by Wally Lamb
By midweek, I was fed up with my wife’s little game of hide-and-seek. After work that morning, I walked over to Signora Siragusa’s to reclaim my famiglia.
The old signora tried to scold me for what I had done to Prosperine and her teeth, but I pushed away the knotty finger that the old nonna shook in front of my face. “Better keep still, old woman,” I warned her. “Your complaining was the thing that started the trouble in my house. Go upstairs and tell my wife to gather her things. I order her to come home now.”
Signora Siragusa sighed and made the sign of the cross, then hobbled up the staircase. A few minutes later, she came back down again. “She told you to go away,” the signora reported. “She said she’d rather rip out her heart than look at you again.”
The workday had begun; the boardinghouse tenants had all gone off to their jobs. There was no one around to hear Tempesta business. I walked past the signora and called up the stairwell to my wife.
“Better come down now, Violetta! . . . Before there is trouble, Violetta!”
Violetta? The signora stared at me with a puzzled look and I stared back at her until she shook her head and went off to her kitchen. My wife appeared at the top of the stairs. Came down five, six steps and stopped. The girl came, too—hiding behind her mother’s skirts.
Ignazia’s face was pale, her eyes as big as a deer’s eyes. Her hand reached behind her, holding on to the girl as if she would protect her from me.
“Fingers broken?” I asked.
Ignazia shook her head. “No thanks to you!” she said.
“You are my wife,” I reminded Ignazia. “Get your things and come home where you belong. I am tired of this foolishness.”
She shook her head once more, held the child closer still.
I told her I tolerated no defiance from my workers at the woolen plant and I would tolerate no more from her, either. Ignazia said I could drop to my knees and beg, but she would never go back to a home where women and children were not safe from monsters.
“The girl’s hand was hurt accidentally,” I reminded her. “And as for that skinny friend of yours, it is she who is the monster in my house. That crazy bitch has always been between us—has always made trouble for you and me. But now that’s finished. I forbid her from entering my home ever again. And tell her for me that I mean business when I say it. Now, go get your things. If I have to, I’ll take hold of your ear and pull you all the way up Hollyhock Avenue.”
Trembling, she told me I would not touch her ear or any other part of her. She and Prosperine had talked through the night, she said. They were leaving town.
“And going where?” I laughed. “Back to New York with two ‘brothers’ who couldn’t wait to sell you off? Back with that penniless mama’s boy of a redhead who still drinks from his mother’s tit?”
I needn’t worry about her, she said. She had found her way in the world before and she could do it again.
“You’ll come back in a week with your tail between your legs,” I said. “Until then, tell me what I am supposed to do for meals and clean clothes?”
“What do I care what you do? Have that puttana ‘Mericana from downtown do your dirty work for all I care—that segretaria with the blond hair and the fat cula!” Ignazia’s knowledge of my little private business with Josephine Reynolds shocked me. And yet, as that defiant wife of mine threw my friendship with the secretary into my face, I softened to her. I thought I saw in her eyes the indignation of a jealous wife—a wife who wanted her husband to herself.
“It is you I love,” I said. “You I have always wanted. But when a wife denies her husband what he needs, he has to go somewhere else. That secretary means nothing. Come back to our bed again and I’ll tell her to go to hell.”
Fat tears fell from her eyes. Concettina stared, wide-eyed. “You go to hell, you brute!” Ignazia said. “You’d put me in a coffin to satisfy your own dirty pleasure! Fill me up with your pig snot so that I might bear you another child and die!” With that, she turned, picked up the girl, and pounded back up the stairs. Concettina peeked down at me from over her mother’s shoulder.
Next afternoon, I was awakened from my daytime sleep by the ringing of the front bell. I put on my pants and went down the stairs, and when I opened the front door, Signora Siragusa was on the other side. She looked ancient and shrunken—a little afraid. She had some news, she said. Like beggars, Ignazia and Prosperine had been pestering her boarders and had finally managed to borrow money from one of them. (The signora herself had refused them, she said; she told Ignazia that wives should stay at home and put up with their husbands.) Now the two women were inquiring about trolley rides to the railroad station in New London. They were planning to take the Saturday evening train bound for New York.
I myself took the trolley to New London on Saturday—the early one, not the one that would carry the two fugitives later that evening. Lucky for me, they had planned their escape on a day when I would miss no work at the mill.
I got to the train station three hours early. The wait gave me more than enough time to buy a steak dinner and to walk around and think and finally to chat with the young policeman on duty at the station. I told him I was there to pick up my cousins who were visiting from Providence. They were arriving on the train headed for New York, I said, but I had mixed up the arrival time, ha ha. I learned all about his family and his police work and even had time to treat Officer Stupido to two cups of coffee and a plate of pork chops. By the time I looked up and saw Ignazia, Prosperine, and the girl coming through the front door of the station, that agente di polizia and I were the best of friends.
“Scusa,” I told him. “I see the wife of a friend of mine across the floor. She looks troubled about something. Would you wait here, please, while I see if there’s a little problem? I don’t want to alarm her if it’s nothing.”
He shrugged and said he was going nowhere until ten o’clock. “Just wave me over if you need me,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye out.”
I approached them as they crossed the crowded lobby, heading with their bags toward the outside platform. “Better come home now, Ignazia!” I called out.
They pivoted toward the sound of my voice. Prosperine muttered a curse.
“My friend, the police officer over there by the ticket window, is waiting for a sign from me,” I said. Their frightened eyes followed my finger to the policeman, who tipped his cap and waited. “Come with me or you’ll give me no choice. I’ll have to call him over here.”
“Call him over then,” Ignazia said. “Call him over and tell him what you do to women and children.” But the trembling in her voice gave her away. The child shook in her arms. “Papa?”
Waiting for their arrival, I had filled my pockets with sweets. I walked closer to the girl and spoke softly to her, handing her chocolates and peppermints. I whispered next to the girl’s mother. “Maybe I’ll tell that police officer instead about life in the Old Country—about a dead artiste and a fishmonger’s daughter named Violetta.”
Outside on the track, a whistle blew. The train rumbled in from Rhode Island. All around us, travelers picked up bags and packages, hugged loved ones, and headed for the back door of the station.
Prosperine snatched my wife’s hand and pulled her toward the others. “Fretta!” she commanded. “Fretta, before it’s too late! If we don’t get on now, we’ll never be rid of him.”
Ignazia let the other one lead her for a few steps, then stopped and looked over her shoulder at the policeman. Her face was pale, twisted with fear.
“My friend the policeman and I have a little arrangement,” I said. “The minute I give him the signal, he comes over to see what the trouble is. Come home with me, Ignazia, and there is no trouble. Get on that train and you’ll end up in a jail cell back in Pescara. You will never see the child again if I speak up. I promise you that. Better make your decision now.”
“Don’t listen to his bluffing!” Prosperine barked at her. She grabbed Concettina’s hand and pull
ed her toward the train. “New York is a big place! Fretta!”
Ignazia moved to follow the Monkey and the child, then stopped to watch my waving arm, the policeman’s nod on the opposite side of the station floor. She dropped the packages she was holding and clasped her head with both hands. “Fishmongers? Dead men? I don’t even know what that crazy talk means!” she cried.
The Monkey locked her jaw, pulled at her arm. Concettina cried for her mother.
“It means,” I said, “that a painter died before his time from swallowing glass and lead.”
“No! Stop it, now!” Ignazia begged me. “Stop it!”
Outside, a whistle screamed. The Monkey got out the door, still holding on to the child, running now toward the train. Ignazia grabbed the bags and ran after them.
I signaled to that policeman to hurry. In a loud voice, I called to them as they pushed past others to board the train. “I’m talking about two murdering women who escaped from their sin and ran to America with false passports!”
Travelers clogging the steps up to the train turned back to stare and whisper.
“Look, Violetta!” I called. “Here comes the policeman! He’s coming to get you.”
Ignazia’s head snapped back. She gave a little gasp. “Don’t listen!” Prosperine shouted. “Fretta!”
“Yes, hurry, Violetta!” I called to my wife. “Hurry and get on that train. By the time you arrive in New York, I promise you, the authorities will be waiting for you at Grand Central Station. I swear it. Easier to deport you from New York—to take the child away and ship you back to Pescara where they hunger to punish a murderous wife!”
The train’s wheels began slowly to roll. Prosperine, clutching child and baggage, stepped up onto the train. The whistle blew again. Ignazia was sobbing, running alongside. “Fretta!” Prosperine screamed. “Step up! Step up!”
The conductor warned Ignazia either to climb aboard that second or get away from the train. Prosperine reached out her hand. Ignazia took the Monkey’s hand and climbed up. Then she snatched the child back in her arms and jumped down again.
“I cannot! I cannot!” Ignazia screamed to the other one, backing away. “He will take away my daughter! I cannot!”
Prosperine shook her fist at me, shouted filth.
“Better shut up and escape while you can, you toothless bitch!” I shouted back to her, running alongside the train to make sure she heard. “Better disappear from my sight or I will make sure you spend your days and nights in prison while you wait to die and go to Hell where you belong!”
Ignazia stood on the platform, rocking the child in her arms and sobbing, moaning as the other one rode away. “I cannot! I cannot! I cannot!”
I held up my hand and stopped the approaching policeman.
My wife, the girl, and I went back home.
44
I spent the next several weeks tying up loose ends on Thomas’s stuff, checking in with Doc Patel, and watching too much baseball. The Red Sox, mostly: bunch of bigger hopeless cases than I was. In between innings, I was trying to figure out my future.
Wake up, Birdsey, I kept telling myself. It’s May. Every other painter in town’s already out there. Then I’d reach for the remote and locate a game, list my excuses. It was like those grief books said: you didn’t get over a brother’s death right away—an identical twin’s, especially. . . . Going up and down on ladders all day was going to put a lot of stress on my foot and ankle again. I’d paid good money for workmen’s comp insurance; might as well use it until it ran out.
Truth was, I’d never loved housepainting. I’d fallen into it running away from teaching. Guys who’d started after me, younger painters, were contracting a lot of their jobs now. Danny Jankowski employed four guys, two of them full-time. He’d called me a while back, said he heard I might be bailing and wondered if I wanted to sell my power-washing equipment. The vultures were already swarming.
But painting houses wasn’t unsatisfying work. You had your good karma jobs, your decent clients. It felt pretty good when you drove away on that last day, paid in full, having restored a little color to someone’s shit-brown life.
But this was part of the trouble: I still saw Henry Rood’s face up there in that window. Still felt myself falling. Jankowski had said he’d need an answer about the power washer by the end of the week. That’d been two weeks ago.
“Indecision was Hamlet’s fatal flaw, Dominick,” Doc Patel said one afternoon.
“Oh, man,” I groaned. “Don’t tell me you have a Ph.D. in Shakespeare, too?”
Since our last appointment, she’d put a new toy on the table: a thick green liquid encased in a rectangle of glass. I reached over and picked it up, made it make waves. “To paint or not to paint,” I mumbled. “That is the question.” But when I looked up, the good doctor was shaking her head.
“To be or not to be,” she said. “To get on with your life or create your own version of your brother’s imprisonment. To drown or not to drown.”
She was hitting below the belt, I thought. Ten minutes earlier, I’d described for her the latest exchange dream I’d had. In this one, Dominick had died and I, Thomas, was at the wheel of the hearse, driving his body around in search of some elusive cemetery.
“Have you called the State Board of Education yet?”
I jockeyed that wave-making toy of hers back and forth, back and forth. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged. In the session before, she had informed me that my shrugging in response to difficult questions was a hostile, not a helpful, response—a passive-aggressive habit I should work on. Officially, Dr. Patel was neutral on the subject of what I should do with the rest of my life, but you could tell she was rooting for my return to teaching. You could read it between the lines. It had been my idea, initially; I’d mentioned it as a possibility two or three appointments back. But since then, I’d begun to actually notice high school kids again. At the mall, at fast-food places. They’d gotten coarser, more desperate or something. All that gang stuff kids were into now, all that bad language. The week before I’d stood in line at Subway behind two girls in Raiders jackets. “That fuckin’ bitch gets in my face about him, I’ll bust her fuckin’ nose,” one of them told the other. “Who the fuck she think she is?” She was beautiful, this kid. Hispanic. These delicate, china doll features. . . . I pictured myself standing in a classroom in front of her and her friend—trying to teach those two about the relevance of history.
“Dominick?”
“What?”
“Why haven’t you called?”
I started to shrug but stopped myself. “I don’t know. I been busy.”
“Yes? Doing what?”
Watching CNN, C–SPAN. Watching baseball history in the making. The week before, I’d seen Rickey Henderson steal his 939th base and Nolan Ryan pitch his seventh career no-hitter on the same frickin’ day. Not that I dared mention baseball to Doc Patel. “Those books you’ve been having me read?” I said. “About the grieving process? Couple of them said that it’s natural to lose focus for a while. Feel a little spaced out or whatever. That it’s to be expected.” She nodded, said nothing. “What? Why are you smiling?”
“Am I smiling?” she asked.
I clunked her stupid wave-maker back onto the table. “I meant to call. I keep . . . I keep thinking about it after it’s too late.”
“Too late?”
“After hours, I mean. It’ll dawn on me that I forgot and I’ll look up at the clock and it’ll be like fifteen minutes after they close.” She gave me one of those who’s-zooming-who looks and waited. “I guess I should write myself a note. That’s what I’ll do: write a note and leave it by the phone. . . . Maybe if they closed their offices at five instead of four-thirty, like the rest of the free world.” Lose the snotty tone, Birdsey, I advised myself. She’ll dismantle you for it. There’s precedent.
Flipping through her notes, Dr. Patel reminded me that, two sessions ago, I had dictated a list of go
als for myself. “Do you remember, Dominick? You told me that it would make you feel better to act on several things instead of continuing to vacillate. You felt that your indecision was depressing you. . . . Ah, yes, here it is. Shall we review your list?”
As if I had a choice.
“Number one,” she said. “Call the State Board of Education to inquire about my teaching license. Number two, make a final decision about my business. Number three, acknowledge sympathy cards and gifts. Number four, clear the air with Ray.” She asked me if I’d called back the “gentleman” who was interested in buying my equipment.
“How can I call him back when I haven’t decided?” I said.
“To let him know that you are still mulling over his inquiry.”
I told her Jankowski was interested in my power washer, not my mulling patterns. “Anyways, he’s probably gone elsewhere by now.” I shifted in my chair. What was I supposed to do? Rush into a decision about my frickin’ livelihood just to please her?
“What about the sympathy cards?”
“Hmm?”
“Have you written back to the people who—”
“Yeah, I did that.” Which was a lie. Every time I sat at my kitchen table, I’d just stare at that stack of sympathy and it would short-circuit whatever promises I’d made. I hadn’t even opened most of those cards yet. “I started, anyway. I’m about halfway done.”
Doc Patel nodded in misplaced approval. It would energize me, she said, to begin to cross things off my list. Depression was, in some ways, a crisis of energy. I had heard her say that before; we were in reruns.