H
ALF A BLOCK
from my parents’ house on Pleasant Street I breathed the aroma of Mama’s cooking. The ugly scene at the Café Roma vanished in the ambrosial waft of sweet basil, oregano, rosemary and thyme.
Suddenly a figure burst from the front door of the house, dashed down the porch steps, and raced to a pickup at the curb.
“Mario!” I shouted. “Mario, wait!”
He either heard me or he didn’t hear me as he started the engine and gunned the noisy truck away without looking at me. I crossed the yard to the porch. My mother stood behind the screen door, her silver hair in a neat pile, her apron fresh and white, her face warmed by happiness and a hot stove. By now Mario’s truck was two blocks away and still farting on five cylinders.
“What’s he running from?”
“He ate and ran. Ascared of your father.”
“He still eats here?”
“When he can. His wife don’t cook Italian.” She glanced down Pleasant Street. “Where’s your father?”
“At the Roma.”
“You had a fight?”
“Argument.”
“You’re not going to the mountains?” There was concern in her voice.
“You knew about that?”
We were still talking through the screen door.
“He said he was going to ask you.”
“He asked. I said, no chance.”
I stepped into the hot, small parlor that was overpowered by the spices from the kitchen. That parlor! It was hellishly hot. A morgue. Walls bedecked with pictures of the dead, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. In the corner on a pedestal stood a statue of Jesus bleeding profusely. Vigil candles in glass cups were at the Savior’s feet. They were a vital part of the household, participating in all that was vital and meaningful, for my mother lit the candles whenever a relative died, or when someone got sick, or when something of value was lost, or when lightning came close to the sky.
Dimly I saw a stack of clothing on the sofa. The stuff looked familiar, like images in an old photograph.
“What’s all this?”
“Your work clothes.”
“
Work
clothes? What kind of work?”
“Mountain work.” She hid her face.
“No mountains for me.”
“Think about it. Make up your own mind.”
“No mountains.”
I studied the clothes, tumbled the garments about. God knew where she had dug them out, some trunk in the hot, stuffy attic where everything eventually mummified—jeans, shirts, a pair of boots, even my baseball sweater with the big SE emblazoned on the chest. The idea that even my baby clothes might be carefully preserved somewhere made me shudder. There was something artful about those resurrected garments, a planned arrangement, a spider setting a trap, and I the victim. She sensed my thought and slipped into the kitchen. I found her at the stove, stirring things inside pots. She had prepared a great deal of food.
“Who’s going to eat all this?”
“Everybody.”
“You invited everybody.”
“No, but they’ll come anyway.”
I dropped into a chair at the kitchen table. She was there right away with a bottle of wine from the refrigerator and a chilled glass. I knew the wine. It had to be the new wine from the vines of Angelo Musso’s vineyard, easily the most important commodity in the house, for without it my father would quickly dry up and fade away.
“Mama, what’s this about a divorce?”
“What divorce?”
“You know what divorce. Why do you think I’m here?”
She laughed. “Just talk. We’re Catholics, we can’t divorce. Didn’t you know that?”
“Mario said he kicked you, choked you. You had to have him arrested.”
“Mario did it. Papa didn’t mean it. He didn’t do it on purpose.” She began slicing bread.
“How can he kick you, choke you, but not on purpose?”
“He didn’t mean it. He was only playing.”
“So he went to jail.”
“For a half hour. It was nothing.”
“What about the lipstick on his underwear?”
“It was jelly.”
“I thought it was jelly.”
“Cherry jelly. On his pancakes. He spilled some on his lap.”
“And for that you accuse him of infidelity?”
“So I was wrong, for once.” She heaved a big sigh. “How many times have I been right the last fifty years?”
I took her hand and smoothed the dry, soft skin.
“You don’t have to worry about things like that anymore. He’s not young anymore. The fire’s out.”
“He don’t need a fire. He keeps going without it.”
“In his mind, that’s all.”
“It’s dirty,” she said. “It’s a sin.”
She busied herself with the dinner, checking the eggplant in the oven, the gnocchi warming in a black iron pot, the veal bubbling in Marsala.
“I couldn’t find any heavy socks. You’ll need them up there. It may snow, this time of the year.”
“I’m not going ‘up there.’”
“Not even this last time, for your father?”
“I’m working. I can’t leave my book.”
That sent her suddenly out of the room toward the bedroom, where I heard her shuffling heavy objects about. She returned with an armful of books, dropping them on the table in front of me. They were my high school textbooks: geometry, American history, English composition, Spanish.
“Take them home,” she said. “They’re still new.”
I thanked her. “Just what I need.”
She studied my face, her fingers touching the delicate bones of her cheeks as she returned to the one obsession of her existence. “You didn’t get him mad? He won’t get into trouble?”
“He’ll drink too much, that’s all.”
“I don’t mind the drinking. The boys bring him home.”
“The boys?”
“Zarlingo and them. They watch him for me. Thank God you’ll be there. They scare me, those mountains.”
An angel, a persistent, tiresome angel. No wonder my papa booted her in the ass. I felt strangled, helpless as an infant swaddled and straining in futility. What the hell was I doing here? What was my wife up to? I was having a serious problem with my book. What the hell was it? Had the old man really put up with this crap for half a century? Who said he was impulsive, lacking patience, intolerant? The sun had dropped below the houses beyond the alley and it was cooler now, about ninety-five in the shade, the sky exploding with red and orange clouds.
“As long as I know where he is,” she was saying. “As long as he lets me know…”
I filled my glass and went out on the front porch, sat in the creaking rocker, and lit a cigarette. Darkness came fast. Down the street a mother stepped out on her porch and called her children to supper. The corner street lamp burst into light and an old dog trotted under it, hurrying home. The white eyes of television sets shone through the windows across the street, cowboys racing across the screens, gunfire crackling in the San Elmo twilight. A lonesome town. All the valley towns were like it, desolate, mystically impermanent, enclaves of human existence, people clustered behind small fences and flimsy stucco walls, barricaded against the darkness, waiting. I rocked back and forth and felt grief seeping into my bones, grief for man and the pain of loneliness in the house of my mother and father, aging, waiting, marking time.
Then my mother came quietly to the screen door and stared at me, as if storing up a remembrance of me, as if she might never see me again. I felt her pulsing back and forth, incorporeal and disembodied, sorrowing and lost as she slipped out of reality and back again, ashamed so little time remained.
“Henry?” Her voice was soft and irresolute. “You mustn’t worry about me and your father. You get a little crazy when you’re older, but it don’t do any harm. Be patient, Henry. You want your supper now?”
The baked eggplant took me back to the childhood of my life when they were a nickel apiece and a great feast, purple globular marvels bulging jolly and generous, rich Arab uncles eager to fill our stomachs, so beautiful I wanted to cry.
The thin slices of veal had me fighting tears again as I washed them down with Joe Musso’s magnificent wine from the nearby foothills. And the gnocchi prepared in butter and milk finally did it. I covered my eyes over the plate and wept with joy, sopping my tears with a napkin, gurgling as if in my mother’s womb, so sweet and peaceful and filling my mouth with life forever. She saw my wet eyes, for there was no hiding them.
“Something in the air,” I said. “Ammonia, maybe? It burns my eyes.”
“It’s ammonia. I mopped the floor with it.”
“That’s it. Ammonia.”
“Your father hates ammonia. He won’t let me use it in the washing machine.”
“Really?”
“You know what he likes?”
“Tell me.”
“Bubble bath.”
She veered to questions about Harriet and my boys. I showed her the snapshots in my wallet, the younger twenty-two, the older twenty-four. She studied the pictures under the kitchen light.
“They don’t look like stonemasons.”
“No.”
“Mario’s boys don’t care for it either. Virgil’s boy wants to play the piano and Stella has all girls. He wants a stonemason so bad, poor man. If we had just one in the family I think he’d quit drinking. All his prayers would be answered.”
“He prays?”
“Never. Or goes to mass.” Her eyes fixed me searchingly. “Do you go to mass, Henry?”
I had anticipated it. “Every Sunday. Like clockwork.”
“And your boys?”
“In the same pew with me and their mother, every Sunday.”
She almost sailed through the ceiling straight for celestial bliss, but she suddenly caught herself, her face growing serious. “You’re lying, Henry. Your wife never turned Catholic.”
“I’m working on it. Takes time.”
She sat down, sighing, disappointed, pouring a bit of wine into a glass. “No Catholics. No stonemasons. Dear God, whatever happened?”
She reached for my hand and folded it within her dry, warm palms, her voice compassionate and imploring. “Talk to your father, Henry. Make him go back to Our Lord. There isn’t much time. When you’re his age you never know from one hour to the next. And what’ll I do when he goes, worrying about where he went?”
“Why don’t you ask Father Martin to talk to him. That’s his business, saving souls.”
“He’s been here lots of times. All they do is fight. Your father has no respect. It’s the old country style. He laughs.”
“Then leave him alone.”
“I hope he goes first. Nobody can put up with him but me. Worse than a child: iron the sheets but not the pillow cases. Starch the cuffs but not the collars. Shine his shoes, trim his mustache, rub his feet, cut his hair, hot water bottle in his bed. You know what he’s got now? A bell, by his bed. Every night it rings for something: bring me a glass of wine, rub my back, make me some soup. When I’m gone you think Stella’ll do all that?”
The bell puzzled me.
“Don’t you sleep together?”
“He threw me out.”
“Why?”
“How should I know? I wouldn’t touch him anyway.” She raced ahead: “Do you know he takes enemas with warm wine, and eats raw eggs in the morning?”
“Nauseating.”
“See what I mean?”
A horn sounded from the street.
“That’s Virgil. Tell him about the gnocchi.”
I walked out on the porch and saw my brother Virgil sitting in his station wagon under the street lamp. I waved him to come in and he motioned me toward the car.
His old wagon was fender-dented, the wood paneling scraped and peeling. We shook hands through the window. We were more like classmates than brothers. Neither of us liked to think of the other, and in that sense we were nonexistent to one another. But he envied me, my lifestyle, my small success that had taken me away from San Elmo. I wasn’t sure he hated me, but I was certain he disliked me.
He was porcine now, his navel packed tight against the steering wheel. At forty-seven he looked ten years older, his hair fast vanishing—full at the temples, bald and glistening over the top. He had not married until thirty-five and now he was the father of four girls and a boy. I could smell them as I thrust my head inside the car, the sour taint of vomit and diapers. All the symbols of family joy were piled helter-skelter in the back of the wagon—playpen, tricycles, toys, diapers, blankets.
My brother Virgil! The genius of the family, destined to be a millionaire, straight out of high school with scholastic awards, honored by the faculty and immediately accepted as a clerk in San Elmo’s only independent bank. After nearly thirty years with the same firm he now managed the Loan Department, and the future was dim indeed, for the president’s three sons, Stanford-educated, had come upon the scene. I felt pity for the guy, but at the same time I thanked God all that baby litter in the back of his car was long gone from my own life.
“How’s everything?”
He smiled in a way that bent his mouth out of shape, a man with toothache of the soul. My mother’s melancholy eyes took up most of his large Neapolitan face.
“How’s Edith?”
“Three guesses.” He smiled feebly, like a man on the gallows.
“Good God, Virgil. Not again!”
He nodded with a great head that wearied his shoulders.
“You should stop, Virgil. You ever hear of a drugstore? Use something.”
“I use my cock. You have any other suggestions?”
“What about vasectomy?”
“That’s for dogs. I’m a man…I think.”
“Come on in. Let’s have a glass of vino.”
“I won’t go in there,” he scowled. “I’m pissed off at them.”
“At Mama? Nobody else is here.”
“Mama, Papa, Mario, the whole family. That paranoia in front of the police station. I can’t take it anymore. They’ve destroyed me in this fucking town. Now they’re trying to bury me.”
I opened the door.
“Come on, Virgil. Mama’s fixed a lovely dinner.”
“Naturally,” he smiled. “Tell me something. How come crazy old ladies cook so well? Same thing with my wife’s mother. A real psychopath, but God, what stroganoff!” He looked toward the house, tempted, but suddenly he leaned over and jerked the door shut.
“I won’t go in there. I’ll starve first!”
The screen door squealed and we looked toward the house as Mama stepped outside. “Come and eat, Virgil. It’s all fixed.”
“No, thanks, Ma.”