And as she remained motionless, her arm covering her eyes, I moved to the bathroom and cleansed my sword with warm water and a washcloth. I saw her lying in the same position as I pulled on my clothes. My eyes scanned the apartment for a last look around. A cold, sterile place, but with a terrible beauty, the beauty of loneliness and two strangers sharing an intimacy, the beauty one felt but did not see. Unforgettable.
I started for the bedroom to say good-bye, but in the doorway I saw something that made me hesitate. Miss Quinlan lay as before, her arm shielding her eyes. But her hair had moved. That lovely pile of Nordic blondness wasn’t real after all. It had slipped to the side, over her ear, revealing a white, bald skull. It humbled me. Had I stayed longer I would have burst into tears. How good she was!
“Thank you, Miss Quinlan,” I said.
“You’re welcome, I’m sure.” It was a tired whisper.
She did not move.
“My father thanks you too.”
“He was a dear man. I’m so glad I could help.”
“Good-bye, Miss Quinlan.”
“Good-bye.”
T
HE DAY BEFORE
the funeral Harriet arrived from Redondo Beach with our sons, and I was at the airport to meet them. She kissed me and stepped back to search my eyes for intimations of infidelity. She must have seen the death of my father in my tired gaze, and the strain of my grief, but I knew she didn’t find anything of Miss Quinlan reflected there, for she gave me a trusting smile and kissed me again.
I had not seen my sons in a month. They had been in Ensenada on what they jestingly referred to as a fishing trip, having driven down there with two women in the van.
Dominic was twenty-four and Phillip two years younger. Their stubbled faces darkened by the Mexican sun, their hair down below their necks, they were dressed in denim jackets and pants, their feet in thonged sandals. They looked like rock freaks, not mourning grandsons of an old man gone from their lives.
Walking across the parking lot I said, “I hope you brought some decent clothes.”
They looked at me in that cynical, aloof way of theirs, and Dominic said, “Don’t worry about it, Dad.”
“I don’t want you at the funeral in those outfits.”
“Yeah. We know.”
“How about haircuts?”
“No way.”
They tossed their grips into the luggage compartment and got into the back seat of the rented car. Harriet slid in beside me, and as I moved the car out I turned to her.
“Have they registered for the new term?”
“They said so,” she answered doubtfully.
I looked over my shoulder at them.
“How about it, Phil. Did you register?” He was in Business Administration.
“Yes, Dad. All taken care of.”
“How about you, Dominic?”
“I did not register,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I took a job.”
“What kind of a job?”
“I’m a checker in a supermarket.”
“What the hell for? What about your degree?”
“I make seven dollars an hour. You know any marine biologists earning that kind of money?”
“Any jerk can check groceries. You need that degree.”
“You didn’t get yours,” he said.
Harriet and I looked at one another in the usual bewilderment. We could not deal with them. They were spoiled rotten, those two, arrogant and sure of themselves. It wasn’t their intelligence, it was their smug cleverness, their icy ability to verbalize. They never fumbled or groped for answers. They were omniscient and trigger-happy.
For a while we drove in silence. They lit small Mexican cigars and offered us the pack; Harriet took one but I declined.
“How old was Grandpa?” Phillip asked.
“In a few months he would have been seventy-seven.”
“The old cock,” Dominic smiled. “He did all right.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what I mean. You’ve told us a hundred stories about Grandpa.”
“I liked him,” Phillip said. “He used to take us to that old Italian saloon when we were little and show us off.”
“The Café Roma,” Dominic remembered. “He loved that vino.”
“And brandy,” Phillip said. “First thing in the morning, brandy in his coffee.”
“He had style,” Dominic said.
We moved east on the freeway, the traffic light and swift. Clouds were piling up to the north and I wondered about rain at tomorrow’s funeral.
“Dad,” Phillip said. “I have a question.”
“Fire away.”
“Are you a diabetic?”
I had thought much of it since my father’s death, worried about it, discussed it with Dr. Maselli. Would it hit me someday? It was a possibility.
“No. I’m not a diabetic.”
“How about Dominic and me? It’s inherited, isn’t it? It’s genetic.”
“The potential is there. Not the disease.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Diet. Avoid sugar, and chances are it’ll skip right over you.”
“Chances are it won’t, too.”
“What are you asking for—a written guarantee? It’s not a bad disease, You can live with it. Your grandfather proved that.”
“You’re dreaming,” Phillip said. “There’s no cure for diabetes.”
“No cure, but there’s control, with insulin. Besides, you haven’t got it, so what the fuck are you talking about?”
That chilled him and he was quiet, but Dominic came on: “Dad, would you have had children if you’d known there was diabetes in your genes?”
I knew they were working their way to that question, and now that it was asked I found it hard to deal with.
“How should I know?” I said.
“No,” Harriet said. “I wouldn’t have had children.”
Touché! The statement slammed the lid on a Pandora’s box of silent speculation as the four of us pondered the nonexistence of Dominic and Phillip. Then the two began to laugh.
We drove to my mother’s house and found it a place of doom and dirge, the cars of mourners parked on both sides of the street, my father’s old friends slouched about the front porch drinking wine from Mama’s treasured crystal glasses, vexed and uncomfortable from the wails of their wives inside. Italians loved their living, but sometimes they loved their dead even more, specially like these womenfolk gathered in every room of the house, swarming about my black-draped mother like dark ants around their queen, sobbing, rattling their rosaries, rolling their necks, embracing the distraught widow, pumping grief into her and intoxicated by the grief she pumped back.
I didn’t blame Phillip and Dominic for not entering the house, and while they stayed in the car Harriet and I pushed our way up the porch and into Mama’s bedroom where Harriet squirmed through the throng of sobbing women to my mother’s side. She kissed Mama and came away with a sticky smear of tears across her cheek.
We could not remain there. Retreating to the kitchen, we saw the table heavy with salami, cheese, wine and fruit, preparations for hours of grief-venting, too much to endure, too absurd.
Slipping out the back way, we darted behind Mrs. Credenza’s hedge next door and hurried along it to the street and the car. As I set the gears I heard Virgil’s voice from the porch, frantically calling my name and running toward us.
“Have you seen Mario?” he asked.
“No.”
“The son of a bitch. He was supposed to bring the pizza.”
I steered the car into the street and drove over to my mother-in-law’s house. As Harriet and the boys got out I caught a glimpse of Hilda Dietrich peering from behind the curtained front door, and when I drove off she stepped out to greet them with open arms.
The end of my life in San Elmo was coming soon. After the funeral I would go away and never return, for without my father the town had vaporized into a wasteland of so many places like it. I knew what I must now do: take my mother away from there too, bring her under my own roof while Stella and my brothers worked out their own lives.
One other matter remained.
Like Paul, who had his moment of truth before Damascus, so too Henry Molise had had his fragment of ecstasy twenty-five years before in the San Elmo Public Library. I pulled up beside the graceful building, climbed the red sandstone steps my father had set with his own hands, entered the foyer, and strode down a corridor of bookshelves to that familiar place in the corner by the window near the pencil sharpener below the portrait of Mark Twain, and drew out the leather-bound copy of
The Brothers Karamazav
. I held it in my hands, I leafed the pages, I drew it tightly into my arms, my life, my joy, my sublime Dostoyevsky. I may have failed him in my deeds, but never in my devotion. My beloved Papa was gone, but Fyodor Mikhailovich would be with me to the end of my life.
I
THOUGHT MY
father’s funeral would bring out the whole town, but I was mistaken. More people had attended the wake on the previous afternoon than were present at the church service. Most were members of the family, and many were grandchildren who didn’t want to be there in the first place, for the circus was in town at the fairgrounds and the kids were annoyed at their grandfather for picking such a lousy time to die. The rest of the mourners were friends and neighbors of my mother and a loyal group from the Café Roma.
Waiting gloomily in their Sunday clothes, the pallbearers shaded themselves under a big elm on that hot, cheerless afternoon. They were Zarlingo, Cavallaro, Antrilli, Mascarini, Benedetti and Rocco Mangone. They were as beautiful as old stones strewn across a patch of hillside. Grief plucked at my throat like the leap of a trout as I looked at them. Now that I had none, I would have taken any one of them for a father. Indeed, any man, or bush, or tree, or stone, if he would have me for a son. I was myself a father. I didn’t want the role. I wanted to go back to a time when I was small and my father stood strong and noisy in the house. To hell with fatherhood. I was never born to it. I was born to be a son.
The pallbearers doffed their hats as Harriet and I entered the church. I waved. I wanted to shout: “I love you, I need you, take care of me, you funny old men!”
The family was gathered in the two front pews before the main altar, my mother in the first pew between Virgil and Stella and their families. Mama wore a black veil covering her hair and face. Harriet and I and our sons slipped into the pew behind them, next to Peggy and her kids. Right away I noticed that one of us was missing. I turned to Peggy.
“Where’s Mario?”
“In a state of shock. I told him to stay home.”
Virgil glanced over his shoulder and sneered.
“With the Giants and Atlanta playing a doubleheader on TV? That’s funny, Peggy. Very funny!”
“It’s true!” Peggy hissed in a loud whisper. “He cried and cried. He really loved his father. But you were all against him. You alienated him. Why did you pick on him? Why didn’t you have a little faith in him? Well, you’ll see. You’ll be sorry, all of you!”
“God help you, baby,” Virgil smirked.
“You fucking bank clerk!” she raged. “You’re not fit to clean Mario’s shoes!”
“Says who?”
“Says me, you creep.”
“Shh!” Mama chided under her black veil. “Please. Papa’s dead.”
Then the hearse arrived and the pallbearers carried the brown casket down the aisle to the communion rail. The mourners watched the attendants bring funeral wreaths and bouquets of flowers to place around the casket. How small the casket seemed. My father had been a bull of a man, but not tall. Horizontal in that box, he seemed no larger than a boy.
Then an enormous wreath was brought down the aisle, all roses and carnations and ferns, so large that two attendants carried it. They placed it at the foot of the coffin and stood it up on wire brackets. It was six feet tall, a gaudy splendor, very impressive. It bore a strip of white silk upon which a red inscription was embossed. It read:
COMPLIMENTS OF CAFÉ ROMA
.
The pallbearers gazed at their tribute with pleasure and satisfaction. No question about it, the Café Roma brotherhood had come through with the biggest and the best. My mother, bless her, was so impressed that she turned, raised her veil, and nodded in appreciation. The Roma boys smiled in sympathy.
A bell tinkled and Father Martin emerged from the sacristy behind two altar boys. Beneath the boys’ cassocks you could see the green and white stripes of their baseball socks, and you knew that somewhere in the town their teammates were waiting for them.
Father Martin moved down to the casket, blessed it with holy water, and read the Latin rites from a missal. Closing it, he put his fingers together and tried to assemble his thoughts as people waited for him to speak. It must have been a problem, for he was dealing with the life and death of a man who had rarely come to church and who had never performed his Catholic obligations.
“Let us pray for the soul of Nicholas Molise,” he began. “A good and simple man, an honest man, a fine craftsman who lived among us for so many years and gave his best for the improvement of the human community. Instead of weeping, let us rejoice that he has come to the end of his toil on this earth, and is now at peace in the arms of his Father in heaven.”
That was it, short and sweet, a bull’s-eye. The mourners joined him in the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, and he concluded with: “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let the perpetual light shine upon him.”
The padre returned to the sacristy as the undertakers opened the casket and my mother led the mourners past the body. She raised her veil and kissed her husband on the forehead. Then she laced her white rosary around his stiffened fingers. Virgil led her away as she cried softly. One by one we passed the bier and stared down at Papa, the children startled, horrified, fascinated, the others weeping silently.
I did not weep. I felt rage, disgust. Good God, what had they done to that poor old man! What had they done to that craggy, magnificent Abruzzian face, those lines of pain and toil, the resolute mouth, the cunning knit of his eyebrows, the furrows of triumph and defeat! Gone, gone…and in their place the smooth, unlined, cotton-stuffed face, the rouged cheeks. It was a shame, an obscenity, and I was stung with a writer’s wickedness, thinking, that’s not my old man, that’s not old Nick, that’s Groucho Marx, and the quicker we bury him the better.