by Wally Lamb
Luckily, my brother’s firing occurred during the spring. Pasquale found work immediately as a roofer for the Werman Construction Company. One night, drunk at a tavern he visited with fellow workers, Pasquale bought a monkey from a sailor who had just returned from Madagascar. No bigger than a house cat that scrawny thing was, with its orange fur, its human eyes and fingers. Pasquale named the monkey Filippo in honor of his boyhood friend and built him a cage which Signora Siragusa allowed Pasquale to keep on her front porch. The monkey soon became a neighborhood attrazione both because of its exotic species and its delicate conditon. That goddamned thing was pregnant!
Filippo quickly became Filippa. Several of the young West Side girls knitted and sewed hats and dresses for that foolish little creature. Another of Signora Siragusa’s boarders, a piano tuner with a gold tooth (name forgotten), went so far as to write a song about her titled “La Regina Piccola”* This strombazzatore performed his song, basso profondo, on the boardinghouse porch all that summer. Each performance brought tears to the eyes of neighbor women. As for me, I held my hands to my ears and slammed the window shut.
In August, Filippa’s baby came out of her stillborn. She cradled that dead, shriveled bambino for two, three whole days and, when she finally gave it up, cried tears which I saw with my own eyes! My brother Pasquale shed tears, too—cried as he had never cried for Papa or Mama or Vincenzo or even for his friend Filippo. He buried the dead baby in the backyard of the boardinghouse and held its grief-torn mother in his lap, stroking and rocking her for hours and hours and humming “The Little Queen”—not in the operatic style of that show-off of a piano tuner, but as a comforting lullaby, a sad but soothing lament. My brother hardly ever spoke and now, for that goddamned little scimmia, he wept and sang! Pasquale grieved as if Filippa’s baby had been his own. . . .
Omertà, I tell my moving lips! Omertà! And yet I am an old man with stool like zuppa and a head burdened with memory. . . . I speak not to bring shame on you, Pasquale, but to understand why.
Why, Pasquale? Why? . . .
My brother began opening Filippa’s cage and taking that smelly monkey of his to work with him. Each morning, the two would head off from the signora’s, Pasquale on foot and Filippa riding on his shoulder. Pasquale would spend his day hammering and hauling shingles and whistling, half the time with a stripe of monkey shit drying on the back of his shirt or his coat. Sometimes as my brother worked, Filippa would sit on the peaks of new and half-built buildings or in nearby trees, removing bugs from her fur and eating them without care or notice as she stared and stared at Pasquale.
When the cold weather came, Pasquale made an agreement with Signora Siragusa. In exchange for the privilege of allowing Filippa to come inside and live in the signora’s coal cellar during the winter months, Pasquale would tend the stove and carry his own bed to the basement, freeing space upstairs for another paying boarder.
That winter my brother seemed happy, living once again the underground life of the caruso, emerging from the signora’s cellar only for meals or trips to the tavern. His foolish monkey accompanied him there, buttoned up inside his coat, its scrawny head poking out of a gap between the buttons.
La lingua non ha ossa, ma rompe il dorso!* By springtime, the Italian women began to gossip, chuckling and wondering when Pasquale Tempesta and his pretty little “wife” would be expecting another bambino, ha ha ha. Signora Siragusa herself whispered to me that she had seen Pasquale and that little furry witch holding hands and whispering into each other’s ears, even kissing each other on the lips! The men talked, too. They were no better. Colosanto, the baker, stopped me on the street one day and asked me, with a laugh, was it true my crazy brother had taught that monkey of his how to undo his pants and “play the pipe” for him?
“Bah!” I told him, pushing past. “Go stick yours in a loaf of dough and bake it in the oven!”
Another time I was at Salvatore Tusia’s barbershop, getting a shave and minding my business, when Picicci, the ice man, came in. “Hey, who’s that whose whiskers you’re taking off, Salvatore?” Picicci asked Tusia. Picicci was always a wise guy with a smirk on his faccia brutta.
Tusia told Picicci that he knew very well who I was. I was Tempesta, the dyer at American Woolen and Textile.
“Oh, it’s Tempesta, is it? The monkey’s uncle himself!”
Every man in that shop had a laugh on me that morning, even that goddamned barber I was paying to shave my face. I stood up half-done and told them all to go to hell in a handbasket—walked out of there with the soap still on my face and Tusia’s cloth hanging from the front of me. On my way back to the boarding-house, I wiped my face and threw that goddamned cloth down the sewer rather than give it back to Tusia. Let him pay for another one and have a laugh about that! I fixed Picicci, too. The next week, downtown, he called across the street to me and asked why my landlady, the signora, bought her ice from Rabinowitz the Jew instead of from a paisano. It was crowded in the street that day, I remember. Picicci had a line of three, four customers. I called back that Rabinowitz’s prices were cheaper and that Rabinowitz didn’t piss in his ice before he froze it. Two of those customers walked away from Picicci’s cart and he raised his fist and cursed me and kicked his horse. If that goddamned son of a bitch was going to call me “monkey’s uncle,” then he was going to pay for it in his pocketbook!
But a family’s honor is a heavy burden to bear if all the lifting falls to the father’s firstborn son.
My brother Pasquale continued to smile and parade Filippa around the town, his ears deaf to the jokes and taunts of paisani. Each day when I got back from the mill, I would lie in my bed and close my eyes, make fists, grind my teeth. I could hear all of Three Rivers laughing at the name Tempesta because of Pasquale and his goddamned monkey. Once again, I was called upon to clean up the mess a brother had made.
My first thought was to sneak down to the signora’s cellar in the middle of the night and wring that animal’s skinny neck! But I had learned in my sad dealings with Vincenzo, a buon’anima, the mistake of trying to force my will upon a hard-headed brother. Now I took a craftier and more practical path, one which called on my patience and my considerable talents as a planner. I refined my plan all that winter, always with old Rosemark’s property in my mind.
On 13 February 1914, I purchased a quarter-acre city lot on the hilly west end of Hollyhock Avenue for the sum of three hundred and forty dollars. I was shrewd enough to realize that two brothers working steadily could build a home twice as quickly as one and that a casa di due appartamenti*ld give its owner both a roof over his head and a rental income. I was now thirty-six years old. Though I was not a billygoat with a frozen cazzu as my brother Vincenzo had been, I did have male urges and a strong desire to pass on the name of Tempesta to Italian-American sons! I assumed that my brother Pasquale had these urges and desires, too, no matter how much that goddamned monkey had managed to turn his head, and I wove that supposizione into my plan. A two-family house, after all, required two families.
I wrote to my cousins in Brooklyn, inquiring about eligible young Italian women, preferably siciliani. I wanted no city-born wives for my brother and me—no fancy northern ideas. Siciliani are the simplest of women and simple women make the best wives. As a property owner, I insisted on strict requirements. They must be virgins, of course. For this reason, I had disqualified the eligible signorini of Three Rivers. Who could tell which ones had been soiled by Vincenzo? All of them, probably! The wives of Domenico and Pasquale Tempesta must also be pleasing to the eye and talented cooks and housekeepers. In addition, they must carry themselves with dignity and be devout and humble. And most important, the dowries their families provided must be large enough to furnish two large appartamenti.
God granted me an early spring that year. By March, the ground had thawed and by Easter, Pasquale and I had cleared and stumped my land and begun digging, shovelful by shovelful, the foundation for my vitrified brick duplex house.
My hou
se would be magnifico—American in front and Sicilian in the back. Each apartment would have seven rooms, two floors, indoor plumbing. Nothing less than a palace for the first siciliano property owner in Three Rivers, Connecticut! And out back, a flight of cement stairs would lead to Sicily! I would plant honeysuckle, peach trees, a small grape arbor, a little tomato garden. There would be herbs growing in stone urns, a chicken coop, rabbit cages, and perhaps a family goat to graze the small yard and give a little milk. In the yard behind my big house, I would be home again at last!
As Pasquale and I labored side by side that summer, I spoke about all these plans and about our happy Sicilian childhood and our loving and unselfish mother. In poetic words, I talked of the beautiful renewal of life. We would be the happiest brothers alive once our new home echoed with the giggles of bambini—once the aromas of baking bread, simmering sauce, garlic and onions frying in olive oil floated from the open kitchen windows of the home we shared, one brother to a side. And now that I was on the subject, wasn’t it about time for us to find wives?
Pasquale shrugged and shoveled. He said he could still hear Mama’s screaming in his ears but that he had forgotten her face.
I told him I had recently communicated by letter and telegramma with Lena and Vitaglio, our Brooklyn cousins. The cousins’ neighbors, the Iaccoi brothers—did Pasquale remember those two plumbers from Palermo? The Iaccoi brothers had big news. Their half-sister, Ignazia, age seventeen, would be arriving that summer from Italy along with a female cugina, Prosperine, age eighteen. Both girls were devout and eager to serve husbands. Good cooks, too! And beautiful in faccia and figura—plump and just ripe for picking!
All that afternoon, I talked of children and natural male urges and the joys of owning a home and a wife of one’s own. At sunset, as we two walked back to the boardinghouse carrying our shovels, I made a generous proposal: Pasquale and I would take the train to Brooklyn at Christmastime, visit our cousins and the Iaccois next door, and decide whether or not we liked what we saw. It would probably make more sense to match the older bride to the older brother, and viceversa, but that could be decided upon at a later date. What did it matter, anyway—when both of the young women were beautiful virgins in the prime of their childbearing years? Both could equally satisfy male urges, eh? If my beloved brother were to take the Iaccois’ half-sister for a wife, the couple would be welcome on the left side of the duplex. I would charge no rent for an entire year. After that, Pasquale could negotiate a year’s rent, at a modest rate, of course—a sum to be decided at a later date. Why rush things, eh? Pasquale needn’t worry about the dowry, either. As the eldest Tempesta brother and a property owner with a shrewd business sense, it would be my honor to take care of those negotiations for him, ha ha. Get him a nice little bundle. If Pasquale needed some help with wedding expenses, I would be glad to assist there, too. A boss dyer, after all, made more money than a roofer. That was merely a fact of life—ha ha! And once the house was built and our young brides were hanging their bloodstained sheets on the backyard clothesline, Pasquale would want, of course, to rid himself of that foolish, goddamned monkey.
Pasquale let go a mouthful of tobacco juice and shook his head.
Pasquale Tempesta, a buon’anima, could sometimes be as mule-headed as his brother Domenico Tempesta was clever! I did not wish to awaken the mulo in him that day. Fine, fine, I told my brother, patting him on the back and wearing a smile that showed all my teeth. The monkey can live in a cage in the backyard until its natural death. But while we were on the subject, I said, Pasquale should really stop his foolish practice of bringing Filippa to work with him. People said unkind things, made ridiculous jokes. He would see soon enough: with a beautiful young wife to distract and provide pleasure for him, Pasquale would quickly have “little monkeys” of his own to play with. He would soon forget about that furry little long-tailed rat of his.
That stubborn mule of a brother threw his shovel aside with a clamor and told me he would work no more on a house where Filippa was not welcome inside.
“Inside?” I shouted. “Inside?”
The negotiations went on over supper and well into the night, at one point so loudly that several of the other boarders complained and Signora Siragusa descended the staircase in her long braids and untrussed bosom and demanded that Pasquale and I either whisper or be evicted. My brother, that stubborn jackass, sat in the signora’s parlor chair and shook his head like a metronome. Whatever I may or may not have promised the Iaccoi brothers, he said, he was not interested in a wife and that was that. He would break his back helping me build my house. He would even die for me. But he would not give up his little Filippa for some wife and he would work no longer on a house where his monkey was unwelcome.
When Pasquale and I rose, finally, from Signora Siragusa’s parlor chairs in the middle of that long and difficult night, I was hot in the face and soaked with sweat. I swore and spat into the signora’s spittoon and then reluctantly shook my brother’s hand. Ha! Should I say I shook that stubborn mule’s front hoof? In exchange for his labor on my casa di due appartamenti until its completion, Pasquale had secured for himself two of the seven rooms on my side of the house, free of rent not for one year but for all eternity! One room would be his and Filippa’s to sleep in, the other a playroom dedicated solely to that goddamned shitting monkey’s ricreazione! But what could I do? Pay two or three lazy workers to do what my brother would break his back doing for free?
After a night’s sleep, I was calm again. Already, a new plan had hatched inside my superior brain. I would continue in private my negotiations with the Iaccois, marry the beautiful cousin, and bring the beautiful half-sister to Three Rivers to stay with us. Nature would take its course. As a happily married husband, I would, as usual, be my younger brother’s good example. The half-sister would surely awaken Pasquale’s sleeping male urges. At long last, my stubborn brother would come to his senses.
1 August 1949
All that summer and fall, I worked in the mill by night and labored on my new house by day, stopping only in late afternoon to eat and sleep. Pasquale roofed houses for Werman until four o’clock each day, then worked on Hollyhock Avenue until dark—always with that goddamned monkey chattering nearby or shitting from her place on his shoulder. My brother and I ate cold suppers together in the signora’s kitchen before he went down to the boardinghouse cellar to sleep and I walked to the mill for work. On Sundays, Pasquale and I labored side by side on my house. These were the best days: two strong, young brothers bringing a dream to life, board by board, brick by brick. . . .
When winter froze the ground that year and stopped construction until springtime, I went with Pasquale to the taverns where the builders drank—not to waste my money on beer or whiskey, but to sit on stools and at tables and pick away at the brains of the workers. Installatori, elettricisti: I got those hibernating builders to talk and draw pictures on paper napkins, to share with me the details of their past victories and mistakes. All that winter, I asked, listened, and learned what I needed to know. And none of it cost me a penny!
Sometimes, after a night of dyeing wool at the mill, I would walk the long way back to Signora Siragusa’s, up Boswell Avenue and Summit Street to Hollyhock Avenue, where the early morning sun shone on the brick and wood and stone of my half-built house. I would think of Papa’s lifetime of labor in the hot, filthy sulphur mines of Giuliana and imagine him standing beside me in this clean, cold Connecticut air. I would imagine him seeing what I saw—shaking his head with pride and disbelief. But it was not Papa’s blood I felt rushing inside of me as I looked at my house and my land. I felt Ciccia blood—the blood of my mother’s people—landowners like me, Domenico Tempesta, who had been conceived while a volcano rumbled and readied its spew! Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, whom the Vergine herself had selected!
In December of that year, I received telegramma from the Iaccois in Brooklyn. They wondered when we Tempesta brothers would be coming to claim our brides-to-be. “Our sw
eet young relatives wait patiently,” the message said, “but it is only a matter of time before ‘Mericano influences begin to turn their heads.” The garment industry in Manhattan cried out for female laborers, the brothers wrote. It was only fair that one or both of the young women begin to bring money into the house, unless Pasquale and I were planning to act soon.
I sent back telegramma urging the brothers to send both girls to work, by all means, and to put half or more of their wages aside to increase the price of their dowries, which remained to be negotiated. I felt no sense of urgency. I was, after all, a boss dyer and the owner of a spectacular and half-completed casa di due appartamenti. I was also a man who—if the full-length hallway mirror in Signora Siragusa’s front hallway did not lie—cut a dashing figure in a three-piece suit. What was the point of false modesty, after all? It did no harm to keep women waiting; it let them see who was the boss and who was not. Waiting was good for a woman’s constitution. Good for the Iaccoi brothers, too. It would make them better appreciate the gifts Pasquale and I would bestow on their women in our own time. A little nervousness might, besides, raise the price of the dowries. I would ask for seven hundred dollars in exchange for marrying Prosperine and four hundred for Ignazia on my brother’s behalf. (Of course, I would have to negotiate my reluctant brother’s marriage without his knowledge.) The Iaccoi brothers would no doubt balk at the price, but I would remain firm. With all the indoor toilets being flushed in America, those two plumbers could probably afford three times as much.