But he never had a chance, for he was a miserable player, desperate, terrifying, playing a pair of deuces like a pat hand, never backing down, raising and reraising the bet until his last chip was pushed into the pot. Of course luck was with him sometimes, when he won everything in sight and broke up the game. Exultant, laughing, he bought drinks on the house and hurried off down Atlantic Street to another game, for he could not quit. He had to go on until his final destruction, like a man determined to sacrifice himself to a fatal passion. Many was the night when Mama, knowing he carried a large sum of money after the completion of a job, sent us to search for him in one of the saloons. We never got to him, for he had established a rule with the house man: his kids were not allowed in the back room where the gamblers gathered.
Sometimes in the evenings after supper my father would trap one of us boys as we sat on the front porch and he came swinging out the door, pausing to light a long black Toscanelli and snapping, “Okay, kid. On your feet. Let’s go.”
“Where to?”
“Follow me.”
Down the street he’d move on quick feet as I hurried to keep pace. It was the Grand Tour, the complete works of Nick Molise. Everybody took it except Mama and my sister. Apparently he regarded it as inappropriate for women.
In those days San Elmo was a town of twelve thousand split by railroad tracks down the middle, the business district and the aristocrats on one side, the railroad machine shops, the roundhouse and the peasants on the other. My father’s first stop on the tour was across town in the neighborhood of the rich, where the public library was situated, a white brick structure, pure New England, with four stone columns above a cascade of red sandstone steps.
Pausing across the street, hands on hips, his face softened reverently as he stared at the building.
“There she is, kid. Isn’t she pretty? You know who built her?”
“You did, Papa.”
“Not bad. Not bad at all.”
“It’s a beauty. Papa.”
“Last a thousand years.”
“At least.”
“Look at that stone, those steps. They flow like water.”
“Great.”
“Hell of a thing.”
He’d drop a hand on my shoulder. “Come on, kid. I got something else to show you.”
Then two blocks down May wood to the Methodist church with its stone steeple and the open bell tower, the ivy-covered stone walls. Five minutes of silent, ritualistic admiration, gazing up at the steeple, the air magical with my father’s joy, his eyes dancing at his handiwork, his face suffused with contentment.
“I did it,” he’d assert. “Yes, sir. I did it.”
“You sure did.”
Off and running again, chasing his heels. The City Hall. The Bank of California. Municipal Water and Power, Spanish-style, with adobe colonnades and a red tile roof. Haley’s Mortuary. The Criterion Theatre. The Fire Department, all red brick and spotless, with expanses of flawless concrete. On to San Elmo High School, with respectful pauses at places of interest—winding concrete walkways, drinking fountains.
“Stop, kid.” He’d block me with his hand. “Down at your feet. What does it look like?”
“Sidewalk.”
“Whose sidewalk?”
“Yours.”
“Wrong. It’s the people’s. Your father built it for them, to keep their feet dry.”
San Elmo High. Red brick. Immense stone stairs, and Papa, hands behind his back, squinting through cigar smoke as he gazed at what we kids came to call “the invisible marvel.”
“Notice anything?”
I’d shake my head. Just a damned school.
“Look careful. You can’t see it, you’ll never see it, but I’ll show it to you.”
My eyes would roll to the inscription across the front of the building. SAN ELMO HIGH SCHOOL. 1936.
“Not that!” he’d say, annoyed. “Look at the building! What’s special about it?”
“You built it.”
“What else? What is it you don’t see?”
“How do I know if I don’t see it?”
“You can—if you use your head.”
I’d move up to the school wall and touch it here and there, scanning it up and down and across, bored to death with his ego trip, playing out a silly game.
“Can’t see anything.”
“What you see is a building that’s been through four earthquakes. Now, look close and tell me what you can’t see.”
“Dead people.”
He’d shake his head in disgust. “You dumb jackass! I’m talking about cracks! Earthquake cracks. Find me a crack in those walls. Go ahead.”
“I can’t, because there aren’t any.”
“So, then. What is it in that building that’s plain to see because you can’t see it?”
“A crack.”
“Why?”
“Because you built it.”
He’d dig into his pocket. “Here’s a quarter. Don’t spend it all in one place.,
I’d take it and run, free at last.
Other times it was the graveyard tour at Valhalla Cemetery, just outside the city limits. It could happen unexpectedly on a Sunday afternoon, an agonizing ordeal if you were thirteen and scheduled to pitch against the Nevada City Tigers at two o’clock and it was already one-thirty, and he was oblivious to your uniform, your glove and your cleats as you followed him around, knowing the ball park was ten blocks across town.
Valhalla Cemetery was crowded with my father’s white marble angels, their wings unfolded, their arms and long fingers outstretched, hawk-faced and grim, a fearsome thrust about them like vultures protecting carrion. Wherever they perched, one got the feeling that they had already desecrated the graves.
Down the cypress-lined path was the enormous bust of Mayor Hal Shriner, stern and iron-jawed, the menacing, cruel countenance of a crooked politican staring down at you from a pedestal above the sunken grave, his eyes empty, a few bird droppings on his stony hair. My father would remove his hat and stare in wonder, like a man enchanted by Michelangelo’s David, while I’d pound my mitt in a frenzy.
“Nine years he’s been dead,” my father would muse. “Now he’s all gone, finished.” His eyes met the mayor’s. “Hello, Mayor, you old son of a bitch. How they treating you down there?”
I would stare out over a sea of tombstones and groan. There still seemed acres to traverse. The whole world had turned into a graveyard. What a way to warm up before a ball game! He knew why I seethed and festered, pawing the gravel with my spiked shoes, he knew, but he didn’t give a damn as he solemnly moved along the path to the gravestone of old Loretta Stevens, the librarian, fashioned like an open book, her vital statistics chiseled on a stony page.
4
MY OLD MAN had never wanted children. He had wanted apprentice bricklayers and stonemasons. He got a writer, a bank teller, a married daughter, and a railroad brakeman. In a sense he tried to shape his sons into stonemasons the way he shaped stone, by whacking it. He failed, of course, for the more he hammered at us, the further he drove us from any love of the craft. When we were kids a great dream possessed Nick Molise, a glimpse of a glorious future lit up in his brain: MOUSE AND SONS, STONEMASONS.
We sons had his brown eyes, his thick hands, his fireplug stature, and he assumed we were naturally blessed with the same devotion to stone, the same dedication to long hours of backbreaking toil. He envisioned a modest beginning in San Elmo, then expansion of operations to Sacramento, Stockton and San Francisco.
The only son who made a serious attempt to share my father’s dream was Mario, who gave it a heroic try after graduating from high school. Since Papa was dealing with a raw apprentice and not a member of the union, he put Mario through a test past all endurance, working him from early morning until after sunset six days a week, at paltry wages paid only when the spirit moved him. He felt that Mario should actually be working for nothing, just for the privilege of having such an illustrious maestro. Th
e apprentice period should last five years, he thought, but in Mario’s case, since his son was so stupid and difficult to instruct, the training period should be extended to seven years.
“Okay!” Mario would keep saying. “But teach me something! I might as well be at Folsom, breaking rocks.”
“That’s the idea,” Papa would say. “First we break you down, so that you’re nothin’. Then we build you up and up, until you can raise your head and tell the world you’re a first-class bricklayer, the son of Nicholas Molise.”
“Aw, bullshit!”
Three months into his apprenticeship Mario had an offer to play professional baseball with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League. At seventeen he was already an extraordinary pitcher, had thrown two no-hit games for the San Elmo High School team, and was the star left-hander for the town team. Playing baseball was the one talent that lifted Mario above the crowd, the passion of his life. Though graduated from high school, he was still a minor, so the San Francisco management needed parental consent before signing him up.
Mama was eager to sign, but the old man refused. Mario was too young, he insisted, and besides, baseball was a foolish way to earn a living. Five, six years and you were through, a nothing, a ditch-digger. Better that he should have an honorable profession, that of a mason, building with brick and stone, than earning money playing a kid game with no future.
God, what a brutal time: we fought him for weeks—Stella, Virgil and I—pleading with him to give Mario his chance, yelling at him, then refusing to speak to him at all. But he was an Abruzzi goat with poised evil horns and he would not relent. He knew what was best for his son, and someday Mario would thank him. Needless to say, there was no gratitude in Mario’s soul, only bitterness and fury.
Gritting his teeth, he went back to the rocks and cement, patiently awaiting the day when he would be eighteen and beyond Papa’s legal hold on his baseball future. But it never happened. The New York Giants moved to the Bay Area that winter and the San Francisco Seals were no more. Mario’s big opportunity vanished in the upheaval. Suddenly he was a nobody once more. True, my father had taught him the rudiments of laying brick, but he was still an apprentice, still made to grovel and crawl at the old man’s will, the seeds of patricide sprouting in his gut. The moment he heard there was no deal with the Seals, Mario leaped from the scaffold of the building my father was constructing and walked away. Papa was shocked and unforgiving. For years he refused to speak to Mario, even crossing the street when he saw his son approaching. In fact, Mario crossed the street when he saw my father approaching.
“He sold me out,” Papa would say. “He deserted his own father.”
Sunday afternoons in summer, my father sat in the grandstand heckling Mario as he pitched semipro ball for the town team against Marysville, Yuba City, Grass Valley, Auburn and Lake Tahoe. Full of beer on those hot afternoons, he was a one-man rooting section, cheering the opposition to clobber his own flesh and blood. “Knock him out of there! Knock his brains out!” he shouted to the batters facing Mario.
I sat with the old man in a crucial game between San Elmo and Yuba City. In the last of the ninth, with the score tied, Mario hit a home run to win the league championship. As he rounded third base to the cheers of the locals, my enraged father rushed from the grandstand and tackled the grinning Mario as he rounded third base. The police dragged him off the field and Mario got up and trotted home with the winning run.
5
THE JET HIT the Sacramento runway on schedule and the passengers unhooked their safety belts. I was first to disembark as a gust of September heat blasted off the concrete runway, shimmering like an unfocused television screen. I had forgotten the heat of the Sacramento Valley. Now I knew I was home again.
My brother Mario was not at the reception gate, where a few people had gathered to meet the Los Angeles flight. I went inside the refrigerated depot and sat down to wait. After fifteen minutes I walked out into the parking area to look for Mario’s truck. There was no sign of Mario and the heat was crushing. I ducked inside the waiting room again, found the cool, dark bar, and ordered beer. By one-thirty I began to doubt that Mario would show up. I dialed his home in San Elmo and his wife Peggy answered. Her voice always had the breathless quality of a mother pursuing children.
“Who’d you say this was?”
“Henry Molise. Your brother-in-law.”
“Well, for God’s sake. Henry Molise! What brings you up here, Henry? Are you still writing those shitty novels? The last one made me vomit. I burned it so the children wouldn’t be contaminated. Lord, what a way to make a living!” (The novel concerned a young railroad brakeman who deserted his wife and children for a career in professional baseball. There was no way for Peggy to like it.)
“Is Mario there, Peggy?”
“Maybe. Why?”
“I want to talk to him.”
“It’s your smart-ass brother,” I heard her call out. “Do you want to talk to him?”
There was a roar in the background, a sporting event of some kind on television. After a long time the volume of the crowd noises was reduced and Mario spoke.
“Hi, Henry. What’s up? You watching the game?”
“Game? What game? You were supposed to meet me at the airport.”
“Forget it. Don’t come up. I was going to call you. Everything’s okay. They made up. All that talk about a divorce—it didn’t mean a thing.”
“You jerk! Why didn’t you let me know?”
“I meant to, Henry. It slipped my mind.”
“Come and get me.”
“Get you? Where are you?”
“Sacramento airport.”
“You mean, you came up?”
“How the hell could I be at the Sacramento airport if I didn’t come up? I flew up, Mario! I’m here, in a phone booth, talking to you. Come and get me!”
He moaned.
“Can’t do it, Henry. It’s the Giants and the Dodgers. Bobby Murcer’s at bat with two on. For God’s sake, Henry, go someplace and find a television set! Hurry! The game’s just started!”
“You rat!”
“Sorry, Henry. Tell you what: there’s a bus to San Elmo at five. I’ll pick you up at the depot.”
I struggled for self-control.
“I don’t want to see you again for the rest of my life,” I told him. “But please. Do me a favor. Don’t tell Mama and Papa I’m coining. I don’t want them at the depot, waiting for me. I don’t want any part of that scene. Okay?”
“Oh, shit,” he said. “Murcer struck out.”
I hung up and went back to my perch at the bar, depressed, frustrated. Mario was a born bungler. No wonder my father was always disgusted with him, always putting him down.
The voice over the public address system announced the next flight to Los Angeles. Suddenly I had a premonition of terrible problems in San Elmo and decided to fly back home. But as I hurried toward the embarkation gate my mind changed. I had come this far, so why not continue another eighteen miles and complete the journey? I owed it to my folks, if only for a few hours.
The airport bus took me into Sacramento, where I went to a movie, loafed around a bookstore, stopped in a bar for a beer and a few plays at the pinball game, and finally boarded a bus to San Elmo, altogether a most fruitful and rewarding day thanks to my wayward brother who had not only triggered the journey but had left me stranded at the end of it.
Coming into San Elmo down Main Street you could see that the town had changed, now that Highway 80 to the Sierras veered away from the city two miles north. San Elmo was isolated now, its lifeline cut, and the town was dying. Except for a few cars parked before the Safeway and Penney’s, the main stem was deserted. Acme Billiards, where much of my early education for life was acquired, was dosed down. So was the Ventura Theatre, where I saw every Elizabeth Taylor movie at least four times.
The bus turned right off Main Street, then left down the alley to the depot. I stepped down with two Chicanos and fo
llowed them inside the depot (formerly a clothing store), which had a few wooden benches fronting the windows looking out on Main Street. The ticket window was open but the depot was unattended. There were only two people in that desolate place. One was my mother, seated on a bench near the window, and the other was my father, seated on another bench as far away from her as possible.
Both saw me at the same time. My mother spoke first, crying out, “Henry, my boy!” and holding out her arms.
Though it was fearfully hot in the waning afternoon, she wore a heavy black coat with a fur-lined collar and hem. I knew that damned coat—we kids called it “the Colorado coat”—a hand-me-down from Aunt Carmelina thirty years ago, a flashy, almost whorish coat, absurdly draping my small, gray-haired mother. Beneath was a gingham housedress. I pulled her into my arms and kissed her hot face and smelled the scent of Italian spices always present in her hair.
“Thank God,” she breathed, clinging to me. “Oh, thank God! All I wanted was to see my dear son one last time.”
Her body twitched, then melted suddenly in my arms, her head thrown back, her mouth open, her eyes closed. She only weighed about a hundred and three pounds, but it was dead weight and hard to control, and I floundered with her, yelling at my father for help.
“Leave her go,” he scowled, a little black cigar in his mouth. “Leave her fall on the floor.”
But he crossed quickly to us, taking her like a sack of grain and hustling her to a bench, mumbling, “Son of a bitchen woman, why don’t somebody put her out of her misery?” Splotches of angry blood bloated his neck and smoke from the black cigar stung his eyes.
Mama lay spread out as if unconscious, eyes closed, mouth open, one hand primly tugging her dress below the knee. Her stockings were held up by sleeve garters. I recognized them: they were discards from the old man’s wardrobe.