The John Fante Reader

by John Fante

  She went back to Gesell, Arnold: Infant and Child in the Culture of Today. There was solid reading comfort in pregnancy. The mound made a superb place to prop books, almost chin high, easy to turn pages. She was very pretty, with gray eyes incredibly bright. Something new was added to those eyes. Fearlessness. It was startling. You looked away. I glanced at the windows and found out what valances were because that was the only green at the windows, the skirt on top, ruffled.

  “What kind of valance do you want, honey?”

  “And please don’t honey me. I don’t like it.”

  I left her sitting there, the gray eyes bright with menace, the tight mouth around a cigarette holder, the long white fingers clutching Gesell. I walked out into my front yard and stood among roses and gloated over my house. The rewards of authorship. Me, author, John Fante, composer of three books. First book sold 2300 copies. Second book sold 4800 copies. Third book sold 2100 copies. But they don’t ask for royalty statements in the picture business. If you have what they want at the moment they pay you, and pay you well. At that moment I had what they wanted, and every Thursday there came this big check.

  A gentleman arrived about the valances. He was queer, with pellucid fingernails and a Paisley scarf under his belted sports coat. He wrung his tapered fingers and there was an intimacy between him and Joyce I could not share. They laughed and chatted over tea and cakes and she was delighted to have the companionship of a cock without spurs. He shuddered at the green valances, squealed in triumph as he tore them down and replaced them with blue. He sent for a truck, and the furniture was hauled away to be re-covered to match the valances.

  Blue soothed Joyce. Now she was very happy. She began to wash windows. She waxed floors. She didn’t like the washing machine and did the laundry by hand. Twice a week we had someone in to do the heavy work, but Joyce fired the woman.

  “I’ll do it alone. I don’t need help.”

  She got very tired from so much work. There were ten shirts piled up, carefully ironed. There was a red place on her thumb, a burn. Her hair hung down, she was haggard and indeed very tired. But the bump was firm, right out there, not tired at all.

  “I can’t go on much longer,” she groaned. “This big house and all.”

  “But why do you do it? You know you mustn’t.”

  “Do you like living in dirty surroundings?”

  “Call somebody. We can afford it now.”

  Ah, she detested me, gritting her teeth, bravely pushing back her fallen hair. She picked up a dustcloth and staggered into the dining room, there to polish the table, taking long desperate strokes, utterly weary, propped on her elbows, gasping for breath.

  “Let me help you.”

  “Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare!”

  She sank into a chair, her hair hanging down, her burnt thumb aching, yet a badge for nobility, her bright weary eyes staring dangerously, the dust rag loose in her hand, a wistful smile on her lips, an expression denoting nostalgia, informing me that her thought was of a happier time, probably San Francisco in the summer of 1940, when her body was slender, when there were no back-breaking chores, when she was free and unmarried, climbing all over Telegraph Hill with her easel and paints, writing tragic love sonnets as she gazed at the Golden Gate.

  “You ought to have a maid, all day long.”

  For those were the fat carnal days for the scribbler, and money was piling up with Thursday coming once a week, bringing my agent full of wit and camaraderie and what was left after he and the government cut up the Paramount check. And yet, there was plenty for us all.

  “Go shopping, dear. Buy yourself some things.”

  God help me. I had forgotten the bulge, and I tried vainly to suck the words back into my mouth. But she did not forget and I had to pretend I wasn’t looking when she came sweeping down the stairs, a white balloon of a wife, holding back belches and pacing here and there like a prisoner.

  She said, “Stop staring.”

  She said, “I suppose you spend the whole day looking at slender actresses.”

  She said, “What are you thinking about?”

  She said, “Never again. This is the first and last.”

  And sometimes I would look up to find her staring at me and shaking her head.

  “In God’s name, why did I ever marry you?”

  I kept quiet, smiling foolishly, because I didn’t know why either, but I was very glad and proud that she had.

  —Full of Life

  AT 9:27 ON THE MORNING of March 18th, in the seventh month of her confinement, Joyce Fante fell through the kitchen floor of our house. The sheer weight of her-she had gained twenty-five pounds and tipped the scale at one hundred and forty-four-plus the condition of the woodwork, came to a shuddering climax as the termite-infested floor boards collapsed beneath the tearing linoleum and the woman with the big bump sank to the ground three feet below.

  I was upstairs in the bathtub at the time, and I remember distinctly the minute events coming before and after the calamity. First there was this fine quiet morning, all decked out in the golden gloss of the sun, there was the placidity of the bath, the mysterious evocations of confined water, the conjuring of faraway things, and then, from somewhere, from everywhere, the quivering of the atmosphere, the ominous portent of chain reaction in fissionable materials. A moment later I heard her scream. It was a theater scream, Barbara Stanwyck trapped by a rapist, and it plucked my spinal column like a giant’s fingers.

  I jumped out of the tub and opened the door. Down there I could hear Joyce shrieking. My one thought was the child-the precious white melon.

  “I’m coming, Joyce. Be brave, darling. I’m coming!”

  I had a gun in my room, but in that moment my only thought was her need for me. Even as I dashed downstairs naked and frightened I somehow knew those were my last mortal steps, that we would die together, that we might have lived had I been armed.

  At first I didn’t see her. Then I found her before the kitchen range, even as she had fallen, snug in the neat cave-in, but cut off as if she were a midget, a slice of ham in one hand, a skillet in the other, with many eggs broken and leaking around her. She was more angry than hurt, melted butter trickling from her hair and mingling with her tears, stringy egg yolk dripping from her elbows.

  “Get me out of here, if you please.”

  I pulled her out. She was surprisingly calm. I stood looking down at the floor.

  “Woh hoppen?”

  Her fingers probed the mound, searching for life. She went to the telephone and began dialing. “Tell Dr. Stanley to hurry. It’s an emergency.” She hung up and walked to the stairs.

  “How’d it happen?”

  She didn’t answer. A moment later she was in bed. I buzzed around, trying to get her things. She was white-faced but very calm. Then she closed her eyes. It scared me. I shook her.

  “You all right?”

  “I think so.”

  She closed her eyes again. I got scared again. I ran downstairs and got her some brandy. She didn’t want any. I asked her not to close her eyes.

  “I’m just resting.”

  “I don’t think you ought to close your eyes.”

  “I’m only resting until the doctor comes.”

  Dr. Stanley was there in twenty minutes. I took him upstairs and he began to examine her. The fall had caused no injury to herself or the child. He put away his stethoscope. I went downstairs to the front door with him. I thought we should have a man-to-man talk about all this.

  “Anything I can do, Doc?”

  “No. Not a thing.”

  There was cold glitter in his eyes. He was getting tired of us. We were taking up a lot of his time.

  I went back to the kitchen and stood before the hole in the floor. Fungus and termites had eaten the wood. It crumbled like soft bread in my hands. I crossed the room to the sink and banged my heel against the floor. The blow punctured it, leaving a hole. Apparently the entire floor was rotted. In the breakfast nook I hit the w
all with my fist. My knuckles sank through spongy plaster and wood. I climbed the table in the breakfast nook to check the ceiling, but my weight made the table legs sink into the floor. I walked into the dining room and stood before an expanse of a pale green wall, freshly painted, immaculate. I raised my fist to let fly, but inside me there was a great sickness and I was afraid to strike.

  My house! Why had this happened to John Fante? What had I done to upset the rhythm of the stars in their courses? I went back to Joyce’s hole and stared. I picked up a piece of rotten wood. There I saw them, the little white beasties, crawling in the dead wood, the wood of my house, and I took one between my fingers, his little white legs pawing the air-a termite, an inhuman beast, and I killed it; I, who couldn’t bear killing anything, but I had to snuff out his life for what he and his vile breed had done to my house. It was the first termite I had ever killed. All those years I had seen them about, watching them in curious admiration. I was a firm believer in the live-and-let-live philosophy, and this was my thanks, this loathsome treachery. Well, there was something wrong with my thinking, there had to be some change in my relations with insects, the hard reality of the facts had to be reckoned, and I started then and there to kill them, breaking the wood open, squashing them, crushing out their nefarious little lives as they ran panic-stricken through my fingers.

  —Full of Life

  JOYCE WAS IN THE LIVING ROOM READING, surrounded with books. I could see Papa in the back yard. He sat under a wide lawn umbrella, a wine jug on the steel table beside him, a cigar in his mouth as he stretched his legs and took his ease, studying the house.

  “What did he say about the hole in the kitchen?”

  “He wants to consider it,” Joyce said.

  “There’s nothing to consider. Just fix the hole.”

  She closed the book. “Let him think about it. He’s full of ideas.”

  “No matter what he thinks, the hole has to be fixed. It was a mistake to bring him down here. He’s old and set in his ways. I predict trouble.”

  “That’s not a very nice way to feel about your own father.”

  “I can’t help it. He’s turned into an eccentric.”

  “You should have thought of that before you asked him. The Fourth Commandment, you know.”

  “The Fourth Commandment?”

  “Honor thy father and thy mother.”

  I gave her a quick look. She was a picture of enormous placidity, her great tummy sitting proudly on her lap like another person. It gave you the feeling you talked to two people. Behind her reading glasses the gray eyes were clear and beautiful. She sat with a dozen books around her, some on the coffee table, others piled beside her on the divan. She was reading Chesterton and Belloc and Thomas Merton and Francois Mauriac. There were books by Karl Adam, Fulton Sheen and Evelyn Waugh. I glanced at some of the titles: The Spirit of Catholicism, The Faith of Our Fathers, The Idea of a University. Some of these books were mine, out of a dusty box in the garage, but most were new and fresh from the bookstore. It was incredible to find her with such books, for she was a cold materialist; she belonged to a semantic group; nay, she was practically an atheist, with a hard scientific patience for facts.

  “What you doing?”

  “I’m thinking of making a change.” She took off her reading glasses. “If God is all-good, why does He permit crippled children to be born?”

  It frightened me at once.

  “Is something wrong with the baby?”

  “Of course not. I’m asking you a question.”

  “I don’t know the answer.”

  She smiled with satisfaction.

  “But I do.”

  “That’s just wonderful.”

  “Don’t you want to hear it?”

  I couldn’t take her seriously. It was but another whim of her pregnancy. Here was the same girl who liked chili sauce on her avocado salad. It would pass as soon as her figure returned. It was a whim. It had to be. I liked an atheistic wife. Her position made matters easy for me. It simplified a planned family. We had no scruples about contraceptives. Ours had been a civil marriage. We were not chained by religious tenets. Divorce was there, any time we wanted it. If she became a Catholic there would be all manner of complications. It was hard to be a good Catholic, very hard, and that was why I had left the Church. To be a good Catholic you had to break through the crowd and help Him pack the cross. I was saving the breakthrough for later. If she broke through I might have to follow, for she was my wife. No; this was a whim of hers, a passing fancy. It had to be.

  “You’ll get over it,” I said. “Any calls?”

  “Nothing important.”

  I phoned my secretary at the studio. My calls were routine. Somebody wanted to play golf, and somebody else wanted to play poker. My producer was in New York, and the front office was very quiet. It was a good time to proceed with arrangements about repairing the kitchen. There was lumber to buy, and Papa would probably need a helper. I walked out to the back yard and took a chair under the big umbrella. Papa sat quietly, his feet on the table. His jug was almost empty. He watched his cigar smoke climb into the branches of a small mock orange tree in the center of the yard.

  “What do you think, Papa? Will it cost much?”

  “My eyes hurt. No good, this country.”

  “Smog. You’ll have to replace some of the joists.”

  “Did I ever tell you about my Uncle Mingo and the bandits?”

  “Sure, lots of times. Will you need a helper on the job?”

  “Brave man, my Uncle Mingo. He was an Andrilli, your Grandma’s brother. They hang him right there in Abruzzi. The carabiniere … Two bullets in his shoulder. They hang him anyway. His wife standing there, crying. Sixty-one years ago. I seen it myself. Coletta Andrilli, pretty woman.

  He drank, the jug in both hands, his Adam’s apple rising and falling. He put down the jug and resumed his pleasant thoughts. I told him there was a lumber yard not far away. If he would compute the materials needed we could drive over to the lumber yard that very day.

  “I’m anxious to get started, Papa.”

  Papa spoke to his cigar: “He’s anxious to get started. I been here two hours. I’m tired. I don’t sleep good on the train, but he wants to get started.”

  I apologized. He was right, of course. I had been very thoughtless. “Certainly, Papa. I don’t mean to rush you. Take it easy for a few days. Get a good rest. The kitchen can wait.”

  “I’ll take care of the kitchen, kid. You take care of the writing.”

  His face showed fatigue, gray bristles at his chin, the tips of his mouth turned down, his eyes half open and bloodshot, smarting from the poison gas in the air.

  “Enjoy yourself, Papa. Rest. Anything you want just ask for it. You need more wine?”

  “Don’t worry about the wine, kid. I’ll take care of the wine.”

  “I’ll order you some Chianti, Papa. Real Chianti.

  Anything else?”

  “Typewrite machine.”

  “I got a portable upstairs. But you can’t type, Papa.”

  He studied his cigar. “You type. I talk.”

  It touched me. Only last evening he had left Mama, and now he wanted to send her a little message. “That’s fine, Papa. She’ll be very happy.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Who?”

  “Coletta Andrilli.”

  “I thought you wanted to write a letter to Mama.”

  “What for? I seen her yesterday. Good God, kid.”

  “Why the typewriter?”

  “My Uncle Mingo and the bandits. We write the story. For the little boy, so he’ll know about Uncle Mingo. Make him feel good, proud.”

  “Not today, Papa. We’ll do it, but later.”

  “Today. Now.”

  “But why today?”

  Fiercely he answered, frightened he answered: “Because I might die any time. Any minute.”

  “Some other time.”

  Quick pain smothered his face. Wi
thout a word he rose and walked very fast into the house. I saw him hurry through the living room without speaking to Joyce. He clambered up the stairs. As I reached the living room the door of the guest bedroom closed sharply. Joyce peered at me over her reading glasses.

  “What did you do to that poor old man?”

  “Nothing. He wants me to write a story about his Uncle Mingo.”

  “You refused, of course.”

  “I said, later.”

  “After Dorothy Lamour and the gypsies?”

  “Don’t be clever.”

  “It’s wrong to treat your father like this. It’s a sin. You know very well that you should reverence the aged, specially your parents. It’s your sacred obligation before God.”

  Big and calm, she was. A big white rock, unperturbed as the breakers smashed against her. A tower of ivory, she was, a morning star, a rolling hill, a Boulder Dam.

  “What’s eating you, anyhow?”

  “I can’t allow you to abuse your father.”

  I groped around for an answer, but there was none. It shook me up because she was so sure of herself. She was a woman of infinite tact who rarely lashed out. I thought of apologizing to Papa, but that would trap me into a session with his Uncle Mingo. Not that I hated Uncle Mingo. I didn’t hate Uncle Mingo. I vowed again that I would write his story, but I just didn’t want to write the goddamn thing at that moment.

  “I’m going to the studio.”

  She had resumed her reading. She looked up.

  “What did you say?”

  “I’m going to the studio.”

  “If God is all-good and all-knowing, why does He create certain souls He knows will suffer eternal damnation?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But I do,” she smiled.

  “Isn’t that just ducky.”

  I walked out to the garage and got into the car. It was twenty minutes to the studio, through heavy crosstown traffic, but I was glad for the snarl of cars and the hooting of busses. Here was the temper of our time. After the baby was born, Joyce would feel it again, the comfort of confusion, the all-excluding necessity of staying alive on the earth. A woman’s confinement was a bad time for a man. Creation gave her terrible strength and she got along without him. But it would pass. I saw her slim again, in black lace, starved for my arms. A first child improved their figures, ripened them. I was very happy when I got to the studio. I was reeling with love, savoring the joys to come.