I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  Dr. Yup, whose smile never left her face during my ten-minute examination, pronounced me damaged and said she’d testify to the fact. She told me she’d studied a year abroad in China and had friends who’d been involved in Tiananmen Square. Her cousin, she said, had been in hiding in the southern provinces ever since.

  “Well,” I said, “you can’t really compare one jerky guard to what happened over there.”

  “Why can’t you?” she countered, the smile finally dropping off her face. “Oppression is oppression.”

  Dale, the nurse’s aide who took the pictures of my injuries, treated me to a running monologue about the time he and his cousin got pulled over and roughed up by some state cops on their way home from an Aerosmith concert. “I wish I’d had the smarts to do what you’re doing, man,” he said. “We could have cashed in bigtime.”

  I didn’t want to cash in. But a picture was forming in my head: my brother walking out the main door at Hatch, squinting into the sunshine. That social worker had been right, I guess; I had acted like an asshole down there the night before. Whatever came of this medical exam, Sheffer had stuck her neck out to suggest it. Thinking about her down there at Hatch, keeping an eye on my brother, gave me some relief. Relaxed me. Made me sleepy. When I got back in the truck, I just sat there, almost dozing off before I managed to put the key in the ignition and drive away.

  From the clinic, I swung over to Henry Rood’s house. Might as well get this one over with, too, I told myself. I’d finish power-washing that goddamned place over the weekend, try to have it scraped and primed by the middle of the following week. Maybe with Ray’s help, I could get that three-story headache finished up by Halloween. I didn’t want to push it beyond that. November temperatures were iffy for oil-based paint; you’d only have three or four hours of good midday sun, and that’s if you were lucky. While I was at it, I’d tell Rood to cool it on the phone messages. I’d had enough of his harassment.

  It had been cold that morning, but now the air was dry and warm, the temperature in the midseventies. Perfect painting weather. When I pulled up to the house on Gillette Street, Rood’s wife Ruth was out on their front porch step, sunning herself. With her stringy black hair and her pasty complexion, she reminded me a little of Morticia Addams. Especially parked in front of that Victorian house of horrors of theirs. She smiled as I approached. “I should be inside grading papers,” she said, “but here I am, celebrating Indian summer instead.” Beside her, a portable radio was broadcasting the opening game of the World Series.

  When I asked to speak to Henry, she told me she didn’t want to disturb him. He was either writing at the computer or else napping, she said. Or passed out in an alcoholic stupor, I figured. Ruth was having a little afternoon snort herself. A sweating glass of something or other sat on the porch floor next to her.

  “Just tell him I apologize about the delay,” I said. “It can’t be helped. There’s been a bunch of circumstances beyond my control the past several days.”

  “So we read,” she said. I looked away.

  “Tell him . . . tell him I can probably have the house prepped by next Wednesday or Thursday—depends on how much of the trim I have to burn off.” I told her I should have the job wrapped up and the scaffolding down in a couple of weeks, max, as long as the weather cooperated. “I should be able to go full-steam next week,” I said. “So tell him he doesn’t have to keep calling me.”

  When she asked me how Thomas was doing, I addressed their porch railing rather than look at her. “He’s all right,” I said. “He’s better.”

  She told me that when she was a girl, a neighbor of hers back in Ohio had ripped out his own eye. For religious reasons, she said, same as my brother. She’d been sitting on the couch, reading a book, when she heard the man’s wife screaming. Later, she watched them lead him out the door and into an ambulance, a towel wrapped around his neck. What she always remembered was how calm he looked—how much at peace he was to have blinded himself like that. It was eerie, she said. They moved away shortly after that—the man and his wife and their two little girls. But Ruth said a month didn’t go by without her thinking about him. “And I was just his neighbor. So I can’t even imagine what you’re going through,” she said. “Well, I can and I can’t. What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry.”

  I nodded. Looked into her nervous, jumpy eyes. Compassion was the last thing I’d expected at this place.

  Ruth asked me if I wanted to join her in a rye and ginger. They had beer, too, she said. Pabst Blue Ribbon, she was pretty sure. Or gin. Her body fidgeted with anticipation.

  I begged off—invented some errands I had to run. I nodded over at the radio—the game. “So who’s your money on?” I said.

  “Oh, I’m strictly a Cincinnati fan,” she said. “From way back. My father used to take my brother and me to Red Legs games when we were kids. How about you?”

  “Yeah, Cincinnati, I guess. Now that Boston’s blown it as usual. If Clemens hadn’t had that little temper tantrum during the playoffs and gotten ejected, maybe the Sox would have been playing in the Series instead of the A’s. Personally, I can’t stand Oakland.”

  “Me either,” she said. “José Canseco? Yecch.”

  I nodded up at Rood’s office window. “So what’s he writing up there, anyway?” I said. “The Great American Novel?”

  She shook her head. Nonfiction, she said. An exposé.

  “Yeah? What’s he exposing? Housepainters?”

  She smiled, fiddled with a blouse button. Even two and a half sheets to the wind, she was a nervous wreck. Henry had been writing this book for eleven years now, she told me. It was hard on him; it had taken its toll. She couldn’t really discuss the subject matter. It would upset Henry for her to talk about it.

  It made me think of what Ma had told me about her father’s autobiography: how everything had been so hush-hush that summer when he wrote that thing. How he’d hired and fired a stenographer, rented a Dictaphone, and then finally retreated to the backyard and finished it himself.

  I told Ruth Rood I’d see her in a couple of days—that by the time I was through, she and her husband would be sick of seeing me.

  “Oh, I doubt that,” she said. On the radio, the crowd roared. The announcer’s voice went manic. Eric Davis had just clobbered a two-run homer off of Dave Stewart. “Yippee!” Mrs. Rood said, draining her rye and ginger.

  With two down and one to go, I headed over to Hollyhock Avenue to see Ray. Started thinking about that goddamned goofy Nedra Frank. She’d stolen that manuscript of my grandfather’s, really. Cashed my check and disappeared. By now, she’d probably trashed the thing. It probably didn’t even exist.

  I rolled slowly up Hollyhock Avenue, pulled in front of the house, and cut the engine. Sat there, just looking up at it: the house that “Papa” had built. . . . The shrubs looked gawky and overgrown; the hedges needed a trim. It was unusual for Ray to let the yard go like that. Thomas used to say that Ray couldn’t sleep unless the hedges stood at attention and the front lawn had a crewcut as short as his. The garbage barrels were out front, too—emptied the day before and still waiting to be brought around to the back. It had always been another of Ray’s pet peeves: people who didn’t bother putting away their trash barrels. We used to hear lectures on the subject.

  I got out of the truck. Walked right by those friggin’ garbage cans and up the flight of cement stairs to the front of the family duplex. Home Sweet Home, aka the House of Horrors. The statute of limitations was long since up on most of the crap Ray had pulled on us while we were growing up, but being back at 68 Hollyhock Avenue always made me feel pissed and small. Ten years old again, and powerless.

  It was funny, kind of—the way things had worked out. Ma was gone, I owned the condo now over on Hillyndale. Over the past several years, Thomas had lived either at the hospital or in the group home, not here. The only one left at the house old Domenico Tempesta had built for his family was Ray Birdsey, a WASP from Youngstown, Ohio.
No Tempesta blood in residence. No Italian blood, even. Ray hadn’t wanted to rent the other side of the duplex after Little Sal, the last of the Tusia family, moved to Arizona where his daughter lived. “Why don’t you move back in?” he asked me, after Dessa’s and my divorce. “Save yourself a mortgage payment. You and him own half this place, anyway. After I kick the bucket, the whole thing’ll be yours.”

  It would have been a smart move financially and a kind of emotional suicide. So I bought the condo instead, and the other side of the duplex on Hollyhock Avenue stayed empty. When I asked him once about renting it, Ray said he didn’t need the extra income. “Yeah, well maybe you don’t,” I told him, “but I can’t afford to turn my nose up at half of a $700-a-month rental income.” Rather than rent, Ray went down to the Liberty Bank and took out a savings account with Thomas and me as beneficiaries. Each month, he deposited $350 into it. It was worth it, he told me. You never knew who you might get stuck with. His buddy Nickerson down at the Boat had rented his upstairs to a bunch of pigs he couldn’t get rid of, no matter what he did. Ray didn’t need that kind of grief. So he paid into that account each month and lived by himself in Domenico Tempesta’s sprawling, sixteen-room, two-family house.

  Rather than knock, I let myself in with my key. La chiave, I thought. I walked through the house, front to back. I hadn’t been over there for a while. The rooms looked cluttered, everything in neat piles but nothing put away. Tools, stacks of old newspapers, and a half-completed jigsaw puzzle littered the dining room table. The rugs felt gritty under my work boots. In the kitchen, the heavy stink of fried food hung in the air. Dishes and pans and cups were clean and stacked on the counter, but Ray hadn’t bothered to put anything back in the cabinets. Lined up on the table were his blood pressure and diabetes medications, a stack of Reader’s Digests, and two piles of mail held together with elastic bands. That day’s Daily Record was folded in quarters, heads up to the article about Thomas’s committal to Hatch.

  So Ray knew already. That much was over with.

  I found him in the back bedroom, tangled up in his blanket, snoring away in the semidarkness. He’d begun sleeping downstairs after Ma died. His official reason was that there’d been a prowler in the neighborhood—someone had jimmied open the Anthonys’ cellar door across the street. But I was pretty sure that wasn’t really it. After Dessa left me, one of the toughest things I had to get used to was her empty side of the bed. I’d find myself falling asleep down on the couch in front of the TV just so’s I wouldn’t have to go upstairs and deal with that empty space. Not that it was something you could have ever talked about with Ray. He had to sleep downstairs with a crowbar under the bed so he could fend off burglars. Be a tough guy instead of facing whatever he was feeling about the death of his wife.

  If Ray was sleeping days, then the shipyard must have him working nights again. You had to hand it to him, really. Sixty-seven years old and the guy’s still working like a plowhorse. I stood there, staring at him. The midafternoon sun came through the open blinds, striping his face with light. With his mouth open and his teeth out, he looked older. Old. His hair was more white than gray now. When had all this happened?

  Growing up, I had wished my stepfather dead so often, it was practically a hobby. I’d killed him over and over in my mind—driven him off cliffs, electrocuted him in the bathtub, shot him dead in hunting accidents. He’d said and done things that still weren’t scabbed over. Had made this place a house of fear. Still, seeing him like this—white-haired and vulnerable, a snoring corpse—I was filled with an unexpected sympathy for the guy.

  Which I didn’t want to feel. Which I shook off.

  I went back into the kitchen. Found a piece of paper and wrote him a note about Thomas. I explained what Sheffer had said about the fifteen-day paper, the security check they had to run on visitors, the upcoming hearing in front of that Review Board. “Call me if you have any questions,” I scrawled at the bottom. But my guess was that he wouldn’t call. My guess was that Ray had already walked away from this one.

  On the way back out to the truck, I passed those garbage pails again. Then I stopped. Grabbed one handle in each hand and walked them up the front stairs and around to the backyard. Saved him a trip.

  Our old backyard . . .

  I put the cans down and walked past the two cement urns where Ma had always grown her parsley and basil. Fresh basil. God, I loved the smell of that stuff—the way it perfumed your fingers for the rest of the day. . . . Dominick? Do me a favor, honey? Go out back and pick me some basilico. Half a dozen leaves or so. I want to put some in the sauce. . . .

  I walked up the six cement stairs to “Papa’s little piece of the Old Country.” That’s what she always called it. According to Ma, Papa had loved to sit out here among his grapes and chicken coops and tomato and pepper plants—to sit in the sun and sip his homemade wine and remember Sicily. . . . Maybe that was why she’d heard him crying that last day as he sat up here, finishing his history. Maybe, at the end of his life, the “Great Man from Humble Beginnings” had wept for Sicily.

  I remembered the way Thomas and I had played up here as kids. Saw us pogo-sticking around the yard, staging massacres with our plastic cowboys and Indians, chasing garter snakes into the stone wall. Every June, when the honeysuckle bush blossomed, we’d suck nectar from the blossoms. One small drop of elixir on your tongue per flower—that was all you got.

  I walked over to the picnic table Ray and I had built one summer. The seat had rotted at one end. I ought to come over some morning and just haul the thing away to the dump for him. Maybe next spring I’d get over here and plant a garden—work the soil, bring this old yard back from the dead. Ray had let this go, too; I’d never seen the backyard so overgrown. The grapevines were all but choked off with weeds. The dead grass was knee-high. Probably hadn’t been mowed once all summer. Probably loaded with ticks. What was the deal on Ray? . . .

  I thought about what Ma had told me that time—the day she’d gone upstairs and come down again with that strongbox. With Papa’s story. She’d come out here with his lunch, she told me. Had found him slumped in the chair. . . . And while she waited for help—waited for the ambulance to get here—she’d gone around picking up the pages of his life story. . . . One of these days, I was going to pursue it: find that bitch Nedra. Get my grandfather’s story back if she hadn’t already destroyed it. She’d told me her ex-husband was a honcho down at the state hospital. Maybe I could track her down through him. He probably had to send alimony someplace, right? And if that didn’t pan out, maybe I’d go see Jerry Martineau over at the police station. Because it was theft, what she’d pulled, not to mention breach of contract. . . .

  The summer the Old Man had died up here was the same summer Ma was pregnant with Thomas and me. Pregnant by a guy whose name I was probably never going to know. And what about him? Had he known about us? Why had she kept him from us? Whose son was I?

  And who, for that matter, had Papa been? In my mind, I saw and felt again those legal-sized pages I had lifted out of the strongbox that morning: the first fifteen or twenty typed and duplicated with carbon paper, the rest of it written in that sprawling fountain-pen script. She’d saved her father’s history for me, she said. Thomas could look at it, too, but Papa’s story was mine. . . . And I saw Nedra Frank’s Yugo sliding diagonally down the street in the middle of that snowstorm. Saw her driving away for good. Talk about shitty luck, getting mixed up with that one. Talk about “losing something in the translation.”

  Once all this Hatch stuff was over with, I’d track her down, even if Martineau couldn’t do anything for me. Even if I had to hire a freakin’ private detective. Because when you thought about it, she’d stolen my grandfather from me. It was a theft that went way beyond the lousy four hundred bucks I’d advanced her. . . . And maybe I’d try to find out about that stenographer, too. That Angelo guy who’d worked here that summer. Ma had said he was cousins with the Mastronunzio family. I knew a Dave Mastronunzio at A
llied Plumbers. Maybe I’d start with him. Start somewhere. Maybe.

  Maybe not.

  12

  Any sane man would have called it quits at that point. Would have said, “Okay, that’s enough crap for one day,” and driven home and crashed. But who ever said sanity ran in our family? Exhausted and antsy, I swung left and drove over to the dealership to see Leo.

  Constantine Chrysler Plymouth Isuzu. “Make Gene’s Boys an honest offer, they’ll give you an honest deal.” Yeah, sure. If honest deals were the way Diogenes “Gene” Constantine, my ex-father-in-law, made his money, then I was Luke Skywalker.

  Leo was out on the lot, holding a single red carnation and helping a middle-aged redhead into a white Grand Prix. “Well, good luck with it now, Jeanette,” he said. “Thanks again for the flower.”

  “Oh, it was nothing, Leo. You’ve just been so sweet. I wish I could have bought two new cars instead of one.”

  “You just give me a call if there’s anything I can do for you in the future. Okay?”

  Jeanette revved her engine like one of the Andrettis. “Oops, sorry,” she giggled. “I’m still getting used to it.”

  “That’s okay, Jeanette. You’ll get the hang of it. You take care now.”

  She put the car in gear, rolling and bucking away from us. “Good riddance, Jeanette,” Leo said, his mouth frozen like a ventriloquist’s. “You fat-headed douche bag. I hope the engine drops out of your goddamned Grand Prix.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “No sale?”

  “The bitch was this far from signing on the dotted line on a white-on-white LeBaron. That thing was loaded, Birdsey. Then I take one stinking day off to go into the city and she buys that showboat from Andy Butrymovic over at Three Rivers Pontiac. You know Butrymovic? Fuckin’ weasel. Fuckin’ Polack bastard.”