Anderson agreed to meet her at his office the following day.
“So that’s where it’s at,” Mario finished off, his voice trembling and desolate. “I can’t believe it, Henry! The end of our family. They won’t live a month without each other.”
“It won’t happen,” I told him.
“You’ve got to save them, Henry. You’re the only one who can.”
I could understand why they were afraid of this ludicrous divorce, of what chaos it would create in their quiet small-town lives. They were no longer in their youth, their hopes for the future were exhausted, and they were already burdened enough with swarms of children crammed into three-bedroom stucco houses with small backyards, a lemon tree in the corner, tomato vines up the back fence, and teen-age daughters in misery for a bedroom of their own. If divorced, where would my mother and father go? Who had spare bedrooms to house them?
True, Mama had queasy, halfhearted plans to share her sister’s flat in Denver, but such a ménage wouldn’t last forty-eight hours, for the daft Carmelina (always in the same black shawl and dress) was a kinky arthritic confined to a wheelchair, in need of constant attention, and she was an even worse tyrant than Nick Molise. A couple of nights in Carmelina’s unventilated apartment and Mama would flee back to San Elmo, to live alone in the crumbling shingle house on Pleasant Street, careless about gas jets in the kitchen stove and prone to falling asleep with the wall furnace going full blast. My old man may have been a poor excuse for a husband, but he at least had sense enough to lower the furnace and open a window in order to survive the night.
What of him? Where would he go after a divorce?
“You’re the oldest son,” Mario said. “He’s your problem.”
“It cannot happen,” I wearily assured him. “A husband and wife bonded together for fifty-one years of marriage are inseparable, like Siamese twins. If they split they die, and they know it.”
“I told you—she’s seeing the lawyer tomorrow.”
“It won’t happen. She’ll see him, but it’ll be for show. Nothing serious.”
“Listen, Henry. You’ve got that nice house at Redondo Beach, all those bedrooms, your kids are grown and gone, you’re sitting pretty, you’ve got space, and we were wondering, me and Stella, if you could help us until this crisis is over, maybe take the old man off our hands for a few days.”
“I’ll take them both.”
“You can’t. They’re talking about divorce. They’ll fight all the time. You don’t want that.”
“I’ll take them anyway, married or divorced.”
“Talk it over with Harriet.”
“What’s to talk about? I’m master of my own house.”
“Just old Nick. Give me your word.”
“Mario, this is a collect call. We’ve been talking for an hour, and it’s costing me.”
The phone flooded with the swoosh of his anger. “A crisis like this and all you think about is the phone bill! Is money that important? Don’t you have any sympathy for the woman who brought you into the world, or the man who raised you by the sweat of his brow, bought your shoes and clothes, put bread in your mouth and sent you to school? You think you’d be a writer today if it wasn’t for those two wonderful people? You always were number one. What about me and Virgil and Stella? You think we enjoyed it seeing you always the favorite? You think I enjoyed it, wearing your hand-me-down shirts and socks? I woulda worn your pants too, only you’re so fuckin’ short they barely covered my knees. You think I forgot who got the bike, and not me or Virgil? We had to sleep together, me and that farting Virgil. But not you! Oh, no, you had your own little room on the back porch with your books and your typewriter and the special light. I won’t forget that, Henry! I never forget anything! I know how you live, you phony. Laying around on that beach all day long, playing like you’re somebody important just because you’re a writer, writing bullshit lies about your family while I slave like a wetback in the yards, eight, ten hours a day—and for what? For nothing but trouble and debts while you’re out of it and far away, listening to the waves, and when I call to tell you that your mother and father are getting a divorce, the best you can do is beef about the phone bill. Okay, buster. Drop dead!”
He hung up with a crash.
I found Harriet under a blanket on the little porch above the beach. Mounds of fog meandered toward the shore like a herd of wandering polar bears. The night was cold and moonless; even the stars would have no part of it. I slipped under the blanket beside her and related the conversation with my brother.
“Hurray for your mother,” Harriet said. “She should have divorced the old bastard fifty years ago.”
“She’s a devout Catholic. There won’t be a divorce.”
“I hope she does. Think of it, free from that old satyr at last.”
“Harriet, she’s seventy-four…”
“She’ll make out just fine. There’s Stella and your brothers, and of course you’ll help out too. It’s your duty.”
“What happens to Nick?”
“What’s the difference? He’s always been a bachelor anyway.”
I paused to consider an innocuous way of saying it, but there really wasn’t any, so I simply said, “I’m thinking of bringing him down here for a while.”
Her body stiffened under the blanket. She turned and studied me with a startled glance as paleness washed the color from her face. Peering into the tunnels of her eyes was like staring at an arctic landscape, frozen and silent as her breathing stopped.
“It’s getting chilly,” she said. “I think I’ll fix a hot drink.”
She must have fixed quite a few, for as I sat at my typewriter an hour later she blossomed in the doorway like a ghost, wearing a white robe and a wavering smile, a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said, addressing my stare. “A divorce between your mother and father makes no sense at all.”
“Of course not.”
“You’d better go up to San Elmo, Henry. Talk to them.”
“Did you ever try to talk to my father?”
“Your mother. After all, it’s her idea.”
“Are you changing your mind because you don’t want my father down here?”
“You’re damn right. You better get up there before they do something stupid. They’re both weird and you know it.”
She was right. We were an impulsive, unpredictable clan, prone to rash decisions and terrible remorse. Even if my mother dropped the divorce idea, my father might take revenge by leaving home and arriving without notice in Redondo Beach. Grimly Harriet crossed the room to the telephone, the extension cord uncoiling as she brought the instrument to my desk.
“Call your brother. Tell him you’re coming.”
I dialed San Elmo. Mario answered so swiftly his hand must have been on the receiver, as if expecting the call.
“What the hell do you want now?” he snarled.
I told him I would fly up in the morning.
“What is this, some kind of a trick?”
“No trick. I think I should come up, that’s all. I’ll take the eleven o’clock flight. Meet me in Sacramento at noon.”
“How come you changed your mind, Henry?”
“Reasons.”
“Harriet?” He laughed. “It figures.”
“Twelve o’clock. Sacramento airport.”
“I’ll be there.”
I hung up and looked at Harriet. She smiled as she came toward me. She stood behind me with her arms around my waist. “Thank you,” she said, her hands slipping past my navel and into my pants. She fondled me, pressed the tip of her tongue into my ear, gently squeezed and stroked me with ten wise, evocative fingers fashioning a fugue for fucking on my flute, and when she breathed, “Let’s do it,” I hurried after her into the bedroom, struggling to peel off my jeans, fearful that the music would stop suddenly as it often had these past months.
Like two serpents we writhed around each other, her b
reath coming in gasps. “Do something for me!” she begged. And thinking perhaps she might want me to eat her, I said, “Yes, anything, honey. Anything!”
“While you’re in San Elmo, promise you’ll pay my mother a visit. She’s changed, Henry. She likes you now.”
That did it. The flute pooped out, the music stopped, and I was raging.
“No,” I said, pushing myself away, rising from the bed.
“What’s the matter with you?”
I was ashamed to tell her the old bitterness still festered in me. How could a mature man, a supposedly compassionate person, stark naked, turn and say to his wife, “I hate your mother.” With my clothes on I might have said it; instead, I went down the hall to the linen closet, snatched a blanket, and spent the night on the divan.
Next morning we passed one another in the hall.
“Good morning,” I said.
“What’s good about it?”
I went into the bathroom to shave. The face in the mirror was that of an escaped lunatic. The days no longer brought peace but ugliness—the veins in my eyes, the beginning of jowls. I glanced at the rumpled bed where we had lain in flawed love, the crushed pillows, the twisted sheets. I remembered seeing them exactly that way in my parents’ bedroom when I was seven, and hating my father for it, for the stale smell of his cigar, and his work pants lying grotesquely on the floor, and the desire to kill him.
2
WE CHOSE to be silent as I drove to the airport—twenty minutes of stinking nitrous oxides along the Coast Highway, Harriet sulking furiously in the corner, smoking one cigarette after another. Her smoking always amused me because she didn’t inhale, she merely sucked the smoke into her mouth and popped it out of her nose, but fast, the cigarette almost catching fire.
Quietly, casually, she said, “May I tell you something about your father?”
“What?”
“Something I’ve never told you before.”
“What’s that?”
“Promise you won’t repeat it.”
“Oh, shit, Harriet…”
“He made a pass at me.”
The revelation did nothing to me—it was like saying my father was a big wine drinker. I looked straight ahead, waiting for her to fill in the date and circumstance.
“Did you hear what I said?” she demanded. “I said Nick Molise, your father, made a pass at me.”
“I heard you.”
“You rotten son of a bitch. Is that all you have to say?”
“When did it happen?”
“On our wedding day. On the back porch of your mother’s house.”
It astonished me. Her face was a fury. The thing must have been bending her mind for years. I said, “You mean, like twenty-six years ago?”
“Does it matter when? It happened, that’s all. I was your bride—his son’s wife, in my wedding gown, on a sacred day in my life, and that dirty little bastard made a pass at me. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“I’m sorry, Harriet. I just can’t seem to get worked up about it. Why didn’t you tell me when it happened?”
“And spoil that lovely day?”
“Maybe it wasn’t a pass. Maybe it was affection. I remember he drank a lot of champagne. Are you sure? What kind of a pass was it?”
“He pinched my derrière.” (That was just like Harriet: she could always say “fuck” or “shit” but when it came to “ass” it was always “derrière” or “bottom.”)
I laughed. “That wasn’t a pass, it was a compliment. All Italians do that. I’ve pinched your ass a thousand times. It’s fun.”
“I don’t want him around my house,” she growled, her chest heaving. “He’s a filthy old lecher with black Dago eyes that give me the creeps. I won’t have him under my roof, and that’s final.”
Now the traffic was bumper to bumper as it eased into the airport complex. Sulking and dangerous, Harriet exploded another cloud of uninhaled cigarette smoke, her eyes slit like a cat’s.
“Do me a favor when you get there.”
“Be glad to.”
“Visit my mother.”
“Never.”
I pulled to the curb at Western Airlines and got out. Harriet slid to the driver’s side. I kissed her cheek that tasted like a cold rock.
“Will you see my mother, please?”
“No.”
Her toe hit the throttle and I was almost decapitated as the car spurted out into traffic.
3
IT WAS A COMFORTABLE flight, serene and reflective, up the San Joaquin Valley, following the river, cruising low over green farms, passing familiar towns—Bakersfield, Fresno, Turlock, Stockton—a time to sip good beer and float back into the past, to orient one’s self to the emotion of returning home. My thoughts were of my father, for he was an old man now; his days were thinning out, and the less time remaining the more rebellious he got, whereas it seemed that my mother, despite her failing eyesight, rheumatic fingers and backache, would be with us for many years to come.
My father would have been a happier man without a family. Were it not for his four children he would have been divorced and long gone to other towns. He loved Stockton, which was full of Italians, and Marysville, where one could play the Chinese lottery day and night. His children were the nails that crucified him to my mother. No kids and he would have been as free as a bird.
He did not like us particularly, and certainly he did not love us at all. We were just ordinary kids, plain and undistinguished, and he expected more. We were chores that had to be done, not a rich harvest, not asparagus or figs or dates, but humbler fare, potatoes and corn and beans, and he was stuck with the toil of it, cursing and kicking clods until the crops matured.
He was a hard-nosed, big-fisted mountain man from Abruzzi, short, five feet seven, wide as a door, born in a part of Italy where poverty was as spectacular as the surrounding glaciers, and any child who survived the first five years would live to eighty-five. Of course, not many reached the age of five. He and my Aunt Pepina, now eighty and living in Denver, were the only two out of thirteen who had survived. That way of life gave my father his toughness. Bread and onions, he used to boast, bread and onions—what else does a man need? That was why my whole life has been a loathing of bread and onions. He was more than the head of the family. He was judge, jury and executioner, Jehovah himself.
Nobody crossed him without a battle. He disliked almost everything, particularly his wife, his children, his neighbors, his church, his priest, his town, his state, his country, and the country from which he emigrated. Nor did he give a damn for the world either, or the sun or the stars, or the universe, or heaven or hell. But he liked women.
He also liked his work and half a dozen paisani who, like himself, were Italians in the dictator mold. He was a flawless craftsman whose imagination and intelligence seemed centered in his marvelously strong hands, and though he called himself a building contractor I came to regard him as a sculptor, for he could shape a rock into man or beast. He was a superb, swift, neat bricklayer as well as an excellent carpenter, plasterer and concrete builder.
He had great contempt for himself, yet was proud and even conceited. Nick Molise believed that every brick he laid, every stone he carved, every sidewalk and wall and fireplace he built, every gravestone he fashioned, belonged to posterity. He had a terrifying lust for work and a bitter squint at the sun which, in his view, moved too fast across the sky. To finish a job brought him deep sadness. His love for stone was a pleasure more fulfilling than his passion for gambling, or wine, or women. He usually worked far beyond quitting time, even into darkness, and he had a bad reputation among hod carriers and helpers for overworking them. He was always in bad standing with the bricklayers’ union.
The town of San Elmo was his Louvre, his work spread out for the world to see. He was angry that the town did not recognize his talents. Had the city council awarded him a medal or a scroll it might have changed his entire life. What the hell, every year the Chamber of Commerc
e passed out commendations to noteworthy citizens; they gave Cramer, the Ford distributor, a scroll for Man of the Year, and they gave another to G. K. Laurel, the druggist—so how come they never took notice of what Nick Molise had done for their asshole town?
A consistent breadwinner, my father had a problem—he never brought the bread home. The poker game at the Elks Club had sucked up thousands of dollars over the years. I remember him counting out seven hundred and eighty dollars for the completion of a stone house, piles of tens and twenties on the kitchen table as he wet a pencil with his tongue and marked the numbers on a piece of paper. When my mother asked for money to buy groceries he offered her five dollars, his face wincing in pain as she stuffed it into her apron. His credit status among merchants was disgraceful, for he never paid his bills unless backed to the wall. He didn’t believe in banking. He liked the sensuality of a big roll of greenbacks in his pocket. He flashed the money, a big shot, and predators in the saloons licked their chops, waiting for him to take a seat at the gaming tables. The Elks Club, the Onyx, the Café Roma, Kelly’s—all the dives beside the railroad tracks on Atlantic Street. Nick drifted from one to another, trying to change his luck—poker at the Elks, blackjack at Kelly’s, pinochle at the Café Roma, and finally, down to his last dollar or so, a penny hearts game in the lobby of the Elmo Hotel. Tenacious, tireless, expectant, he hung in there until his pockets were empty. Then he stumbled home, weary and debauched from wine, falling upon the bed, where my mother pulled off his clothes and searched his pockets, finding nails, matches, the stub of a pencil, but never so much as a dime.
Next morning he was on the job an hour before his fellow workers arrived, sweat oozing through his shirt as he screened sand or mixed mortar, or hefted a hod of brick to the scaffold, dangerous as a dog with distemper, sick with the nausea of his own affliction. Why this passion for gambling? Virgil believed it stemmed from his poverty in childhood. But that was too easy an explanation. I believed it was his rage at the world, his desire for triumph over the Establishment, his immigrant sense of being an outsider.