The Big Hunger

by John Fante

  I decided to face the man. He was on his knees in the dahlia bed, digging up bulbs. On the pretext of emptying a wastebasket I went out to the incinerator. Richardson looked up and waved a muddy glove.

  “Haven’t seen you around,” he said.

  “Been working.”

  “You work nights too?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Nice and quiet at night,” he said. “Nobody around.”

  That decided it. Richardson suspected something. The situation was untenable. One course lay before me—to get out of town until the whole thing blew over.

  A telephone call from my agent simplified matters. There was a job at Paramount. He was airmailing the script. I told him I would take the job, that I liked the script without reading it. There was a ten-week guarantee. I promised to be at work Monday morning.

  “And leave me alone in this haunted house?” my wife said.

  I was shocked.

  “I thought you were over that nonsense.”

  “I won’t stay here alone.”

  I tried to point out the salubrious effects of a brief holiday between husbands and wives—a time of reflection on the past, a time of high resolves for the future. Besides, there was the needless expense of two people in Hollywood.

  “I won’t stay here alone in this house.”

  I reminded her that it was our home, our hearthstone rooted in the earth. The lawn, the roses, the trees so dearly loved—these were the ancient responsibilities of the wife while her husband went into the jungle to forage for food.

  “You don’t go to Hollywood without me.”

  She phoned a real estate agent, offering our house on a short-term lease. The next morning Mr. and Mrs. Aidlin called on us. They were Berkeley people. Mr. Aidlin was an engineer for the State Highway Division, which was now putting in a new freeway to Marysville. For months the Aidlins had lived in hotels and auto courts. They were desperate for decent housing.

  They stood in our fern-patterned living room, Mrs. Aidlin’s large sad eyes brimming with eagerness as she clutched her husband’s arm. They would take the house under any circumstances, for any length of time, a week or a year.

  “But you haven’t seen it,” my wife said. “Don’t you think you ought to go through it first?”

  Mrs. Aidlin refused to take another step. She was perfectly satisfied. I took Mr. Aidlin upstairs. He was in his late forties, tall and grey and tired. He peeked into the front bedroom. He put his head inside the bathroom and nodded. Then he went down the hall to my bedroom. He stood in the middle of a wine carpet and suddenly his reserve was gone.

  “Oh man,” he said. “A room of my own.”

  He threw himself into the reading chair by the window, unbuttoned his collar and spread his legs wide.

  “Oh man,” he repeated. “Oh man, oh man.”

  We had a couple of slugs of bourbon and went downstairs. Mrs. Aidlin and my wife were having tea in the kitchen. The Aidlins were friendly, solid people. Their desire to lease the house was our good fortune. They solemnly promised to vacate in ten weeks. We followed them to their car and shook hands all around. Saturday night they drove us to the depot. I gave Mr. Aidlin the keys to the house and told him to finish the bourbon. We hoarded the train to Los Angeles and they drove back to Harmony Lane.

  The Roseville Tribune was forwarded to our Los Angeles hotel, and I watched every issue. It was not until the eighth week of our stay that I found on the Tribune’s front page the story I sought: news of the capture of the panty thief. The Roseville police had collared their man under a railroad bridge near the public library. Thirty assorted pairs of ladies’ panties were found in his blanket roll. He was brought to swift justice, sentenced to a week in the city jail, and then given a floater out of town.

  A few days later the Tribune reported the death of Mr. Aidlin. He had succumbed to a heart attack in his sleep. We had had no correspondence with the Aidlins, and the news of his death was a shock. My wife sent a card of condolence, and Mrs. Aidlin replied with a brief note telling us of her desire to close the house and return to her family in Berkeley.

  We carefully avoided the subject, but there was no denying simple arithmetic. Mr. Aidlin was the third person to go directly from our house to the morgue. I remembered the way he looked that first day in my room, how he spread his legs and looked around and was pleased. He had died in his sleep, so he had died up there in my room, in my bed. I felt sorry for Mr. Aidlin, but I didn’t like him dying in my bed.

  Now that Mrs. Aidlin was leaving, someone would have to look after the house. My wife’s mother was ill and my brother was out of town. That left the Old Man. But there were still over a hundred gallons of wine in the basement.

  “I’ll go,” my wife said.

  In the afternoon she took a plane. A week later, the studio having closed me out on schedule, I was back in Roseville too. We carried the luggage up to my room, and she sat on the bed and gave me a report. She had talked to Mrs. Aidlin a few minutes before the unhappy woman returned to Berkeley. Apparently Aidlin had never been sick before. When his alarm continued to ring that morning Mrs Aidlin had found him there, a book in his lap.

  It was coming. I knew it was coming, and that night as I lay in bed things began to happen. I heard the alarm go off. I heard footsteps downstairs. I heard someone crawling around in the attic. I lay in the bed of a dead man, felt the curvature of the mattress that had once pressed against his body, and stared at the very ceiling which had been his last view of this world. I turned the bed around. I put the pillow at the foot of the bed and slept with my feet toward the top. It was no good. I tried to sleep in the chair, but it had me, the fancies, and I remembered Aidlin sitting there, and I got up and made my bed on the floor. Here in this room he had died, here too Edward Coffin had died, and here I might die too. For a week I fought it, but it got steadily worse. When, in the darkness, I saw both Edward Coffin and Aidlin sitting in the elm tree outside my window, it was too much

  I grabbed an armful of blankets and went downstairs to the couch in my workroom. Here all the fancies vanished, and I slept well. I awoke strong and fresh, ready for work. At breakfast I told my wife I had changed bedrooms. From now on, I would sleep in the workroom.

  “I can’t sleep upstairs. I keep thinking about Aidlin.”

  “But Mr. Aidlin didn’t die upstairs,” my wife said. “He died on the couch in your workroom.”

  We sold the house and headed back to Los Angeles.

  Mama’s Dream

  MAMA ANDRILLI SAT at the kitchen table preparing lunch. The hot white sun of the Sacramento Valley burst out into the room from the south windows—big cascades of sunshine spilling over the red linoleum floor where slept Papa’s cats, Philomina and Constanza. Both were males, but Papa recognized only one sex in cats.

  In less than an hour he would be home from work. Papa was seventy now, and worse than ever, Except for a weakening of his eyes, he still laid brick and stone as fast as a young mason. But the years—no matter how blasphemous his denials—had taken their toll, and by now Mama had given up all hope of a quiet old age.

  When a man reaches seventy you would think he might mellow. But no: the past ten years, with their three sons married and gone, had been the worst. Now Papa would never soften and grow gentle. Until his last breath he would go raging and shouting, with Mama always there, patient to the end. It had been so for forty years, and now Mama was sixty-eight, with white hair and sometimes excruciating agony in her withered hands. Papa still had his red mustache and only traces of grey at his temples. He still pounded his chest with furious blows as he entreated God to strike him down and remove him from this valley of travail. Years ago, when she was young and strong, Mama took comfort in the thought that she would leave her noisy husband as soon as her children were grown. The notion was a tiny jewel she hoarded in secret. But it was lost now, misplaced in some teapot of the past, and Mama had forgotten it.

  On the table stood a bowl of bell peppers, gre
en and fat. Mama cut them into strips for frying and thought again of last nights dream. Papa had slept badly, his kidneys heckling him, tumbling him from bed half a dozen times. Naturally he blamed Mama. Not enough peppers in his diet. Papa was a sort of primitive medicine man with some ancient Italian notions about food. You ate fish for the brain, cheese for the teeth, eggplant for the blood, beans for the bowels, bread for brawn, chicory for the nerves, garlic for purity, olive oil for strength, and peppers for the kidneys. Without these a man faced quick decay.

  For a week he had demanded peppers without avail. This was the result. Coming back to dump his tired body beside her, he had accused her of trying to destroy him, of deliberately withholding peppers so that his kidneys would become diseased, a malady which had cut down his cousin Rocco at the age of thirty-five, thus ending the career of the man who made the best zinfandel in California.

  The dream had come after that, a product of shattered sleep, lucid through her husband’s grumbling. In it Mama saw herself naked at the side of Highway 99 as a speeding car approached. Nick, her oldest son, was driving the car. Beside him sat his wife Hild. She was laughing hysterically as she blew her nose into a large piece of lace. For all her nudity and shame Mama could not help seeing in horror that the lace was an altar boy’s surplice. Hild tossed the surplice out of the speeding car, Nick honked the horn madly, and the surplice came flying back to Mama. At that moment the car went over a cliff with Nick screaming, “Mama, Mama.”

  Frightened and suddenly aware of her nudity, Mama ran away, the surplice shielding her loins, her backside exposed and gleaming in the moonlight as she ran across a field. In a little while she reached a graveyard where a funeral service was being conducted. In the descending coffin she saw her son Nick. The coffin was open, but Nick was not dead. He was on his knees before a typewriter, his fingers tapping out a message on a yellow Western Union blank. The message read: They won’t give me the last sacraments. Mama began to scream for a priest, and the mourners around the grave turned to glare at her in annoyance. Once more she was aware of her nakedness and rushed off in shame, her backside shining like a diamond in the moonlight. This ended the dream.

  Mama cut the last of the peppers and probed for a meaning to the dream. She was a lonely woman and her dreams fascinated her. She did not believe in dreams, since the Church forbade it, but there was a desire to believe and a wonder at their portent

  Nick at his typewriter she understood, for her son was a writer. The surplice meant Nick as a youngster, when he was an altar boy. The disgusting and sacrilegious spectacle of her daughter-in-law blowing her nose into the surplice symbolized the fact that Nick had married a Protestant girl. As for the funeral, Mama dared not make any conjecture. It could mean that Nick was dead back in Los Angeles, just as previous coffin dreams had presaged the deaths of her mother and father, her brother Gino, and her sister Cathy. The telegram was of course bad news. Mama always dreaded telegram dreams. But the most confusing part of the dream was her own nudity. For the last ten years Mama had been dreaming of herself walking around the countryside without a stitch to cover her, and it was completely baffling. For a while she presumed it meant a cold was coming on. She fortified herself with aspirin and put on an extra sweater, but the cold never materialized and she was left more confused than ever.

  The peppers were cut now, and ready for frying. Mama put Cathy’s pot over the gas jet and lit the flame. Cathy’s pot was not a pot, nor did it belong to Cathy. It was a heavy iron skillet Mama’s sister Cathy gave her as a wedding present forty years ago, and yet throughout the years it was ever known as Cathy’s pot. Mama’s little house was full of things described in that fashion. For the years of sacrifice in the life of Mama Andrilli had removed all sense of possession from her nature. Living around her, one quickly got the false impression that everything was borrowed.

  In truth, all the things in the house were hers—and many were gifts from her sons, her brothers and sisters. There were no strings attached to these gifts, they belonged to her completely, but Mama Andrilli had long ago lost any sense of possession. For this reason, the three-room bungalow contained Nick’s radio, Stella’s sheets, Mike’s towels, Ralph’s lamp, Rosie’s coffee pot, Tony’s dress, Bettina’s shoes, and Vito’s bathrobe. There were also Mike’s suitcase, Nettie’s tablecloth, Joe’s dishes, and Angelo’s rugs. A notable omission was anything belonging to Papa, except, of course, Papa’s breakfast, Papa’s laundry, Papa’s hash. But these were not concrete possessions. They were things Mama had to get done.

  And now, Papa’s peppers. They had to be prepared with solemn precision. Though Mama did all the cooking and was excellent in the Neapolitan style, Papa had altered her technique to suit the tastes of his Abruzzian origins. The difference was a matter of quantity. Where Mama used one clove of garlic, he demanded two. These she cut up now, dropping the small bits into hot olive oil in Cathy’s pot. She added sweet basil and rosemary, spicing the oil with breathless caution. After forty years, Papa still sampled his wife’s cooking with the darkest suspicions, lest she concoct some unpalatable thing to lay him low.

  There was an angry swoosh as she dumped the peppers into the hot oil. Shielding her face, she saw the cats spring up from the floor, their backs arched as they hissed like snakes. Philomina and Constanza knew that Mama’s hearing was poor and failing, and they always assumed this hostile position to warn her that someone was at the front door.

  It was the man from Western Union. He was no less alarming than an angel of death, and she stared at him with her face suddenly white as he said, “Telegram for Mr. Andrilli.”

  He opened the screen and pushed the yellow envelope toward her, but she refused to accept it, her arm failing to go out after that missive so symbolic of death somewhere in the clan. The memory of all the telegrams in her past blocked the reflexes of her arm and she stood with bulging eyes while the frightened cats brushed against her and hissed their hatred of the man on the porch. Finally he thrust the message into her hands and she accepted it weakly.

  A few more telegrams showed inside his hat and as he hurried away she thought of how many others besides Nick had suddenly gone to their God. Nick! Her Nicola, her first-born. For now she knew the meaning of last night’s dream. Her son was dead. She dragged herself to the kitchen table and began to cry, the deep wailing lament that only death can arouse. The crushed telegram fell in a ball to the floor and the cats made sport with it.

  Thirty minutes later Papa Andrilli turned into the yard from the back alley and sniffed the odor of burning peppers. He wore a mangled felt hat, tan shirt and trousers. All of him was smeared with grey mortar, for he had just come off the scaffold after a morning of bricklaying. His nostrils flared at the smell. Already tasting his burnt lunch, he slammed the back gate and went charging up the porch steps.

  The kitchen was smudged with black smoke. At the table sat his weeping wife, oblivious to the choking fumes. Quickly he turned off the flame under the skillet. The peppers were black and shriveled, but the tragic face of Mama Andrilli drove the anger out of him.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Her chin trembled and the torrent from her eyes made him afraid. His own eyes began to sting as he forced himself to be calm and took a chair at the table opposite her. They sat in the heavy pall and he twisted his thick battered fingers and prepared for the worst.

  “What is it, mia moglia?” he asked again. “Tell your husband the trouble.”

  “Our Nicola.”

  It sounded ominous. When in trouble he was always Nicola, otherwise he was just plain Nick.

  “What’s he done now?”

  “The telegram. He’s dead.”

  Papa looked for the telegram, the shock of her words choking his vision with blinding tears. The crushed message skittered across the smooth floor, pursued by the cats. He rose to pick it up, but he could not bear to read it. He could only sit opposite his wife, numbed by the pain in his soul. Then a fresh burst of grief surged from h
er, and he set his jaw and determined to be strong.

  Even now he told himself again that weeping was for women, but the pain in his chest was very great as he threw open the windows to let the smoke escape. Like a thing of horror, the telegram slid crazily over the floor, the cats pouncing upon it and snarling at one another. Mama Andrilli shuddered, her face buried in her arms. He turned from her in misery, wanting to comfort her. But Italo Andrilli was not familiar with sentiment, nor had he ever practiced tenderness.

  Ashamed of his inadequacy, he opened the refrigerator door and grabbed a decanter of red wine. He drank quickly, desperately, the shock of cold wine down his throat as he recalled the face of his son, his very hands and feet. There was nobody like Nick, dead before his time, the first and favorite of his children. There was even a touch of genius in Nick, the storywriter, with his books and wild ideas and the reckless ways he spent money. Papa Andrilli had not always approved of the things in his son’s books, tales of his own family and their friends. He had been enraged about the theme of one of Nick’s books, a tale of infidelity involving an Italian stone-mason and his wife. Even though there was considerable truth in the story, he had torn the book in half and burned it and even thought of launching a lawsuit against his son. But that was in the past; all was forgiven now, forgiven and forgotten. For better or worse, it was not given to all men to be set down in books by their sons.

  But Nick’s death took away irrevocably one stirring ambition in the final days of Italo Andrilli. Remembering it now, Papa went to his desk in the living room and pulled out a set of building plans. He had made these sketches in pencil on rolled sheets of drawing paper. He placed the wine bottle on the desk and unrolled the plans. Here in neat black lines was his scheme of a master house for Nick and his wife. For weeks at odd moments he had worked over these plans, hoping to show them to his son when he visited Sacramento again.

  Papa studied them and wept bitterly as from the kitchen came the pitiful moans of his wife. Gulping down more wine, Papa wept without shame. But his grief was suffused with rising indignation. It was not right that Nick should die so young. No man should be taken at thirty-seven, not even a bad man, and Nick was good. With both fists in the air he cried to his God and demanded an explanation of this terrible tragedy. His mortar-splattered fingers clawed at the drawings, tearing them to shreds as he sobbed helplessly.