I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  Ignazia no longer took walks into town to stare into the store windows and shop for my dinner. Now she learned how to use the telephone and called in her order to Hurok’s. Her face and ears would blush with shame as she shouted into the receiver, repeating again and again the names of items and brands until Hurok or his wife understood what it was she wanted, or until she slammed down the receiver and cried. She withdrew further from ‘Mericano ways; she had learned nothing but the rudiments of English, preferring instead to chitter-chatter with that scrawny accomplice of hers. But the Monkey’s banishment had silenced her. Her pronunciation of English was hopeless. Even her Italian was limited by the intellect of her gender and by the dialect of her native village. I brought Italian newspapers into our home, La Sicilia, La Nave. Myself, I read them from front to back, but Ignazia was indifferent now even to news of the Old Country. More and more, she was alone.

  “Tell that wife of yours to come next door and visit me, Domenico,” Signora Tusia said one day at the front gate. “You would think that partition between our apartments was the Atlantic Ocean!” But Ignazia was no longer interested in visiting. Not interested, either, in attending banquets or social events as the wife of the most respected Italiano in Three Rivers, Connecticut. She had not even attended my installation as presidente of Figli d’Italia. At first she had said she was going and then, that evening, she wouldn’t go. She shook her head no so often that I stopped asking her to accompany me. She stayed inside, moping and cleaning and playing with her red-haired, rabbit-faced daughter. After a while, Ignazia would not even answer the telephone when it rang. She would not answer the doorbell. Her daughter and her daily chores became the only two things in her life.

  One night, before I went off to work, Ignazia put stewed chicken and polenta and a bowl of escarole and lentils in front of me for my supper. I ate and ate and when I put the last forkful of polenta into my mouth, my tooth bit down on something hard. I spat a little gray nugget into my hand.

  Ignazia was in the bedroom, singing a song to Concettina, and making the girl’s little dollies dance before her eyes. That wife of mine treated her husband like a dog and her daughter like a princess.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  She squinted. “Looks like a little pebble.”

  “It was in my food.”

  “In the lentils?” She shrugged. “Sometimes a stone sneaks in.”

  “Not in the lentils,” I said. “In the polenta.”

  Another shrug. “Probably a little chip from the millstone when they ground the corn.” She held out her hand. “Give it to me. I’ll throw it away for you. Lucky you didn’t break a tooth.”

  I snapped my hand closed on the pebble. “Don’t bother,” I told her. “I’ll throw it away.” Instead, I wrapped it inside my handkerchief and put it in my pocket. Ignazia had shown me no love, I told myself, but no real hatred, either. I provided her and the child everything they needed. She would be a fool to fool with my life.

  That night at work, I kept poking my hand inside my pocket to feel the tiny pebble, roll it between my thumb and finger. Was it a stone or a small piece of glass? Glass is clear, I told myself. This shard is cloudy. Still . . .

  What else had she given me to swallow? Earlier that week, I had been plagued with foul gas; the Saturday before, I’d gone to bed with upset stomach. I had blamed it on bad wine, but maybe it had not been the wine. By the middle of my shift that night at the mill, I had convinced myself that my wife was poisoning me—getting ready to do me in as she had done in her last husband, Gallante Selvi, a buon’anima. Should I go home and beat the truth out of her? Should I go in the morning to see Father Guglielmo? Confide my suspicion to the priest and seek his advice? . . . No, that would not do. Domenico Tempesta was a man who gave advice now. Guglielmo would probably tell me to forgive my wife as Jesus forgave—to keep swallowing her tainted food and, for penance, to write down the recipes! I promised myself that if murder was what my wife was up to, I would make her pay. But I needed proof.

  When my pocket watch said 2 A.M., I went to the office and told Baxter that I had a bad toothache and needed to go home. I didn’t like leaving work—had only done it twice before in sixteen years of service to American Woolen and Textile. But if that sneaky bitch was trying to poison me, I had to act quickly. Hunt for proof while she slept. Catch her before she knew I suspected anything. . . .

  When I got home, I took off my shoes at the front door and lit the oil lamp, adjusting it to its dimmest glow. Tiptoeing through the house in stocking feet, I entered the kitchen. As quietly as a thief, I opened drawers, poked inside bins, felt with my fingers along the highest shelves. I was looking for glass powder or solder wire or whatever other murderous ingredients she might be using against me.

  She was in the back bedroom; I heard her groan in her sleep. I stopped and waited, then began hunting and poking again. She groaned a second time.

  Then a voice spoke—not my wife’s.

  If that goddamned mick of a monsignor had never visited me that morning years before—if his insults had not angered me enough to throw the wet cement at him—then 66-through-68 Hollyhock Avenue would never have borne the curse that Guglielmo and all the holy water in the world had not been able to dissolve! If McNulty had not trespassed against me, I would never have seen what I saw that night when I snuck home like a burglar and entered my own house in stocking feet. On that terrible night, that godforsaken monsignor must have laughed from Hell in anticipation of what I was about to discover. That night, the curse that McNulty had put on my casa di due appartamenti bore its most bitter fruit. . . .

  I made the lamp bright—stood for a moment at that bedroom door, then threw it open. I smelled her before I saw her—the stink of her pipe tobacco.

  At first, my brain could not understand what my eyes showed me: the two of them, clinging to each other like monkeys. . . . Ignazia, I weep to this day for the sins that cast you into Hell, for the shame you brought upon my good name.

  They screamed when they saw me, scrambling from the bed. “Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!” Ignazia shrieked. Prosperine clutched the sheet in front of herself and grabbed Ignazia’s sewing scissors.

  That goddamned smelly Monkey was wild-eyed with hatred and fear. She inched her way toward the door, scissors raised and ready to hack me dead, and thus escaped from the room, first, and then from the house. Lucky for her and lucky for me, too, I realized later. If I had understood the perversion I saw—if I had been able to act immediately upon what I had interrupted—I might have strangled her on the spot. Might have ended up in the newspaper as the shamed husband whose wife . . .

  I weep. It shames me to tell it, but I must let it out. . . .

  Ignazia made a run from me, too—not out the back door like the other one, but upstairs to the girl’s room. I caught her halfway up the stairs. “Don’t hurt Concettina!” she begged. “Kill me if you want, but don’t harm an innocent child!”

  I told her to shut up her mouth, to let me think. My head was nearly ready to explode! Ignazia dropped to her knees, cowering at my feet like a scared rabbit. She sobbed, choking, begging me not to take her life—not to send her off to Hell and make Concettina a motherless child.

  I must have stared for a minute or more, my mind racing to decide what to do—how to respond to the depravity I had seen in my back bedroom and could not stop seeing. What other husband in the world has ever faced what I faced that night?

  Forgive even that, Padre Guglielmo? Is that what you would have told me? Forgive even that? . . .

  “Get up!” I ordered her. Grabbed her hair and pulled her up. “You are the wife of Domenico Tempesta, not filth on the floor. Get into the bathroom and clean yourself. Wash away the stink of that she-devil.” Ignazia would burn in Hell, all right—but not before I was finished with her.

  That night I reclaimed what was rightfully mine—took what I had a right to take, did the things only a man can do to a woman. And when Ignazia’s screams threatened to ca
rry through the walls to Tusia’s appartamento, I held my elbow to her throat and shut her up and took some more of what belonged to me. To me, not that goddamned Monkey! For the rest of that night, I reclaimed what was mine!

  Next morning, I went to Signora Siragusa’s to see if the Monkey was hiding there. The signora said she had not seen her; it was the sorrow in the old woman’s eyes I believed more than the words coming out of her mouth. She grabbed my arm and held it. Whatever new trouble there was in my house, the signora said, she only hoped I would not make worse trouble—would not act the brute. “Bah!” I said, and walked out the front door without closing it. Let that meddlesome old woman’s coal heat the outside. What did I care? My business was my business.

  I didn’t go home. I went to the junkyard to see Yeitz, the ragpicker. He had been trying to sell me a police dog for over a month. I handed him three dollars and he handed me the rope and the dog. “Never had a better watchdog than this fella right here,” Yeitz told me. “Good hunter, too. He can be a mean son of a bitch, though. He’d just as soon tear a rat apart as let it live.”

  Back at my house, I pulled from my pocket the underclothes that toothless Monkey had left behind and stuck them in front of the dog’s nose. He sniffed and sniffed, then led me through backyards, over the top of Pleasant Hill, and into the woods. At the clearing, I saw that I had been led to the north side of Rosemark’s Pond by a route I had never walked before. That goddamned dog began to bark and lunge toward old Rosemark’s fishing shack on the far end of the pond. I jerked the rope almost hard enough to break his goddamned neck. Then I got him the hell out of there. Now I knew what I needed to know. In a short time, I would have my vendetta. However she had gotten back to Three Rivers, that filthy Monkey would regret that she had done it. I would make her sorry she had fucked with the thing that belonged to Domenico Onofrio Tempesta. She would pay the price!

  Back at home, I nailed the back door and downstairs windows shut and drove an iron stake into the front yard. With the heaviest chain I had, I tied that damn dog to the stake. No one was going in or out of my front door unless I wanted it. Ignazia was terrified of the dog—afraid of its barking and lunging at her and the girl as they peeked out the windows. This was just the dog I wanted—just the animal to guard a faithless fica of a wife whose husband worked at night.

  Upon my orders, Ignazia slept upstairs now. We were husband and wife again, as God had intended. I had never stopped wanting her in that way; my passione for her had survived even her vile betrayal. Sometimes, in the middle of my relief, I would see again what I had seen that crazy night: the Monkey and my wife, clutching each other in sin and perversion. I would finish my business in anger, then, sometimes striking her if she cried, and then I would get off of her—wait until her sobbing stopped, until her breathing said she was falling asleep. Then I would lean to her and whisper in her ear. “Maybe I’ve put a baby inside of you, eh? . . . Maybe I’ve just planted the seed that will burst your heart and send you to Hell where you belong.”

  Love and hatred: I bore the burden of them both for having loved a faithless wife, and so we each imprisoned the other. . . .

  And as for that other depraved and toothless mona, I fixed her wagon!

  “Why, Domenico, my friend! To what do I owe the pleasure, sir?” Shanley said, rising from behind his big pezzo grosso of a mayor’s desk to shake my hand. It was the morning after the police dog had led me to the shack by Rosemark’s Pond.

  I told Shanley I had been seriously considering his request that I help recruit Italian voters for him before the next election.

  “Splendid news!” he said. “Well worth exploring! Sit down, sir! Sit!”

  “I’m considering it,” I repeated. “But first, there is a little matter I’d like your help with.”

  “Anything, Domenico,” that crooked bastardo told me, and he smiled a smile that showed his gold back teeth. “Anything at all, my good friend.”

  I told him about the crazy woman from the Old Country who had once worked inside my home and who now plagued my family. I explained that my wife and I had been good enough to take in this poor creature when we were married, but that, in her craziness, she had turned against us. We had put up as best we could with her eccentricities, I told the mayor—her mumbled curses, her petty thefts. But then she had threatened to hurt our precious little daughter. “Pathetic as she is,” I told the mayor, “we have had to put her out of our house.”

  “Of course you did,” Shanley insisted. “What choice did you have, poor man?”

  After that, I told the mayor, this poor wretch had gone completely mad. For a while, she had run away to who-knew-where? But now she had come back. The night before, I told him, I had seen her peeking in the window. My dog and I had tracked her scent to a shack near old man Rosemark’s Pond, on the other side of Pleasant Hill. I worked nights, I said. I was afraid of what she might do to my wife or my child when I wasn’t there to protect them. “She’s crazy, but she’s sneaky, too,” I said.

  “She’s crazy like a fox,” the mayor agreed. He picked up the telephone and began dialing the Chief of Police. “Why, you’ve done the town a service by bringing this public menace to my attention, my friend,” Shanley told me. “I’ll have her picked up and put behind bars before the noon whistle blows. I’ll make sure Chief Confrey makes it his top priority.”

  “Scusa,” I said, raising my hand to stop him. The mayor stopped, hung up the telephone. “I was thinking . . . if she spends a few days in jail, then the problem is fixed for a few days. If she’s put away in the crazy hospital where she belongs, then my poor wife and child can walk the streets again. That woman is lunatic. One time she even claimed she was a witch!”

  “You’re absolutely right!” Shanley said, slapping the top of his desk. “You’re a shrewd man, my friend. And a practical one, too. If she has to be locked up, we might as well put her on the state’s dole instead of on the city’s. Ha ha.” He called for his secretary to bring him the telephone number of Three Rivers State Hospital.

  I waited and listened as Shanley talked on the telephone with one person, then another person. “The mayor of this fair city, that’s who’s calling, you goddamned jackass!” he shouted into the telephone. Then Dr. Henry Settle, the pezzo grosso of that godforsaken asylum, got on the line.

  They talked about this, about that, and then Shanley finally got down to business. He cupped his hand over the receiver and turned to me.

  “Does she have any relatives in town? If she won’t sign herself in, they’ll need a relative to do it for her—a blood relation to sign her in and sign her back out again if she gets cured.”

  I told him it would be a miracle if that addle-brained cousin of mine ever got cured—that if my poor auntie back in the Old Country could see that daughter of hers now, she would cry a river of tears. Shanley gave me a wink.

  I met the police and the dottore at the asylum. They took her out of the paddy wagon, bucking and straining against the straitjacket they had forced her into. When the Monkey saw me, she screamed every curse in the devil’s book!

  After I had signed my name to the papers they wanted me to sign, I took my cap off my head and clutched it in my hand, playing once again the part of the humble immigrant. “Scusai,” I whispered to the guard in charge. “May I have a moment in private to say goodbye to my poor cousin?” The idiot shrugged and moved across the room. I leaned close to Prosperine, pretending to give my cugina a goodbye kiss. But instead, I put my lips to her ear. “There’s more than one way to fuck the monkey that fucks with Domenico Tempesta!” I whispered. Then I lurched back and spat in her face the way she had spat on my medaglia. I left her tugging and lunging, screaming the most filthy oaths and curses of the Italian language. I had fixed that one for good!

  I never saw the Monkey again. For all I know, she’s still living down at that place for lunatics. Still eating and drawing breath, and paying the price she paid for fucking with Tempesta. I was never notified otherwise, but
if she is dead, then I spit on her grave. . . .

  For twenty-six years now—through all the tragedy and grief that has followed—through all my hard work and success and sleepless hours—I have always had that small satisfaction, at least: the memory of that moment when I won my battle against the Monkey, when I used my God-given cleverness to punish that she-devil for the sins she had committed against Domenico Tempesta.

  In September of that year, the archbishop in Hartford made Father Guglielmo a monsignor and transferred him to a parish in Bridgeport. There was a High Mass for Guglielmo in honor of his installation and a banquet afterward. I received a fancy engraved invitation but could not afford the time for a trip to Bridgeport. I was too busy canvassing the West Side and the neighborhoods near the mill, knocking on doors and turning paisani into Democrats for Mayor Shanley.

  In October, Signora Siragusa died in her sleep and I helped her sons carry her coffin to the grave. I wept for the old signora as if she had been my own mother—as if her flesh and bone had been mine. You see, Guglielmo? I still had tears inside my head. The troubles that God and the Monkey had given me had not completely hardened the heart of Tempesta! The signora’s sons were, of course, grateful to have a dignitary such as myself to help them bear their mother’s coffin.

  The following month, Shanley lost the election in spite of my efforts on his behalf. Lost because of my efforts, that ungrateful goddamned son of a bitch told his two cronies, Rector and O’Brien, right in front of my face. The four of us sat there in his office the morning after, those three micks puffing away on their cigars. Shanley offered me no smoke. I was no longer good enough for one of his stinking cheap panatelas.

  “You want to know how we lost it, boys?” Shanley said. “We lost it on account of three wops named Sacco, Vanzetti, and Tempesta. First, our friend here spends over half a grand registering every goddamned dago in this town that breathes and a few that don’t. Then, two days before the election, he decides to spout off his mouth to the newspaper about how those goddamned murdering son-of-a-bitching anarchists up there in Massachusetts are poor, innocent victims. ‘Does Mayor Shanley share your sentiments about this case, Mr. Tempesta?’ ‘Oh, yes. The mayor strongly supports all Italian-Americans.’ As if I had to wipe the ass of every goddamned guinea in this town. It wouldn’t have been so bad if all those wops we paid a dollar apiece to register had been smart enough to figure out that it was a package deal—that they had to register and vote in the goddamned election! Well, the swamp Yankees voted, all right, didn’t they, boys? They came out with a vengeance so they could keep us all safe from wops and anarchists, and that’s why Flint Peterson is the goddamned mayor-elect! That’s how he did it, boys: with the help of our friend the organ-grinder here!”