Wait Until Spring, Bandini

by John Fante

  ‘We’re hungry,’ he said. ‘Where does it hurt?’

  ‘I’ll get up,’ she said.

  They heard the crack of her joints, saw the blood seep back into the white side of her face, sensed the staleness of her lips and the misery of her being. August hated it. Suddenly his own breath had that stale taste.

  ‘Where does it hurt, Mamma?’

  Federico said: ‘Why the heck does Grandma Donna have to come to our house?’

  She sat up, nausea crawling over her. She clinched her teeth to check a sudden retch. She had always been ill, but hers was ever sickness without symptom, pain without blood or bruise. The room reeled with her dismay. Together the brothers felt a desire to flee into the kitchen, where it was bright and warm. They left guiltily.

  Arturo sat with his feet in the oven, supported on blocks of wood. The dead chicken lay in the corner, a trickle of red slipping from her beak. When Maria entered she saw it without surprise. Arturo watched Federico and August, who watched their mother. They were disappointed that the dead chicken had not annoyed her.

  ‘Everybody has to take a bath right after supper,’ she said. ‘Grandma’s coming tomorrow.’

  The brothers set up a groaning and wailing. There was no bathtub. Bathing meant pails of water into a washtub on the kitchen floor, an increasingly hateful task to Arturo, since he was growing now and could no longer sit in the tub with any freedom.

  For more than fourteen years Svevo Bandini had reiterated his promise to install a bathtub. Maria could remember the first day she walked into that house with him. When he showed her what he flatteringly termed the bathroom, he had quickly added that next week he would have a bathtub installed. After fourteen years he was still affirming it that way.

  ‘Next week,’ he would say, ‘I’ll see about that bathtub.’

  The promise had become family folklore. The boys enjoyed it. Year after year Federico or Arturo asked, ‘Papa, when we gonna have a bathtub?’ and Bandini would answer in profound determination, ‘Next week,’ or, ‘The first of the week.’

  When they laughed to hear him say it over and over again, he glared at them, demanded silence and shouted, ‘What the hell’s so funny?’ Even he, when he bathed, grumbled and cursed the washtub in the kitchen. The boys could hear him deprecating his lot with life, and his violent avowals.

  ‘Next week, by God, next week!’

  While Maria dressed the chicken for dinner, Federico shouted: ‘I get the leg!’ and disappeared behind the stove with a pocket knife. Squatting on the kindling wood box, he carved boats to sail as he took his bath. He carved and stacked them, a dozen boats, big and small, enough wood indeed to fill the tub by half, to say nothing of water displacement by his own body. But the more the better: he could have a sea-battle, even if he did have to sit on some of his craft.

  August was hunched in the corner studying the Latin liturgy of the altar boy at Mass. Father Andrew had given him the prayer-book as a reward for outstanding piety during the Holy Sacrifice, such piety being a triumph of sheer physical endurance, for whereas Arturo, who was also an altar boy, was always lifting his weight from one knee to the other as he knelt through the long services of High Mass, or scratching himself, or yawning, or forgetting to respond to the priest’s words, August was never guilty of such impiety. Indeed, August was very proud of a more or less unofficial record he now held in the Altar Boy Society. To wit: He could kneel up straight with his hands reverently folded for a longer period of time than any other acolyte. The other altar boys freely acknowledged August’s supremacy in this field, and not one of the forty members of the organization saw any sense in challenging him. That his talent as an endurance-kneeler went unchallenged often annoyed the champion.

  August’s great show of piety, his masterful efficiency as an altar boy, was a matter of everlasting satisfaction to Maria. Whenever the nuns or members of the parish mentioned August’s ritualistic proclivities, it made her glow happily. She never missed a Sunday Mass at which August served. Kneeling in the first pew, at the foot of the main altar, the sight of her second son in his cassock and surplice lifted her to fulfillment. The flow of his robes as he walked, the precision of his service, the silence of his feet on lush red carpet, was reverie and dream, paradise on earth. Some day August would be a priest; all else became meaningless; she could suffer and slave; she could die and die again, but her womb had given God a priest, sanctifying her, a chosen one, mother of a priest, kindred of the Blessed Virgin …

  With Bandini it was different. August was very pious and desired to become a priest – si. But Chi copro! What the hell, he would get over that. The spectacle of his sons as altar boys gave him more amusement than spiritual satisfaction. The rare times he went to Mass and saw them, usually Christmas morning when the tremendous ceremony of Catholicism reached its most elaborate expression, it was not without chuckling that he watched his three sons in the solemn procession down the center aisle. Then he saw them not as consecrated children cloaked in expensive lace and deeply in communion with the Almighty; rather, such habiliments served to heighten the contrast, and he saw them simply and more vividly, as they really were, not only his sons but also the other boys – savages, irreverent kids uncomfortable and itching in their heavy cassocks. The sight of Arturo, choking with a tight celluloid collar against his ears, his freckled face red and bloated, his withering hatred of the whole ceremony made Bandini titter aloud. As for little Federico, he was the same, a devil for all his trappings. The seraphic sighs of women to the contrary notwithstanding, Bandini knew the embarrassment, the discomfort, the awful annoyance of the boys. August wanted to be a priest; oh, he would get over that. He would grow up and forget all about it. He would grow up and be a man, or he, Svevo Bandini, would knock his goddamn block off.

  Maria picked up the dead chicken by the legs. The boys held their noses and fled from the kitchen when she opened and dressed it.

  ‘I get the leg,’ Federico said.

  ‘We heard you the first time,’ Arturo said.

  He was in a black mood, his conscience shouting questions about the murdered hen. Had he committed a mortal sin, or was the killing of the hen only a venial sin? Lying on the floor in the living room, the heat of the pot-bellied stove scorching one side of his body, he reflected darkly upon the three elements which, according to the catechism, constituted a mortal sin. first, grievous matter; second, sufficient reflection; third, full consent of the will.

  His mind spiralled in gloomy productions. He recalled that story of Sister Justinus about the murderer who, all of his waking and sleeping hours, saw before his eyes the contorted face of the man he had murdered; the apparition taunting him, accusing him, until the murderer had gone in terror to confession and poured out his black crime to God.

  Was it possible that he too would suffer like that? That happy, unsuspecting chicken. An hour ago the bird was alive, at peace with the earth. Now she was dead, killed in cold blood by his own hand. Would his life be haunted to the end by the face of a chicken? He stared at the wall, blinked his eyes, and gasped. It was there – the dead chicken was staring him in the face, clucking fiendishly! He leaped to his feet, hurried to the bedroom, locked the door:

  ‘Oh Virgin Mary, give me a break! I didn’t mean it! I swear to God I don’t know why I done it! Oh please, dear chicken! Dear chicken, I’m sorry I killed you!’

  He launched into a fusillade of Hail Marys and Our Fathers until his knees ached, until having kept accurate record of each prayer, he concluded that forty-five Hail Marys and nineteen Our Fathers were enough for true contrition. But a superstition about the number nineteen forced him to whisper one more Our Father that it might come out an even twenty. Then, his mind still fretting about possible stinginess he heaped on two more Hail Marys and two more Our Fathers just to prove beyond a doubt that he was not superstitious and had no faith in numbers, for the catechism emphatically denounced any species of superstition whatever.

  He might have prayed on, ex
cept that his mother called him to dinner. In the center of the kitchen table she had placed a plate piled high with brown fried chicken. Federico squealed and hammered his dish with a fork. The pious August bent his head and whispered grace before meals. Long after he had said the prayer he kept his aching neck bent, wondering why his mother made no comment. Federico nudged Arturo, then thumbed his nose at the devout August. Maria faced the stove. She turned around, the gravy pitcher in her hand, and saw August, his golden head so reverently tipped.

  ‘Good boy, August,’ she smiled. ‘Good boy. God bless you!’

  August raised his head and blessed himself. But by that time Federico had already raided the chicken dish and both legs were gone. One of them Federico gnawed; the other he had hidden between his legs. August’s eyes searched the table in annoyance. He suspected Arturo, who sat with zestless appetite. Then Maria seated herself. In silence she spread margarine over a slice of bread.

  Arturo’s lips were locked in a grimace as he stared at the crisp, dismembered chicken. An hour ago that chicken had been happy, unaware of the murder that would befall it. He glanced at Federico, whose mouth dripped as he tore into the luscious flesh. It nauseated Arturo. Maria pushed the plate toward him.

  ‘Arturo – you’re not eating.’

  The tip of his fork searched with insincere perspicacity. He found a lonely piece, a miserable piece that looked even worse when he lifted it to his own plate – the gizzard. God, please don’t let me be unkind to animals anymore. He nibbled cautiously. Not bad. It had a delicious taste. He took another bite. He grinned. He reached for more. He ate with gusto, rummaging for white meat. He remembered where Federico had hidden that other leg. His hand slipped under the table and he filched it without anyone noticing the act, took it from Federico’s lap. When he had finished the leg, he laughed and tossed the bone into his little brother’s plate. Federico stared at it, pawing his lap in alarm:

  ‘Damn you,’ he said. ‘Damn you, Arturo. You crook.’

  August looked at his little brother reproachfully, shaking his yellow head. Damn was a sinful word; possibly not a mortal sin; probably only a venial sin, but a sin for all that. He was very sad about it and was so glad he didn’t use cuss words like his brothers.

  It was not a large chicken. They cleaned the plate in the center of the table, and when only bones lay before them Arturo and Federico gnawed them open and sucked the marrow.

  ‘Good thing Papa ain’t coming home,’ Federico said. ‘We’d have to save some for him.’

  Maria smiled at them, gravy plastered over their faces, crumbs of chicken even in Federico’s hair. She brushed them aside and warned about bad manners in front of Grandma Donna.

  ‘If you eat the way you did tonight, she won’t give you a Christmas present.’

  A futile threat. Christmas presents from Grandma Donna! Arturo grunted. ‘All she ever gives us is pajamas. Who the heck wants pajamas?’

  ‘Betcha Papa’s drunk by now,’ Federico said. ‘Him and Rocco Saccone.’

  Maria’s fist went white and tight. ‘That beast,’ she said. ‘Don’t mention him at this table!’

  Arturo understood his mother’s hatred for Rocco. Maria was so afraid of him, so revolted when he came near. Her hatred of his lifelong friendship with Bandini was tireless. They had been boys together in Abruzzi. In the early days before her marriage they had known women together, and when Rocco came to the house, he and Svevo had a way of drinking and laughing together without speaking, of muttering provincial Italian dialect and then laughing uproariously, a violent language of grunts and memories, teeming with implication, yet meaningless and always of a world in which she had never belonged and could never belong. What Bandini had done before his marriage she pretended not to care, but this Rocco Saccone with his dirty laughter which Bandini enjoyed and shared was a secret out of the past that she longed to capture, to lay open once and for all, for she seemed to know that, once the secrets of those early days were revealed to her, the private language of Svevo Bandini and Rocco Saccone would become extinct forever.

  With Bandini gone, the house was not the same. After supper the boys, stupid with food, lay on the floor in the living room, enjoying the friendly stove in the corner. Arturo fed it coal, and it wheezed and chuckled happily, laughing softly as they sprawled around it, their appetites sodden.

  In the kitchen Maria washed the dishes, conscious of one less dish to put away, one less cup. When she returned them to the pantry, Bandini’s heavy battered cup, larger and clumsier than the others, seemed to convey an injured pride that it had remained unused throughout the meal. In the drawer where she kept the cutlery Bandini’s knife, his favorite, the sharpest and most vicious table knife in the set, glistened in the light.

  The house lost its identity now. A loose shingle whispered caustically to the wind; the electric light wires rubbed the gabled back porch, sneering. The world of inanimate things found voice, conversed with the old house, and the house chattered with cronish delight of the discontent within its walls. The boards under her feet squealed their miserable pleasure.

  Bandini would not be home tonight.

  The realization that he would not come home, the knowledge that he was probably drunk somewhere in the town, deliberately staying away, was terrifying. All that was hideous and destructive upon the earth seemed privy to the information. Already she sensed the forces of blackness and terror gathering around her, creeping in macabre formation upon the house.

  Once the supper dishes were out of the way, the sink cleaned, the floor swept, her day abruptly died. Now nothing remained to occupy her. She had done so much sewing and patching over fourteen years under yellow light that her eyes resisted violently whenever she attempted it; headaches seized her, and she had to give it up until the daytime.

  Sometimes she opened the pages of a woman’s magazine whenever one came her way; those sleek bright magazines that shrieked of an American paradise for women: beautiful furniture, beautiful gowns: of fair women who found romance in yeast: of smart women discussing toilet paper. These magazines, these pictures represented that vague category: ‘American women.’ Always she spoke in awe of what ‘the American women’ were doing.

  She believed those pictures. By the hour she could sit in the old rocker beside the window in the living room, ever turning the pages of a woman’s magazine, methodically licking the tip of her finger and turning the page. She came away drugged with the conviction of her separation from that world of ‘American women.’

  Here was a side of her Bandini bitterly derided. He, for example, was a pure Italian, of peasant stock that went back deeply into the generations. Yet he, now that he had citizenship papers, never regarded himself as an Italian. No, he was an American; sometimes sentiment buzzed in his head and he liked to yell his pride of heritage; but for all sensible purposes he was an American, and when Maria spoke to him of what ‘the American women’ were doing and wearing, when she mentioned the activity of a neighbor, ‘that American woman down the street,’ it infuriated him. For he was highly sensitive to the distinction of class and race, to the suffering it entailed, and he was bitterly against it.

  He was a bricklayer, and to him there was not a more sacred calling upon the face of the earth. You could be a king; you could be a conqueror, but no matter what you were you had to have a house; and if you had any sense at all it would be a brickhouse; and, of course, built by a union man, on the union scale. That was important.

  But Maria, lost in the fairyland of a woman’s magazine, gazing with sighs at electric irons and vacuum cleaners and automatic washing machines and electric ranges, had but to close the pages of that land of fantasy and look about her: the hard chairs, the worn carpets, the cold rooms. She had but to turn her hand and examine the palm, calloused from a washboard, to realize that she was not, after all, an American woman. Nothing about her, neither her complexion, nor her hands, nor her feet; neither the food she ate nor the teeth that chewed it – nothing about her, nothing
, gave her kinship with ‘the American women.’

  She had no need in her heart for either book or magazine. She had her own way of escape, her own passage into contentment: her rosary. That string of white beads, the tiny links worn in a dozen places and held together by strands of white thread which in turn broke regularly, was, bead for bead, her quiet flight out of the world. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. And Maria began to climb. Bead for bead, life and living fell away. Hail Mary, Hail Mary. Dream without sleep encompassed her. Passion without flesh lulled her. Love without death crooned the melody of belief. She was away: she was free; she was no longer Maria, American or Italian, poor or rich, with or without electric washing machines and vacuum cleaners; here was the land of all-possessing. Hail Mary, Hail Mary, over and over, a thousand and a hundred thousand times, prayer upon prayer, the sleep of the body, the escape of the mind, the death of memory, the slipping away of pain, the deep silent reverie of belief. Hail Mary and Hail Mary. It was for this that she lived.

  * * *

  Tonight the beaded passage into escape, the sense of joy the rosary brought her, was in her mind long before she turned out the kitchen light and walked into the living room, where her grunting, groggy sons were sprawled over the floor. The meal had been too much for Federico. Already he was heavily asleep. He lay with his face turned aside, his mouth wide open. August, flat on his stomach, stared blankly into Federico’s mouth and reflected that, after he was ordained a priest, he would certainly get a rich parish and have chicken dinner every night.

  Maria sank into the rocking chair by the window. The familiar crack of her knees caused Arturo to flinch in annoyance. She drew the beads from the pocket of her apron. Her dark eyes closed and the tired lips moved, a whispering audible and intense.

  Arturo rolled over and studied his mother’s face. His mind worked fast. Should he interrupt her and ask her for a dime for the movies, or should he save time and trouble by going into the bedroom and stealing it? There was no danger of being caught. Once his mother began her rosary she never opened her eyes. Federico was asleep, and as for August, he was too dumb and holy to know what was going on in the world anyway. He stood up and stretched himself.