I Know This Much Is True (130 page)

“Something bothering you?” Ray asked me.

“Huh? No. Why?”

“I don’t know. It just seems like something’s eating you.” I waved away the remark—told him I was fine. What was he, a shrink now?

Was something eating me?

The nights were bad; that was when the worst panics fell over me. I slept in fits and starts, sitting bolt upright from noises I thought I heard, from dreams. One night the phone rang at 2:00

A.M. I couldn’t answer it. I was sure it would be Joy. Whatever my I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 870

870

WALLY LAMB

test said, I wasn’t doing it—cleaning up
her
mess for her. She had no right to even ask. I was
nobody’s
father.

Tuesday night—the night before I was due to call for my test results: that was when I hit bottom. Crying jags, the shakes. I went out for a drive to calm down and ran right through a red light at Broad and Benson. No one was coming the other way, thank God, but they could have been. That was the point: someone
could have been
coming. I guess I was a little screwy by then from all that sleep deprivation.

I admired the irony of it, in a way: the way God had waited all those years and then had finally gotten around to me after all. Had finally zapped me for being the son of a bitch brother. I’d never figured that out: why God had given Thomas schizophrenia and not me. But now I thought I glimpsed the master plan. The Lord Almighty had been saving me for something else. The AIDS virus: the disease you couldn’t win against no matter how well you played defense. And He
was
a jokester, too: that little scare He’d given me when I thought Thomas had the disease. But that had turned out to be a false alarm.

Previews of coming attractions. He’d been saving the HIV card to play on
me
. . . .

I kept thinking about that goofy priest—the one at my brother’s burial service. The guy in the sandals. Father LaVie, who’d beaten cancer. The
padre
with the amazing shrinking tumor. . . . They’d imported him from somewhere else because all the priests at St. Anthony’s were busy that day. He’d told me where he’d driven in from, but I’d forgotten. I opened the phone book to the list of towns.
Danbury, Danielson
.

. . . That was it. He’d said he was pinch-hitting at a rectory up in Danielson.

It was Father LaVie who answered. Sure he remembered me, he said. And how about this for a coincidence: he’d just read an article that day about twins who survived their siblings and had started thinking about me. How difficult it must be to mourn a twin. So how was I? What could he do for me?

I rambled on, in no particular order, about Ray’s gangrene, Angela, the weight my brother had put on me. About what a bully my grandfather had been and how I’d bullied Thomas all our lives I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 871

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE

871

because I was insecure in my mother’s love. About Joy’s visit, her news. “Every time I take a step forward, I get clobbered,” I told him.

“God must really hate me.”

Father LaVie promised me that there was meaning to be mined from suffering—that God was merciful, whether we understood His ways or not. This is pap, I thought—Hallmark greeting card theol-ogy. But when I hung up, I felt calmer. Better. Whatever that test result was going to say, it was beyond my control. All I could do now was hang on. Pray for a merciful, not an ironic, god.

On Wednesday afternoon, I called the test center. Got busy signals until four-forty-five. The woman had me repeat my number.

“Okay, just a second,” she said.

I closed my eyes. Gripped the receiver. I had it: I knew I did. I’d gotten the virus to pay for the sins I’d committed against my brother, my mother, my wife. . . .

The phone clunked. “Okay,” she said. “It’s here. Non-reactive.”

“Non-reactive?”

That was good, she said. That was what I wanted. Non-reactive.

I walked around the condo. Took deep breaths. Dropped to the floor and did push-ups. Go to some bar and get shit-faced, I told myself.

Go celebrate life.

I grabbed the keys, got in the car. It took me to the hospital.

I passed sleeping children, fretting children, empty cribs. Passed those two rabbits that Dessa had told me about. Pet therapy, she’d called it. “You wanna play?” a bald-headed girl asked me. She sat before a TV screen, playing Nintendo. “I’ll let you. There’s two controls.”

“Can’t now,” I said. “Maybe later.”

Dessa was in a room off to the left, seated in a rocker, holding and rocking a sprawled boy in feet pajamas. A big bruiser. The two of them, sitting, rocking, made a kind of
pietà.

“Hi,” Dessa said. “What are you doing here?”

Bob Marley was playing from a kiddie tape recorder:
One heart,
one love . . .

I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 872

872

WALLY LAMB

The boy was staring at a strange lamp on the table next to them.

One of those fiberoptic things—hundreds of strands, a small, fragile tip of light at each end. I squinted at it and it became the night sky in miniature—the heavens themselves.

“I heard . . . I heard there were kids at this place that need holding,”

I said.

Dessa nodded. “This is Nicky,” she said. “My leg’s asleep. I could use a break.”

He had black hair, bushy eyebrows, huge brown eyes. “Hey, Nicky,”

I said. Reached down and took him from her. Lifted him into my arms.

All my life, I had imagined the scenario in which my father would, at last, reveal himself to me. As a kid, I’d cooked up cowboy dads, pilot fathers who made emergency landings on Hollyhock Avenue, hopped from their planes, and rescued us from Ray. Later, I had cast gym teachers, shop teachers, the man who owned the hobby shop downtown, and even benign Mr. Anthony across the street as potential fathers: the
real
thing, as opposed to the intruder who had married my mother and installed himself at our house to make us miserable. I was thirty-six years old and
still
fantasizing when the doctors told Ma that her cancer would kill her. Over the months I watched her wither, I’d kept romanticizing her death—shaping it, as usual, to my own selfish need. She would pull me close and deliver me to my father, I thought—whisper his name into my ear and then go peacefully, having delivered us both. . . . By then, I had managed to gain, then lose, my grandfather’s “history”—had lost it permanently, I thought. My suspicion at the time had rested on Angelo Nardi, the dashing Italian stenographer my grandfather had hired to help him write his story, his

“guide for Italian youth.” They’d been friends, she said. She made him coffee, helped him with his English. She’d hardly ever gone out. Who else could it have been? . . . Later on, after Domenico’s manuscript had come back to me—had dropped
thunk!
onto my hospital bed—I’d begun the history in hopes that I would find my father within its pages. Hesitantly, with growing difficulty, I had let Domenico’s voice I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 873

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE

873

fill up my head—had struggled with the ugliness and dread of what I became surer and surer his sorry story would reveal. . . . But in the end, Domenico had left me nothing more than a legacy of riddles and monkeys, cryptic remarks about secret-keeping that neither confirmed nor denied what I had come to fear: that he had taken evil advantage of the harelipped daughter he assumed no other man would want.

That he had needed to punish, even in her death, the troubled wife he had always wanted but never really had.

But in a lifetime of fantasizing—of waiting for my real father to appear—I could not have imagined that I would find him in the exact same place—in the exact same
booth
—where, ten months earlier, my brother had sat across from me and warned me that, should America launch a holy war against the Nation of Islam, God’s vengeance would be swift and terrible. That he, Thomas, was fasting in preparation for a sacrifice he hoped would short-circuit a Holy War and rescue the children of God. . . . And the last person I had ever expected would deliver me from the pain and confusion of a withheld identity was the man who, I had always felt, had stepped in and stolen my true father’s place. In the end, it was Ray who delivered me—Ray who took me, finally, into his arms and held me and brought me home to the man I had spent a lifetime looking for.

“So how’s it feel, overall?” I asked him.

“Feels all right. It’s chafing a little. I probably overdid it.”

It was Ray’s first foray into the world on his brand-new leg. Things had gone well for a change—better than expected. We’d gone to Benny’s for some batteries. Had stopped back at Hollyhock Avenue to check things out—make sure everything was secure. Now we were at Friendly’s having lunch. Celebrating his new leg.

“Well, they said they can make some minor adjustments after you’ve taken it for a couple of test runs,” I reminded him. “Make sure you tell them about that chafing.”

“Okay, Dad,” he quipped. Our waitress approached with menus.

“Hi, guys. My name’s Kristin. How are you two doing today?”

“None of your business,” Ray said. He cracked a smile. He was feeling his oats.

I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 874

874

WALLY LAMB

“None of my business, huh? Okay, you old grouch. What can I get for you, then?”

I recognized her. She’d been a fledgling that day when she’d waited on my brother and me—a trainee. Thomas had treated her to a sample of his religious manifesto and she’d stood there, order pad in hand, speechless. Now, ten months later, the Gulf War had been fought and filed away, my brother was dead, and Kristin here was an old pro at handling cranky customers.

Ray ordered the potpie; I got one of those “supermelt” things.

Kristin asked us if we wanted our coffees right away. If we thought the hurricane everyone was talking about was actually going to come up as far as Connecticut. “Pfft,” Ray said. “Hurricane
Bob
. Doesn’t sound too scary to me. They just play these things up on the television to jack up their ratings.”

Kristin told us she and her boyfriend were going out after work to get candles, masking tape for the windows, junk food. She came from Minnesota, she said. This was her first hurricane. She was “psyched.”

After she was out of earshot, Ray muttered that she wouldn’t be so “psyched” if her roof blew off.

“Sure she would,” I said. “She’s young, she’s got a landlord to worry about the roof. All she’s got to do is screw her boyfriend by candlelight and pass the potato chips.”

“Sounds like a good life,” Ray said. “What the hell are you and I doing wrong?”

I asked him if he’d been following the news about Russia.

“Looks like the Communists may be on the ropes over there, huh?”

I said. “How do you feel about
that
?”

“How do I
feel
about it?” He said he didn’t feel anything. Why?

What was he supposed to feel?

I reminded him that he’d gone to war to stop the Communists over in Korea. That he’d worked almost forty years building nuclear subs, just in case the Russians decided to drop the bomb.

“That was all politics,” he said. “I just went to work every day and did my job. . . . You mark my words, though. Day after tomorrow, all I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 875

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE

875

those TV guys that are ballyhooing this Hurricane Bob thing will be going ‘Hurricane? What hurricane?’ ”

I sat there, baffled by his nonreaction to the teetering of the Soviet empire.

Our food came. The restaurant emptied out as we ate. Neither of us said too much more and, in the silence, my mind drifted to the phone conversation I’d had that morning with Joy. I
couldn’t
promise her something like that, I’d told her. She’d be all right; they were coming out with new drugs all the time. How about that AZT stuff I’d just read about? Had she heard about that?

I’d try to help her out as much as I could, I’d said—help both of them out—but my
own
life was still up in the air. I couldn’t commit to something as big as that—I just
couldn’t.
She had to get a grip; there were support services available for people in her situation. It was just a matter of finding out how to access them. I hadn’t meant for it to come out like a speech—like my lecture that time about couch-buying. But that was what Joy accused me of doing: giving her a speech when all she needed was some peace of mind—a promise that her daughter would be taken care of by someone she trusted. Not shipped off to some foster home with perverts or people who only wanted the money.

She’d cried more than spoken during that conversation—had finally hung up in my face.

“I been thinking about something,” Ray said. “It’s been bothering me.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. I took a sip of coffee. I thought we were talking about his leg.

“Do you remember a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago?

About your father? . . . How I said she never told me who he was?”

I nodded. Held my breath.

He had had a similar kind of thing pulled on him, he said—the way his family had tricked him into thinking Edna was his sister instead of his mother. That was what he’d been thinking about ever since that conversation we’d had. Our situations were different, of course, but similar in other ways. It had pulled the rug out from under him when he’d found out the truth, he said; he’d had a
right
to I Know[859-902] 7/24/02 2:15 PM Page 876

876

WALLY LAMB

know who his own mother was, for Christ’s sake. Having the wool pulled over his eyes like that—well, in one way or another, he’d paid for that the rest of his life. He’d always felt inferior to other people, he said. Ashamed. And
mad
—mad at the whole world. Not that my situation and his were the same. Well, in a way they were. They were the same but they were different.