by John Fante
I pictured them lying there in the darkness of different worlds, sharing the same manger, like a burro and a hen. Man and wife, side by side, in two nests of a sagging mattress, yet separated by the remains of their dead marriage. It had me writhing. Well, all right! So my mother wasn’t much any more, with aching teeth that had to come out and hair streaked with grey that wouldn’t stay in. She owned no rouge or lipstick, and her rear would look ridiculously small on one of those bar stools at the Onyx, but she would never leave the mark of her mouth on another man’s face. She did what had to be done, submissive to the will of God—the laundry, the cleaning, the cooking, the raising of her family. All in all, it was enough to drive a man out of the house and you couldn’t blame my father for running for his life. But those women! Those big-assed, loafing women! They knew he had a wife and family, yet they smeared their lipstick on him, and he was as bad as they for allowing it.
Sleep would not come as I twisted and groped, and my hand came upon something under August’s pillow. I drew it carefully from under the weight of his head. It was a large brown envelope. For months I had been searching for that mysterious envelope, knowing he kept it hidden, his most secret possession.
He slept deeply with his mouth open and I sat up and drew out the contents of the envelope. They were glossy photographs of Carole Lombard, a varied collection, curiously luminous in that cold clear light. They showed her in bathing suits and evening gowns, in wide hats and pirate costumes, on horseback and in speed boats, on tiptoe in lingerie.
Then I found the real reason for August’s secrecy. Some of the portraits were signed in his own handwriting. “For my darling August, adoringly—Carole.” “To August, with undying love—Carole.” “For Augie, passionate memories of Malibu nights—Carole.” “Dear August: do with me what you will. I am yours body and soul. Your Carole.”
You were supposed to laugh at such things, for they made you out a fool. I looked at him with his open mouth, his breath puffing steam into the frigid air. The autographs were not funny. He had written sad things, intimate things, too sacred for anyone else to see. He was fifteen, and I had got used to treating him as though he was no more than five or six. Yet there he was, only two years younger than myself, dreaming of Carole Lombard as fiercely as I dreamed of baseball. Tenderness filled me. I bent over and kissed his cold forehead. Then I put the pictures back into the envelope and slipped it under his pillow.
I lay there in the white night watching my breath escape in misty plumes. Dreamers, we were a house full of dreamers. Grandma dreamed of her home in faroff Abruzzi. My father dreamed of being free of debt and laying brick side by side with his son. My mother dreamed of her heavenly reward wth a cheerful husband who didn’t run away. My sister Clara dreamed of becoming a nun, and my little brother Frederick could hardly wait to grow up and become a cowboy. Closing my eyes I could hear the buzz of dreams through the house, and then I fell asleep.
Chapter Two
All at once I felt myself lifted awake out of the depth of sleep and feeling a presence close by. It was not a dream. Someone was in the bedroom besides my brother and myself. I opened my eyes.
The room was glacier cold, my breath funneling carbon monoxide into the frozen air. At the bedside stood a woman so near I could have reached out and touched her. Her gown was a flowing blue velvet, and her slender waist was cinched with a golden cord that matched her yellow hair. Her feet were in blue sandals with golden thongs. She looked down on me and smiled. For a moment I thought it was Carole Lombard. Her hand held a luminous globe, the planet earth, the land bodies in gold, the oceans and rivers a bright blue.
Suddenly it came to me who she was, and the shock pushed me trembling under the blankets. She was the Virgin Mary. She had to be. The bed throbbed with the beat of my heart and I was afraid to look again.
I shook my brother. “Augie.”
“What?” He rolled away from me.
I shook him again and crawled closer.
“Somebody’s here,” I whispered.
He bolted to a sitting position, suddenly wide awake and afraid. “Where?” he said. “I don’t see anybody.”
I sat up and looked at the place where she had stood. She was gone. I pointed. “She was right there. I saw her plain as day.”
“Who?”
“The Blessed Virgin.”
“Oh, shit!” he said, sinking back in disgust and pulling the covers over his head.
In the morning my mother woke us and I was troubled as I sat at the bedside and started dressing. Augie lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.
“Boy, did you have a nightmare.”
“It wasn’t a nightmare. I saw her.”
“You’re cracked.”
“I saw her, damn it!”
He kicked off the covers and pulled on his pants. “Maybe you did, at that.” He bent over to put on his socks. “She only appears for dimwits.”
“I tell you I saw her.”
“Do me a favor.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Don’t tell Mama. You know how she is. She’ll believe you and make a shrine out of this room. She’ll light candles and sprinkle holy water all over the place. We don’t want to sleep in no grotto, like Lourdes.”
“Augie, I saw her. Honest to God.”
“I’m happy for you, Dom,” he smiled. “I’m happy for the whole family. It isn’t everybody that has a saint for a brother. No wonder we’re so rich.”
We washed up and went to the kitchen for breakfast of oatmeal and coffee. Clara and Frederick were already there, finishing their meal. Grandma stood beside the table like a grim cop, holding tightly the two handles of the pewter sugar bowl. She was the self-appointed dispenser of sugar, opposed to its use in all forms, while we favored it in everything. Each morning she brought the sugar bowl from her bedroom, tightly clutching the handles with blue-veined hands, fighting us over every spoonful.
Clara and Frederick left for school, and Augie and I ate in silence while Mama sipped black coffee. Then Augie nudged me.
“Mama,” he said. “You seen the Blessed Virgin lately?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, brightening.
“How was she?”
“Fine, fine. She’s so lovely.”
“Was she in heaven?”
“Oh, no. She was in the chicken house.”
“Chicken house? Doing what?”
She leaned forward, her eyes widening with enthusiasm. “She was kneeling at the foot of the cross, kissing our Lord’s feet.”
Augie turned to me and nodded wisely.
“She have anything to say?”
“She said, ‘This is my beloved son, who died for the sins of the world.’”
Augie grinned at me.
“Top that, jughead.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“I wish she’d call on me sometime,” he said. “Some people have all the luck.”
“Just pray,” Mama said. “Prayer brings all things.”
“You hear that, stupid? Pray!”
I scooped up a handful of oatmeal and shoved it into his face. He just sat there, the mush flaking from his nose and eyes, his smile unblemished.
“Oh, Dominic!” Mama said. “Why?”
“Brother against brother,” Grandma groaned, her hands across her stomach. “God help America!”
I grabbed my books and headed for school.
All morning the thing clung to me, a cobweb of remembering, too obstinate to brush aside. Had I really seen the Virgin Mary, or could it have been my mother standing at the bedside? It couldn’t have been my mother. Had a strange woman drifted off the street and into our house? Perhaps it had been an optical illusion, a distortion of light and shadow. Who ever heard of a woman in blue velvet and gold sandals wandering into somebody’s bedroom? And why did I sense her presence even before I saw her?
It began to get the best of me. I cut geometry and went for a walk. On the veranda of the rectory Father Murray paced back
and forth in a black overcoat, reading his breviary. I started toward him to tell him of the vision and then I realized it wouldn’t help at all, for he knew all the answers to all the dilemmas in heaven and on earth, and passed them around like so many sticks of gum.
I came to the side door of the church and stepped inside, smelling the incense of baptisms and funerals, of high mass and benedictions, the odor of myself, of my past life, of my life before I was born and after I died. My mother and father were married in this church, and we kids were baptized in it. Grandpa Giovanni’s funeral took place here, as would Grandma’s and the rest of us. In many ways it was like walking into the church of Torricella Peligna. I had never been there, but I knew it had to be very much like this, with the same essence of wax candles and frankincense, with a few old ladies kneeling in prayer the same as the two or three I now saw stooped before the Virgin’s altar.
I dipped my finger in the holy water font, made the sign of the cross, and tiptoed across the slate floor to the Virgin’s statue. Her waxen plaster face looked down as I went to my knees. She stood with bare feet crushing a serpent, the child Jesus in her arms. It was not an attractive statue, the Virgin’s cheeks bloated, the jaw too square, the expression insolent rather than smiling. The infant had the face of a frowning old man, and he was not much larger than her hands.
I tried to pray. “Was it you?” I asked. “What does it mean?” I raised my eyes to her, and the more I stared the more ugly the statue became, until it came to me that I had not seen the Virgin at all, but an earthly creature, maybe Carole Lombard after all, or Garbo, or Jean Harlow, or Miriam Hopkins. My skull rattled with the confusion. It was meaningless and tiresome.
I was glad to hear the noon bell sounding, and when I stepped out into the schoolyard the sun was a horse ablaze in the sky, chasing a herd of clouds across the mountains. Boys clustered in little groups where the sunlight formed pools of warmth against the handball courts. In white middies and pleated skirts the girls gathered cackling about the nuns on the school steps, their voices like bursts of birds. Things were thawing out, the naked trees dripping, clumps of snow losing their grasp of the slate roof, sliding lazily to the rain gutters and plopping heavily on the ground.
I pushed myself up on the bike rail and felt the warm kiss of the sun. What a day! I could almost see long fly balls and popups in the blue sky. Guys strolled past and paid their respects, asking about the old arm and saying it wouldn’t be long now. When they said, “Hi, Dom,” they were paying their respects to St. Catherine’s greatest pitcher, and not the kid with freckles and bunny ears.
Two freshmen strolled up, and one said, “Hey, ain’t you Dominic Molise?”
“Righto.”
It was like being interviewed by a couple of sports writers.
“I saw you pitch against Boulder Prep,” he said. “Man, were you hot!”
I smiled modestly. “A two-hitter, if memory serves.”
“You struck out nineteen.”
“One of my better days.”
“Hey, Dom. Do you use a spitter?”
I smiled mysteriously.
“The answer is, yes. But don’t quote me.”
“Think we’ll have a good team this year, Dom?”
“The pitching is in good hands.”
They grinned.
“How tall are you, Dom?”
“Around five seven.”
“Hell, I’m taller’n that.”
I just laughed. “How are you with a bat in your hand, punk? And me throwing them?”
It stopped him cold. “No hard feelings, Dom.”
“That’s okay, Kid.”
They moved on.
Even The Arm began to stir, like a plant brought out into the sun. I could feel it pulsing, coming out of hibernation, and I gave it a friendly squeeze. Easy, baby; it’s still the middle of February, so don’t let a flash of sunshine fool you; quiet down, go back to sleep. After school we’ll toss a few, just enough to kick up a little blood.
Three o’clock that afternoon and it was snowing again, flakes as big as eucharist wafers, the sky in twilight darkness. It was four blocks to the Elks Club, where Ken Parrish and I worked out two or three times a week in the basement gym. Ken’s father was grand exalted ruler of the Elks, and made arrangements for us to practise there. The gym was too small for batting practise, but we got a good workout standing at opposite ends of a single bowling alley and throwing the ball back and forth.
Ken wasn’t there when I arrived. I put on a sweat suit and gym shoes and stretched out on a bench in the locker room, waiting for him. The basement windows were at the street level and I could see the snow falling on the sidewalk and the legs of passersby as they waded through the fresh storm.
It was a good time for me, the best part of my winter, these afternoons with Ken Parrish. He was a senior at Roper High, and my best friend. We kept alive from one day to the next just for baseball. Ken was back in Roper after being expelled from two Eastern prep schools, not for bad grades, but for ditching classes to watch the ball games at Fenway Park in Boston.
His idol was Lou Gehrig of the Yankees. He owned three broken Gehrig bats and a band-aid with Gehrig’s dried blood and little hairs from Gehrig’s thumb stuck to the adhesive. This is what happened: seated behind the Yankee dugout one afternoon, Kenny saw Lou Gehrig rip the adhesive from his thumb and toss it near the first base line. Racing down the aisle, Ken jumped over the barrier and down on the playing field, snatching the bandage off the grass as two ushers collared him. They marched him out of the park, but Ken had his souvenir and didn’t mind.
After the game he hung around the Yankee dressing room until Gehrig came out. Ken asked the great man to autograph the bandage, and Lou did it with his own fountain pen. That blood-stained strip of tape now hung from the wall of Ken’s bedroom, framed and under glass. He was sure that it would be worth a lot of money some day, but I had my doubts. Old ball-players fade away fast.
The Parrishes were the richest family in Roper. They owned the hardware store and the furniture company and lived in a three storey Tudor house up on College Hill. There was a tennis court on the grounds, and the only private swimming pool in town. They had three cars, a cook, a housekeeper and a fulltime gardener. Their lighted Christmas tree won first prize every year.
The massive brick house was like a castle built for one purpose, a fortress to protect their only daughter. Kenny often invited me there, so I knew Dorothy’s bedroom was in the southwest corner on the second floor. Many a night in good weather and bad I went out of my way to walk past and glance up at her window. Sometimes I saw her up there, but usually not. Just seeing the light coming from the window, warm behind the curtains, made my heart speed up. I loved her. It was crazy, impossible and stupid, but I longed to be the rug she walked on, the bed she slept in, the soap that cleansed her skin, the toilet she sat on.
She was a senior English major at Colorado U., down at Boulder, and a Kappa, and I had this endless yearning for her from the first time I saw her three years before, the summer she worked in her father’s hardware store. My flesh shivers when I remember.
I had gone there that morning on an errand for my father, and she was behind the counter in a grey smock.
“Can I help you?” she said.
I told her I wanted to buy a Number Two mason’s pencil.
“Is there really such a thing?” she smiled. “I never heard of it.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “A big flat pencil.”
Her eyes were large and warm and grey, her hair in a trim bob, the friendliest blonde I ever saw. I knew who she was, for already she had fame as freshman queen at the university and at tennis, and her picture was often in the local paper and the Denver Post.
She asked her father where the pencils were and he pointed to a shelf near the front of the store. I followed her along a wall of merchandise shelves ten feet high. She walked like a cat, trim and fluid in white sneakers. Her smock was an inch shorter than the blue
skirt beneath and her ass undulated with the snug compactness of an athlete’s.
The pencils were up on a shelf near the ceiling and there was a tall ladder on a trolley which she moved into place. Without hesitation she started up the ladder.
“Wait,” I said. “Let me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she smiled.
The ladder was perfectly safe, locked to guide rails above and below, but I held on to it with both hands, for no other reason than that you instinctively support a ladder when someone climbs it. I did something else without thinking, instinctively. I stared. What I saw I had never seen before in quite that fashion. Her rump, two loaves of round golden bread, a breath-taking cleavage between them, and a burst of hair like brass filings.
All my life I had brooded and pondered over the depressing unattractiveness of that place, having seen it beneath the dresses of my mother and my aunts, startling as a nest of mice, drab as the sweepings of a vacuum cleaner, obscene but obligatory, the harsh confrontation every man had to face some day. No wonder women kept it hidden. No wonder it was a sin to look at it, a sin to desire it, and an even greater sin to penetrate it unless you were married.
Yet there it was on the ladder five feet above me, a tawny cloud floating in the tent of her skirt, sunlight through the plate glass window striking it with electric perception, and I was hypnotized.
Then I heard her voice: “That’s the silliest expression I ever saw in my life.”
She was glaring down at me with a deadly smile. I felt shame and a flash of panic. I wanted to make a run for the street. She descended, and I kept my eyes away from her, backing off.
“Here you are.”
I turned to see her holding out the pencil, studying me not in anger but defiance.
“Ten cents,” she said.
I handed her a dime and took the pencil. Shaking and out of control, I turned to leave and crashed into a display of paint brushes on a wire rack. A few brushes hit the floor. I thought of running again. She stood looking at me.