by Wally Lamb
I rose from my chair and took my hat from the rack. I told him I had worked my ass off for him and would not now sit there and be his scapegoat.
“Oh, no?” Shanley said. “Then whose ‘skeppa goata’ are you?”
After all the work I had done for that son of a bitch, he sat there mocking my English, mocking me! “Go piss in your hats, the three of you,” I told him and his goons. I’d had a bellyful of those swindlers and their dirty politics. I slammed that office door so hard, I thought the glass was going to fall out!
18 August 1949
It was 10 January 1925. A Tuesday, it was. Tuesday or Wednesday? I can’t remember now. But I must remember. . . .
That month, the Navy had given American Woolen a rush job. The summer before, they had given us a smaller order than usual for wool for pea jackets. Then, suddenly, halfway through the winter, they need enough dyed wool for ten thousand new jackets. The Navy was always that way—no planning and then they needed everything in a hurry! For a week, I had been working double shifts, getting by on three, four hours’ sleep. I was exhausted. I got home a little after eight in the morning.
Bitter cold that day, I remember. January had been warmer than usual, and then, suddenly, below zero. I was worried that Ignazia hadn’t put enough coal in the stove—worried that the pipes might freeze.
The dog was the first sign that something was wrong. He lay on his side, stomach collapsed, dead in his own bloody vomit. Poisoned. I pushed him a little with my foot but he didn’t budge. He was stuck stiff to the ground; he’d been dead for a while.
When I opened the door and went inside, a bird flew past my eyes! A sparrow, it was. I should have known then: a bird in the house is no good. I am not a superstitious man, but some signs cannot be ignored.
The fireplace in the parlor was stone cold. The radiators, too. The kitchen stove. I stood staring at the closed door of the back bedroom.
I put my hand on the cold knob but was afraid to open it—afraid of what I would see. I stood there, looking at my own breath. She never closed that door during the daytime. Never.
That goddamned bird flew in circles around the parlor, its wings skidding against the walls, its body crashing repeatedly into the mirror above the mantelpiece.
“Ignazia!” I called at the closed door. “Eh! Ignazia!” No answer.
I went upstairs. “Ignazia? . . . Concettina?”
Our bed was neatly made. Nothing overturned, nothing unusual. Her clothes and things were in the closet, in the drawers. I went to the girl’s room. Everything there, too. . . .
I went down to the cellar, started the furnace again. It took a while to get going. If the pipes froze, there’d be hell to pay. I stayed down there twenty minutes, half an hour, shoveling coal and watching it catch and burn. Twice, I thought I heard footsteps above my head, but when I stopped shoveling, it was quiet up there.
When I went upstairs again, that sparrow was dead on the parlor floor. I picked it up in my hand and carried it to the kitchen. Wrapped the goddamned thing in newspaper and threw it in the garbage. You would have thought a flock of sparrows had gotten inside, from all the feathers, blood, and shit it left. That one little bird with its crushable bones.
I still remember that: the mess that thing left in dying.
Confessione is good for the soul, eh? That’s what Guglielmo used to tell me. I lost track of him after he moved to Bridgeport. I couldn’t say, even, if he is dead or alive. . . . “Do your penance, Domenico. Reflect on your life and be umile. Write it down. . . . Be humble, Domenico. To be human is to be humble. What choice is there, really? Let none of us attempt God’s work.”
But I was never too good at confessione. . . .
The police pulled her body from the bottom of Rosemark’s Pond. I was there; I saw her come out of the water. She had fallen through the ice and drowned in the middle of the night, the coroner said. Before the bitter cold had set in. He could tell from the body’s bloating.
I thought she had taken the girl to her death as well. There was evidence: their footprints, helter-skelter, in the snow that covered the ice. Those footprints told of a struggle between them. Now both the son and daughter she had birthed on my kitchen table were gone. She had killed a husband, and now, God help her, a daughter, too. She had hated me enough to do it. She had despaired enough to drown the one she loved the most.
But Concettina was alive, hiding in the shack, half-frozen but still breathing. That’s how they found her—the police; her whimpering led them to her. And when I picked her up and held that half-dead girl in my arms, her bones felt almost as small and frail as that sparrow’s bones. And I held her against me, against the cold, against what her mother had done. And now I loved her.
Next day, the story of Ignazia’s drowning was in the newspaper, front page. It was after that, a week or so after I buried her, that the other details began to spread, began to fuel the fires of imagination. The poisoned dog, the footprints of both the woman and the girl. . . . All my life—even back in the Old Country—townsmen and townswomen have been happy to throw mud and gossip, to celebrate the bad fortune of my famiglia. Ignazia’s fate became a guessing game for the people of the town. The Italians of Three Rivers—my ungrateful paisani—speculated that God or that crazy housekeeper I had had locked up “down below” had been at the bottom of things. For months afterward, for years, a rumor survived that Ignazia had been stolen in the night by a strange man, then killed and thrown through the ice. . . .
But there had been no strange man. No kidnapping. No evidence of that kind of struggle. Only the footprints of my wife and the girl, the black hole at the center of the pond. And as for Concettina, she was mute about that night—told nothing to me, nothing to the police. To this day, we have never spoken about it. . . . She was only eight years old the night her mother tried to take her with her to Hell to punish Tempesta. But she did not take her. I don’t know what Concettina remembers.
After Ignazia’s death, Italian ladies rang my bell and stood in the doorway with sympathy and hope in their eyes, food in their hands. Beside them stood unmarried daughters, spinster sisters, young widows who volunteered to clean my big house and care for my poor motherless daughter. “No, thank you . . . no, thank you.” I refused them all. Each night when I went to work, I brought the child to the apartment next door where she slept in the care of Tusia’s family. Tusia’s Jennie left high school to launder and cook and sweep for me. I wanted no more of women in my life. No more wives. I was done with all that. . . . And by the time Jennie Tusia fell in love, married that sailor from Georgia, my daughter was old enough to take over. To take care of her father’s house—that poor, harelipped girl that no other man wanted.
She’s not a bad girl. She cooks, she cleans, she is quiet. Her silenzia honors her father. Concettina has Sicilian blood in her veins. She knows how to keep her secrets.
Well, here you have it, Guglielmo. This was what you wanted, eh?
Confession. Penance. Humility. . . .
May God Almighty save my soul!
46
Thomas and I float below the Falls, easing down the Sachem River on inner tubes. From the banks, people wave to us. Strangers, people we know. Our mother is there, and behind her, in the shadows, a little girl. She steps forward, into the sun. It’s Penny Ann Drinkwater, alive again, a third-grader still. She calls to us, points downriver. From the woods behind her, a siren blares. . . .
I lunged at the ringing. Knocked the damn phone to the floor, cradle and all. Hauled it by the cord back onto the bed. “Hello?”
Dr. Azzi said he was sorry to be calling this early but that, schedule-wise, he was looking at the day from hell. He was about to leave for the hospital. We could meet in the fourth-floor lounge in an hour, after he’d checked on Ray. Otherwise, we’d have to wait until the end of the day.
The red digital blur on the bureau said . . . 6:11? “Yeah, sure. I can be there. So you . . . you had to amputate?”
You didn’t wa
nt to fool around with gangrene, he said. He’d see me at about seven-fifteen.
I hung up, flopped back down on the bed. Closed my burning eyes. Okay, I told myself. Grab a shower, get over there. Fourth floor, right? . . . When I swung my legs over and onto the floor, my feet crinkled paper.
In the covers, all around the bed, lay the ruined pages of my grandfather’s manuscript. I had finished Domenico’s “history” somewhere in the middle of the night. For all its ugly revelations, it had provided none of the answers I’d both sought and dreaded. Only more questions, more suspicions, and one bleak revelation I had not gone looking for: that my grandmother, in her despair, had tried to take my mother with her. That when Ma was an eight-year-old girl, she had had to fight her mother for her life. . . . Confessions, penance, family secrets: in a fit of frustration and freedom, I had gotten to the last page of Papa’s history and wept. Had yanked the pages from their binder, balled them up, ripped them. Had made confetti of all my grandfather’s excuses, his sorry excuse of a life.
I stumbled toward the bathroom, my bare feet padding through the wasted pages. She cooks, she cleans, she knows how to keep secrets. . . . I stepped into the shower and made the water hot, hotter, as hot as I could stand it. . . . He’d died a failure: that much was clear. All that confession, all that eleventh-hour contrition: too little, too late. . . . Humble yourself, they’d told him his whole life, but he’d never quite gotten the hang of it. He’d held grudges, played God with people’s lives. He’d had that strange woman thrown into the asylum and had just let her rot in there. . . . Rot. Gangrene. This is your old man calling. You home yet? Give me a jingle, will ya?
I showered, shampooed. Stood there and let the water run over me. And when I finally stepped out, I faced myself, dripping wet and naked.
Don’t be him, Dominick, I told my eyes. Don’t be him, don’t be him. . . .
“There’s wet gangrene and dry gangrene,” Dr. Azzi said. “Wet’s worse, of course, because it means the bacteria’s set in. Which was the case with your dad. That was why we had to amputate as soon as possible. If we’d let it go, the infection would have started galloping through him. Shutting him down, system by system. Questions?”
“It’s . . . it’s definitely his diabetes that caused it?”
He nodded. “Compromising the blood flow to the extremities. And, of course, he was doing a pretty good job of ignoring the symptoms, too. He’s like my father: last of the tough guys. What else can I tell you?”
“Is, uh . . . I’m sorry. It’s a lot to take in all at once. The gangrene is the actual infection, right?”
Dr. Azzi shook his head. “Look, let me back up a little. See, I had no idea you were coming at this cold. I just assumed your dad was keeping you posted.”
He would have been, I thought, if I’d bothered to answer any of those phone messages. Whatever the outcome on Ray, I was pretty sure I’d just flunked some litmus test for basic human decency. “Gangrene’s dead tissue,” Dr. Azzi said. “It’s the breeding ground for infection. His foot wasn’t getting the oxygen and nutrients it needed. Wasn’t getting any nourishment, in other words. Human tissue’s like any other living thing. You starve it long enough, it dies.”
Dr. Azzi detailed what the next months would be like: intensive therapy at the hospital for a week or so. Then a transfer to a subacute rehab center—a nursing home—so that Ray could learn how to walk again. Then crutches for a while, an artificial leg later on if Ray chose to go that route. Some insurance covered prosthetics, some didn’t. The goal, of course, was to get him back home again. Ray had made it clear to him that he didn’t want to be stuck long term in some convalescent home. “He lives alone, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“Stairs?”
I nodded. “Outside and in.”
At the end of our meeting, we stood, shook hands. “He’s going to have a tough row to hoe, no doubt about it,” Dr. Azzi said. “But he’ll adapt. He was lucky, really. Remind him of that.”
I asked if I could see Ray. Sure thing, he said, but he had just had a shot; he’d probably be out for most of the morning. But I was welcome to go in and take a peek.
I went down the hall, found Ray’s room. Pass at your own risk, I thought.
He was breathing hard through his mouth. There was dried crud on the front of his hospital johnny, a thin ribbon of blood floating in the fluid just above his IV insertion. He looked so small and gray.
Acute therapy, subacute. Wet and dry gangrene. How could I have missed the fear in his voice? . . . This is your old man calling. You home yet? . . . Past history or not, who else did he have?
Look at it, I told myself. Do your penance. Face it.
And so I willed my eyes down from Ray’s gray face to his rising and falling chest, then down to the bottom of the bed. My stomach lurched a little. I faced the flatness where his right leg was supposed to be. . . . Remembered my brother’s shiny pink scar tissue—his grafted, upholstered stump. Somewhere along the way, I’d heard that when they amputated, they didn’t use some high-tech laser procedure; they just used a saw. Sawed through muscle and bone and then just threw the dead leg . . . where? In a Dumpster or something? Jesus.
He’ll need to stay at a rehabilitation center for a while—a nursing home—so that he can learn how to walk again. Jesus, he was going to go off the deep end, grounded like this. Always puttering with this or that—Ray couldn’t sit still to save himself.
The woman who entered made me jump. She was chubby, Asian. We exchanged nods. “I, uh . . . Dr. Azzi said I could see him. I know it’s not visiting—”
“That’s fine,” she said. She fitted a blood pressure cuff above Ray’s wrist, pumped her little black bulb. Read her gauge, pumped some more. Corrie something, R.N. In the old days, nurses wore white uniforms, not UConn sweatshirts.
“Uh, there’s a little bit of blood in his IV tube,” I said. “Are you aware of that?”
She squinted, leaned toward it. “Not a problem,” she said. She positioned a thermometer under Ray’s tongue and closed his mouth, held his jaw shut. Ray slept on, oblivious. Whatever was in that shot they’d given him had really knocked him out. The box beeped. She pulled the thermometer and jotted the results. I asked how he was doing.
“Temp’s down a little, his BP’s good,” she said. “Are you his son?”
I stood there, unable to answer her. When she lifted the sheet to check his dressing, my eyes jumped away.
“Looking good,” she said. “Looking good.” She let the sheet fall again, tucking it around him. He’d probably sleep most of the morning, she said, but I was welcome to stay. I shook my head. Told her I’d stay just a little longer, then come back in the afternoon.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll leave you guys alone, then.”
I stood there for a while, watching him sleep.
Reached out. Reached toward his hand. Passed a finger over the hills and valleys his knuckles made.
Like any other living thing. You starve something long enough, it dies. Dr. Azzi was more right than he realized. . . .
Thomas’s drowning out at the Falls had only been the official cause of death; he’d died down at Hatch, cut off from hope, from family. My brother had starved to death. . . . And my grandmother: she’d died in prison, too. The Old Man had installed that guard dog—had kept her captive in that goddamned, godforsaken house of his. Had raped her on weekends because she was “his.” And so, in despair, she’d done what she’d done before. Run. Escaped. Dragged her daughter out to that pond and . . .
Papa was a wonderful man, Dominick. Why was that, Ma? Because he looked good in comparison? Because over on Hollyhock Avenue, everything was relative? . . .
I have to go because you suck all the oxygen out of the room, Dessa had told me that morning she left. I have to breathe, Dominick.
I stood there, touching Ray’s hand, and finally getting it. . . . Dessa hadn’t stopped loving me, caring about me. About us. But she’d needed to sa
ve herself. Had needed to amputate me from her life because . . . I was starving her. Infecting her. Because if she’d stayed, I would have begun shutting her down, system by system.
Well, good for you, Dess, I thought. I’m glad you got out alive. And my tears fell fast, splashing against Ray’s bed railing, sinking into his sheets.
I got home around noon—left a message for Dr. Patel that I needed to see her as soon as possible. I heated up some soup, flipped through Newsweek without anything really registering. When I went to wash the dishes, I realized I’d just washed them.
Domenico’s ruined manuscript was in there: lying all over the bedroom where I’d left it. Okay, I told myself, you finished it and then you trashed it. So it’s trash. Right? Go in there and get rid of it.
I grabbed a garbage bag and went into the bedroom.
Stuffing page after ruined page of the Old Man’s “history” into the plastic bag, I thought about Ma—what she had told me about the day her father died. He’d just finished it: his long-in-the-making confessione, his failed act of contrition. . . . She’d heard him crying out there—had wanted to go to him, to comfort him, but it was against the rules. He would have been too angry, and it was his anger that had ruled that house. . . . I sat back on the bed. Saw her out there, harvesting Papa’s story. She must have felt her whole life shift that day, I thought. Her father was dead; her sons were growing inside of her. . . .