The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (162 page)

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?