by Wally Lamb
So I had three options: go out in a downpour, read a wet newspaper, or read some more of the Old Man’s history. I flopped back down on the couch and reached for the waterlogged Daily Record.
100,000 defy gorbachev, flood red square—ask end of soviet regime. From the looks of things over there, the “Evil Empire” was on the respirator. I thought about all those submarines Ray and the boys had built in preparation for the Soviet attack, all those bomb shelters people had sunk into their backyards. Duck and cover! they had taught us back in grade school. If the Russians drop the bomb . . . And so all us Mickey Mouseketeers had grown up ready for the end of the world, the big meltdown, courtesy of the Communists. . . . Weird the way everything was shifting, changing. Breaking up. They’d sledgehammered the Berlin Wall. The Ayatollah had keeled over. Saddam had been driven back to his bunker. Jesus, if we weren’t careful, we were going to run out of bad guys. . . .
IDENTIFY L.A.P.D. BEATING VICTIM.
Except for ourselves, maybe. Except for the bad guy in the mirror. . . .
The victim looked up at me from the front page of the wet, limp Daily Record. He was black, of course; it was always a black man. He had a name now—Rodney King—and a battered, lopsided face, a slit for an eye. . . . Hey, man, in a way, I was glad the cable was out—grateful for the reprieve. For three days now, they’d been showing that grainy video. The cops hammering this guy—kicking him, clubbing him, zapping him with their stun guns. They’d hog-tied him, busted his legs, his jaw, his eye socket. Had paralyzed the left side of his face. Over and over and over, they’d shown it: America’s real home videos. And the repetition had already begun to lull me, numb me—make me feel the blows a little less each time they savaged him. . . .
Except Rodney King wasn’t cutting anybody any slack. He’d looked directly into that camera’s lens and now, on page one, he met me, face to battered face, eye to bruised and busted eye. And won. . . . I blinked first. I was the one who had to look away.
I put the paper down, got up, paced around the living room. . . . It had been the second straight day of hard rain with more expected tomorrow. If this kept up, all the stores downtown would be bailing the Sachem River out of their basements. . . .
Oppression, man: the “haves” kicking the “have-nots” in the teeth, kicking them while they were down. Might was right, eh, Domenico? You had to rough her up a little. Show her who owned who—who was the boss in your house. Right, Big Man? . . . Well, at least that monkey-faced little housekeeper had restored a little of the balance of power over there on Hollyhock Avenue. The power of the peeling knife. Touch her again and I’ll make you a woman. . . .
God, I was tired. Wired up and exhausted, both. Unable to sleep the night before, I had reached under the bed for the Old Man’s story. Stupid move, Birdsey, no matter what your shrink says. . . . Run away from your past, Dominick? I thought the past was what you were looking for. . . . But Dr. Patel was right. I needed to face him whether I wanted to or not. Needed to hear his voice because . . . because that goddamned manuscript existed. Because before she died, Ma had come down the stairs lugging that strongbox. This is for you, honey. . . . Because I’d fallen off that roof and landed in a hospital room with Nedra Frank’s fiancé. Weird how I’d mourned the loss of that thing—Domenico’s story—and then it had come back to me.
How much of it did you know, Ma? Did you know you were a twin, too? Did Papa ever tell you about your dead baby brother? . . .
DOMENICO ONOFRIO TEMPESTA, 1880–1949 “THE GREATEST GRIEFS ARE SILENT.”
I pictured his gravestone out there at the Boswell Avenue Cemetery. And hers—my grandmother’s—that small, forgotten stone that Thomas and I hadn’t even known about until the summer we’d worked for the Public Works. It was way the hell over on the other side of the cemetery from his, I remember. Why hadn’t they been buried together? Why hadn’t Ma ever taken us to see her mother’s grave? . . . And that ornate granite monstrosity of his: seven or eight feet tall, those cement angels, their faces contorted in pain over his passing. Ma had said he’d made his own burial arrangements ahead of time. It figured. Who else would have chosen something that grand-scale but the “great man from humble beginnings”? . . . The greatest griefs are silent. So why’d you hire a stenographer then, Papa? Hire him, fire him. . . . Why’d you rent a fucking Dictaphone to be your confidante? Why did you have to burden me?
He hadn’t been working on any “guide for Italian youth,” that much I’d figured out. That had only been the “official” excuse for whatever the hell it was he was trying to do. And what was that? Stroke his ego a little more before he kicked off? Exonerate himself for being such a prick? . . . It was weird: when we were kids, Ma would take us out to the cemetery with her, decorate his grave, and not even mention her mother’s. . . . How old had she been when her mother died? I couldn’t remember the dates. I had to get out there to the cemetery one of these days—look for that stone, check Ignazia’s dates.
I saw, again, the way she had looked in that weird dream. Ignazia, my drowned grandmother. Halloween night, it was—the night I’d totaled my truck. In the dream, I was standing on the ice, looking down at all those lost limbo babies floating beneath me. And then . . . what was the word for grandmother? Nonna? Why did you come to me, Nonna? What did you want? . . .
She’d drowned, Ma said—had fallen through the ice at Rosemark’s Pond. Had she been skating? Taking a shortcut over thin ice? I had never really gotten the details.
The greatest griefs are silent. . . .
In that dream, Ignazia’s eyes had looked up at me from beneath the ice—she had found me, had looked me right in the eye. What were you trying to tell me, Nonna? What?
Keep reading your grandfather’s history, Dominick. . . .
But all it ever did was confuse me. Make me feel worse. . . .
Life is a river, Dominick. . . .
Well, fuck it. You could drown in a river. . . . I saw myself going down to the Falls. Throwing the Old Man’s manuscript over the edge. Watching it flutter, page by page, into the water. I saw Domenico’s story float away.
The thing was I hated the son of a bitch—the way he’d treated his daughter. His wife. Wouldn’t even leave work to get the goddamned doctor. . . . The “big man from humble beginnings.” The “chosen one” who’d been conceived the night a volcano blew—who’d seen some stupid statue cry. . . . He’d paid for it, though—all that arrogance of his. I saw him up there in his garden, clutching his stillborn son, refusing to hand him over. Even when they brought in the big boys—the cops, his boss from the mill. . . . Well, we had that much in common, Domenico and me. We both knew what that felt like: holding your dead child in your arms. Facing just how powerless you were. . . .
Stop it, Dominick. Don’t go there. Do something.
I picked up the paper again—flipped to the local news. wequonnocs pray to ancestors, break ground at casino site. Good, I thought. More power to ’em. I hoped they made millions down there. Hoped they emptied the pockets of every friggin’ paleface whose ancestor-oppressors had screwed them over and left them for dead.
And then I noticed him: front and center in the oversized picture they’d run with the article. Ralph Drinkwater, whooping and hopping around, in full Indian dress. He was into it, I guess. And, hey, why not? If that casino took off like everyone said it was going to, it’d probably make him a millionaire. He’d be able to tell Hatch Forensic Institute to take its mops and brooms and toilet brushes and shove ’em. Ralph Drinkwater: part black, part Indian, and dancing up a storm. . . .
Life had hog-tied Ralph, that was for sure—had kicked Ralph in the head more than once. We’d all taken a crack at him: the teachers at school, Dell Weeks and his wife, me sitting there that night in the police interrogation room. And here he still was, dancing and celebrating. Praying to his ancestors.
His name was Swift Wolf, according to the caption, not Ralph Drinkwater. He was the tribal pipe-keeper of the Wequonnoc Nation, not the
screwed-up little boy who’d posed for all those dirty pictures. . . . I saw Ralph at his desk in Mrs. Jeffrey’s class, a fourth- grader, looking away while I passed the cardboard collection bucket so that we could “honor” his strangled sister. Saw him later, in Mr. LoPresto’s history class, smirking in self-defense while LoPresto declared that the Wequonnocs had been annihilated, every last one of them wiped out in the name of progress. Manifest Destiny. He’d been true to himself—had tried to claim his heritage all along. His blackness, his Wequonnoc blood. “Read Soul on Ice!” he kept telling us that summer we worked together. “That book tells it like it is!” And Leo and I had laughed—turned it into a joke. . . . Well, good for you, Ralph. Enjoy the last laugh, man. I hope you make millions down there. . . .
Maybe the world really was changing, I thought. The Berlin Wall was down, the Russians hadn’t blown us up after all, and the Indians were rising up from the ashes. . . .
I don’t know how long I dozed. Long enough for it to turn from day to night. “Yeah, yeah, wait a minute,” I told the ringing telephone. Went stumbling in the dark toward it, trying to wake up.
Just what I need, I thought: me tripping over something and falling—racking up my foot all over again. I reached for the receiver. “Yup?”
“Birdsey?”
“Maybe. Who’s this?”
“Is this Dominick Birdsey or isn’t it?” I knew the voice but couldn’t place it. I waited.
“You wrote your number down. Asked me to call if I saw anything.”
Drinkwater? Ralph was calling me? “Hey, man, I was just looking at your picture in the—” Then, it hit me: something was wrong with my brother.
“And I don’t want to get caught in the middle of anything,” he was saying. “Understand? That’s the last thing I need right now. You keep my name out of it.”
“What is it?” I said. “What’s happened to him?” I was standing there, getting the shakes, same as always when I got a call about Thomas.
“Get him tested,” Ralph said.
“Tested? Tested for what?”
“HIV.”
39
12 August 1949
That was the night the Monkey told me her story . . . the night my enemy drank my wine and revealed to me the truth of what she was—what they both were.
“Once, many years ago,” the Monkey began, “I witnessed some very strange magic. It changed my life. And now, what I saw that day long ago has come back to me with the birth of the two . . . and because the one that lived is cursed with the rabbit’s lip.” She was whispering—confiding to me in the manner of a criminal. “The magic I speak of involved rabbits,” she said.
At the time, she told me, she was a girl of fourteen, living in her native seaside village of Pescara.
“Pescara?” I interrupted. “I thought you were siciliana.”
“You thought that because it’s what those two plumbers wanted you to think. You thought I was their cousin, too. I am not.”
“Don’t be stupid, woman,” I said. “Why would they have sponsored a creature as homely as you, taken on the burden of marrying you off to boot, if not because of obbligo di famiglia?”
“Why does anyone do such things?” she said, and stroked her thumb against her fingers. “Lying was profitable for those two plumbers, that’s why. They played you for a fool, Tempesta.”
I leaned toward her and grabbed her arm, demanding that she explain herself.
“I begin at the beginning,” she said. “But not with you squeezing my arm like it’s a chicken’s neck. And not with an empty glass, either. Let go of me and pour the wine! And don’t be cheap about it.”
Her father was a poor macaroni-maker cursed with bad luck, she said. Typhoid had taken his wife and son and left him with three daughters to raise. Prosperine was the oldest of these, forced by circumstance both to serve as mother to the other two and to make macaroni all day long. Ripetizione rapida was everything in that work, she said, and those repeated movements lived still in her hands. Sometimes when her mind wandered, she told me, she still caught her fingers making macaroni. Even now, even here, an ocean away from her sisters and the life she had been forced to leave.
As soon as each was able, the sisters were put to work at the wheels and mills and bowls in the macaroni shop. They began each morning before dawn, their father turning semolina into dough, his three daughters pressing, cutting, and shaping the strings and strips with their knives and machines, their thumbs and fingers. Flour would fly in the air, the Monkey said, making a paste in their mouths as they breathed and dusting their hair and skin, turning each sister into a pale, gray-haired nonna by the time the sun had climbed to its full height in the sky.
In Pescara, she said, the noon hour was her favorite time of day. While her papa took his nap and the macaroni sat drying on racks and trays, Anna and Teodolina and she were free to roam through the busy square. Often, they were joined on these daily walks by another motherless girl, a fishmonger’s daughter named Violetta D’Annunzio. She was younger than the Monkey—closer in age to Teodolina. A saucy thing, she was! Violetta’s friends, the three sisters, were plain, but she herself was beautiful. She had dark eyes and hair and skin like cream. Her eyebrows grew in an upturned direction that gave her the tortured look of saints.
Like young girls everywhere, the four friends laughed and ran through the village, touching and coveting the expensive merchandise that their poor fathers could never have afforded. They amused themselves with whatever was new that day in the marketplace—jugglers, puppet shows, some rich woman’s new finery. When nothing was new, they satisfied their restlessness by mocking and giggling at the poor village eccentrici, those unfortunate villagers who were defective or crazy.
A favorite target of the girls was Ciccolina, a bowlegged old butcher-woman burdened with a hunchback and breasts that hung from her like two big sacks of semolina. Ciccolina mumbled to herself and cursed the girls when they teased her from across the road, swiping at the air with her walking stick. Half-blind from cataracts, the old woman was afflicted with an ugly tumor that stuck out on her forehead—a knob the size of a baby’s fist that had darkened to the color of an eggplant. That hideous lump both repelled Prosperine and drew her to the old woman like a magnet. Don’t look at it! Don’t look! the Monkey would counsel herself, even as she stared in horror.
Each morning from the window of her father’s shop, Prosperine watched Ciccolina hobble to the village square, dragging behind her a small cart weighted down with coops. Inside were scrawny hares and half-bald hens. These doomed creatures the old woman sometimes sold to customers, who would make their choices, and then stand and watch as their dinner was strangled, beheaded, plucked, skinned. The old woman used a rusty cleaver and a rusty knife for the job, and a scarred, bloodstained cutting board that she balanced against her knees. Her untrussed tette—those two big sacks of semolina—rested on the board as she worked.
There were rumors that Ciccolina was a witch as well as a butcher and that, for the price of a few coins, she could be hired to perform small acts of revenge. People said she could both cure and inflict il mal occhio. Superstitious mothers shielded their children from the old woman’s milky-eyed gaze and guilty men crossed the street rather than walk past the strega. The old hunchback was said to have caused the customs officer’s haughty wife to go bald and to have curdled the milk of a farmer’s cows for an entire summer. According to rumor, that poor devil of a farmer had tripped over Ciccolina’s cages and stumbled to the ground, drawing laughter from other villagers. Humiliated, he had stood and slapped the old woman for what, in fact, had been his own clumsiness. His cows’ milk began to go bad the very next day.
Prosperine’s sisters would not go near Ciccolina, but the risk of dark magic thrilled both the Monkey and her daring friend Violetta. Young and stupid girls, they wanted both to bow to the possibility of evil and to laugh in its face. And so, from across the road, they hid behind the awning of the trattoria, calling and chan
ting to the old witch.
Finocchio, finocchio!
Non dami il mal occhio!
In other ways, the Monkey said, she was the shyest and most sensible of the four girls, but in the teasing of the old strega, she was the loudest and most cruel, because that was what Violetta loved. Once, Prosperine dared to call out to the poor old eccentric that she must be the smartest person in all of Pescara since she had grown that second purple brain on her forehead. Ciccolina spun in the direction of the insult, squinting and demanding to know who had said it. Prosperine shouted back that it was she, Befana, the good witch of the Epiphany. “Be a nice little girl now!” she called to the old hag. “Or I will leave coal in your shoes instead of sweetmeats!” From behind the safety of the awning, Violetta screamed with delight at her friend’s brazen disrespect and Prosperine laughed so hard that her throat hurt.
She stopped her story for a minute to sip more of my wine and I watched her closely as she smiled and remembered. . . . That Monkey’s smile was a rare thing in my house, and soon enough into her remembrances of the past, it was replaced again by her more familiar scowl. “That was before I knew that young girls, like litters of cats and rabbits, grow toward separation,” she continued. “Before I realized that fathers could sell away their eldest daughters. More wine, Tempesta. Pour!”
“Never mind about fathers,” I said, refilling her glass. That night, it was as if I were the bartender and she were the paying customer! “Tell me why you lied about your birthplace. Tell me how those two plumbers played me for a fool! I ask you for the time of day, you tell me how to build a clock!”
“Shut up, then,” she said. “Shut up and listen. Tonight I feel like talking and will talk!”
As the four friends grew toward womanhood, Prosperine, her sisters, and Violetta began walking not just through the square but also down to the docks to peek at the fishermen. There, Violetta sometimes cast her nets for the men’s attenzione, encouraging the saucy remarks the men threw her way and making bold remarks back at the handsomest of them—even the married ones! Though she was the youngest of the four, Violetta knew things the other girls did not and was happy to school the macaroni-maker’s daughters about the exchanges between women and men. Once, walking back from the docks, the girls saw a stallion mount a white mare in a rich man’s field.