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

  I made a new rule. Ignazia could sleep downstairs in the back bedroom during weeknights but was now expected to visit me upstairs in my bed on Saturday and Sunday. A little comfort once or twice a week in exchange for all I provided for her and the child wasn’t much to ask, I reminded her; in marriage, a wife gave as well as took. With a little care and common sense, she could perform her duty to me without putting a baby inside of herself. And if an accident resulted, then maybe it was God’s will. Maybe her heart was stronger than that ‘Mericano doctor had said. You’ll probably end up an old gray-haired nonna with a dozen grandchildren trailing after you, I told her. God Almighty blessed family life. God provided.

  She threatened to go to my friend Father Guglielmo and tell him about my new rule. “If you want me to keep your secrets about the Old Country,” I said, “then you had better keep the ones at this house, too. No squealing inside the confessional. And no squealing, either, to Signora Tusia on the other side of the house or to that dottore who scared you away from me in the first place.” Furthermore, I said, I wanted no more idle chitter-chatter with her ‘Mericana lady friends in the neighborhood. “They’ll look at that long face of yours and think you’re worse off than you are. Those women would like nothing better than to see trouble in an Italian home. ‘Mericani are nice to your face and call you ‘dirty wop’ behind your back. They want us all to fail. They wait for that to happen.”

  That overpriced Sears and Roebuck baby carriage stood idle in the front hallway. Ignazia obeyed my new rules, and the child grew, and our lives went on.

  Around Three Rivers, I became busier than ever: zoning board, committee member for this, officer for that. I no longer saw Josephine Reynolds. Too busy. I advised families just over from the Old Country and paisani from the mill eager to move from the row houses owned by American Woolen and Textile to homes of their own. If I had charged for all the free advice I gave, I would have been a millionaire! This was the price I paid for being shrewd with my money and successful in life. Half of the town wanted directions from Domenico Tempesta about how to live life!

  In the spring of 1924, I was voted Il Presidente of Sons of Italy. (Picture in the newspaper, page two. That burned me up a little. Graziadio had been presidente the year before and they’d put his fat puss on page one.) At American Woolen and Textile, some troublemakers came up from New Haven and there was talk of organizing a union for dyers. I didn’t like the looks of those goddamned outsiders; they put ideas in my workers’ heads. When Domenico Tempesta spoke out against the union, the plan fell apart. The agent, Baxter, bought me a bottle of whiskey and had the butcher deliver a dressed turkey to my home. (The meat was tough.) He had had a talk with his father-in-law, Baxter said; there was a plan in a year or two to promote me from dye house boss to nighttime supervisor of Plant Number 2.

  The politicians were talking to me, too—Democrats and Republicans. Shanley, the mayor, called me on the telephone one afternoon and invited me to his office. He sat me across from his fancy oak desk and lit me a cigar almost as long as my forearm. It was going to be an uphill battle to get reelected in November, he said. He needed every vote he could get. The Italians in town had always had poor voter turnout. He wondered if I might help to turn that around. “You’re highly respected in this community, Domenico,” Shanley said. “And, of course, if you agree to work for us, maybe we could sweeten the deal.”

  I held my hat in my hand and looked as much as I could like the immigrante stupido he thought I was. “How you say ‘sweeten the deal,’ your excellency?” I asked. Crooked politicians who wanted something had to be willing to give a little something, too.

  “Oh, we’ll just keep that open for now,” Shanley said. “An appointment, maybe. A favor granted here and there. George B. Shanley doesn’t forget his friends or his friendly constituencies. It’s like having money in the bank.” I told him I would think about his request.

  Walking home from that goddamned Democrat’s office, I remembered the haughty couple aboard the SS Napolitano—those two who had stood and watched the waiter kick me awake. I thought, too, about what I had shouted to the three of them as I stumbled back below to steerage: Some go up the steps and some go down. And it had proven true! I had come to this country and made something of myself. Paisani listened to me when I gave them advice and now ‘Mericano politicians kissed my ass. Everyone wanted Domenico Tempesta for a friend. I was regarded as a man of dignity and worth throughout Three Rivers, Connecticut.

  Throughout the town, yes, but not inside my own home. There, my wife cooked, cleaned, and opened her legs to me on Saturday and Sunday nights as I ordered. In her duties, she was obedient. I had scared the defiance out of her. Yet she submitted to me just as the girl Hattie on Bickel Road had submitted—with distrazione, indifferenza . . . with contempt written in her eyes. And always, when I awoke in the morning, she was gone from my bed, escaped back downstairs to her sewing in the back bedroom or her scrubbing in the kitchen or to her duties to the growing girl—that split-lipped reminder that my unloving wife had known how to love a no-good redhead back in Brooklyn.

  Ignazia no longer took walks into town to stare into the store windows and shop for my dinner. Now she learned how to use the telephone and called in her order to Hurok’s. Her face and ears would blush with shame as she shouted into the receiver, repeating again and again the names of items and brands until Hurok or his wife understood what it was she wanted, or until she slammed down the receiver and cried. She withdrew further from ‘Mericano ways; she had learned nothing but the rudiments of English, preferring instead to chitter-chatter with that scrawny accomplice of hers. But the Monkey’s banishment had silenced her. Her pronunciation of English was hopeless. Even her Italian was limited by the intellect of her gender and by the dialect of her native village. I brought Italian newspapers into our home, La Sicilia, La Nave. Myself, I read them from front to back, but Ignazia was indifferent now even to news of the Old Country. More and more, she was alone.

  “Tell that wife of yours to come next door and visit me, Domenico,” Signora Tusia said one day at the front gate. “You would think that partition between our apartments was the Atlantic Ocean!” But Ignazia was no longer interested in visiting. Not interested, either, in attending banquets or social events as the wife of the most respected Italiano in Three Rivers, Connecticut. She had not even attended my installation as presidente of Figli d’Italia. At first she had said she was going and then, that evening, she wouldn’t go. She shook her head no so often that I stopped asking her to accompany me. She stayed inside, moping and cleaning and playing with her red-haired, rabbit-faced daughter. After a while, Ignazia would not even answer the telephone when it rang. She would not answer the doorbell. Her daughter and her daily chores became the only two things in her life.

  One night, before I went off to work, Ignazia put stewed chicken and polenta and a bowl of escarole and lentils in front of me for my supper. I ate and ate and when I put the last forkful of polenta into my mouth, my tooth bit down on something hard. I spat a little gray nugget into my hand.

  Ignazia was in the bedroom, singing a song to Concettina, and making the girl’s little dollies dance before her eyes. That wife of mine treated her husband like a dog and her daughter like a princess.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  She squinted. “Looks like a little pebble.”

  “It was in my food.”

  “In the lentils?” She shrugged. “Sometimes a stone sneaks in.”

  “Not in the lentils,” I said. “In the polenta.”

  Another shrug. “Probably a little chip from the millstone when they ground the corn.” She held out her hand. “Give it to me. I’ll throw it away for you. Lucky you didn’t break a tooth.”

  I snapped my hand closed on the pebble. “Don’t bother,” I told her. “I’ll throw it away.” Instead, I wrapped it inside my handkerchief and put it in my pocket. Ignazia had shown me no love, I told myself, but no real hatred, either. I provid
ed her and the child everything they needed. She would be a fool to fool with my life.

  That night at work, I kept poking my hand inside my pocket to feel the tiny pebble, roll it between my thumb and finger. Was it a stone or a small piece of glass? Glass is clear, I told myself. This shard is cloudy. Still . . .

  What else had she given me to swallow? Earlier that week, I had been plagued with foul gas; the Saturday before, I’d gone to bed with upset stomach. I had blamed it on bad wine, but maybe it had not been the wine. By the middle of my shift that night at the mill, I had convinced myself that my wife was poisoning me—getting ready to do me in as she had done in her last husband, Gallante Selvi, a buon’anima. Should I go home and beat the truth out of her? Should I go in the morning to see Father Guglielmo? Confide my suspicion to the priest and seek his advice? . . . No, that would not do. Domenico Tempesta was a man who gave advice now. Guglielmo would probably tell me to forgive my wife as Jesus forgave—to keep swallowing her tainted food and, for penance, to write down the recipes! I promised myself that if murder was what my wife was up to, I would make her pay. But I needed proof.

  When my pocket watch said 2 A.M., I went to the office and told Baxter that I had a bad toothache and needed to go home. I didn’t like leaving work—had only done it twice before in sixteen years of service to American Woolen and Textile. But if that sneaky bitch was trying to poison me, I had to act quickly. Hunt for proof while she slept. Catch her before she knew I suspected anything. . . .

  When I got home, I took off my shoes at the front door and lit the oil lamp, adjusting it to its dimmest glow. Tiptoeing through the house in stocking feet, I entered the kitchen. As quietly as a thief, I opened drawers, poked inside bins, felt with my fingers along the highest shelves. I was looking for glass powder or solder wire or whatever other murderous ingredients she might be using against me.

  She was in the back bedroom; I heard her groan in her sleep. I stopped and waited, then began hunting and poking again. She groaned a second time.

  Then a voice spoke—not my wife’s.

  If that goddamned mick of a monsignor had never visited me that morning years before—if his insults had not angered me enough to throw the wet cement at him—then 66-through-68 Hollyhock Avenue would never have borne the curse that Guglielmo and all the holy water in the world had not been able to dissolve! If McNulty had not trespassed against me, I would never have seen what I saw that night when I snuck home like a burglar and entered my own house in stocking feet. On that terrible night, that godforsaken monsignor must have laughed from Hell in anticipation of what I was about to discover. That night, the curse that McNulty had put on my casa di due appartamenti bore its most bitter fruit. . . .

  I made the lamp bright—stood for a moment at that bedroom door, then threw it open. I smelled her before I saw her—the stink of her pipe tobacco.

  At first, my brain could not understand what my eyes showed me: the two of them, clinging to each other like monkeys. . . . Ignazia, I weep to this day for the sins that cast you into Hell, for the shame you brought upon my good name.

  They screamed when they saw me, scrambling from the bed. “Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!” Ignazia shrieked. Prosperine clutched the sheet in front of herself and grabbed Ignazia’s sewing scissors.

  That goddamned smelly Monkey was wild-eyed with hatred and fear. She inched her way toward the door, scissors raised and ready to hack me dead, and thus escaped from the room, first, and then from the house. Lucky for her and lucky for me, too, I realized later. If I had understood the perversion I saw—if I had been able to act immediately upon what I had interrupted—I might have strangled her on the spot. Might have ended up in the newspaper as the shamed husband whose wife . . .

  I weep. It shames me to tell it, but I must let it out. . . .

  Ignazia made a run from me, too—not out the back door like the other one, but upstairs to the girl’s room. I caught her halfway up the stairs. “Don’t hurt Concettina!” she begged. “Kill me if you want, but don’t harm an innocent child!”

  I told her to shut up her mouth, to let me think. My head was nearly ready to explode! Ignazia dropped to her knees, cowering at my feet like a scared rabbit. She sobbed, choking, begging me not to take her life—not to send her off to Hell and make Concettina a motherless child.

  I must have stared for a minute or more, my mind racing to decide what to do—how to respond to the depravity I had seen in my back bedroom and could not stop seeing. What other husband in the world has ever faced what I faced that night?

  Forgive even that, Padre Guglielmo? Is that what you would have told me? Forgive even that? . . .

  “Get up!” I ordered her. Grabbed her hair and pulled her up. “You are the wife of Domenico Tempesta, not filth on the floor. Get into the bathroom and clean yourself. Wash away the stink of that she-devil.” Ignazia would burn in Hell, all right—but not before I was finished with her.

  That night I reclaimed what was rightfully mine—took what I had a right to take, did the things only a man can do to a woman. And when Ignazia’s screams threatened to carry through the walls to Tusia’s appartamento, I held my elbow to her throat and shut her up and took some more of what belonged to me. To me, not that goddamned Monkey! For the rest of that night, I reclaimed what was mine!

  Next morning, I went to Signora Siragusa’s to see if the Monkey was hiding there. The signora said she had not seen her; it was the sorrow in the old woman’s eyes I believed more than the words coming out of her mouth. She grabbed my arm and held it. Whatever new trouble there was in my house, the signora said, she only hoped I would not make worse trouble—would not act the brute. “Bah!” I said, and walked out the front door without closing it. Let that meddlesome old woman’s coal heat the outside. What did I care? My business was my business.

  I didn’t go home. I went to the junkyard to see Yeitz, the ragpicker. He had been trying to sell me a police dog for over a month. I handed him three dollars and he handed me the rope and the dog. “Never had a better watchdog than this fella right here,” Yeitz told me. “Good hunter, too. He can be a mean son of a bitch, though. He’d just as soon tear a rat apart as let it live.”

  Back at my house, I pulled from my pocket the underclothes that toothless Monkey had left behind and stuck them in front of the dog’s nose. He sniffed and sniffed, then led me through backyards, over the top of Pleasant Hill, and into the woods. At the clearing, I saw that I had been led to the north side of Rosemark’s Pond by a route I had never walked before. That goddamned dog began to bark and lunge toward old Rosemark’s fishing shack on the far end of the pond. I jerked the rope almost hard enough to break his goddamned neck. Then I got him the hell out of there. Now I knew what I needed to know. In a short time, I would have my vendetta. However she had gotten back to Three Rivers, that filthy Monkey would regret that she had done it. I would make her sorry she had fucked with the thing that belonged to Domenico Onofrio Tempesta. She would pay the price!

  Back at home, I nailed the back door and downstairs windows shut and drove an iron stake into the front yard. With the heaviest chain I had, I tied that damn dog to the stake. No one was going in or out of my front door unless I wanted it. Ignazia was terrified of the dog—afraid of its barking and lunging at her and the girl as they peeked out the windows. This was just the dog I wanted—just the animal to guard a faithless fica of a wife whose husband worked at night.

  Upon my orders, Ignazia slept upstairs now. We were husband and wife again, as God had intended. I had never stopped wanting her in that way; my passione for her had survived even her vile betrayal. Sometimes, in the middle of my relief, I would see again what I had seen that crazy night: the Monkey and my wife, clutching each other in sin and perversion. I would finish my business in anger, then, sometimes striking her if she cried, and then I would get off of her—wait until her sobbing stopped, until her breathing said she was falling asleep. Then I would lean to her and whisper in her ear. “Maybe I’ve put a baby
inside of you, eh? . . . Maybe I’ve just planted the seed that will burst your heart and send you to Hell where you belong.”

  Love and hatred: I bore the burden of them both for having loved a faithless wife, and so we each imprisoned the other. . . .

  And as for that other depraved and toothless mona, I fixed her wagon!

  “Why, Domenico, my friend! To what do I owe the pleasure, sir?” Shanley said, rising from behind his big pezzo grosso of a mayor’s desk to shake my hand. It was the morning after the police dog had led me to the shack by Rosemark’s Pond.

  I told Shanley I had been seriously considering his request that I help recruit Italian voters for him before the next election.

  “Splendid news!” he said. “Well worth exploring! Sit down, sir! Sit!”

  “I’m considering it,” I repeated. “But first, there is a little matter I’d like your help with.”

  “Anything, Domenico,” that crooked bastardo told me, and he smiled a smile that showed his gold back teeth. “Anything at all, my good friend.”

  I told him about the crazy woman from the Old Country who had once worked inside my home and who now plagued my family. I explained that my wife and I had been good enough to take in this poor creature when we were married, but that, in her craziness, she had turned against us. We had put up as best we could with her eccentricities, I told the mayor—her mumbled curses, her petty thefts. But then she had threatened to hurt our precious little daughter. “Pathetic as she is,” I told the mayor, “we have had to put her out of our house.”

  “Of course you did,” Shanley insisted. “What choice did you have, poor man?”

  After that, I told the mayor, this poor wretch had gone completely mad. For a while, she had run away to who-knew-where? But now she had come back. The night before, I told him, I had seen her peeking in the window. My dog and I had tracked her scent to a shack near old man Rosemark’s Pond, on the other side of Pleasant Hill. I worked nights, I said. I was afraid of what she might do to my wife or my child when I wasn’t there to protect them. “She’s crazy, but she’s sneaky, too,” I said.