Dominick Birdsey–Domenico Tempesta grandfather-grandson relationship

Dominick Birdsey’s relationship with his maternal grandfather, Domenico Tempesta, is an inheritance discovered rather than a bond lived: the two never meet, and Dominick knows Domenico through a manuscript Ma gives him near the end of her life. Reading it, Dominick encounters a self-fashioned family history and begins to recognize patterns that also appear in Thomas Birdsey’s religious delusions. The connection is therefore both personal and interpretive: Domenico’s story offers Dominick a way to examine family resemblance, but it also raises the troubling possibility that resemblance can look like destiny.

An inherited story

Dominick and Thomas were born after Domenico had died, so neither knew their maternal grandfather. Dominick explains to his therapist that Domenico dictated part of a long account of his life and wrote the rest, using a rented Dictaphone and a stenographer. The manuscript recounts his journey from Italy and describes his past in his own terms. It is a substantial private document—more than a hundred pages—rather than a published book or a history Dominick had grown up hearing.

The manuscript enters Dominick’s life through Ma. Four or five months before she dies, while already seriously ill, she produces the bulky papers from a strongbox and gives them to him. She says Thomas may read them if he wants, but it is Dominick she chooses as recipient. He cannot explain why she selects him, and the uncertainty matters: the gift gives him responsibility for a story without telling him what he is meant to do with it.

Dominick imagines turning the manuscript into a present for Ma, having it translated and bound so she can read her father’s history before she dies. The plan remains unrealized. He delays reading the work, loses and later recovers it, and only begins in earnest after the opportunity to give Ma that finished book has passed. The manuscript thus carries two inheritances at once: Domenico’s account of himself and Dominick’s unfinished wish to return that account to his mother.

A self-made great man

Dominick’s early reading gives him an impression of a writer absorbed in his own greatness. Domenico repeatedly compares himself favorably with others in his village, including his two brothers. Dominick has read only fifteen or twenty pages when he tells his therapist he may not finish, but even this partial encounter is enough to make the manuscript’s self-presentation conspicuous. The title’s claim to tell the story of a great man from humble beginnings matches the expansive self-image Dominick finds inside it.

One episode particularly sharpens that impression. In Domenico’s account, a statue in his village begins to weep, and he says he is the first person to see its tears. Dominick does not simply treat this as a family anecdote: while discussing it in therapy, he recognizes that the story presents Domenico as unusually close to God. His response is cautious and incomplete. He avoids pursuing the parallel he senses, and his reluctance to finish the manuscript leaves its claims only partly examined.

Resemblance and the question of being chosen

The therapist makes the family resemblance explicit by placing Domenico’s sense of divine closeness beside Thomas’s belief that God selected him as an instrument to prevent conflict between the United States and Iraq. She observes that Dominick has described grandiosity in Thomas’s position and now describes a similar quality in Domenico’s account. The comparison identifies a recurring pattern in the family’s stories: exceptional status is represented as a calling, but the resemblance does not establish that Thomas learned the idea from his grandfather. Dominick insists Thomas never read the manuscript and could not have taken the idea from it. The therapist frames the parallel as something to record and perhaps explore, not as a proven cause.

That distinction is central to the relationship. Domenico’s writing gives Dominick a precedent through which to understand Thomas’s claims, but it does not explain Thomas’s illness or demonstrate a transmitted belief. The manuscript and Thomas’s delusion remain separate experiences that become linked in Dominick’s mind and in therapy. The family resemblance is meaningful as a question, not a diagnosis.

The living twin as another kind of mirror

The comparison with Domenico unfolds against Dominick’s established role as Thomas’s brother and interpreter. He takes substantial responsibility for Thomas’s care, blaming himself alongside the doctors when Thomas cuts off his hand and insisting that Thomas feels safe and comfortable with Dr. Willis Ehlers. In another therapy discussion, Dominick initially resists becoming further involved, but is asked to share his memories of childhood and of the period when Thomas’s schizophrenia began to appear. The therapist describes him as Thomas’s healthy mirror and, in research terms, a control against which Thomas’s experience might be studied.

The family manuscript changes the meaning of that mirror without making the two relationships identical. Thomas is Dominick’s living twin, while Domenico is an absent ancestor whose identity reaches him through a document. Yet both become objects of comparison: Dominick is asked to help make sense of Thomas, then finds himself considering how Thomas’s claims might echo an earlier family story. A proposed study of the twins’ brains, including possible MRI scans, extends the comparison into scientific research, but the therapist says it is not something to pursue immediately and presents it as reassurance, not a settled explanation.

An unfinished inheritance

After a frightening experience in which he sees the family’s resemblances in his own reflection, Dominick imagines Thomas whole again, Ma without the split in her lip, and Domenico in the stern portrait on Ma’s bureau. He thinks of them as, in a sense, each other. The image brings together three generations without erasing their differences: Thomas’s damaged body, Ma’s visible injury, and the grandfather preserved in a portrait become parts of Dominick’s perception of shared family identity.

By then, Dominick knows he is unlikely to finish Domenico’s manuscript. He has only recently started reading it, after months of avoidance, and the translation-and-binding gift he wanted to make for Ma has not happened. His relationship with Domenico consequently remains unresolved and mediated: it is built from Ma’s choice, a partly read life story, a portrait, and patterns Dominick cannot confidently explain. What passes between generations is not a simple inheritance of belief, but a difficult act of recognition—seeing likeness, questioning what it means, and resisting the temptation to mistake a family echo for proof of fate.