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

  “Yeah?” I said. “What’s that?”

  “His voice on the page. His history. Indirectly or not, Dominick, your grandfather is speaking to you.”

  I started the Escort, backed out of the handicapped space. I was already in traffic before it dawned on me that I’d negotiated my way back down Doc Patel’s long flight of stairs without panicking about falling. Without even really noticing my own descent.

  Papa’s voice. Thomas’s voices. Joy’s voice on that tape . . .

  The Dominick Birdsey Museum of Misery. Fuck her. At the red light, waiting to get back onto the access road, I took Joy’s cassette out of my pocket. Tossed the goddamned thing out the window. It felt good doing it, too.

  Felt real good.

  That’s how good a curator I was.

  Fuck her.

  35

  28 July 1949

  For two nights now, no sleep. I long to forget but weep to remember those strange days when my brother Pasquale became not the simplest, but the most puzzling of men. . . . Omertà, omertà, the Sicilian in me whispers. Silenzio! In the Old Country, the code of silence is a stone dropped into a pond. Its rings expand and encircle all. Siciliani remember but do not speak. And yet my brain hungers to understand—to crack open a brother’s secret and look inside. Pasquale, I speak not to dishonor your name, but to try one last time to understand and forgive. . . .

  Mama and Papa’s secondborn son was not blessed with my superior intelligence or my desire to embrace destiny. Unlike our amorous brother Vincenzo, Pasquale did not tempt women and women did not tempt him. His gifts were for simple labor and stubbornness and hearty eating. Each week, he paid Signora Siragusa seventy-five cents for the extra things she packed in the dinner pail he carried to the factory: a half-dozen of boiled eggs, a whole loaf of bread instead of half, a generous slab of cheese, a ring or two of the signora’s hot salsiccia.

  Sometimes, the signora included a special treat in Pasquale’s dinner pail—a jar of her pickled peppers, my brother’s favorite. Pasquale’s custom was to eat the peppers with his fingers—a kind of insalata improvvisata—and then wash the rest of the food down with gulps of the pickling brine. “That brother of yours has the appetite of three men!” the signora would often remark to me, always with a cackle of motherly approval. In his years at the mill, Pasquale became famous amongst the workers for those big dinners and valued by the bosses for the hard work the food fueled. Flynn, the agent, once stopped me and told me that Domenico Tempesta worked like a well-oiled machine and his brother Pasquale labored like a plowhorse!

  He did not talk much, my brother. Was it his years in the sulphur mines as my father’s caruso that made him so private and singular? His was a childhood spent underground in filth and toil, so different from my own sunny youth at the convent school, where I had been sent because of my natura speciale and because the statue of the Vergine had wept in my presence. By the age of fifteen, I had eyed the sights of Palermo and Potenza! I had swum in the Adriatico, stood amidst the relics of Rome! But my poor, simple brother had known only the rock and darkness of the earth’s bowels, the stink of sulphur in his nose. . . .

  And yet, I remember Pasquale as a happy boy. Each Sunday when our family reunited, he laughed and ran through the village and the hills with his friends, fellow carusi—those boys as pale as mushrooms enjoying their one day a week in the Sicilian sun. A pack of young dogs they were, with their pranks and giuoco violento. The village wives would scold and chase them with brooms, frowning from one side of their mouths and smiling at the boys’ mischief from the other side. The leader of these naughty carusi was Pasquale’s best friend, Filippo, whose pale, pointed face and dark eyes my memory still sees. The terrible collapse that took Papa’s life also took the life of Pasquale’s beloved friend, Filippo. On that day, the happy part of Pasquale was buried in the mine forever.

  * * *

  It was Drinkwater, that goddamned lazy Indian, who ruined things for Pasquale at the mill. One night, he snuck whiskey into the plant and got my brother drunk. When Flynn came out of his office to investigate the source of the agitazione, he caught Pasquale singing and pissing into the dye vat while the spinning girls screamed and peeked between the fingers they held to their faces.

  Flynn fired Pasquale but not that no-good Indian, an injustice that fills me with anger to this day. Under other circumstances, I might have protested Flynn’s actions or even quit the mill in the name of dignità di famiglia. Ha! I would have gladly left Flynn to explain to Baxter, the mill owner’s son-in-law, the loss of his two best nighttime workers. But a man who vows to seek his destiny must be ready when opportunity arrives! Earlier that week, the newspaper had reported a transaction between the city of Three Rivers and old Rosemark’s widow. At long last, the old farmer’s hill property would be divided into city lots and put up for sale. A road was planned, the paper said, and a street name had been chosen: Hollyhock Avenue. The lots would be sold later that spring for five, six hundred each. By then, I had saved twelve hundred dollars. I would need all of that and more if I was to become the first Italiano in Three Rivers, Connecticut, to own his own land. Despite the injustice done to my brother Pasquale by American Woolen and Textile, I could not afford both family honor and a home of my own.

  Luckily, my brother’s firing occurred during the spring. Pasquale found work immediately as a roofer for the Werman Construction Company. One night, drunk at a tavern he visited with fellow workers, Pasquale bought a monkey from a sailor who had just returned from Madagascar. No bigger than a house cat that scrawny thing was, with its orange fur, its human eyes and fingers. Pasquale named the monkey Filippo in honor of his boyhood friend and built him a cage which Signora Siragusa allowed Pasquale to keep on her front porch. The monkey soon became a neighborhood attrazione both because of its exotic species and its delicate condition. That goddamned thing was pregnant!

  Filippo quickly became Filippa. Several of the young West Side girls knitted and sewed hats and dresses for that foolish little creature. Another of Signora Siragusa’s boarders, a piano tuner with a gold tooth (name forgotten), went so far as to write a song about her titled “La Regina Piccola”* This strombazzatore performed his song, basso profondo, on the boardinghouse porch all that summer. Each performance brought tears to the eyes of neighbor women. As for me, I held my hands to my ears and slammed the window shut.

  In August, Filippa’s baby came out of her stillborn. She cradled that dead, shriveled bambino for two, three whole days and, when she finally gave it up, cried tears which I saw with my own eyes! My brother Pasquale shed tears, too—cried as he had never cried for Papa or Mama or Vincenzo or even for his friend Filippo. He buried the dead baby in the backyard of the boardinghouse and held its grief-torn mother in his lap, stroking and rocking her for hours and hours and humming “The Little Queen”—not in the operatic style of that show-off of a piano tuner, but as a comforting lullaby, a sad but soothing lament. My brother hardly ever spoke and now, for that goddamned little scimmia, he wept and sang! Pasquale grieved as if Filippa’s baby had been his own. . . .

  Omertà, I tell my moving lips! Omertà! And yet I am an old man with stool like zuppa and a head burdened with memory. . . . I speak not to bring shame on you, Pasquale, but to understand why.

  Why, Pasquale? Why? . . .

  My brother began opening Filippa’s cage and taking that smelly monkey of his to work with him. Each morning, the two would head off from the signora’s, Pasquale on foot and Filippa riding on his shoulder. Pasquale would spend his day hammering and hauling shingles and whistling, half the time with a stripe of monkey shit drying on the back of his shirt or his coat. Sometimes as my brother worked, Filippa would sit on the peaks of new and half-built buildings or in nearby trees, removing bugs from her fur and eating them without care or notice as she stared and stared at Pasquale.

  When the cold weather came, Pasquale made an agreement with Signora Siragusa. In exchange for the privilege of allowing Filippa to come
inside and live in the signora’s coal cellar during the winter months, Pasquale would tend the stove and carry his own bed to the basement, freeing space upstairs for another paying boarder.

  That winter my brother seemed happy, living once again the underground life of the caruso, emerging from the signora’s cellar only for meals or trips to the tavern. His foolish monkey accompanied him there, buttoned up inside his coat, its scrawny head poking out of a gap between the buttons.

  La lingua non ha ossa, ma rompe il dorso!* By springtime, the Italian women began to gossip, chuckling and wondering when Pasquale Tempesta and his pretty little “wife” would be expecting another bambino, ha ha ha. Signora Siragusa herself whispered to me that she had seen Pasquale and that little furry witch holding hands and whispering into each other’s ears, even kissing each other on the lips! The men talked, too. They were no better. Colosanto, the baker, stopped me on the street one day and asked me, with a laugh, was it true my crazy brother had taught that monkey of his how to undo his pants and “play the pipe” for him?

  “Bah!” I told him, pushing past. “Go stick yours in a loaf of dough and bake it in the oven!”

  Another time I was at Salvatore Tusia’s barbershop, getting a shave and minding my business, when Picicci, the ice man, came in. “Hey, who’s that whose whiskers you’re taking off, Salvatore?” Picicci asked Tusia. Picicci was always a wise guy with a smirk on his faccia brutta.

  Tusia told Picicci that he knew very well who I was. I was Tempesta, the dyer at American Woolen and Textile.

  “Oh, it’s Tempesta, is it? The monkey’s uncle himself!”

  Every man in that shop had a laugh on me that morning, even that goddamned barber I was paying to shave my face. I stood up half-done and told them all to go to hell in a handbasket—walked out of there with the soap still on my face and Tusia’s cloth hanging from the front of me. On my way back to the boarding-house, I wiped my face and threw that goddamned cloth down the sewer rather than give it back to Tusia. Let him pay for another one and have a laugh about that! I fixed Picicci, too. The next week, downtown, he called across the street to me and asked why my landlady, the signora, bought her ice from Rabinowitz the Jew instead of from a paisano. It was crowded in the street that day, I remember. Picicci had a line of three, four customers. I called back that Rabinowitz’s prices were cheaper and that Rabinowitz didn’t piss in his ice before he froze it. Two of those customers walked away from Picicci’s cart and he raised his fist and cursed me and kicked his horse. If that goddamned son of a bitch was going to call me “monkey’s uncle,” then he was going to pay for it in his pocketbook!

  But a family’s honor is a heavy burden to bear if all the lifting falls to the father’s firstborn son.

  My brother Pasquale continued to smile and parade Filippa around the town, his ears deaf to the jokes and taunts of paisani. Each day when I got back from the mill, I would lie in my bed and close my eyes, make fists, grind my teeth. I could hear all of Three Rivers laughing at the name Tempesta because of Pasquale and his goddamned monkey. Once again, I was called upon to clean up the mess a brother had made.

  My first thought was to sneak down to the signora’s cellar in the middle of the night and wring that animal’s skinny neck! But I had learned in my sad dealings with Vincenzo, a buon’anima, the mistake of trying to force my will upon a hard-headed brother. Now I took a craftier and more practical path, one which called on my patience and my considerable talents as a planner. I refined my plan all that winter, always with old Rosemark’s property in my mind.

  On 13 February 1914, I purchased a quarter-acre city lot on the hilly west end of Hollyhock Avenue for the sum of three hundred and forty dollars. I was shrewd enough to realize that two brothers working steadily could build a home twice as quickly as one and that a casa di due appartamenti*ld give its owner both a roof over his head and a rental income. I was now thirty-six years old. Though I was not a billygoat with a frozen cazzu as my brother Vincenzo had been, I did have male urges and a strong desire to pass on the name of Tempesta to Italian-American sons! I assumed that my brother Pasquale had these urges and desires, too, no matter how much that goddamned monkey had managed to turn his head, and I wove that supposizione into my plan. A two-family house, after all, required two families.

  I wrote to my cousins in Brooklyn, inquiring about eligible young Italian women, preferably siciliani. I wanted no city-born wives for my brother and me—no fancy northern ideas. Siciliani are the simplest of women and simple women make the best wives. As a property owner, I insisted on strict requirements. They must be virgins, of course. For this reason, I had disqualified the eligible signorini of Three Rivers. Who could tell which ones had been soiled by Vincenzo? All of them, probably! The wives of Domenico and Pasquale Tempesta must also be pleasing to the eye and talented cooks and housekeepers. In addition, they must carry themselves with dignity and be devout and humble. And most important, the dowries their families provided must be large enough to furnish two large appartamenti.

  God granted me an early spring that year. By March, the ground had thawed and by Easter, Pasquale and I had cleared and stumped my land and begun digging, shovelful by shovelful, the foundation for my vitrified brick duplex house.

  My house would be magnifico—American in front and Sicilian in the back. Each apartment would have seven rooms, two floors, indoor plumbing. Nothing less than a palace for the first siciliano property owner in Three Rivers, Connecticut! And out back, a flight of cement stairs would lead to Sicily! I would plant honeysuckle, peach trees, a small grape arbor, a little tomato garden. There would be herbs growing in stone urns, a chicken coop, rabbit cages, and perhaps a family goat to graze the small yard and give a little milk. In the yard behind my big house, I would be home again at last!

  As Pasquale and I labored side by side that summer, I spoke about all these plans and about our happy Sicilian childhood and our loving and unselfish mother. In poetic words, I talked of the beautiful renewal of life. We would be the happiest brothers alive once our new home echoed with the giggles of bambini—once the aromas of baking bread, simmering sauce, garlic and onions frying in olive oil floated from the open kitchen windows of the home we shared, one brother to a side. And now that I was on the subject, wasn’t it about time for us to find wives?

  Pasquale shrugged and shoveled. He said he could still hear Mama’s screaming in his ears but that he had forgotten her face.

  I told him I had recently communicated by letter and telegramma with Lena and Vitaglio, our Brooklyn cousins. The cousins’ neighbors, the Iaccoi brothers—did Pasquale remember those two plumbers from Palermo? The Iaccoi brothers had big news. Their half-sister, Ignazia, age seventeen, would be arriving that summer from Italy along with a female cugina, Prosperine, age eighteen. Both girls were devout and eager to serve husbands. Good cooks, too! And beautiful in faccia and figura—plump and just ripe for picking!

  All that afternoon, I talked of children and natural male urges and the joys of owning a home and a wife of one’s own. At sunset, as we two walked back to the boardinghouse carrying our shovels, I made a generous proposal: Pasquale and I would take the train to Brooklyn at Christmastime, visit our cousins and the Iaccois next door, and decide whether or not we liked what we saw. It would probably make more sense to match the older bride to the older brother, and viceversa, but that could be decided upon at a later date. What did it matter, anyway—when both of the young women were beautiful virgins in the prime of their childbearing years? Both could equally satisfy male urges, eh? If my beloved brother were to take the Iaccois’ half-sister for a wife, the couple would be welcome on the left side of the duplex. I would charge no rent for an entire year. After that, Pasquale could negotiate a year’s rent, at a modest rate, of course—a sum to be decided at a later date. Why rush things, eh? Pasquale needn’t worry about the dowry, either. As the eldest Tempesta brother and a property owner with a shrewd business sense, it would be my honor to take care of those nego
tiations for him, ha ha. Get him a nice little bundle. If Pasquale needed some help with wedding expenses, I would be glad to assist there, too. A boss dyer, after all, made more money than a roofer. That was merely a fact of life—ha ha! And once the house was built and our young brides were hanging their bloodstained sheets on the backyard clothesline, Pasquale would want, of course, to rid himself of that foolish, goddamned monkey.

  Pasquale let go a mouthful of tobacco juice and shook his head.

  Pasquale Tempesta, a buon’anima, could sometimes be as mule-headed as his brother Domenico Tempesta was clever! I did not wish to awaken the mulo in him that day. Fine, fine, I told my brother, patting him on the back and wearing a smile that showed all my teeth. The monkey can live in a cage in the backyard until its natural death. But while we were on the subject, I said, Pasquale should really stop his foolish practice of bringing Filippa to work with him. People said unkind things, made ridiculous jokes. He would see soon enough: with a beautiful young wife to distract and provide pleasure for him, Pasquale would quickly have “little monkeys” of his own to play with. He would soon forget about that furry little long-tailed rat of his.

  That stubborn mule of a brother threw his shovel aside with a clamor and told me he would work no more on a house where Filippa was not welcome inside.

  “Inside?” I shouted. “Inside?”

  The negotiations went on over supper and well into the night, at one point so loudly that several of the other boarders complained and Signora Siragusa descended the staircase in her long braids and untrussed bosom and demanded that Pasquale and I either whisper or be evicted. My brother, that stubborn jackass, sat in the signora’s parlor chair and shook his head like a metronome. Whatever I may or may not have promised the Iaccoi brothers, he said, he was not interested in a wife and that was that. He would break his back helping me build my house. He would even die for me. But he would not give up his little Filippa for some wife and he would work no longer on a house where his monkey was unwelcome.