The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (190 page)

“I have to use the bathroom,” she said. “Then I have to go.”

Back to their peeling farmhouse with that jazzy mailbox, I thought. Back to him.

I was looking through Ma’s photo album when she came back down the stairs. I’d taken it out of the china closet to shove Jerry Martineau’s basketball picture in there and then gotten lost in the old photographs. And when I patted the sofa, she surprised me. Sat down beside me.

We leafed through the book together: Thomas and me with Mamie Eisenhower; Domenico in a two-piece bathing suit at Ocean Beach. . . . I opened my mouth to tell Dessa about how I’d been reading the Old Man’s “history,” and then changed my mind. I was whipped; it was complicated. She’d already had enough of Dominick and Company.

“I’m worried about you,” she said. I kept turning pages. Thomas and me in Junior Midshipmen; Thomas, Ray, and me at the New York World’s Fair . . .

I told her I’d be okay—that, in some ways, Thomas’s death felt like a reprieve. That I wasn’t sorry I’d nailed Ray in front of witnesses.

“Well, you’re bound to have all kinds of conflicting emotions right now, Dominick,” she said. “You really need to
talk
to someone.”

I asked her if she was volunteering for the job.

“You know what I mean. A counselor. A therapist.”

I told her I was way ahead of her. Filled her in on Dr. Patel.

She nodded. Reached over and took my hand. “What made you start going?”

I flipped another page of Ma’s book. Shrugged. “Him being locked
up at Hatch, I guess. That maximum-security stuff: it was eating me alive. I guess it was like that front hall closet all over again. . . . At first, I was just going there to fill her in on his history. Give her some background on our happy little childhood here at Happy Valley. And then . . . I don’t know, things just shifted. She said to me one afternoon that Thomas and I were like two guys lost in the woods or something. She said she thought she could help me get out of the woods. So we started working on
my
shit.”

“And how’s it going?” she asked.

I shrugged. “She was here earlier; you missed her. She’s pretty terrific, actually. Doesn’t take much shit off of me. . . . We been . . . we been working on anger management. I don’t think she’d have been too thrilled at my little showdown with Ray.”

Dessa said that at least, these days, my anger seemed to be hitting the target I was aiming for. I looked over at her. Studied her face. Nodded.

“I’m
glad
you’re seeing someone,” she said. “You and Thomas had a pretty complex relationship. You’ve spent an enormous amount of emotional energy on Thomas. Your whole life. Now, you’re going to have to take all of that energy and . . .
re
invest it, I guess. It’s bound to be a complicated process.”

“Sounds like shrink talk,” I said. “What are you trying to do? Cut Doc Patel out of the action?”

She was serious, she said. She’d hate to see me deal with Thomas’s death by not dealing with it—have my anger boomerang back in a hundred other ways. Or dodge the pain—quit the process when the going got tough.

“
When
it gets tough?” I said. “You saying it gets
more
brutal than this?”

She shook her head. “What I’m saying, Slugger, is that it’s a big step for you—therapy. I’m proud of you.”

Slugger: she hadn’t called me that in years. I asked her how
she
was doing.

She looked away. Looked back again. Fair, she said.

“Yeah? Just fair? What’s the matter?”

Oh, Thomas’s death, mainly, she said. She’d really loved my brother. He’d had to struggle so hard. She was grieving, too. And now her mother—those dizzy spells.

“Everything else all right?” I said. “Anything else bothering you?” Tell me you and him are on the skids, I thought. Tell me it’s gone bad between you two.

“You’ve got enough on your mind, Dominick,” she said. “You don’t need to hear about my stuff on top of it.”

“No, tell me. What?”

Sadie, she said. Sadie wasn’t doing too great.

“Goofus? Why? What’s the matter with her?”

“She’s
old
. Her heart’s bad, her kidneys. The vet said I should start thinking about the next step—whether or not I want her put to sleep.”

I thought about the day I’d given her Sadie. Her twenty-fifth birthday, it was. I saw myself opening the pantry door of our old apartment, that damn puppy making a beeline right to her. Licking her bare feet. Big red bow I’d put on her. I remembered that day whole.

The two of us just sat there, neither one of us saying anything.

“And something else,” she finally said.

What else what? Where were we?

“Did you read that thing in the papers last week? About Eric Clapton’s little boy? God, this is so stupid.”

“Little dude who fell out the window, right?” I said. “Fell from a skyscraper?”

She got up. Walked over to the window. “Hey, it’s not like
I
was their close personal friend.
You
were always the big Clapton fan. Not me. . . . But I can’t stop thinking about that poor little boy. Conor, his name was. I’ve even dreamt about him.”

“It’s Angela,” I said. She looked over at me. “Tell me the dream.”

“No, never mind, Dominick. This is stupid. Compared to everything
you’ve
been through? My god.”

“
Tell
me,” I said.

In Dessa’s dream, the boy kneels on the windowsill, waving
down at them—the crowd that’s gathered on the sidewalk below. They hold their breath every time he moves. He doesn’t understand how dangerous it is, what can happen. “Eric Clapton’s there,” Dessa said. “And the boy’s mother, the police. But somehow it’s
me
who’s responsible. I keep promising everyone that I’ll catch him if he falls. . . . And I
know
I’m not going to be able to do it, but I keep
promising
. Everyone’s counting on me. And then he slips. He starts to fall. . . .”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “It wasn’t
anybody’s
fault. She just died.”

She turned back to me. Nodded. “Maybe Thomas just couldn’t take it anymore, Dominick. . . . Maybe he was just
ready
to stop fighting.”

I got up and walked over to her. Put my arms around her. She leaned her face against my chest. For a minute or more, we just stood there, holding each other. “Come on,” I said. “Sit down.”

Thomas and me in Davy Crockett pajamas. In our high school caps and gowns. . . . Domenico and Ma, hand in hand on the front steps. . . . Dessa and me on our wedding day. “Hey, who are these two hippie freaks?” I said. “They look vaguely familiar.” I could feel, rather than see, her smile.

“Oh, my poor mother,” Dessa sighed. “Married on the beach instead of in the Greek church. Me in that thirty-nine-dollar peasant dress instead of something with seed pearls and a ten-foot train. Now I see what she meant. And you wearing those sandals. You don’t want to
know
how much grief I took about that.”

Sandals, I thought. Father LaVie.

Dessa said it amazed her to think how self-assured she had been at that point in her life—how confident she was that if she just
planned
a future, that that would be the future she would have. “Look how young we were,” she said. “No wonder.”

“Better watch it, you two,” I told the scraggly wedding couple. “Life’s going to rear up, kick you in the ass.”

I flipped the page. Our honeymoon in Puerto Rico, the two of us as godparents at Shannon’s christening. We were in the thick of it
at that point, I remember: all that fertility counseling. “So,” I said. “How’s Dan the Man?”

She talked about how busy he was—about some major buyer out in Santa Fe or something. “Dominick?” she said. “Do you ever talk about us? You and your therapist? Or is that considered ancient history?”

I smiled. “My therapist’s got an anthropology degree,” I said. “Ancient history’s exactly what she’s into.” I turned a couple more pages of the album.

“Yeah, I talk about us,” I finally said. “How it was my anger that made me march down there and get that stupid vasectomy. How beneath all this
anger
I’ve got is . . . is all this
fear.
Believe me—ancient history’s
exactly
what she wants me to muck around in. She says if I want any kind of a future, I gotta go back and face all that fear. Renovate the past or whatever. She’s big on that word: renovation. . . . I probably ought to go down to town hall and get a freakin’ building permit, I got so much
renovating
to do.”

Dessa reached over and stroked my arm.

“I been . . . I’ve been reading this thing my grandfather wrote? Ma’s father? His autobiography, or whatever. It was all in Italian. I had it translated.”

“Papa,” Dessa said. “He was your mother’s hero.”

“He was a prick,” I said. “A bully. You think
I’m
angry?”

She stayed another half hour or so. I made us tea; she cut us each a piece of her chocolate pie. At the door, I thanked her for coming, for cleaning up the kitchen.

“I love you,” I said. “I know you don’t want me to, but I can’t help it.”

She nodded. Smiled. Told me to keep going to see Dr. Patel.

“I can . . . if you want me to, I can drive you over to the cemetery some time. Visit his grave. Ma’s. . . . Maybe visit the baby’s grave, too, if you wanted to.”

She nodded. Smiled the saddest smile I’d ever seen. She’d driven out to Angela’s grave that morning, she said. She liked visiting her;
she usually went there once or twice a week. Someone had just planted flowers for her, she said. Angie, maybe. Or her father—she’d forgotten to ask.

Red and white tulips, she said. They were so beautiful, they had made her cry.

16 August 1949

After that victorious banquet in the church basement, everyone wanted the help of Domenico Tempesta for this thing, that thing.

“Tempesta, we need your advice. . . .”

“Tempesta, we’re forming a new group on such and such. . . .” “Tempesta, can’t you do us one small favor? If
you
do it, it gets done right.”

I became member of Elks and Knights of Columbus and an elected officer in Sons of Italy. I helped the Republicans downtown register Italian voters and was named to the city planning commission (first Italian in Three Rivers history). I was so busy, I had to have a telephone brought into my house. That thing rang off the hook. Always there was someone on the other end who needed my help. “Hello, Domenico? . . . Good afternoon, Mr. Tempesta.” My mouth got tired from saying hello back to everyone who called needing something. Not just Italians calling, either. Now even Shanley, that crooked Irish mayor, knew that my first name was Domenico and my telephone number was 817.

“How are you coming on your personal reflection?” Father
Guglielmo asked me one morning after church. Ignazia, the girl, and I went faithfully to the nine o’clock Mass now and sat in the second pew. (I passed the basket and kept an eye on the other collectors for Guglielmo—made sure no one put “itchy fingers” on the church’s money. One of that priest’s problems was that he trusted everybody.)

I laughed at Guglielmo’s question and told him I barely had time for a few hours’ sleep each day—no time at all to sit and write about forty-five years of living. I assured him his worrying was unnecessary. He should bother the parishioners with bigger sins on their souls than I had on mine. My family and I were at peace.

I thought it was true. . . . I had stopped visiting the girl Hattie on Bickel Road. I was much too busy for that now—and too well known by the big shots in Three Rivers to be spotted at that place! Running from this meeting to that one gave me a rest from thinking too much about my wife’s flesh, though if anything, Ignazia’s contentment had made her a little plumper and more desirable.

My work on the planning commission led to a little private friendship with Mrs. Josephine Reynolds, a stenographer who worked at City Hall and took the minutes at our meetings. Josie was not much next to Ignazia. A little too skinny on the top. Like every other
‘Mericana,
she made coffee that tasted weak as dishwater. But she knew how to comfort a busy man and knew how to keep quiet about it, too. She lived up the road in Willimantic. I got up there when I could, not too often. Gave her a little friendship when I was able. I would not have looked twice at her if my wife hadn’t had a bad heart.