by Wally Lamb
“Environment?” I offered. We were eating dinner. She had made one of my favorites, manicotti and meatballs.
“Yeah, that. Live and let live. Right, Felix?” Rather than take sides, I shoved more manicotti into my mouth. “And besides, Sal, you catch fish, you gotta clean ’em and I gotta cook ’em. It stinks up the house and you don’t even like fish that much to begin with. Lobster and clams, yeah. Who doesn’t like them? But remember that bluefish you caught? You ate about half of what was on your plate, and then the leftovers sat in the fridge until I had to throw them out. And you know how I hate to waste food.”
“Plenty of cats in the neighborhood,” Pop pointed out. “You shoulda put it out on the back steps for them.” In her raised voice of righteous exasperation, Ma reminded him that he hated cats. Sometimes in her dealings with my father, Ma could be Not So Sweet Marie.
“Pop, why don’t you ask Iggy to go out with you?” I suggested.
“And listen to him bellyache for hours about his sciatica, or the guys he works with that he can’t stand, or that piece-of-shit Datsun I told him not to buy in the first place? No thanks. Last time I took him out, he got seasick and we had to come in early.”
Rather than see my dad drive off by himself to the marina with his poles, his tackle box, his five-gallon can of gas, and his jug of Chianti, I sacrificed every other Sunday to go fishing with him. I dreaded these excursions, not because I felt about fishing the way my mother did or suffered seasickness like my uncle, but because I had reached an age where I felt uncomfortable being in a confined space with just him, out on the open water for hours, particularly those times when the Sweet Marie’s motor conked out and we had to wait around for the Coast Guard to tow us back to shore. I loved Pop; that wasn’t it. But the countdown to my going off to college had begun, and I had better things to do than be stranded offshore with his neediness. Still, he had always been a good father so I felt obliged to be a good son. But I rejoiced guiltily on those Sundays when rain poured down or strong winds made the seas too choppy. Otherwise, on alternate Sundays, we’d drive to the marina, unmoor the Sweet Marie from its slip, and head toward the waters off Watch Hill or Weekapaug.
We fished for flounder, fluke, blackfish. If the mackerel were running, we’d chum and jig for them. We never caught much, but Pop did seem to relax out on those open waters, particularly after he got hammered. He always made and packed us lunch: grinders thick with Genoa salami and capicola and provolone cut from the chunk, not sliced. These were accompanied by pickled peppers, summer tomatoes from his garden, and a big bag of Ruffles potato chips we passed back and forth. For dessert, he’d pack Ma’s blond brownies or chocolate chip cookies or, if she’d been mad at Pop that week, cookies courtesy of Keebler or Nabisco.
To wash down all this food, Pop would pour himself Chianti from his jug and hand me one of those seven-ounce beers called ponies from the six-pack he’d bought for me. I wasn’t able to drink legally yet, so I appreciated this nod to my impending adulthood. Two years later, in a college anthropology class, I would read about the coming-of-age ceremonies of various cultures: circumcisions and scarifications, the Amish rumspringa and the Jewish bar mitzvah, the proselytizing requirement for Mormon missionaries, the wilderness walkabout of Aboriginal male youth. Reflecting back on that summer of ’71, I felt fortunate to have gotten off pretty easily. I’d not been cut or dropped off in some wilderness or required to memorize lengthy passages from the Torah. My rite of passage had only required me to be confined out on the ocean with my father, listening to his boring stories, and, one pony after another, enjoying the reprieve of a mild beer buzz.
Along with boating, wine drinking had become another of Pop’s relaxation techniques. Out on the water, three or four plastic glasses’ worth into the afternoon, Pop would become nostalgic, waxing sentimentally, often weepily, about the past. But it was during one of those father-and-son excursions that his reminiscences turned dark. That was the afternoon he spilled his guts about how and why Frances had become our sister.
“Did you know that my brother and I were partners at the lunch counter at the beginning?” he asked. “It was after your nonno died. We sold his lunch wagon and moved the operation into the bus depot.” Pop’s boat didn’t have a head; the two of us were standing next to each other, pissing into the ocean on the starboard side.
“Yeah, and then you bought out Uncle Iggy and started running it by yourself, right? Ma said it was because you two had a falling-out.”
“Ha! It was more like a brawl than a falling-out. I got a sprained neck and a busted coffee table out of the deal and Iggy ended up with a couple of cracked ribs and a swollen schnozzola.”
“You broke his nose?”
“Nah. Smushed up the cartilage a little, that was all.” He zipped up and smiled. “The fight started in the kitchen. He threw the first punch, but I got him in a headlock and we ended up in the parlor. Your mother wasn’t too happy about her three-legged coffee table, but it was worth getting her a new one not to have to put up with his bullshit anymore. After that was when Ig started working in the warehouse down at Electric Boat. Of course, when him and me had that parting of the ways, you weren’t even a twinkle in my eye yet. You want to know something, Felix?” Uh-oh, I thought; his eyes are getting watery. Here comes the sentimentality. “I used to get on my knees every night before I went to bed and ask God to give me a son. And then He not only gave me any son. He gave me you.”
I felt more comfortable deflecting his compliment than accepting it. “Yeah, well, be careful what you wish for.”
“No siree Bob. I got no complaints. Lotta young bucks your age are out tomcatting, smoking that wacky weed. But not you. You work hard, keep your nose clean. God gave me one of the good ones.”
I needed to change the subject as quickly as possible. “So what was the big fight about?”
Pop went over to his jug, poured himself another glass of wine. “He was stealing from the business. We didn’t suspect it at first, your mother and me, and it was driving her crazy. You know what a crackerjack she is with the figures. Likes to account for everything, down to the penny. She finally figured out that Iggy was fingering bills out of the register, a little at a time so’s nobody would notice. You know, a fin here, a fin there.”
“To gamble with?” I asked.
“Well, yeah. That’s where some of it ended up, I imagine.” Out came Pop’s handkerchief. He wiped his eyes, blew his nose. “But mainly it was because he’d gotten this gal he was seeing in a family way and he needed the cash so he could take care of the situation.”
“You talking about an abortion?”
“Jesus, I don’t even like to hear that word spoken,” he said. “But yeah, that was how he was planning to handle it. Marie and I didn’t know why we kept coming up short until she figured out he had his hand in the till. We knew he was seeing some little chippy up there at that hotel where he played cards, but not that she was pregnant. And married, for Christ’s sake. All of that came out later. That was what the fight was about: not only that he was stealing from the business, but that now that he’d had his fun, he wasn’t going to do the right thing. Because that’s what a man does, Felix: he pays the piper, you know what I’m saying? Steps up and takes responsibility. You make a mistake like that, you can’t just pay someone to erase it for you. But that’s what that jackass brother of mine was planning to do. He knew this guy up there, okay? Friend of one of his poker chums. And he had a sister who knew how to perform that procedure. Nice people, huh? The brother sets the thing up and the sister does the dirty work. They were charging an arm and a leg, too. Them two are probably both roasting in hell right now, or headed there once they kick the bucket.”
I was neither pro-choice nor pro-life back then. I wasn’t anything. But I’m pretty sure that, even at that age, I could see both sides of the abortion issue.
“But Iggy’s girl backed out of having it done anyway. Decided to have the baby after all. Except your uncle di
dn’t know that.”
“The baby?” I said. “Are we talking about Frances?”
He nodded. “Hey, hand me that jug of Chianti, will you? You ready for another pony?”
I shook my head and passed him his. “So who was she?”
“The mother? Just a kid, really. She was from the South. Couldn’t have been more than a year or two out of high school. If she even graduated high school. She didn’t exactly come from high society. That much I know.”
“And she was married, you said?”
“Yeah. Just barely, I guess.”
“Did you ever meet her?”
He shook his head and replenished his glass. Downed about half of it in a single gulp. “I’m telling you, Felix, it was one hell of a mess. In the papers and everything.”
I asked him her name.
“Whose name?”
“Frances’s birth mother.”
“Oh. It was Vera or Verna something. I forget what her last name was.”
At first, she had agreed to the abortion, Pop said. Uncle Iggy had convinced her that she had no business bringing a child into the world and he wanted no part of being a father, or a husband either, in case she was getting any bright ideas about a quickie Mexican divorce so they could get hitched. So how was she supposed to explain this baby to her husband when he got back and started counting backwards? “He was a merchant seaman, see? Those guys go out for months at a time. I hate to say this about my own flesh and blood, Felix, but back then your uncle was a selfish, overgrown mama’s boy. In his thirties and still living with his mother? Letting her do his laundry, cook his meals? She’d let him slip by on the rent if he’d had a bad weekend at the track, too. She was part of the problem, see?”
Pop drained the rest of his wine and squeezed the plastic glass so hard it cracked. “Your nonna, may she rest in peace, she spoiled him rotten. Of the two of us, he was the favorite, her little angel. When we were kids and she caught me being bad? She’d take out the strap and whale me with it. But if Little Lord Fauntleroy messed up, he’d get a couple of little slaps on the back of his hand with a soupspoon. ‘Chicky-chockies,’ she called them. I’d get welts on my behind and he’d get chicky-chockies.” Listening to him, I was struck by how much Pop’s gripes about parental favoritism sounded like Frances’s. “Plus, after the old man died, it was me who always had to go over to the house and fix something if it needed fixing. Iggy didn’t know the working end of a screwdriver from the handle. He was no mechanic, either. Couldn’t even change the oil on that big showboat he used to drive around in. I’m telling you, he was helpless. The only tool he knew how to use was his pecker.
“One time Mama called me up, asked me would I come over and shovel her stairs and her front walk. It had been snowing like a bastard and we had maybe nine or ten inches on the ground. So I said, ‘Where’s Ignazio? Why can’t he do the shoveling?’ And she says, ‘Well, he’s just starting a cold. I don’t want him going outside and catching a chill. He could end up with pneumonia.’ So, like an idiot, I get in the car, slip and slide over there, and shovel them out. And when I look up, there’s the crown prince standing at the window, watching me. When he gave me a wave, I got so pissed I made a snowball and threw it at him. Lucky it didn’t break the window because it woulda been me who had to fix that, too. He’s grown up a lot since then, your uncle, but I tell you, Felix, back then he was useless—at home and at the lunch counter, too. Partners? Ha! I did about seventy-five percent of the work while he leaned against the counter, kibitzing with the customers like he was the host at some party we were throwing. Believe me, after I bought him out, it wasn’t like I had a lot more work to do than I was already used to.”
Listening to all this, I recalled what Uncle Iggy had looked and acted like that day when he came late to that counseling session after Frances found out she was his daughter. He’d seemed like a child who’d been caught doing something naughty and was about to get spanked.
After Pop filled in some of the blanks about Frances’s origin, I became hungry for more. But then school started, the first semester of my freshman year in college, so I had to shelve my curiosity. When I came home for Christmas break, I resumed my quest for information. Frances was in dental school by then and went back to Boston right after Christmas. I’m not sure I would have pursued the issue with her, anyway. Too sensitive a subject, maybe? Uncle Iggy came over to the house a couple of times while I was home, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to go there with me. So I drove over to Simone and Jeff’s and asked my newlywed sister what she knew.
Shortly after she and Jeff had returned from their honeymoon the year before, Simone said, Ma had gone over to their apartment to help hang kitchen curtains. And after the job was finished, while they were having coffee and admiring the way the curtains looked, Ma had changed the subject abruptly, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Now that you’re a married woman, you know things you wouldn’t have understood before,” she told her newlywed daughter. “So if you ever want me to tell you about the time your sister came to live with us, you can ask me. I have some stuff I can show you, too.”
“Like what?” I asked Simone.
Simone shrugged. “Jeff walked in on us and the subject was closed. And I haven’t pursued it since.”
We both laughed at our mother’s assumption that she and Jeff had waited until the wedding night to have sex. “She thinks it’s still the 1950s,” she said.
“Yeah, I bet Jeff was glad when Pop handed over the key to your chastity belt. So Pop’s still at work, right? You want to go see Ma now? Hear what she has to say and see her ‘stuff’?”
Simone’s smile faded away. “I don’t know, Felix. Maybe we should just let sleeping dogs lie.”
“In other words, deal with it in typical Funicello fashion by not dealing with it.”
She held my gaze for the next several seconds. Then she said, “All right. Let’s go over there. But just remember: This was your idea, not mine.”
Ma hesitated, looking back and forth between us. Then she sighed and told Simone to put on a pot of coffee. She had to get something first. When she reentered the kitchen, she was holding a bulging manila envelope. I asked her what was in it. “Hold your horses,” she said. She put out some leftover Christmas cookies and went over to the hutch. A bottle of anisette and two cordial glasses came out. She returned to the table and poured shots for herself and Simone. “I’ll take one of those, too, while you’re at it,” I said. Ma gave me one of her who-do-you-think-you-are looks and said she’d be happy to pour me one as soon as I was old enough to drink. When I asked her if she wanted to see my fake ID, she rolled her eyes.
Ma told us that, after Frances’s birth and her mother’s death, she had gone down to the police station to get some answers. She’d been able to read both the initial police report and the later report filed by the investigating detectives. “It helped that Al Martineau had just been made deputy chief,” she said. “He was sweet on me back in high school. Asked me to the senior formal, but I’d already told Cosmo Pusateri I’d go with him. Your mother was quite a looker back then, you know? Never had any trouble filling my dance card.” Simone and I nodded in agreement. We’d seen the old pictures; she’d been a stunner.
She poured anisette into her coffee, stirred it with her finger, took a sip, and smiled. “So that day down at the station, I batted my eyes a little and told Al that I’d always regretted not going to our formal with him. And I did regret it, too. That cheapskate Cosmo came to the door empty-handed. I was the only girl at the formal who didn’t have a nosegay or a corsage. But anyways, Al hemmed and hawed, said I wasn’t really supposed to see those reports. Then he went and got them for me.”
“Do you have copies?” I asked.
She shook her head. “We didn’t know from Xerox machines back then. We just had carbon paper. So what I did was, I sat in this little room Al put me in and took notes.” She reached into the envelope and pulled them out. They looked like
lines and squiggles—some kind of secret code. I glanced over at Simone and shrugged.
“Shorthand,” my sister said. “She took the secretarial course in high school.” Ma told us to shush while she read and refreshed her memory. Then she got up and said she was going to the living room where it was quiet. She’d be right back.
While we waited, Simone slid her anisette over to me. “Here,” she whispered.
“Nah, that’s okay.”
“No, I mean it, Felix. Drink it for me. We don’t want to say anything until we’re sure, but I may be pregnant.”
I broke out in a smile. Slammed back the anisette. I was still feeling the burn at the back of my throat when Ma returned. “Okay, I’m ready,” she said.
When the responding officers got to Frances’s mother’s room, Ma told us, another woman was holding the infant. Verna, which was Frances’s mother’s name, was dead in the bed, her body pulled up on its side in the fetal position. The mattress and bedsheets were soaked with blood. The towels between her thighs looked as if they’d been dyed red.
Ma said that the subsequent detectives’ report had included an interview with the woman who was holding Frances when the cops got there: a nurse named Nancy Wiggins. She’d been driving from Millinocket, Maine, to Washington, D.C., because she’d taken a new job. Her plan was to stop someplace after New York City, but she’d become hungry and tired, so instead had pulled off the highway, gotten good and lost, and stopped at the first hotel she spotted. She told the detectives she’d gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom down the hall. She saw the mess in and around the toilet, then followed the drops of blood to Verna’s room. When she knocked, the unlocked door had opened by itself and she had looked inside and seen that the woman on the bed was in trouble.