The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (84 page)

I sat there, pumping my leg up and down, wanting her to stop—wanting Harold Kettlety to still be a kid so I could find him and rip his fucking face off for him.

“And so I told the teacher, and she sent me to the principal. Mother Agnes, her name was. She was a stern thing.” Ma’s fingers twisted her pocketbook strap as she spoke. “She told me to stop making a mountain out of a molehill. I was making things worse, she said, by calling it to everyone’s attention. I should just ignore it. . . . Then more boys got on the bandwagon, even boys from other grades. It got so bad, I used to get the dry heaves before school every morning. You didn’t stay home sick in our house unless you had something like the measles or the chicken pox. That’s the last thing Papa would have stood for—me home all day long just because some stinker was calling me a name.”

I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice—to see the way she was twisting that pocketbook strap. If she kept
talking, she might break down and tell me everything. “I don’t see how any of this sob story stuff has anything to do with me,” I said. “Are you planning to get to the point before I die of old age?”

She shut up after that, silenced, I guess, by the fact that her own son had joined forces with Harold Kettlety. On the drive home from the optometrist’s, I chose to sit in the backseat and not speak to her. Somewhere en route, I drew my new glasses from their brown plastic clip-to-your-pocket case, rubbed the lenses with the silicone-impregnated cleaning cloth, and slipped them on. I looked out the window, privately dazzled by a world more sharp and clear than I remembered. I said nothing about this, spoke no apologies, offered no concessions.

“Ma’s
crying
downstairs,” Thomas informed me later, up in our bedroom. I was lifting weights, shirt off, glasses on.

“So what am
I
supposed to do about it?” I said. “Hold a snot rag to her nose?”

“Just try being decent to her,” he said. “She’s your
mother,
Dominick. Sometimes you treat her like s-h-i-t.”

I stared at myself in our bedroom mirror as I lifted the weights, studying the muscle definition I’d begun to acquire and which I could now see clearly, thanks to my glasses. “Why don’t you
say
the word instead of spelling it,” I smirked. “Go ahead. Say ‘shit.’ Give yourself a thrill.”

He’d been changing out of his school clothes as we spoke. Now he stood there, hands on his hips, wearing just his underpants, his socks, and one of those fake-turtleneck dickey things that were popular with all the goody-goody kids at our school. Thomas had them in four or five different colors. God, I hated those dickeys of his.

I looked at the two of us, side by side, in the mirror. Next to me, Thomas was a scrawny joke. Mr. Pep Squad Captain. Mr. Goody-Goody Boy.

“I
mean
it, Dominick,” he said. “You better treat her right or I’ll say something to Ray. I
will
. Don’t think I wouldn’t.”

Which was bullshit and we both knew it.

I grabbed my barbell wrench, banged extra weights onto the bar,
lifted them. Fink. Pansy Ass Dickey Boy. “Oh, geez, I’m nervous,” I told him. “I’m so scared, I’ll probably shit my p-a-n-t-s.”

He stood there, just like Ma, his look of indignation melting into forgiveness. “Just cool it, is all I’m saying, Dominick,” he said. “Oh, by the way, I like your glasses.”

When Ma came back down the stairs on that day of failed kitchen renovation, she was carrying a gray metal strongbox. I put down the picture album, stood, and walked toward her. “Here, honey,” she said. “This is for you. Phew, kind of heavy.”

“Ma, I
told
you I’d get it.” I took it from her. “What’s in it, anyways?”

“Open it and see,” she said.

She had masking-taped the key to the side of the box; I kidded her about it—told her it was a good thing she didn’t work for Fort Knox. She watched my fingers peel the key free, put it in the lock, and turn. In anticipation of my opening the strongbox, she didn’t even seem to hear my teasing.

Inside the box was a large manila envelope curled around a small coverless dictionary and held in place with an elastic band that broke as soon as I touched it. The envelope held a thick sheaf of paper—a manuscript of some kind. The first ten or fifteen pages were typewritten—originals and carbon copies. The rest had been written in longhand—a scrawling, ornate script in blue fountain-pen ink. “It’s Italian, right?” I asked. “What is it?”

“It’s my father’s life story,” she said. “He dictated it the summer he died.”

As I fanned through the thing, its mildewy aroma went up my nose. “Dictated it to who?” I asked her. “You?”

“Oh, gosh, no,” she said. Did I remember the Mastronunzios from church? Tootsie and Ida Mastronunzio? My mother was always doing that: assuming that my mental database of all the Italians in Three Rivers was as extensive as hers was.

“Uh-uh,” I said.

Sure I did, she insisted. They drove that big white car to Mass? Ida
worked at the dry cleaner’s? Walked with a little bit of a limp? Well, anyway, Tootsie had a cousin who came over from Italy right after the war. Angelo Nardi, his name was. He’d been a courtroom stenographer in Palermo. “He was a handsome fella, too—very dashing. He was looking for work.”

Her father had been saying for years how, someday, he was going to sit down and tell the story of his life for the benefit of
siciliani
. He thought boys and young men back in the Old Country would want to read about how one of their own had come to America and made good. Gotten ahead in life. Papa thought it might inspire them to do likewise. So when he met Tootsie’s cousin one day over at the Italian Club, he came up with a big idea. He would tell Angelo his story—have Angelo write it all down as he spoke and then type it up on the typewriter.

The project had begun as something of an extravaganza, according to my mother. “Careful with his money” his whole life, Papa now spared no expense at first on his inspirational autobiography. He cleared some of the furniture out of the parlor and rented a typewriter for Angelo. “Things were hunky-dory for the first couple of days,” Ma said. “But after that, there were problems.”

Papa decided he could not tell his story as freely with Angelo in the room—that he would be able to remember things better if he was by himself. “So the next thing you know, he was on the telephone with a bunch of office equipment companies—making all these long-distance calls, which I could hardly believe he was doing, Dominick, because he’d never even call his cousins down in Brooklyn to wish them a Merry Christmas or a Happy Easter.
They
always had to call
us
every year because Papa didn’t want to waste his money. But for that project of his, he called all over creation. He ended up renting this Dictaphone machine from some place all the way down in Bridgeport.” Ma shook her head, wonder-struck still. “Jeepers, you should have seen that contraption when it got here! I almost fell over the day they lugged that thing into the house.”

Two machines sat on rolling carts, she said—one for the person dictating, the other for the stenographer who would turn the
recorded sounds first into squiggles and then into typewritten words. They set it up in the front parlor and moved Angelo’s typewriter into the spare room. “Poor Angelo,” Ma said. “I don’t think he knew what he was getting himself into.”

Neither Angelo nor Papa could figure out how to run the Dictaphone at first, Ma said. They tried and tried. That whole day, Papa swore a blue streak! He finally made Angelo take the bus down to Bridgeport so that he could learn how to operate the foolish thing. “And here the poor guy could just barely speak English, Dominick. He’d just gotten over here from the Old Country. But anyway, when he came back again, he knew how to run it—how to make everything work.

“Every morning, Angelo would set things up—get everything ready—and then he’d have to leave Papa alone. That was the rule. Papa got so he wouldn’t dictate a word of it until he was alone. Angelo used to come out in the kitchen and wait. So I got to know him a little. He was a nice man, Dominick, and so
handsome
. I’d make him coffee and we’d talk about this and that—his life back in Palermo, his family. I used to help him a little with his English. He was smart, too; you’d explain something to him and he’d pick it up just like that. You could just tell he was going places.”

The Dictaphone had red plastic belts, Ma said; that was what the voice was recorded on, if she remembered right. Papa would stay in there for two or three hours at a time and then, when he was finished, he’d call Angelo and Angelo would have to go running. He’d wheel the cart into the back room where the typewriter was. Listen to whatever was recorded on the belts and take it down in shorthand. Then he’d type it up. “But my father hated the sound of typewriting, see? He didn’t want that clickety-clacking all over the house after he’d finished his end of things for the day. All that remembering made him cranky.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why didn’t he just dictate it to him directly?”

“I don’t know. He was just nervous, I guess.” She reached over and touched the manuscript—passed her fingers across her father’s
words. She herself didn’t dare to go anywhere near that parlor when Papa was speaking into the Dictaphone, she said. He was so serious about it. He probably would have shot her on sight!

Ma told me that the complicated system her father had devised —stenographer, Dictaphone, private rooms for dictator and dictatee—had worked for about a week and then that, too, had fallen apart. First of all, there had been a misunderstanding about the rental price for the recording equipment. Papa had thought he was paying eight dollars per week to rent the Dictaphone but then learned that he was being charged eight dollars a
day. Forty
dollars a week! “So he told the rental company where they could go, and he and Angelo wheeled the carts onto the front porch. Those machines were parked out there for two whole days before someone drove up from Bridgeport and picked them up. I was a nervous wreck with those contraptions just sitting out there. I couldn’t even sleep. What if it had rained? What if someone had come along and snitched them?

“But anyway, Papa went back to dictating his story directly to Angelo. But that didn’t go any better than it had the first time. Things got worse and worse. Papa started accusing Angelo of poking around in his business—asking him to clear up this thing or that thing when Papa had told him exactly as much as he wanted to tell him and nothing more. Oh, he could be a stubborn son of a gun, my father. He started accusing poor Angelo of changing around some of the things that he had said—of deliberately trying to portray my father in a bad light. Angelo got fed up, the poor guy. The two of them started fighting like cats and dogs.”

Somewhere in the middle of July, Papa fired Angelo, my mother said. Then, after a few days, he cooled down and rehired him. But the day after Angelo came back, Papa fired him all over again. When he tried to rehire him a second time, Angelo refused to come back again. “He moved away pretty soon after that,” she said. “Out west to the Chicago area. He wrote me one letter and I wrote back and then that was that. But after all that business with Angelo and the Dictaphone and everything—all that rigmarole—Papa finally just went up to the backyard and wrote the rest of his story himself.
He worked on it all the rest of that summer. He’d climb up the back stairs every morning, right after breakfast, unless it was raining or he didn’t feel well. He’d sit up there at his little metal table with his paper and his fountain pen. Writing away, all by his lonesome.”

I leafed again through the musty manuscript—those pages and pages of foreign words. “You ever read it?” I asked her.

She shook her head. We lost eye contact.

“Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Dominick. I peeked at it a couple of times, I guess. But I just never felt right about it. My Italian’s too rusty. You forget a lot of it if you don’t use it.”

We sat there, side by side on the couch, neither of us speaking. In less than a year, I thought, she’ll be dead.

“It’s funny, though,” she said. “It was kind of out of character for Papa to do something like that. Write things down. He’d always been so private about everything. Sometimes I’d ask him about the Old Country—about his mother and father or the village where he’d grown up—and he’d say, oh, he didn’t even remember that stuff anymore. Or he’d tell me Sicilians kept their eyes open and their mouths shut. . . . But then, that summer: he hired Angelo, rented that contraption. . . . Some mornings I’d hear him crying up there. Up in the backyard. Or speaking out loud—kind of arguing with himself about something. Papa had had a lot of tragedy in his life, see? Both his brothers who he came over here with had died young. And his wife. All he had was me, really. It was just the two of us.”

The first page of the manuscript was hand-lettered in blue fountain-pen ink, lots of flourishes and curlicues. “I can read his name,” I said. “What does the rest say?”

“Let’s see. It says, ‘The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from . . .”
Umile? Umile?
Humble! . . . ‘The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings.’ “

I had to smile. “He had a pretty good idea of himself, didn’t he?”

Her eyes brimmed with tears. “He was a wonderful man, Dominick.”

“Yeah, right. As long as you ate your eggs. And your cigarettes.”

Ma stroked the small, coverless dictionary. “I’ve been meaning to give you this stuff for a long time, honey,” she said. “You take it with you when you go. It’s for Thomas, too, if he ever wants to look at it, but I wanted to give it to you, especially, because you were the one who always used to ask about Papa.”

“I was?”

She nodded. “When you were little. See this dictionary? This is the one he used right after he came over from the Old Country—the one he learned his English from.”

I opened the tattered book. Its onionskin pages were stained with grease from his fingers. On one page, I covered his thumbprint with my thumb and considered for the first time that Papa might have been more than just old pictures—old, repeated stories.