by Wally Lamb
Prosperine Albrizio had been in the third-to-last wave of psychiatric patients disgorged from the Settle Building before it closed its doors in March of 1992. No records survived, or existed, of a Prosperine Tucci. Nor did I find any evidence that Prosperine Albrizio and my brother Thomas had ever known each other in their long stays at Settle—that Thomas had, perhaps, drawn her a cup of coffee from his cart or that the old woman had hobbled past him one day in the dining hall, imagining herself in the presence of her nemesis, our grandfather, who had imprisoned her. If it even was Prosperine Albrizio whom Domenico had imprisoned. If Prosperine Albrizio had been Prosperine Tucci. . . .
In February of 1994, at the conclusion of a three-month trial, Dr. Richard Hume and four other physician-administrators were cleared of charges of negligence related to the spread of AIDS and HIV at Hatch Forensic Institute. Hatch’s 127 remaining inmates were transferred to Middletown, and the forensic hospital—the last operating facility of Three Rivers State Hospital—ceased to exist. Oddly enough, the abandoned state hospital grounds, once part of the sacred hunting and fishing lands of the Wequonnoc Nation, may again revert to the tribe, annexed for the purpose of expansion. Tribal officials and the Governor of Connecticut are deep in negotiations.
Electric Boat, manufacturer of nuclear submarines—and for the second half of the twentieth century, the economic backbone of the region—has, in the post–Cold War era, laid off workers to a small fraction of its former payroll. “The ghost yard,” people now call the once-booming shipyard where my brother and I long ago witnessed the launching of the Nautilus and posed for a picture with the First Lady of the United States of America. But if the defense industry has dwindled here in eastern Connecticut, the gaming industry has thrived. The Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort opened in September of ’92 and has exceeded by far even the most optimistic predictions about its impact on economic revival. In the six years of Wequonnoc Moon’s existence, expansion has never stopped and the complex of casinos and hotels rises, now, like an emerald Oz out of the sleeping woods off Route 22. The resort, which has both its champions and its detractors, employs seventy-five thousand. Cars and buses stream there night and day, nonstop, and the planning committee is looking into the feasibility of ferrying gamblers up the Sachem River from New York and delivering them from Boston by way of a high-speed, state-of-the-art private railroad. We 415 members of the Wequonnoc Nation are millionaires.
Dessa and I began dating again in the fall of 1993, although we’d been seeing each other regularly at the children’s hospice. She called me one afternoon, out of the blue. “I have an extra ticket for tonight’s UConn women’s game,” she said. “Angie and I usually go together, but she’s busy.”
“Women’s basketball?” I said, disdainfully. But of course, I accepted. Sat there, for the first several minutes, like a male chauvinist pain-in-the-ass. “When are they gonna start slam-dunking? . . . Who’s the coach—Frankie Avalon?”
“Oh, shut up, Dominick,” Dessa said, elbowing me. “Go, Jamelle!”
By the end of that season, I knew all the players’ names and positions and could give lectures on the strengths and weaknesses of each women’s team in the Big East. In ’95, Dessa and I traveled out to Minneapolis together to watch Lobo and Company win the national championship.
I proposed to Dessa later that spring. We were up at the Cape—Truro—walking Long Nook Beach. Mid-May, it was: bright sun, blue sky—a picture-book kind of day. I hadn’t planned it out—didn’t have a ring in my pocket or anything. I just put my arms around her, kissed her forehead, and asked her if she’d be willing to take another chance.
She didn’t smile. She looked kind of scared, actually, and I thought, You’re an idiot, Birdsey. You promised her right from the beginning that you wouldn’t pressure her.
She said she was pretty sure it wasn’t a good idea. She’d come to like living by herself. She’d think about it, though.
I told her I could withdraw the offer altogether if she wanted. No, she said. She asked for a week.
We left the beach, went back to the hotel, had some wine. Went out to dinner. Neither of us mentioned what I’d asked her back on the beach, but it sat there between us, as big as a Buick in the living room. Me and Dessa and this Buick of a remarriage proposal I’d probably just screwed up everything by making. I’d just laid it on her without any preliminaries, any planning: do you want to sign on again? Take your chances again with the guy who almost suffocated you? Hey, if I was her, I would have said no. . . .
After dinner, we ended up at this arcade place. Dessa beat my butt at Skee-ball; I beat hers at mini-golf. It was a nice night, it had been a nice weekend, but we were both quiet. Distracted. I kept wishing I’d just kept my mouth shut.
We got back to the hotel. Got into our separate Rob and Laura Petrie beds. After the news, we started watching this old black-and-white Italian movie called The Bicycle Thief. Dessa said she couldn’t believe I’d never heard of it—that it was probably the saddest movie she’d ever seen. “Yeah?” I said. “Wow.” I fell asleep ten minutes into the thing.
It was her crying that woke me up, her shaking my bed—which she was sitting on. “Hey?” I said. Squinted over at the TV, the rolling credits. “What is it? The movie?”
She shook her head. Put the table lamp on. Our slit-eyes adjusted to the light.
“All right,” she said.
“All right what?”
“Let’s try again.”
I tried to read her face. “Yeah? You sure? Because we could always—”
“I still love you,” she said. “And I’m not afraid of you anymore. So, okay.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
We kept it small, simple. Leo and Angie stood up for us, same as the first time.
And by the way, Leo did get the General Manager’s job down at Constantine Motors. Big Gene was against it, of course, but Thula and her two daughters flexed a little feminist muscle and voted the promotion through. And here’s the funny part. When Leo, king of the bullshitters, got the top spot? The corner office? What does he do but go legit. Gets rid of all the bells and whistles—the bogus giveaways, the jockeying around with trade-in numbers. Plays it straight on all the TV ads, too, which he stars in, of course. “It’s the nineties, Birdseed,” he told me. “People are tired of getting jerked around.” And the formula works, too, I guess. Isuzu just named him Regional Manager of the Year. His sales have been up eleven months in a row.
So, apparently, is his sperm count, thanks to those boxer shorts he started wearing. Their third kid’s going to be a boy, according to the amnio. Angie says she and Leo are old enough to be the chaperones at their Lamaze classes. Little Leo, they’re going to call him. He’s due the end of October.
A month after Wequonnoc Moon opened, Aunt Minnie rolled her Winnebago back east from California. She’s one of the Tribal Council Elders now: Princess Laughing Woman. She tells racy jokes, loves to dance, and makes a three-alarm chili that’ll clean your clock out in the very first bite. Minnie knew my mother; she helped me fill in some of the blanks. “I’m not saying there weren’t problems,” she told me. “But those two were crazy about each other—Connie and Henry. He used to talk to me about her all the time. You and your brother came from real love.”
Ralph and I warmed to each other, over time. We had, after all, a shared history, common blood. We had something else in common, too, which we talked about once: both of us understood the singular loneliness of the solitary twin. One night—it was after a General Council meeting—Ralph and I stopped back at his office for a drink. I asked him, flat out, if he could forgive me for the way I’d betrayed him that time, long ago, in the interrogation room of the state police barracks. He thought about it, took a slow sip of Chivas, and said he guessed he already had. It’s something to see Ralph in action—to watch him calm the waters at those stormy Tribal Council meetings. He’s fair, even-keeled—one of the best leaders we’ve got. It was Ralph who l
ed the fight to get that desk off the casino floor—the one where gambling addicts had been able to sit down and sign away the titles to their cars, the deeds to their homes. He is, and always has been, an ethical man. My cousin. Ralph.
Ray got used to his artificial leg without much of a problem—got home again to Hollyhock Avenue. He was doing great for a while there, had three or four good years, and then had a stroke. It was a bad one—landed him back at Rivercrest. His buddy Norman had passed away by then, but Stony was still alive and kicking. The stroke paralyzed Ray’s right side. He couldn’t talk. Couldn’t walk without assistance or swallow anything that hadn’t been pureed into this pukelike consistency first. He’s come part of the way back since then. We got him set up in a little three-room unit out at Father Fox Boulevard, that elderly housing place the parish opened last year. I could have afforded more, but that was what he wanted. I check in on him just about every day, call him on the days I can’t get there. He’s happy enough.
The house at “66-through-68 Hollyhock Avenue” stood vacant for a while. I went back and forth about what to do with it and then, one night, Dessa and I went over to Sheffer’s house for dinner. We’ve gotten friendly with them: Sheffer and Monica. We got to talking about how there’d never been a battered women’s shelter in Three Rivers—how, whenever an emergency came up, women had to escape with their kids and get all the way down to Easterly. The first of the casino money had started coming in by then. One thing led to another; Sheffer and I courted the zoning board and three or four state agencies. Made a case. Next thing you know, Domenico’s brick casa di due appartamenti had become the Concettina T. Birdsey Women and Family Shelter. Monica’s company, Womyn’s Work, did the remodeling. They found a way to reroute the staircases and knocked down the dividing wall between the two apartments—made it one.
Joy died in March of ’97. That was a tough one—draining for everyone, me and Dessa included. She’d put up a good battle. She and Dessa got to be friends during that last year or so. The first time we went to see her at Shanley, Joy told Dess about that time she’d spotted her and Angie at the mall and followed them to the food court. Had sat down near them and listened to their conversation and wished she was Dessa’s friend. And then, in that last year, she became Dessa’s friend after all.
Dessa and Tyffanie took to each other, right from the start—even before all those UConn women’s basketball games Dessa started taking her to. Long before she started living with us. At six, Tyffanie already knows all the players, has most of their autographs. The other afternoon, out in the driveway, she made her first basket. Regulation height that thing is out there and swish: I couldn’t believe it.
The adoption went through last January, a couple days after my birthday. Joy had signed all the paperwork two or three months before she died. She’d cried and laughed, both, signing those papers; God, she was so weak by then. She told me she’d finally gotten what she always wanted: for me to be that little girl’s father.
I stopped seeing Dr. Patel at about the time we took Tyff. During our last session together, I told her about the most recent of my Thomas dreams: those unconscious exchanges in which I fell asleep and became my brother.
“I have a theory about those dreams,” Dr. Patel said. “Shall I share it with you?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Like I could stop you?”
“I think,” she said, “that you may be attempting to incorporate in yourself what was good about your brother. His kindness, his gentleness. Perhaps you wish to be yourself and Thomas. Which would be lovely, don’t you think? Your strength and your brother’s sweetness, together?”
I nodded, smiled. “You know what?” I said. “I think I’m finished here.”
“I think you’re finished, too,” she said.
And we both teared up a little, hugged each other. I looked at that knee-high statue of hers, standing over by the window: Dr. Patel’s smiling, dancing Shiva. And I went over and snatched up that damn thing, grabbed Doc, and waltzed the three of us in circles around her office.
We Wequonnoc-Italians celebrate wholeness—the roundness of things.
I was forty-one years old the year I lost my brother and found my fathers—the one who had died years before and the one who’d been there all along. In the years since, I have become a wealthy man, a little girl’s father, and the husband, once again, of the woman I always loved but thought I had lost for good. Renovate your life, the old myths say, and the universe is yours.
I teach American history now, at the Wequonnoc School—a different kind of history than Mr. LoPresto used to teach. My students balk at tests, complain that I give too much work, and learn, I like to think, what I have learned: that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed. More than anyone, it was my maternal grandfather, Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, who taught me that. I have come, finally, to a kind of gratitude for Papa’s legacy—that troublesome document by which he tried and failed so miserably to prove his “greatness” to “Italian youth.” God—life—can be both merciful and ironic, I have come to believe. Papa approached his true worth only when he rolled that rented Dictaphone equipment onto the porch, sent home the stenographer, and retreated to the backyard to face his failures. Until he had humbled himself. Papa, I treasure your gift.
I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.
This much, at least, I’ve figured out. I know this much is true.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Linda Chester, my literary agent and friend, and to her associate, Laurie Fox, who shares equal billing. Glinda and Dorothy in one agency: how lucky can a writer get?
I am indebted to Judith Regan, my publisher and paisana, for her loyalty, her patient trust, and her passionate response to my work. Grazie, Judith.
The following writer-compadres offered invaluable critical reaction to this novel in its many stages, and I am grateful for and humbled by the generosity of their collective response. They are: Bruce Cohen, Deborah DeFord, Joan Joffe Hall, Rick Hornung, Leslie Johnson, Terese Karmel, Ann Z. Leventhal, Pam Lewis, David Morse, Bessy Reyna, Wanda Rickerby, Ellen Zahl, and Feenie Ziner.
A novel this size is both a big, shaggy beast and a complex process requiring faith, luck, moral support, and knowledge far beyond what its author brings to it. I bow deeply to the following, each of whom—in a variety of ways—helped me to find, tell, and publish this story (and, in two cases, to retrieve it from hard-drive never-never land): Elliott Beard, Andre Becker, Bernice Bennett, Lary Bloom, Cathy Bochain, Aileen Boyle, Angelica Canales, Lawrence Carver, Lynn Castelli, Steve Courtney, Tracy Dene, Barbara Dombrowski, David Dunnack, John Ekizian, Sharon Garthwait, Douglas Hood, Gary Jaffe, Susan Kosko, Ken Lamothe, Linda Lamothe, Doreen Louie, Peter Mayock, Susan McDonough, Alice McGee, Joseph Mills, Joseph Montebello, Bob Parzych, Maryann Petyak, Pam Pfeifer, Pit Pinegar, Nancy Potter, Joanna Pulcini, Jenny Romero, Allyson Salazar, Ron Sands, Maureen Shea, Dolores Simon, Suzy Staubach, Nick Stevens, Christine Tanigawa, David Teplica, Denise Tyburski, Patrick Vitagliano Jr., Oprah Winfrey, Patricia Wolf, Shirley Woodka, Genevieve Young, the morning crew at the Sugar Shack Bakery, and my students at the Norwich Free Academy and the University of Connecticut.
I am indebted to Rita Regan, who helped me with copyediting and advice about all things Sicilian, and to Mary Ann Hall, who put Gabrielle D'Annunzio's Tales of My Native Town into my hands.
Special thanks to Ethel Mantzaris for long-standing friendship and faithful support.
Finally, I feel gratitude beyond what I can articulate to Christine Lamb, my life partner and love, who makes my writing life possible.
I acknowledge and honor the following teachers, from elementary through graduate school, each of whom en
couraged excellence and nurtured creativity: Frances Heneault, Violet Shugrue, Katherine Farrell, Leona Comstock, Elizabeth Winters, Lenora Chapman, Miriam Sexton, Richard Bilda, Victor Ferry, Dorothy Cramer, Mildred Clegg, Mary English, Lois Taylor, Irene Rose, Daniel O'Neill, Dorothy Williams, James Williams, Alexander Medlicott, Alan Driscoll, Gabriel Herring, Frances Leta, Wayne Diederich, Joan Joffe Hall, Gordon Weaver, and Gladys Swan.
I was fortunate to have the support of the following writer-friendly institutions and organizations during the writing of this novel: the Norwich Free Academy, the Willimantic, Connecticut, Public Library, the Homer D. Babbidge Library, the University of Connecticut, and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.
This novel would not have come into existence without the generous support and validation of the National Endowment for the Arts.
A List of Sources Consulted
Baker, Russell. Growing Up. New York: New American Library, 1982.
Barron, D. S. “Once There Were Two: Twins Are Bound Together Forever, Even When One of Them Dies—Stories from the Lone Twin Network.” Health, September 1996, pp. 84–90.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Burlingham, Dorothy. Twins: A Study of Three Pairs of Identical Twins. New York: International Universities Press, 1952.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press/Bollingen, 1972.
Cohen, David Steven, ed. America: The Dream of My Life—Selections from the Federal Writers’ Project’s New Jersey Ethnic Survey. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.