were parked out there for two whole days before someone drove up from Bridgeport and picked them up. I was a nervous wreck with those contrapt
ions just sitting out there. I couldn’t even sleep. What if it had rained? What if someone had come along and snitched them?
“But anyway, Papa went back to dictating his story directly to Angelo. But that didn’t go any better than it had the first time. Things got worse and worse. Papa started accusing Angelo of poking around in his business—asking him to clear up this thing or that thing when Papa had told him exactly as much as he wanted to tell him and nothing more. Oh, he could be a stubborn son of a gun, my father. He started accusing poor Angelo of changing around some of the things that he had said—of deliberately trying to portray my father in a bad light. Angelo got fed up, the poor guy. The two of them started fighting like cats and dogs.”
Somewhere in the middle of July, Papa fired Angelo, my mother said. Then, after a few days, he cooled down and rehired him. But the day after Angelo came back, Papa fired him all over again. When he tried to rehire him a second time, Angelo refused to come back again. “He moved away pretty soon after that,” she said. “Out west to the Chicago area. He wrote me one letter and I wrote back and then that was that. But after all that business with Angelo and the Dictaphone and everything—all that rigmarole—Papa finally just went up to the backyard and wrote the rest of his story himself. He worked on it all the rest of that summer. He’d climb up the back stairs every morning, right after breakfast, unless it was raining or he didn’t feel well. He’d sit up there at his little metal table with his paper and his fountain pen. Writing away, all by his lonesome.”