The Immigrants

by Howard Fast

  He stepped into the room, closed the door behind him, and stood there staring at her. He was wearing his pajamas and no robe, and as he stood there, staring at Gina, he felt his desire rise in him like a gush of flame. She held out her hand; he took it; and she drew him down to her and kissed him. Then she touched his penis, and he ejaculated with a force and passion that wracked his entire body.

  “All right, all right, Stevey,” she whispered. “You see, it’s all right. You’re a man, you’re a wonderful man. You’ll never have trouble again.” She spoke in soft, liquid Italian.

  He made love to her until just before dawn, the Italian words “Sono un uomo” echoing and reechoing in his mind.

  When he left her, she said to him, “I must not have a child, Stevey, so you buy some condoms and I will keep them with me. And tomorrow night–or when you wish. I love you very much, and I ask nothing, I swear.”

  For the next six months, he spent most nights at San Mateo, and the affair with Gina went on, once, twice, sometimes three times each week. No one knew or suspected. At the end of the six months, Joanna was pregnant, and by common consent of Gina and Stephan, their affair ended. They never slept together again after that, but, in a curious way, they loved each other.

  And amidst great joy in the Cassala household, Joanna’s baby was born, a fine eight-pound boy they named Ralph.

  Fortas was an enormous, large-bellied, shaggy-haired Basque who was always engaged in minor feuds with his neighbors, whose dogs, as he claimed, killed his lambs. He kept a small herd of sheep, and the degree of his anger depended upon how far-ranging the neighborhood dogs were and how dangerous, by his judgment, the breed. Since Jake and Clair owned a pair of gentle mongrels who stayed close to home, their relations with Fortas were on the better side. Now, when they came to him for advice, he greeted them warmly, took them into his kitchen, and poured wine while his wife sliced a cake.

  Jake outlined, briefly, Rabbi Blum’s proposal. “So we come to you,” he said. “We don’t know the first damn thing about making wine.”

  “Jewish wine!” Fortas exploded. “Sonofabitch–you two Jewish?”

  Clair grinned and nodded.

  “Goddamn! Hey, Sada,” he yelled to his wife, “these two kids the same bastard what killed our Lord. First goddamn Jew I ever see.”

  “Oh, shut up, Fortas,” his wife said. “He got the brains of a monkey and the voice of a bull,” she said to Clair.

  “Ah, hell,” Fortas said. “Goddamn long time ago. Who give a shit? You kids want to know how to make wine? Easiest goddamn thing. You crush the grapes and then you got the wine.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Sada. “Easy for you because I make the wine. What does he know?”

  Jake produced the bottle of wine that Rabbi Blum had left with them and explained, “This is the kind of wine we have to make.”

  “The point is,” Clair said, “that we wish we could just buy this zinfandel of yours, which is absolutely delicious, but it wouldn’t be acceptable.”

  Fortas nodded. “I know the slop they drink in church.”

  His wife poured a glass of Rabbi Blum’s wine, tasted it, made a face, and handed the glass to her husband. Fortas drank and spat out the wine.

  “Goddamn slop!”

  “Oh, shut up,” Sada told him. “Listen,” she said to Clair and Jake, “this is a sweet wine, very sweet. Not so good, I’m afraid, but very sweet. Not even like a good muscatel or Tokay–I don’t know what. You want to know how we make the wine, fine, I show you–you still got Gallagher’s stuff, the crushers and the vats and the barrels?”

  “Yes, we have his equipment.”

  “Good. Next week, maybe, the weather is good, we begin to pick the first grape. Then you crush. You get the juice–we call it ‘must.’ We make a red wine, so we let the skins ferment with the must. You watch, you taste, you strain, you clarify–you got wine.”

  “But your wine is dry, not sweet.”

  “Ah, yes. That’s another art. You stop the souring, the fermentation.”

  “Throw in some brandy,” Fortas said. “That stop it.”

  “Brandy, brandy–where they get brandy today?”

  The argument went on, the upshot of it being that if you were Fortas and Sada, you made wine by taste and instinct; but for Jake and Clair, the result was only bewilderment and confusion. The following day, they packed the children into the car and drove to Sausalito, where they delivered the children to a grateful Sarah, pulled out Volume 28 of the Britannica–a gift for Jake’s thirteenth birthday–turned to “Wine,” and found the subsection “Malaga.”

  “Malaga,” Clair read aloud, while Jake listened with intense concentration, “is a sweet wine generally, as exported, a blend made from vino dulce and vino secco, together with varying quantities of vino maestro, vino tierno, arope, and vino de color. The vino dulce and vino secco are both made as a rule from the Pedro Jimenez (white) grape. The vino maestro consists of must, which has only been fermented to a slight degree and which has been ‘killed’ by the addition of about 17 percent alcohol. The vino tierno is made by mashing raisins (6 parts) with water (2 parts), pressing, and then adding alcohol (1 part) to the must. Arope is obtained–”

  “Enough, enough,” Jake pleaded. “I don’t know what in hell they’re talking about.”

  “Neither do I,” Clair agreed sweetly. “You didn’t think we were going to solve this out of the encyclopedia. I don’t for a moment believe that this Malaga wine which is made somewhere in Spain has much connection with what the rabbi wants. There must be someone somewhere who can give us simple and scientific directions for the making of sweet wine–and Jake, believe me, it’s worth it. I think that the making of wine is one of the most romantic things in the world. We have nine hundred acres of some of the best vineland in the Napa Valley, and we’ve broken our backs to own it. This crazy Prohibition thing can’t last forever. It’s turning the whole country into a cesspool of crime and violence, and sooner or later the people are going to be fed up and disgusted enough to repeal that crazy law. Meanwhile, if we learn how to make this sacramental wine, we have a head start on every other grower.”

  “So? What do we do?”

  “Let’s start by leaving the kids with your mother and going over to Berkeley and finding someone on the faculty who can give us some scientific answers. And if we can’t find him at Berkeley, we’ll go to Stanford–but somewhere there’s someone who can say, do this and this and this. Right?”

  “O.K., we’ll give it a shot.”

  Professor Simon Masseo was enthralled with Clair. He was a small, rotund, middle-aged man, who obviously adored women and who was completely taken by her height, her splendid, strong body, her pleasantly freckled handsome face, and her great unruly mop of red hair. He could not keep his eyes off her, and insisted that she and Jake lunch with him at the faculty dining room. He was one of those men who derive a simple and total pleasure in being in the company of a beautiful woman; and Clair possessed the open, unfettered quality of making a man feel that he alone mattered. She gave Professor Masseo just that feeling, and he unbent in return.

  “Of course you must make the wine,” he told them. “Should the art perish entirely because a handful of maniacs have decreed that man’s dearest consolation is criminal? I’ve taught the art of wine-making, among other things. In nineteen eighteen, I had over two hundred students. In nineteen twenty–well, we dropped the course.”

  “Then if there is no course,” Clair began, “how–”

  “How? Dear lady, let me begin by assuring you that man does not make wine. Nature makes it; man directs the process. And how did man come to it? Five thousand years ago, he tasted the wine in overripe grapes, crushed them in his mouth, and drank wine. What is wine? Take some grapes, put them in a large receptacle, mash them, and place the pot or whatever in a warm place. Stir the mixture each day–and thus begins that marvelous process called fermentation. Then one sniffs at it. Ah, what a delicious odor! Now it comes alive an
d begins to move and heave and chuckle with its own voice as you stir it. Then it appears to rest. Now it is time to drain off the must, which is simply the word used for the wine fluid. This is still alive with yeast. We drain it off into a clean container. Then we squeeze the fluid from what remains in the original jug, and we add that to the must. We cover the receptacle this time, but we do not seal it because the wine is still alive, and once again we set it in a slightly warm place. And we watch it–carefully. And then, very soon, it comes to rest. At this point, the increasing alcohol content has halted the action of the yeast. Now we pour the wine into bottles or jugs or whatever, and we stopper it tightly. Place it in a cool spot, a nice part of the cellar, and let it settle. Then we open the jug, pour out the clear liquid, gently leaving the sediment–and behold, we have wine!”

  “As simple as that,” Clair exclaimed.

  “Precisely–or as complicated as one could imagine. Because, dear lady, when you drink the wine–well, you might have a superb wine or a perfectly wretched wine, a bitter wine, a sourish wine, a bland wine, a marvelous wine–who knows? It is the thousand variables and the control of these variables that constitute the wine-makers’ art. The yeast is there, in the marvelous waxy bloom on the skin of the grape, but now we must ask, what kind of grapes, and how ripe, and from what district, and what of the stems? The stems contain about three percent of tannin, and it is tannin that gives the wine astringency, that delicate puckering in taste–and how much of it do we want? And what of the seeds? They too possess tannin. And what of the skins? It is the skin that makes the difference between a red wine and a white wine, and this coloring substance in the skins is not a simple pigment but a very complex substance somewhat like the tannin yet different–and different in every different variety of grape, mind you, and this is only the beginning of the art of knowing and controlling the variables.”

  Jake sighed. “I knew it was too good to be true.”

  “Defeat so soon? My dear boy, I am sure your lovely wife is not discouraged.”

  “But our problem,” Clair said, “is to produce a sweet wine like the wine we brought for you to taste. And that certainly must be very difficult.”

  “Indeed no–nowhere so difficult as to produce an excellent dry wine, and I’ll explain, and if you have an hour to spend in my laboratory, I’ll spell out the steps and you can make notes. I’ll also lend you a book or two on the subject, and then if you will be so kind as to invite me to a tasting at your place in the Napa Valley, I’ll be delighted to come.”

  “Would you?”

  “I would indeed. Now let us consider the wine your friend Rabbi Blum gave you. Not a very good wine. From the taste, I would suggest that it was made out of New York State or perhaps Maryland Concord grapes and sweetened with additional sugar. Now I must explain that in the fermentation process of wine-making we begin with a very high proportion of sugar in the pulp of the grape. Depending on the grape and the degree of ripeness, you can have as much as two hundred and seventy-five grams of sugar in relation to eight hundred grams of water. This sugar, known as grape sugar, consists of dextrose and levulose, and in the process fermentation, the sugar is converted into ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. But when the alcohol in the grape juice has reached a level of about fourteen or fifteen percent, the yeast is halted in its process of converting the sugar. At this point, most wines are still rather sweet. Now your problem, of course, is not to rid yourself of the sweetness but to add to it, and there are several ways to go about this. First of all the grape. What kind of grapes do you grow for the market?”

  “Zinfandels mostly. We have some Thompsons–”

  “Ah, well the color of zinfandels is excellent, but we want a sweeter grape. Next month there ought to be some excellent muscatels and Marsalas available in the San Joaquin Valley. There is no need for you to try to produce a varietal, which simply means a wine produced out of a single variety of grape. What you want is to imitate that stuff you gave me–and improve it. I don’t think the rabbi would object to that. Now you want your grapes to be very ripe, indeed a trifle overripe–almost at that stage which in France is called the pourriture noble state, or just a bit rotten. Pourriture noble is a trifle risky, but table grapes are always picked a bit early. We want something in between, and I can give you the name of a couple of growers in the valley who will know what you are talking about. The point is to select your grapes and contract for them in advance, so that the growers will let them hang on the vines. So much for the grapes, and we will talk some more about that. Now another factor which we must also consider is the addition of brandy, which halts the yeast process while the must is quite sweet–simply by raising the alcohol content to the required fourteen percent. And then there is the use of sugar–oh no, no simple matter this wine-making, but intriguing. We shall discuss it.”

  When at long last they parted from Professor Masseo, loaded with books, notebooks, confusion, and a mass of uneasy information on wine-making, Jake said to his wife, “Baby, I am scared. Eight hundred gallons of wine. Do you realize how much that is? I have visions of us bankrupt, loaded with tubs of rotten grapes and barrels of sour wine. Heaven help us.”

  “Rabbi Blum will see to that,” Clair said.

  Pierre Kardeneaux had opened a small but exceedingly elegant couturier shop off California Street where an evening gown could cost more than a thousand dollars. On her second visit there, Jean ran into Alan Brocker, whom she had not spoken to for years. He sat in one of Kardeneaux’s velvet-upholstered chairs, his chin on a gold-topped walking stick, observing a slender blond girl pirouette in a white velvet evening wrap with a white mink collar. Then the slender blond girl kissed him lightly on the cheek, and Jean heard her say, “Oh, please, dear, dear Alan–may I have it? I do love it so.”

  Smiling, Jean said, “But of course. You can’t deny your daughter a little thing like that.”

  “Oh, but I’m not–” the slender blond girl began.

  “But of course,” Jean agreed, and swept away.

  Brocker telephoned the following day, and Jean said cheerfully, “Dear Alan, how delightful to hear from you after all this time.”

  “Darling, you are the most incredible bitch.”

  “Then that lovely child wasn’t your daughter?”

  “Shall we have lunch?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Tomorrow then. I’ll pick you up.”

  Now why did I agree? Jean asked herself, and could find no other answer except that she was bored and that Alan Brocker was entertaining. He had a quality not too frequently found in men, the ability to gossip and to wet his gossip with acid. She also felt a pleasant sense of superiority. When she had first met Brocker, he was the teacher, sophisticated, knowledgeable, and in command. But nothing about him appeared to have changed very much, whereas Jean had changed a great deal. She saw him now as an ineffectual, permanent adolescent, and she enjoyed the sense of being in command.

  “At least he will be amusing,” she decided.

  At lunch the following day, Jean said to him, “How old are you these days, dear Alan?”

  “How old are you, my dear?”

  “Thirty-seven. I make no secret of it.”

  “I’m only forty-three, my love. We are both of us in our prime.”

  “Then wouldn’t you say that child you were squiring yesterday is somewhat underdone? How old is she? Eighteen?”

  “Twenty.”

  “And she’s earned an evening wrap. How very talented!”

  “My dear Jean, are you moralizing?”

  “Heaven forbid! It would become me poorly, don’t you think?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Anyway, thank you for accusing me of moralizing and not of jealousy.”

  “Jealousy? My dear, you cut me out of your life.”

  “You were never in my life, dear Alan.”

  “Let’s stop being nasty and catch up. What are those two handsome children of yours up to?”

&nbs
p; “Children? Yes, I suppose so. Barbara is thirteen. Jazz, films, and horses. There seems to be something valid underneath all that, but when and where I don’t know. As for Tom, well, he’s just beautiful. Almost sixteen, six feet, and the apple of my eye, if you must know. I adore him. He has brains and character and looks, not his father’s, I may say.”

  “I would say you’ve found a substitute.”

  “For whom?” she asked coldly.

  “For the fisherman.”

  “You do hate him, don’t you?”

  “Don’t you, Jean?” he asked her.

  She stared at him, shuddering inwardly at the thought of being married to this man who sat across the table from her. What an aimless, mindless, contemptible creature he was! And how strange that in all the years she had known him, she had never passed judgment upon him. Yet he amused her, and she could talk to him and spend time with him without being bored–and of course she was not married to him, which was the decisive factor.

  “Why should I hate him?” she wondered aloud.

  “He keeps you prisoner.”

  “Or do I keep him prisoner? Think about it, Alan.”

  “Why, I can’t imagine. You are still the most beautiful and engaging woman in San Francisco. And by the way, he does occasionally escape.”

  “Oh?”

  “You do know about the incident at Harry’s bar?”

  “You mean that wretched speakeasy? What incident?”

  “As I hear it, your husband wrecked the place a few weeks ago. Became offensive and they tried to throw him out. Five or six of them. He put two of them in the hospital and got himself beat up and arrested. It took Sunny Jim in person to get him out of it.”

  “And when was this?”

  “About two weeks ago from what I hear.”

  “Two weeks ago,” she said slowly, thinking of the scar on his cheek and the supposed auto accident. “Six men–really. My dear Alan, what would you do if six men attacked you?”