The John Fante Reader

by John Fante

  My father sat at the dining room table drinking wine and I sat across from him, doing my homework. We both stared as the wine in the carafe tossed like a small red sea. Mamma and Grandma came startled from the kitchen. We heard the rap of knuckles on the front door.

  “Come in!” my father shouted.

  Father Ramponi loomed in the doorway, hat in hand, so tall he barely made it through the door. Had the President of the United States entered, we could not have been more surprised.

  “Good evening,” he smiled.

  “Whaddya say there,” Papa said, too astonished for amenities as Father Ramponi walked deeper into the house. All a twitter, my mother’s face tingled with excitement as she hurried to take the priest’s overcoat. He laid it across her arms like a massive black rug, so large that it dragged over the floor as she hauled it away to the bedroom.

  By now the rest of us were on our feet, staring at the towering priest. Everything shrank proportionately, the room, the furniture, and the members of our family. Suddenly we were a tribe of pygmies confronted by a giant explorer from the outside world.

  As they shook hands, Father Ramponi lowered a friendly paw on Papa’s shoulder and spoke in his high, gentle voice.

  “They tell me you’re the finest stonemason in Colorado. Is it true?”

  My father’s face blossomed like a sunflower.

  “That’s the truth, Father.”

  “Fine, fine I like a man who’s not ashamed of his worth.”

  Reeling with flattery, Papa turned and ordered the room cleared. “Everybody out!”

  With grand pretensions of authority Mamma herded us into the living room, which didn’t in the least add to the privacy since the two rooms were separated by French doors, only there weren’t any doors, just the hinges. The doors were out in the garage, for reasons nobody ever questioned.

  We kids flung ourselves on the floor near the stove and Mamma settled into the rocking chair. Presently Grandma appeared, a black shawl around her shoulders, the rosary twined in her fingers, and she too found a chair. No more than four feet away, Papa and Father Ramponi had the entire dining room to themselves.

  Those were the days of Prohibition and Papa’s routine with guests never changed. Every caller was invited down into the earthen cellar where four fifty-gallon barrels of wine were stored—a hundred gallons matured, and a hundred in the fermentation process.

  Through the trapdoor in the pantry he and Father Ramponi disappeared into the cellar. We listened to them down there under the house, their voices muffled, their laughter rumbling in the ground. Patiently we waited for them to reappear, like an audience expecting the return of the players to the stage.

  As they came back Papa carried a fresh pitcher of wine, the beaded foam still bubbling. They sat at the table beneath light pouring down from a green metal shade. Papa filled two tumblers with wine and Father Ramponi lit a cigarette.

  Raising his glass, the priest proposed a toast. “To Florence, city of your birth.”

  Pleased but dubious, my father shook his head. “I come from Abruzzi, Father. From Torcelli Peligna.”

  It surprised Father Ramponi. “Is that so? Now where did I get the idea you were a Florentine?”

  “Never been there in my life.”

  “Maybe your relatives came from there.”

  “Maybe,” Papa shrugged.

  “You look like a Florentine.”

  “You think so?”

  “A true Florentine, a craftsman in the tradition of that great city.” He drained his tumbler.

  We watched Papa expand with a sense of importance. It was as if Father Ramponi had sprinkled him with a holy water of magic powers. From that moment he was Father Ramponi’s pigeon, eating corn from the good priest’s hand. Then the subject matter changed quickly, and the real reason for the priest’s visit became apparent.

  “Nick,” he said with a new familiarity, his voice softer than ever. “Why is it that I never find you at Mass on Sunday morning?”

  Mamma and Grandma nodded at one another smugly. My father was a long time answering, kneading a kink in his neck, smiling as he sensed a trap.

  “I been thinking about that,” he said.

  “Thinking about it?”

  “About going.”

  “You should. As an example to your children.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. My father put the tip of his fingernail in the wine glass and twirled it absently. “We’ll talk about it some other time,” he said.

  “Come to the rectory tomorrow,” Father Ramponi suggested.

  “I’m gonna be pretty busy tomorrow.”

  “How about the day after tomorrow?”

  “I’m pretty busy, Father.”

  “In this wretched weather?”

  “Lots of figuring to do. Getting ready for Spring.”

  “Shall we make it next week?”

  Papa frowned, rubbed his chin. “Too far ahead. You never know, one day to the next.”

  The priest sighed, lifted his hands. “Then I leave it entirely up to you. When would it be most convenient?”

  My father found a cigar butt in the ashtray and went to a lot of trouble scraping and lighting it. “Let me think about it, Father.” He produced clouds of smoke that hid his face. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he said, “Let’s make it tomorrow.”

  Mamma’s gulp of delight sounded like a shout.

  Father Ramponi rose and offered his hand. He was smiling in triumph and my father shook hands and squinted at him skeptically. Having committed himself, he seemed to regret it.

  “Two o’clock tomorrow?” Father Ramponi asked.

  “Not possible,” Papa said.

  “Three, then? Four?”

  “Can’t make it.”

  “Would you prefer to come in the morning?”

  “How can I come in the morning? You don’t understand, Father! I got things to do, people to see. I’m a busy man. All the time. Day and night!”

  The priest did not press it. “I leave it up to you. Come when you can.”

  Papa nodded bleakly. “We’ll see. I can’t promise anything. I’ll do the best I can.”

  The very next day my father began a series of talks at the rectory with Father Ramponi. The meetings left him in a somber mood, and a brooding calm settled over our house. We tiptoed around him, we talked in whispers. During meals he was completely silent, tearing bread and holding it uneaten in his hand. Even my little sister felt his melancholy.

  “Are you sick, Papa?” she asked.

  “Shhh!” Mamma said.

  My father exhaled a sigh and stared, his forkful of macaroni dangling limply in mid-air.

  Every day he wore his Sunday clothes with a white shirt and a necktie. So intent was his concentration that he stopped talking altogether and merely gestured when he had some request. A wave of his hand could clear the room. A nod at his feet summoned his slippers. A flat stare and talking ceased among us. Moving furtively in the background, my mother and grandmother watched him with sympathetic, adoring eyes. The man of the house was in crisis, grappling with the devil, and the decision was in doubt. Every night at bedtime we left him alone in the dining room, seated under the light, sipping wine and writing on a jumbo school tablet with a stubby pencil.

  A week of this, and suddenly the saturnine atmosphere of our home was shattered and my father was himself again. We awoke to hear him in the front yard, shoveling snow. Mamma called him to breakfast. He bounded into the house with scarlet cheeks and purple ears, his eyes snow-bright as he slapped his hands hungrily and sat down before his scrambled eggs. One mouthful and he scowled.

  “Can’t you even fry eggs?” he said.

  We were happy again. Papa was complaining like his old self.

  As I prepared for school, my mother followed me into the living room and brought my mackinaw from the closet. She buttoned me up while my father stood watching. He had a bulky envelope in his hand.

  “Give this to Father Ramponi,”
he said, handing it to me. I said okay and folded it to the size of my pocket.

  “Not like that,” he said, taking it from me. He opened the mackinaw and stuffed the envelope under my T-shirt. “Guard it with your life,” he warned.

  “What the heck is it?”

  “Never mind. Just give it to Father Ramponi.”

  “Tell him,” Mamma said. “So he’ll know how important it is.”

  “You talk too much!” he snapped.

  “It’s your father’s confession,” Mamma said.

  I suddenly felt it there against my flesh, and sucked in my stomach. It was incredible, impossible, sacrilegious.

  “You can’t write your confession!” I wailed. “You have to tell it. In the confessional!”

  “Who says so?”

  “It’s the rule. Everybody knows that!”

  “He won’t get me in that confession box.”

  “It’s the rule!” I cried, ready to burst into tears. “Mamma! Tell him, please! He doesn’t understand!”

  “That shows how much you know,” Papa said. “He told me to write it: so what do you think of that!”

  I searched my mother’s face for the truth. She smiled. “Father Ramponi said it was all right this way.”

  I looked at my father accusingly.

  “Why can’t you be like everybody else?”

  “No, sir. You can’t get me in that box!”

  Dazed and angry and disgusted, I walked out into the cold morning, my lunch pail rigid in one hand, my books in the other, my father’s cold envelope freezing my stomach. Who the hell did he think he was? Why didn’t he take his damned confession to the priest himself? Why should I be forced to walk the streets with it? They weren’t my sins, they were his, so let him carry them to the priest.

  The frozen air took my breath and whirled it into ostrich plumes and I walked afraid, like a glass vial, fearful of spilling my burden. I knew my father had not been to confession for thirty years, not since he was a boy of my age.

  All of this wickedness, every human being he had injured, every sin against God’s commandments were congealed in a block of ice burning against my stomach as I crossed town, under dripping maple trees, around grey mounds of mud-splattered snow, my toes picking their way with the delicacy of bird’s feet, across the town, the awful responsibility of my burden hurting my flesh, too sacred, too heavy for my life.

  As I reached St. Catherine’s Father Ramponi drove up and parked in front of the stone steps leading to the main entrance. I waited for him to step out, pulling the envelope from under my shirt as the bell sounded and stragglers raced up the stairs.

  “Oh, yes,” he smiled, taking the envelope. “Thank you.” He seemed in a great hurry and at a loss as to what to do with the envelope. Opening the car door, he tossed the envelope on the seat and dashed away, taking the stairs three at a time.

  I watched in dismay as he disappeared. How could he do such a thing? That document was no trifling thing. It was my father’s confession, a matter sacred to God, and there it lay on the car seat, cast aside like a rag.

  What if someone came by and filched it—one of the older boys? The school was full of thieves who stole anything not nailed down. Suddenly I was in a panic as I imagined the confession being passed around, being read in the lavatory, touching off raucous laughter spilling into the halls, the streets, as the whole town laughed at my father’s sins.

  Guard it with your life, my father had warned, and guard it I did. For three hours I posted myself beside Father Ramponi’s car, my feet numbed with cold, my ears burning like ice cubes as I stayed out of school and scorned the wrath of Sister Justinus.

  At last the noon bell sounded and the students burst from the doors and down the stairs. I concealed myself as Father Ramponi appeared. He slid under the steering wheel and drove away, and the minuscule pinching pain in my stomach vanished at last.

  That night Father Ramponi made his second visit to our house. It was very late and Papa was turning out the lights when the priest knocked. Papa welcomed him and they came into the dining room. Through the open bedroom door I saw them as I lay beside my sleeping brother. Father Ramponi stood huge as a black bear under the green lampshade. Then my father noticed the open bedroom door and he closed it, and I was in darkness save for a ribbon of light under the threshold. I slipped out of bed and peered through the keyhole.

  Papa had seated himself before the wine, but Father Ramponi was still on his feet. He drew the envelope from his overcoat and tossed it on the table.

  “You deceived me,” he said quietly.

  My father lifted the envelope and tested it in his fist. “It’s all there, Father. I didn’t forget a thing.”

  “It’s long enough. God knows.”

  “Some things I wrote, they were very hard, but it’s all there, over thirty years, the bad things in a man’s life.”

  “But you wrote it in Italian

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  Father Ramponi sank gloomily into a chair, his hands thrust deeply into his overcoat pockets. “I don’t speak Italian,” he sighed. “Or read it. Or write it. Or understand it.”

  My father stared.

  “Bruno Ramponi, and you don’t speak Italian? That’s terrible.”

  The priest sank deeper in his chair and covered one eye. “It simply never entered my mind that you’d make your confession in Italian.”

  “The pope speaks Italian,” my father said. “The cardinals, they speak Italian. The saints speak Italian. Even God speaks Italian. But you, Father Bruno Ramponi, don’t speak Italian.”

  A moan from the priest. He pushed the envelope toward my father. “Burn it.”

  “Burn it?”

  “Burn it. Now.”

  It was an order, angry and incontrovertible. My father rose and took the envelope into the kitchen. I heard the lid of the stove open, then close, and then he returned to the dining room where Father Ramponi now stood and draped a purple stole around his neck.

  “Please kneel for penance and absolution,” he said.

  My father’s joints cracked like sticks as he knelt on the linoleum. He clasped his hands together and lowered his eyes. Father Ramponi made the sign of the cross over him and murmured a Latin prayer. Then he touched my father’s shoulder.

  “As a penance, I want you to say The Lord’s Prayer once a day until Christmas.”

  My father lifted his eyes.

  “Until Christmas, Father? That’s sixty days.”

  “You can say it in Italian.”

  It pleased my father and he lowered his eyes. Father Ramponi absolved and blessed him, and the little ceremony was concluded. My father got to his feet.

  “Thank you, Father. How about a glass of wine?”

  The priest declined. They moved toward the front door. Suddenly my father laughed. “I feel good,” he said. “Real good, Father.”

  “Next time I’ll expect you to come to the church for your confession.”

  “We’ll see, Father.”

  “And I’ll expect you at Mass Sunday.”

  “I’ll try and make it, Father.”

  They said good night and the door closed. I heard Father Ramponi’s car drive away. My father returned to the dining room. Through the keyhole I watched him pour a glass of wine. He raised it heavenward and drank. Then he turned out the light and all was darkness.

  —The Wine of Youth

  Part Two

  DAYS OF FEVER

  THE ODYSSEY OF A WOP

  V

  WHEN I FINISH IN THE PAROCHIAL SCHOOL my people decide to send me to a Jesuit academy in another city. My father comes with me on the first day. Chiseled into the stone coping that skirts the roof of the main building of the academy is the Latin inscription: Religioni et Bonis Artibus. My father and I stand at a distance, and he reads it aloud and tells me what it means.

  I look up at him in amazement. Is this man my father? Why, look at him! Listen to him! He reads with an Italian inflection! He’s
wearing an Italian mustache. I have never realized it until this moment, but he looks exactly like a Wop. His suit hangs carelessly in wrinkles upon him. Why the deuce doesn’t he buy a new one? And look at his tie! It’s crooked. And his shoes: they need a shine. And, for the Lord’s sake, will you look at his pants! They’re not even buttoned in front. And oh, damn, damn, damn, you can see those dirty old suspenders that he won’t throw away. Say, Mister, are you really my father? You there, why, you’re such a little guy, such a runt, such an old-looking fellow! You look exactly like one of those immigrants carrying a blanket. You can’t be my father! Why, I thought … I’ve always thought …

  I’m crying now, the first time I’ve ever cried for any reason excepting a licking, and I’m glad he’s not crying too. I’m glad he’s as tough as he is, and we say good-by quickly, and I go down the path quickly, and I do not turn to look back, for I know he’s standing there and looking at me.

  I enter the administration building and stand in line with strange boys who also wait to register for the autumn term. Some Italian boys stand among them. I am away from home, and I sense the Italians. We look at one another and our eyes meet in an irresistible amalgamation, a suffusive consanguinity; I look away.

  A burly Jesuit rises from his chair behind the desk and introduces himself to me. Such a voice for a man! There are a dozen thunderstorms in his chest. He asks my name, and writes it down on a little card.

  “Nationality?” he roars.

  “American.”

  “Your father’s name?”

  I whisper it: “Guido.”

  “How’s that? Spell it out. Talk louder.”

  I cough. I touch my lips with the back of my hand and spell out the name.

  “Ha!” shouts the registrar. “And still they come! Another Wop! Well, young man, you’ll be at home here! Yes, sir! Lots of Wops here! We’ve even got Kikes! And, you know, this place reeks with shanty Irish!”

  Dio! How I hate that priest!

  He continues: “Where was your father born?”