The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (105 page)

When she asked me how Thomas was doing, I addressed their porch railing rather than look at her. “He’s all right,” I said. “He’s better.”

She told me that when she was a girl, a neighbor of hers back in Ohio had ripped out his own eye. For religious reasons, she said, same as my brother. She’d been sitting on the couch, reading a book, when she heard the man’s wife screaming. Later, she watched them lead him out the door and into an ambulance, a towel wrapped around his neck. What she always remembered was how calm he looked—how much at peace he was to have blinded himself like that. It was eerie, she said. They moved away shortly after that—the man and his wife and their two little girls. But Ruth said a month didn’t go by without her thinking about him. “And I was just his neighbor. So I can’t even imagine what
you’re
going through,” she said. “Well, I can and I can’t. What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry.”

I nodded.
Looked into her nervous, jumpy eyes. Compassion was the last thing I’d expected at this place.

Ruth asked me if I wanted to join her in a rye and ginger. They had beer, too, she said. Pabst Blue Ribbon, she was pretty sure. Or gin. Her body fidgeted with anticipation.

I begged off—invented some errands I had to run. I nodded over at the radio—the game. “So who’s your money on?” I said.

“Oh, I’m strictly a Cincinnati fan,” she said. “From
way
back. My father used to take my brother and me to Red Legs games when we were kids. How about you?”

“Yeah, Cincinnati, I guess. Now that Boston’s blown it as usual. If Clemens hadn’t had that little temper tantrum during the playoffs and gotten ejected, maybe the Sox would have been playing in the Series instead of the A’s. Personally, I can’t stand Oakland.”

“Me either,” she said. “José Canseco? Yecch.”

I nodded up at Rood’s office window. “So what’s he writing up there, anyway?” I said. “The Great American Novel?”

She shook her head. Nonfiction, she said. An exposé.

“Yeah? What’s he exposing? Housepainters?”

She smiled, fiddled with a blouse button. Even two and a half sheets to the wind, she was a nervous wreck. Henry had been writing this book for eleven years now, she told me. It was hard on him; it had taken its toll. She couldn’t really discuss the subject matter. It would upset Henry for her to talk about it.

It made me think of what Ma had told me about her father’s autobiography: how everything had been so hush-hush that summer when he wrote that thing. How he’d hired and fired a stenographer, rented a Dictaphone, and then finally retreated to the backyard and finished it himself.

I told Ruth Rood I’d see her in a couple of days—that by the time I was through, she and her husband would be
sick
of seeing me.

“Oh, I doubt that,” she said. On the radio, the crowd roared. The announcer’s voice went manic. Eric Davis had just clobbered a two-run homer off of Dave Stewart. “Yippee!” Mrs. Rood said, draining her rye and ginger.

With two down and one to go, I headed over to Hollyhock Avenue to see Ray. Started thinking about that goddamned goofy Nedra Frank. She’d
stolen
that manuscript of my grandfather’s, really. Cashed my check and disappeared. By now, she’d probably trashed the thing. It probably didn’t even exist.

I rolled slowly up Hollyhock Avenue, pulled in front of the house,
and cut the engine. Sat there, just looking up at it: the house that “Papa” had built. . . . The shrubs looked gawky and overgrown; the hedges needed a trim. It was unusual for Ray to let the yard go like that. Thomas used to say that Ray couldn’t sleep unless the hedges stood at attention and the front lawn had a crewcut as short as his. The garbage barrels were out front, too—emptied the day before and still waiting to be brought around to the back. It had always been another of Ray’s pet peeves: people who didn’t bother putting away their trash barrels. We used to hear
lectures
on the subject.

I got out of the truck. Walked right by those friggin’ garbage cans and up the flight of cement stairs to the front of the family duplex. Home Sweet Home, aka the House of Horrors. The statute of limitations was long since up on most of the crap Ray had pulled on us while we were growing up, but being back at 68 Hollyhock Avenue always made me feel pissed and small. Ten years old again, and powerless.

It was funny, kind of—the way things had worked out. Ma was gone, I owned the condo now over on Hillyndale. Over the past several years, Thomas had lived either at the hospital or in the group home, not here. The only one left at the house old Domenico Tempesta had built for his family was Ray Birdsey, a WASP from Youngstown, Ohio. No Tempesta blood in residence. No Italian blood, even. Ray hadn’t wanted to rent the other side of the duplex after Little Sal, the last of the Tusia family, moved to Arizona where his daughter lived. “Why don’t
you
move back in?” he asked me, after Dessa’s and my divorce. “Save yourself a mortgage payment. You and him own half this place, anyway. After I kick the bucket, the whole thing’ll be yours.”

It would have been a smart move financially and a kind of emotional suicide. So I bought the condo instead, and the other side of the duplex on Hollyhock Avenue stayed empty. When I asked him once about renting it, Ray said he didn’t need the extra income. “Yeah, well maybe
you
don’t,” I told him, “but I can’t afford to turn my nose up at half of a $700-a-month rental income.” Rather than rent, Ray went down to the Liberty Bank and took out a savings
account with Thomas and me as beneficiaries. Each month, he deposited $350 into it. It was worth it, he told me. You never knew who you might get stuck with. His buddy Nickerson down at the Boat had rented his upstairs to a bunch of pigs he couldn’t get rid of, no matter what he did. Ray didn’t need that kind of grief. So he paid into that account each month and lived by himself in Domenico Tempesta’s sprawling, sixteen-room, two-family house.

Rather than knock, I let myself in with my key.
La chiave,
I thought
.
I walked through the house, front to back. I hadn’t been over there for a while. The rooms looked cluttered, everything in neat piles but nothing put away. Tools, stacks of old newspapers, and a half-completed jigsaw puzzle littered the dining room table. The rugs felt gritty under my work boots. In the kitchen, the heavy stink of fried food hung in the air. Dishes and pans and cups were clean and stacked on the counter, but Ray hadn’t bothered to put anything back in the cabinets. Lined up on the table were his blood pressure and diabetes medications, a stack of
Reader’s Digest
s, and two piles of mail held together with elastic bands. That day’s
Daily Record
was folded in quarters, heads up to the article about Thomas’s committal to Hatch.

So Ray knew already. That much was over with.

I found him in the back bedroom, tangled up in his blanket, snoring away in the semidarkness. He’d begun sleeping downstairs after Ma died. His official reason was that there’d been a prowler in the neighborhood—someone had jimmied open the Anthonys’ cellar door across the street. But I was pretty sure that wasn’t really it. After Dessa left me, one of the toughest things I had to get used to was her empty side of the bed. I’d find myself falling asleep down on the couch in front of the TV just so’s I wouldn’t have to go upstairs and deal with that empty space. Not that it was something you could have ever talked about with Ray. He had to sleep downstairs with a crowbar under the bed so he could fend off burglars. Be a tough guy instead of facing whatever he was feeling about the death of his wife.

If Ray was sleeping days, then the shipyard must have him work
ing nights again. You had to hand it to him, really. Sixty-seven years old and the guy’s still working like a plowhorse. I stood there, staring at him. The midafternoon sun came through the open blinds, striping his face with light. With his mouth open and his teeth out, he looked older. Old. His hair was more white than gray now. When had all this happened?

Growing up, I had wished my stepfather dead so often, it was practically a hobby. I’d killed him over and over in my mind—driven him off cliffs, electrocuted him in the bathtub, shot him dead in hunting accidents. He’d said and done things that
still
weren’t scabbed over. Had made this place a house of fear. Still, seeing him like this—white-haired and vulnerable, a snoring corpse—I was filled with an unexpected sympathy for the guy.

Which I didn’t want to feel. Which I shook off.

I went back into the kitchen. Found a piece of paper and wrote him a note about Thomas. I explained what Sheffer had said about the fifteen-day paper, the security check they had to run on visitors, the upcoming hearing in front of that Review Board. “Call me if you have any questions,” I scrawled at the bottom. But my guess was that he wouldn’t call. My guess was that Ray had already walked away from this one.

On the way back out to the truck, I passed those garbage pails again. Then I stopped. Grabbed one handle in each hand and walked them up the front stairs and around to the backyard. Saved him a trip.

Our old backyard . . .

I put the cans down and walked past the two cement urns where Ma had always grown her parsley and basil. Fresh basil. God, I loved the smell of that stuff—the way it perfumed your fingers for the rest of the day. . . .
Dominick? Do me a favor, honey? Go out back and pick me some
basilico
. Half a dozen leaves or so. I want to put some in the sauce. . . .

I walked up the six cement stairs to “Papa’s little piece of the Old Country.” That’s what she always called it. According to Ma, Papa had loved to sit out here among his grapes and chicken coops
and tomato and pepper plants—to sit in the sun and sip his homemade wine and remember Sicily. . . . Maybe that was why she’d heard him crying that last day as he sat up here, finishing his history. Maybe, at the end of his life, the “Great Man from Humble Beginnings” had wept for Sicily.

I remembered the way Thomas and I had played up here as kids. Saw us pogo-sticking around the yard, staging massacres with our plastic cowboys and Indians, chasing garter snakes into the stone wall. Every June, when the honeysuckle bush blossomed, we’d suck nectar from the blossoms. One small drop of elixir on your tongue per flower—that was all you got.

I walked over to the picnic table Ray and I had built one summer. The seat had rotted at one end. I ought to come over some morning and just haul the thing away to the dump for him. Maybe next spring I’d get over here and plant a garden—work the soil, bring this old yard back from the dead. Ray had let this go, too; I’d never seen the backyard so overgrown. The grapevines were all but choked off with weeds. The dead grass was knee-high. Probably hadn’t been mowed once all summer. Probably
loaded
with ticks. What was the deal on Ray? . . .

I thought about what Ma had told me that time—the day she’d gone upstairs and come down again with that strongbox. With Papa’s story. She’d come out here with his lunch, she told me. Had found him slumped in the chair. . . . And while she waited for help—waited for the ambulance to get here—she’d gone around picking up the pages of his life story. . . . One of these days, I was going to pursue it: find that bitch Nedra. Get my grandfather’s story back if she hadn’t already destroyed it. She’d told me her ex-husband was a honcho down at the state hospital. Maybe I could track her down through him. He probably had to send alimony someplace, right? And if that didn’t pan out, maybe I’d go see Jerry Martineau over at the police station. Because it was
theft,
what she’d pulled, not to mention breach of contract. . . .

The summer the Old Man had died up here was the same summer Ma was pregnant with Thomas and me. Pregnant by a guy
whose name I was probably
never
going to know. And what about him? Had
he
known about
us
? Why had she kept him from us? Whose son was I?

And who, for that matter, had Papa been? In my mind, I saw and felt again those legal-sized pages I had lifted out of the strongbox that morning: the first fifteen or twenty typed and duplicated with carbon paper, the rest of it written in that sprawling fountain-pen script. She’d saved her father’s history for
me,
she said. Thomas could look at it, too, but Papa’s story was mine. . . . And I saw Nedra Frank’s Yugo sliding diagonally down the street in the middle of that snowstorm. Saw her driving away for good. Talk about shitty luck, getting mixed up with that one. Talk about “losing something in the translation.”

Once all this Hatch stuff was over with, I’d track her down, even if Martineau couldn’t do anything for me. Even if I had to hire a freakin’ private detective. Because when you thought about it, she’d
stolen
my grandfather from me. It was a theft that went way beyond the lousy four hundred bucks I’d advanced her. . . . And maybe I’d try to find out about that stenographer, too. That Angelo guy who’d worked here that summer. Ma had said he was cousins with the Mastronunzio family. I knew a Dave Mastronunzio at Allied Plumbers. Maybe I’d start with him. Start somewhere. Maybe.

Maybe not.