The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (160 page)

“Ah, yes,” she said, breaking out in a smile. “You liked my little gift?”

“I did, yeah. I
do
. I was going to write you a thank-you note about fifty times.”

“Well, now you’ve thanked me in person,” she said. “Which is even better, don’t you think? Have a seat, please.” Placing the tea tray between us, she sat down herself. “Let’s let this steep while we catch up.”

She’d been reviewing my records, she said. Our last session had been on the twenty-second of October. We had never discussed ending our work together, she reminded me. I had seen her three times, canceled two appointments in a row, and then just not called anymore. If our work were to resume, she said, she would expect more of a commitment from me.

“A commitment?” I shifted in my chair. “Geez, you’re not asking me to go steady, are you?”

She didn’t crack a smile. Perhaps, she said, we could meet weekly for four sessions and then decide
jointly
whether or not we wished to continue the process.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. No problem.” What was she going to do if I didn’t honor my “commitment”? Sic the bloodhounds? Alert the psychology police?

She removed the teapot lid and peered inside. “Not quite ready yet,” she said.

We just sat there, Dr. Patel smiling, watching me lace and unlace my fingers, shift around in my seat. “I’ve . . . I’ve got him up on my bookcase.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your little statue guy. I put him in the room where I read. . . . That’s
one
thing you get to do when you fall off a roof and put yourself out of commission: catch up on your reading.”

“Is it? I’m envious then. What have you been reading, Dominick?”

“The Bible, for one thing.”

“Yes?” She looked neither pleased nor displeased.

“I . . . well, it was kind of an accident, really. I was trying to poke something else down from the top shelf with one of my crutches.
Sho-gun,
I think it was
.
James Clavell. Thought I’d read that one again. But then I knocked this whole stack down on top of me, instead—this little avalanche of books. And there it was. Didn’t even know I still
had
that damn thing. My mother had given it to me for my confirmation, way back in sixth grade. Thomas and me—we each got one. Mine’s in a little better shape than his.”

She smiled. “Which passages are you reading? The Old Testament or the New?”

“Old.”

“Ah, the ancient stories. And are you finding them illuminating? Was your ‘little avalanche’ fortuitous?”

Was she busting my balls? Getting in a couple of jabs because of those canceled appointments? “I guess . . . I guess I can see why some people find them useful.”

She nodded. “But I’m asking if
you
’
ve
found them useful.”

“Me? Personally, you mean? No, not really. I guess I’m more interested in them from a historical perspective. Or, sociological or whatever. . . . Well, in a way, maybe. The Book of Job: I could relate to
that
one.”

“Job? Yes? Why is that?”

I shrugged, shifted around in my seat for the zillionth time. “I don’t know. Guy’s just minding his own business, trying to do what’s right, and he gets crapped all over. Becomes God’s little test case.”

“Is that how
you
feel? As if you are ‘God’s little test case’?”

I reminded her that I didn’t believe in God.

“Then perhaps you can clarify for me why you—”

“
Fate’s
test case, maybe. Schizophrenic brother, dead baby daughter, girlfriend who . . . But, hey, shit happens, right?”

“It does, yes,” she agreed. “Sometimes irrespective of how we are conducting our lives, and sometimes not. What other Old Testament stories have you found relevant?”

I shrugged. “Look, don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not like the Bible fell off the bookshelf, struck me upside the head, and now, suddenly, I’m ‘born again’ or something. Gonna go down to the library and cut my hand off for Jesus.”

She waited.

“But, uh . . . well, there’s the obvious one, I guess: Cain and Abel. God creates the universe, Adam and Eve crank out a couple of kids, and
voilà.
Sibling rivalry. One brother murders the other brother.”

“Yes? Continue, please.”

“What? I . . . It was just a
joke
.”

“Yes, I understand your tone. But explain a little further, if you will.”

“I didn’t mean anything
deep
. Just . . . brother troubles.”

She waited. Wouldn’t look away.

“I just . . . Well, I could understand why the guy was pissed. That’s all.”

“Why who was pissed?”

“
Cain.
”

“Yes? And why was he pissed?”

“Hey,
you’re
the one with the anthropology degree. Not me.”

“And
you’re
the one who mentioned the Old Testament. Correct? Answer my question, please.”

“Hey, Doc, I ever tell you how much I like your accent? ‘Onswer the question, please.’ ‘Why was he peesed?’ “ No smile, nothing. I drummed my fingers against my knees. Let out a sigh. “I don’t know. He just . . . he does his work, makes his offering like everyone else, and . . . and the only sacrifice God notices is his brother’s. It’s just typical.”

“What is?”

“That all the credit goes to Mr.Goody Two-shoes. And what does the other one get? A big lecture about sin ‘crouching at the door.’ Like sin’s the Big Bad Wolf or something. . . . That reminds me. I looked at a couple of those books
you
recommended. Those myth things, or fable things, or whatever. Remember? You made me a list?”

Yes, she said. She remembered.

“Someone went and got them out of the library for me. My ex-wife, actually. The Three Rivers library didn’t have them, but she got them through interlibrary loan.”

“Dessa’s been helping you then?”

Had she remembered Dessa’s name or looked it up before I got there? “She, uh . . . she brought over a couple of meals, ran a few errands.” I wrapped my arms around my chest. I’d read somewhere that that was an instinct left over from caveman days: protect your heart. “Everyone’s been pitching in. Even Ray.”

“Your stepfather? Yes?”

“Well, he, uh . . . he’s had more time on his hands. Got laid off in December. Happy holidays from the big guys down at Electric Boat. He gives that company almost forty years of his life and then, just before his pension maxes out, they hand him his walking papers. They keep promising they’re going to call the old guys back, but they won’t.”

Dr. Patel nodded sympathetically.

“So anyway, he’s had more time lately. Drove me back and forth to the doctor’s the first couple of months, down to physical therapy. I even had him doing my grocery shopping for a while there. Before I started driving again. Kind of funny, isn’t it?”

“What is funny, Dominick?”

“Well, if you’d told me a year ago that Ray Birdsey was going to be my chauffeur, my personal errand boy . . .” I stood up. Walked back over to the window.

“I find your terminology interesting,” Dr. Patel said.

I turned and faced her. “What do you mean?”

“Your comment just now about Ray. By helping you during your time of need, has he been serving as your ‘personal errand boy’ or as your father? Despite his past failures, I mean. Despite biology. Fathers do that, yes? Come to their sons’ aid in times of need?”

She checked the tea again, pronounced it ready. You had to watch Doc Patel—had to put up your dukes even before the tea was poured. In a couple of months, I’d kind of forgotten how to play D with her.

“Tell me,” she said. “Which of the books that I recommended did you read?”

“Oh, well, I didn’t . . . I just kind of skimmed them. That
Hero with a Thousand Faces
thing and . . . what’s that one by the guy you studied with in Chicago?”

“Dr. Bettelheim?”

“Yeah. That Freud-meets-Little-Red-Riding-Hood thing of his.”

She laughed. “Otherwise known as
The Uses of Enchantment.
And did you discover any?”

“Any . . . ?”

“Uses for enchantment?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Cinderella’s lost slipper’s really about castration anxiety; the beanstalk Jack’s climbing up is really his Oedipus complex. It was kind of interesting, I guess, but . . .”

“But what?” She was watching me with mischievous eyes. Had I actually
committed
to four more sessions, or had we just talked about it?

“I guess . . . I think maybe we ought to just let fairy tales be fairy tales, you know? Instead of turning them into these deep, dark . . . performing all these psychological
autopsies
on them. You know?” I sat
there, not looking at her, picking away at a loose thread on my sweatshirt.

Dr. Patel told me she used to tease Dr. Bettelheim about that same thing. “I would say, ‘Be careful, Bruno, or the magical little imps nestled in these ancient tales will become frightened and retreat back to the forest of antiquity.’ But, of course, I could say that to him because I had such high regard for his work. It freed me to play the imp myself, you see.”

I shrugged, sipped some tea. “Yeah, well, you and me probably read that book of his on two entirely different levels. . . . It was interesting, though. Thanks.”

She asked no further questions, made no observation. Just watched me sit there, unraveling the end of my sweatshirt sleeve.

“You, uh . . . you know what I started reading this morning? Speaking of autopsies? This thing my grandfather wrote. My mother’s father.”

“Yes? Your grandfather was an author, Dominick?”

“Huh? Oh, no. . . . This was just some private thing. His personal history, or whatever. We never knew him, Thomas and me—he died before we were even born. But, he, uh . . . he dictated this whole big long thing—his life story—how he came over here from Italy, etcetera, etcetera. Well, dictated part of it, I guess, and wrote the rest of it. Rented one of those Dictaphone things, hired a stenographer. This Italian guy who’d come over after the war. He’d worked in the courts or something.”

Angelo Nardi, I thought: my chief suspect in the case of the missing father. Not that I was going to get into my theory with Doc Patel.

“He, uh . . . he died right after he finished it, I guess. According to my mother. He was up in the backyard, reading it over, and when Ma went outside to check on him, he was just sitting there, his mouth gaping open—dead, from a stroke. She said the manuscript pages were blowing all over the yard. . . . Life’s a bitch, right? Works all summer long on that thing and then just keels over.”

“What you’re reading is a transcription of your grandfather’s oral history, then?”

“Yeah, partly. Oral
and
written. I remember my mother said he fired the stenographer about halfway through. Wrote the rest himself. It was all in Italian; I had it translated. . . . It’s part oral history, part written, and about seventy-five percent bullshit.”

She asked me what I meant by that.

“Oh. I don’t know. . . . He had a pretty good idea of himself.”

“Explain, please?”

“It’s . . . well, the whole thing—what I read so far, anyway—it keeps going on and on about how
great
he is. Compared to everyone else in his village, compared to his two brothers. . . . I didn’t even know this thing existed until, maybe, four or five months before my mother died. I went over there to visit her one afternoon and she just gives it to me, out of the blue. This big, bulky thing she’d been keeping in a strongbox. It’s over a hundred pages. . . . She was pretty sick by then—that day she gave it to me. She said I could share it with Thomas—that he could read it if he wanted to—but it was
me
she wanted to give it to.”

“Her father’s story? Why you?”

“I don’t know, really. I didn’t ask her. . . . ‘The Story of a Great Man from Humble Beginnings.’ I got this big idea that I was going to have it translated for her. Give it to her as a present. Have it translated and bound into a book, or whatever, so that, you know, she could read her father’s history before she died.”

“She had never read it?”

“No. She said she knew some Sicilian, but not enough to read it page by page. But anyway, I got this big idea. Hired a translator and everything.”

“What a lovely gesture,” Dr. Patel said. “Your mother must have been very pleased to receive her gift.”

“She
didn’t
receive it. The translation took much longer than I figured it would. And then she got worse. She went downhill pretty fast near the end. . . . And then the damn thing got lost.”

“Lost? The manuscript?”

“Well, not lost, exactly. It’s a long story.” I was damned if I was going to get into Nedra Frank with her—the way she’d suddenly
reappeared in her cowgirl outfit, at the foot of my hospital bed, like one of my morphine nightmares.
Thunk!
She’d practically
aimed
Domenico’s goddamned manuscript at my busted foot.

“Just as well, though,” I said. “That Ma never read it. Now that I’m finally getting around to reading the thing myself, I don’t think I would have given it to her anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Because . . . well, for one thing, he bad-mouthed her pretty bad in it.”

“Your mother? Why do you—?”

“Right in the middle of dictating his big life story? Talking about what a great man he is—how all the ‘sons of Italy’ should follow his example? He starts crabbing about what a nuisance she is. Calls her ‘rabbit-face.’ ‘Cracked jug.’ Says how she’s so homely, she can’t get a husband. Can’t give him any grandchildren the way she’s supposed to. . . . Rabbit-face: what did he think? That she
wanted
to be born with that cleft lip? That it was her
fault
or something? . . . And the pitiful thing is, she
worshipped
the guy. When we were kids? Thomas and me? It was always, ‘Papa said this, Papa did that.’ . . . I don’t know. I’m
glad
she never read it, actually. It just would have hurt her feelings, reading that shit.”

“Dominick?”

“Hmm?”

“You seem very tense. Why do you think—?”

“You know what his whole reason for writing it was? Did I tell you that? So that young Italian boys could read about him and get . . .
inspired
or whatever. You can just tell what a pompous asshole he was. Keeps going on and on about how ‘special’ he is. What a martyr he is because of what he’s had to put up with from everyone who’s less perfect than he is.”