The Brotherhood of the Grape

by John Fante

  “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.”

  “Baked eggplant, Virgil,” she coaxed. “I fixed it special the way you like it. And gnocchi in milk and butter, and veal in wine.”

  “Thank you just the same, Ma.”

  She was hurt and startled by his refusal and slipped back into the darkness of the house. I stared at him.

  “Nice going, you jerk.”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “How does she know your reasons? All she’s thinking about is your gut.”

  “What’s this new madness? Mario says you’re going to work for the old man.”

  “He’s crazy.”

  “I know that. But is it true?”

  “Of course it’s not true. What kind of an idiot do you take me for? I’m leaving tomorrow morning.”

  “Leave town, Henry. Leave before they trap you.”

  “Nobody traps me. I’m my own man.”

  “Henry,” he smiled patiently. “Please. I’ve heard all that bullshit before. Get out of here as fast as you can. Tonight. Leave now. I’ll drive you to the airport.”

  “Thanks, Virgil. I’m staying.”

  “The old man’s too old to lay stone. Tell him. Then get the hell out.”

  “If he wants to lay stone, let him. It’s his life.”

  “And it could be the end of his life.”

  “You want to talk to him, Virgil? You want to reason with that old bastard? He’s down at the Café Roma right now. Go on down there and talk it over.”

  He threw up his hands.

  “God, what a family!”

  He started the car and I stepped away and watched it move forward about thirty feet. Then it rolled back to where I stood. A foolish, helpless smile crinkled Virgil’s fat face.

  “Is the eggplant made with bread crumbs and Romano cheese?”

  “It sure is.”

  Resigned, he turned off the engine. Together we walked into the house.

  The kitchen. La cucina, the true mother country, this warm cave of the good witch deep in the desolate land of loneliness, with pots of sweet potions bubbling over the fire, a cavern of magic herbs, rosemary and thyme and sage and oregano, balm of lotus that brought sanity to lunatics, peace to the troubled, joy to the joyless, this small twenty-by-twenty world, the altar a kitchen range, the magic circle a checkered tablecloth where the children fed, the old children, lured back to their beginnings, the taste of mother’s milk still haunting their memories, fragrance in the nostrils, eyes brightening, the wicked world receding as the old mother witch sheltered her brood from the wolves outside.

  Beguiled and voracious Virgil filled his cheeks with gnocchi and eggplant and veal, and flooded them down his gullet with the fabulous grape of Joe Musso, spellbound, captivated, mooning over his great mother, enrapturing her with loving glances, even pausing midst his greed to lift her hand and kiss it gratefully. She laughed to see how completely she had woven her spell, and while they stared like haunted lovers I slipped into the parlor and telephoned Harriet in Redondo Beach.

  “Is everything all right up there?” she asked.

  “Fine, fine. No problems.”

  “What about the divorce?”

  “Forgotten.”

  “Did you see my mother?”

  “No.”

  “Will you?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Promise?”

  “No.”

  I felt my mother’s warm breath on my neck and turned to face her, eavesdropping behind me. Not surreptitiously, but brazenly listening.

  “Let me talk,” she said, drawing the phone from my hand. Then, into it: “Halloo, Harrietta. She’sa me talkin’, you modder-in-law. How you are, Harrietta. Thassa good. Me? I’ma feela fine.”

  There it was again, my mother’s hypocritical fawning before Harriet, that groveling like a serf before the baroness, so self-debasing that even her powers of speech fell apart. Born in Chicago, knowing only the English language, my mother nonetheless spoke like a Neapolitan immigrant fresh off the boat whenever she and Harriet came together.

  I listened, exasperated, tearing my hair. “Harrietta, I’ma gonna aska yo wan beeg favor, si? You tink she’sa all right iffen your husba stay two, three day, maybe wan week? He’sa help his papa, poor ole man, he’sa got the rheumatiz. I tink wan week, maybe ten day, maybe two, tree week, and the job, she’sa finish. Okay, Miss Harrietta? Tank you so much. Godda bless…”

  I ripped the phone from her. “Home tomorrow, Harriet. Forget all that garbage!”

  Mama shoved her mouth into the instrument.

  “Please, Harrietta, I hope I donna make trouble in you house, okay? I’m joost try to help his papa. He’sa gotta sore back.”

  “Home tomorrow!” I yelled, clapping down the receiver.

  A clatter of heavy shoes on the front porch, the clumsy movement of bodies. Joe Zarlingo and Lou Cavallaro lurched through the front door carrying my father between them. With calm professionalism, like a nurse, my mother cleared the sofa and fluffed a pillow as the men stretched my father out. He lay there besotted, a smile on his dribbling lips.

  “He’s smashed,” I said, looking down at him.

  “I’ll get the coffee,” Mama said.

  Zarlingo and Cavallaro glared at me.

  “What brought this on?” I asked.

  Zarlingo was shocked. “You got the guts to ask?”

  It sickened Cavallaro. “Jesus, man. You ain’t even human.”

  Virgil came from the kitchen, wiping his mouth with a napkin and studying the old man without emotion. Then he moved to the front door, tossed the napkin into a chair, and smiled at me.

  “What did I tell you?”

  He went through the front door. I stepped out on the front porch and watched him drive away. Another car, a Datsun camper, was parked out there. It was Zarlingo’s.

  He came from the house with Lou Cavallaro and the two stood silently on either side of me. Zarlingo bit off the tip of a Toscanelli and jabbed it between his teeth.

  “You going up to Donner Pass with your father?” he demanded.

  “Nope.”

  “You mean, you want your old man to go up there, haul rock, mix mortar, and build a stone house all by himself?”

  “If that’s what he wants, I certainly won’t stand in his way.”

  “In other words, you don’t give a fuck if your father lives or dies.”


  “I didn’t say that, you did.”

  “He’s a proud man,” Cavallaro said. “Don’t you understand that by now?”

  “Pride goeth before the fall.”

  Suddenly old Zarlingo hauled off and hit me a loud whack across the cheek with his open palm. It was a stinging smack, surprising, shocking. He seemed more surprised than I at what he had done, and Cavallaro stood there bewildered. I laughed. There was nothing else I could do. I laughed to hide my anger and walked away, down the path to the sidewalk, where I turned to look back, a bloat of rage bulging inside my ribs.

  “You creep!” I yelled. “You senile, pathetic old drunk!”

  “You punk!” he screamed, charging down the steps toward me. “You better show a little respect.”

  I thought of standing my ground, even of belting him, but none of it made sense, especially my anger, and I quickly walked away. Over my shoulder I saw him pick up a beer can from the gutter and throw it at me. The can clattered harmlessly past my feet, and that made me laugh again. I continued down the street toward town. My mind clicked into gear: I was leaving that goddamn town. In three or four hours I would be under the covers in my own bed, four hundred miles away, listening to the sigh of the surf, and all of this bad dream would be forgotten. Straight down Pleasant Street I walked to Lincoln, then right on Lincoln to the bus depot.

  In the alley the Sacramento bus was breathing hard as it took on a handful of passengers. I bought a ticket and walked back to the bus, but I did not get aboard. I had lost the power to make a decision. The longer I lingered—the driver waiting, watching me through the door—the more momentous the choice became as fear set in, the fear of delivering a fatal blow to my aged parents, the fear of regretting it the rest of my life. I had to stay. Not from choice but duty. And so I turned away and walked home, searching myself for a burst of Christian exhilaration for having done the right thing, building up my reward in heaven.

  The Datsun was gone when I reached the house and so were Zarlingo and Cavallaro. In the bedroom my mother sat beside the old man, who lay undressed beneath a sheet in the hot, small room.

  “Where’d you go?” my mother said. “I was so worried.”

  “About what?”

  “You’re a writer. This town’s no place for you at night.”

  I thought I heard my father sob and moved closer to him. In his sleep he wept, tears spilling from his closed eyes. She blotted his wet lashes with the hem of the sheet.

  “Why is he crying?”

  “He’s dreaming. He wants his mother.”

  His mother. Dead sixty years.

  I choked up and fled to the kitchen, craving wine. I was into the second glass when Mama appeared.

  “I changed the sheets, Henry. You sleep in my bed.”

  8

  I WAS TOO TIRED to care. Like all the rooms in that old house, my mother’s bedroom was small. The bed was still warm from the heat of the day as I slipped naked beneath a sheet and down into a cradle in the mattress that measured the contours of my mother’s body. It was very black down there when I snapped off the bedside lamp. In the pillow my nostrils drew the sweet, earthy odor of my mother’s hair, pulling me back to other times, when I was not yet twenty and sought to run away.

  Yes, I got away. I made it when I was not yet twenty. The writers drew me away. London, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Silone, Hamsun, Steinbeck. Trapped and barricaded against the darkness and the loneliness of the valley, I used to sit with library books piled on the kitchen table, desolate, listening to the call of the voices in the books, hungering for other towns.

  I had come to the limits of shooting pool, playing poker and bullshitting over beers, of driving off with other guys and broads into lonely orchards, clawing clumsily at skirts and panties, clawing in vain. Women were fine but demanding, you hurt easily at nineteen; you thought women were sweet and submissive but find them alley cats; you find comfort in whores who are less deceitful, and if you are lucky you learn to read.

  My old man, the son of a bitch, lurching home with a snoutful of vino, yelling turn off the lights, get to bed, what the hell’s come over you, for books were a drug and my addiction was alarming, and I was hardly his son at all anymore. Get a job, he demanded, do something with your life. He was right. He must have been. Everybody agreed with him. Even the guys at the poolhall noticed the change. We couldn’t talk to one another the old way.

  I got a job. I picked almonds. I picked grapes. I worked the hop fields. The rains came, the fields wet and unworkable, thank God, and I was back in the kitchen, reading the sweet books. They thought I was ill—my eyes red and staring, my mother feeling my forehead: You all right, Henry? Maybe you got the flu.

  He should see a doctor, my father said. Find out what’s wrong. Where you going with your life? Who’s gonna take care of your mother when I’m gone? They don’t pay wages for reading books. Get out of here! There’s a war on. Get in the army. Go to San Francisco. Get on a boat. Support yourself. Be a man. You know what a man is? A man works. He sweats. He digs. He pounds. He builds. He gets a few dollars and puts them away. Listen to who’s talking! I sneered.

  There was no answer for that street-corner Dago, that low-born Abruzzian wop, the yahoo peasant ginzo, that shit-kicker, that curb crawler. What did he know? What had he read?

  For I was okay. I was on to something. A new feeling of the world beyond San Elmo and television, thrilling, shocking, pumping my adrenalin. Why had I not come upon it before? Where had I been all those years? Trying to carry a hod, mixing mortar? Who was it that had stunted my brain, kept books out of my range, ignored them, despised them? My old man. His ignorance, the frenzy of living under his roof, his rantings, his threats, his greed, his bullying, his gambling. Christmas without money. Graduation a suit of clothes. Debts, debts. We stopped speaking. One day we passed one another crossing the railroad tracks. He went on a few steps, stopped, and began to laugh. I turned. He pointed at me and began to laugh. He pretended to read a book and laughed. It was not amusement. It was rage and disappointment and contempt.

  Then it happened. One night as the rain beat on the slanted kitchen roof a great spirit slipped forever into my life. I held his book in my hands and trembled as he spoke to me of man and the world, of love and wisdom, pain and guilt, and I knew I would never be the same. His name was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. He knew more of fathers and sons than any man in the world, and of brothers and sisters, priests and rogues, guilt and innocence. Dostoyevsky changed me. The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler. He turned me inside out. I found I could breathe, could see invisible horizons. The hatred for my father melted. I loved my father, poor, suffering, haunted wretch. I loved my mother too, and all my family. It was time to become a man, to leave San Elmo and go out into the world. I wanted to think and feel like Dostoyevsky. I wanted to write.

  The week before I left town the draft board summoned me to Sacramento for my physical. I was glad to go. Someone other than myself could make my decisions. The army turned me down. I had asthma. Inflammation of the bronchial tubes.

  “That’s nothing. I’ve always had it.”

  “See your doctor.”

  I got the needed information from a medical book at the public library. Was asthma fatal? It could be. And so be it. Dostoyevsky had epilepsy, I had asthma. To write well a man must have a fatal ailment. It was the only way to deal with the presence of death.

  9

  MY FIRST DAY in Los Angeles I took a job washing dishes at Clifton’s Cafeteria. After a few days I was promoted to busboy and was sacked for “socializing with the public,” in this case a girl carrying a volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay who invited me to her table for coffee and a talk on poetry.

  Next day I found another dishwashing job at a saloon on the corner of Fifth and Main. My room was upstairs for four dollars a week, shared by another dishwasher. His name was Hernandez and he was crazy. He was the first writer I ever met, a
tall, laughing Mexican sitting on the bed with a typewriter in his lap, guffawing at every line he wrote. His project was a book called Fun and Profit in Dishwashing. It was as mad as Hernandez himself. I used to fall asleep listening to him read the manuscript, convulsing with pleasure. One of his chapters was “The Mystery of Hot Water,” another, “Clean Hands Make Clean Minds.”

  But the job was exhausting, the floor always submerged from leaking pipes, and the food inedible. I quit to work in the garment district pushing dress racks and running errands for everyone. I had a dozen bosses who kept me rushing after coffee, sandwiches, newspapers and a hundred other trifles. One of them owned an independent cab service and offered me a job driving at night. I accepted though I knew nothing of the huge, complicated city. For eight hours I cruised downtown Los Angeles that first night without catching a single fare. My boss assured me that things would improve when the dry spell ended, and to pray for rain.

  The following night I had my first customers, a black man and his girl. The man asked to be driven to Ninety-sixth and Central Avenue-As I consulted a map of the city he said, “You mean to tell me you don’t know where Ninety-sixth and Central is?” I told him I was new in town. “I’ll show you the way,” he said. “Down one block and turn left.”

  For two hours I followed his directions, all the way to San Bernardino, where I was told to stop in a tractless, houseless wasteland without street lights or sidewalks. I felt the barrel of a pistol in my ear as he ordered me out of the car. His girlfriend searched me and took all I possessed, nine dollars. They drove off, leaving me there in a place resembling Death Valley.

  As daylight pulsed in the east, a police car came up silently and found me walking toward what appeared to be the lights of a distant city. I spent three hours in the San Bernardino Police Station being grilled mercilessly by two detectives who suspected me of being AWOL or draft-dodging. The 4-F status of my draft card did not impress them. They fingerprinted me and ran a check. At noon they released me, without breakfast or even coffee, and ordered me out of town. They were bad guys: they wouldn’t even give me directions.