1933 Was a Bad Year

by John Fante

  The snow fell so heavily we couldn’t see the courthouse across the way. Cars moved bleakly in the mournful traffic, headlights dim and shrouded. We plodded a block to the bus stop on Pearl Street, beside the snow-bloated popcorn wagon. Usually I waited until the bus picked him up and we talked of when we would meet again. Now he drifted away to stand alone against the wall of the bank, hands in the pockets of his sheepskin coat, peering up the street for the approach of his bus, snowflakes powdering his coat. Finally the white eyes of the bus came out of the gloom. He moved up to the curb.

  “Well,” he smiled. “Cool off, Dago.”

  It made me furious. I grabbed his throat.

  “Don’t ever call me that again!”

  His eyes popped in astonishment. I let go and he turned and entered the bus. It drew away, spewing the smell of oil as it vanished into the storm. I shoved my hands into my pockets and started up Pearl Street, slogging home in the slush of the pointless storm. But the snow had its consolations after all. It hid you from others, your freckles and fan-shaped ears and miserable stature, and you drifted past other ghosts in the desolation, heads bent, eyes hidden, your guilt and worthlessness deep and protected inside.

  Chapter Three

  Supper was ready, the table set in the dining room. We waited, Grandma watching at the front window.

  “Hell come,” Mama said. “He knows we’re having lamb.”

  She looked almost festive, her hair braided and in a pile, wearing a fresh house dress, a fragrance of lilacs following her—too much talcum powder.

  By seven we knew he would not come, and we sat down to minestrone, breast of lamb stuffed with rice and raisins, peppers in garlic and olive oil, and jello.

  Mama wouldn’t eat. She left the table and we heard her in the kitchen, washing pots and pans. Two empty places at the table now, the wine carafe beside Papa’s napkin.

  “I’d call the police,” Clara said.

  “What for?”

  “Teach him a lesson.”

  She had always been Mama’s loyal ally. She was now thirteen, suddenly sassy and hostile, longing for her own bedroom instead of sharing the front room with Frederick, sleeping on the unyielding leather sofa.

  “Hanging around that dirty old poolhall!” she said. “I wouldn’t let my husband get away with it.”

  “Be quiet,” I said, brooding about Kenny, knowing I had lost my best friend.

  “I won’t be quiet. What do you know? You’re a man, like your father. That’s the way it always is, the men against the women.”

  “What can you expect from America?” Grandma growled. “Cards and poolhalls, whiskey and women! Give me the sweet poverty of Christ and the good old days. At least the towns were small and a man could not wander far, and came home when he was hungry.”

  We carried our dishes into the kitchen and started homework while Clara and Mama did the dishes. Many times my father was away from home, but tonight something was wrong. It was in the air we breathed.

  “Don’t, Mama,” Clara said, and we glanced from our books to see our mother crying softly. She dried her red hands and ran through the dining room to her bedroom.

  Clara finished the dishes and brought her books to the table. We were miserable and it was hard to concentrate. We couldn’t hear Mama crying, but even the house was aware of her tears, the floors her feet had trod, the pieces of furniture, the friendly old stove, the pots and pans, the dish towel by the sink, still wet from her hands.

  “Go to your mother,” Grandma said.

  She lay with her head on the pillow, looking at the ceiling, her eyes like wet birds. I sat at the bedside and took her cold, weightless hand and asked if there was something I could do.

  “He lied,” she said bitterly. “He always lied. And now it’s too late.”

  She sat up and blew her nose.

  Across the room, under the dresser, were my father’s work shoes, not worn for months, gnarled and misshapen and chalk white from mortar, the toes turned up like the shoes of a dead man.

  “I don’t blame him anymore,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror. “I’m old, I’m nothing, I never was. No wonder I married him! There wasn’t anybody else.”

  “You look just fine, just right.”

  It was the best I could say, and it was true. I would not have wanted her any other way. She was not a beauty, but she was beautiful, a mater dolorosa, like the mother of God.

  Holy pictures stared down at us from the walls, the madonna over the bedside, the Savior with his exposed and bleeding heart above the headboard, a statue of St. Anthony on the dresser, St. Teresa across the room. It was like a nun’s cell, and I wondered again how they could make love in a room like that, yet all four of us had been conceived there, on that very bed.

  “He never cared for me,” she said bitterly. “He really wanted to marry your Aunt Flora, but she couldn’t stand him. When he gave her the ring she wouldn’t have it on her finger, she threw it in the sink and laughed, and then he gave it to me to spite her. And that’s how I married your father.”

  “Didn’t you love him?”

  “I felt sorry for him, if that’s what you mean.”

  I couldn’t bear the curled up shoes under the dresser, pale and luminous and grotesque. I rose from the bed and dropped them with a boom in the closet.

  “He likes them under the dresser,” she said.

  “They give me the creeps.”

  “So we got married, and he told me about our wonderful house in Roper. My own house!” It made her smile to remember it. “You don’t know what that means to a woman. In the forest, he said, right by a little stream, a place to raise children. We took the train from Denver, and he said he lost the tickets, and the conductor waited and waited, and then he said he lost his wallet too. I felt so sorry for him because he had that funny Italian accent and the conductor didn’t understand a word, so I paid the fare myelf. Somebody rob me, he said, somebody steal nine hundred dollars. The poor man. He married me without a penny, not even a dollar to give the priest.”

  She kept glancing at the vacant place where the shoes had been, and now she rose from the bed, crossed to the closet, lifted out the ghostly shoes, and placed them under the dresser once more. In the mirror she studied the tumble of disarrayed hair and began removing hairpins, holding them in her mouth, speaking through them:

  “And then I saw my house, my wonderful house in the forest.” Her eyes took in the bedroom, her smile touched with irony. “You think this house is cold and worn out? You should have seen that place on Roper Creek! A shack near the old city dump. Made of old lumber and tin roofing. No water, no sink, no toilet. We had to go out under the trees. And the furniture—boxes to sit on, a mattress for a bed, an oil drum for a stove. Oh God, how he lied to me!”

  Her hair tumbled over her shoulders and she ran her fingers through it and cried. “Then that old lady in the next shack came over and knocked on the door and said could she have her furniture back, because he’d borrowed it—the boxes, the stove, the mattress, and I helped her carry it out, and there wasn’t anything left, just the dirt floor.”

  I thought how terrible it must have been for her, but I pitied my father too. She had only been the victim, while he had been both the victim and the betrayer.

  “Poor guy,” I said.

  “He lied!” she shot back.

  “He was poor, trapped.”

  “He was a liar.”

  “He was proud, so he lied.”

  “How can a liar have pride?” She went to the window where the glass had frosted. Shuddering, she held her elbows and turned away. “I don’t blame your father anymore. I blame myself. If you put up with a man’s lies, you’re as bad as he is. You’re a liar, same as him.”

  A horn sounded in the street. By the time I got to the front door Clara and my brothers were already there, looking at a grey sedan parked at the curb. It had to be Kenny in his Dad’s car.

  “Wow!” Augie said. “A brand new LaSalle. Look
at that long snazzy hood!”

  I ran out in my shirt sleeves. Kenny was behind the wheel, and at his side was the unbelievable, beautiful Dorothy. She was in a mink coat with a white scarf around her neck, her honey hair inside the deep collar. She was smiling, actually looking into my face and meeting my eyes for the first time. I felt myself floating, coming off the ground, and I had to grab the car to keep myself down, stunned and without words.

  “Hi,” she smiled.

  It was more eloquent than all of Tennyson. My God, what a lovely thing to say! My God, how inspiring, how moving! How clever she was!

  “Hi,” I answered, but even then I was afraid I had said too much, a long speech that bored her. Kenny was watching me. He laughed.

  “Get your coat, Dom.”

  “Sure. What for?”

  “A Ginger Rogers picture at the Apollo. She wants to see it.”

  Was it really happening? Was I making the whole thing up? Had I gone stark raving mad and run out into the street, imagining the whole thing? I stared at the sparkling face before me, the wide-set grey eyes, the ravishing mouth out of which cunning white vapors appeared.

  “Please come,” the mouth said.

  Beautiful. Better than Shakespeare. I almost went under. Her fragrant perfume wafted from within the car and enveloped me like a pink cloud, and I went staggering back to the house in a gurgle of enchantment, without feet, a zephyr, a floating thing pushed along by the motor of my heart.

  “Who are they?” Grandma said. “What do they want?”

  “It’s Kenny,” I said, pushing past them.

  “The hottest car on the road today,” Augie said.

  “It looks like a hearse,” Bettina said. “Where are they taking you, to the graveyard?”

  I shoved them away from the door and closed it. “Animals,” I said.

  While I changed shirts, Augie brought me his mackinaw, the best thing he owned. I tried to comb my hair at the mirror but I trembled so much I couldn’t part it straight, and gradually I began to conk out, couldn’t even think of being so near her, sharing the same car seat with her, and a numbing futility came over me. I sank on the bed, my hands dangling between my knees as I felt myself turning into an ox or some thick four-legged beast. I could almost feel my ears growing larger, and animal hair growing on my face. What was the use? No matter what the night held, I knew I would blow it sky high. What could I say when those cool grey eyes measured me? What if she kissed me? I would drop dead.

  From the street the LaSalle horn blared sharply. Frederick raced into the room.

  “Hurry up! They’re waiting!”

  “I don’t feel so good.”

  Augie shook me and pulled me to my feet. He snatched the bottle of Sloan’s from the dresser and twisted off the cork.

  “Here. Use it.”

  “I’ll stink.”

  “Just breathe it, till you get your strength back.”

  He shoved the bottle under my nose and I inhaled from my knees. It helped. My bones were hardening up, my muscles tightening, the pungency enveloping me like a hot flame, until I stood straight and courageous, tears running from my eyes as the liniment curled the hairs in my nostrils.

  Then I remembered who I was—not some crumb bum nobody, but The Arm, the can-do man, the must-be man, the got-it man, not the hey-kid man, but the man with the bucket of sliders, the clutch man, Mister Hall of Fame.

  Augie held the mackinaw up and I slipped into it, calm restored. I sauntered into the front room, past the crowd at the front door, and out to the waiting car. The front door opened and I slipped into the seat beside the dream. Ken touched the starter. There was a crunch of ice as the car moved into the street.

  The miracle. All my hours of longing for her, all the aimless impossible reveries, and suddenly she was beside me golden and holy. The car was warm and cozy and I exulted in the intoxication of her perfume. She moved slightly, an accidental pleasure of her knee against mine. Like a kiss. What would happen next was unfathomable, beyond imagination. She might even speak to me.

  The snow was deep over the iced pavement and Ken drove carefully, twenty miles an hour. The elms along Arapahoe were laced with snow. The street lights gave the snow a glittering warmth, sensuous white mounds like loaves of bread. Not a soul walked the streets, and only an occasional car passed, floating by as if in slow motion.

  We turned off Arapahoe and moved north up Twelfth Street toward downtown. She had not spoken a word and seemed content to gaze ahead at the oncoming street. She lit a cigarette with the dash lighter and a lazy bubble of enchanting smoke tumbled from the intimate warmth of her mouth. Her smoke. Different. Overpowering.

  Kenny spoke to her. “Remember now, you promised to behave.” To me he said, “I told her what you said this afternoon.”

  The fool. It had me embarrassed.

  “You talk too much,” I said.

  Her hand took mine.

  “I agree,” she said.

  I felt the smooth warmth of her black kid glove squeezing my hand. “I’m sorry if I was rude,” she added. “It’s just that all you and Ken talk about is baseball.”

  “Don’t you like baseball?”

  “I can live without it.”

  “What do you like?”

  “Tennis, skiing, books. I love James Joyce.”

  “You mean Jim Joyce, short stop for the St. Louis Browns?”

  “Oh, my God.”

  She exhaled, impatiently snuffed out her cigarette. Kenny grinned.

  “She means Joyce, the writer.”

  Me and my big mouth. I had never heard of him. She grew rigid, folding her arms and staring straight ahead.

  “Oh, that one!” I said, trying to cover my ignorance, but it was useless and I knew she was convinced that I was a boob. I looked at her face, her jaw hard, her teeth clamped. I wanted to jump out and roll under the wheels of the car. She refused to speak another word.

  “See what you’ve been missing?” Ken said. “A pure unadulterated bitch.”

  He wheeled into the curb across the street from the Apollo. I stepped out fast, almost in flight, then remembered to offer her my hand to help her down, but she ignored it and swept past me, bundling her fur around herself and hurrying toward the theatre, Ken following her.

  I stood there with iced blood, feeling sick and unable to move. The iron fence around the courthouse was only a few feet away, and beyond it a growth of snow-laden lilac bushes. I thought of leaping the fence and walking away, clear to Wyoming. I was in the wrong state, with the wrong girl, afraid of her, afraid to breathe in her presence. But there was still another way out. I could rush down to the railroad track and throw myself in front of the eight o’clock local from Greeley, hurl myself at the cow-catcher, crushed chest, split skull, blood all over, Roper youth commits suicide, parents identify body of Dominic Molise, well-known athlete.

  “Hey, come on!”

  Kenny was waving in front of the theatre. I crossed the street. Dorothy stood under the marquee, stamping her shoes. I had no money of course and Kenny bought the tickets. She glanced at me fleetingly, cold as a star, as Kenny stepped away from the ticket booth and we went inside.

  The place was almost empty, maybe twenty people. A newsreel was showing former President Hoover playing golf. Half a dozen patrons booed. We sat in the back loges where smoking was allowed, Dorothy between us. She flung back her fur and I tried to help her with it, but she did it herself, crisply, wanting no help from me. A dizzying fragrance filled the air, released by the open coat. I drew it in and heaved a sigh. She put a cigarette to her lips and waited for a light from either of us. Like mad I went scavenging through my pockets, and I was still pawing as Ken lit her Camel. She exhaled and sat back, waiting for the newsreel to end.

  Then the first of two features hit the screen. It was Tom Mix in The Man From Nogales.

  ““Oh, shit,” she whispered, knowing she would have to sit through it until Ginger Rogers appeared in Dancing Daughters.

  T
he western bothered her from the first shot of Tom Mix and Tony. For ten minutes she fussed restlessly, crossing and uncrossing her legs as the screen blazed with gunfire.

  Suddenly she said, “I can’t stand it,” gathered up her coat and stalked up the aisle. I turned in surprise and watched her leave the theatre.

  “What happened?”

  Ken slouched deeper into his seat.

  “She doesn’t like cowboy pictures.”

  “Maybe we better go too.”

  “Not me. I love Tom Mix.”

  I rose and hurried up the aisle. When I reached the street she was slipping behind the wheel of the LaSalle. I called to her and she saw me and started the engine. I ran across the street as the car began to move, crunching snow.

  “Wait.”

  The car stopped and the grey eyes, almost solemn now, turned to me.

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t go. Stay.”

  She flexed her shoulder.

  “It’s so childish, all that shooting.”

  The night wind tossed her hair, fluttered her white scarf against her black gloves. Her breath fluted out like a flower in the cold air. I could have stared forever.

  “It’s so cold,” she shuddered. “Why don’t you go back with Ken and enjoy the show?”

  But I couldn’t leave her. I might never be alone with her again. A man got such few chances with a girl like her.

  “I have to talk to you,” I said. “It’s very important.”

  “Some other time.”

  “I’m desperate, Dorothy. Help me. I need your advice. I need it bad.”

  Her eyebrows lifted.

  “Desperate?” She was amused. “How can I possibly give you any advice?”

  “I know you can.”

  “How, for heaven’s sake?”

  “By just listening. You’re a psychology major, aren’t you?”

  She considered it carefully.

  “Get in,” she said without enthusiasm.