1933 Was a Bad Year

by John Fante

  I ran around to the other side and sat beside her. She shifted gears and the car crawled into the street. At last we were alone, Dorothy Parrish and Dominic Molise. It was the high point of my life.

  She drove slowly, without speaking, as if to give me time to gather my thoughts. I knew I had to be good, and I went rummaging through my mind, trying to find something of value. Then it came to me, the vision of the virgin standing at my bedside.

  We drove up Pearl Street. The store windows were lit but the street was deserted. To the west a cumulus cloud sat like a swan on Flagstaff Mountain. She turned on Walnut and we went past the Onyx with its blazing neon lights. People sat along the bar, and juke box music spilled into the street.

  “Well, young man. What’s your problem?”

  “A dream I had. It worries me.”

  Her eyes turned to me and they were troubled and uneasy.

  “Maybe I’m not the person to talk to. Dreams are so personal. Shouldn’t you see a psychiatrist?”

  “It’s not that bad. I mean, it’s not sinful or anything like that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. It’s got the Virgin Mary in it.”

  “I don’t know a thing about her. Why don’t you talk to the priest?”

  I told her about the mysterious visitation, how I had wakened Augie, who failed to see it. As I talked we cruised up and down the town, out to the picnic grounds, up to the Chautauqua, around the junior college campus, the car very warm from the humming heater under the dashboard.

  When she slipped her arms out of her fur coat I helped her, and she thanked me as it fell away from her, a nest of mink lined with golden silk. Beneath was a white turtleneck sweater and a green wool skirt, and knees round and smooth.

  Even as I talked, I dared not look at her too closely. Every detail sent a small explosion through me—the curve of her elbow, the chiseled perfection of her nostrils, the heavy languor of her hair, the jeweled perfection of her wristwatch, the lipstick on her cigarette, her in-curving belly, the smoothness of her lap, her jaunty breasts sailing gaily ahead of the rest of her, bouncing with vitality.

  The visitation baffled and fascinated her, but she insisted that it was nothing more than a dream. The luscious words of her mouth spilled out like globules of music, and I put every syllable carefully away in the storehouse of my mind, swearing to remember them forever. How beautiful Roper was now! How near the lovely mountains! What enchanting streets, what dear people in quiet chimneys! How fortunate to be alive, how exciting the future!

  All of it, the incredible of it, the perfection of that moment, pounded around my waist and thighs, booming like a drum stretched tight, painful, writhing, the delicious torment spreading through me.

  She had studied dreams, she said, herself never imagining what was happening inside of me. “A dream is like a baseball. You have to remove the horsehide and unravel all the string before you get to the core.”

  “That’s fine,” I told her. “Let’s do that. Let’s unravel it.”

  “It will take time.” She glanced at me, smiling. “Do you mind?”

  “Oh, no. Take all the time you want. You’ve helped a lot. I don’t know how to thank you. I’m learning things I never knew before. You make everything so clear.”

  She was pleased.

  “How about a cup of coffee?”

  “It keeps me awake,” I said, knowing I didn’t have a penny.

  “If we’re going to discuss this, you’ll have to keep awake. We could have it at my house.”

  “Good idea.”

  We were clear over on the south side of town, touring around the bandstand at the fair grounds. She made the circle and we started back toward the center of town. The drum at my loins stretched tighter, waves of pain spreading across my back and down my legs. I had a hard-on like a quivering spear, a serious problem, and I knew it. When we reached her house and she saw me standing in the light our discussion would end right there.

  I asked, “Would you mind stopping at the Elks? I left a book down in the gym.”

  “Not at all.”

  We were back downtown again.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Old enough. Age isn’t important.”

  “Seventeen is important. You’re seventeen, aren’t you?”

  “Almost eighteen.”

  She pulled up alongside the curbing at the Elks Club.

  “Since we’re asking, how old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “That’s not too old.”

  “Too old for what?”

  “I mean, you’re not an old woman.”

  She smiled. “Too old for you.”

  I said nothing, but I didn’t agree. She could have been seventy and it would not have mattered. When she was eighty I would be seventy-four, and when she got to a hundred I would be ninety-four, so what the hell difference did age make?

  I stepped from the car, my loins shrieking help murder as I stood erect and felt a tightening of bolts and nuts. But my brother’s mackinaw covered me to the knees as I walked without flinching down the snowy steps to the gym.

  The basement was dark and very warm from overhead steam pipes. I crossed to my locker, pulled off my pants, and slipped into a jockey strap. Then I got into my pants again and stood before the mirror. The jock did its job, concealing everything that might be embarrassing. There was nothing new in this technique. Many people used it.

  When I got back to the car, she saw that I was empty-handed. “Couldn’t find it,” I said.

  We drove to the Parrish house and she brought the car into the garage beside her mother’s Buick. Carrying her coat, I followed her up the stairs of the service porch. She opened the door and flipped on the light. We were in the kitchen.

  A great room. White enamel stove and refrigerator, all manner of copper pots and pans hanging from the low beams, a floor of shining red tiles. The breakfast nook was a large oak table surrounded by captains’ chairs. At the center sat a bowl of apples and oranges.

  She took the fur from me, flung it over the back of a chair, and told me to make myself at home. I took off the mackinaw and sat down, watching her move back and forth across the gleaming floor as she prepared the coffee.

  “Suppose we start at the beginning,” she said. “Tell me what happened again.”

  I talked and ate her with my eyes. Her pretty ass beneath the green skirt was as firm as a basketball. What grace she had. She made coffee-brewing a ballet. I never knew that opening a cupboard could be so beautiful. When she brought the cream pitcher to the table and set it down, the pressure inside the jock mounted like a time-bomb.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “How about scrambled eggs?”

  “Fine. Can I help?”

  “If you like.”

  I glanced at my hands. They could do with soap and water. She nodded toward a door. “The bathroom’s through there.”

  The door opened to a laundry room, the bathroom at the other end. I washed and dried my hands and started back to the kitchen. A clothesline running the length of the laundry room caught my attention. It was strung with a dozen panties hanging there like a crowd of laughing girls. Some were blue, some pink, some were white and some were gold. They were too exquisitely small to belong to Mrs. Parrish. They could adorn none but the glory of my life, the sacred silks of my beloved. Hot damn! I was getting my fill of her tonight! I walked along the line and let my face brush each pair. They stroked my nostrils, they ruffled my hair. Twelve there were. So many, and I had none, not one for a trophy to take away for remembrance sake. The gold one beckoned my eye. It had black sequins around the edges, feather soft, sweet as an oriole. One for me, eleven for Dorothy; it was more than fair. I unhooked the clothespins and stuffed it under my shirt. I felt it close to my flesh, breathing there, cuddled happily.

  Then I walked into the kitchen. Dorothy was at the sideboard, breaking eggs and
spilling them into a bowl. Just watching the oval things crack in her white fingers and spill forth with a golden plop created a series of small explosions inside me. My calves shuddered as she scrambled them with a fork and they turned yellow like her hair. She poured a bit of cream into the mixture and the silken smoothness of the descending cream had me reeling. I wanted to say, “Dorothy Parrish, I love you,” to take her in my arms, to lift the bowl of scrambled eggs above our heads and pour it over our bodies, to roll on the red tiles with her, smeared with the conquest of eggs, squirming and slithering in the yellow of love.

  I made the toast and she buttered it while we talked of deathless matters, like the weather, the movies, and the fact that everybody had a cold. We went to the round table and ate the eggs and toast and drank the coffee.

  She ate ravenously, excitingly, and I envied every morsel that passed her lips. I listened to her teeth grinding toast, I heard a gulp when she swallowed coffee, and I thought I detected an enchanting gurgle somewhere in her lovely intestines, a limpid whimper, a note of pure music.

  She got nowhere with the vision, and I knew she was trying to extract elements it did not contain. She showed off a bit too, with words like libido and the id. When my fingernails caught her eye she lifted my hand to study the thick stubbed nails.

  “How long have you been biting them?”

  “All my life.”

  “Don’t worry about it. The new theory about nail-biting is that it’s just a harmless tensional outlet. I agree with Voellerts. It’s probably good for you.”

  “Fine, fine. I’ve been worrying about it for years. I feel a lot better now.”

  That pleased her. “Now then, let’s get to the root of the matter. Your father. How do you get along with him?”

  “Okay. We manage.”

  “Do I detect hostility in that?”

  “We have our disagreements.”

  She smiled confidently. “I thought so. You really hate him, don’t you?”

  “I feel sorry for him.”

  “Pity?”

  “He’s out of work, with a big family to support Why shouldn’t I?”

  She lit a cigarette and zeroed in: “Pity, you know, is a form of superiority. I think you enjoy seeing him suffer.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She pursued it hotly. “You hate your father because you resent his attentions toward your mother.”

  “Trouble is, he doesn’t pay any attention at all.”

  “Trouble?” She jumped at this. “You say ‘the trouble?’ Why?”

  “My mother’s a plain woman. I think he’s tired of her.”

  “Now I see it all,” she said triumphantly. “That wasn’t the Virgin. It was your mother.”

  “Couldn’t have been. My mother has dark hair, and the Virgin was a lot younger.”

  “Don’t you see? The Virgin was the woman you want your mother to be!”

  Her eyes were big and luminous. I could see myself reflected in the pupils, convexed, my face, my eyes, the fruit bowl.

  “I’m so happy,” she sighed. “I’m helping you. I honestly feel I’m making a contribution.” She put her hand on mine. “What’s your brother like? How do you feel about him? Do you quarrel?”

  “A lot.”

  “About what?”

  “Everything.”

  She rose in excitement and began to pace. “That’s interesting. Very interesting!” She paced with her golden mane bobbing, swinging about to face me, her arms flung wide, her chest bursting:

  “I have it! Sibling rivalry!”

  She leaped at me and put her two hands on my shoulders, her wet lips spilling over with excitement.

  “You’re jealous of your brother because your mother loves him more than she loves you! It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  She groaned. “You’re not cooperating. You have to be honest, or we’re wasting time.”

  “I’m trying.”

  She shook me.

  “Think hard, Dominic. Go back to your early childhood. Far, far back to your earliest memories. What kind of toilet training did you have?”

  “You’re on the wrong track now.”

  “Am I?” She was full of assurance. “Think back. Was it a problem?”

  I could only think of now, that moment of being with her, not of potty time and peeing the bed ages ago. “I don’t remember,” I said.

  “It doesn’t surprise me. A case of adolescent amnesia: the unconscious compulsion to forget unpleasant facts. We all have it. More coffee?”

  She crossed to the stove, gliding like a golden snake, and I stared and hungered and felt a demon rising in me, a surging urgency, nothing ventured nothing gained, now or never, do or die.

  “I love you,” I said.

  She put down the coffee pot and turned around thoughtfully, amused and not amused, not quite believing.

  “Don’t be silly,” she smiled.

  “I love you.”

  Now or never. I stood up without feet and found myself pulled toward her, falling to my knees before her, my arms around her hips, my face in the depths of her dress, and the demon had me totally in his power.

  “I love you, I love you!”

  “Stop it!”

  She writhed and fought to free herself.

  “Let go of me, you idiot!”

  But the demon gave me strength and I pressed kisses against her belly and thighs as she struggled to break away. Then her feet went out from under her on the shining tiles and she fell on top of me, and I peppered her with kisses, inspired, remembering the Litany of the Blessed Virgin as we rolled over the floor, kissing now her neck, now her knee, her leg, her elbow, anything within range of my lips as I cried, “Mystical Rose! Seat of Wisdom! Cause of Joy! Vessel of Honor! Tower of David! Tower of Ivory! Refuge of Sinners! Ark of the Covenant! Gate of Heaven! Morning Star! Comforter of the afflicted! Help of Christians! Lamb of God!”

  Squirming and pulling, she dragged me this way and that across the glossy floor, her shoes off, belting me wildly with both hands, then getting to her feet, tearing out strands of my hair, finally breaking free. For some moments we panted in silence, getting our breaths, she leaning against the refrigerator, I on my stomach.

  Finally she spoke. “Will you kindly go home now?”

  She tucked in her blouse, smoothed her skirt, and stepped into her shoes. I stood up and began shoving my shirt tail and it fell there at my feet—her golden panties with the black sequins. I picked them up. I was beyond shame. I just held them, wearily, gasping for breath.

  “My new pants!” she said.

  “Can I have them?”

  “No!”

  “Please.”

  “Of course not!” She snatched them from my grasp. “What a terrible boy you are!”

  “I love you,” I said, my arms out.

  “Don’t you dare!”

  I stared at her long neck, her yellow hair, the miracle of how she stood in her shoes, and I started to cry, for Dorothy Parrish would never be mine, nobody who came from Torricella Peligna ever possessed a girl like Dorothy Parrish, not in a thousand years, not as long as there was another man on earth.

  “I mean it,” I sobbed. “I can’t help it. I love you.”

  “Please,” she said quietly.

  She crossed to the back door and opened it, and I picked up my mackinaw and walked past her and out on the service porch.

  “Good night,” she said.

  “You’ll be sorry,” I told her as I put on the mackinaw. “You’ll hear about me some day, and you’ll be sorry.”

  She closed the door and the lock clicked. I went down the driveway to the street.

  Chapter Four

  Two blocks down College Avenue I ran into Kenny on his way home from the show. He said, “Hi, lover.”

  “Aren’t you cute.”

  “You missed a great show. Both pictures. Ginger Rogers—what a body.”

  “I have to tell you something about me and you
r sister.”

  “Don’t tell me you scored.” He was mocking me.

  “I kissed her, that’s all.”

  “Was it that bad? You look like a fugitive from justice.”

  “I liked it. She didn’t.”

  “She’s too old for you. Not your type.”

  “What’s my type, Mr. Anthony?”

  “She’ll emerge out of your fame, some girl along the way. Maybe a movie star like Ginger Rogers. It’s not important now. You have to think of the arm, Dom. Nothing matters but the arm.”

  “The Arm’s not worried.” I held it out. “The Arm knows what’s important.”

  “Does it know that women and pitching don’t mix?”

  “It’s not so sure.”

  “Does it pine for a certain tropical setting off the coast of California, owned by a chewing gum tycoon?”

  “The Arm is aware of such a place.”

  “Ask it, when do we leave?”

  “Pretty soon.”

  “Time’s running out. Let’s move.”

  He stood pink-cheeked under the lamp post, warm as a beaver inside his new coat, his feet in heavy galoshes, confident, free to go anywhere.

  “You talk pretty big,” I said. “Are you by any chance the son of Joe Parrish, one of the richest men in this town?”

  “Oh, balls! There you go again.” He kicked at the snow. “A lousy fifty bucks. You can raise it, if you try.”

  “How?”

  “Your old man.”

  “He hasn’t got it.”

  “Can’t he borrow it?”

  “He wouldn’t ask.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  He smiled faintly. “You know what I think, Guinea? I think you’re chicken.”

  I thought of hitting him, but suddenly his smile was his sister’s, and so were his placid eyes. I spat right in his face. He did not move, the spittle trickling down his nose as he calmly flicked it away with the back of his glove.

  “Feel better now?” he said.

  Shoving my fists into the mackinaw, I walked away, but after twenty steps I slowed down. I liked him. He was the only friend I had. He respected The Arm. Sometimes he needled me, but I did the same to him, and we had a common dream. I couldn’t throw it all away. He was trudging up the hill, bending forward against the incline.