I Know This Much Is True (6 page)

“
La chiave,
” I repeated, and dropped the key into my pocket.

That night, I awoke from a sound sleep with the idea: the perfect gift for my dying mother. It was so simple and right that its obviousness had eluded me until 2:00 A.M. I’d have her father’s life story translated, printed, and bound for her to read.

I drove up to the university and found the Department of Romance Languages office tucked into the top floor of a stone building dwarfed by two massive, leafless beech trees. The secretary drew up a list of possibilities for me to try. After an hour’s worth of false leads and locked doors, I walked the narrow steps to a half-landing and knocked at the office door of Nedra Frank, the last person on my list.

She looked about forty, but it’s hard to tell with those hair-yanked-back, glasses-on-a-chain types. As she leafed through my grandfather’s pages, I checked out her breasts (nice ones), the mole on her neck, her gnawed-down cuticles. She shared the office with another grad student; her sloppy desk and his neat one were a study in opposites.

“Some of this is written in standard Italian,” she said. “And some I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 31

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of it’s . . . it looks like peasant Sicilian. What was he—schizo or something?”

Okay, bitch, thanks anyway. Give it the fuck back to me and I’ll be on my way.

“I’m a scholar,” she said, looking up. She handed me back the manuscript. “What you’re asking me to do is roughly the same as trying to commission a serious artist to paint you something that goes with the sofa and drapes.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.” Already, I’d begun backing out of her low-ceilinged office—a glorified closet, really, and not all that glorified.

She sighed. “Let me see it again.” I handed it back and she scanned several pages, frowning. “The typed pages are single-spaced,” she said.

“That’s twice as much work.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

“The penmanship’s legible, at least. . . . I could do the handwritten material for eight dollars a page. I’d have to charge sixteen for the typed ones. More on the ones where explanatory footnotes were necessary.”

“How much more?”

“Oh, let’s say five dollars per footnote. I mean, fair is fair, right?

If I’m actually
generating
text instead of just translating and interpreting, I should be paid more. Shouldn’t I?”

I nodded. Did the math in my head. Somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand bucks
without
the footnotes. More than I thought it would be, but a lot less than a kitchen renovation. “Are you saying you’ll do it then?”

She sighed, kept me waiting for several seconds. “All right,” she finally said. “To be perfectly honest, I have no interest in the project, but I need money for my car. Can you believe it? A year and a half old and the tranny’s already got problems.”

It struck me funny: this Marian the Librarian using gearhead lingo. “Why are you smiling?” she asked.

I shrugged. “No reason, really. What kind of car is it?”

“A Yugo,” she said. “I suppose
that’s
funny, too?”

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Nedra Frank told me she wanted four hundred dollars up front and estimated the translation would take her a month or two to complete, given her schedule, which she described as “oppressive.”

Her detachment annoyed me; she had looked twice at her wall clock as I spoke of my grandfather’s accomplishments, my mother’s lym-phoma. I wrote her a check, worrying that she might summarize or skip pages—shortchange me in spite of what she was charging. I left her office feeling vulnerable—subject to her abbreviations and interpretations, her sourpuss way of seeing the world. Still, the project was under way.

I called her several times over the next few weeks, wanting to check her progress or to see if she had any questions. But all I ever got was an unanswered ring.

Whenever my mother underwent her chemotherapy and radiation treatments at Yale–New Haven, Ray drove her down there, kept her company, ate his meals in the cafeteria downstairs, and catnapped in the chair beside her bed. By early evening, he’d get back on the road, driving north on I-95 in time for his shift at Electric Boat. When I suggested that maybe he was taking on too much, he shrugged and asked me what the hell else he was supposed to do.

Did he want to talk about it?

What was there to talk about?

Was there anything I could do for him?

I should worry about my mother, not him. He could take care of himself.

I tried to make it down to New Haven two or three times a week. I brought Thomas with me when I could, usually on Sundays. It was hard to gauge how well or poorly Thomas was handling Ma’s dying. As was usually the case with him, the pendulum swung irregularly. Sometimes he seemed resigned and accepting. “It’s God’s will,” he’d sigh, echoing Ma herself. “We have to be strong for each other.” Sometimes he’d sob and pound his fists on my dashboard. At other times, he was pumped up with hope. “I
know
she’s going to beat this thing,” he told me one afternoon over I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 33

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the phone. “I’m praying every day to Saint Agatha.”

“Saint who?” I said, immediately sorry I’d asked.

“Saint Agatha,” he repeated. “The patron saint invoked against fire and volcanoes and cancer.” He rambled on and on about his stupid saint: a virgin whose jilted suitor had had her breasts severed, her body burned at the stake. Agatha had stopped the eruption of a volcano, had died a Bride of Christ, blah blah blah.

One morning at 6:00 A.M., Thomas woke me up with the theory that the Special K our mother ate for breakfast every day had been deliberately impregnated with carcinogens. The Kellogg’s Cereal Company was secretly owned by the Soviets, he said. “They target the relatives of the people they’re
really
after. I’m on their hit list because I do God’s bidding.” Now that he was on to them, he said, he was considering exposing Kellogg’s—rubbing it right in their corporate face. He would probably end up as
Time
magazine’s Man of the Year and have to go into hiding. Stalkers followed famous people. Look what had happened to poor John Lennon. Did I remember the song “Instant Karma”? John had written it specifically for him, to encourage him to do good in the world after he’d gone.

“Listen!” my brother said. “It’s so obvious, it’s pathetic!” He broke out into a combination of song and shouting.

Instant karma’s gonna get you—gonna look you right in the FACE

You better recognize your BROTHER and join the HUMAN RACE!

One Sunday afternoon when Thomas and I drove down to visit Ma, her bed was empty. We found her in the solarium, illuminated by a column of sun coming through the skylight, sitting by herself among clusters of other people’s visitors. By then, the chemo had stained her skin and turned her hair to duck fluff—had given her, once again, the singed look she’d had that day she emerged from the burning parlor on Hollyhock Avenue. Somehow, bald and shrunken in her quilted pink robe, she looked beautiful to me.

Thomas sat slumped and uncommunicative through that whole I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 34

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visit. He had wanted me to stop at McDonald’s on the way down and I’d told him no—that maybe we could go there on the ride back. In the solarium, he pouted and stared trancelike at the TV and ignored Ma’s questions and efforts at conversation. He refused to take off his coat. He wouldn’t stop checking his watch.

I was angry by the time we left, angrier still when, during the drive home, he interrupted my speech about his selfishness to ask if we were still going to McDonald’s. “Don’t you get it, asshole?” I shouted. “Don’t you even come up for air when your own goddamned mother’s dying?” He undid his seatbelt and climbed over the front seat. Squatting on the backseat floor, he assumed a modified version of the old duck-and-cover.

I pulled the car into the breakdown lane, threw her into neutral, and told him to get the fuck back in front—that I was sick and tired of
his
bullshit, fed up with
his
crap on top of everything else I was trying to juggle. When he refused to get up, I yanked him up and out of the car. He pulled free and bolted, running across the interstate without even looking. Horns wailed, cars swerved wildly. Don’t ask me how he made it across. And by the time I got across the highway myself, Thomas had disappeared. I ran, panic-stricken, through woods and yards, imagining the ugly thump of impact, Thomas ripped in half, his blood splattered all over the road.

I found him lying in the tall grass at the side of the highway about a quarter of a mile up from where the car was. His eyes were closed, his mouth smiling up at the sun. When I helped him up, the grass was dented in the shape of his body. Like a visual aid at a crime scene.

Like one of those angels he and I used to make in new snow.

. . . Back in the car, I gripped the wheel to steady my hands and tried not to hear and see those cars that had swerved out of his way. In Madison, I pulled into a McDonald’s and got him a large fries, a Quarter Pounder with cheese, a strawberry shake. If he was not exactly happy for the rest of the trip, he was at least quiet and full.

That evening, Nedra Frank picked up on the first ring.

“I know you’re busy,” I said. I told her what Ray had just called I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 35

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and told me: that my mother’s condition had gotten worse.

“I’m working on it right now, as a matter of fact,” she said. “I’ve decided to leave some of the Italian words and phrases intact to give you some sense of the music.”

“The music?”

“Italian is such a musical language. I didn’t want to translate the manuscript to death. But you’ll recognize the words I’ve left untouched—either contextually or phonetically. Or both. And some of the proverbs he uses are virtually untranslatable. I’ve left them in whole but provided parenthetical notations—approximations. Now, I’m preserving very little of the Sicilian, on the assumption that one
weeds
the garden. Right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever. It’s the
English
I’m more interested in, anyway.” She sure didn’t have a whole lot of use for Sicily. “So . . .

what’s he like?” I asked.

There was a pause. “What’s he
like
?”

“Yeah. I mean, you know the guy better than I do at this point.

I’m just curious. Do you like him?”

“A translator’s position should be an objective one. An emotional reaction might get in the way of—”

The day had been brutal. I had no patience with her scholarly detachment. “Well, just this once, treat yourself to an emotional reaction,” I said. “For my sake.”

There was dead air on the other end for the next several seconds.

Then I got what I had asked for. “I don’t like him, actually, no. Far from it. He’s pompous, misogynistic. He’s horrible, really.”

Now the silence was coming from my end.

“You
see
?” she said. “Now you’re offended. I
knew
I shouldn’t have relinquished my objectivity.”

“I’m not offended,” I said. “I’m just impatient. I just want it to get done before she’s too sick to enjoy it.”

“Well, I’m doing the best I can. I told you about my schedule.

And anyway, I think you’d better read it first before you decide to share it with her. If I were you, I wouldn’t talk it up just yet.”

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Now her lack of objectivity
was
pissing me off. What right did she have to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do? Screw you, I wanted to tell her. You’re just the translator.

Ma’s third round of chemo made her too sick to eat. In February, she landed back in the hospital weighing in at ninety-four pounds and looking like an ad for famine relief. By then, I’d stopped bringing Thomas to see her. The incident on the highway had scared me shitless, had kept me up more nights than one.

“This may jab a little going in, sweetie pie,” the nurse said, her intravenous needle poised in front of my mother’s pale face.

Ma managed a nod, a weak smile.

“I’m having a little trouble locating a good vein on you. Let’s try it again, okay? You ready, sweetheart?”

The insertion was a failure. The next one, too. “I’m going to try one more time,” she said. “And if that doesn’t work, I’m going to have to call my supervisor.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I mumbled. Walked over to the window.

The nurse turned toward me, red-faced. “Would you rather step outside until we’re finished?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’d rather you stopped treating her like she’s a friggin’ pincushion. And as long as you’re asking, I’d just as soon you stop calling her ‘honey’ and ‘sweetie pie’ like we’re all on fucking
Sesame Street
or something.”

Ma began to cry—over my behavior, not her own pain. I’ve got this talent for making bad situations worse. “Later, Ma,” I said, grabbing my jacket. “I’ll call you.”

Late that same afternoon, I was standing at the picture window in my apartment, watching unpredicted snow fall, when Nedra Frank pulled up unexpectedly in her orange Yugo, hopping the curb and coming to a sliding stop. She’d parked half on the sidewalk, half in the road.

“Come in, come in,” I said. She was wearing a down vest, sweatshirt, denim skirt, sneakers—clothes I never would have predicted.

She carried a bulging briefcase.

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“So it’s finished?”

“What?” Her eyes followed mine to the briefcase. “Oh,
no,
” she said. “This is my doctoral thesis. The apartment house where I live was broken into last week, so I’m carrying this wherever I go. But I’m working on your project. It’s coming along.” She asked me nothing about my mother’s condition.