by John Fante
“I must go now,” she said. “It was a wonderful dinner, Mrs. Toscana. I enjoyed it so much.”
Papa grinned. You could see he felt highly complimented. He put his arm around Mamma’s waist and patted her seat. “You ain’t tasted nothing yet, Coletta. This old girl can really cook.” Then he laughed. “What do you think I married her for? Maybe she don’t look like you, but, oh, boy, how she can cook!” Mamma backed away, her face white and tight. Dino took both Mamma’s hands in his and opened the palms. He bent and kissed each of them lightly, in the middle.
“Thank you, my Maria,” he said in his usual Italian. “These weary little hands are much too patient with all of us.” The sharpness left Mamma’s face, and for the first time she smiled. “Thank you, Dino,” she said.
Papa left the room and returned with Coletta’s fur. Hugo growled and we shut him up. Papa’s eyes were bright as he held the fur, and you could see his fingers were startled by the rich softness. He was awed as he held it out to Coletta, holding it out in his two hands as though it were an animal that mystified him. Like a black leopard she walked across the room to the edge of the divan, where she had left her handkerchief. All of us, those in the house and we at the window, stared in amazement and marveled at the miracle of her wonderful movements.
Then Papa spoke. “As long as you’re going toward town, Coletta, why don’t you give Dino a lift?”
“Of course!” she said.
Dino protested: it was too much trouble, he felt like walking, he loved the night air, he needed exercise, his rooms were only a few blocks away. We turned from the window to look at the car, which stood directly in front of our house, the sleek lines melting into the night. It seemed as it should be, that car. Coletta belonged in no other car but that one; it was as much a part of her as the dark hair, the black fur, the leopard-like movements.
Dino’s protests got him nothing. Both Coletta and Papa pooh-poohed his desire for exercise, and when Papa handed him his hat Dino shrugged in defeat.
“Go on, you two,” Papa said. “Hop out there.”
He took Dino’s left hand and slipped it under Coletta’s right arm. Dino looked at Mamma for help, and Mamma understood, but she couldn’t do anything. Coletta dropped her eyes shyly, looking down at Dino, because she was taller and in every way larger than he.
She said: “There doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it, does there, Dino?” And Dino smiled to hide his embarrassment. Papa got behind them, put his arms around both of them, and almost knocked them down when he crushed them together and shoved them toward the door.
“Go on, you two!” he said. “Get out there under the moon and under them there stars and really get to know one another!”
Tony looked at the sky.
“What’s he talking about? There ain’t any stars.”
“No moon, neither,” Mike said.
“Shut up,” I said.
We heard them on the front porch. We ran around the side of the house and threw ourselves on our bellies in the strawberry patch. Coletta and Dino stepped off the porch, their arms locked, and walked up the path toward the car. Gently Dino tried to remove his hand. It brought a yell from Papa on the porch.
“No you don’t, Dino! What’s the matter? Can’t you act like a gentleman for five minutes?” and Papa laughed.
We were so disgusted with Papa that we buried our faces in the strawberry patch, and I was so disgusted I tore out grass with my teeth. When they reached the street Dino did take his hand from her arm as he stepped toward the big car and briskly opened the door. But Coletta scarcely saw him as she walked past the shiny monster and stopped before a tattered jalopy parked behind it. The wreck was an old Ford, top gutted, fenders smashed, paint peeling. It was such a wreck that we hadn’t even noticed it.
“No, Dino,” Coletta said. “Poor little me. This is my car.”
Shocked, disillusioned, incredulous, the three of us sat up. We didn’t care if we were seen or not. Coletta got behind the wheel and Dino got in beside her. The engine started with a series of plups and flups and the choke rod squealed hideously as Coletta pumped it. The car rattled down the street, Hugo chasing it and barking bitterly while we stood sneering at the wake of dirty exhaust smoke almost concealing an Illinois license plate.
“Pah,” Mike said. “She’s a phony.”
“I hate her,” Tony said.
“A frill,” I said.
Hugo came back to where the car had been parked. Very busily he smelled around here and there and, when he looked up the street where they had gone, his hair stood up on his neck and he growled menacingly.
For a week after Coletta’s visit our house was a pretty hard place to live in. Mamma got careless with her hair, and she stopped using face powder, and she kept wearing the same blue gingham dress with the white dots. That was the way with things at our house. Mamma and Papa would have a quarrel, and Mamma would let herself crumble and waste away.
It was just the opposite with Papa. Oh, he got spruced up more than ever. He took to shining his shoes and whistling all the time, as though something exciting were going to happen that night, like a dance or a banquet at the Little Italy Club.
While Mamma cooked dinner he would be very gentle with us, giving Clara a nickel for brushing his suit or going after ten-cent cigars, because at those times of strife with Mamma, Papa always smoked Chancellors, perfuming the house with their rich Papa-like smell. Then we would have dinner, Papa all frisked up in a white shirt without a tie, and he would laugh and talk to us, wonderfully heroic with tales of what he did years ago, when men were men and bricklayers were really artists, when he had built a whole church with his own hands.
We worshipped him then: he was exciting, and he answered all our questions with rich stories that ended in ways undreamed of. We sometimes got mad at Mamma, because she would push back her chair and leave the table in the middle of one of his stories. A shadow would cross his face as he watched her go, and we would plead loudly with him to tell us some more, and he would shake himself as if it were all a dream, saying: “Oh, yes, where was I?” We would tell him and he would sigh and finish the story.
But his stories were always better if Mamma listened. We couldn’t understand why Mamma stayed mad at him; we sometimes blamed Mamma, yet in a way we were glad they were quarreling, because Papa never told those wild tales of his past unless he and Mamma were not on speaking terms. I used to think about it a great deal in those days, and I used to say how foolish Mamma was, and I used to think if I were she I could never be mad at a man as exciting as Papa.
Four nights after Coletta’s visit, Papa came home drunk. It must have been about five in the morning, because when we woke up it was almost daylight through the bedroom window. We heard him stumbling around in the living room, singing “La Donna è mobile.” All at once there was a crash of furniture, and then quiet. The lights flashed on, we jumped out of bed, and Mamma and all of us hurried to the living room to find Papa sprawled on the carpet, lying on his back with a pleasant smile on his face. Hugo walked up and licked Papa’s nose, and Papa said woo-woo-woo and tried to kiss Hugo. In the corner, still rocking back and forth, was Mike’s football, swished there after Papa had stepped upon it. We knew he wasn’t hurt or he wouldn’t be smiling so happily. Hugo had smelled Papa’s breath and sauntered away in disgust.
“Papa’s drunk,” Tony said, and we looked at one another and smiled. Old Papa, just plastered to the gills and very happy, and we grinned knowingly, feeling sophisticated and mature. Papa often got drunk. He was so generous when he got drunk. We liked him very much when he got drunk. But Mamma felt different. She detested him like that. She looked down at him, her teeth clenched.
“Look at him,” she said. “Just look at that shameless man, father of four innocent children!”
We didn’t like to be called innocent, so we defended Papa, and Mike surprised Mamma when he said: “A man’s got a right to get drunk once in a while.”
“Let’
s wake him up,” Tony said. “Maybe he’ll give us some money.”
“Look!” Clara pointed. “Blood! There’s blood all over his shirt.”
We fell on our knees around him. Tony and Mike began to cry, and that started Hugo whimpering. “Papa’s hurt,” Mike said. “Our papa’s injured. He’s dead, he’s dead.” I told them to shut up, and while Mamma unbuttoned Papa’s coat they became so interested they stopped crying.
“Funny blood,” Clara said. “Looks kinda pink.”
Below Papa’s collar was the imprint of pressed lipstick, forming a woman’s mouth. They didn’t know it, Mike and Tony and Clara, but Mamma did, and so did I. We looked at each other, and I had to turn away from the gray fury of Mamma’s eyes. Without a word she got up and walked into the bedroom. She threw herself upon the bed and lay rigid and silent.
“Somebody bit him,” Tony said.
Papa came awake long enough to grin, look around, and ask the time. We told him, and Tony said: “Papa, are you dead or not?” He shook his head serenely and closed his eyes once more. “‘La donna è mobile,’” he tried to sing, but his tongue was so heavy he laughed at himself and was content to hum it feebly as he drifted back to sleep, his thick work-scarred fists holding Tony’s small hand with the same tenderness he might have shown a chick.
“Papa,” Mike said, “kin I have a dime?”
“Sure. You can have anything you want. You just come to Papa when you want something, and you’ll be sure to get it. ’Cause your papa loves you lots more than your mamma loves you.”
“Gimme,” Mike said.
Papa fumbled at his pants, searching for the pockets. Tony was glad to assist him, taking Papa’s limp hand and pushing it into the pocket. There it remained, for Papa fell asleep at once, a slumber from which he could not be roused though we shook him violently; and Mike cupped his hands at Papa’s ear and shouted: “Hey, Papa! What about the dime?”
It was in vain. He slumbered with a wide grin across his face, and after a moment he snored loudly. The hand could not be moved. We thought of throwing water in his face, but we were afraid that would make him so sober he would get his razor strop. We were pushing him this way and that across the floor, Hugo gnawing his shoes, when Mamma came back to the room. She had been crying. Carefully she removed his hand from the pocket and drew out a few coins. She gave each of us a dime, and went back to bed.
In a while she called me. I got up and it was bright morning, cold. She had undressed him, pushed blankets under him, a pillow under his head, and covered him there on the floor. His clothes were folded on the rocking chair, all but his shirt, which lay in a heap where she had rolled it up and thrown it into the corner.
“You saw what it was?” she asked.
“I know,” I said. “But I won’t tell.”
“Good boy.” Though she spoke calmly, the tears seeped from her eyes. “It’s that woman,” she said. “I know it’s that woman.”
“It ain’t nothing serious.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “A kiss. No—that’s nothing. But this is serious, this, what he does to me here,” and she pressed her heart. Papa awakened, groaned, and rolled himself, blankets and all, across the floor.
“What’s going on around here?” he said. “What’s all these women doing in my bed?”
It made me laugh. I felt sorry for Mamma, but I went back to bed laughing at what Papa had said.
At seven o’clock we got up to go to school. Papa wasn’t on the floor. We looked in the bedroom, but he wasn’t there either. We had breakfast in the kitchen. There was Mamma, polishing the stove. She worked in a fury, the sweat clinging like mist across the lines of her forehead. The stove was very hot, in some places it was red-hot, and the kitchen had the pungent smell of stove-black and burning rags. We sat down and crammed ourselves with eggs and toast.
“Where’s Papa?” Clara said.
“He’s gone,” Mamma panted. “He went to work.”
Mike held his nose.
“Pheeeeeew! Something stinks!”
We looked at the rag in Mamma’s hand. Mike and Tony and Clara didn’t notice it, but I could tell by what remained of the buttons that it was Papa’s shirt of the night before. I glanced at Mamma’s face. It shone with vengeance. It made the toast clog my throat like sand. It frightened me, and I looked away.
At school we had choir practice, and I didn’t get home until six o’clock. On the front porch was Papa, sound asleep in the rocking chair, his eyelids raw and sickly, his mouth wide open, his lunch pail beside him on the floor. The smears of mortar on his hands and arms showed how hard he had worked that day. From under his hat a curl of hair was pasted against his forehead, sweat-dried and pathetic.
He hurt me, Papa did, he hurt me, the way he looked there, his bones aching, his knotty hands deformed yet so brave, outraged by years of toil. Oh, he hurt me deeply in my chest, a cry there, a wail I wanted to send floating into the warm twilight. And all of a sudden I hated Mamma.
I ran into the kitchen and threw my books down. I smelled fish, which meant Friday, baked fish. Mamma stood over the stove, her face as sullen as it was that morning.
“Why do you do it?” I said. “Why do you leave him out there by himself? He’s lonesome. Why don’t you talk to him?”
She didn’t answer.
“You’re wicked. You’re mean to him. He didn’t do anything serious. Look how hard he works every day.”
She lifted a pot of boiling potatoes from the stove and carried it to the colander in the sink, steam from the pot hiding her face. “Please stay out of my way,” she said. While she mashed the potatoes I sat at the table, watching the set face, the changeless line of her lips. I couldn’t understand it: day after day the same even flow of anger, the constant blaze in her eyes. It was all right to get mad once in a while and stay that way for a while, but why stay mad all the time? After all, what did we have to do with it, Mike and Tony and I? We had to live there too.
She drew the baked fish from the oven and tested it with a fork. It was ready. She went to the back porch and called Mike and Tony and Clara, who were pitching horseshoes in the back yard. They marched in and and sat at the dining-room table without washing their hands and faces, and their hands were the color of dust. Mamma didn’t care. Mike and Tony began to pick at the fish with their hands, tossing chunks to Hugo under the table. She didn’t say a word. I kicked Hugo out and tried to make them wash their hands and faces, but they thumbed their noses at me and said I wasn’t anybody important. It made me so mad I didn’t wash, either. We sat in a circle, every place taken but Papa’s.
“What about him?” I said.
“Call him,” Mamma said. “That is, if you really want him.”
I went out to the porch and shook Papa awake. He staggered inside, his muscles aching. At the kitchen sink he bent over and washed his face, gasping from the cold water. Then he combed his hair before the little wall mirror and came into the dining room and sat down. The sight of him made Mamma pale. She pushed back her plate and went into the bedroom, locking the door behind her. We ate in silence. The fish was burned, the mashed potatoes were watery; there weren’t any napkins, and every few minutes one of us got up to get something that should have been there.
As soon as dinner was finished, Papa walked into the bedroom. Immediately Mamma walked out of the bedroom and went into the kitchen. We could hear Papa dressing in the bedroom. He felt better now, he was whistling, and we could hear him moving around with more quickness.
He was whistling “La Donna è mobile” when he left, wearing his new suit and whistling for all the world like a man without troubles. It made Mamma so furious that she took the large fish platter and sent it crashing over the floor. Hugo howled in fright and came dashing out of the kitchen, to hide himself under the bed. Mamma kicked the pieces aside and rushed back to the bedroom. Hugo crawled from under the bed and went back and ate the fish on the floor. After a while Mamma returned to the kitchen, swept up the broken pieces,
and finished the supper dishes.
We sat around the dining-room table, playing casino. Mamma went back to the bedroom and locked the door. After an hour she called me. I went in and stood at the bedside in the darkness. I could smell her grief and tears in the room, filling the room.
“Go down to Dino’s,” she said. “Tell Dino to come here right away.”
“What for?”
“Do what I tell you.”
I pulled on my sweater and started out. Dino’s barber shop was next to the alley on Osage Street, a block from the Platte River Bridge. You could hear and smell the river from Dino’s. It was a one-chair shop, not much bigger than our dining room. Next to the shop was the North Pole Recreation Club, where Papa played a card game called pangini and sometimes got drunk. Dino’s shop was closed, a dim blue light burning over the opened cash register. Dino lived in a bedroom and kitchen behind the shop. Many years ago this place had been a blacksmith shop, and when you were inside you could still smell horsehide and burned horses’ hoofs.
I went around the alley to the back door. Lights shone from the two kitchen windows. I climbed the fence. From inside came laughter, the rich deep laughter of Coletta and the sharp brash laughter of my father. I crept to the window and looked inside. They sat at a small table in the middle of Dino’s white, immaculate kitchen, a bottle of wine between them: Coletta, Dino, and Papa. Dino sat as though by himself, a little apart from Coletta and Papa, who were close together, their chairs touching. That other time she had worn black. Tonight she was in white, but color made no difference—she still looked beautifully naked. I swallowed slowly. Holy cow! What a honey!
Papa was swinging his arms as he talked, sometimes hugging her, talking all the time.
“Look at him there!” Papa said. “He ain’t no man, Coletta. He’s half a man, that’s what.”
Dino smiled indifferently.
“Don’t laugh,” Papa warned. “We know you, you impostor, you ingannatore. You just ain’t got the guts to go out and get a woman. That’s his trouble, ain’t it, Coletta?”
