by Lamb, Wally
The President’s wife was in Groton, Connecticut, that winter day to break champagne against the USS Nautilus, America’s first nuclear-powered submarine. Our family stood in the crowd below the dignitaries’ platform, ticket-holding guests by virtue of our new stepfather’s job as a pipe fitter for Electric Boat. EB and the Navy were partners in the building of the Nautilus, America’s best hope for containing Communism.
According to my mother, it had been cold and foggy the morning of the launch and then, just before the submarine’s christening, the sun had burned through and lit up the celebration. Ma had prayed to Saint Anne for good weather and saw this sudden clearing as a small miracle, a further sign of what everybody knew already: that Heaven was on our side, was against the godless Communists who wanted to conquer the world and blow America to smithereens.
“It was the proudest day of my life, Dominick,” she told me that morning when I started, then halted, the renovation of her kitchen and sat, instead, and looked. “Seeing you two boys with the President’s wife. I remember it like it was yesterday. Mamie and some admiral’s wife were up there on the VIP platform, waving down to the crowd, and I said to your father, ‘Look, Ray. She’s pointing right at the boys!’ He said, ‘Oh, go on. They’re just putting on a show.’ But I could tell she was looking at you two. It used to happen all the time. People get such a kick out of twins. You boys were always special.”
Her happy remembrance of that long-ago day strengthened her voice, animated her gestures. The past, the old pictures, the sudden brilliance of the morning sun through the front windows: the mix made her joyful and took away, I think, a little of her pain.
“And then, next thing you know, the four of us were following some Secret Service men to the Officers’ Club lounge. Ray took it in stride, of course, but I was scared skinny. I thought we were in trouble for something. Come to find out, we were following Mrs. Eisenhower’s orders. She wanted her picture taken with my two boys!
“They treated us like big shots, too. Your father had a cocktail with Admiral Rickover and some of the other big brass. They asked him all about his service record. Then a waiter brought you and your brother orange sodas in frosted glasses almost as tall as you two were. I was scared one of you was going to spill soda all over Mamie.”
“What did you and she have to drink?” I kidded her. “Couple of boilermakers?”
“Oh, honey, I didn’t take a thing. I was a nervous wreck, standing that close to her. She ordered a Manhattan, I remember, and had some liver pâté on a cracker. She was nice—very down to earth. She asked me if I’d sewn the little sailor suits you and Thomas were wearing. She told me she knitted some still when she and the President traveled, but she’d never had a talent for sewing. When she stooped down to have her picture taken with you two boys, she told you she had a grandson just a little older than you. David Eisenhower is who she was talking about. Julie Nixon’s husband. Camp David.”
Ma shook her head and smiled, in disbelief still. Then she pulled a Kleenex from the sleeve of her bathrobe and dabbed at her eyes. “Your grandfather just wouldn’t have believed it,” she said. “First he comes to this country with holes in his pockets, and then, the next thing you know, his two little grandsons are hobnobbing with the First Lady of the United States of America. Papa would have gotten a big kick out of that. He would have been proud as a peacock.”
Papa.
Domenico Onofrio Tempesta—my maternal grandfather, my namesake—is as prominent in my mother’s photo album as he was in her life of service to him. He died during the summer of 1949, oblivious of the fact that the unmarried thirty-three-year-old daughter who kept his house—his only child—was pregnant with twins. Growing up, my brother and I knew Papa as a stern-faced paragon of accomplishment, the subject of a few dozen sepia-tinted photographs, the star of a hundred anecdotes. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went.
He had emigrated to America from Sicily in 1901 and gotten ahead because he was shrewd with his money and unafraid of hard work, lucky for us! He’d bought a half-acre lot from a farmer’s widow and thus become the first Italian immigrant to own property in Three Rivers, Connecticut. Papa had put the roof over our heads, had built “with his own two hands” the brick Victorian duplex on Hollyhock Avenue where we’d lived as kids—where my mother had lived all her life. Papa had had a will of iron and a stubborn streak—just the traits he needed to raise a young daughter “all by his lonesome.” If we thought Ray was strict, we should have seen Papa! Once when Ma was a girl, she was bellyaching about having to eat fried eggs for supper. Papa let her go on and on and then, without saying a word, reached over and pushed her face down in her plate. “I came up with egg yolk dripping off my hair and the tip of my nose and even my eyelashes. I was crying to beat the band. After that night, I just ate my eggs and shut up about it!”
Another time, when Ma was a teenager working at the Rexall store, Papa found her secret package of cigarettes and marched himself right down to the drugstore where he made her eat one of her own Pall Malls. Right in front of the customers and her boss, Mr. Chase. And Claude Sminkey, the soda jerk she had such an awful crush on. After he left, Ma ran outside and had to throw up at the curb with people walking by and watching. She had to quit her job, she was so ashamed of herself. But she never smoked again—never even liked the smell of cigarettes after that. Papa had fixed her wagon, all right. She had defied him and then lived to regret it. The last thing Papa wanted was a sneak living under his own roof.
Sometime during our visit with the photo album that morning, my mother told me to wait there. She had something she wanted to get. With a soft sigh of pain, she was on her feet and heading for the front stairs.
“Ma, whatever it is, let me get it for you,” I called out.
“That’s okay, honey,” she called back down the stairs. “I know right where it is.”
I flipped quickly through the pages as I waited—made my family a jerky, imperfect movie. It struck me that my mother had compiled mostly a book of her father, Thomas, and me. Others make appearances: Ray, Dessa, the Anthonys from across the street, the Tusia sisters from next door. But my grandfather, my brother, and I are the stars of my mother’s book. Ma herself, camera-shy and self-conscious about her cleft lip, appears only twice in the family album. In the first picture, she’s one of a line of dour-faced schoolchildren posed on the front step of St. Mary of Jesus Christ Grammar School. (A couple of years ago, the parish sold that dilapidated old schoolhouse to a developer from Massachusetts who converted it into apartments. I bid on the inside painting, but Paint Plus came in under me.) In the second photograph, Ma looks about nine or ten. She stands beside her lanky father on the front porch of the house on Hollyhock Avenue, wearing a sacklike dress and a sober look that matches Papa’s. In both of these photos, my mother holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth.
It was a gesture she had apparently learned early and practiced all her life: the hiding of her cleft lip with her right fist—her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she’d had no control. The lip, split just to the left of her front teeth, exposed a half-inch gash of gum and gave the illusion that she was sneering. But Ma never sneered. She apologized. She put her fist to her mouth for store clerks and door-to-door salesmen, for mailmen and teachers on parents’ visiting day, for neighbors, for her husband, and even, sometimes, for herself when she sat in the parlor watching TV, her image reflected on the screen.
She had made reference to her harelip only once, a day in 1964 when she sat across from me in an optometrist’s office. A month earlier, my ninth-grade algebra teacher had caught me squinting at the blackboard and called to advise my mother to get my eyes tested. But I’d balked. Glasses were for brains, for losers and finky kids. I was furious because Thomas had developed no twin case of myopia—no identical need to wear stupid faggy glasses like me. He was the jerk,
the brownnoser at school. He should be the nearsighted one. If she made me get glasses, I told her, I just wouldn’t wear them.
But Ma had talked to Ray, and Ray had issued one of his supper table ultimatums. So I’d gone to Dr. Wisdo’s office, acted my surliest, and flunked the freaking wall chart. Now, two weeks later, my black plastic frames were being fitted to my face in a fluorescent-lit room with too many mirrors.
“Well, I think they make you look handsome, Dominick,” Ma offered. “Distinguished. He looks like a young Ray Milland. Doesn’t he, Doctor?”
Dr. Wisdo didn’t like me because of my bad attitude during the first visit. “Well,” he mumbled reluctantly, “now that you mention it.”
This all occurred during the fever of puberty and Beatlemania. The summer before, at the basketball courts at Fitz Field, a kid named Billy Grillo had shown me and Marty Overturf a stack of rain-wrinkled paperbacks he’d found out in the woods in a plastic bag: Sensuous Sisters, Lusty Days & Lusty Nights, The Technician of Ecstasy. I’d swiped a couple of those mildewed books and taken them out past the picnic tables where I read page after faded page, simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the things men did to women, the things women did to themselves and each other. It flabbergasted me, for instance, that a man might put his dick inside a woman’s mouth and have her “hungrily gulp down his creamy nectar.” That a woman might cram a glass bottle up between another woman’s legs and that this would make both “scream and undulate with pleasure.” I’d gone home from basketball that day, flopped onto my bed and fallen asleep, awakening in the middle of my first wet dream. Shortly after that, the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan. Behind the locked bathroom door, I began combing my bangs forward and beating off to my dirty fantasies about all those girls who screamed for the Beatles—what those same girls would do to me, what they’d let me do to them. So the last person I wanted to look like was Ray Milland, one of my mother’s old fart movie stars.
“Could you just shut up, please?” I told Ma, right in front of Dr. Wisdo.
“Hey, hey, hey, come on now. Enough is enough,” Dr. Wisdo protested. “What kind of boy says ‘Shut up’ to his own mother?”
Ma put her fist to her mouth and told the doctor it was all right. I was just upset. This wasn’t the way I really was.
As if she knew the way I really was, I thought to myself, smiling inwardly.
Dr. Wisdo told me he had to leave the room for a few minutes, and by the time he got back, he hoped I would have apologized to my poor mother.
Neither of us said anything for a minute or more. I just sat there, smirking defiantly at her, triumphant and miserable. Then Ma took me by complete surprise. “You think glasses are bad,” she said. “You should try having what I have. At least you can take your glasses off.”
I knew immediately what she meant—her harelip—but her abrupt reference to it hit me like a snowball in the eye. Of all the forbidden subjects in our house, the two most forbidden were the identification of Thomas’s and my biological father and our mother’s disfigurement. We had never asked about either—had somehow been raised not to ask and had honored the near-sacredness of the silence. Now Ma herself was breaking one of the two cardinal rules. I looked away, shocked, embarrassed, but Ma wouldn’t stop talking.
“One time,” she said, “a boy in my class, a mean boy named Harold Kettlety, started calling me ‘Rabbit Face.’ I hadn’t done anything to him. Not a thing. I never bothered anyone at all—I was scared of my own shadow. He just thought up that name one day and decided it was funny. ‘Hello there, Rabbit Face,’ he used to whisper to me across the aisle. After a while, some of the other boys took it up, too. They used to chase me at recess and call me ‘Rabbit Face.’ “
I sat there, pumping my leg up and down, wanting her to stop—wanting Harold Kettlety to still be a kid so I could find him and rip his fucking face off for him.
“And so I told the teacher, and she sent me to the principal. Mother Agnes, her name was. She was a stern thing.” Ma’s fingers twisted her pocketbook strap as she spoke. “She told me to stop making a mountain out of a molehill. I was making things worse, she said, by calling it to everyone’s attention. I should just ignore it. . . . Then more boys got on the bandwagon, even boys from other grades. It got so bad, I used to get the dry heaves before school every morning. You didn’t stay home sick in our house unless you had something like the measles or the chicken pox. That’s the last thing Papa would have stood for—me home all day long just because some stinker was calling me a name.”
I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice—to see the way she was twisting that pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything. “I don’t see how any of this sob story stuff has anything to do with me,” I said. “Are you planning to get to the point before I die of old age?”
She shut up after that, silenced, I guess, by the fact that her own son had joined forces with Harold Kettlety. On the drive home from the optometrist’s, I chose to sit in the backseat and not speak to her. Somewhere en route, I drew my new glasses from their brown plastic clip-to-your-pocket case, rubbed the lenses with the silicone-impregnated cleaning cloth, and slipped them on. I looked out the window, privately dazzled by a world more sharp and clear than I remembered. I said nothing about this, spoke no apologies, offered no concessions.
“Ma’s crying downstairs,” Thomas informed me later, up in our bedroom. I was lifting weights, shirt off, glasses on.
“So what am I supposed to do about it?” I said. “Hold a snot rag to her nose?”
“Just try being decent to her,” he said. “She’s your mother, Dominick. Sometimes you treat her like s-h-i-t.”
I stared at myself in our bedroom mirror as I lifted the weights, studying the muscle definition I’d begun to acquire and which I could now see clearly, thanks to my glasses. “Why don’t you say the word instead of spelling it,” I smirked. “Go ahead. Say ‘shit.’ Give yourself a thrill.”
He’d been changing out of his school clothes as we spoke. Now he stood there, hands on his hips, wearing just his underpants, his socks, and one of those fake-turtleneck dickey things that were popular with all the goody-goody kids at our school. Thomas had them in four or five different colors. God, I hated those dickeys of his.
I looked at the two of us, side by side, in the mirror. Next to me, Thomas was a scrawny joke. Mr. Pep Squad Captain. Mr. Goody-Goody Boy.
“I mean it, Dominick,” he said. “You better treat her right or I’ll say something to Ray. I will. Don’t think I wouldn’t.”
Which was bullshit and we both knew it.
I grabbed my barbell wrench, banged extra weights onto the bar, lifted them. Fink. Pansy Ass Dickey Boy. “Oh, geez, I’m nervous,” I told him. “I’m so scared, I’ll probably shit my p-a-n-t-s.”
He stood there, just like Ma, his look of indignation melting into forgiveness. “Just cool it, is all I’m saying, Dominick,” he said. “Oh, by the way, I like your glasses.”
When Ma came back down the stairs on that day of failed kitchen renovation, she was carrying a gray metal strongbox. I put down the picture album, stood, and walked toward her. “Here, honey,” she said. “This is for you. Phew, kind of heavy.”
“Ma, I told you I’d get it.” I took it from her. “What’s in it, anyways?”
“Open it and see,” she said.
She had masking-taped the key to the side of the box; I kidded her about it—told her it was a good thing she didn’t work for Fort Knox. She watched my fingers peel the key free, put it in the lock, and turn. In anticipation of my opening the strongbox, she didn’t even seem to hear my teasing.
Inside the box was a large manila envelope curled around a small coverless dictionary and held in place with an elastic band that broke as soon as I touched it. The envelope held a thick sheaf of paper—a manuscript of some kind. The first ten or fifteen pages were typewritten—originals and carbon copies. The rest had been written in
longhand—a scrawling, ornate script in blue fountain-pen ink. “It’s Italian, right?” I asked. “What is it?”
“It’s my father’s life story,” she said. “He dictated it the summer he died.”
As I fanned through the thing, its mildewy aroma went up my nose. “Dictated it to who?” I asked her. “You?”
“Oh, gosh, no,” she said. Did I remember the Mastronunzios from church? Tootsie and Ida Mastronunzio? My mother was always doing that: assuming that my mental database of all the Italians in Three Rivers was as extensive as hers was.
“Uh-uh,” I said.
Sure I did, she insisted. They drove that big white car to Mass? Ida worked at the dry cleaner’s? Walked with a little bit of a limp? Well, anyway, Tootsie had a cousin who came over from Italy right after the war. Angelo Nardi, his name was. He’d been a courtroom stenographer in Palermo. “He was a handsome fella, too—very dashing. He was looking for work.”
Her father had been saying for years how, someday, he was going to sit down and tell the story of his life for the benefit of siciliani. He thought boys and young men back in the Old Country would want to read about how one of their own had come to America and made good. Gotten ahead in life. Papa thought it might inspire them to do likewise. So when he met Tootsie’s cousin one day over at the Italian Club, he came up with a big idea. He would tell Angelo his story—have Angelo write it all down as he spoke and then type it up on the typewriter.
The project had begun as something of an extravaganza, according to my mother. “Careful with his money” his whole life, Papa now spared no expense at first on his inspirational autobiography. He cleared some of the furniture out of the parlor and rented a typewriter for Angelo. “Things were hunky-dory for the first couple of days,” Ma said. “But after that, there were problems.”