The Brotherhood of the Grape

by John Fante

  The end of my life in San Elmo was coming soon. After the funeral I would go away and never return, for without my father the town had vaporized into a wasteland of so many places like it. I knew what I must now do: take my mother away from there too, bring her under my own roof while Stella and my brothers worked out their own lives.

  One other matter remained.

  Like Paul, who had his moment of truth before Damascus, so too Henry Molise had had his fragment of ecstasy twenty-five years before in the San Elmo Public Library. I pulled up beside the graceful building, climbed the red sandstone steps my father had set with his own hands, entered the foyer, and strode down a corridor of bookshelves to that familiar place in the corner by the window near the pencil sharpener below the portrait of Mark Twain, and drew out the leather-bound copy of The Brothers Karamazav. I held it in my hands, I leafed the pages, I drew it tightly into my arms, my life, my joy, my sublime Dostoyevsky. I may have failed him in my deeds, but never in my devotion. My beloved Papa was gone, but Fyodor Mikhailovich would be with me to the end of my life.

  30

  I THOUGHT MY father’s funeral would bring out the whole town, but I was mistaken. More people had attended the wake on the previous afternoon than were present at the church service. Most were members of the family, and many were grandchildren who didn’t want to be there in the first place, for the circus was in town at the fairgrounds and the kids were annoyed at their grandfather for picking such a lousy time to die. The rest of the mourners were friends and neighbors of my mother and a loyal group from the Café Roma.

  Waiting gloomily in their Sunday clothes, the pallbearers shaded themselves under a big elm on that hot, cheerless afternoon. They were Zarlingo, Cavallaro, Antrilli, Mascarini, Benedetti and Rocco Mangone. They were as beautiful as old stones strewn across a patch of hillside. Grief plucked at my throat like the leap of a trout as I looked at them. Now that I had none, I would have taken any one of them for a father. Indeed, any man, or bush, or tree, or stone, if he would have me for a son. I was myself a father. I didn’t want the role. I wanted to go back to a time when I was small and my father stood strong and noisy in the house. To hell with fatherhood. I was never born to it. I was born to be a son.

  The pallbearers doffed their hats as Harriet and I entered the church. I waved. I wanted to shout: “I love you, I need you, take care of me, you funny old men!”

  The family was gathered in the two front pews before the main altar, my mother in the first pew between Virgil and Stella and their families. Mama wore a black veil covering her hair and face. Harriet and I and our sons slipped into the pew behind them, next to Peggy and her kids. Right away I noticed that one of us was missing. I turned to Peggy.

  “Where’s Mario?”

  “In a state of shock. I told him to stay home.”

  Virgil glanced over his shoulder and sneered.

  “With the Giants and Atlanta playing a doubleheader on TV? That’s funny, Peggy. Very funny!”

  “It’s true!” Peggy hissed in a loud whisper. “He cried and cried. He really loved his father. But you were all against him. You alienated him. Why did you pick on him? Why didn’t you have a little faith in him? Well, you’ll see. You’ll be sorry, all of you!”

  “God help you, baby,” Virgil smirked.

  “You fucking bank clerk!” she raged. “You’re not fit to clean Mario’s shoes!”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me, you creep.”

  “Shh!” Mama chided under her black veil. “Please. Papa’s dead.”

  Then the hearse arrived and the pallbearers carried the brown casket down the aisle to the communion rail. The mourners watched the attendants bring funeral wreaths and bouquets of flowers to place around the casket. How small the casket seemed. My father had been a bull of a man, but not tall. Horizontal in that box, he seemed no larger than a boy.

  Then an enormous wreath was brought down the aisle, all roses and carnations and ferns, so large that two attendants carried it. They placed it at the foot of the coffin and stood it up on wire brackets. It was six feet tall, a gaudy splendor, very impressive. It bore a strip of white silk upon which a red inscription was embossed. It read:

  COMPLIMENTS OF CAFÉ ROMA.

  The pallbearers gazed at their tribute with pleasure and satisfaction. No question about it, the Café Roma brotherhood had come through with the biggest and the best. My mother, bless her, was so impressed that she turned, raised her veil, and nodded in appreciation. The Roma boys smiled in sympathy.

  A bell tinkled and Father Martin emerged from the sacristy behind two altar boys. Beneath the boys’ cassocks you could see the green and white stripes of their baseball socks, and you knew that somewhere in the town their teammates were waiting for them.

  Father Martin moved down to the casket, blessed it with holy water, and read the Latin rites from a missal. Closing it, he put his fingers together and tried to assemble his thoughts as people waited for him to speak. It must have been a problem, for he was dealing with the life and death of a man who had rarely come to church and who had never performed his Catholic obligations.

  “Let us pray for the soul of Nicholas Molise,” he began. “A good and simple man, an honest man, a fine craftsman who lived among us for so many years and gave his best for the improvement of the human community. Instead of weeping, let us rejoice that he has come to the end of his toil on this earth, and is now at peace in the arms of his Father in heaven.”

  That was it, short and sweet, a bull’s-eye. The mourners joined him in the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, and he concluded with: “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let the perpetual light shine upon him.”

  The padre returned to the sacristy as the undertakers opened the casket and my mother led the mourners past the body. She raised her veil and kissed her husband on the forehead. Then she laced her white rosary around his stiffened fingers. Virgil led her away as she cried softly. One by one we passed the bier and stared down at Papa, the children startled, horrified, fascinated, the others weeping silently.

  I did not weep. I felt rage, disgust. Good God, what had they done to that poor old man! What had they done to that craggy, magnificent Abruzzian face, those lines of pain and toil, the resolute mouth, the cunning knit of his eyebrows, the furrows of triumph and defeat! Gone, gone…and in their place the smooth, unlined, cotton-stuffed face, the rouged cheeks. It was a shame, an obscenity, and I was stung with a writer’s wickedness, thinking, that’s not my old man, that’s not old Nick, that’s Groucho Marx, and the quicker we bury him the better.

  31

  TEN CARS of mourners followed the hearse across town to the cemetery a mile away, behind the high school gym. We had a police escort, a cop on a motorcycle leading us through the deserted little town, everybody having gone to the circus. No traffic at all, only the slow-moving funeral procession over the bridge to Pacific Street. My car followed the hearse, Mama sitting between Virgil and me.

  “Didn’t Papa look great?” Virgil said. “God, the things they can do nowadays.”

  “He looked happy,” Mama said. “It’s the way he used to be, always laughing, always making jokes.”

  The joke was on Papa, but I held my tongue.

  At every intersection the cop brought his Harley to a halt, raised his arm, glanced to the left and the right, blew his whistle, and waved the hearse to proceed. It was twelve blocks to the graveyard and he stopped the procession at all twelve intersections. My mother watched, deeply impressed, her veil lifted, for the escort gave her husband an air of importance, as though he’d been a big man in the town.

  We moved slowly through the cemetery gates and past the “new” graveyard to the “old” one, the difference being that the new section was without ornate tombstones or large trees, whereas the old place was a brooding fairyland of grotesque marble figures beneath enormous oaks and sycamores, luxuriantly shaded, the grass moist and very green and uncut, as if to devour the ancient sunken graves.
Through the trees we could see Father Martin standing before an opening in the ground, waiting, prayer book in hand.

  I helped my mother from the car and she choked back a cry as she moved toward the priest. As I started to follow, Virgil snatched my arm.

  “Let’s watch it now,” he cautioned. “Keep her between us. She might try something.”

  “Try what?”

  “Jumping on the coffin.”

  The thing was possible, but it didn’t happen. Each of us held her by an elbow during the last rites, and though she swayed as she watched the casket descend, the pulleys squealing, she remained composed and without grief. Afterward Father Martin came to her side and took her hands in his and she looked up at him and began to cry. He bent and kissed her on the forehead and that made everybody cry, adults and children alike, and people turned away and tried to hide their misery as they drifted back to their cars.

  Harriet joined me and we escorted Mama away through the sycamores. Then, from a distance, we heard it: a voice, mechanical, electronic, pulsing across the land and through the trees as if to make every leaf tremble, a cry of battle, growing louder. We stopped to listen. It was a radio voice, a sportscaster, tense, explosive, profaning the holy cemetery with alien vibrations.

  “Bottom of the ninth!” the voice proclaimed. “Two out. Bonds at second, Rader at third, Kingman the batter. The count: two balls and two strikes. Capra in a full windup. Here’s the pitch: a ball!”

  Through the trees lurched Mario’s battered truck, nuts and bolts jangling, the voice strident as it swept down upon us. Joy brightened my mother’s face.

  “It’s Mario!” she exulted. “Oh, Mario! He came after all. I knew he would, I knew it! Oh, thanks be to God!”

  The truck skidded around a curve and braked to a stop before us, throwing gravel. The radio’s irreverent hysteria seemed to jeer at the peaceful dead, rude, flouting their eternal sleep.

  Kingman had struck out. The Giants had lost. Momentarily Mario caved in upon the steering wheel. He snapped off the radio and returned to reality, looking at us.

  “Am I too late?”

  “No, Mario,” Mama said. “There’s still time. Hurry, before they cover him up!”

  He jumped from the truck and walked quickly toward the grave where two men with shovels were preparing to fill the plot. We watched him look down upon the casket, covering his face with both hands as he began to cry. Then we walked to the car.

  My mother got between Harriet and me. She took off her veil, leaned back and sighed. Her face was beautiful, her eyes were warm with a sense of peace. She took my hand.

  “I’m so happy,” she said.

  “He died quickly,” I said. “He didn’t suffer at all.”

  She sighed.

  “He worried me so, all the time, from the day we were married. I never knew where he was, what he was doing, or who he was with. He wouldn’t tell me anything. Every night I wondered if he’d come home again. Now it’s over. I don’t have to worry anymore. I know where he is. That he’s all right.” She uttered a little moan. “Oh, God. The things I used to find in his pockets!”

  I started the car.

  “Let’s go home.”

  “I bought a leg of lamb,” she said. “We’ll have a nice dinner. The whole family. With new potatoes.”

  About the Author

  JOHN FANTE was born in Colorado in 1909. He attended parochial school in Boulder, and Regis High School, a Jesuit boarding school. He also attended the University of Colorado and Long Beach City College.

  Fante began writing in 1929 and published his first short story in The American Mercury in 1932. He published numerous stories in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Mercury, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Esquire, and Harper’s Bazaar. His first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, was published in 1938. The following year Ask the Dust appeared, and in 1940 a collection of his short stories, Dago Red, was published.

  Meanwhile, Fante had been occupied extensively in screenwriting. Some of his credits include Full of Life, Jeanne Eagels, My Man and I, The Reluctant Saint, Something for a Lonely Man, My Six Loves and Walk on the Wild Side.

  John Fante was stricken with diabetes in 1955 and its complications brought about his blindness in 1978, but he continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce, and the result was Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982). He died at the age of 74 on May 8,1983.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  BY JOHN FANTE

  AVAILABLE FROM ECCO

  The Saga of Arturo Bandini:

  Wait Until Spring, Bandini

  The Road to Los Angeles

  Ask the Dust

  Dreams from Bunker Hill

  Full of Life

  The Brotherhood of the Grape

  The Wine of Youth: Selected Stories of John Fante

  1933 Was a Bad Year

  West of Rome

  John Fante: Selected Letters

  The Big Hunger: Stories, 1932–1959

  The John Fante Reader

  Copyright

  THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE GRAPE. Copyright © 1977 by John Fante. Copyright © 1988 by Joyce Fante. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  First Ecco edition published 2002.

  Library of Congress has catalogued a previous edition as:

  Fante, John, 1909-1983

  Brotherhood of the grape.

  I. Title.

  PS3511.A594B7 1988 813’.52 88-2588

  ISBN 0-87685-727-6

  ISBN 0-87685-726-8 (pbk.)

  EPub Edition © March 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201303-3

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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