The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (197 page)

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.

“She’s crazy like a fox,” the mayor agreed. He picked up the telephone and began dialing the Chief of Police. “Why, you’ve done the town a service by bringing this public menace to my attention,
my friend,” Shanley told me. “I’ll have her picked up and put behind bars before the noon whistle blows. I’ll make sure Chief Confrey makes it his top priority.”

“
Scusa,
” I said, raising my hand to stop him. The mayor stopped, hung up the telephone. “I was thinking . . . if she spends a few days in jail, then the problem is fixed for a few days. If she’s put away in the crazy hospital where she belongs, then my poor wife and child can walk the streets again. That woman is lunatic. One time she even claimed she was a witch!”

“You’re absolutely right!” Shanley said, slapping the top of his desk. “You’re a shrewd man, my friend. And a practical one, too. If she has to be locked up, we might as well put her on the state’s dole instead of on the city’s. Ha ha.” He called for his secretary to bring him the telephone number of Three Rivers State Hospital.

I waited and listened as Shanley talked on the telephone with one person, then another person. “The
mayor
of this fair city,
that’s
who’s calling, you goddamned jackass!” he shouted into the telephone. Then Dr. Henry Settle, the
pezzo grosso
of that godforsaken asylum, got on the line.

They talked about this, about that, and then Shanley finally got down to business. He cupped his hand over the receiver and turned to me.

“Does she have any relatives in town? If she won’t sign herself in, they’ll need a relative to do it for her—a blood relation to sign her in and sign her back out again if she gets cured.”

I told him it would be a miracle if that addle-brained cousin of mine ever got cured—that if my poor auntie back in the Old Country could see that daughter of hers now, she would cry a river of tears. Shanley gave me a wink.

I met the police and the
dottore
at the asylum. They took her out of the paddy wagon, bucking and straining against the straitjacket they had forced her into. When the Monkey saw me, she screamed every curse in the devil’s book!

After I had signed my name to the papers they wanted me to
sign, I took my cap off my head and clutched it in my hand, playing once again the part of the humble immigrant.
“Scusai,”
I whispered to the guard in charge. “May I have a moment in private to say goodbye to my poor cousin?” The idiot shrugged and moved across the room. I leaned close to Prosperine, pretending to give my
cugina
a goodbye kiss. But instead, I put my lips to her ear. “There’s more than one way to fuck the monkey that fucks with Domenico Tempesta!” I whispered. Then I lurched back and spat in her face the way she had spat on my
medaglia.
I left her tugging and lunging, screaming the most filthy oaths and curses of the Italian language. I had fixed that one for good!

I never saw the Monkey again. For all I know, she’s still living down at that place for lunatics. Still eating and drawing breath, and paying the price she paid for fucking with Tempesta. I was never notified otherwise, but if she is dead, then I spit on her grave. . . .

For twenty-six years now—through all the tragedy and grief that has followed—through all my hard work and success and sleepless hours—I have always had that small satisfaction, at least: the memory of that moment when I won my battle against the Monkey, when I used my God-given cleverness to punish that she-devil for the sins she had committed against Domenico Tempesta.

In September of that year, the archbishop in Hartford made Father Guglielmo a monsignor and transferred him to a parish in Bridgeport. There was a High Mass for Guglielmo in honor of his installation and a banquet afterward. I received a fancy engraved invitation but could not afford the time for a trip to Bridgeport. I was too busy canvassing the West Side and the neighborhoods near the mill, knocking on doors and turning
paisani
into Democrats for Mayor Shanley.

In October,
Signora
Siragusa died in her sleep and I helped her sons carry her coffin to the grave. I wept for the old
signora
as if she had been my own mother—as if her flesh and bone had been mine. You see, Guglielmo? I still had tears inside my head. The troubles
that God and the Monkey had given me had not completely hardened the heart of Tempesta! The
signora
’s sons were, of course, grateful to have a dignitary such as myself to help them bear their mother’s coffin.

The following month, Shanley lost the election in spite of my efforts on his behalf. Lost
because
of my efforts, that ungrateful goddamned son of a bitch told his two cronies, Rector and O’Brien, right in front of my face. The four of us sat there in his office the morning after, those three micks puffing away on their cigars. Shanley offered me no smoke. I was no longer good enough for one of his stinking cheap panatelas.

“You want to know how we lost it, boys?” Shanley said. “We lost it on account of three wops named Sacco, Vanzetti, and Tempesta. First, our friend here spends over half a grand registering every goddamned dago in this town that breathes and a few that don’t. Then, two days before the election, he decides to spout off his mouth to the newspaper about how those goddamned murdering son-of-a-bitching anarchists up there in Massachusetts are poor, innocent victims. ‘Does Mayor Shanley share your sentiments about this case, Mr. Tempesta?’ ‘Oh, yes. The mayor strongly supports all Italian-Americans.’ As if I had to wipe the ass of every goddamned guinea in this town. It wouldn’t have been so bad if all those wops we paid a dollar apiece to register had been smart enough to figure out that it was a package deal—that they had to register
and
vote in the goddamned election! Well, the swamp Yankees voted, all right, didn’t they, boys? They came out with a vengeance
so they could keep us all safe from wops and anarchists, and
that’s
why Flint Peterson is the goddamned mayor-elect!
That’s
how he did it, boys: with the help of our friend the organ-grinder here!”

I rose from my chair and took my hat from the rack. I told him I had worked my ass off for him and would not now sit there and be his scapegoat.

“Oh, no?” Shanley said. “Then whose ‘
skeppa goata’
are you?”

After all the work I had done for that son of a bitch, he sat there mocking my English, mocking me! “Go piss in your hats, the three of you,” I told him and his goons. I’d had a bellyful of those swindlers and their dirty politics. I slammed that office door so hard, I thought the glass was going to fall out!

18 August 1949

It was 10 January 1925. A Tuesday, it was. Tuesday or Wednesday? I can’t remember now. But I must remember. . . .

That month, the Navy had given American Woolen a rush job. The summer before, they had given us a smaller order than usual for wool for pea jackets. Then, suddenly, halfway through the winter, they need enough dyed wool for ten thousand new jackets. The Navy was always that way—no planning and then they needed everything in a hurry! For a week, I had been working double shifts, getting by on three, four hours’ sleep. I was exhausted. I got home a little after eight in the morning.

Bitter cold that day, I remember. January had been warmer than usual, and then, suddenly, below zero. I was worried that Ignazia hadn’t put enough coal in the stove—worried that the pipes might freeze.

The dog was the first sign that something was wrong. He lay on his side, stomach collapsed, dead in his own bloody vomit. Poisoned. I pushed him a little with my foot but he didn’t budge. He was stuck stiff to the ground; he’d been dead for a while.

When I opened the door and went inside, a bird flew past my eyes! A sparrow, it was. I should have known then: a bird in the house is no good. I am not a superstitious man, but some signs cannot be ignored.

The fireplace in the parlor was stone cold. The radiators, too. The kitchen stove. I stood staring at the closed door of the back bedroom.

I put my hand on the cold knob but was afraid to open it—afraid of what I would see. I stood there, looking at my own breath. She never closed that door during the daytime. Never.

That goddamned bird flew in circles around the parlor, its wings skidding against the walls, its body crashing repeatedly into the mirror above the mantelpiece.

“Ignazia!” I called at the closed door. “Eh! Ignazia!” No answer.

I went upstairs. “Ignazia? . . . Concettina?”

Our bed was neatly made. Nothing overturned, nothing unusual. Her clothes and things were in the closet, in the drawers. I went to the girl’s room. Everything there, too. . . .

I went down to the cellar, started the furnace again. It took a while to get going. If the pipes froze, there’d be hell to pay. I stayed down there twenty minutes, half an hour, shoveling coal and watching it catch and burn. Twice, I thought I heard footsteps above my head, but when I stopped shoveling, it was quiet up there.

When I went upstairs again, that sparrow was dead on the parlor floor. I picked it up in my hand and carried it to the kitchen. Wrapped the goddamned thing in newspaper and threw it in the garbage. You would have thought a
flock
of sparrows had gotten inside, from all the feathers, blood, and shit it left. That one little bird with its crushable bones.

I still remember that: the mess that thing left in dying.

Confessione
is good for the soul, eh? That’s what Guglielmo used to tell me. I lost track of him after he moved to Bridgeport. I couldn’t say, even, if he is dead or alive. . . . “Do your penance, Domenico. Reflect on your life and be
umile.
Write it down. . . . Be humble, Domenico
.
To be human is to be humble
.
What choice is there, really? Let none of us attempt God’s work.”

But I was never too good at
confessione.
. . .

The police pulled her body from the bottom of Rosemark’s Pond. I was there; I saw her come out of the water. She had fallen
through the ice and drowned in the middle of the night, the coroner said. Before the bitter cold had set in. He could tell from the body’s bloating.

I thought she had taken the girl to her death as well. There was evidence: their footprints, helter-skelter, in the snow that covered the ice. Those footprints told of a struggle between them. Now both the son and daughter she had birthed on my kitchen table were gone. She had killed a husband, and now, God help her, a daughter, too. She had hated me enough to do it. She had despaired enough to drown the one she loved the most.

But Concettina was alive, hiding in the shack, half-frozen but still breathing. That’s how they found her—the police; her whimpering led them to her. And when I picked her up and held that half-dead girl in my arms, her bones felt almost as small and frail as that sparrow’s bones. And I held her against me, against the cold, against what her mother had done. And now I loved her.

Next day, the story of Ignazia’s drowning was in the newspaper, front page. It was after that, a week or so after I buried her, that the other details began to spread, began to fuel the fires of imagination. The poisoned dog, the footprints of both the woman and the girl. . . . All my life—even back in the Old Country—townsmen and townswomen have been happy to throw mud and gossip, to celebrate the bad fortune of my
famiglia.
Ignazia’s fate became a guessing game for the people of the town. The Italians of Three Rivers—my ungrateful
paisani
—speculated that God or that crazy housekeeper I had had locked up “down below” had been at the bottom of things. For months afterward, for years, a rumor survived that Ignazia had been stolen in the night by a strange man, then killed and thrown through the ice. . . .

But there had been no strange man. No kidnapping. No evidence of that kind of struggle. Only the footprints of my wife and the girl, the black hole at the center of the pond. And as for Concettina, she was mute about that night—told nothing to me,
nothing to the police. To this day, we have never spoken about it. . . . She was only eight years old the night her mother tried to take her with her to Hell to punish Tempesta. But she did not take her. I don’t know what Concettina remembers.