May 1, 1987

May 1, 1987, marks the death of Ma, Dominick Birdsey’s mother, after breast cancer. The date gathers two strands of the family’s history: Ma’s final hours and Dominick’s promise to look after Thomas. It also fixes what the family did not learn from her: she never read her father’s life story and never disclosed the identity of the twins’ biological father.

The final vigil

On May 1, Ma slipped out of consciousness. Dominick and Ray kept watch through the night as her breathing became labored and she repeatedly tried to remove her oxygen mask. A hospice worker had told them that a person in a coma might still hear and understand, and suggested that they could give Ma permission to go. Ray could not bring himself to do so. Ten minutes before Ma died, while Ray was away in the men’s room, Dominick leaned close and told her he loved her, promised to care for Thomas, and said she could go. The moment makes the date more than a marker of death: it is when Dominick accepts, in words, a responsibility that had long defined his relationship with his twin.

What remained undisclosed

Ma’s death did not bring the revelations Dominick had imagined during her final illness. She did not sit up and identify the man who had fathered him and Thomas, and she never got to read her father’s history. The manuscript had been dictated during the summer her father died. Its surviving pages, found by Dominick in a strongbox, included typewritten sheets and handwritten Italian; Ma explained that the account was her father’s life story. The manuscript’s making had itself been precarious. Her father’s arrangement for dictation, involving a stenographer and recording equipment, broke down over the rental cost, and he returned to dictating directly to Angelo. On his last morning, he told Ma he was nearly finished, but also said he might burn the completed work. Later, when she brought him lunch, she found him slumped over and the pages scattered outside. Ma died without reading the account, leaving both its family history and the twins’ parentage unresolved for Dominick.

A promise carried forward

The promise Dominick made at Ma’s bedside echoes an earlier family crisis. During a fire, Ma returned to the house to rescue her photo album; afterward, with the twins close beside her, she repeatedly reassured them that everything was all right. Years later, Dominick dreamed of his dead mother at a picture window, silently repeating that reassurance. The recollection links the bedside promise to the earlier scene: Ma had tried to keep her sons safe, and Dominick now remembered himself as the one charged with keeping Thomas safe. That continuity does not make the promise simple. Dominick’s devotion to Thomas coexists with the strain of being his brother’s caretaker, and the novel later presents their illness and separation as sources of longing as well as burden. May 1 records the origin of a renewed vow, not its easy fulfillment.

The date in retrospect

The scene is narrated retrospectively, with the exact date grounding a deeply personal memory in the sequence of Ma’s illness and death. Its significance is sharpened by what the vigil cannot settle: Dominick can tell his mother that he will care for Thomas, but he cannot recover the disclosure about their father or share with her the life story she never read. Her death closes the possibility of asking her directly, while her reassurance and Dominick’s promise continue to recur in his memory.