by John Fante
“We didn’t get no rain that year. My cousin went to Naples. Oh, we had a few grapes but the crop was poor. Olive country, rock in the soil. No barber shops in Torcelli, you cut your own. It didn’t snow till the 19th of January. Uncle Mingo came over to the house, and he was mad…”
The doorbell rang again. It was the delivery man from the liquor store. He piled sacks and cases in the hall. Papa staggered into the kitchen and returned with a corkscrew. He opened a bottle of Chianti. For a moment I thought the ordeal was over. He swayed uncertainly, pulling at the bottle, but he came back to the living room and sat down again.
“Let me see now—where was I?”
I would see it through to the end. I would die in that room, chained to that chair, but I would hear it all. “Your Uncle Mingo came to the house, and he was mad.”
“Sure he was mad! How much can a man stand? You don’t know. You sit here in Los Angeles, with plenty to eat, but what do you know about a man’s problems? All those rock, falling on his land. The little boy was sick. My mother went over. Wind blowing all the time. The goat died, and Dino went to Rome to be a priest. The taxes were too high. I was seventeen before I got to Naples. Had trouble with my eyes. Uncle Mingo took off his shoe, and his foot was bleeding. We had olive oil, but the frost ruined the grape. No lights, no gas. Elena, my brother’s wife, had a baby. Uncle Mingo got him by the neck, and he said, ‘Alfredo, I’ll break every bone in your body.’ That was the night it rained. They were all afraid of Uncle Mingo…”
He never got to the bandits. Joyce’s friends departed in respectful silence; he drank two bottles of Chianti, and he spoke of many things, but I never heard the details of Uncle Mingo and the bandits. Nearing midnight, Joyce tiptoed upstairs. We sat in the small light from a table lamp. Slowly, interminably, he went to sleep. I roused him, but still asleep he climbed the stairs, his arm around my shoulder. I helped him to his room, pulled off his clothes, and covered him up, long underwear and all.
My work was not yet finished. In the morning he would ask for the story. I went to my room and uncovered the portable. I set down the date and wrote it in the form of a letter.
Dear Child to Be Born:
Tonight your Grandpa told me the story of his Uncle Mingo and the bandits. Uncle Mingo was your great-great-uncle. I write this tale because your Grandpa wishes it preserved for the day when you will be able to read and possibly enjoy it…
I thought it could be done in twenty minutes. But out of that chaos of jumbled anecdotes something had to emerge. It came, a mood. At four in the morning, my teeth afire from cigarettes, I was still pounding away. To hell with the kid; I could sell this one to the Saturday Evening Post. Through the night I heard Papa snore. I heard him rise and groan and make his way to the bathroom. There was much commotion in the hall, and the pattering of many feet. If Papa was not in possession of the bathroom, Joyce was. Out of their rooms these two people kept coming in a steady procession to the bathroom. Once I heard rapid pacing in the hall. It was Joyce, awaiting her turn. Papa emerged in his long underwear. They looked at one another, smiled in somnambulistic understanding, and went their separate ways.
I came downstairs next day at noon. I had it with me, twenty good pages about an Italian bandit, a heroic figure with red hair. I found Papa in the dining room. He had a sheet of drawing paper spread across the table, and he worked closely with a pencil and a ruler.
“Here it is, Papa. Uncle Mingo’s story.”
I tossed it on the drawing paper. He picked up the sheets and handed them back. “Save it for the boy.”
“Don’t you want to read it?”
“What I got to read it for? Good God, kid, I lived it.”
FIVE
I THOUGHT it was a whim of hers, a passing fancy, but now she saw no reason to hide the facts. Since the beginning of pregnancy she had felt the pull of religion, the urgency for change. It had grown stronger with the child. At first she had concealed it, even from herself, but the deception made her miserable and she began to read, searching, the mysterious urge increasing. She had kept it from me, but during my absence up North she had made the decision: she was going to join the Church.
She was so ripe now, so juicy, so huge. The gray eyes devoured you with the child she bore, you felt yourself drowning in their hypnotic depths if you stared too long, and the passion of faith throbbed in them. I often found her staring past me, entranced in some spiritual pipe dream. At noon the Angelus sounded in the steeple of St. Boniface, the parish church. She instantly dropped whatever was at hand, her book, her comb, the dustcloth, and recited the Angelus prayers. It made me uneasy.
“Why are you embarrassed?” she asked. “You’re supposed to be a liberal. Prove it, right here in your own home.”
At meals she announced that we would now say grace, and I would look at Papa and he would shrug at me, and we would stare foolishly at our plates until grace was said. She was in deadly earnest. She spent hours in her room, smoking cigarettes as she lay on the bed and reflected on the fleeting quality of life. I could not fathom it. Sometimes I thought it was the fear of death in relation to childbirth. One night the old passion returned, and I slipped in beside her and put my arms around her. She was sound asleep. Then she woke, snapped on the bed lamp, got to one elbow, and stared down at me, vapors of warm piety coming from her eyes.
“You should practice self-denial,” she smiled. “It will make you very strong.”
“Who cares about being strong?”
“Today I read a poem. It went like this:
Take all the pleasures of all the spheres
And multiply each through endless years,—
One minute of heaven is worth them all.”
I made the most dignified exit possible under the circumstances, and crawled back into my own bed, wondering where it all would end.
Twice a week she went to the rectory of St. Boniface for religious instruction. She read the catechism and a few simple tracts the priest had offered. But these were not enough. She was a rapid, voracious reader, wolfing everything she could find on the subject. She read canon law, Aquinas, a Kempis, St. Augustine, the papal encyclicals, and the Catholic Encyclopaedia.
One evening as I lolled in the bathtub, she knocked on the door and came in.
“Do you believe in free will?”
I could answer that one, remembering it from my schoolboy catechism.
“Certainly I believe in free will.”
“Do idiots have free will? The insane?”
That wasn’t in the catechism.
“I don’t know about idiots.”
She beamed in serenity.
“But I do.”
“Hurray for you!”
In four weeks, a few days before entering the hospital, she planned to be baptized. She was having a most absorbing and difficult time selecting a patron saint. She screened them down, and out of hundreds she reduced her choice to one of two: Saint Elizabeth and Saint Anne. I did not wish to become involved in this business, but she was always talking about it.
Finally I said, “What’s wrong with Saint Teresa? She’s got a big reputation, all over the world.”
“Too popular,” Joyce said. “Not obscure, not mysterious enough. Besides, she was an awfully plain woman. Personally I lean toward Saint Elizabeth. She was very rich and very beautiful. She wrote well, too. I feel very close to Saint Elizabeth. I think she understands me better that anyone in the world.”
“Isn’t that just ducky.”
She gave me a sweet tolerant smile.
“I’m ready for your scoffs. I’ve prepared myself.”
“I’m not scoffing. I just don’t want to become involved. I got plenty of troubles of my own.”
“You’re in my prayers constantly,” she said. “I know how troubled you are. I was that way too, once.”
“Oh, stop it.”
“But I do pray for you. And for the baby. And for world peace.”
She was suddenly irresistible, an
d I made a lunge for her, but all I got was a fat kiss on the cheek as the white balloon poked me in the stomach.
She went shopping for rosaries, a statue of Saint Elizabeth, and a number of crucifixes. She brought little bottles of holy water and attached a bronze font inside the door of her bedroom, within easy reach of her hand, so that she could make the sign of the cross with consecrated water whenever she entered the room. The statue of Saint Elizabeth went on an elaborate knickknack shelf in the corner. She heaped flowers before it, lit candles, and read the saint’s works.
I said to Papa, “What do you think about Joyce becoming a Catholic?”
“Good. Fine.”
“What’s good about it?”
“Is it bad?”
“I like to plan my family.”
“Then plan it. Get going. Babies.”
“Babies, sure. Lots of babies. But I want them when I want them, Papa. No birth control in the Church, Papa.”
“Birth control?”
“You can’t stop them from coming. They just keep coming, on and on.”
“Is that bad? That’s good.”
“We’re not peasants any more, Papa. We got to stop someplace.”
His eyes squinted.
“I don’t like that kind of talk.”
“A man should be able to say when he wants a baby.”
“You heard me, kid. I don’t like it.”
“Suppose they come, and we got no money?”
“Get money.”
“It’s rough, Papa.”
Up came his fist, the fingers splayed, grabbing my shirt.
“Not my grandchildren, understand? You leave them alone. Let them come. They got as much right here as you.”
I took his fist away.
“It has nothing to do with rights, Papa. It’s a question of economics.”
“Cut out reading them books.”
“Books—what books? I can’t support too many.”
“We couldn’t afford none either, me and Mama. Not one. But we had four. We did it without money, a few dollars, but never enough money. You want we should use something from the drugstore, and you not even born today, without your sister and brothers, and me and Mama alone in the world? For what?”
Stated that way, it was unanswerable.
“I guess you’re basically a religious man, Papa. You really believe.”
“Grandchildren. That’s what I believe in. And leave them books alone.”
Yes, she was in deadly earnest, with the passion of a convert. She liked walking up and down before the statue of Saint Elizabeth, saying the rosary. Through the half-open door I saw her moving back and forth, she and the child, her lips reciting the beads, her eyes catching a view of herself in the mirror as she tried to pull her tummy in and up.
One morning she walked with me out to the garage.
“You know of course that we must get married as soon as possible.”
“We’re already married. The justice of the peace married us in Reno.”
“It was a civil ceremony. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t count.”
“It counts with me.”
“I want my marriage sanctified.”
“You mean—we’ve been living in adultery all these years?”
“We’ll be married after my baptism. It’s a lovely ceremony. We’ll be married to the end of our lives.” She smiled. “You won’t be able to divorce me, ever.”
You do not argue with the mother of your coming child. You do the very best you can, and try to keep her happy. You have lost caste in her eyes, you are barely tolerated, the part you have played is little enough, she becomes the star of the show, and you are expected to knuckle under, for that is the way the script is written. Otherwise you might upset her, bringing anguish, and in turn upset the child.
“What do you want me to do, darling? In your own words, tell me exactly what you want me to do.”
“Father Gondalfo is coming to see you. He’s my instructor. I want you to talk to him.”
Two days later Father John Gondalfo came to our house. That afternoon I found him sitting in the living room with Papa and Joyce. Father Gondalfo was the hard-boiled type. He had been a Marine chaplain in the South Pacific. For over an hour he had been waiting for me. Because of the heat, he had removed his coat, and he sat in a white T shirt, the black hair of his beefy chest seeping through the weave of the shirt. He had the arms of a wrestler and kept himself in condition by playing handball against the wall of the parish garage. He was a young priest, no more than forty-two, with a dark Sicilian face, a broken nose, and a crew haircut. He looked like a guard or tackle from Santa Clara. The moment I saw him I realized he was, like me, of Italian descent, and the consanguinity quickly established a violent familiarity. He crushed my knuckles in a handshake.
“It’s five-thirty, Fante. Where you been?”
I told him, working.
“What time you knock off?”
I told him, a little past four.
“Four? Where you been, the last hour and a half?”
I told him, to Lucey’s for a highball.
“Don’t you know your wife’s pregnant?”
Joyce sat in a big chair, the great mound lolling indolently in her lap, her knees spread slightly to support it. She adored Father John. I sensed Papa’s admiration too, as well as a slight hostility toward me.
“What’s wrong with drinking here in your own home?” Father John said. “With your wife and this great man who’s your father? Ever think of that?”
I marveled at his shoulders, the black intensity of his eyes. “Sure, Father, I drink at home, lots.”
“Time you got wise to yourself, Fante.”
“Certainly, Father. But…”
“Don’t argue with me, boy. You think I just come over on the ferry from Hoboken?”
I didn’t want to argue with anybody. Looking at Joyce, I saw that she was caught up in the fervor of Father John’s vague admonition. At that moment she didn’t approve of me at all. Neither did Papa, who sat before a bottle of wine, wetting his lips and nodding sagely at the priest’s words.
Father John smacked his mighty hands together, rubbed them hard, and said, “Well, let’s get down to business. Fante, your wife intends to join the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Any objections?”
“No objections, Father.”
And that was the simple truth. There could be no objections. I might wish it otherwise, I might hope that she postpone her desire for a while, but that was something else again.
“And what about you? Your father here, this great and wonderful man, tells me that he sweated and toiled to give you a fine Catholic education. But now you read books, and, if you please, you write books. Just what do you have against us, Fante? You must be very brilliant indeed. Tell me all about it. I’m listening.”
“I don’t have anything against the Church, Father. It’s just that I want to think…”
“Ah, so that’s it! The infallibility of the Holy Father. So you want to know if the Bishop of Rome is really infallible in matters of faith and morals. Fante, I shall clear that up for you at once: he is. Now, what else is bothering you?”
I crossed to Papa, took his bottle, and swigged from it. Father John’s sudden attack had me rocking on my heels, and I had to get matters quiet in my mind.
‘You see, Father. The Blessed Virgin Mary…” “I’ll tell you about the Blessed Virgin Mary, Fante. I’ll let you have it straight, without equivocation. Mary, the Mother of God, was conceived without sin, and upon her death ascended into heaven. Surely a man of your intelligence can understand that.”
“Yes, Father. I will accept that for the moment. But in the mass, at the consecration…”
“At the consecration, the bread and wine is changed into the body and blood of Christ. What else is eating you?”
“Well, Father. When a man goes to confession…”
“Christ gave his priests the power to forgive sins when he said, ‘Receive
ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.’ It’s right there in the New Testament. Read it yourself.”
“I understand the words, Father. But in the doctrine of original sin…”
“Ho! So that’s it! By original sin we mean that as children of our first parents we are conceived in sin and remain so until the glorious sacrament of baptism.”
“Yes, Father. I know. But the resurrection…”
“The resurrection? For heaven’s sake, Fante, that’s simple enough. Christ our Lord was crucified, and then rose from the dead, which is the promise of immortality for all of his children. Or do you choose to die like a dog, consigned forever to oblivion?”
I sighed and sat down. There was nothing more to say. Papa cleared his throat, a small smile on his lips, as he raised the bottle. There was a curious warmth to his eyes. Ash from his cigar fell in gray disorder across his lap.
“The kid reads too much, Father. I been telling him for years.”
So it was “the kid” now.
“But I like to read, Papa. It’s part of my trade.”
“It’s them books, Father. Birth control, he told me himself.”
“Birth control?” Father John smiled sadly as he shook his head. “I’ll tell you about birth control in the Catholic Church. There ain’t any.”
“I told him, Father. I said, 1 don’t like that stuff.’ It’s not the girl’s fault, Father. She’s a Protestant. She don’t know no better. But him: he told me. 1 like to control my family,’ he told me that, coupla days ago. Me, his own father.”
“I did say something like that,” I admitted. “But what I meant was this, Father. My income…”
“You see?” Papa interrupted. “Nearly four years, they been married. Plenty time for two, a little boy and a little girl. My grandchildren. But are they here, Father? Go upstairs. Look in all the rooms, under the beds, in the closets. You won’t find them. Little Nicky and little Philomena. Nicky, he’d be about three now, talking to his Grandpa. The little girl, she’d be just walking. You see them around, Father? Go out in the back yard; look in the garage. No, you won’t find them, because they ain’t here. And it’s his fault!” Papa’s right forefinger, the one with the broken nail, shot toward me.
