by Wally Lamb
I leafed again through the musty manuscript—those pages and pages of foreign words. “You ever read it?” I asked her.
She shook her head. We lost eye contact.
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Dominick. I peeked at it a couple of times, I guess. But I just never felt right about it. My Italian’s too rusty. You forget a lot of it if you don’t use it.”
We sat there, side by side on the couch, neither of us speaking. In less than a year, I thought, she’ll be dead.
“It’s funny, though,” she said. “It was kind of out of character for Papa to do something like that. Write things down. He’d always been so private about everything. Sometimes I’d ask him about the Old Country—about his mother and father or the village where he’d grown up—and he’d say, oh, he didn’t even remember that stuff anymore. Or he’d tell me Sicilians kept their eyes open and their mouths shut. . . . But then, that summer: he hired Angelo, rented that contraption. . . . Some mornings I’d hear him crying up there. Up in the backyard. Or speaking out loud—kind of arguing with himself about something. Papa had had a lot of tragedy in his life, see? Both his brothers who he came over here with had died young. And his wife. All he had was me, really. It was just the two of us.”
The first page of the manuscript was hand-lettered in blue fountain-pen ink, lots of flourishes and curlicues. “I can read his name,” I said. “What does the rest say?”
“Let’s see. It says, ‘The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from . . .” Umile? Umile? Humble! . . . ‘The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings.’ “
I had to smile. “He had a pretty good idea of himself, didn’t he?”
Her eyes brimmed with tears. “He was a wonderful man, Dominick.”
“Yeah, right. As long as you ate your eggs. And your cigarettes.”
Ma stroked the small, coverless dictionary. “I’ve been meaning to give you this stuff for a long time, honey,” she said. “You take it with you when you go. It’s for Thomas, too, if he ever wants to look at it, but I wanted to give it to you, especially, because you were the one who always used to ask about Papa.”
“I was?”
She nodded. “When you were little. See this dictionary? This is the one he used right after he came over from the Old Country—the one he learned his English from.”
I opened the tattered book. Its onionskin pages were stained with grease from his fingers. On one page, I covered his thumbprint with my thumb and considered for the first time that Papa might have been more than just old pictures—old, repeated stories.
I took my mother into the kitchen and showed her the pencil marks written onto the joist. “Yup, that’s his writing!” she said. “I’ll be a son of a gun. Look at that! It almost brings him right back again.”
I reached out and rubbed her shoulder, the cloth of her bathrobe, the skin and bone. “You know what I think?” I said. “I think you should translate that story of his.”
Ma shook her head. “Oh, honey, I can’t. I told you, I’ve forgotten more Italian than I remember. I never learned it that good to begin with. It was confusing. Sometimes he’d speak the Italian he’d learned in school—up in the North—and sometimes he’d speak Sicilian. I used to get them mixed up. . . . And anyway, it’s like I said. I just don’t think he wanted me to read it. Whenever I’d go out into the yard to hang the clothes or bring him a cold drink, he’d get so mad at me. Shout at me, shoo me away. ‘Stay out of my business!’ he’d say. I’m telling you, he was a regular J. Edgar Hoover about that project of his.”
“But, Ma, he’s dead,” I reminded her. “He’s been dead for almost forty years.”
She stopped, was quiet. She seemed lost in thought.
“What?” I said. “What are you thinking about?”
“Oh, nothing, really. I was just remembering the day he died. He was all alone out there, all by himself when he had that stroke.” She drew her Kleenex from her sleeve. Wiped her eyes. “That same morning, while he was eating his breakfast, he told me he was almost done with it. It took me back a little—him giving me a progress report like that—because up until then, he had never said one word to me about it. Not directly, I mean. . . . And so I asked him, I said, ‘What are you going to do with it, Papa, once you’re finished?’ I thought he was going to start writing away to some publishers back in Italy. Try to get it made into a book like he’d said. But you know what he told me? He said maybe he’d just throw it into the ash barrel and put a match to it. Burn the whole thing up once he was finished writing it. It just wasn’t the answer I was expecting. After all that trouble he’d gone to to get it down. . . . I heard him sobbing up there a couple of times that last morning—really wailing one time. It was terrible. And I wanted to go up to him, Dominick, but I thought it would have made him mad if I did. Made things worse. He’d been so private about it.
“And then, later on, when I went out there with his lunch, there he was. Slumped over, his head on the table. These pages were all over the place: stuck in the hedges, stuck against the chicken coop. They’d blown all over the yard.
“And so I ran back down inside and called the police. And the priest. Your grandfather wasn’t a churchgoer—he had a kind of a grudge against St. Mary’s for some reason—but I figured, well, I’d call the priest anyway. . . . It was awful, Dominick. I was so scared. I was shaking like a leaf. And here I was, carrying your brother and you. . . .”
I reached over. Put my arm around her.
“After I made those two phone calls, I just went back out there and waited. Went back up the stairs. I stood there, about ten or twelve feet away from him, watching him. I knew he was dead, but I kept watching him, hoping maybe I’d see him blink or yawn. Hoping and praying that I was mistaken. But I knew I wasn’t. He hadn’t moved a muscle.” She passed her hand again over Papa’s manuscript. “And so I went around the yard, picking up this thing. It was all I could think of to do for him, Dominick. Pick up the pages of his history.”
The room filled up with silence. The sun had shifted—had cast us both in shadow.
“Well, anyway,” she said. “That was a long time ago.”
Before I left, I tapped the wainscoting back into place, covering once again Domenico’s notes and calculations. I walked out the door and down the front porch steps, balancing my toolbox, the strongbox, and several foil-wrapped packages of frozen leftovers. (“I worry about you in that apartment all by yourself, honey. Your face looks too thin. I can tell you’re not eating the way you should. Here, take these.”) At the door of the truck, I heard her calling and went back up the steps.
“You forgot this,” she said. I put my hand out, palm up, and she opened her fist. The strongbox key fell into my hand. “La chiave,” she said.
“Come again?”
“La chiave. Your key. The word for it just came back to me.”
“La chiave,” I repeated, and dropped the key into my pocket.
That night, I awoke from a sound sleep with the idea: the perfect gift for my dying mother. It was so simple and right that its obviousness had eluded me until 2:00 A.M. I’d have her father’s life story translated, printed, and bound for her to read.
I drove up to the university and found the Department of Romance Languages office tucked into the top floor of a stone building dwarfed by two massive, leafless beech trees. The secretary drew up a list of possibilities for me to try. After an hour’s worth of false leads and locked doors, I walked the narrow steps to a half-landing and knocked at the office door of Nedra Frank, the last person on my list.
She looked about forty, but it’s hard to tell with those hair-yanked-back, glasses-on-a-chain types. As she leafed through my grandfather’s pages, I checked out her breasts (nice ones), the mole on her neck, her gnawed-down cuticles. She shared the office with another grad student; her sloppy desk and his neat one were a study in opposites.
“Some of this is written in standard Ita
lian,” she said. “And some of it’s . . . it looks like peasant Sicilian. What was he—schizo or something?”
Okay, bitch, thanks anyway. Give it the fuck back to me and I’ll be on my way.
“I’m a scholar,” she said, looking up. She handed me back the manuscript. “What you’re asking me to do is roughly the same as trying to commission a serious artist to paint you something that goes with the sofa and drapes.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.” Already, I’d begun backing out of her low-ceilinged office—a glorified closet, really, and not all that glorified.
She sighed. “Let me see it again.” I handed it back and she scanned several pages, frowning. “The typed pages are single-spaced,” she said. “That’s twice as much work.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
“The penmanship’s legible, at least. . . . I could do the handwritten material for eight dollars a page. I’d have to charge sixteen for the typed ones. More on the ones where explanatory footnotes were necessary.”
“How much more?”
“Oh, let’s say five dollars per footnote. I mean, fair is fair, right? If I’m actually generating text instead of just translating and interpreting, I should be paid more. Shouldn’t I?”
I nodded. Did the math in my head. Somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand bucks without the footnotes. More than I thought it would be, but a lot less than a kitchen renovation. “Are you saying you’ll do it then?”
She sighed, kept me waiting for several seconds. “All right,” she finally said. “To be perfectly honest, I have no interest in the project, but I need money for my car. Can you believe it? A year and a half old and the tranny’s already got problems.”
It struck me funny: this Marian the Librarian using gearhead lingo. “Why are you smiling?” she asked.
I shrugged. “No reason, really. What kind of car is it?”
“A Yugo,” she said. “I suppose that’s funny, too?”
Nedra Frank told me she wanted four hundred dollars up front and estimated the translation would take her a month or two to complete, given her schedule, which she described as “oppressive.” Her detachment annoyed me; she had looked twice at her wall clock as I spoke of my grandfather’s accomplishments, my mother’s lymphoma. I wrote her a check, worrying that she might summarize or skip pages—shortchange me in spite of what she was charging. I left her office feeling vulnerable—subject to her abbreviations and interpretations, her sourpuss way of seeing the world. Still, the project was under way.
I called her several times over the next few weeks, wanting to check her progress or to see if she had any questions. But all I ever got was an unanswered ring.
Whenever my mother underwent her chemotherapy and radiation treatments at Yale–New Haven, Ray drove her down there, kept her company, ate his meals in the cafeteria downstairs, and catnapped in the chair beside her bed. By early evening, he’d get back on the road, driving north on I-95 in time for his shift at Electric Boat. When I suggested that maybe he was taking on too much, he shrugged and asked me what the hell else he was supposed to do.
Did he want to talk about it?
What was there to talk about?
Was there anything I could do for him?
I should worry about my mother, not him. He could take care of himself.
I tried to make it down to New Haven two or three times a week. I brought Thomas with me when I could, usually on Sundays. It was hard to gauge how well or poorly Thomas was handling Ma’s dying. As was usually the case with him, the pendulum swung irregularly. Sometimes he seemed resigned and accepting. “It’s God’s will,” he’d sigh, echoing Ma herself. “We have to be strong for each other.” Sometimes he’d sob and pound his fists on my dashboard. At other times, he was pumped up with hope. “I know she’s going to beat this thing,” he told me one afternoon over the phone. “I’m praying every day to Saint Agatha.”
“Saint who?” I said, immediately sorry I’d asked.
“Saint Agatha,” he repeated. “The patron saint invoked against fire and volcanoes and cancer.” He rambled on and on about his stupid saint: a virgin whose jilted suitor had had her breasts severed, her body burned at the stake. Agatha had stopped the eruption of a volcano, had died a Bride of Christ, blah blah blah.
One morning at 6:00 A.M., Thomas woke me up with the theory that the Special K our mother ate for breakfast every day had been deliberately impregnated with carcinogens. The Kellogg’s Cereal Company was secretly owned by the Soviets, he said. “They target the relatives of the people they’re really after. I’m on their hit list because I do God’s bidding.” Now that he was on to them, he said, he was considering exposing Kellogg’s—rubbing it right in their corporate face. He would probably end up as Time magazine’s Man of the Year and have to go into hiding. Stalkers followed famous people. Look what had happened to poor John Lennon. Did I remember the song “Instant Karma”? John had written it specifically for him, to encourage him to do good in the world after he’d gone. “Listen!” my brother said. “It’s so obvious, it’s pathetic!” He broke out into a combination of song and shouting.
Instant karma’s gonna get you—gonna look you right in the FACE
You better recognize your BROTHER and join the HUMAN RACE!
One Sunday afternoon when Thomas and I drove down to visit Ma, her bed was empty. We found her in the solarium, illuminated by a column of sun coming through the skylight, sitting by herself among clusters of other people’s visitors. By then, the chemo had stained her skin and turned her hair to duck fluff—had given her, once again, the singed look she’d had that day she emerged from the burning parlor on Hollyhock Avenue. Somehow, bald and shrunken in her quilted pink robe, she looked beautiful to me.
Thomas sat slumped and uncommunicative through that whole visit. He had wanted me to stop at McDonald’s on the way down and I’d told him no—that maybe we could go there on the ride back. In the solarium, he pouted and stared trancelike at the TV and ignored Ma’s questions and efforts at conversation. He refused to take off his coat. He wouldn’t stop checking his watch.
I was angry by the time we left, angrier still when, during the drive home, he interrupted my speech about his selfishness to ask if we were still going to McDonald’s. “Don’t you get it, asshole?” I shouted. “Don’t you even come up for air when your own goddamned mother’s dying?” He undid his seatbelt and climbed over the front seat. Squatting on the backseat floor, he assumed a modified version of the old duck-and-cover.
I pulled the car into the breakdown lane, threw her into neutral, and told him to get the fuck back in front—that I was sick and tired of his bullshit, fed up with his crap on top of everything else I was trying to juggle. When he refused to get up, I yanked him up and out of the car. He pulled free and bolted, running across the interstate without even looking. Horns wailed, cars swerved wildly. Don’t ask me how he made it across. And by the time I got across the highway myself, Thomas had disappeared. I ran, panic-stricken, through woods and yards, imagining the ugly thump of impact, Thomas ripped in half, his blood splattered all over the road.
I found him lying in the tall grass at the side of the highway about a quarter of a mile up from where the car was. His eyes were closed, his mouth smiling up at the sun. When I helped him up, the grass was dented in the shape of his body. Like a visual aid at a crime scene. Like one of those angels he and I used to make in new snow. . . . Back in the car, I gripped the wheel to steady my hands and tried not to hear and see those cars that had swerved out of his way. In Madison, I pulled into a McDonald’s and got him a large fries, a Quarter Pounder with cheese, a strawberry shake. If he was not exactly happy for the rest of the trip, he was at least quiet and full.
That evening, Nedra Frank picked up on the first ring.
“I know you’re busy,” I said. I told her what Ray had just called and told me: that my mother’s condition had gotten worse.
“I’m working on it right now, as a matter of fact,” s
he said. “I’ve decided to leave some of the Italian words and phrases intact to give you some sense of the music.”
“The music?”
“Italian is such a musical language. I didn’t want to translate the manuscript to death. But you’ll recognize the words I’ve left untouched—either contextually or phonetically. Or both. And some of the proverbs he uses are virtually untranslatable. I’ve left them in whole but provided parenthetical notations—approximations. Now, I’m preserving very little of the Sicilian, on the assumption that one weeds the garden. Right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever. It’s the English I’m more interested in, anyway.” She sure didn’t have a whole lot of use for Sicily. “So . . . what’s he like?” I asked.
There was a pause. “What’s he like?”
“Yeah. I mean, you know the guy better than I do at this point. I’m just curious. Do you like him?”
“A translator’s position should be an objective one. An emotional reaction might get in the way of—”
The day had been brutal. I had no patience with her scholarly detachment. “Well, just this once, treat yourself to an emotional reaction,” I said. “For my sake.”
There was dead air on the other end for the next several seconds. Then I got what I had asked for. “I don’t like him, actually, no. Far from it. He’s pompous, misogynistic. He’s horrible, really.”
Now the silence was coming from my end.
“You see?” she said. “Now you’re offended. I knew I shouldn’t have relinquished my objectivity.”
“I’m not offended,” I said. “I’m just impatient. I just want it to get done before she’s too sick to enjoy it.”
“Well, I’m doing the best I can. I told you about my schedule. And anyway, I think you’d better read it first before you decide to share it with her. If I were you, I wouldn’t talk it up just yet.”
Now her lack of objectivity was pissing me off. What right did she have to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do? Screw you, I wanted to tell her. You’re just the translator.