by Wally Lamb
“Noble? What’s so noble about it?”
“Because he is struggling to cure himself, Dominick. To rid himself of what must be his gravest fear: chaos. If he can somehow order the world, save the world, then he can save himself. That was his motivation when he removed his hand in the library, was it not? To sacrifice himself? To stop the destruction that war inevitably brings? Your brother is a very sick man, Dominick, but also a very good one and, I would venture to say, in some ways, even a noble one. I hope that gives you some small comfort.”
“Yeah, right,” I scoffed. “He goes to the library and hacks off his freakin’ hand. Gets the attention of every media bozo he can. . . . Yeah, it’s been real comforting, Doc, I tell ya.”
She said nothing. Waited. But I was finished.
If she were to work with Thomas long term, Dr. Patel told me—and whether or not she did would be the decision of the probate judge—her eventual goals would be to help him develop better insights about his behavior and to assist in honing such life skills as money management, the conscientious performance of household tasks, the conscientious taking of the medications that could maintain him outside of the hospital setting. “The thinking now is that long-term institutionalization prepares patients for nothing except more of the same,” she said. “We would dwell on his future, your brother and I, not on his past. We would, perhaps, think in terms of successful group-home placement. But, of course, that is the cart before the horse. For now, his history is what is important to my understanding of who he is. And was.”
“You’re a little behind the times, aren’t you?” I said.
“Yes? Explain.”
“His other doctors did that kind of thing for years: went over his potty training, his elementary school records. Then everybody changed their minds—decided it was all about biochemistry, the genetic cocktail.”
“Oh, it is, Dominick,” she said. “No question. I’m only attempting, as much as possible, to map your brother’s past and present realities. To become him, as it were—try on his skin. And toward that end, you can be of enormous help. If you are willing.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How?”
“By continuing to listen to the tapes of your brother’s sessions and sharing your insights. And by sharing your own remembrances of the past. I am particularly interested in your recollections of early childhood, and of the onset of the disease—the months when the schizophrenia began to manifest itself. The hows and whys of that time.”
Nineteen sixty-nine, I thought: our work-crew summer.
“Because, as we said before, you are your brother’s mirror. His healthy self. In scientific terms, you are the equivalent of a control group. And as such, it may be helpful for me to study you both as I design the shape of his therapy. If, as I say, you are willing.”
I’d been suckered in before by optimism. By the bullshit of hope. I didn’t know what I was or wasn’t willing to do anymore. I told her I’d think about it.
“What solitary child hasn’t wished for a twin, Mr. Birdsey?” she said. “Hasn’t imagined that a double exists somewhere in the world? It’s a hungering for human connection—another way of sheltering oneself against the storm. So who is to say that ‘twinness’ might not provide a key to your brother’s recovery?”
A key, I thought. Chiave.
One thing was clear: she sounded sincere. For once, my brother hadn’t been assigned someone from the hit-or-miss, take-the-money-and-run school of state-appointed psychology. For once, he had a doc who hadn’t majored in indifference.
At the door, at the end of the session, she asked me what I had taught.
“What? . . . Oh. History. High school history.”
“Ah,” she said. “That is challenging work. And so very necessary. It is important for children to learn that they are the sum of those who have come before them. Don’t you agree?”
“Yeah, well . . .”
“Why are you blushing, Mr. Birdsey?”
“I’m not blushing. I’ve just . . . I’ve been out of the classroom for over seven years. Thanks for the tea. I’ll think about what you said. Call me if anything else happens.”
She asked me to wait a minute. Went over to her desk and wrote down something on a slip of paper. “Here is your prescription from me, Mr. Birdsey,” she said, handing me the paper. “If you are a lover of reading, read these books. They are good for the soul.”
Her prescription: as if I was the patient. As if she was treating me.
I took the paper, glanced at it without reading it, and stuffed it into my jeans. “Thanks,” I said. “Only the problem isn’t my soul, Doctor. The problem is my brother’s brain.”
She nodded. “And toward that end, you will do as I ask? Begin to retrieve for me any childhood memories you feel may be significant? And try to recall your brother’s earliest schizophrenic episodes? His initial decompensation?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.” A step or two out into the hallway, I stopped. Turned back. “I, uh . . . you know before? When you asked me if I had any kids?”
“Yes.”
“We . . . my wife and I—well, my ex-wife . . .”
“Yes?”
“We had a little girl.” She waited, those eyes of hers smiling, still. “She . . . she died. Crib death. She was three weeks old.”
“Ah,” she said. “You have my sympathy. And my gratitude.”
“Your gratitude? For what?”
“For sharing that information with me. I know you are a private person, Mr. Birdsey. Thank you for trusting me.”
The next morning, a Saturday, Joy passed by me, her arms full of dirty laundry. “Do you want this?” she said. She was waving Dr. Patel’s “prescription”: the list of books I’d already forgotten about. Joy had fished it out of the pocket of my jeans. In fat, backward-slanting script, Dr. Patel had written: The Uses of Enchantment, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The King and the Corpse.
“Toss it,” I said, and Joy walked toward the laundry room. “Well, wait a second. Give it to me.”
16
1969
Ma was thrilled to have us back home from school after our first year away at college, but she didn’t like the fact that Thomas had gotten so skinny. She set out to put some meat back on his bones, baking lasagnas and pies and getting up early every morning to cook us bacon and eggs and make our lunches for work. Ma packed extra sandwiches in Thomas’s lunch pail and enclosed little handwritten notes about how proud she was of him—how he was one of the best sons any mother could have.
Jobs were scarce that summer, but my brother and I had landed seasonal work with the Three Rivers Public Works Department. (Ray knew the superintendent, Lou Clukey, from the VFW.) It was tough minimum-wage labor with fringe benefits like poison ivy and heat rash. But I actually liked working for the Three Rivers PW. It got us each a paycheck and got us out of the house during the day while Ray was home. After a year’s worth of being cooped up with the books, confined in a dorm room with my brother, it felt good to catch some rays, breathe in fresh air, and work up a sweat. I liked the way you could take a scythe or a shovel and tackle a job, then look back at what you’d accomplished without waiting for some know-it-all professor’s seal of approval.
The job I enjoyed most was mowing and weeding out at the town cemeteries: the ancient graveyard up in Rivertown with its crazy epitaphs, the Indian burial grounds down by the Falls, and the bigger cemeteries on Boswell Avenue and Slater Street. That first day out at Boswell Avenue, I located my grandfather’s grave: a six-foot granite monument, presided over by a pair of grief-stricken cement angels. Domenico Onofrio Tempesta (1880–1949) “The greatest griefs are silent.” His wife, Ignazia (1897–1925), was buried across the cemetery beneath a smaller, more modest stone. Thomas was the one who found Ma’s mother’s grave, halfway through the summer. “Oh, I don’t know. . . . No reason, really,” Ma said when I asked her why the two of them hadn’t been buried together.
I was nervous, at fi
rst, about Thomas. For one thing, I was still a little freaked out about that busted typewriter bullshit. For another, he wasn’t exactly the manual labor type. But I shut my mouth and kept my eyes open, and after the first week or so, I began to relax. Let down my guard.
Sometimes he’d lose track of what he was doing or drift off in a fog somewhere, but nothing out of the ordinary. He pretty much held his own. By the beginning of July, he had tanned and bulked up a little and lost his Lurch look. So college hadn’t driven him over the edge after all, I told myself. He’d just been exhausted. He was okay. And come September, he could begin digging himself out of the academic hole he’d dug for himself with all those class cuts, the stupid asshole. The jerk.
Thomas never ate those extra sandwiches Ma packed for him. I ate them. Sometimes, when he didn’t hand them to me outright, I’d go looking for them and find the notes Ma had written him. She knew better than to write me those things. One time she’d pulled that in high school, and my buddies had snatched the note away and passed it around. I’d gone home and screamed bloody murder at her. But that TLC stuff never embarrassed Thomas the way it did me. He thrived on that kind of crap.
I’ll say this for Thomas: he went out and got our typewriter fixed without my bugging him about it. Without Ma or Ray catching wind of what had happened. He took the initiative, paid for the repairs out of his first paycheck from the city, and had the machine back within a week. The only problem was, he couldn’t buy another carrying case. When Ma noticed it was missing, it was me she asked about it, not Thomas. I told her someone at school had swiped it. She stood there, looking worried, not saying anything. “It’s no big deal, Ma,” I assured her. “Better they took the case than the typewriter. Right?”
Ma said she couldn’t believe that college boys would steal from each other.
I told her it would surprise her what college boys did.
“Is it drugs, Dominick?” she said. “Is that why he lost all that weight?”
I reached down and gave her a smooch. Told her she was a worrywart. Teased the fear out of her eyes. He’s fine, Ma, I said. Really. It was just his nerves.
Each workday morning at seven-thirty, Thomas and I reported to the city barn where Lou Clukey dispatched the work crews around Three Rivers. Thomas and I were assigned this big burly foreman named Dell Weeks. Dell was a strange one. He had a shaved head, a silver tooth in front, and the filthiest mouth I’d ever heard on anyone. Dell couldn’t stand Lou Clukey, who was an ex-Navy officer and a straight arrow, and you could tell the feeling was mutual. You could feel the tension when Dell and Lou were within twenty feet of each other. So it was no big surprise that our crew usually drew the day’s dirtiest work. All morning long, we shoveled sand, cut swamp brush, pumped sewage, disinfected campground toilets. We saved the mowing jobs for afternoon.
Not counting Dell Weeks, there were four guys on our crew: Thomas, me, Leo Blood, and Ralph Drinkwater. Leo was seasonal like Thomas and me, a year ahead of us at UConn. Drinkwater was full-time. If the draft or Electric Boat didn’t get him first, he ran the risk of becoming a Three Rivers Public Works “lifer” like Dell.
Drinkwater hadn’t grown much since that year in high school when he’d gotten thrown out of Mr. LoPresto’s class for laughing out loud at the concept that the red man had been annihilated because of the white man’s natural superiority. He was still only five-six, five-seven, maybe, but he was tougher and cockier than he’d been back then. A bantamweight. He had tight, ropy muscles and walked with the trace of a strut; he even mowed lawns with an attitude. That whole summer, Drinkwater wore the exact same clothes to work. He didn’t stink or anything, the way Dell sometimes did. He just never wore anything else but these same black jeans and this blue tank top. Leo and I had a twenty-dollar bet going as to when Drinkwater would finally break down and change his clothes. I had the odd calendar days and Leo had the evens, and we both waited all summer to collect.
Although I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, Drinkwater was the best worker of the four of us, focused and steady-paced, no matter how hot it got. All day long, he listened to the transistor radio he kept hitched to his belt loop—Top 40, baseball if the Red Sox had an afternoon game. He played that radio so relentlessly, I still know half the commercials by heart. Come alive, you’re in the Pepsi generation. . . . You’ve got a friend at Three Rivers Savings. . . . Come on down to Constantine Motors, where we’re on the hill but on the level. All day long, the music and talk moved with Drinkwater.
He was pretty antisocial at first. He seemed always to be watching Thomas and me. About fifty times a day, I’d look up and catch Ralph looking away from one of us. It wasn’t anything new: people had always stared at Thomas and me. Oh, look, Muriel! Twins! But Ralph had been a twin, too. What was he looking at?
Riding out to a job, Thomas, Leo, and I would usually hop into the back of the truck and Ralph would ride up front with Dell. He’d talk to Dell sometimes, but he hardly ever said a word to us, even when one of us asked him something directly. Ralph’s older cousin Lonnie had been killed in Nam earlier that year—had been buried in the Indian graveyard. When we were mowing out there, Ralph would steer clear of Lonnie’s headstone. It was me who’d usually trim around it; we’d divide the cemetery into quadrants, and that was always my section. I’d be clipping and yanking weeds and start thinking about Lonnie—the time he got in trouble for spitting on kids at the playground, that time at the movies, in the downstairs bathroom, when he’d grabbed me by the wrist and humiliated me for his and Ralph’s entertainment. Why you hitting yourself, kid? Huh? Why you hitting yourself? . . . It was good-sized—Lonnie’s gravestone. Granite, rough-hewn on one side, polished on the other. Placed there by the VFW, it said, in honor of Lonnie’s having been one of the first Three Rivers kids to fall in Vietnam. Some honor: giving up your life for our national mistake. For nothing. When Thomas and I were little kids, the big villains of the world were other kids. Bad kids. Troublemakers like Lonnie Peck. Now Nixon was the enemy. Nixon and those other neckless old farts who kept escalating the war over there—kept sending kids over to the jungle to get their heads blown off.
Ralph’s sister’s grave was out there, too. Penny Ann’s. It was close by Lonnie’s but not right next to it, twenty-five or thirty feet away. Hers was just a small sandstone foot marker with her initials, P.A.D. I’d missed it the first couple of times we were out there. Then, bam! It hit me whose stone it was. I kept trying to say something to Ralph about the graves. About Lonnie’s at least. The death of a soldier was easier to talk about than the rape and murder of a little girl. But I didn’t say anything about either one. Ralph gave me no openings. Didn’t let down his guard for a second. One time during the first week, the two of us—Ralph and me—were loading tools back into the truck bed. I reminded him that we’d both been at River Street Elementary School together and then together again in Asshole LoPresto’s history class at JFK. Drinkwater just looked at me, expressionless. “Remember?” I finally said. He stood there, staring at me like I was from Mars or something.
“Yeah, I remember,” he said. “What about it?”
“Nothing,” I sputtered. “Sorry I mentioned it. Excuse me for breathing, okay?”
When the morning was cool and the job wasn’t too strenuous—or if Lou Clukey was in the vicinity—Dell would become a working foreman—would labor alongside us. Otherwise, he’d sit in the truck, leaning against the open driver’s side door, smoking his Old Golds and finding fault. Sometimes he’d get up off his ass and go over to my brother. Snatch Thomas’s push broom or bow saw away from him and give him a little demonstration on how he should be doing it. Or else he’d tell Drinkwater to stop work and go show Thomas the right way to do something. It was degrading for both Thomas and Ralph—enough so that you’d have to look away. But Dell liked the flustered reaction Thomas never failed to give him and the look of contempt he’d get from Ralph. He enjoyed busting their balls, Thomas’s especially. Dell started this joke about h
ow he couldn’t tell my brother and me apart unless we each had a shovel in our hands. Then he knew who was who, no problem. He nicknamed us the Dicky Bird brothers, Dick and Dickless.
Of the four of us, Dell came to favor Leo and me. We were the ones he always picked to stop work and drive over to Central Soda Shop for coffees, or fill up the water jugs at the town spring, or run and get him some cigs. Leo and I were the ones that Dell started addressing his stupid jokes to.
“Nigger’s walking down the street leading a bull on a rope, and the bull’s got this hard-on that’s yea-big. Woman comes up to him and says, ‘Hey, how much would it cost me to slip that foot-and-a-half of meat up my cunt?’ So the nigger says, ‘Well, I’ll fuck you for free, lady, but I’ll have to get someone to watch my bull here.’”
When Dell told his jokes, I’d usually give him a fake smile or a nervous laugh. Sometimes I’d sneak a glance over at Drinkwater. Ralph might have been a full-blooded Wequonnoc Indian like he’d claimed that day in Mr. LoPresto’s class, but he was pretty dark-skinned. I’d never seen an Indian with an Afro. All summer long, Ralph’s transistor radio kept singing about the dawning of the age of Aquarius and everybody smiling on their brother and loving one another, but Dell’s jokes had a way of curdling those songs.
Drinkwater was always deadpan when Dell got to the punch lines of those racist jokes. He never cracked a smile, but he never gave him an argument, either—never challenged him the way he had that day in class with Mr. LoPresto. I hated those jokes of Dell’s, really hated them, but I was too gutless to object. Not that I admitted it to myself. With thirty college credits under my belt, I was able to intellectualize my silence: eventually, people our age would be in charge and all the bigots of the world would die off. And anyway, if Drinkwater didn’t say anything—he had to be at least partly black—then why should I? So I kept selling myself for the privilege of making those big-deal errands to the spring and the coffee shop. I smiled and kept my mouth shut and maintained my “favored worker status.” Leo did the same.