The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (198 page)

After Ignazia’s death, Italian ladies rang my bell and stood in the doorway with sympathy and hope in their eyes, food in their hands. Beside them stood unmarried daughters, spinster sisters, young widows who volunteered to clean my big house and care for my poor motherless daughter. “No, thank you . . . no, thank you.” I refused them all. Each night when I went to work, I brought the child to the apartment next door where she slept in the care of Tusia’s family. Tusia’s Jennie left high school to launder and cook and sweep for me. I wanted no more of women in my life. No more wives. I was done with all that. . . . And by the time Jennie Tusia fell in love, married that sailor from Georgia, my daughter was old enough to take over. To take care of her father’s house—that poor, harelipped girl that no other man wanted.

She’s not a bad girl. She cooks, she cleans, she is quiet. Her
silenzia
honors her father. Concettina has Sicilian blood in her veins. She knows how to keep her secrets.

Well, here you have it, Guglielmo. This was what you wanted, eh?

Confession. Penance. Humility. . . .

May God Almighty save my soul!

Thomas and I float below the Falls, easing down the Sachem River on inner tubes. From the banks, people wave to us. Strangers, people we know. Our mother is there, and behind her, in the shadows, a little girl. She steps forward, into the sun. It’s Penny Ann Drinkwater, alive again, a third-grader still. She calls to us, points downriver. From the woods behind her, a siren blares. . . .

I lunged at the ringing. Knocked the damn phone to the floor, cradle and all. Hauled it by the cord back onto the bed. “Hello?”

Dr. Azzi said he was sorry to be calling this early but that, schedule-wise, he was looking at the day from hell. He was about to leave for the hospital. We could meet in the fourth-floor lounge in an hour, after he’d checked on Ray. Otherwise, we’d have to wait until the end of the day.

The red digital blur on the bureau said . . . 6:11? “Yeah, sure. I can be there. So you . . . you had to amputate?”

You didn’t want to fool around with gangrene, he said. He’d see me at about seven-fifteen.

I hung up, flopped back down on the bed. Closed my burning eyes. Okay, I told myself. Grab a shower, get over there. Fourth floor, right? . . . When I swung my legs over and onto the floor, my feet crinkled paper.

In the covers, all around the bed, lay the ruined pages of my grandfather’s manuscript. I had finished Domenico’s “history” somewhere in the middle of the night. For all its ugly revelations, it had provided none of the answers I’d both sought and dreaded. Only more questions, more suspicions, and one bleak revelation I had
not
gone looking for: that my grandmother, in her despair, had tried to take my mother with her. That when Ma was an eight-year-old girl, she had had to fight her mother for her life. . . . Confessions, penance, family secrets: in a fit of frustration and freedom, I had gotten to the last page of Papa’s history and wept. Had yanked the pages from their binder, balled them up, ripped them. Had made confetti of all my grandfather’s excuses, his sorry excuse of a life.

I stumbled toward the bathroom, my bare feet padding through the wasted pages.
She cooks, she cleans, she knows how to keep secrets.
. . . I stepped into the shower and made the water hot, hotter, as hot as I could stand it. . . . He’d died a failure: that much was clear. All that confession, all that eleventh-hour contrition: too little, too late. . . . Humble yourself, they’d told him his whole life, but he’d never quite gotten the hang of it. He’d held grudges, played God with people’s lives. He’d had that strange woman thrown into the asylum and had just let her rot in there. . . . Rot. Gangrene.
This is your old man calling. You home yet? Give me a jingle, will ya?

I showered, shampooed. Stood there and let the water run over me. And when I finally stepped out, I faced myself, dripping wet and naked.

Don’t
be
him, Dominick, I told my eyes. Don’t
be
him, don’t
be
him. . . .

“There’s wet gangrene and dry gangrene,” Dr. Azzi said. “Wet’s worse, of course, because it means the bacteria’s set in. Which was the case with your dad. That was why we had to amputate as soon as possible.
If we’d let it go, the infection would have started galloping through him. Shutting him down, system by system. Questions?”

“It’s . . . it’s definitely his diabetes that caused it?”

He nodded. “Compromising the blood flow to the extremities. And, of course, he was doing a pretty good job of ignoring the symptoms, too. He’s like my father: last of the tough guys. What else can I tell you?”

“Is, uh . . . I’m sorry. It’s a lot to take in all at once. The gangrene is the actual infection, right?”

Dr. Azzi shook his head. “Look, let me back up a little. See, I had no idea you were coming at this cold. I just assumed your dad was keeping you posted.”

He would have been, I thought, if I’d bothered to answer any of those phone messages. Whatever the outcome on Ray, I was pretty sure I’d just flunked some litmus test for basic human decency. “Gangrene’s dead tissue,” Dr. Azzi said. “It’s the
breeding ground
for infection. His foot wasn’t getting the oxygen and nutrients it needed. Wasn’t getting any nourishment, in other words. Human tissue’s like any other living thing. You starve it long enough, it dies.”

Dr. Azzi detailed what the next months would be like: intensive therapy at the hospital for a week or so. Then a transfer to a subacute rehab center—a nursing home—so that Ray could learn how to walk again. Then crutches for a while, an artificial leg later on if Ray chose to go that route. Some insurance covered prosthetics, some didn’t. The goal, of course, was to get him back home again. Ray had made it clear to him that he didn’t want to be stuck long term in some convalescent home. “He lives alone, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Stairs?”

I nodded. “Outside and in.”

At the end of our meeting, we stood, shook hands. “He’s going to have a tough row to hoe, no doubt about it,” Dr. Azzi said. “But he’ll adapt. He was lucky, really. Remind him of that.”

I asked if I could see Ray. Sure thing, he said, but he had just had
a shot; he’d probably be out for most of the morning. But I was welcome to go in and take a peek.

I went down the hall, found Ray’s room.
Pass at your own risk,
I thought.

He was breathing hard through his mouth. There was dried crud on the front of his hospital johnny, a thin ribbon of blood floating in the fluid just above his IV insertion. He looked so small and gray.

Acute therapy, subacute. Wet and dry gangrene. How could I have missed the fear in his voice? . . .
This is your old man calling. You home yet?
. . . Past history or not, who else did he have?

Look at it, I told myself. Do your penance. Face it.

And so I willed my eyes down from Ray’s gray face to his rising and falling chest, then down to the bottom of the bed. My stomach lurched a little. I faced the flatness where his right leg was supposed to be. . . . Remembered my brother’s shiny pink scar tissue—his grafted, upholstered stump. Somewhere along the way, I’d heard that when they amputated, they didn’t use some high-tech laser procedure; they just used a saw. Sawed through muscle and bone and then just threw the dead leg . . . where? In a Dumpster or something? Jesus.

He’ll need to stay at a rehabilitation center for a while
—
a nursing home—so that he can learn how to walk again
. Jesus, he was going to go off the deep end, grounded like this. Always puttering with this or that—Ray couldn’t sit still to save himself.

The woman who entered made me jump. She was chubby, Asian. We exchanged nods. “I, uh . . . Dr. Azzi said I could see him. I know it’s not visiting—”

“That’s fine,” she said. She fitted a blood pressure cuff above Ray’s wrist, pumped her little black bulb. Read her gauge, pumped some more.
Corrie
something,
R.N
. In the old days, nurses wore white uniforms, not UConn sweatshirts.

“Uh, there’s a little bit of blood in his IV tube,” I said. “Are you aware of that?”

She squinted, leaned toward it. “Not a problem,” she said. She positioned a thermometer under Ray’s tongue and closed his mouth,
held his jaw shut. Ray slept on, oblivious. Whatever was in that shot they’d given him had really knocked him out. The box beeped. She pulled the thermometer and jotted the results. I asked how he was doing.

“Temp’s down a little, his BP’s good,” she said. “Are you his son?”

I stood there, unable to answer her. When she lifted the sheet to check his dressing, my eyes jumped away.

“Looking good,” she said. “Looking good.” She let the sheet fall again, tucking it around him. He’d probably sleep most of the morning, she said, but I was welcome to stay. I shook my head. Told her I’d stay just a little longer, then come back in the afternoon.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll leave you guys alone, then.”

I stood there for a while, watching him sleep.

Reached out. Reached toward his hand. Passed a finger over the hills and valleys his knuckles made.

Like any other living thing. You starve something long enough, it dies.
Dr. Azzi was more right than he realized. . . .

Thomas’s drowning out at the Falls had only been the
official
cause of death; he’d died down at Hatch, cut off from hope, from family. My brother had starved to death. . . . And my grandmother: she’d died in prison, too. The Old Man had installed that guard dog—had kept her captive in that goddamned, godforsaken house of his. Had raped her on weekends because she was “his.” And so, in despair, she’d done what she’d done before. Run. Escaped. Dragged her daughter out to that pond and . . .

Papa was a wonderful man, Dominick.
Why was that, Ma? Because he looked good in comparison? Because over on Hollyhock Avenue, everything was relative? . . .

I have to go because you suck all the oxygen out of the room
, Dessa had told me that morning she left
. I have to breathe, Dominick.

I stood there, touching Ray’s hand, and finally
getting it
. . . . Dessa hadn’t stopped loving me, caring about me. About us. But she’d needed to save herself. Had needed to amputate me from her life because . . . I was starving her. Infecting her. Because if she’d stayed, I would have begun shutting her down, system by system.

Well, good for you, Dess, I thought
.
I’m
glad
you got out alive. And my tears fell fast, splashing against Ray’s bed railing, sinking into his sheets.

I got home around noon—left a message for Dr. Patel that I needed to see her as soon as possible. I heated up some soup, flipped through
Newsweek
without anything really registering. When I went to wash the dishes, I realized I’d just washed them.

Domenico’s ruined manuscript was in there: lying all over the bedroom where I’d left it. Okay, I told myself, you finished it and then you trashed it. So it’s trash. Right? Go in there and get rid of it.

I grabbed a garbage bag and went into the bedroom.

Stuffing page after ruined page of the Old Man’s “history” into the plastic bag, I thought about Ma—what she had told me about the day her father died. He’d just finished it: his long-in-the-making
confessione
, his failed act of contrition. . . . She’d heard him crying out there—had wanted to go to him, to comfort him, but it was against the rules. He would have been too angry, and it was his anger that had ruled that house. . . . I sat back on the bed. Saw her out there, harvesting Papa’s story. She must have felt her whole life shift that day, I thought. Her father was dead; her sons were growing inside of her. . . .

She had been brave after all. Brave enough to go on—to raise us as best she could. And earlier: the sober girl in those photographs, standing next to her father in a starched pinafore, her fist to her face to cover her disfigured mouth. A brave eight-year-old girl, dragged that night into the bitter cold by a mother who’d been starved of hope. Made crazy from despair. . . . There’d been evidence of a struggle out there, the Old Man had written. A story told in footprints. But that brave, serious girl had kept her mother’s terrible secret—had said nothing to the police, or to her father. It was the footprints that had told. In her anger or her crazy despair, Ignazia had meant to take her with her—take her daughter’s life. But Ma had struggled. Had saved herself. Had hidden in the shack and survived the night and then gone home and lived with her father. . . .

Had she loved Papa as much as she’d always claimed? Hated
him? Had my brother and I been conceived in evil? . . . “The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta” had turned out to be just another hall of mirrors, just one more maze inside the maze. Because by the end of his story, the Old Man had confessed everything and nothing. Like father, like daughter, I thought. They had
both
known how to keep their secrets. . . .

I reached down, pulled a page from the garbage bag. Flattened it and read.
“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. . . .”