1933 Was a Bad Year

by John Fante

  “Ken!”

  He turned around.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay, pal.”

  “You sore?”

  “Nope.”

  “See you at the Elks tomorrow.”

  ‘Talk to your old man, Dom. It won’t hurt to try.”

  “Okay.”

  It was payday at the pottery works, so the Onyx Bar was swirling with customers two deep along the bar and four or five in every booth. The floor was slick and wet from tramped-in snow and spilled beer, and the juke box played deafening country music, everybody shouting to be heard over it. Riley the bartender saw me enter and yelled, “He’s not here, Don,” which wasn’t my name.

  I squirmed my way between the bar and the booths to the poolroom in back. Everything was quiet back there, no players at the pool tables, but a crowd of men at the two poker games to the rear. My father wasn’t there. I crossed to the cue rack. Sometimes the old man went out of town to shoot pool, taking his own cue along. But his stick was there, locked in the rack, his name burned into the handle.

  I left the big room and started back through the crowd at the bar when a woman’s hand darted from one of the booths and plucked my sleeve. It was a plump, cigarette browned hand with two gold rings on the fingers. It was Rita Calabrese. She was alone in the booth, sipping sweet wine. You could smell the sweetness when she spoke.

  “You’re Mary Molise’s boy.”

  She had known my mother when they were girls together in Denver. Her husband Ralph owned Studebaker Rockne Motors, and she had a son Robert who once wrestled Strangler Lewis in Greeley. My mother said she was a bad woman.

  I asked her if she had seen my father.

  “Sit down,” she said. “I adore your mother. She’s an angel.”

  The moment I sat down Riley shouted, “On your way, Don,” and jerked his thumb toward the door. I started to leave and Rita took my sleeve again.

  “You know Edna Pruitt?” she asked.

  “Sure. What of it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “My father’s with her?”

  “I didn’t say that,” she smirked. “All I said was, I think your mother’s an angel.”

  You had to be from out of town not to know Edna Pruitt. Years before she had been charged with performing abortions and there had been a famous trial in which she was acquitted. But her sinister reputation lingered on, and every new generation of Roper kids claimed to have found stillborn embryos in the garbage can behind Edna Pruitt’s house. Many a time I too had paused, furtive and fearful, to lift the lid of her garbage can and peer inside, repulsed and expecting something awful. I was always disappointed.

  Her white frame bungalow was on Pine Street, across from the new post office. On the door of the glassed in front porch was the sign:

  Edna Mae Pruitt, DSC, PHM

  Chiropractic Masseuse

  Personalized Manipulation

  Spiritual Healing

  Day or Night. Phone 37 W

  The front of the house was in darkness, but a light shone behind the green shade at one of the side windows. I stood in the street and wondered: what the hell am I doing here? If I wanted my father’s help, and he was in there, the last place I should be was near this house. In the bitter cold the sky heaved a quiet sigh and it began to snow.

  I looked at the lighted window again. Was he in there? What was he doing? It was none of my business, but I had to know. Maybe they were having an orgy, committing adultery. What would I do—stop them? And be carried off mangled and broken to the morgue? Roper boy murder victim. Father knifes son…Police find murder weapon in snow…Distraught father held…Blames uncontrollable temper…Was good boy, parent states…Prominent athlete…Heartbroken father tries to hang self in cell…Priest eulogizes murdered youth…Destined for major leagues, says Father Murray…Team mates act as pallbearers…Jury finds Molise guilty…Execution date set…Governor denies last minute plea…Bricklayer executed.

  I crossed the small lawn to the window and peered through an inch of light under the green shade. It wasn’t any orgy, and it wasn’t a party. It didn’t even look like a love tryst. It was just two people, Papa and Edna Pruitt, sitting quietly in the parlor, under a big picture of President Hoover. Edna was in a rocking chair, knitting a sock, and my father sat at a bridge table playing solitaire. He hadn’t even taken off his coat, but there was something peaceful about him, a strange serenity I had never seen before.

  Edna was ten years older, a heavy woman in the white uniform of a nurse, down to white stockings and white shoes. They did not speak or look at one another, and they were motionless except for their hands, my father slowly turning cards, Edna’s fingers working the knitting needles. If he had not been my father, I would have sworn they had been married for twenty years, two people sharing silence and companionship on a Winter night.

  Then my father yawned and stretched his arms. Edna yawned too, smiled, and crossed to the closet, the weight of her thick body making the floor creak. She brought out my father’s overcoat and held it open as he put his arms into it. Then the most dramatic incident of the night took place: Edna kissed him. She kissed him on the jawbone, casually, and he started for the door.

  As he stepped out on the porch, I dashed up the alley, staying a little ahead of him, and we met on Twelfth Street. Out of breath, I got in stride with him.

  “Where you been, at this hour?”

  “With Kenny. I want to talk to you, Papa. It’s very important.”

  “I thought it was settled. You’re going to finish school, then come to work for me.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “Shut up about it.”

  We went along stride for stride, the snow piling up on our coats. I decided on a different approach.

  “You know who Joe DiMaggio is, Papa? And Tony Lazzeri, and Frank Crosetti?”

  “Ball players,” he groused.

  “You ever heard of Babe Pinelli, or Lou Fonseca, or Ron Pelligrini?”

  “More ball players.”

  “Or Vic Monte, or Sam La Torra, or Boots Zarlingo?”

  “Ball players.”

  “People, Papa! Human beings like you and me. Sons of tailors and butchers and fishermen. Of barbers and coal miners. Italian-Americans from homes like ours, from all over the country in this land of opportunity. You know what they say about opportunity, Papa?”

  “You know everything. Tell me.”

  “It knocks but once.”

  He stopped and so did I. He looked at me in exasperation, his hand sliding from the pocket of his coat. He doubled it into a fist and brought it close to my nose.

  “See this? It knocks too. Just once.”

  But I had to make my stand.

  “I’m leaving town, Papa.”

  He turned and walked on, faster. We went a block before he spoke.

  “Where you going?”

  “California.”

  He stopped once more, his hat and shoulders coated with snow. “And you’re gonna get rich, playing ball.”

  “I’m going to try out with the Chicago Cubs.”

  “Do the Chicago Cubs know this?”

  “They’ll know, when they see me.”

  Pain and sadness softened his face. He put his hand on my shoulder, hesitant to speak what was on his mind. But I knew.

  “Say it. You don’t think I’m good enough.”

  “You’re good enough, Kid,” he said gently. “But you’re not tough enough. You know what I’m talking about? Those men are like iron. They’re hard, tough. They’ll grind you in the dirt. They’ll kill you. They’ll break your heart.”

  We were on this dead street in the middle of the night in snow so thick we could hardly see one another, and he was telling me I was weak, my own father, and it depressed me to realize he was judging me on the basis of himself. He was a great bricklayer and a failure; I was a great ball player and I would fail too. Like father, like son. With this difference: he was from Torricella Peli
gna, a foreigner, and I wasn’t.

  “You don’t understand me at all,” I said, and that closed the subject, and I was relieved. How was I to get fifty dollars from this poor, rumpled stranger from so far away, floundering around in a big, complicated, new country? Stone, goats, bread, wine: he understood those things. Not baseball.

  We slogged on, crossing the bridge that spanned Roper Creek, where he paused, pleased to find a cigar butt that had fallen through a hole in the lining of his overcoat pocket. I waited for him to light up and smelled the fragrance of the cigar in the heavy air.

  “Look,” he said, pointing with the match.

  Through the high snow along the creek bank, a beaver dragged an aspen branch. We watched the little creature splash into the water and swim to the beginnings of a new dam.

  “That’s what I mean,” he said. “Weather like this, everybody works but the bricklayer. Even chipmunks.”

  “Beaver. Not chipmunk.”

  “Chipmunks, too.”

  He shouted to the beaver: “Try using mortar sometime! You’ll see!”

  We stood on the bridge whose piers my father had erected brick on brick. I remembered the summer three years ago when the job was in progress, and the place where his little concrete mixer had stood on the creek bank, the engine putt-putting through the long, warm day.

  We plodded on. The first building beyond the bridge was Hale’s Candy Store. Every brick in its walls had passed through my father’s hands. Beneath our feet under the snow was the concrete sidewalk my father had poured and smoothed with his trowels.

  How many things he had built when the sun gave him a chance! All over town you could see his handiwork—schools, churches, homes, garages, chimneys, driveways, terraces, fireplaces, sidewalks of stone, of concrete, of brick, steps going up and steps going down.

  Work, sweat, paycheck. How he loved his task, like that tireless mixer of his, the Jaeger, his partner, wheezing and snorting through all those good days. Then the rains came, or the snow fell, and the machine was trundled away to the shed and covered with a canvas, out of work like his partner. No wonder he went to see Edna Pruitt. He was not a machine made of iron, hibernating under a canvas, sitting out the winter. He was flesh and blood.

  Poor old Papa. What a life! But not Dom Molise. I had a way out, a gift of God, The Arm. As we stood on the front porch knocking the snow from our shoes, my mind reached out suddenly to trap the solution to my problem. I had found a way. I knew what had to be done.

  Chapter Five

  Next morning I ditched school and hurried over to Roper High to tell Kenny my plan. I had to catch him before his first class, so I stationed myself at the top of the school steps, watching the flow of students coming off the street.

  Last night’s storm was over, and a sweet day it was, the sun nice and warm, storm clouds on the run. The snow melted fast, brewing torrents of brown water roaring down the curbs. Beyond the Rockies to the West the sky sparkled a Virgin Mary blue, reminding me that somewhere out there the Chicago Cubs were probably having breakfast at that very moment.

  The Cubs! My future team mates: Manager Joe McCarthy, Charley Grimm, Hack Wilson, Bill Nicholson, Gabby Hartnett, Stan Hack.

  “Gabby, how’s that Molise kid doing?”

  “Jesus, he’s fantastic.”

  “Cocky kid.”

  “You’d be too, if you was him.”

  “He finally signed his contract.”

  “Thank God. What’d he get?”

  “Twenty thousand, with a five thousand bonus.”

  “Lotta moola for a seventeen year old.”

  “For a twenty-five game winner? Hell, we stole him.”

  The nine o’clock bell clanged as a bus pulled up and Kenny got out with a gang of kids. They raced up the stairs. Seeing me there startled Kenny.

  “What’s up?”

  “You ready to go?” I said.

  “Catalina?”

  “We can leave today.”

  “You raise the dough?”

  “I’ll have it in three hours.” I took his arm. “Let’s get some coffee and talk.”

  He hung back. “I got an English class.”

  ‘That’s for kids. Today we become men.”

  He followed me across the street to the corner drugstore and we mounted a couple of stools. As we smoked and drank coffee I told him about my father’s concrete mixer and how I planned to borrow it. There was a builder’s supply store in Longmont, ten miles away, where I could get fifty, maybe sixty dollars for the mixer.

  “Once it’s sold, we grab the five o’clock bus and it’s California all the way.”

  He was not enthusiastic, drumming the marbletop counter, swirling coffee around in his mouth, swallowing thoughtfully.

  “Where’s the mixer now?”

  “In the shed behind our house. We’ll need a truck to haul it away. That’s where you come in.”

  “Isn’t that known as stealing?”

  “How can a man steal from his own father? It’s like community property. What’s his is mine, and vice versa.”

  “That might be true if you owned anything, which you don’t.”

  “Not now,” I agreed, having rehearsed all the answers. “But in a couple of months I’ll be able to buy him a brand new mixer, one of those super jobs.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “I’ll be playing ball for money.”

  He squeezed shut his eyes and shook his head.

  “Madness,” he said. “Madness.”

  His pessimism was getting me down.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I said. “Who’s chicken now?”

  “I’m not chicken. I’m not a thief either.”

  ‘Thief? What thief? All you do is borrow your old man’s truck so we haul the mixer to Longmont.”

  “That makes me an accessory to the crime.”

  “Crime, thief, stealing! Stop talking like that! You think my father’s going to let the loan of a broken-down concrete-mixer stand in the way of my whole future?”

  “Knowing your father, yes.”

  He was so calm, so grave, so stubborn I wanted to strangle him, but I tried reasoning with him instead.

  “Look, stupid. Don’t you see how foolish it would be to ask for my father’s permission to sell the mixer? You know he’d refuse.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “Okay, stupid. But if I don’t ask him, and sell the mixer anyway, what can he do? Hell have to say yes, since the deed was done. And a yes is a yes, before or after. Don’t you understand what I’m saying? In other words, I’m not stealing the mixer, I’m merely taking it out of the shed and putting it to use for a while, borrowing it for a few weeks while it just sits there rusting up, doing nothing. After I sign with the Cubs, I send the old boy a few hundred bucks and he goes out and buys himself a brand new mixer, and he still has some extra cash in his pocket. In other words, for the use of the mixer which is just laying there in the shed, he makes five or six hundred percent profit. And while this is going on, I’m playing regular ball and mailing my mother a check each week. She pays off our debts, it’s summertime and my father’s pulling down big jobs on account of his new mixer, which can do the work of five men, which is how it is when you have the proper equipment. So everybody’s happy. What’s wrong with that? Are you against happiness, Ken? Are you against my family getting ahead in the world? Why should my old man stay poor, while yours gets rich? Do you have something against us because we’re Italians? Have I ever stooped to borrowing anything from you? Am I asking you to loan me the money? No. All I’m asking from you is the loan of the truck, so that I can borrow my father’s mixer for a few weeks. If that’s asking too much, forget it, forget our friendship, let’s shake hands and go our separate ways.”

  He sat there silently, frowning and full of doubts, rubbing the back of his neck.

  “For the sake of argument, suppose, just suppose you don’t make it with the Cubs? It’s possible. Any thing’s pos
sible.”

  It shocked me. “Some friend!” I said. “One day I’m God’s gift to baseball, and now I’m a Cub reject! All these months, building me up, and now it comes out in the open: the betrayal, the knife in the back!” I looked at him in disgust. “That’s all, buster. That finishes us!”

  I slammed a nickel on the counter and walked out. He ran up the street after me.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll get the truck, on one condition.”

  “What condition?”

  “That you’ll pay your father back, either with the money you earn from baseball, or any other job.”

  “What ‘other’ job?”

  “Laying brick, maybe.”

  “I’m a ball player, Parrish. A pro. People pay me to pitch. That’s the way I earn my money.”

  “Not yet, you don’t,” he said stubbornly.

  I took him by the arm to the bus bench on the corner and told him to sit down. Once more I called upon the reserves of my patience to explain certain elemental facts. It was possible, of course, that I wouldn’t make the Cubs. Many things could divert me—a broken leg, a fatal disease, an automobile accident. But even these were only temporary setbacks beyond my control. The possibility also existed that the Cub management had no need for another left hander, which would necessitate sending me down to one of their minor league clubs, perhaps L.A. in the Pacific Coast League, or Atlanta in the Southern Association. But that was as low as I could sink. I knew that, The Arm knew it, Kenny knew it.

  “Right?”

  He shrugged vaguely. “I guess so.”

  “Don’t guess, Ken. You’re fooling with a human life.”

  “Okay,” he sighed. “You’re right.”

  So it was stealing, so it was wrong. Was it as wrong as my father two-timing my mother? Did he imagine I was some punk kid who didn’t know or care that he was dishonoring his marriage? Did he believe he could go un-punished? I resolved the first dollar I earned would go to my mother. I’d get her a lawyer. I’d get her out of Roper, in a little house of her own. I’d even support my father, send him a few bucks a week so he wouldn’t have to work, but he’d have to live alone, in a hotel.