by John Fante
She crossed to the sink and poured a cup of water, drinking it slowly because it was so cold, and I could hear it tumbling into her.
“Were you downtown tonight?” she asked.
“I went to the show. I didn’t see him.”
“Who?” she asked, innocently.
“Papa.”
“He lost ten dollars last night.”
If my father admitted losing ten it must have been more like fifty. It was his pool-playing that kept us going during the winter. He was far and away the best billiard player in Roper, but his skill went against him because it was hard to lure competitors, and he had to give away too many points. Sharp as he was in calculating the talents of a stranger, he sometimes ran into a hustler from Denver or Cheyenne who would wipe him out. Then he would start over again, playing for quarters and half dollars, sometimes borrowing to get off the ground and build another stake.
“Do women go there?” Mama asked.
She constantly asked it, and I always said no, but she knew otherwise. The Onyx was a wide open saloon with a bar in front and the pool and poker tables behind the partition to the rear. Women were barred from the back room, but at the bar they were as numerous as the men.
“It’s a bad part of town,” she said. “I’d be afraid to go in there.”
“What’s bad about it? The police station is right across the street.”
“That’s true,” she said, staring, something else disturbing her.
I knew. She could not bring herself to express it: that she suspected my father of playing around. It seemed such a corny notion—old Papa, the father of four children, a bricklayer out of work and trying to hustle a buck with a cue stick, taking on the added trouble of another woman. The plain truth was, my father didn’t like women very much. Not even his own mother, and certainly not his wife.
“What’s wrong with him?” she went on. “I’ll never understand it. A nice home, four wonderful children, spaghetti on the table, wine in the cellar, and he’s out every night. Even if he doesn’t care for me, you’d think he’d have some consideration for his children. Why does a man do that?”
“It’s very simple. He hates women and children. Besides, where would we be if he didn’t scratch out a few dollars shooting pool?”
“All the time? Day and night, Sundays too? Not even to Mass once in a while? Nobody shoots pool that much.”
“It’s the way he is, and you can’t change it.”
“He’ll change. God’ll step in one of these days. You’ll see.”
She meant her prayers, the peeling of thousands of rosary beads through thousands of days on her knees in the locked bedroom. There were lumps on her kneecaps telling of it.
She eased quietly behind me and I felt her cold fingers through my hair, and then her hands palming my mushroom ears.
“Don’t,” I said, squirming away.
“Wear the stocking. And keep praying.”
The remedy for protruding ears, as suggested by the Potenzese, was the wearing of a woman’s stocking over your head at night. It worked fine until you removed the stocking. Then the ears sprang out again.
“I’ve learned to live with my ears, Mama. Will you please try to do the same?”
“But have you tried the Blessed Mother? Try her for a month. If she can make cripples walk, look how easy for her to…”
“Shut up!” I screamed. “Leave me alone, leave my ears alone!”
She stared, wounded, large-eyed, and without a word she turned and walked quietly back to the bedroom, her troubled spirit dragging after her like a tattered wedding veil.
I was sorry I had screamed at her, I hated myself, but the idea of praying to the mother of God to flatten my ears, since her son had made them stick out in the first place, seemed like plain madness. Prayer! What good was it? What had it done for her? My father beside her in bed every night, listening to the click of her rosary, finding her on her knees, shivering in the cold, what the hell are you doing down there, come to bed for Christ’s sake before you freeze to death, her prayers a snapping whip at his ass, reminding him of his worthlessness, his wife like a child writing letters to Santa Claus, collapsing from life into the arms of God, of St. Teresa, of the Virgin Mary. Oh, my mother was a good woman, a noble woman, she never cheated or lied or deceived or ever spoke an unkind word. She scrubbed floors and hung out huge bundles of laundry and ironed by the hour, she cooked and sewed and swept and smiled bravely at hard times, God’s victim, my father’s victim, her children’s victim, she walked about with the wounds of Christ in her hands and feet, a crown of thorns about her head. Her suffering was too unbearable to watch, so that I wished she’d say oh shit, or fuck it Jasper, or piss on you Joe. I longed for the day of revolt when she would break a wine jug over my father’s head, smack Bettina in the mouth and beat us children with a stick. But she punished us instead with Our Fathers and Hail Marys, she strangled us with a string of rosary beads.
Prayer. Oh, prayers! Oh, the reaching out into nothingness for small favors like a pair of shoes, or miracles like adding another six inches to my height so that I could develop a really fast ball. Years of prayers—and what was the result? I had even stopped measuring myself against the bedroom wall. The futility of it! If St. Francis of Assisi, one of the princes of the Church, was only five feet tall, then what chance had I of reaching six feet? Hell, it was a total waste of time, a gnashing of teeth in the wilderness.
The old clock on the stove clucked away and it was after one when I finished studying. The house was cold now, an icy cold that crept into the kitchen from under the floors. I heard something, a step or a sigh, and looked out into the backyard. The world was as white and silent as the moon. Snow mounds outlined rows of cabbages buried in straw in the garden. Slowly I felt a presence, something out there and all around the house, an energy alive and unseen, ominous as a burglar, trying to break in, peering through every window, pushing against doors and walls. I knew what it was, and I was afraid to think of it.
I turned from the window and got the big bottle of Sloan’s from the dish cabinet. I poured a generous handful and massaged the piney tartness into The Arm, rubbing and pressing and kneading it into the flesh. I smeared it on my chest and neck and dabbed my nostrils until I felt calm again and the pain had burned me fearless.
What a problem! Was this the way it was going to be? Other people had thoughts of death, and each put them down in his own way. I couldn’t rely on The Arm forever, dousing it with liniment. It made for a very dubious future. What would happen if I got lost in the mountains for a week, alone and without Sloan’s? I saw myself screaming, running mad through the forest.
Far down the street, the sound carrying boldly in the frozen stillness, came footsteps quick and crunching the snow. It had to be my father. He always walked with determination and purpose, going nowhere. The front porch shook as he stomped the snow from his shoes.
“That damn stuff,” I heard him grumble as he stepped into the front room and sniffed. He stomped through the house, his way of informing everyone that he had arrived, and found me at the kitchen sink, the bottle of liniment in my hand.
“When you gonna grow up?” he said, his nostrils quivering.
His cheeks shone like apples. He hung his hat and overcoat on a hook behind the door. He was forty-five, with massive hands and short thick fingers. He was a neat man, careful of his dress, and even in work clothes he looked spruced up because of the white neckties he liked to wear, and the small mustache he kept meticulously trimmed. He wore a thick silver ring on the index finger of his left hand which he claimed was the secret to his skill with a pool cue. Though he was seldom at home, except for eating and sleeping, the house had an unmistakable way of jolting to attention, like an engine starting up, the moment he came through the door.
I watched him dig the stub of a cigar from his shirt pocket and sink his teeth into it as he poured wine from a jug into a saucepan. He not only smoked cigars, he ate them up, bit by bit. He put
a match to the gas burner and placed the pan over the blue flame. Then he dropped a couple of bay leaves into the wine. He stared at it in silence, waiting for it to heat up.
“Papa,” I said. “Do you ever think about dying?”
He looked at me in surprise.
“What kind of a question is that?”
“Well, do you?”
“What for?”
“No reason. But doesn’t it pop into your head once in a while?”
“Never.”
“Never?”
“Never. Don’t think about it. Think about living. Think about school. How you doin’ in school?”
“I’m passing. I’ll graduate.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. I’m considering it.”
“What?”
“My career.”
“What career?”
“My future.”
“What future?”
“Numerous possibilities.”
“Baseball,” he said. “Phooey.”
“Did I make a reference to baseball?”
“You know Johnny Di Massio?”
I knew him, a bricklayer compatriot of my father’s, also a pool shark.
“Fastest, cleanest bricklayer in the state. Left-handed too, like you.”
“The similarity does not overwhelm me,” I said, putting him down, since he spoke cautious and uncertain English.
“Some day you’re gonna be faster than Johnny.”
It was a shock. I lifted my left hand to the light. “You’re asking me to use this for laying brick? Surely you can’t be serious, sir.”
“Sure I’m serious. I’ll learn you the trade. Three, four years mixing mortar and carrying the hod, and you’ll be up on the scaffold with me. We’ll be partners—father and son, contractors, figuring jobs together. Make money.”
For years he had tried to interest me in bricklaying. His father and grandfathers for generations had been bricklayers and masons, and he believed the trade was planted in the blood line, blossoming with every new generation. When I was only seven he took me to the job for the first time and I got a nickel a day carrying drinking water to the bricklayers. The past two summers I had worked for him as a helper, operating a concrete mixer and packing a hod. It had been donkey work, and The Arm resented it and was sore all the time.
He himself was a very good bricklayer, laying them as expertly as he shot pool, fast and neat and with a rhythm, but he stayed poor just the same, no matter how hard he worked, until it was plain that being poor was not his fault but the fault of his trade.
I tried to speak calmly, reasonably, respectful of his temper, which could explode like a bullet.
“Papa,” I said. “I regret to say this, but I don’t think I have the right temperament for bricklaying.”
‘Temperament—what’s temperament got to do with it? Just put one brick on top of another and keep your wall plumb. Any jackass can do it.”
“My talent lies in other areas.”
“What talent?”
“A special talent. You might say I was born with it.”
He gave me a look of disgust, grabbed a glass tumbler from the cupboard and slammed it on the table. Then he poured the mulled wine into it, blowing on the wine to cool it, glaring at me.
“What talent?” he repeated.
I wanted to speak the truth but it wasn’t in me to say baseball. He still swung at me now and then, missing on purpose, but you could never be sure.
“Medicine,” I said. “Helping sick people get well, crippled little children, people with heart trouble and dropsy.”
The anger left his face and he was thoughtful as he sipped the steaming wine. “That takes money,” he said.
“And time.”
“How long?”
“Eight years of college.”
“You better think of something else. I can’t afford it. My God, Kid, you’re almost eighteen years old! When I was your age I was cutting stone.”
“I won’t lay brick.”
He sighed and sat down.
“Look, Kid,” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “I know what’s eating you, but you don’t have to quit baseball. You can play with the Plasterers’ Union. They got a good team. Sunday ball is plenty.”
“Oh, great. Lay brick all week long, bust my fingers, and pitch on Sundays. It’s the best offer I’ve had in years.”
He shook his head patiently, cupping the wine tumbler in both hands and breathing on it, keeping his eyes averted.
“We’re in trouble,” he said quietly. “We owe everybody—the rent, the lights, the gas, the butcher, the doctor, the bank, the lumber yard.” His brown eyes came up as if from a deep pool and implored me to understand.
It was not an easy admission of crisis. He was a proud man with faith in himself and in good times and he kept his problems hidden as well as possible for a poor man. He had never asked for help before. I looked at him and saw a lonely man with a houseful of kids and no way out. He would never own more than the clothes on his back, his sack of mason’s tools, his concrete-mixer, and his favorite pool cue. He would go on working year after year until his strength gave out, until he could stoop no more over a wall, and the trowel fell from his hand. Why had he come so far, all the way from Abruzzi, for this? Grandma Bettina was right. He should have stayed in the old country. Had he done so, it would have changed my life too. What did they play in Torricella Peligna—soccer, bocci?
“I’ll help, Papa.”
“Good boy,” taking a big gulp of the mulled wine. “This June you graduate. Then we’ll go to work. We’ll show them! Show the whole world. Father and son. We’ll pay our debts, save our money, and some day we’ll go in the lumber business.”
“Lumber business?” I stared.
“That’s where the money is.”
“Pass, Papa. I’ll learn to lay brick, but I want no part of the lumber business.”
“Not right now. In the future. Four, five years of laying brick, then the lumber business.”
“But why the lumber business? Isn’t laying brick bad enough?”
‘That’s what I mean. A man should work hard to get out of it. But it’s a trade, a start.”
So there it was. The whole book. The Tragic Life of Dominic Molise, written by his father. Part One: The Thrills of Bricklaying. Part Two: Fun in a Lumber Yard. Part Three: How To Let Your Father Ruin Your Life. Part Four: Here Lies Dominic Molise, Obedient Son.
I mulled it over and decided not to argue, not at that hour. I just sat there soothing my arm, stroking it, calming it down as it whimpered like a child.
Papa drained the tumbler and daubed his mustache with a knuckle, his face to the light for the first time. It was then that I noticed it, a scarlet smear on his upper lip below the mustache. I couldn’t help staring, and he sensed my surprise and disbelief, his face bulging with the soar of blood. Quickly he crossed to the mirror over the sink and thrust his face close.
“That damned razor,” he said.
He watched to see if I believed him, but now I saw other places.
“You cut your chin too, and your neck.”
“It’s nothing.”
Nothing but lipstick. I felt shame and could not look at him. The lumber business. Partners. Father and son. I wanted to spew him, the sneak of him, the cheapness of him, the betrayal, the death in him, myself in him, my sister Clara and my brothers in him, all our days and nights, all our lives in him.
We didn’t say anything as I gathered my books and papers. As I started to leave, he touched my shoulder but I jerked away into the dining room and then into my bedroom. In the snowy light that bounced through the window I undressed and slipped into bed beside my brother August. He jerked and said oh God as the liniment seared his nostrils.
The gleaming snow gave the room a phosphorescence. From the eaves above the window icicles hung like my mother’s taffy, which had a way of congealing like patterns of jagged glass.
From the kitchen came a roaring sea of silence churned up by my father. Not that I cared, not one bit did I care. But I cared all the same. Why hadn’t he wiped it off? Why had he been so careless and forced me to see it, the lip marks of some woman not my mother?
Those ugly dames at the Onyx! Where else in town could my father find another woman to kiss him? I saw them now, big-assed, hard-drinking women from the pottery factory, divorced women, married women who opened the saloon at ten in the morning and never left until it closed at two. It was a kind of exclusive club, a sorority of drinking women.
I could hear him in the kitchen, lathering soap, flooding his face with water, gasping and splashing like a man swimming for his life. His footsteps sounded and he came to the bedroom door.
“Come here,” he whispered.
“What for?”
“I want to talk to you.”
I got up in my shorts and followed him back to the kitchen. His face showed pain, his forehead wrinkled, his eyes pleading.
I waited in the doorway.
“Don’t get the wrong idea,” he said. “It’s nothing. A crazy woman fooling around. I don’t even know her name.”
“It’s okay.”
“Sure it’s okay. Just some crazy woman.”
I turned to go back to the bedroom.
“Wait a minute.”
I faced him again.
“You know how your mother is.”
“I won’t say anything.”
“I get enough trouble. You understand?”
“Sure, Papa.”
“I don’t care what you think of me, but don’t hurt your mother.”
“I know.”
“You know what I’m saying?”
“I know.”
“Okay. Be a man.”
“Okay.”
I went back to the bedroom and lay down. The kitchen light went out and the floor creaked with his steps as he walked into the bedroom next to ours. There was a boom when his shoe hit the floor, and then another. I heard the tinkle of coins and nails as he pulled off his pants then the twang of bed springs as his weight descended at my mother’s side.
