The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (83 page)

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m scared for you.” But it was myself I was scared for. Closing in on forty, I was wifeless, childless. Now I’d be motherless, too. Left with my crazy brother and Ray.

She reached over and rubbed my arm. “Well, honey,” she said, “it’s scary. But I accept it because it’s what God wants for me.”

“What God wants,” I repeated, with a little snort of contempt. I dragged my sleeve across my eyes, cleared my throat.

“Give me something little,” she repeated. “You remember that time last spring when you came over and said, ‘Hey, Ma, get in the car and I’ll buy you a hot fudge sundae’?
That’s
the kind of thing I’d like. Just come visit. Look at my album with me.”

Tucked in the inside front cover pocket of my mother’s scrapbook are two pictures of Thomas and me, scissored four decades earlier
from the
Three Rivers Daily Record
. The folded newsprint, stained brown with age, feels as light and brittle as dead skin. In the first photo, we’re wrinkled newborns, our diapered bodies curved toward each other like opening and closing parentheses.
IDENTICAL TWINS RING OUT OLD, RING IN NEW
, the caption claims and goes on to explain that Thomas and Dominick Tempesta were born at the Daniel P. Shanley Memorial Hospital on December 31, 1949, and January 1, 1950, respectively—six minutes apart and in two different years. (The article makes no mention of our father and says only that our unnamed mother is “doing fine.” We were bastards; our births would have been discreetly ignored by the newspaper had we not been the New Year’s babies.) “Little Thomas arrived first, at 11:57
P.M.
,” the article explains. “His brother Dominick followed
at 12:03
A.M.
Between them, they straddle the first and second halves of the twentieth century!”

In the second newspaper photo, taken on January 24, 1954, my brother and I have become Thomas and Dominick Birdsey. We wear matching sailor hats and woolen pea jackets and salute the readers of the
Daily Record
. Mamie Eisenhower squats between us, one mink-coated arm wrapped around each of our waists. Mrs. Eisenhower, in her short bangs and flowered hat, beams directly at the camera. Thomas and I, age four, wear twin looks of bewildered obedience. This picture is captioned first lady gets a two-gun salute.

The President’s wife was in Groton, Connecticut, that winter day to break champagne against the USS
Nautilus
, America’s first nuclear-powered submarine. Our family stood in the crowd below the dignitaries’ platform, ticket-holding guests by virtue of our new stepfather’s job as a pipe fitter for Electric Boat. EB and the Navy were partners in the building of the
Nautilus
, America’s best hope for containing Communism.

According to my mother, it had been cold and foggy the morning of the launch and then, just before the submarine’s christening, the sun had burned through and lit up the celebration. Ma had prayed to Saint Anne for good weather and saw this sudden clearing
as a small miracle, a further sign of what everybody knew already: that Heaven was on our side, was
against
the godless Communists who wanted to conquer the world and blow America to smithereens.

“It was the proudest day of my life, Dominick,” she told me that morning when I started, then halted, the renovation of her kitchen and sat, instead, and looked. “Seeing you two boys with the President’s wife. I remember it like it was yesterday. Mamie and some admiral’s wife were up there on the VIP platform, waving down to the crowd, and I said to your father, ‘Look, Ray. She’s pointing right at the boys!’ He said, ‘Oh, go on. They’re just putting on a show.’ But I could tell she was looking at you two. It used to happen all the time. People get such a kick out of twins. You boys were always special.”

Her happy remembrance of that long-ago day strengthened her voice, animated her gestures. The past, the old pictures, the sudden brilliance of the morning sun through the front windows: the mix made her joyful and took away, I think, a little of her pain.

“And then, next thing you know, the four of us were following some Secret Service men to the Officers’ Club lounge. Ray took it in stride, of course, but I was scared skinny. I thought we were in trouble for something. Come to find out, we were following Mrs. Eisenhower’s orders. She wanted her picture taken with my two boys!

“They treated us like big shots, too. Your father had a cocktail with Admiral Rickover and some of the other big brass. They asked him all about his service record. Then a waiter brought you and your brother orange sodas in frosted glasses almost as tall as you two were. I was scared one of you was going to spill soda all over Mamie.”

“What did you and she have to drink?” I kidded her. “Couple of boilermakers?”

“Oh, honey, I didn’t take a thing. I was a nervous wreck, standing that close to her. She ordered a Manhattan, I remember, and had some liver pâté on a cracker. She was nice—very down to earth. She asked me if I’d sewn the little sailor suits you and Thomas were wearing. She told me she knitted some still when she and the
President traveled, but she’d never had a talent for sewing. When she stooped down to have her picture taken with you two boys, she told you she had a grandson just a little older than you.
David
Eisenhower is who she was talking about. Julie Nixon’s husband.
Camp
David.”

Ma shook her head and smiled, in disbelief still. Then she pulled a Kleenex from the sleeve of her bathrobe and dabbed at her eyes. “Your grandfather just wouldn’t have believed it,” she said. “First he comes to this country with holes in his pockets, and then, the next thing you know, his two little grandsons are hobnobbing with the First Lady of the United States of America. Papa would have gotten a big kick out of that. He would have been proud as a peacock.”

Papa.

Domenico Onofrio Tempesta—my maternal grandfather, my namesake—is as prominent in my mother’s photo album as he was in her life of service to him. He died during the summer of 1949, oblivious of the fact that the unmarried thirty-three-year-old daughter who kept his house—his only child—was pregnant with twins. Growing up, my brother and I knew Papa as a stern-faced paragon of accomplishment, the subject of a few dozen sepia-tinted photographs, the star of a hundred anecdotes. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that
he
was the boss, that
he
ruled the roost, that what
he
said went.

He had emigrated to America from Sicily in 1901 and gotten ahead because he was shrewd with his money and unafraid of hard work, lucky for us! He’d bought a half-acre lot from a farmer’s widow and thus become the first Italian immigrant to own property in Three Rivers, Connecticut. Papa had put the roof over our heads, had built “with his own two hands” the brick Victorian duplex on Hollyhock Avenue where we’d lived as kids—where my mother had lived all her life. Papa had had a will of iron and a stubborn streak—just the traits he needed to raise a young daughter “all by his lonesome.” If we thought
Ray
was strict, we should have seen Papa! Once when Ma was a girl, she was bellyaching about having to eat fried eggs for supper. Papa let her go on and on and then, without
saying a word, reached over and pushed her face down in her plate. “I came up with egg yolk dripping off my hair and the tip of my nose and even my eyelashes. I was crying to beat the band.
After that night, I just ate my eggs and shut up about it!”

Another time, when Ma was a teenager working at the Rexall store, Papa found her secret package of cigarettes and marched himself right down to the drugstore where he made her eat one of her own Pall Malls. Right in front of the customers and her boss, Mr. Chase. And Claude Sminkey, the soda jerk she had such an awful crush on. After he left, Ma ran outside and had to throw up at the curb with people walking by and watching. She had to quit her job, she was so ashamed of herself. But she never smoked again—never even liked the smell of cigarettes after that. Papa had fixed
her
wagon, all right. She had defied him and then lived to regret it. The last thing Papa wanted was a sneak living under his own roof.

Sometime during our visit with the photo album that morning, my mother told me to wait there. She had something she wanted to get. With a soft sigh of pain, she was on her feet and heading for the front stairs.

“Ma, whatever it is, let
me
get it for you,” I called out.

“That’s okay, honey,” she called back down the stairs. “I know right where it is.”

I flipped quickly through the pages as I waited—made my family a jerky, imperfect movie. It struck me that my mother had compiled mostly a book of her father, Thomas, and me. Others make appearances: Ray, Dessa, the Anthonys from across the street, the Tusia sisters from next door. But my grandfather, my brother, and I are the stars of my mother’s book. Ma herself, camera-shy and self-conscious about her cleft lip, appears only twice in the family album. In the first picture, she’s one of a line of dour-faced schoolchildren posed on the front step of St. Mary of Jesus Christ Grammar School. (A couple of years ago, the parish sold that dilapidated old schoolhouse to a developer from Massachusetts who converted it into apartments. I bid on the inside painting, but Paint Plus came in under me.) In the second photograph, Ma looks about nine or ten.
She stands beside her lanky father on the front porch of the house on Hollyhock Avenue, wearing a sacklike dress and a sober look that matches Papa’s.
In both of these photos, my mother holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth.

It was a gesture she had apparently learned early and practiced all her life: the hiding of her cleft lip with her right fist—her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she’d had no control. The lip, split just to the left of her front teeth, exposed a half-inch gash of gum and gave the illusion that she was sneering. But Ma never sneered. She apologized. She put her fist to her mouth for store clerks and door-to-door salesmen, for mailmen and teachers on parents’ visiting day, for neighbors, for her husband, and even, sometimes, for herself when she sat in the parlor watching TV, her image reflected on the screen.

She had made reference to her harelip only once, a day in 1964 when she sat across from me in an optometrist’s office. A month earlier, my ninth-grade algebra teacher had caught me squinting at the blackboard and called to advise my mother to get my eyes tested. But I’d balked. Glasses were for brains, for losers and finky kids. I was furious because Thomas had developed no twin case of myopia—no identical need to wear stupid faggy glasses like me.
He
was the jerk, the brownnoser at school.
He
should be the nearsighted one. If she made me get glasses, I told her, I just wouldn’t wear them.

But Ma had talked to Ray, and Ray had issued one of his supper table ultimatums. So I’d gone to Dr. Wisdo’s office, acted my surliest, and flunked the freaking wall chart. Now, two weeks later, my black plastic frames were being fitted to my face in a fluorescent-lit room with too many mirrors.

“Well, I think they make you look handsome, Dominick,” Ma offered. “Distinguished. He looks like a young Ray Milland. Doesn’t he, Doctor?”

Dr. Wisdo didn’t like me because of my bad attitude during the first visit. “Well,” he mumbled reluctantly, “now that you mention it.”

This all occurred during the fever of puberty and Beatlemania. The summer before, at the basketball courts at Fitz Field, a kid named Billy Grillo had shown me and Marty Overturf a stack of rain-wrinkled paperbacks he’d found out in the woods in a plastic bag:
Sensuous Sisters, Lusty Days & Lusty Nights, The Technician of Ecstasy
. I’d swiped a couple of those mildewed books and taken them out past the picnic tables where I read page after faded page, simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the things men did to women, the things women did to themselves and each other. It flabbergasted me, for instance, that a man might put his dick inside a woman’s mouth and have her “hungrily gulp down his creamy nectar.” That a woman might cram a glass bottle up between another woman’s legs and that this would make both “scream and undulate with pleasure.” I’d gone home from basketball that day, flopped onto my bed and fallen asleep, awakening in the middle of my first
wet dream. Shortly after that, the Beatles appeared on
Ed Sullivan
. Behind the locked bathroom door, I began combing my bangs forward and beating off to my dirty fantasies about all those girls who screamed for the Beatles—what those same girls would do to me, what they’d let me do to them. So the last person I wanted to look like was Ray Milland, one of my mother’s old fart movie stars.

“Could you just shut up, please?” I told Ma, right in front of Dr. Wisdo.

“Hey, hey, hey, come on now. Enough is enough,” Dr. Wisdo protested. “What kind of boy says ‘Shut up’ to his own mother?”

Ma put her fist to her mouth and told the doctor it was all right. I was just upset. This wasn’t the way I really was.

As if
she
knew the way I really was, I thought to myself, smiling inwardly.

Dr. Wisdo told me he had to leave the room for a few minutes, and by the time he got back, he hoped I would have apologized to my poor mother.

Neither of us said anything for a minute or more. I just sat there, smirking defiantly at her, triumphant and miserable. Then Ma took
me by complete surprise. “You think
glasses
are bad,” she said. “You should try having what I have. At least you can take your glasses off.”

I knew immediately what she meant—her harelip—but her abrupt reference to it hit me like a snowball in the eye. Of all the forbidden subjects in our house, the two
most
forbidden were the identification of Thomas’s and my biological father and our mother’s disfigurement. We had never asked about either—had somehow been raised not to ask and had honored the near-sacredness of the silence. Now Ma herself was breaking one of the two cardinal rules. I looked away, shocked, embarrassed, but Ma wouldn’t stop talking.

“One time,” she said, “a boy in my class, a mean boy named Harold Kettlety, started calling me ‘Rabbit Face.’ I hadn’t done anything to him. Not a thing. I never bothered anyone at all—I was scared of my own shadow. He just thought up that name one day and decided it was funny. ‘Hello there, Rabbit Face,’ he used to whisper to me across the aisle. After a while, some of the other boys took it up, too. They used to chase me at recess and call me ‘Rabbit Face.’ “