Read I Know This Much Is True for Free Online Page A

herself didn’t dare to go anywhere near that parlor when Papa was speaking into the Dictaphone, she said. He was so serious about it. He probably would have shot her on sight!
    Ma told me that the complicated system her father had devised
    —stenographer, Dictaphone, private rooms for dictator and dicta-tee—had worked for about a week and then that, too, had fallen apart. First of all, there had been a misunderstanding about the rental price for the recording equipment. Papa had thought he was paying eight dollars per week to rent the Dictaphone but then learned that he was being charged eight dollars a day. Forty dollars a week! “So he told the rental company where they could go, and he and Angelo wheeled the carts onto the front porch. Those machines were parked out there for two whole days before someone drove up from Bridgeport and picked them up. I was a nervous wreck with those contraptions just sitting out there. I couldn’t even sleep. What if it had rained? What if someone had come along and snitched them?
    “But anyway, Papa went back to dictating his story directly to Angelo. But that didn’t go any better than it had the first time.
    Things got worse and worse. Papa started accusing Angelo of poking around in his business—asking him to clear up this thing or that thing when Papa had told him exactly as much as he wanted to tell him and nothing more. Oh, he could be a stubborn son of a gun, my father. He started accusing poor Angelo of changing around some of the things that he had said—of deliberately trying to portray my father in a bad light. Angelo got fed up, the poor guy. The two of them started fighting like cats and dogs.”
    Somewhere in the middle of July, Papa fired Angelo, my mother said. Then, after a few days, he cooled down and rehired him. But the day after Angelo came back, Papa fired him all over again.
    When he tried to rehire him a second time, Angelo refused to come back again. “He moved away pretty soon after that,” she said. “Out west to the Chicago area. He wrote me one letter and I wrote back and then that was that. But after all that business with Angelo and the Dictaphone and everything—all that rigmarole—Papa finally just went up to the backyard and wrote the rest of his story himself.

    I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 27
    I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE
    27
    He worked on it all the rest of that summer. He’d climb up the back stairs every morning, right after breakfast, unless it was raining or he didn’t feel well. He’d sit up there at his little metal table with his paper and his fountain pen. Writing away, all by his lonesome.”
    I leafed again through the musty manuscript—those pages and pages of foreign words. “You ever read it?” I asked her.
    She shook her head. We lost eye contact.
    “Why not?”
    “Oh, I don’t know, Dominick. I peeked at it a couple of times, I guess. But I just never felt right about it. My Italian’s too rusty. You forget a lot of it if you don’t use it.”
    We sat there, side by side on the couch, neither of us speaking.
    In less than a year, I thought, she’ll be dead.
    “It’s funny, though,” she said. “It was kind of out of character for Papa to do something like that. Write things down. He’d always been so private about everything. Sometimes I’d ask him about the Old Country—about his mother and father or the village where he’d grown up—and he’d say, oh, he didn’t even remember that stuff anymore. Or he’d tell me Sicilians kept their eyes open and their mouths shut.
    . . . But then, that summer: he hired Angelo, rented that contraption.
    . . . Some mornings I’d hear him crying up there. Up in the backyard.
    Or speaking out loud—kind of arguing with himself about something.
    Papa had had a lot of tragedy in his life, see? Both his brothers who he came over here with had died young. And his wife. All he had was me, really. It was just the two of us.”
    The first page of the manuscript was