by John Fante
“It’s nothin’,” Papa said. “Same old thing. Just nothin’.”
“Water,” Mama moaned.
I looked about for a water fountain.
“There ain’t any in here,” Papa said.
I ran out on Main Street and down four doors to the Colfax Café and asked the waitress for a glass of water. When I got back to the depot my mother was sitting up, her face thrown back as Papa bopped himself disgustedly at the side of his head. I put the paper cup to Mama’s lips and she sipped the water timidly, like a kitten. It revived her with remarkable swiftness. Quickly she smiled with alert brown eyes as she studied me.
“You don’t look well, Henry. Doesn’t she treat you good?”
“She treats me fine, just fine. You feeling better now?”
“It’s my heart, Henry. It won’t be long now. I’m ready to go any time. I’ve had a terrible life. He kicked me. He choked me. He’s like a wild animal now. You don’t know what I have to put up with. He’s strange, Henry. I’m afraid to go to bed at night.”
Papa slumped down on the bench and let his body grow limp, wearily shaking his head as he stared at the bare wooden floor. I glanced at him commiseratingly and our eyes met.
“You don’t know, kid,” he said. “You’ll never know the half of it.”
This brought a moan from my mother. I took her hot dry hand.
“You rest a while. I’ll call a taxi.”
She shook her head. “Taxi costs fifty cents.”
“Taxi went outa business two years ago,” Papa said.
“Call Stella,” I told him. “She’ll come in her car.”
“Nothin’ wrong with that woman. Let her walk.”
It was said quietly and truthfully, I was sure, but it was cruel nevertheless, for an old lady was entitled to her whims, especially my mother, who possessed little else. She struggled to get to her feet.
“I’ll try,” she said.
I put my arm around her. “I can’t,” she sighed, easing down on the bench again.
“She’s lying,” Papa said.
“Goddamn it! Call Stella!”
His face dropped in embarrassment. Blunt as he was to others, he could not bear it when anyone spoke harshly to him. His mustache was white now, his hair a brownish gray, like autumn leaves. He had the apple cheeks of the inveterate Chianti drinker and his brown eyes were cobwebbed with minute red veins. After a moment of brooding silence he crossed to the pay phone bolted to the wall, moving quickly but with a faint limp, as if pain pinched the soles of his feet. Though he still looked very strong, the patina of vitality was gone from his movements. He had lost weight and the seat of his khaki trousers drooped sadly.
He inserted a coin into the phone and began to dial, at the same time pronging his middle and index finger toward my mother, a peasant gesture of ill will.
Watching him, she whispered, “Can I tell you something, Henry?” I saw her eyes shining with cunning innocence.
“Yes?”
“Your father’s losing his mind.”
I said I didn’t think so, that he was the same.
“Stella don’t answer,” Papa said from the phone.
The coin returned and he began to dial again. Suddenly he was yelling, his mouth like a bulldog’s, snarling into the instrument, his fist shaking to emphasize his threats.
“I’ll kill you!” he shouted. “I’ll break every bone in your body. I’m warning you, keep away!”
It was madness, total frenzy.
“You see?” my mother said, pleased.
Certainly it was no way to speak to his own daughter. I crossed to the phone and lifted the receiver from his hand.
“Hello, Stella.”
It wasn’t Stella at all. It was Mario. He and my father were having their usual scholarly discourse.
“Listen, Henry,” he implored. “Put a muzzle on that mad dog. All I said was, I can’t leave now. It’s the bottom of the seventh, Henry, and the Giants got two men on base. Oh God, man! Matthews is on second, Rader’s on third, and Murcer’s stepping into the batter’s box. Oh, sweet Jesus, it’s now or never! I can’t leave, Henry. I’m sorry…I’m sorry…”
“You still watching the same rucking game?” I yelled.
“It’s fantastic! It’s the end of the world! Good-bye, Henry!” He hung up.
I turned to my father. He was lighting a cigar stub. He flipped the match in disgust. “My son Mario!” he grumbled; then he turned to Mama, “You ready to come home now, on your own two feet?”
“Let’s all go home,” she said cheerfully, scanning the barnlike room. “Where’s the water closet?” She saw the properly marked door and crossed to it without a trace of fatigue. Papa watched her enter. “Won’t be long now,” he reflected. “I give her a year at the most.”
“What are you talking about?”
He pressed a finger into his temple. “Her head. She’s crazy.”
“You’re both crazy.”
He flicked the remark aside as if dispersing a fly.
“Where’s your suitcase?”
“Didn’t bring any. I’m going back tonight.”
His red eyes seemed to catch fire. “No, you ain’t. You stay a while.”
“I can’t. Gotta work.”
“Work? You? What work?”
“My book.”
He snorted. “Book! You call that work?” He threw his cigar at a spittoon and missed. “Then, go. Get out of here. Take the next bus. And don’t come back.” He spun around and marched for the door. I ran after him.
“Wait. I’ll stay till tomorrow.”
I snatched at his arm, but he jerked it away and was gone, hurrying past the front window and down the street as Mama came out of the restroom. She got a flash of her husband hurrying across the street.
“What’s he mad at now?”
I told her.
“Did he say anything about the job?”
“Job?”
“He knows. Let him tell you.”
It sounded secretive, mysterious, conspiratorial, but she said no more as she stepped out onto the sidewalk. I squired her down the hot street to the intersection with the bank on the corner. She drew me toward the plate glass window and pointed to a desk, my brother Virgil’s desk, with a bronze nameplate upon it: VIRGIL T. MOLISE—LOANS. At that hour the bank was closed.
“Look how neat he is,” she said, pleased. “How clean he keeps his desk. Such a good boy.”
“He always was a neat kid,” I said. I almost added that he always was something of a prick too.
We crossed the street. She was perspiring and I made her take off the whorehouse coat. I slung it under my arm.
“I fixed you a nice dinner,” she said. “Baked eggplant with ricotta cheese, gnocchi di latta, and veal. Remember the eggplant? It’s your favorite.”
“You knew I was coming.”
“Mario phoned.”
Oh, that Mario!
She took small quick steps, staying close to the line of shops on the shady side of Lincoln Street. Very few people were about in the infernal heat. Even the lobby of the Hotel Ritz, where railroad men liked to loaf in leather chairs, was deserted. A sick town. One had the feeling that bulldozers lurked at the city limits, waiting for the death rattle.
“Make your father see the doctor,” she said. “At his age you never know.”
“He looks fine. Thinner, but that’s good.”
“Too much wine. Up and down all night to the water closet. I bought some nice mozzarella. Tomorrow I’ll fix some croquettes. Mario loves them.”
We crossed the railroad tracks to the other side of Atlantic Street, the oldest part of town, with rotting brick stores, a street of a few Chinese shops, a laundry, a restaurant, and a dry goods store. The Café Roma was the last place on the dead-end street.
“That’s where he is,” she said, looking toward it with a frown. “They have puttana upstairs.”
“Really?”
There were always prostitutes up
stairs above the Café Roma. After high school I used to go up there all the time, and I loved it especially on rainy winter afternoons, playing the jukebox and playing gin rummy for tricks with the girls.
I was there one night when a great commotion rumbled on the staircase, and I heard my own father yelling as the madam and three hookers pushed him into the alley for being drunk and obnoxious and broke. I was ashamed of him that night, and when the madam asked if I knew the man, I said no, I don’t know the man, I never saw him before in my life; a crazy Dago, I said, they’re all over town, they’re all over town, and you could hear my father in the alley, yelling up at the window, “I’m going to the police! I’ll have you shut down!”
Yes, I knew a great deal about the Café Roma and the rooms upstairs. I could still see the bare mattresses in the cribs and smell the cold loveless rooms and remember the sad, broken, stupid women, for San Elmo was in a prostitution circuit that included Marysville, Yuba City and Lodi, and when the syndicate sent a prostie down to San Elmo she had to be a pig, not even fit to work Yuba City, which was surely the end of the world.
Looking toward the neon sign blinking CAFÉ ROMA above the saloon, my mother’s eyes heated with Christian righteousness. “Thank God you’re all married. It keeps you out of those places.”
I laughed and kissed her for this outrageous naiveté. “You go home now,” I said. “I’ll get Papa.”
“Don’t fight.”
“No fighting.”
“Tomorrow I’ll make you a nice fritto misto with scampi and cauliflower.”
“Beautiful.”
“You still like new cabbage?”
“Love it.”
“We’ll see. Maybe day after tomorrow. And Sunday, ravioli.” She was working it out in her mind, delicious little schemes to keep me there. I watched her mincing away on fast small feet, carrying her fur-trimmed coat.
6
THE ONLY CHANGE in the Café Roma in over a quarter of a century was the clientele. The old men I remembered were planted in the graveyard, replaced by a new generation of old men. Otherwise things were as usual. The long mahogany bar was the same and so were the two dusty, fly-specked Italian and American flags above it. A touch of the modern was displayed above the bar, a blowup of Marlon Brando as the Godfather, four feet square, in a frame of gold filigree.
The same propeller fan droned from the ceiling, spinning slowly enough not to disturb the warm air, with sportive flies landing on the propeller blades, enjoying a spin or two, then jumping off. Green shades over the front windows gave the dark interior an illusion of coolness, as did the fragrance of tap beer. But this aroma was knifed by the gut-slashing pungency of olive oil and rancid parmigiano cheese mixed with the piny tang of fresh sawdust deep on the floor.
Something else had changed: when I was a lad the patrons of the Café Roma spoke only Italian. Now the new breed of old cockers spoke English, the English of the street, but English all the same.
Eight or nine of them were crowded around a green felt table in the rear. The low-hanging lamp lit up five card players seated around the table, the others standing about, watching and kibitzing. My father was one of the spectators. They were a cranky, irascible, bitter gang of Social Security guys, intense, snarling, rather mean old bastards, bitter, but enjoying their cruel wit, their profanity and their companionship. No philosophers here, no aged oracles speaking from the depths of life’s experience. Simply old men killing time, waiting for the clock to run down. My father was one of them. It came to me as a shock. I never thought of him that way until I saw him with his own kind. Now he looked even older than the gaffers around him.
I moved to Papa’s side and said “Hi.” He grunted. The bald-headed dealer never took his eyes off the cards as he spoke to my father.
“Friend of yours, Nick?”
“Nah. This is my kid Henry.”
I recognized the dealer: Joe Zarlingo, a retired railroad engineer. Though he had not operated a train in ten years, he still wore striped overalls and an engineer’s cap and sported all manner of colored pens and pencils in his bib pocket, as if serving notice that he was a very busy man.
I looked around and said “Hello” to everybody, and two or three answered with preoccupied growls, not bothering to look at me. Some I remembered. Lou Cavallaro, a retired brakeman. Bosco Antrilli, once the super at the telegraph office, the father of Nellie Antrilli, whom I seduced on an anthill in a field south of town in the dead of night (the anthill unseen, Nellie and I fully clothed, then screaming and tearing off our clothes as the outraged ants attacked us). Pete Benedetti, formerly postmaster. The game ended, the chips were drawn in, and the players finally took time to study me while Zarlingo shuffled the cards. They were not impressed.
“Which boy is this one, Nick?” Zarlingo asked.
“Writes books.”
Zarlingo looked at me.
“Books, uh? What kind of books?”
“Novels.”
“What kind?”
“Take your finger out of your ass and deal the cards,” Antrilli said.
“Fuck you, you shit-kicker,” Zarlingo fired back.
The profanity embarrassed my father, for in his mind I was still fourteen, the kid he dragged around on his tours, and he wanted to shield me from the vulgarity of his more mature friends. He whispered, “Come on,” and drew me away, and I followed him out into the trembling sunshine.
“What you hanging around here for?” he said. “No place for you.”
“Come on, Papa. I’m fifty years old. I’ve heard just about everything. I came to tell you I’m staying in town for a while.”
It was like poking a stick into a hornet’s nest. He squinted at me with his little hot red eyes. “Suit yourself, but don’t do me no favors. I don’t need any of you people. I been working since I was eight years old. I was laying stone on the streets of Ban twenty years before you were born, so don’t think I can’t do it myself.”
“Do what?”
“Never mind.”
I lifted my palms. “Papa, listen. Don’t get sore. Let’s get out of this heat and talk it over.”
His hands plunged from one pocket to another until he found it—the stub of a black cigar. He struck a wooden match against his thigh and lit up, a cloud of white smoke burying his face.
“Okay. Let’s talk business.”
“Business?”
I followed him into the Roma to the bar. They had no hard liquor, only beer and wine. The bartender was the youngest man in the place, a kid of around forty-five, with hair down to the small of his back and a hip mustache that curled over his cheeks like quarter moons.
“Frank,” Papa said. “This here’s my son. Give him a beer.” To me he said, “This is Frank Mascarini.”
Frank drew me an overflowing stein from the tap. He served my father a decanter of Musso claret from one of the wine barrels beneath the bar. Papa took his decanter and a glass to one of the tables and I followed with the beer and we sat down. He sipped his wine thoughtfully. Whatever was on his mind, he was carefully tooling up to speak it.
Finally he said, “I got a chance to make some real money.”
“Glad to hear of it.”
He was a poor man but not a pauper. Social Security and checks from Virgil and me took care of him and Mama. They lived frugally but well, for my mother could make a meal from hot water and a bone, and dandelions were free in any empty lot.
“What’s the job?”
“A stone smokehouse, up in the mountains.”
“Can you handle it?”
He chortled at the foolishness of such a question. “When I was fourteen I built a well in the mountains of Abruzzi. Down through solid rock. Thirty feet deep and ten feet wide. Cold spring water. I did it myself. Carried rock out of the hole, then carried it back. I worked in water up to my ass. It took me three months. I got paid a hundred lira. You know how much that was, in those days? Forty-five cents. Fifteen-cents-a-month wages. Now I got a chance to make
fifteen hundred dollars in one month, and you want to know if I can handle it!” This amused him. He laughed. “Of course I can handle it! All I need is a little help.”
“Papa, you’re a liar. Nobody works for fifteen cents a month.”
His fist banged the table.
“I did. And I’ll tell you something else. I put away half my wages.”
“What’d you do with the other half?”
“Squandered it. Gambled. Got drunk. Slept with some woman.”
He quaffed a couple of large mouthfuls of the Musso claret as I studied him. There was no questioning the man’s years, especially the eyes. Their sparkle was gone, as if behind a yellowish film and a net of small red veins.
I said, “Papa, I don’t think you should take that job.”
“Who says so?”
“You’re too damned old. You’ll have a stroke, or a heart attack. It’ll finish you off.”
“My mother was ninety-four. My father was eighty-one. All I need is a first-class helper, somebody who knows how to mix mortar and carry stone.”
“You got anybody in mind?”
He sipped the claret. “Yep.”
“Is he reliable?”
“Hell no, but you take what you can get.”
I realized whom he had in mind.
“Papa,” I smiled. “You’re out of your tree.”
“How long can you stay?”
“A day or two.”
“We can do it in three weeks.”
“Impossible.”
“Easy job. Little stone house up at Monte Casino. Ten by ten. No windows. One door. I’ll lay up the walls, you mix the mortar, carry the stone. Nice place. Good country. Forest. Big trees. Mountain air. Do you good. Get the fat off.”
“Fat? What fat?”
“Fat. Out of shape. I pay ten dollars a day. Board and room. Seven days a week. We’ll be outa there in two weeks if you don’t waste time or quit on me. You want the job? You got it. But remember who’s boss. I do the thinkin’.”
“Papa, I want you to listen carefully to what I am about to say. I want you to stay calm, and I want you to be reasonable. My business, as you know, is writing. Your business is building things. All I know how to do is string one word after another, like beads. All you know is piling one rock on another. I don’t know how to lay brick or mix mortar. I don’t want to know. I have certain things to do. I have a commitment. A commitment is a contract. There’s a man in New York, a publisher, who’s paying me to write a book. He is waiting for this book. He has been waiting for over a year. He is losing his patience. He sends me angry letters. He telephones and calls me filthy names. He threatens to sue me. You understand what I’m saying, Papa?”