At first I tried to be respectful to that dog-faced man of the cloth. I smiled and promised I would return to Sunday Mass as soon as the four doors of my house were hung, my twenty-two windows were glazed, and the roof was completed. I pointed a thumb at Pasquale, who was now climbing the ladder to the half-completed roof, Filippa riding atop one shoulder and a bundle of wooden shingles balanced on the other. “And now that Pasquale has his lunch inside of him,” I joked, “he’ll probably have that roof shingled by nightfall, as formidable in size as it is. It is often said that I work like a well-oiled machine and my brother works like a plowhorse. Ha ha.”
Monsignor McNulty said that pride was perhaps the greatest sin of all and that my revering of worldly possessions over things spiritual was shocking and sacrilegious. He told me he hoped and prayed there would not be some terrible price for me to pay. Then he dropped his voice and made a comment about men and monkeys that made Father Guglielmo blush.
I stopped my cement-mixing. In my hand, the trowel felt like a I Know[566-612] 8/19/02 1:21 PM Page 595
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weapon of murder. “
Vai in mona di tua sorella!
” I told him.
“Translation! Translation!” the old priest demanded of the meek but earnest Father Guglielmo.
In his stuttering fashion, the nervous young priest said that I had asked them both to please leave now.
“I told you to get the fuck out of here!” I shouted to Monsignor Dog-Face, this time in English. “I said to go home to your sister’s cunt!”
Father Guglielmo put up both his hands and attempted to negotiate a peace, but the monsignor reached over and hit him on the head. Then he marched to the road, ordering Guglielmo to follow. When the little priest had joined him, McNulty pointed his finger at me and called back in a public voice meant to dishonor me and all my countrymen. A house from which a man of God was ordered to leave, he said—and ordered in terms only an Italian would be vulgar enough to use—such a house was a Godforsaken place, damned from its peak to its foundation! “You wait and see, Tempesta!” the old monsignor shouted. “You mark my words!”
As he turned his back, I scooped a clump of the wet cement onto my trowel and flung it. It landed against the monsignor’s back, dripping down his cassock like monkey shit. The old and young priests scurried down the hill, McNulty screaming and striking his little assistant several more times, and kicking him once as well.
To have my house cursed by a man of God was no small thing, but Pasquale had no understanding of the seriousness of what had just occurred. Up on the roof, his laughter boomed and carried into the trees.
“Shut up your mouth and go to work!” I yelled, and flung a trowelful of the wet cement at him and Filippa. My action frightened that little monkey-whore of Pasquale’s, and the creature jumped off her master’s shoulder, scurrying along the peak of the roof. With a leap, she hid in the big maple tree.
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Along with his formidable lunch on that horrible day, my brother Pasquale had consumed the better part of a bottle of good-luck wine from Pippo Conti, a fellow roofer who had visited that morning on his way to Sunday Mass. Pasquale was whistling and laying down a row of shingles when he heard, over the sound of his hammering, Filippa’s cries for help. She was seated high in the nearby tree, plagued, suddenly, by angry bluejays. Pasquale rose and ran to the animal’s defense, forgetting about the gap in the roof between himself and the tree.
He fell.
I saw it with my eyes.
Hammer in hand, he fell through the stairwells to the foundation below.
I saw it all and heard the terrible breaking of my brother’s bones against the dirt floor of my cellar. When I ran to him and cradled his head in my lap, it wobbled like the head of a broken doll. “
Dio ci
scampi! Dio ci scampi!
” I shouted, over and over. If only I had held my tongue with the old priest! If only I had not thrown cement!
Filippa, who had now rid herself of the bluejays and hurried down the tree, sat huddled on Pasquale’s chest, curling the hair on his head around one small pink finger. Pasquale mouthed, rather than spoke, his last words, “Filippa . . . Filippa.”
As I watched the precious gift of life leave my brother, mine was the greatest anguish possible! “Filippa . . . Filippa,” his lips kept saying, and I pledged to my dying brother, on the lives of our ancestors and descendants, that I would care for his little monkey.
Then Pasquale convulsed and vomited blood and his eyes took on the gaze of holy statues.
Now, I was alone. . . .
Pasquale was waked for three afternoons in the boardinghouse parlor.
Signora
Siragusa wailed for my brother as a mother wails. My position of respect in the town, as well as the scope of the tragedy, brought out most of the Italians of Three Rivers. Flynn, the mill I Know[566-612] 8/19/02 1:21 PM Page 597
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boss, came with his wife to pay respects. Werman, who owned the construction company where Pasquale had worked, showed up with his two sons. At the celebration of the crowded funeral Mass at St. Mary of Jesus Christ Church, that dog-faced monsignor assumed a disdainful attitude that deeply offended me. After my brother was laid to rest in the ground beside Vincenzo, I sat and wrote a letter of complaint to the Pope in Rome. (Never a response.)
3 August 1949
Trouble with my bowels since Tuesday. Arthritis afflicts my joints. My body fails me, but not my memory!
Despite Father Guglielmo’s counsel—the little priest visited me several times after Pasquale’s death—I did not return to church when the snow flew. I vowed never again to cross the threshold of the house of God as long as that no-good monsignor was alive.
And I am proud to write that I kept that promise!
In the wake of her master’s death, Filippa, the spoiled “little queen” who had doomed my brother, sat shivering in a corner of her cage on the boardinghouse porch. Sometimes at night, through the opened window of my room, I heard her strange, chattering lamentation—the agitation of her cage as she threw herself, violently, against it.
Signora
Siragusa, that most superstitious of old women, began to see
il mal occhio
—the evil eye—in the monkey’s gaze. Young children and grandmothers began to look away from the creature and make the sign of the cross upon entering or leaving the boardinghouse. The
signora
insisted that I remove the creature’s cage from the front to the back porch. There, the older boys spat at her and poked her with sticks as she sat, hissing and shivering.
Americo Cavoli, the
signora
’s nephew, made a hobby of tormenting that godforsaken creature. I knew this went on, but what could I I Know[566-612] 8/19/02 1:21 PM Page 598
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do? Quit my work? Interrupt my sleep to play policeman for that goddamned monkey?
As a boss dyer and property owner, I, of course, embraced modern ideas, dismissing as women’s foolishness the growing suspicion of
il mal occhio
. I regarded Filippa not as a witch but as a nuisance—one more expense in a sea of financial obligations that swirled around me because of my new home and my brother’s funeral expenses. On practical grounds, I began to realize how unfortunate my hasty promise to my dying brother had been. For the sake of economy, I cut back on the expensive mixture of bananas, grain, and honey that Pasquale had provided for her, feeding her now, instead, potato peels and other garbage from
Signora
Siragusa’s kitchen. The
signora
began to complain about Filippa’s lice and about the foul-smelling diarrhea with which the monkey’s new diet had afflicted her. Winter was coming. The
signora
didn’t want that unclean little she-devil living down in the coal cellar, dispensing trouble and bugs up through the heating grates.
Soon, the boarders in her house would all be scratching themselves, or packing their bags, or meeting with tragedy like my poor brother! She owned a boardinghouse, not a
giardino zoologico
. I would have to do something, she warned.
That same evening, as I reached into Filippa’s filthy cage to dump her nightly swill, that goddamned monkey bared her fangs and bit me savagely on the wrist. I cursed the thing, sucked my hand at the point of the wound, and made a plan.
The next Sunday morning, I paid young Cavoli a nickel to run to Hollyhock Avenue with a burlap sack, line the bottom of it with broken, discarded bricks, and lug the bag to the Sachem River Bridge. I instructed the boy to wait for me there. Cautiously, I opened Filippa’s cage and leashed the balking monkey.
We two walked toward the river. At several points, I was forced to drag the creature, who seemed somehow to understand the fate that was about to befall her. And when we arrived at our destination, Filippa held fast to the bars of the footbridge railing I Know[566-612] 8/19/02 1:21 PM Page 599
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and screamed.
I grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and young Cavoli held open the sack. Between us, we managed to force her inside the brick-weighted bag and cinch the top. Filippa had scratched and bitten us both in the struggle and now she poked and battled with unnatural strength to free herself from the bag. Somehow, we managed to lift that goddamned screaming monkey over the railing and let go.
The bag sank efficiently.
What had to be done had been done and now it was over.
Ha! That’s what I thought!
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“So he drags her to the bridge, shoves her into this bag they’ve weighted down, and throws her over the side. Just
drowns
her.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Because it was easier to kill the damn thing than to keep his promise.” I was standing by her window, watching the Sachem River rush by behind the trees. We’d had a week or so of warmer weather; the current was traveling at a pretty good clip from the late-winter thaw. “I don’t know, Doc. Maybe I should stop reading the damn thing. Chuck it into the woodstove or something.”
“Burn your family history, Dominick? Why would you do that?”
“Because it riles me up. . . . Last night? After I read about all that monkey stuff? I couldn’t even
sleep.
” I turned and faced Dr. Patel. “We resemble him, you know? Thomas and me.”
“Your grandfather? Yes? You have photographs?”
I nodded. “My mother used to keep this big scrapbook—all her family pictures. God, she was always dragging that thing out. She even
600
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rescued it once.” I saw Ma burst from the burning house, screaming—that scrapbook clutched to her chest.
“Rescued it?”
“We had a fire at our house. When Thomas and I were kids.
. . . You know what’s weird about reading that thing? The more I get into it, the less I can stand the son of a bitch—the way he treats people, the way he thinks he’s better than everyone—but at the same time, I can sort of
recognize
him, you know?
Relate
to him, on
some
level.”
“You’re talking about more than physical resemblance then?”
“I guess. Yeah. . . . Last night? After I read how he drowned the monkey? I started thinking about how
I’d
gotten trapped by a promise, same as him. Same as Papa. . . . That was the last thing I ever said to her, you know? I ever tell you that?”
“The last thing you said to whom?”
“My mother. I promised her I’d take care of him. Keep him safe—her ‘little bunny rabbit.’ . . . It was the very last thing I said to her before she died.” I locked my arms across my chest. Watched two boys hike along the bank of the rushing river.
“Do you think you relate to your grandfather in some respects because—?”
“Because we both welshed on our promises. Went back on our word.”
Dr. Patel said she didn’t see how I had arrived at that conclusion.
Hadn’t I campaigned tirelessly—aggressively, for better or worse—on my brother’s behalf? What made me feel that I had failed to honor my word to my mother?
The question made me laugh. “Look where he
is
,” I said.
“Locked in
his
cage down there. A year, minimum, with an option to renew. Rubbing elbows with every goddamn psychopath who . . .
Yeah, Doc, I did a
great
job of keeping him safe for her, didn’t I?”
“Dominick, we’ve been over this before. For you to take responsibility for circumstances beyond your control is both counterpro-ductive and—”
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“Look, you can say whatever you want to try and make me feel better or whatever, but the truth is I
blew
it for him. Fell off that freakin’ roof over there, missed his hearing, and then
bam!
He ends up long term at the Hatch Hotel.”
Dr. Patel shook her head. In the first place, she said, she doubted whether my appearance at Thomas’s hearing would have changed a course of action that was most likely inevitable. And second, the pledge I had made to my mother while she was dying—merciful and well-intentioned as it might have been—had exacted a very high personal cost.
Too
high a cost, in her opinion. It had made me unhappy, unwell—suicidal, even, for a brief period last fall. Certainly, my mother would not have wanted me to sacrifice my
own
well-being in a futile attempt to secure the well-being of my brother.