I Know This Much Is True (126 page)

I stood there, touching Ray’s hand, and finally
getting it
.

. . . Dessa hadn’t stopped loving me, caring about me. About us. But she’d needed to save herself. Had needed to amputate me from her life because . . . I was starving her. Infecting her. Because if she’d stayed, I would have begun shutting her down, system by system.

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Well, good for you, Dess, I thought
.
I’m
glad
you got out alive.

And my tears fell fast, splashing against Ray’s bed railing, sinking into his sheets.

I got home around noon—left a message for Dr. Patel that I needed to see her as soon as possible. I heated up some soup, flipped through
Newsweek
without anything really registering. When I went to wash the dishes, I realized I’d just washed them.

Domenico’s ruined manuscript was in there: lying all over the bedroom where I’d left it. Okay, I told myself, you finished it and then you trashed it. So it’s trash. Right? Go in there and get rid of it.

I grabbed a garbage bag and went into the bedroom.

Stuffing page after ruined page of the Old Man’s “history” into the plastic bag, I thought about Ma—what she had told me about the day her father died. He’d just finished it: his long-in-the-making
confessione
, his failed act of contrition. . . . She’d heard him crying out there—had wanted to go to him, to comfort him, but it was against the rules. He would have been too angry, and it was his anger that had ruled that house. . . . I sat back on the bed. Saw her out there, harvesting Papa’s story. She must have felt her whole life shift that day, I thought. Her father was dead; her sons were growing inside of her. . . .

She had been brave after all. Brave enough to go on—to raise us as best she could. And earlier: the sober girl in those photographs, standing next to her father in a starched pinafore, her fist to her face to cover her disfigured mouth. A brave eight-year-old girl, dragged that night into the bitter cold by a mother who’d been starved of hope. Made crazy from despair. . . . There’d been evidence of a struggle out there, the Old Man had written. A story told in footprints. But that brave, serious girl had kept her mother’s terrible secret—had said nothing to the police, or to her father. It was the footprints that had told. In her anger or her crazy despair, Ignazia had meant to take her with her—take her daughter’s life. But Ma had struggled. Had saved herself. Had hidden in the shack and survived the night and then gone home and lived with her father. . . .

Had she loved Papa as much as she’d always claimed? Hated I Know[749-858] 7/24/02 1:42 PM Page 844

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him? Had my brother and I been conceived in evil? . . . “The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta” had turned out to be just another hall of mirrors, just one more maze inside the maze.

Because by the end of his story, the Old Man had confessed everything and nothing. Like father, like daughter, I thought. They had
both
known how to keep their secrets. . . .

I reached down, pulled a page from the garbage bag. Flattened it and read.
“I have always had that small satisfaction, at least: the memory
of that moment when I won my battle against the Monkey, when I used
my God-given cleverness to punish that she-devil for the sins she had
committed against Domenico Tempesta. . . .”

I shook my head at his hopelessness, his isolation out there on that last day of his life. Domenico had starved to death, too.

“I’m not saying it’s impossible, Dominick,” Dr. Patel said. “I’m saying it’s highly improbable. You’re not retarded. You don’t suffer from hemophilia or any of the other myriad complications. If you are, as you fear, the product of incest, you seem to have come away remarkably unscathed.”

Unscathed? I reminded her that my brother had been a schizophrenic, that my daughter had died in the fourth week of her life.

A specious argument, she said. As far as she knew, there was no scientific evidence linking father-daughter incest to either schizophrenia or SIDS. I was welcome to research the topic, of course, but she doubted I would find anything. That left me with what she saw as a somewhat neurotic fear and one vague remark in my grandfather’s book: that my mother had known how to keep secrets. It could mean anything, she said. Secrets her mother told her, secret recipes. And, of course, the terrible secret that the mother who had given her life had tried, that night, to take it away.

Father-daughter incest: Dr. Patel’s giving it a name, a label, somehow confined it. Put a cage around it and made me feel safer.

What had she just accused me of? A “somewhat neurotic” fear?

From what I’d told her, she said, my grandfather had been a terribly unhappy and misguided man—cruel, self-serving, paranoid, I Know[749-858] 7/24/02 1:42 PM Page 845

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perhaps—although she was always reluctant to diagnose the dead.

But none of what I had told her meant, necessarily, that he had raped his daughter and fathered my brother and me.

“Then I’m exactly where I was
before
I read the damn thing,” I said.

“And where is that, my friend?”

“Fucked up. . . . Fatherless.”

She said she begged to differ on a couple of counts. First of all, I was certainly
not
fatherless, provided I was willing to think beyond sperm and egg. If one defined one’s father as the male elder who attended one’s passage from childhood to adulthood, then my father was lying in a hospital bed over at Shanley Memorial, recovering from surgery. Whatever Ray’s parental shortcomings had been, whatever trauma he had caused me and my brother, his presence in my life had been a constant. He had borne witness.

Nor did she feel that the completion of my grandfather’s history had left me exactly where I had been. “Indulge the anthropologist in me, please, Dominick,” she said. “Let’s think for a moment of the manuscript not as a mystery with a maddeningly inconclusive ending, but as a parable. Parables instruct. One reaches the end of an allegory and confronts the lesson it offers. And so I ask you: what does your grandfather’s story teach you?”

“What does it
teach
me?” I shifted in my seat. Looked away. “I don’t know. Watch out for thin ice? Steer clear of monkeys?”

She clapped her hands together like a fed-up schoolteacher. “Seriously, please!”

Our eyes met. I leaned forward. “That I should stop feeling so goddamned sinned against,” I said. “That I have to let go of grudges.”

She smiled. Nodded. Clapped again, this time in applause.

Intentionally or not, Dr. Patel said, my grandfather had given me a valuable gift: the parable of his failure. And I should not forget who had been the conduit of that story. It had come to me by way of a mother who, Dr. Patel suspected, had loved me deeply—a woman who, despite her meekness, had been quite courageous. In fighting for her life out there at the pond that night, she had made possible I Know[749-858] 7/24/02 1:42 PM Page 846

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mine and Thomas’s lives. She had made mistakes along the way—yes, yes, there was no denying it—but she had nevertheless raised her two sons in good faith. Had done her best. And it was to me, personally, that she had bequeathed her father’s story.

“Use your gift, Dominick,” Dr. Patel said. “Learn from it. Let it set you free.”

“Is he finished yet?” the dietary aide asked me, a little huffy this time.

She’d been in twice before to collect Ray’s untouched lunch tray. At the nurses’ station, they’d told me he’d woken up around eleven, been given another shot of morphine, and then drifted back to Dreamland.

“He’s still out,” I told the aide. “Go ahead. Just take it.” It was three-thirty. Who the hell had been prescribing his painkillers, anyway—Dr. Kevorkian?

I watched the aide attempt the impossible: balancing Ray’s tray atop her already overflowing cart. It slid clattering to the floor, and the two of us bent to sop up soup, reconstruct his sandwich, locate a runaway apple. By the time I looked back at Ray again, his eyes were open. “Who are you?” he said.

I told him I was Dominick. Asked him how he was feeling.

“
Who?
”

“Dominick,” I said. “Connie’s son. One of the twins.”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought you were the hall monitor.”

The hall monitor? I asked him if he knew where he was. He surveyed the room, studied the hallway outside and then looked back at me. “The hospital?”

I nodded. Reminded him he’d had an operation the day before.

He asked me when the football game was starting.

Football game? I glanced up at the ceiling-mounted TV. I’d been watching it without sound while I waited for him to wake up.

“There’s no football on now, Ray,” I said. “It’s May. Baseball season.

Basketball playoffs.”

He leaned forward, looking down at his amputation without any observable understanding of loss. “Has Edna been here to see me?”

he asked.

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“Edna?” I said. “Who’s Edna?”

“Edna,” he said. “You know. My
sister
.” He shook his head, disgusted. “What’s this?” He had picked up the tethered TV remote.

“Changes the channels,” I said. “On your TV up there. Go ahead, try it. The blue button, not the red one. The red one calls the nurse.”

He pressed the red button,
then
the blue. Held his thumb down on it.

Channels whizzed by: soap operas, CNN, the Maytag repairman. He stopped when he got to Oprah.

“Yes?” a staticky voice said. “How may I help you?”

“Oh,” I said. “He . . . we just pushed the wrong button. Sorry.”

Click.

“What time is the football game starting?” Ray asked again.

When I reminded him that it wasn’t football season, he interrupted me to lead a cheer.

Strawberry shortcake! Huckleberry pie!

V-I-C-T-O-R-Y!

Can we do it? Yes, yes, yes!

We are the students of the B-G-S!

I glanced out into the hall. Up at Oprah. “What’s the, uh . . . what’s BGS?”

“The BGS!” he said. “The BGS! The Broadway Grammar School!

What are you, slow or something?”

“I don’t know. I guess there probably is a God. There
has
to be.”

Dessa dangled the tea bag in and out of her cup. Looked up at me.

“He’s not merciful, though. That’s a crock. He’s more into
irony
than mercy. He’s a
gotcha!
kind of god. A practical jokester. Because this is just too perfect to chalk up to random coincidence.”

Dessa said she wasn’t following me.

“Well, think about it,” I said. “First my brother dies. Then my stepfather loses an appendage, starts talking crazy. Stump II: the Sequel.

It’s perfect.”

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Dessa said she was pretty sure that God dealt in challenges, not practical jokes.

We were seated at a back table in the hospital cafeteria. An hour earlier, I’d held open the elevator door for hurrying footsteps that had turned out to be my ex-wife’s. Now, with the exception of the white-haired woman at the cash register and a couple of whispering candy stripers two tables over, we had the place to ourselves.

“And anyway,” she said, “didn’t they say he was probably just disoriented from the pain medication? Didn’t you just tell me that
you
woke up disoriented after
your
surgery?” A few minutes earlier, I’d alluded to my strange morphine dream without going into the details: suffocating my brother as he hung from that tree, cutting him down and lugging him to the river. Kind of funny, in a way: in
my
morphine hallucination, I’d been a murderer. Ray had become head cheerleader in his.

Neither of us said anything for a minute or so. I finished my coffee. Began unraveling the Styrofoam cup, apple-peel style. We both sat there, watching the long, continuous spiral. “You still go to church?” I said.

It was weird I was asking, she said. She hadn’t been—had stayed away for years—but she’d just started going again.

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Because of this place, partly.”

When I’d run into her on the elevator, I’d assumed that something else was wrong with her mother, but Dessa had said no—she’d started volunteering in the children’s hospice. “You should see some of these kids I’m working with, Dominick,” she said now. “They’re so sick, so brave. They all seem like miracles to me.”

She told me about a six-year-old girl with a brain tumor and a giggle so infectious that she could start a whole room laughing.

About the AIDS babies with their string of infections, their need to be held and rocked. About Nicky, a seven-year-old boy with an enzyme disorder that had gradually robbed him of speech, balance, the ability, even, to swallow. Nicky was her favorite, she said. “You should see the way music lights up his eyes. And lights. Remember those lava lamps everyone used to get stoned and stare at? Nicky I Know[749-858] 7/24/02 1:42 PM Page 849

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will just stare and stare at one of those things, as if it makes sense—explains something to him that the rest of us don’t get. He’s got such beautiful brown eyes, Dominick. That’s one of the places where
I
see God, I think. In Nicky’s eyes.” She laughed, embarrassed suddenly. “It’s hard to explain. I must sound so New Age.”

I poked my foot against her foot. “Well, there’s probably still hope,” I said. “You haven’t bought any Yanni tapes yet, have you?”