The Brotherhood of the Grape

by John Fante

  As we stepped from the car Mrs. Dietrich emerged from the house in a raincoat, carrying an umbrella. Her bleak tight-mouthed glare, the protruding cords in her neck, told us she already knew and that there was nothing to say. Hand in hand we moved up the porch steps. Harriet braved a smile.

  “Mother, Henry and I are married.”

  Mrs. Dietrich raised her umbrella and whacked me over the head.

  That was twenty-five years ago, and Harriet and her mother had long since made an adjustment to the marriage. They corresponded, talked by telephone, and our two sons spent frequent summers with their grandmother in San Elmo. But Henry Molise was anathema. His name, his books, his films were never discussed in the Dietrich house. Whenever we visited San Elmo, Harriet stayed at her mother’s house and I lived with my parents. However, four years ago Hilda Dietrich was laid low by pneumonia and Harriet and I flew up because her doctor said it was critical and advised us to come. It was the first and last time I stayed in the Dietrich house.

  I avoided the sick woman as much as possible, playing golf by day, staying out of sight, careful not to agitate her condition. To the doctor’s amazement she was well and on her feet two days after we arrived. He called it a miracle of antibiotics, but I knew better. Hilda Dietrich had simply willed herself back to health in order to get me out from under her roof. As we left for home she stepped out on the porch to kiss Harriet good-bye and thank her for coming.

  Ignoring my hand, she said, “Good-bye, Mr. Malice.”

  “Molise,” I corrected.

  She smiled wickedly. “Oh, what’s the difference!”

  We descended the stairs to a waiting taxi.

  “Bitch,” I said.

  “Be tolerant,” Harriet said.

  “Bitch.”

  I rang Hilda Dietrich’s door chimes four times before the curtains parted and the old lady’s white face appeared behind the glass door, her cold eyes widening in annoyance. She stood there, staring, making no move to open the door.

  I said, “Good morning.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Harriet asked me to drop by.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “Just a visit. To see how you’re getting along.”

  She hesitated. “I’m very busy now. Tell Harriet I’m getting along fine.”

  “I’ll only stay a moment.”

  “Some other time, Mr. Malice.”

  “Molise,” I pronounced. “With an o.”

  “As long as you’re here, I wish you’d take your golf clubs with you.”

  I had left the clubs when we visited during her illness. Deliberately, for I liked the local course but not the nuisance of traveling with golf clubs. Besides, I had another set at home.

  “I’d rather leave them here, if they’re not in the way.”

  “They most certainly are,” she snapped.

  “In that case, I’ll take them away,” I said, expecting her to open the door.

  “You’ll find them in the toolhouse.”

  The conversation came to a frozen halt as we stared at one another and I felt the boil of blood in my throat, the urge to take her corded old neck in my two hands and break it.

  The depth of her dislike was unfathomable. Harriet had said she was “changed.” Was this the change, that she hated me more? What had I done to this woman? Had I been cruel to her daughter, or caught in the sack with another woman, the measure of a mother’s bitterness would have been understandable. But there was more than hatred in those aged, glittering eyes. Fear was there, paranoia, a sickening obsession, the dread that I might slash her with a knife, Italian-style. Nothing I said or did would rid it from her mind, and it left me sickened and enraged.

  I turned away, quickly descending the porch stairs and hurrying around the house to the toolshed. My golf clubs! I had tucked them out of the way in the far corner of a bedroom closet. My clubs! My beautiful custom-made Stan Thompsons, four woods, nine irons, with special grips, featherlike graphite shafts—expensive, perfectly balanced weapons that fired a ball true and far.

  And there they were, on the moist adobe floor of the toolhouse, the leather bag flaking apart as I lifted it. Shocking. A disaster. As sacrilegious as spitting out the sacred host. Only a golfer could comprehend this wanton, brutal crime. Every club was rusted, every grip peeling away from the shaft. It was more than the murder of golf clubs. It was an attack on me, my life, my pleasure. Only a deranged mind could conjure up such a desecration.

  I wanted revenge, to strike back, to destroy. I looked around and saw them hanging neatly from hooks—her rakes, shovels, clippers, garden tools. I snatched a saw and a shovel and breathed a gloating sigh as the saw’s teeth ripped apart the handle of the shovel. But after it was done I felt absurd and embarrassed.

  Then I discovered the gloves, a woman’s leather gardening gloves hanging from a nail, shaped like the small hands of Hilda Dietrich. I unzipped my fly and poured the golden liquid into them. They had a human form as I hung them up again: they were filled out, grotesque, seeping, the palms open, moist and supplicating.

  13

  THE THREE SENIORS were waiting in the Datsun camper when I got back to the house—Zarlingo behind the wheel, my father between him and Cavallaro.

  “Where you been?” my father asked thickly, his tongue dragging. “Get a move on.”

  I strode up and studied their slowing faces. Cavallaro might have been sober, but Zarlingo and my father were drunk, smoking long cigars. Zarlingo was quite gone, drooling from the corners of his mouth.

  He said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “You’re too drunk to drive,” I said.

  He smiled moronically.

  “Wassa matter, punk? Scared?”

  “Scared to death. I’m not going.”

  I started toward the house, leaving them staring. My mother watched from behind the screen door. “They’re bad company, Henry. Be a good boy. Don’t go with them.”

  She followed me into the kitchen and watched as I made a salami sandwich. “I had an awful dream last night,” she remembered. “The car went over a cliff and you were killed. Your chest was broke wide open, and you kept screaming, but nobody came.”

  “Gee, Ma. Thanks for telling me.”

  Cavallaro walked through the house and stood hesitantly in the kitchen door.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “Would you feel any better if I drove?”

  “How sober are you?”

  “Two beers, so help me God.”

  I bit into the sandwich and thought it over. Cavallaro was trying to be reasonable. He had none of Zarlingo’s boorishness.

  “Mama,” I said. “Can you trust this man?”

  She moved to him and looked up at his face.

  “Swear you won’t drink, Louie.”

  “I swear,” he said, raising his right hand.

  “Swear by the blood of the Blessed Virgin.”

  “I swear.”

  Mama gave me a confident smile. “Go with them, Henry. Everything’s gonna be all right.” Suddenly the camera of my fate projected a dark sea and I saw fish swimming among my white, clean bones. I looked at Cavallaro, at my mother, and I was mystified. Maybe the man who had pissed into the gloves was the maddest of them all.

  They wanted me up front with them in the cab, but I stopped that one immediately.

  “Lotsa room,” Papa said. “Sit on my lap.”

  “No, thanks, Daddy-O. I’ll make out in the camper.”

  It was heaped with Papa’s junk, which I moved this way and that until there was a place to upright the wheelbarrow. I spread a canvas over it and seated myself guru-style. No doubt Zarlingo’s wife had hung the pink organdy curtains. The interior was like a mobile whorehouse where a bricklayer with all his paraphernalia was being serviced. Peering through the window, I saw my mother weeping and waving a handkerchief as I gazed mournfully at what might be my last look at the house. Cavallaro cruised down Pleasant Street to Lincoln,
then east on Vernon to Highway 80.

  A few miles out of town the old tomcats began harmonizing, belting out the immortals of their youth: “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” “The Prisoner’s Song,” and “Three O’Clock in the Morning.” They were horribly out of tune, but they were happy too, companions of the road, free, going places, adventuring into old times.

  Through the window the lovely autumn hillsides glided by, the manzanita, the scrub oak and pine, the farmhouses, the vineyards, cattle and sheep grazing among white stones, the peach and pear orchards. Autumn up here was a strong season when the earth showed its muscle and its fertility, and there was a wild feeling in the air.

  There was a knock on the window behind the seat. I opened it. “Want a beer?” my father asked.

  “Sure.”

  He passed it through, dripping and cold from the cooler, gorgeous in my warm throat, perfection, with the hot sun above, the white peaks of the Sierras in the distance, and the Datsun humming confidently along the wide highway. I felt good now. Perhaps the trip would turn out well after all.

  14

  TWENTY MILES EAST of San Elmo the camper slowed as Cavallero made a sharp turn to the right. We were entering the vineyard of Angelo Musso, sacred soil to my father and his friends. For fifty years they had quaffed the genial Chianti and claret from the vines of those rocky hills. Not only were they Angelo’s customers, they were in fact his slaves, anguished when his crop failed, for his wine was the milk of their second childhood, delivered to the customer’s back door in gallon jugs once a month, the empties carried back to the winery.

  Every five years or so a freeze destroyed the vines or the new wie turned inexplicably sour and the paisani had to switch to another brand. It brought despair among them, and insomnia and rheumatism. To a man, Angelo’s customers lived in dread that he might die before them.

  The tires crackled in the gravel driveway as we pulled to the side of the Musso house and piled out of the car. A very nice house it was, a stone house of two stories built by my father a long time ago. Massive grapevines covered it now, climbing up the chimney atop the slanted tile roof. A roar, like the distant sound of traffic, made the air throb. It was the bees, thousands of them, humming moodily in the vines, a funereal mmmmmm sound when you tuned your attention to the mournful cadence of their mysterious dirge that seemed to lift the house off the ground and hold it in melancholy suspension.

  Next to the house stood a thick grape arbor, so impenetrable it blocked out the hot sunshine, and beneath it, at the end of a long picnic table, sat Angelo Musso, eighty-four years old, a shriveled, bald gnome of a man, sun-blackened, with tawny muscat eyes. His chair was a beat-up, overstuffed mohair, so low the old man’s chin was barely above the table level.

  Angelo Musso could not utter a word, for his cancerous voice box had been excised ten years earlier. Cigarette ash left a trail of gray down the front of his blue shirt, and he coughed intermittently, for he was a chain smoker, with two packs of Camels on the table in front of him, as well as a carafe of wine, a cigarette lighter and an overflowing ashtray.

  For my father and most of the old-time Italians in Placer County Angelo Musso was extra special, an ancient oracle who dispensed no wisdom, a sage who gave no advice, a prophet without predictions, and a god who fermented the most enchanting wine in the world on a tiny thirty-acre vineyard endowed with large boulders and sublime vines. That made him divine. So did his enforced silence. Because he could not speak, everyone came to him with their problems. And everyone found solutions in his yellowish eyes.

  We approached him reverently, monks in single file paying homage to their abbot, bowing, lifting his mummified, blue-veined hand and kissing it solemnly. The others spoke to him in whispered Italian, congratulating him on his good health, saying he seemed to grow younger with each passing year, causing him to smile with toothless delight.

  My father introduced me, and though the old man had seen me many times, he failed to recognize me then. Bowing to the custom, I kissed what seemed only bones and parchment in his hand, noticed the yellowish fingers, and smelled the nicotine-drenched skin.

  As we took seats at the long table Angelo tapped the wine carafe with a spoon. At the bell-like tinkle, the kitchen door opened and a woman appeared, carrying a tray of food and wine.

  She was short, ponderous, and graceful as an elephant, whirling down upon us quickly, dispensing glass tumblers, two pitchers of wine, and plates of bread and provolone cheese. She looked about fifty, her massive body giving her head the appearance of smallness, and she had hardly any neck at all. Her costume was bib overalls over a T-shirt and a frilly cocktail apron around her waist. She had a mustache too, a dim fuzz that matched her black hair. I stared in fascination. I had never seen her before.

  “Odette, the housekeeper,” my father whispered.

  Swiftly Odette served the guests, pirouetting around the table and back into the kitchen.

  Out of respect for Angelo’s muteness we did not speak as we ate and drank, and this I thought strange; after all, there was nothing wrong with Angelo’s hearing. But we tossed kisses his way to show our pleasure with the chilled wine, the homemade mozzarella and the Italian bread. Now the bees came, one or two at a time in advance parties, then swarms to investigate Angelo’s guests, settling on our shirts, our arms, the rims of the glasses and carafes. They formed a little halo around Angelo’s gray hair and helped themselves to his cheese and wine, and he seemed to enjoy their company.

  Soon I too drew their attention, two or three at first, circling, tasting, sniffing, then a howling mob. They were in my hair and on my ears, on my hands and along my neck, and I remembered the crabs and I trembled with a creeping fear and a desire to bolt for open country, holding my breath, resisting panic, knowing they would clobber me if I made a run for it.

  Angelo cackled at my plight, a chicken noise in his dead throat, his waning eyes flickering like candles.

  “Take it easy,” my father warned. “Be friends with them. Get acquainted.”

  They did not sting me, they were simply putting me on, and most of them flew away as suddenly as they had arrived. We got down to deep meditative drinking, the witchery of the wine transcending the miracle of its taste, enveloping our souls within the cocoon of the humming bees, a sweet droning, the vintage plentiful and cool in those warm hills as Hypnos descended and time passed to the drone of the bees.

  I slept about an hour, my head in my arms, my arms on the table. Wakening, bombs detonated in my skull and my eyes tried to burst their sockets. My father sat mumbling to himself, dipping a finger into his wine glass and sucking it foolishly. I saw Cavallaro stumbling in the hot sunshine, walking drunkenly toward us in the grape arbor, trying to zip his fly and not succeeding. Zarlingo was gone and so was our ancient host.

  I craved water, cold water on my face, on my body, a creek, a pond, a horse trough, cool cleanliness, and I got up and staggered out into the sun toward the winery a hundred yards away, a stone building like the house. What had happened? Why had I drunk so much? To sip a glass of wine, and a second glass, and even a third, yes. But to drown in it, to drink beyond satiety, to gorge in the heat of the day, to tempt death quietly, silently, in the company of drunken old men—mama mia!

  The heavy, planked winery door squealed on its hinges as Zarlingo emerged, blinded by the sun, and lurched into me. He was pale, his face textured in misery. Like a zombie he shoved me aside and wandered back toward the house, one hand clutching his belt. I watched him weave away. His pants were on backward.

  As I turned, Odette faced me in the winery door and I backed away in surprise. She smiled with her charming mustache.

  “Hello, buster…”

  I said, “Hi.”

  “You want some action?”

  She reached for my fly and I backed away.

  “God, no.”

  “Any way you want it. I suck too.”

  “Pass.”

  I stepped away and hurried down the path, past th
e winery and out into the vineyard. On a hill two hundred yards away I saw oscillating sprinklers forming a rainbow as they pulsed jets of water upon a field of grape stumps sprouting new buds. I scrambled up to the section, peeled off my clothes, and stood naked at the end of the rainbow. It was a summer shower, refreshing my soul, nostalgic, a day in Italy, the hills of Tuscany, and I was sober again as I put on my clothes.

  Back at Angelo’s house I found Zarlingo and Cavallaro asleep in the cab of the truck. My father wasn’t around. I went to the kitchen door and knocked several times. Finally I stepped inside a large, disorderly kitchen. Odette was not a good housekeeper. The sink was full of dirty dishes, and an open garbage pail occupied the center of the room. Asleep on a studio couch, his dentures and his cigarettes on a table beside him, was Angelo.

  I went outside again. Coming along the path from the winery were Odette and my old man. He had the legs of a rag doll. Her arm was around his waist and she laughed as she carried him along. He was sound asleep, his shirttail hanging out. Odette and I boosted him into the driver’s seat, and as his butt loomed before me I slammed him with my knee as hard as I could, and I was glad, glad, glad.

  15

  BY NECESSITY it became my turn to drive, with Zarlingo back in the wheelbarrow and my father up front between me and Cavallaro. We left the hill country, the orchards and the vineyards, and began to climb toward the Sierra peaks. The old man slept deeply on my shoulder, his breath as sour as one of Angelo Musso’s barrels.

  After a while the air grew colder, and lowering, white mists rumbled down to the highway. I opened the window and tattered pieces of clouds whisked through my father’s hair. The air was good for him, cold in his nostrils and lungs, and he wakened and looked around, his eyes like crushed cherries. He wanted a cigar.

  The road dipped and it was on the downgrade a couple of miles to a place called Alp Hollow. There was a grocery store and one small cabin. I stopped in front of the store and my father and Cavallaro rumbled out like sacks of kindling—you heard the crackle of their bones. Growling like a beast, Zarlingo crawled from the camper. The three bumbled their way into a cathedral of superb pines, in different directions, and urinated, each against a tree, secretly, furtively, swaying like sleepwalkers, their backs to one another, too modest to flash their cocks.