The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  Mama, what would you have had me do? Stay, and be supported by an old woman’s lacemaking? Stay, and be starved out of work by the slanderer who polluted my father’s bed? It was you, not I, who brought dishonor to the name of Giacomo Tempesta. It was you!

  17 July 1949

  Ours was a terrible twenty-four-day journey to la ‘Merica, made unbearable by spoiled food, tainted water, and rolling seas. A broken propeller delayed us off the coast of Portugal for three extra days and nights of hell. Worst of all was the darkness and stink of life below, inside the belly of the big ship. Where there is sun and fresh air, there is hope, but here the sun did not shine and the air we breathed was stale and fetid. Aboveboard, bands played and the filthy rich dined off china and drank from fancy glasses. We in steerage lived like rats. Women and children sobbed, men fought each other over trifles, and everyone suffered the stench of vomit and excrement. There was a stabbing en route, and the birth of a baby, and the death of the child’s mother two days later. That crying bambino was passed from breast to breast after that, and we prayed for its fate. All our fates. That baby cried for us all!

  There were rats, too, plenty of them; nighttime was when those goddamned creatures prowled. One night I woke to find one sitting on my neck, sniffing at my mustache. I screamed out, waking even my brother Pasquale, who always slept like a dead man. After that night, I took no chances, napping as best I could while sitting or leaning against beams and walls. Day and night fell together on that hellish journey across the sea, and my mind existed in a place between sleep and vigilance.

  During the voyage, my brother Vincenzo was as shamefully behaved as always—pinching women’s behinds, boasting about his mischief, cheating at cards against men with bad and worsening tempers. Vincenzo was forever wandering away from Pasquale and me and getting himself in trouble, then calling for me to settle some dispute he had provoked. It is the firstborn’s burden to unravel the knots that younger brothers make.

  Throughout that endless and terrible journey across the ocean, I was afflicted with lice and worry—scratching and haunting myself with the cold fear of what would come to pass once we landed in this place I had risked everything to reach. For a Sicilian, home is everything. How could I have done this? Had I been bewitched into thinking that the unknown would be preferable to putting up with the petty nuisances of a stonemason who would die off in time anyway? The rumbling every few years of a distant vulcano? As much as I hated Etna for the damage it had visited upon my famiglia, the lives it had claimed, at least it was an enemy I could watch. What enemies awaited me in this Mundo Novu toward which we sailed? My heart was sick from thinking and worrying and pinching those goddamned lice between my fingernails!

  The little rest I stole came to me in short, interrupted naps made terrible with nightmares. In my dreams, I saw flowing lava, cracking earth, screaming women stuck in fiery trees. Somewhere in the middle of one of those desperate nights, I promised myself that I would never again put myself through such a hellish journey—that I would never return home. That night I said farewell to Sicily forever. Whatever la ‘Merica held in store for me, it was where I would stay for the rest of my days. The vow was small comfort, but comfort nonetheless.

  Sometimes as the other steerage travelers slept, I crept amongst them and over them and did what was forbidden: climbed the narrow stairs to the ship’s deck where the wealthier travelers strolled and where I might take into my lungs the clean salt air or watch the moon’s rippling reflection against that endless sea. In the school run by the good Sisters of Humility, I had envied the rich boys their supplies of India ink. Now, here in the moonlight, was an ocean full of it through which we traveled—enough inchiostro di china in which to drown the whole world, let alone Domenico Tempesta. But I would not give those haughty boys at the convent school the satisfaction of dying! I was not weak. I had been the best of them—the student most loved by the good sisters—and I would prevail!

  On one such night of watching the endless ocean, the moon shone brighter than usual, illuminating a small school of dolphins that jumped and swam alongside the SS Napolitano. I have always been a modern man who leaves superstition to ignorant old women, but the sight of those delfini that night—their bodies arcing toward the sky, their taut skin glistening in the moonlight—it seemed to me a powerful omen. That night, I stood smiling through my tears and was comforted. I knelt on the ship’s deck to pray and, in that position, fell into the only sweet, deep sleep I enjoyed during that long and horrible journey.

  I awakened next morning to the blinding sun, a mocking voice, and a kick in the ribs! When I squinted and looked up, I was peering into the arrogant face of a ship’s waiter. Nearby, a well-dressed couple stood staring at me with looks of disdain. “Get back down where you belong,” the haughty waiter ordered—commanding me, the son of a hero! The grandson of landowners! A man who had once been singled out by the Blessed Virgin herself!

  The rich woman shook her head and chattered like a squirrel. “Poveri si, sporchi no,” she told the rich man.*

  Still half-asleep, I rose and stumbled toward the ship’s hold, and the waiter and the well-dressed couple moved on. My dignity returned along with my consciousness. Boldly, I turned back, shouting to the three of them, “Il mondo e fatto a scale, chi le scende e chi le sale!”*

  One day, I vowed, I would have power and money enough to spit in the faces of those who had humiliated me! In America, my destiny would be realized and I would be avenged!

  32

  Rain drummed against the car roof. From the east, a flash of light, a low rumble. Thunder? In February?

  Exit 4: Division Street and Downtown.

  Should have canceled, I thought. Those stairs at Dr. Patel’s were going to be a bitch to climb on crutches. Why was I even doing this?

  Because you’re looking for help, I reminded myself. For answers.

  I reached over and punched the radio buttons, trying to get some news. Now that Saddam had set all the oil wells on fire, there was talk that the CIA, or the Israelis, or someone in his own ranks was going to whack the bastard.

  “—held in Washington this morning, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell stated that, although allied combat operations have dramatically exceeded expectations, a ground campaign will most likely be necessary to ensure total victory against Iraqi aggression.”

  You hear that, Papa? Not just meeting our expectations; exceeding them. Money and power, man, just like you said. Might still makes right. God bless America.

  “Meanwhile, in Kuwait, the hundreds of oil installations ablaze since yesterday have blocked the sun, shrouding the region in eerie daytime darkness.”

  I pictured it like one of those Biblical epics Ma used to take us to. Ben Hur, King of Kings—one of those wide-screen jobs. And hey, Desert Storm was Biblical, in a way: fire and brimstone, slaughtered innocents. If you cocked your head and squinted a little, you could see that all those crazy prophesies of Thomas’s had hit their mark. Hey, the freakin’ sun wasn’t even shining anymore. . . . You hear that, Domenico? You thought you were touched by God because you saw some stupid statue crying? He trumped you, man. Your crazy grandson’s a prophet.

  He’d surprised me these past weeks, though. Thomas. His nonreaction to the war. I’d gone down to Hatch the morning after they’d fired the first missiles, expecting to have to peel him off the ceiling. See him in restraints, or something. But he’d just sat there, clear-eyed, staring at CNN, same as everyone else. By then, he’d resigned himself to war—had become indifferent to the thing that, three months earlier, he’d cut off his friggin’ hand to try and stop. Part of it was the Haldol, like they said, but not all of it. It was like . . . like he’d waved the white flag. Resigned his post as Chairman of Jesus’ Joint Chiefs of Staff. These days, for good or bad, Thomas’s fighting spirit was as gone as his right hand.

  I had to face it: he was lost down there, no matter how much I rattled the cage door on his behalf. And hey, hadn’t I finally
gotten what I always wanted? Separation? Free agency? Be careful what you wish for. Right, Domenico?

  I took a quick glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. Thought: well, your brother may be lost, but at least you’re still here. Fell three stories off that roof and lived to tell the tale. Got through that other night, too—the night you really hit bottom. . . .

  And it had gotten better, hadn’t it? Just like Leo and the doctors and everyone else had promised it would. Not great, not perfect. But better. I was down from two crutches to one. I was driving again. A Ford Escort beat walking. Right?

  A heartbeat was more than some people had. Right, Papa, you sanctimonious son of a bitch? Right, Rood?

  I signaled a right into the strip mall and pulled into a handicapped space near her door. Fished out my permit. It was one of the few perks of being a gimp: primo parking, the empty space by the door in the middle of a rainstorm. I cut the engine. Sat there for a minute or so, thinking about how much I didn’t want to go up there. Get on with the autopsy of my life. All our lives, really—mine and Thomas’s, Ma’s, Ray’s. Even old Domenico’s, I guess. Judging from the little bit I’d read so far of the “great man from humble beginnings,” I was going to have to factor that old bastard into the equation, too.

  I was early, though. Better to just sit out in the car and listen to the rain drum against the roof than to go up and cool my jets in that cramped little space outside her door. I looked in the mirror at my fogged-up face. Thought, again, about that rock-bottom night—the third night after I’d gotten home from the hospital. . . .

  For three days, everyone had been milling around, getting in each other’s way trying to help out the poor jerk who’d totaled his truck and fallen off a roof, and whose pregnant girlfriend had bailed in the middle of it. The home health care people, Meals on Wheels, Leo and Angie, Ray: it’d been like Grand Central Station over there for three days and then, on that third night, it got quiet. I’d been set up for my first nighttime solo: phone, urinal, remote control for the TV. Water in a thermos, two Percoset doses laid out on the nightstand. The health care aide was due back at seven the next morning. All I had to do was lie there. Stay put. Watch TV, drug myself on schedule, and sleep.

  But I got restless. Panicky. I couldn’t stand just lying there, listening anymore to that yacking little bedside TV that Leo had gotten me. Only, when I turned the damned thing off, the silence was even worse. The absolute quiet: it spooked me. And when I closed my eyes, I saw my brother: the way his eyes had looked at me in my morphine dream, the way his body had jerked and twisted on the end of the noose. . . .

  I saw Rood, up in his attic window. . . .

  Saw the Duchess, standing by my hospital bed, holding that cassette of hers. . . . She’d let him watch us, man. She’d let that sick fuck turn our most private, our most intimate . . . And both of those times he’d been there—each of those two nights she’d let him trespass like that—it had been him she was making love to. Not me. I’d just been the dupe, the means to their perverted little end. And so I lay there feeling ashamed. Dirty. Powerless to take back my fuck. . . .

  I got up. Got out of bed, in spite of all the promises I had made to everyone to stay put. I gimped my way out to the kitchen. Stood there, watching the phone message blinks. Nine, ten, eleven. I’d been avoiding listening to that thing since I’d gotten home from the hospital three days before. At first I didn’t even know why and then, finally, I realized what it was: Rood. I was afraid Rood’s voice would be on there, whether he’d blown out his brains or not. Welcome to the black hole, Dominick. I’m your tour guide, Henry Rood. . . .

  I’d been planning it right along—had spent a lot of time in the hospital getting used to the idea. Figuring out how. I figured I’d take my Percoset prescription and that Happy Holidays bottle of Scotch I’d gotten and just Kevorkian myself. Get it over with. Because it was all over anyway. Joy had fucked me over and left. Dessa sure as hell wasn’t coming back. She’d sent over some stew, put a couple of get-well cards in the mail. But that was all I was going to get. Those years we’d been together were as dead, now, as our daughter. And without the hope of her ever coming back, I was already a dead man. Breathing was just a technicality.

  I hobbled my way out to the spare room and got the Scotch. Got back to the kitchen. I eased myself down onto a chair, broke the seal, unscrewed the cap. Took three or four long swigs—swallowed, winced. In between slugs, I kept picking up my prescription vial. Shaking it. Listening to those capsules click around in there. Dead man’s castanets, I thought. It struck me funny.

  Should I leave a note? Dear Ray, Thanks for the memories. . . . Dear Dessa, Thanks for sticking by me, for better or worse. And what about Thomas? . . .

  Hey, man, fuck Thomas. Wouldn’t that be one of suicide’s big perks—throwing the look-alike talking corpse, once and for all, off my shoulders? Getting my life sentence as my brother’s keeper commuted? It was funny, though—not at all what I’d figured on: Thomas outlasting me. Winning.

  I wanted to watch myself take them: watch the condemned man eat his last meal. On the way to the bathroom—the medicine cabinet mirror—I stopped.

  Slipped open the door of Joy’s empty closet.

  I tapped the empty wire hangers, watched the way they rocked back and forth, back and forth. Betrayal didn’t cut any deeper than what she had done. Let him into our bedroom—let him crouch in there like sin itself. . . . And I thought, suddenly, about Ralph Drinkwater. The way Joseph Monk had snatched his sister and his mother had self-destructed over it. The way Dell Weeks and his wife had given Ralph food and shelter for . . . for his nakedness. For dirty pictures that they could turn around and sell to strangers. That’s what that had been about: profiting from a young boy’s vulnerability—a confused kid’s need to have a home. This was how bad human nature could get, I thought. This was the sweet little world I was checking out of.

  The guy in the medicine cabinet mirror scared me a little—looked both familiar and strange. Looked nothing like Henry Rood had looked. . . . I held up my two hands, wiggled my fingers a little. Saw Thomas, whole again. Saw Ma without the split in her lip. And I could see Domenico, too—that stern face in the tinted portrait on my mother’s bureau. The resemblances were scary. Undeniable. We were all, in a way, each other. . . .

  Maybe we were damned or something. Cursed. Was that it? . . . Funny: I was never going to finish Papa’s manuscript after all. I’d lost that damned thing, had gotten it back again, and then had put off reading it for weeks. Months, now, really. Had only just that week started reading it. I’d purposely avoided reading it—his “history of a great man from humble beginnings.” Unfinished business. A loose end. Well, so what? Fuck it, man. Couldn’t keep the Grim Reaper waiting. . . . It was strange, though. Or it was the Percoset or something. I could see their faces in my face. . . .

  I couldn’t do it.

  Poured that little cascade of capsules down the sink instead of down my throat. Turned the water on and washed away my big suicide. I hobbled back into the bedroom. Eased myself back down on the bed.

  Called Leo.

  And by some miracle, it was Leo who answered. “Hello? . . . Hello?”

  It felt like one of those dreams where you can’t run, can’t scream.

  “Dominick? Dominick, is that you? . . . Hold on, man. I’m coming right over.”

  It was time. The rain had let up a little. I swung the door open and hoisted my bad leg over and onto the wet asphalt. With all the leg room they gave you in these luxury Escorts, getting in and out on a bum foot was a breeze. And pigs flew. And we were in that war over in Kuwait for all the right reasons. . . .

  Inside, I surveyed the long, wet flight of stairs that led up to Miss Patti’s Academy of World Dance on the left, Dr. Patel’s office on the right. When I’d been going to see her before, I hadn’t even really noticed those stairs—had probably barreled up the damn things two at a time. But that had been three months and a lifetime ago—back when Roo
d was still leaving messages on my machine and Joy’s boyfriend was still hiding in the closet and I was still kidding myself about springing my brother from Hatch. Everything had changed since then. Everything. We’d gone to goddamned war, for Christ’s sake. . . .

  The stairwell walls vibrated with the pulse of African drum music. “Let the rhythm enter your body,” someone called out up there. “Let it be your body. Faster, now! Faster!”

  Take it slow, I told myself. Damn stairs were wet, waxed. Your ankle’s still weak, no matter how good you’re doing down at physical therapy. You slip and fall, you’ll set yourself back another couple months. You’ll really need a shrink then.

  I clutched the railing with my left hand, the crutch with my right. Started up. Those stairs were just the warm-up, I reminded myself. The real challenge was up at the top, door on the right. Because if I was serious about finally getting some answers, they weren’t going to come without some pain. Without me opening up a vein or two.

  I was a third of the way up when I heard footsteps, giggles. The door below banged open. I froze. Held my breath. “Wait a minute, girls,” some merciful mother called. “Wait for that man to get up.”

  “It’s okay,” I called back over my shoulder. “They can go around me. I’ll just hold on to the rail.”

  “No, no, you go ahead. Take your time.”

  I negotiated a step. Another one. What about that goddamned Americans with Disabilities act that Bush had signed, anyway? Where was the friggin’ elevator? I could hear them all down there, watching me, waiting.

  “Really,” I called back. “I’ll just stop. Have ’em go around me.”

  She must have given them the okay because the next thing I knew, they were clomping up, stampeding past me. “Easy,” I mumbled. “Easy.” My crutch hand was shaking so bad, the rubber tip on the bottom squeaked against the wet stair.

  By the time I got to the top, I’d had to stop and let three more groups pass—one up, two down. My usual great timing: I’d managed to get there right when all the classes were changing. But, okay, I’d made it. Gotten up there.