The Brotherhood of the Grape

by John Fante

  Zarlingo and Cavallaro returned to the truck, but my father marched stiffly into the grocery store. He returned puffing on a cigar, a package under his arm. With grotesque drunken dignity he came to the camper and nearly fell on his face as he climbed into the seat.

  “Let’s move!” he ordered, like some fool in command of other fools. I gave him my ugliest glance, sickened by his glut for booze, his abuse of his last handful of days.

  With a demonic smile he opened the paper sack. It was a pint of brandy. He looked at me and laughed at my loathing of him, and I felt anger and disgust. As he put the bottle to his mouth I snatched it from his hand and flung it out the window. It exploded against a stone. He was surprised, but he didn’t breathe a word. Flicking the ash from his cigar, his crazed red eyes drilled at the windshield as he slashed off a slew of soft Italian curses, something about America and dogshit.

  It was six o’clock now, the sun long gone from Alp Hollow, and it was cold with the quickening night, but as we climbed out of there sunlight made a wedding cake of the snow peaks as Highway 80 snaked eastward and up to 7,000 feet. The dying sun at our backs, we cruised through lonesome mountain hamlets—Emigrant Gap, Cisco, Soda Springs, Donner Pass.

  Beyond the pass my father cautioned me to slow down. “It’s up ahead a little ways.”

  I scanned the terrain for signs of the Monte Casino golf course—the greens with waving flags, the golfers, the rolling fairways, the clubhouse. Truth was, in the back of my mind the most compelling reason for making the trip was the golf course. Looking around, all I saw on both sides of the highway was a vast ocean of pines, tall and impenetrable, flowing into infinity.

  “I don’t see the golf course, Papa.”

  He looked ahead without speaking.

  “Where’s the golf course?”

  “They ain’t any.”

  “You said there was a golf course.”

  “No golf course.”

  “How come?”

  “So I said so. So sue me.”

  “Why did you say it?”

  “’Less I said it, you wouldn’t come.”

  He turned to me in pain and embarrassment, battered eyes, battered man, and I had a sudden flashback, and he was nine years old in an impoverished Italian village, trapped by his father in some boyish fabrication, with the same injured expression his face now showed. A sad business, the way the creases shaped themselves on the face into unerasable furrows. I hated the sorrow upon his face. I liked him better when he was arrogant, selfish, tough, a bastard to the core. I slapped his knee.

  “It’s okay,” I smiled. “I would have come anyway.”

  His hand trembled as he struck a match and put it to his cigar that was already lit.

  “No tennis, either?” I smiled.

  “No tennis.”

  “No swimming pool?”

  “Nope.”

  “How about the bears, and the timber wolves?”

  He tried to laugh and almost succeeded.

  The Monte Casino Lodge was not a lodge at all. It was a motel. A quarter of a mile down a side road off the highway we came to a clearing in the deep woods. A dozen log cabins were scattered among the trees, most of them with cars parked alongside. But for the cars, the scene could have been a settlers’ village a hundred years before, smoke trailing from cabin chimneys and hanging heavily among the trees, the odor of bacon and beefsteak permeating the chilling air. A red neon sign spelling OFFICE Over the porch of the far cabin spoiled the primitive scene.

  We pulled up before the porch and my father hit the horn a couple of times. It brought Sam Ramponi from inside. He was a squat, balloon-bellied man of seventy with the body of a bear and the face of a wolf. With a yell of joyous recognition he rushed toward us as my father and Cavallaro got out of the car. No doubt about it, Sam Ramponi belonged to the brotherhood of the grape, his heavy face streaked with purple cobwebs of broken blood vessels, his grinning mouth sporting big, repulsive dentures. There was much laughter and handshaking, and when Zarlingo dropped from the camper the jollity began again, backslapping, guffaws, embraces—a class reunion—for Sam Ramponi was a San Elmo man, a retired brakeman who longed for the good old days when the Café Roma was the center of the universe and the world had not turned into merde.

  He stared warmly as my father introduced us.

  “My oldest boy. He’s my helper.”

  Ramponi grabbed my hand.

  “Hello, Tony. I remember you now! The best football player San Elmo ever had.”

  My name wasn’t Tony and I had never played high school football, but the man was only trying to be friendly.

  “You, boy!” my father barked. “Get this here truck unloaded.” It was his ugliest flaw: the boss, the big-shot syndrome. “Drive around back of those cabins. You’ll see some stone and a pile of sand. Unload there. And be careful with my tools. Cover them up, in case it rains.”

  His three friends were impressed, staring in silence. “Righton, sir!” I saluted, and climbed into the truck.

  Ramponi herded his friends toward the office.

  “Come on, you suckers. Let’s play cards.”

  16

  IT WAS DARK when I finished unloading the truck. A pumpkin moon slipped above the treetops, lighting up the site of the new smokehouse—a freshly poured concrete slab. My father was right. It was going to be a small uncomplicated job and we would be out of there in about ten days.

  A NO VACANCY sign blazed above the porch as I brought the truck back to the motel office and parked. I went inside, past the desk and into the kitchen, where a poker game was in progress, the four paisani seated around a table covered with a white oilcloth. Mrs. Ramponi, a brittle, diminutive woman, was serving wine from an Angelo Musso jug. She was quite frail, clasping the jug to her bosom with both arms as she poured, her skin the color of wax beans, her scalp beneath thinning white hair shining under the overhead drop light.

  The way Sam Ramponi treated his wife, Gloria Steinem would have gunned him down on the spot. He did not trouble to introduce me, and when she nodded, smiling with broken teeth, I said hello.

  “Give him a drink,” Sam said.

  Mrs. Ramponi placed the jug on the sideboard in order to free her hands and offer me a glass. I thanked her as she poured.

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  “Out,” Sam ordered.

  At once she crossed the kitchen to an open bedroom and sat in the semidarkness near the door, arms folded, awaiting further orders. She reminded me of the old women attendants in the men’s washrooms of Rome nightclubs. I thought of joining the card game for a while, but obviously I was an outsider, not of their generation, and nobody invited me to sit down. But I moved closer to the table and watched the play. Ramponi put a fresh cigar into his mouth and searched for a match. She was there at his side immediately, holding a match under his stiffened jaw.

  “Cabin seven,” he said. “Turn mattress. Change sheets for Nick and son.”

  She left at once.

  Sam Ramponi dealt the cards. It was draw poker, open on anything, two-bit limit. The chips were for nickels, dimes and quarters. So far it was an even game, everyone with about the same number of chips.

  When Zarlingo picked up his cards I saw that he held a pair of queens and an ace, not bad for openers in a small, sociable game. But he said, “Pass.”

  The others passed too. The pot was sweetened with another dime from each player, Ramponi dealing. Again I looked down at Zarlingo’s hand. This time he held a pair of kings and an ace.

  “Pass,” he said.

  They all passed and four more dimes were added to the pot. It was that kind of a game, tight-assed, cutthroat poker, building up the stakes, waiting for the nuts. Fortunately for my old man, the stakes were small and limited. He was too volatile for poker, too impatient, a born loser playing in the wrong game. And yet, alas, it was his favorite game. He liked to charge in there boldly. The patience of his opponents, their stoicism, steamed him into rash decisio
ns. A bad hand, and he sagged in despair. Three aces and he was grinning from ear to ear. Trapped and beaten, he was too proud to drop out and tried to bluff. And then they shafted him. I had witnessed it so many times I marveled they could take his money.

  Tonight it did not seem that kind of a game, nor would it last long. He, Zarlingo and Cavallaro were haggard from exhaustion, bodies crumpled from dissipation. They had drunk wine the night before and most of that day, and now they were juiced again on Angelo’s grapes.

  Mrs. Ramponi returned and handed me the key to Cabin 7. “I hope you’ll be comfortable,” she said, standing there a moment, pretending to watch the game. Ramponi frowned at her.

  “Food,” he said.

  Immediately Mrs. Ramponi produced a loaf of bread and a jar of mayonnaise. That Ramponi! Eyes in the back of his head, for she was behind him as she began to spread mayonnaise for sandwiches.

  “Butter,” he said.

  She brought out the butter. I gave Zarlingo the keys to his truck and backed toward the door. The poker hand was a showdown between my father and Ramponi. My father spread out kings and queens: two pair. Ramponi spread three deuces and swept up the pot.

  I said good night to everyone, but the gamblers ignored me as I started for the door. Without enthusiasm, without sincerity, Ramponi called, “Hey, Tony. Sure you won’t play a hand or two?”

  “Let him go to bed,” my father said. “He’s got a big day tomorrow.”

  17

  THE NIGHT WAS cold and misty. From half a dozen cabins came the voice of Archie Bunker insulting his wife, the audience shrieking with delight. No doubt about it, Archie belonged in that poker game, his kind of people.

  I carried the luggage and a sack of tools from the truck to Cabin 7. The accommodations were routine motel décor: a kitchen with a bar, a divan, a rug, a couple of chairs, a TV and a bed.

  The bed I did not like. It was a double bed and it meant I would have to sleep with the old man. Fretting, I sat on it and considered the dilemma. I had never slept with my father. I had rarely in my life even touched him, except for a rare handshake over the years, and now I had no desire to sleep with him. I considered his old bones, his old skin, the lonely, ornery oldness of him, the wine-soaked oldness of him and his sodden, sinful friends, the son of a bitch he had been: unreasonable, tyrannical, boorish, profligate wop who had trapped me on this snafu safari into the mountains, far from wife and home and work, all for his bedizened vanity, to prove to himself he was still a hotshot stonemason.

  Then it all began to come back. I was ten years old at a street dance in San Elmo, the night of the Fourth of July. I was in the alley behind the dance, searching trash barrels. In the darkness I saw a man and woman making love against a telephone post, the woman holding up her dress, the man throwing his body at her. I knew what they were doing, but it scared me as I crouched behind a pile of crates. Hand in hand the man and woman walked toward me. The man was my father. The woman was Della Lorenzo, who lived two doors from our house with her husband and two sons, my classmates in school. After that I never played with the Lorenzo kids again. I was ashamed to look into their eyes. I hated my father. I hated Mrs. Lorenzo; she was so common, so frumpy and plain. I hated the Lorenzo house, their yard. I kicked their mongrel dog. I strangled one of their chickens. When Mrs. Lorenzo died of breast cancer the next year I was indifferent. She had it coming. No doubt she was in hell, making a place for my father.

  Easter Sunday. I was twelve. We were at the Santucci farm, the entire family. Hordes of Italians from all over the county, long tables sagging with wine, pasta, salad and roast goat, my old man with a goat’s head on his plate, eating the brains and the eyes, laughing and showing off before women screaming in horror. Afterward, a softball game. Somebody hit a ball over the hedge in the outfield. I leaped after it and landed on top of my father, hidden in the tall grass, his bare bottom white as a winter moon as he pumped Mrs. Santucci, who was supposed to be my mother’s best friend. Astounded, I ran toward the orchard, over the creek, down the pear grove. My father came racing after me. I had the speed of a deer. I knew he would never catch me, but he did. He shook me. He was throwing spit in his rage. “One word to your mother and by God I’ll kill you!”

  I spent the rest of the long afternoon at my mother’s side while she gossiped on the lawn with the other ladies. I would not leave her. I sat on the grass and clutched the hem of her dress and it annoyed her. “Go play with the other kids,” she said. “You’re bothering me.”

  No. I would not lie down in the mountain darkness beside that abominable old man, rewarding him with affection and companionship after a lifetime of unrepentant sensuality at the expense of his wife and family. No wonder my poor mother thought of divorce, and Virgil was ashamed of him, and Mario fled from the sight of him, and Stella disapproved of him.

  I found an extra blanket in the closet, kicked off my shoes, and curled up on the divan. Hours later I wakened to voices outside, drunken laughter, the banging of car doors. I went to the window and watched Zarlingo and Cavallaro drive off in the Datsun. It crept along, barely moving in the deep mist as my father ran alongside, waving his arms and shouting, “Turn on your lights!”

  The lights speared the mist and the car crawled away. The disappearing taillights through the forest road promised certain doom. I was sure the old dudes would never make it back to San Elmo, that they would drift off the road into some canyon wasteland. But I was wrong. They made it home in four days, traveling ninety-five miles by easy stages, stopping at every saloon that popped up along the perilous route.

  It was after one o’clock when my father tumbled into the cabin. He switched on the ugly light in the globed overhead chandelier, left the door open, and marched straight to the bed, where he collapsed. In thirty seconds he was deeply asleep, his breathing heavy, his mouth open. I locked the door, peeled off his clothes, and rolled him under the covers. As I turned off the light and lay down on the divan he began to moan, “Mama mia, mama mia.”

  Then he was sobbing. Was this any way for a man to fall asleep, calling for his mother? It seemed he would never stop. It tore me to shreds. I knew nothing of his mother. She had been dead for over sixty years, had expired in Italy after he had left and come to America, still visiting him now in his old man’s sleep, as if he felt her near in his dreams, like one lost and wandering, crying for her.

  I lay there tearing my hair and thinking. Stop it, Father, you are drunk and full of self-pity and you must stop it, you have no right to cry, you are my father and the right to cry belongs to my wife and children, to my mother, for it is obscene that you should cry, it humiliates me, I shall die from your grief, I cannot endure your pain, I should be spared your pain for I have enough of my own. I shall have more too, but I shall never cry before others, I shall be strong and face my last days without tears, old man. I need your life and not your death, your joy and not your dismay.

  Then I was crying too, on my feet, crossing to him. I gathered his limp head in my arms (as I had seen my mother do), I wiped his tears with a corner of the sheet, I rocked him like a child, and soon he was no longer crying, and I eased him gently to the pillow and he slept quietly.

  18

  HE WAS SOMBER and wretched in the morning, eyes smoldering beneath the ashes of the night before. Dangerous he was, breathing pain, hostile to the dreary prospects of a gray, new day. He began with the usual ritual of the wine, removing one of the gallon jugs from a cardboard carton and tilting it on his elbow, sucking with the greed of an infant. He turn to growl at me as he corked the jug.

  “Get up. Time to work.”

  I sat up and reached for my jeans. He crossed to the window and stared at a bleak, foggy world.

  “I don’t like this place,” he complained. “I musta been crazy to take this job.”

  “Let’s shove it, then. Let’s just leave.”

  “Only thing to do is get out as fast as we can. Four or five days.”

  “I thought you said ten day
s.”

  “Get some breakfast. We got work to do.”

  As he left there was activity in the parkway, car motors coughing and wheezing in the thin, cold atmosphere as the motel guests began to drive off. It felt like impending snow as I stepped outside, clouds bloated and hanging low, a dismal and remote corner of the earth. Down south at this hour I would be in bed still, bright sunshine through my window and a view of the sea. I would put on a robe and have my first of ten cups of coffee, contemplating a walk along the warm deserted beach or perhaps a sunbath, altogether a dreamy day of rest and calculated indolence, putting off an hour or two of work to the late afternoon when it could no longer be avoided.

  Though the motel had no restaurant, our arrangement with Ramponi included board and room. I crossed through the office to the kitchen, where Mrs. Ramponi was preparing my breakfast, my father having told her I was on my way. We said good morning and I sat at the table and asked if my father had eaten a good breakfast.

  “Brandy and coffee. It’s all he wanted.”

  She looked fresher than the night before, with the clean, well-soaped complexion of a Swede or German, pale eyes and white eyebrows. When Ramponi wasn’t around to crush her she was vivacious and pleasant and not bad-looking for an older woman. She wore a blue scarf around her soft hair, her figure covered by the kind of apron worn by hotel porters, full length with many pockets. A place was set at the table, and she served me a breakfast steak with two eggs and toast and coffee.