needle wouldn’t hurt but it
did
hurt. When I cried, Ray squeezed my arm
and said, “What’s the matter with you? Are you a tough guy or a sissy?”
When Thomas and I both cry, Ray says, “Wah, wah, wah, it’s the little
sissy girls.” That makes us cry more.
Ma says last night Thomas got the shakes so bad that his teeth chattered. “Show me!” I said and she made her teeth go click click click. Thomas
gets to drink all the ginger ale he wants AND there’s a bowl of Jell-O
downstairs in the refrigerator that’s only for him, not me. When I go
downstairs, I’m going to lick it. My Thomas is a bad, bad boy.
When you’re big, you don’t
have
to take naps. You can stay up late and
watch the Friday night fights and drink highballs. When I’m big, I’m
going to fill up the whole bathtub with ginger ale and jump in and drink
it and not even get sick.
When Ma was a little girl, she got scarlet fever like Thomas. She had
to stay in bed all day long and bang a pot on the wall for Mrs. Tusia next
door if she needed help because her father was sleeping. . . . Little boys
and girls used to die from scarlet fever, Ma says. Or they got better but
grew weak hearts.
I’m not supposed to get off this bed until after my nap. If I get up, Ma is
going to tell Ray. Naps make me mad. They’re dumb. I’m rolling and rolling
up in my bedspread. I’m a hot dog and my blanket is a hot dog bun. . . . Now
I stand up and my bed’s a GIANT TRAMPOLINE! I jump! And jump!
All the way up to Heaven where Mrs.Tusia lives. . . . She died. She was old.
Some men came and carried her down the steps and drove her away. But I
won’t let those men take my Thomas. I’ll shoot them. Pow! Pow! Pow! Ma
says Thomas can come out of the spare room in one week, but I don’t know
when that is. I think maybe he’s dead.The man on Ma’s opera records is dead
and he can sing. “Ladies and gentlemen, Enrico Caruso!” They used to be
Papa’s records. Papa is in Heaven, too.
Why
can’t
I see Thomas? Why
can’t
I touch the drawings he’s touched?
This nap is making me hot. And thirsty, too. I’m thirsty for some ice cold
Canada Dry ginger ale.
“Ma! . . . Ma-aa?”
“What?”
“Can I get up now?”
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“After your nap. Now go to sleep!”
The brown stain on the ceiling turns into that monster. It’s going to
come alive and fly down the hallway and bang the door down and eat my
brother. Unless I shoot it.
My bedroom rug is a giant lake. The flowers in it are stones. They
lead to the edge. . . . I can make it. I
do
make it.
I’m at the doorway. Sometimes Ma
says
she’s going to tell Ray when
I’m bad and then she doesn’t tell him. The hallway is a boiling river. You
can’t swim in it. You have to fly over it in your airplane, the Song Bird.
“Hang on, Thomas. I will save you!” I’m Sky King. This isn’t my hand;
it’s my radio.
I fly the Song Bird over the boiling river to Thomas’s door. Stare at it.
Listen.
I put my fingers on the big diamond doorknob. It twists, clicks open. I
enter the room. . . .
It’s dark in here. The shades are pulled down. It smells bad. The fan
from Ma and Ray’s room is in the window, blowing a breeze. I walk over
to the bed. Stare at my Thomas. I say his name over the whirr of the fan.
“Thomas? Thomas Birdsey! . . . THOMAS JOSEPH BIRDSEY!”
Thomas’s mouth is closed. I want to see his strawberry tongue. Is he
asleep or dead? . . .
He sighs.
I move closer. His shirt is off. I see the bones beneath his skin. His
hands are raised above his head, palms out, as if some cowboy had said,
“Stick ’em up!” and then shot him anyway.
Chattering teeth, a strawberry tongue. . . . Suddenly, I know something I never knew before. Thomas and I are not one person. There are
two of us.
I move closer, bend down to his ear, and whisper my name.
He twitches. Swats at the sound.
“Dominick!”
We are different people.
Thomas is sick and I am not.
He’s asleep. I’m awake.
I can save myself.
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41
f
f
13 August 1949
My wife and I never discussed what the
dottore
had said—that another birth could stop her heart. Ignazia moved her clothes downstairs into Prosperine’s bedroom and I made no move to claim that which rightfully belongs to a husband.
After the night of Prosperine’s story, I refused to eat the food cooked in my own home. I had a little meeting with
Signora
Siragusa, my former landlady. She agreed to make my meals for four dollars a week and an extra fifty cents to still that wagging tongue in her mouth. Each evening on the way to work, I walked past the
signora
’s and picked up my dinner pail. Each morning, at the end of my shift, I stopped there again to leave the pail and eat my breakfast in the
signora
’s kitchen. The third meal I skipped or bought downtown—
’Mericana
food with no taste, everything drowning in that yellow glue they call gravy. Bread that tasted more like cotton than bread.
Ignazia was insulted that I would not eat what she cooked.
This she told me with her frowns and banging pot lids and her sighs sent up to Heaven—never with her words. We shared no words, either, about all that Prosperine had told, though I was sure those two whispered plenty about it behind my back. If I
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had been their fool before that night, I was their fool no longer. The Monkey’s drunken
confessione
had made me dangerous to them both.
If I had been
’Mericano
, I might have run squealing to the police and repeated what Prosperine had revealed. Maybe the law would have taken that crazy monkey out of my house and sent her back across the ocean. But a Sicilian knows to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut. I wanted no more scandal brought down on the name of Tempesta—no fingers pointing at my
casa di due
appartamenti
as the place where murdering women had gone to hide. Sometimes I told myself Ignazia was
not
Violetta D’Annunzio, that hellcat who had fouled herself with men and tricked a husband into swallowing glass. Maybe Violetta had paid the price for her sins and been put in the ground in Palermo, as Prosperine had said. But this I could only make myself believe for an hour or an afternoon and then, again, I would know the terrible truth.
In the first weeks of her life, Ignazia’s harelipped baby suffered from
colica
and cried during night and day. Ignazia cried, too, and was plagued with female problems. Tusia’s wife told my wife all problems would go away—that mother and child would be at peace—once the girl was baptized.
“No
battesimo,
” I told Ignazia. She had come upstairs to my bedroom—to the room where she had once slept by my side—to ask my permission.
“Why not?” she said. “So that my suffering can continue? So that both my babies can be lost to God’s mercy?”
I had said nothing to Ignazia about the boy’s purification in the pantry on the morning of his birth and death. My fear was that my action may have angered God—a boy christened with dishwater by a father who had thrown cement at a priest, forsaken Jesus Christ.
. . . If I had harmed the soul of my own son with blasphemous
battesimo
, I would not then send the redhead’s daughter into Heaven.
“I once ordered two priests off this property,” I told Ignazia. “I I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 718
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will not be
ipocrita
now and go crawling back to them on my knees.”
“Then I’ll bring her to them,” she said. I shook my head and told her she would do what I told her to do.
“What kind of selfish father would keep the gates of Heaven locked against his own child?” she shouted. “Yours is a wicked sin!”
“Better shut up your mouth about
my
sins!” I told her. “Worry, instead, about your own—the ones you committed here with that no-good redheaded mick in New York and the ones you committed back in the Old Country.”
She turned her face away from mine and hurried out of the room. But I followed her down the stairwell and through the downstairs to the back room. She was face down on the bed, sobbing against the pillows. From the doorway, I warned her—made it clear that if she defied me and had the girl baptized in secret, she would pay a high price. “If I discover such a plan,” I told her, “you and your scrawny friend will live to regret it.”
In spite of all I knew, now, about Ignazia—in spite of the fear and hatred that stood between us—my
passione
for her was stronger than ever. My eyes could never stop following her around a room.
Her face and
figura
were a constant torment. A hundred times a day, I kissed her mouth, unpinned her hair, ripped away her buttons, and had what was mine, but these actions I took only in my
immaginazione.
. . . Sometimes I would torture myself by thinking of those filthy pictures the
fotografo
had taken of her back in the Old Country—see those photographs being passed around from man to man. I would shudder at this, my fingers twitching with the desire to slit the throats of those faceless men. My wife in the hands of every man except her lawful husband! But mixed with the torture of knowing that those photographs existed was the excitement of what they had captured. To have unspent lust for a murderous wife was a terrible thing—a living Hell!
Sometimes in my dreams she loved me—submitted to me with obedience and desire as a good Sicilian wife surrenders herself to her husband. I would wake from these reveries in a rush of joy and I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 719
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excitement. Then sadness would overtake me and I would clean myself, wipe away the spilt milk of desire that made children but could make none for me. Once, too, I had a very strange and terrible dream in which Ignazia shared her
passione
with my dead brother Vincenzo, while I sat on the bed and combed her long hair.
In that dream, I was happy, not jealous, and woke only slowly to the humiliation of the story my dream had told me. I could almost hear Vincenzo laughing at me from Hell.
Sometimes my longing for my wife’s flesh would reach me at work and become an ache so strong that it distracted me. Even the giggles of the homely little spinning girls could excite me . . .
even Nabby Drinkwater’s boastful talk of his pleasures at the whorehouse on Bickel Road.
One morning, my hunger led me past the
signora
’s and down to that place on Bickel Road where the fat Hungarian woman kept her whores and house cats. The inside of that place reeked of cabbage and cat piss. I paid and she called to a skinny servant girl who was busy polishing the staircase railing. “This way,” the girl said, and I followed her up the stairs. I thought she was taking me to a whore, but when I entered the room, she closed the door behind us. She was no more than fourteen, fifteen . . . did not yet have the meat of a grown woman on her bones. While I did what I did, she looked the same as she had looked polishing that banister. I left that house with a promise that I had gone there for the first and last time. But I went there again and again, each time worrying that I would run into Drinkwater—that that goddamned Indian who worked beneath me would know that I shared his weakness for the flesh. That the devil that had claimed my brother Vincenzo had claimed me, too.
I always had the same girl. Always, after I finished my business, I made her put on her clothes and leave quickly. I would stare at the wall while she dressed herself, my shame taking over once my
ardore
had been spent. Then I would rise from that cheap bed, button myself, and walk back to my house where I lived with two I Know[649-748] 7/24/02 1:31 PM Page 720
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murderous women and a redhaired baby whose mouth was split and whose soul remained stained with original sin.
One day, a little after the war was over, I read in the newspaper that that dog-faced Monsignor McNulty had keeled over and died from a bad heart. The paper said little Father Guglielmo had been named acting pastor of St. Mary of Jesus Christ Church—the church’s first
pastore Italiano.
I was happy for both McNulty’s death and Guglielmo’s promotion. I had never had quarrel with
Padre
Guglielmo—he had only been the other one’s whipped dog. In my mind, I wished him well.
Not a week later, when I went to the boardinghouse for my breakfast, I found Guglielmo waiting for me in
Signora
Siragusa’s kitchen. The old
signora
fluttered around in a sweat, making special cakes and
frittata
and frying dough in her finest olive oil, as if the Pope himself had dropped in. “It’s good to see you again, my friend,” Guglielmo said. “It’s been a while now, hasn’t it? How’s your wife these days?”