by Lamb, Wally
The orthopedic surgeon who later treated my brother was amazed at his determination; the severity of the pain, he said, should have aborted his mission midway. With his left hand, Thomas enacted each of the steps he’d rehearsed in his mind. Slicing at the point of his right wrist, he crunched through the bone, amputating his hand cleanly with the sharp knife. With a loud grunt, he flung the severed hand halfway across the library floor. Then he reached into his wound and yanked at the spurting ulna and radial artery, pinching and twisting it closed as best he could. He raised his arm in the air to slow the bleeding.
When the other people in the library realized—or thought they realized—what had just happened, there was chaos. Some ran for the door; two women hid in the stacks, fearing that the crazy man would attack them next. Mrs. Fenneck crouched behind the front desk and called 911. By then, Thomas had risen, teetering, from the study carrel and staggered to a nearby table where he sat, sighing deeply but otherwise quiet. The knife lay inside the carrel where he’d left it. Thomas went into shock.
There was blood, of course, though not as much as there might have been had Thomas not had the know-how and the presence of mind to stanch its flow. (As a kid, he’d earned advanced first-aid badges and certificates long after I’d declared the Boy Scouts an organization for assholes.) When it was clearer that Thomas meant harm to no one but himself, Mrs. Fenneck rose from behind the library desk and ordered the custodian to cover the hand with a newspaper. The EMTs and the police arrived simultaneously. The med techs hastily treated my brother, strapped him to a stretcher, and packed the hand in an ice-filled plastic bag that someone had run and gotten from the staff lounge refrigerator.
In the emergency room, my brother regained consciousness and was emphatic in his refusal of any surgical attempt to reattach the hand. Our stepfather, Ray, was away and unreachable. I was up on the scaffolding, power-washing a three-story Victorian on Gillette Street, when the cruiser pulled up in front, blue lights flashing. I arrived at the hospital during the middle of Thomas’s argument with the surgeon who’d been called in and, as my brother’s rational next of kin, was given the decision of whether or not the surgery should proceed. “We’ll knock him out good, tranq him up the ying-yang when he comes out of it,” the doctor promised. He was a young guy with TV news reporter hair—thirty years old, if that. He spoke in a normal tone, not even so much as a conspiratorial whisper.
“And I’ll just rip it off again,” my brother warned. “Do you think a few stitches are going to keep me from doing what I have to do? I have a pact with the Lord God Almighty.”
“We can restrain him for the first several days if we have to,” the doctor continued. “Give the nerves a chance to regenerate.”
“There’s only one savior in this universe, Doctor,” Thomas shouted. “And you’re not it!”
The surgeon and Thomas both turned to me. I said I needed a second to think about things, to get my head clear. I left the room and started down the corridor.
“Well, don’t think for too long,” the surgeon called after me. “It’s only a fifty-fifty thing at this point, and the longer we wait, the worse the odds.”
Blood banged inside my head. I loved my brother. I hated him. There was no solution to who he was. No getting back who he had been.
By the time I reached the dead end of that corridor, the only arguments I’d come up with were stupid arguments: Could he still pray without two hands to fold? Still pour coffee? Flick his Bic? Down the hall I heard him shouting. “It was a religious act! A sacrifice! Why should you have control over me?”
Control: that was the hot button that pushed me to my decision. Suddenly, that gel-haired surgeon was our stepfather and every other bully and power broker that Thomas had ever suffered. You tell him, Thomas, I thought. You fight for your fucking rights!
I walked back up the corridor and told the doctor no.
“No?” he said. He was already scrubbed and dressed. He stared at me in disbelief. “No?”
In the operating room, the surgeon instead removed a sheet of skin from my brother’s upper thigh and fashioned it into a flaplike graft that covered his butchered wrist. The procedure took four hours. By the time it was over, several newspaper reporters and TV research assistants had already called my home and talked to Joy.
Over the next several days, narcotics dripped through a catheter and into my brother’s spine to ease his pain. Antibiotics and antipsychotics were injected into his rump to fight infection and lessen his combativeness. An “approved” visitors’ list kept the media away from him, but Thomas explained impatiently, unswervingly, to everyone else—police detectives, shrinks, nurses, orderlies—that he had had no intention of killing himself. He wanted only to make a public statement that would wake up America, help us all to see what he’d seen, know what he knew: that our country had to give up its wicked greed and follow a more spiritual course if we were to survive, if we were to avoid stumbling amongst the corpses of our own slaughtered children. He had been a doubting Thomas, he said, but he was Simon Peter now—the rock upon which God’s new order would be built. He’d been blessed, he said, with the gift and the burden of prophecy. If people would only listen, he could lead the way.
He repeated all this to me the night before his release and recommitment to the Three Rivers State Hospital, his on-and-off home since 1970. “Sometimes I wonder why I have to be the one to do all this, Dominick,” he said, sighing. “Why it’s all on my shoulders. It’s hard.”
I didn’t respond to him. Couldn’t speak at all. Couldn’t look at his self-mutilation—not even the clean, bandaged version of it. Instead, I looked at my own rough, stained housepainter’s hands. Watched the left one clutch the right at the wrist. They seemed more like puppets than hands. I had no feeling in either.
2
One Saturday morning when my brother and I were ten, our family television set spontaneously combusted.
Thomas and I had spent most of that morning lolling around in our pajamas, watching cartoons and ignoring our mother’s orders to go upstairs, take our baths, and put on our dungarees. We were supposed to help her outside with the window washing. Whenever Ray gave an order, my brother and I snapped to attention, but our stepfather was duck hunting that weekend with his friend Eddie Banas. Obeying Ma was optional.
She was outside looking in when it happened—standing in the geranium bed on a stool so she could reach the parlor windows. Her hair was in pin curls. Her coat pockets were stuffed with paper towels. As she Windexed and wiped the glass, her circular strokes gave the illusion that she was waving in at us. “We better get out there and help,” Thomas said. “What if she tells Ray?”
“She won’t tell,” I said. “She never tells.”
It was true. However angry we could make our mother, she would never have fed us to the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room, rose to his alarm clock at three-thirty each afternoon, and built submarines at night. Electric Boat, third shift. At our house, you tiptoed and whispered during the day and became free each evening at nine-thirty when Eddie Banas, Ray’s fellow third-shifter, pulled into the driveway and honked. I would wait for the sound of that horn. Hunger for it. With it came a loosening of limbs, a relaxation in the chest and hands, the ability to breathe deeply again. Some nights, my brother and I celebrated the slamming of Eddie’s truck door by jumping in the dark on our mattresses. Freedom from Ray turned our beds into trampolines.
“Hey, look,” Thomas said, staring with puzzlement at the television.
“What?”
Then I saw it, too: a thin curl of smoke rising from the back of the set. The Howdy Doody Show was on, I remember. Clarabel the Clown was chasing someone with his seltzer bottle. The picture and sound went dead. Flames whooshed up the parlor wall.
I thought the Russians had done it—that Khrushchev had dropped the bomb at last. If the unthinkable ever happened, Ray had lectured us at the dinner table, the submarine base and
Electric Boat were guaranteed targets. We’d feel the jolt nine miles up the road in Three Rivers. Fires would ignite everywhere. Then the worst of it: the meltdown. People’s hands and legs and faces would melt like cheese.
“Duck and cover!” I yelled to my brother.
Thomas and I fell to the floor in the protective position the civil defense lady had made us practice at school. There was an explosion over by the television, a confusion of thick black smoke. The room rained glass.
The noise and smoke brought Ma, screaming, inside. Her shoes crunched glass as she ran toward us. She picked up Thomas in her arms and told me to climb onto her back.
“We can’t go outside!” I shouted. “Fallout!”
“It’s not the bomb!” she shouted back. “It’s the TV!”
Outside, Ma ordered Thomas and me to run across the street and tell the Anthonys to call the fire department. While Mr. Anthony made the call, Mrs. Anthony brushed glass bits off the tops of our crew cuts with her whisk broom. We spat soot-flecked phlegm. By the time we returned to the front sidewalk, Ma was missing.
“Where’s your mother?” Mr. Anthony shouted. “She didn’t go back in there, did she? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”
Thomas began to cry. Then Mrs. Anthony and I were crying, too. “Hurry up!” my brother shrieked to the distant sound of the fire siren. Through the parlor windows, I could see the flames shrivel our lace curtains.
A minute or so later, Ma emerged from the burning house, sobbing, clutching something against her chest. One of her pockets was ablaze from the paper towels; her coat was smoking.
Mr. Anthony yanked off Ma’s coat and stomped on it. Fire trucks rounded the corner, sirens blaring. Neighbors hurried out of their houses to cluster and stare.
Ma stank. The fire had sizzled her eyebrows and given her a sooty face. When she reached out to pull Thomas and me to her body, several loose photographs spilled to the ground. That’s when I realized why she’d gone back into the house: to rescue her photo album from its keeping place in the bottom drawer of the china closet.
“It’s all right now,” she kept saying. “It’s all right, it’s all right.” And, for Ma, it was all right. The house her father had built would be saved. Her twins were within arm’s reach. Her picture album had been rescued. Just last week, I dreamt my mother—dead from breast cancer since 1987—was standing at the picture window at Joy’s and my condominium, looking in at me and mouthing that long-ago promise. “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right.”
Sometime during Ma’s endless opening and closing of that overstuffed photo album she loved so much, the two brass pins that attached the front and back covers first bent, then broke, causing most of the book’s black construction paper pages to loosen and detach. The book had been broken for years when, in October of 1986, Ma herself was opened and closed on a surgical table at Yale–New Haven Hospital. After several months’ worth of feeling tired and run down and contending with a cold that never quite went away, she had fingered a lump in her left breast. “No bigger than a pencil eraser,” she told me over the phone. “But Lena Anthony thinks I should go to the doctor, so I’m going.”
My mother’s breast was removed. A week later, she was told that the cancer had metastasized—spread to her bone and lymph nodes. With luck and aggressive treatment, the oncologist told her, she could probably live another six to nine months.
My stepfather, my brother, and I struggled independently with our feelings about Ma’s illness and pain—her death sentence. Each of us fumbled, in our own way, to make things up to her. Thomas set to work in the arts and crafts room down at the state hospital’s Settle Building. While Ma lay in the hospital being scanned and probed and plied with cancer-killing poisons, he spent hours assembling and gluing and shellacking something called a “hodgepodge collage”—a busy arrangement of nuts, washers, buttons, macaroni, and dried peas that declared: god = love! Between hospital stays, Ma hung it on the kitchen wall where its hundreds of glued doodads seemed to pulsate like something alive—an organism under a microscope, molecules bouncing around in a science movie. It unnerved me to look at that thing.
My stepfather decided he would fix, once and for all, Ma’s broken scrapbook. He took the album from the china closet and brought it out to the garage. There he jerry-rigged a solution, reinforcing the broken binding with strips of custom-cut aluminum sheeting and small metal bolts. “She’s all set now,” Ray told me when he showed me the rebound book. He held it at arm’s length and opened it face down to the floor, flapping the covers back and forth as if they were the wings of a captured duck.
My own project for my dying mother was the most costly and ambitious. I would remodel her pink 1950s-era kitchen, Sheetrocking the cracked plaster walls, replacing the creaky cabinets with modern units, and installing a center island with built-in oven and cooktop. I conceived the idea, I think, to show Ma that I loved her best of all. Or that I was the most grateful of the three of us for all she’d endured on our behalf. Or that I was the sorriest that fate had given her first a volatile husband and then a schizophrenic son and then tapped her on the shoulder and handed her the “big C.” What I proved, instead, was that I was the deepest in denial. If I was going to go to the trouble and expense of giving her a new kitchen, then she’d better live long enough to appreciate it.
I arrived with my toolbox at the old brick duplex early one Saturday morning, less than a week after her discharge from the hospital. Ray officially disapproved of the project and left in a huff when I got there. Looking pale and walking cautiously, Ma forced a smile and began carrying her canisters and knickknacks out of the kitchen to temporary storage. She watched from the pantry doorway as I committed my first act of renovation, tamping my flat bar with a hammer and wedging it between the wainscoting and the wall. Ma’s hand was a fist at her mouth, tapping, tapping against her lip.
With the crack and groan of nails letting go their hold, the four-foot-wide piece of wainscoting was pried loose from the wall, revealing plaster and lath and an exposed joist where someone had written notes and calculations. “Look,” I said, wanting to show her what I guessed was her father’s handwriting. But when I turned around, I realized I was addressing the empty pantry.
I was thirty-six at the time, unhappily divorced for less than a year. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d still reach for Dessa, and her empty side of the bed would startle me awake. We’d been together for sixteen years.
I found my mother sitting in the front parlor, trying to hide her tears. The newly repaired photo album was in her lap.
“What’s the matter?”
She shook her head, tapped her lip. “I don’t know, Dominick. You go ahead. It’s just that with everything that’s happening right now . . .”
“You don’t want a new kitchen?” I asked. The question came out like a threat.
“Honey, it’s not that I don’t appreciate it.” She patted the sofa cushion next to her. “Come here. Sit down.”
Still standing, I reminded her that she’d complained for decades about her lack of counter space. I described the new stoves I’d seen at Kitchen Depot—the ones where the burners are one continuous flat surface, a cinch for cleaning. I sounded just like the saleswoman who’d led me around from one showroom miracle to the next.
Ma said that she knew a new kitchen would be great, but that maybe what she really needed right now was for things to stay settled.
I sat. Sighed, defeated.
“If you want to give me something,” she said, “give me something small.”
“Okay, fine,” I huffed. “I’ll just make you one of those collage things like Thomas’s. Except mine will say life sucks. Or jesus christ’s a son of a bitch.” My mother was a religious woman. I might as well have taken my flatbar and poked at her incision.
“Don’t be bitter, honey,” she said.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, I was crying—tears and strangled little barks that convulsed from the back of my throat
. “I’m scared,” I said.
“What are you scared of, Dominick? Tell me.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m scared for you.” But it was myself I was scared for. Closing in on forty, I was wifeless, childless. Now I’d be motherless, too. Left with my crazy brother and Ray.
She reached over and rubbed my arm. “Well, honey,” she said, “it’s scary. But I accept it because it’s what God wants for me.”
“What God wants,” I repeated, with a little snort of contempt. I dragged my sleeve across my eyes, cleared my throat.
“Give me something little,” she repeated. “You remember that time last spring when you came over and said, ‘Hey, Ma, get in the car and I’ll buy you a hot fudge sundae’? That’s the kind of thing I’d like. Just come visit. Look at my album with me.”
Tucked in the inside front cover pocket of my mother’s scrapbook are two pictures of Thomas and me, scissored four decades earlier from the Three Rivers Daily Record. The folded newsprint, stained brown with age, feels as light and brittle as dead skin. In the first photo, we’re wrinkled newborns, our diapered bodies curved toward each other like opening and closing parentheses. IDENTICAL TWINS RING OUT OLD, RING IN NEW, the caption claims and goes on to explain that Thomas and Dominick Tempesta were born at the Daniel P. Shanley Memorial Hospital on December 31, 1949, and January 1, 1950, respectively—six minutes apart and in two different years. (The article makes no mention of our father and says only that our unnamed mother is “doing fine.” We were bastards; our births would have been discreetly ignored by the newspaper had we not been the New Year’s babies.) “Little Thomas arrived first, at 11:57 P.M.,” the article explains. “His brother Dominick followed at 12:03 A.M. Between them, they straddle the first and second halves of the twentieth century!”
In the second newspaper photo, taken on January 24, 1954, my brother and I have become Thomas and Dominick Birdsey. We wear matching sailor hats and woolen pea jackets and salute the readers of the Daily Record. Mamie Eisenhower squats between us, one mink-coated arm wrapped around each of our waists. Mrs. Eisenhower, in her short bangs and flowered hat, beams directly at the camera. Thomas and I, age four, wear twin looks of bewildered obedience. This picture is captioned first lady gets a two-gun salute.