The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (181 page)

I’m at the doorway. Sometimes Ma
says
she’s going to tell Ray when I’m bad and then she doesn’t tell him. The hallway is a boiling river. You can’t swim in it. You have to fly over it in your airplane, the Song Bird. “Hang on, Thomas. I will save you!” I’m Sky King. This isn’t my hand; it’s my radio.

I fly the Song Bird over the boiling river to Thomas’s door. Stare at it. Listen.

I put my fingers on the big diamond doorknob. It twists, clicks open. I enter the room. . . .

It’s dark in here. The shades are pulled down. It smells bad. The fan from Ma and Ray’s room is in the window, blowing a breeze. I walk over to the bed. Stare at my Thomas. I say his name over the whirr of the fan. “Thomas? Thomas Birdsey! . . . THOMAS JOSEPH BIRDSEY!”

Thomas’s mouth is closed. I want to see his strawberry tongue. Is he asleep or dead? . . .

He sighs.

I move closer. His shirt is off. I see the bones beneath his skin. His hands are raised above his head, palms out, as if some cowboy had said, “Stick ’em up!” and then shot him anyway.

Chattering teeth, a strawberry tongue. . . . Suddenly, I know something I never knew before. Thomas and I are not one person. There are two of us.

I move closer, bend down to his ear, and whisper my name.

He twitches. Swats at the sound.

“Dominick!”

We are different people.

Thomas is sick and I am not.

He’s asleep. I’m awake.

I can save myself.

13 August 1949

My wife and I never discussed what the
dottore
had said—that another birth could stop her heart. Ignazia moved her clothes downstairs into Prosperine’s bedroom and I made no move to claim that which rightfully belongs to a husband.

After the night of Prosperine’s story, I refused to eat the food cooked in my own home. I had a little meeting with
Signora
Siragusa, my former landlady. She agreed to make my meals for four dollars a week and an extra fifty cents to still that wagging tongue in her mouth. Each evening on the way to work, I walked past the
signora
’s and picked up my dinner pail. Each morning, at the end of my shift, I stopped there again to leave the pail and eat my breakfast in the
signora
’s kitchen. The third meal I skipped or bought downtown—
’Mericana
food with no taste, everything drowning in that yellow glue they call gravy. Bread that tasted more like cotton than bread.

Ignazia was insulted that I would not eat what she cooked. This she told me with her frowns and banging pot lids and her sighs sent up to Heaven—never with her words. We shared no words, either, about all that Prosperine had told, though I was sure those two whispered plenty about it behind my back. If I
had been their fool before that night, I was their fool no longer. The Monkey’s drunken
confessione
had made me dangerous to them both.

If I had been
‘Mericano
, I might have run squealing to the police and repeated what Prosperine had revealed. Maybe the law would have taken that crazy monkey out of my house and sent her back across the ocean. But a Sicilian knows to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut. I wanted no more scandal brought down on the name of Tempesta—no fingers pointing at my
casa di due appartamenti
as the place where murdering women had gone to hide. Sometimes I told myself Ignazia was
not
Violetta D’Annunzio, that hellcat who had fouled herself with men and tricked a husband into swallowing glass. Maybe Violetta had paid the price for her sins and been put in the ground in Palermo, as Prosperine had said. But this I could only make myself believe for an hour or an afternoon and then, again, I would know the terrible truth.

In the first weeks of her life, Ignazia’s harelipped baby suffered from
colica
and cried during night and day. Ignazia cried, too, and was plagued with female problems. Tusia’s wife told my wife all problems would go away—that mother and child would be at peace—once the girl was baptized.

“No
battesimo,
” I told Ignazia. She had come upstairs to my bedroom—to the room where she had once slept by my side—to ask my permission.

“Why not?” she said. “So that my suffering can continue? So that both my babies can be lost to God’s mercy?”

I had said nothing to Ignazia about the boy’s purification in the pantry on the morning of his birth and death. My fear was that my action may have angered God—a boy christened with dishwater by a father who had thrown cement at a priest, forsaken Jesus Christ. . . . If I had harmed the soul of my own son with blasphemous
battesimo
, I would not then send the redhead’s daughter into Heaven.

“I once ordered two priests off this property,” I told Ignazia.
“I will not be
ipocrita
now and go crawling back to them on my knees.”

“Then I’ll bring her to them,” she said. I shook my head and told her she would do what I told her to do.

“What kind of selfish father would keep the gates of Heaven locked against his own child?” she shouted. “Yours is a wicked sin!”

“Better shut up your mouth about
my
sins!” I told her. “Worry, instead, about your own—the ones you committed here with that no-good redheaded mick in New York and the ones you committed back in the Old Country.”

She turned her face away from mine and hurried out of the room. But I followed her down the stairwell and through the downstairs to the back room. She was face down on the bed, sobbing against the pillows. From the doorway, I warned her—made it clear that if she defied me and had the girl baptized in secret, she would pay a high price. “If I discover such a plan,” I told her, “you and your scrawny friend will live to regret it.”

In spite of all I knew, now, about Ignazia—in spite of the fear and hatred that stood between us—my
passione
for her was stronger than ever. My eyes could never stop following her around a room. Her face and
figura
were a constant torment. A hundred times a day, I kissed her mouth, unpinned her hair, ripped away her buttons, and had what was mine, but these actions I took only in my
immaginazione.
. . . Sometimes I would torture myself by thinking of those filthy pictures the
fotografo
had taken of her back in the Old Country—see those photographs being passed around from man to man. I would shudder at this, my fingers twitching with the desire to slit the throats of those faceless men. My wife in the hands of every man except her lawful husband! But mixed with the torture of knowing that those photographs existed was the excitement of what they had captured. To have unspent lust for a murderous wife was a terrible thing—a living Hell!

Sometimes in my dreams she loved me—submitted to me with obedience and desire as a good Sicilian wife surrenders herself to her husband. I would wake from these reveries in a rush of joy and
excitement. Then sadness would overtake me and I would clean myself, wipe away the spilt milk of desire that made children but could make none for me. Once, too, I had a very strange and terrible dream in which Ignazia shared her
passione
with my dead brother Vincenzo, while I sat on the bed and combed her long hair. In that dream, I was happy, not jealous, and woke only slowly to the humiliation of the story my dream had told me. I could almost hear Vincenzo laughing at me from Hell.

Sometimes my longing for my wife’s flesh would reach me at work and become an ache so strong that it distracted me. Even the giggles of the homely little spinning girls could excite me . . . even Nabby Drinkwater’s boastful talk of his pleasures at the whorehouse on Bickel Road.

One morning, my hunger led me past the
signora
’s and down to that place on Bickel Road where the fat Hungarian woman kept her whores and house cats. The inside of that place reeked of cabbage and cat piss. I paid and she called to a skinny servant girl who was busy polishing the staircase railing. “This way,” the girl said, and I followed her up the stairs. I thought she was taking me to a whore, but when I entered the room, she closed the door behind us. She was no more than fourteen, fifteen . . . did not yet have the meat of a grown woman on her bones. While I did what I did, she looked the same as she had looked polishing that banister. I left that house with a promise that I had gone there for the first and last time. But I went there again and again, each time worrying that I would run into Drinkwater—that that goddamned Indian who worked beneath me would know that I shared his weakness for the flesh. That the devil that had claimed my brother Vincenzo had claimed me, too.

I always had the same girl. Always, after I finished my business, I made her put on her clothes and leave quickly. I would stare at the wall while she dressed herself, my shame taking over once my
ardore
had been spent. Then I would rise from that cheap bed, button myself, and walk back to my house where I lived with two
murderous women and a redhaired baby whose mouth was split and whose soul remained stained with original sin.

One day, a little after the war was over, I read in the newspaper that that dog-faced Monsignor McNulty had keeled over and died from a bad heart. The paper said little Father Guglielmo had been named acting pastor of St. Mary of Jesus Christ Church—the church’s first
pastore Italiano.
I was happy for both McNulty’s death and Guglielmo’s promotion. I had never had quarrel with
Padre
Guglielmo—he had only been the other one’s whipped dog. In my mind, I wished him well.

Not a week later, when I went to the boardinghouse for my breakfast, I found Guglielmo waiting for me in
Signora
Siragusa’s kitchen. The old
signora
fluttered around in a sweat, making special cakes and
frittata
and frying dough in her finest olive oil, as if the Pope himself had dropped in. “It’s good to see you again, my friend,” Guglielmo said. “It’s been a while now, hasn’t it? How’s your wife these days?”

I told him my wife was fed and cared for.

“And your child? A daughter, isn’t it? Why, she must be walking by now.”

I nodded. Ambush
,
I thought. But I told myself I was too clever to be taken in by such
imboscata
as this.
Signora
Siragusa could put all the sugar she wanted on that fried dough of hers, but I was not about to let that redhead’s daughter be baptized.

Two years had passed since the girl’s birth. The war against the Germans had been fought and won and American Woolen and Textile had dyed all the wool for the sailors’ coats. Tusia’s wife and
Signora
Siragusa had both spoken to me about my refusal to let the child be christened. Even Tusia himself had had the nerve to lecture me one morning while I sat in his barber’s chair getting my free shave. (Tusia thought he was a big shot now—
pezzo grosso
in both Knights of Columbus and Sons of Italy.) “
Scusa,
Salvatore,” I told him, right in the middle of his big speech. “You better mind
your own business before I decide to raise your rent.” That shut him up, all right. For the rest of my shave, the only sound in the shop was the voice of Caruso coming out of Tusia’s Victrola.

In the years I had been away from the church, Father Guglielmo’s face had broadened a little and his hair had turned to silver. Now he held out his hand for me to shake it.
Signora
Siragusa stopped her bustling to watch. The three of us waited to see what that hand of mine would do.

I shook Guglielmo’s hand. Like I said, I had never had a quarrel with that little priest who had once sat out in the parlor at the
signora
’s and tried to help me talk sense into my brother Vincenzo. More than just the color of Guglielmo’s hair had changed. He smoked
sigaretti
now, one after another, and he no longer carried himself like a man afraid of the world. He asked about my health and my work and called me by my first name. I congratulated him on his appointment as
pastore
and said I hoped the old monsignor had gone to Hell where he belonged.

Signora
Siragusa gasped and slapped at me with her dishcloth, but Guglielmo thanked me for my good wishes. “May I sit and join you for breakfast and have a little talk?” he asked me.