The John Fante Reader

by John Fante

  My secretary was on her feet, waiting for me.

  “Call your wife. It’s urgent.”

  Even as I dialed, I saw her prostrate in the back of a taxi, a messy scene, the baby half born, Joyce moaning, the cab driver in terror, motorcycle police ripping an opening through Wilshire traffic, sirens shrieking as the cab roared to the hospital.

  Joyce answered the phone.

  “Your father’s gone.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Back to San Juan.”

  “But he can’t. He hasn’t any money.”

  “He’s walking. Down Wilshire. I couldn’t stop him.”

  “I’ll get him.”

  I hung up, hurried out to the car, and raced toward Wilshire. A mile east of my house, I found him. I found him and wept. He sat on a bench on the boulevard, at a bus stop. His tool kit and roped suitcases were beside him. There on the corner he sat, an old man with his ruined possessions. He sat without hope, weary in a big town, at the edge of a river of automobiles, waves of monoxide gas flooding his tired face. Yes, I wept. I wanted to beat my breast and say, mea culpa, mea culpa, for I saw the pathos of the aged, the loneliness of the last years, my Papa, my old Papa, all the way from Abruzzi, a peasant to the end, sitting on the bench, alone in the world. Why, sure, I would write his story! Why, sure, we would put it down about Uncle Mingo, for the baby to read! It was the most important thing a man had to write. I parked the car and wiped my eyes and went to him on the bench.

  “Papa. What you doing here?”

  “Hello, kid.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “What was Uncle Mingo like, Papa? Tell me the whole thing from the beginning.”

  “He had red hair, kid. Big feet. Very strong man.”

  But he couldn’t continue. He began to cry, and I cried too, and we put our arms around one another and cried and cried because we knew the importance of Uncle Mingo and we loved him so much after all these years.

  “Come on, Papa. Let’s go home. We’ll write it down. I’m hot now, Papa. I’ll write the whole damn thing.”

  I tried to help him from the bench, but he pulled away.

  “I got no home, kid. Nobody wants me.”

  “Come on, Papa. We’ll get you some wine, then we’ll go home and write it.”

  “A little bottle, maybe.”

  He took out a blue polka dot bandana and wiped his eyes and sent a blast from his nose. Then he pulled out his pocketbook with the many compartments, and I saw the garlic again, like a snarling little brown flame, and he poked around and his fingers held some coins, sixty or seventy cents, which he offered me.

  “A little bottle, for your papa.”

  “Put it away, Papa. I’ll get you the best wine in the world. Save your money, Papa. I got money.”

  We carried the luggage to the car and he got in beside me. So he had forgiven me, and it was good to be forgiven, and I wanted to show my thanks. We drove to a liquor store with many handsome bottles from everywhere, and he looked about, his sadness vanishing in that shimmer of beautiful bottles. Only a little wine, he insisted, something to wet his lips, maybe a pint of California wine, but the great wide world was on these shelves, and it was for my Papa. Some Cabernet from Chile, and he weakened and we ordered a few bottles; and some ChAteau Lyonnat; and a case of golden Bordeaux, and he smiled and thought it was very foolish and expensive for a man who wanted only a sip or two of California claret. Yes, Joyce was right, and I must honor the aged, pay homage to my Papa, and he almost sobbed to hold that bottle of Chianti wrapped in straw, so we bought a case of that too.

  “It’s too much,” he said, and he wrung his hands, but he got into the spirit of the thing presently, he lit a cigar and a shrewd merchant-prince aspect came over him, and he walked up and down the handsome store, pulling out bottles, reading labels, putting bottles back. He was a man of superb taste, he knew Portuguese brandies, and he did not forget Martell. But there was an exotic side to his nature too, for he liked the Florentine anisette made by the Italian monks, and when he saw the tall golden bottle of Galliano I knew he must have that too, an old man must have Galliano, the bottle is so exquisitely tall, the liqueur as yellow as the Italian sun.

  The clerk promised quick delivery to my house, but Papa trusted only himself with the Galliano, and he felt he should bring the Martell too. We drove home and pulled into the garage. He got out carefully, measuring each movement.

  Joyce was glad to see us come in together and she kissed us, and her lips on my cheeks were the lips of a nun.

  “Bless you, dearest,” she said.

  It was the first time in her life she ever said such a thing. Papa opened the Galliano, and the Martell, and we got comfortable in the living room. Like an alchemist in some ancient Venetian cellar, he poured himself two ounces of Martell and smiled in blissful content as he floated an ounce of Galliano upon it. He sipped, and such ecstasy seized him I thought he might float gently to the ceiling.

  “My Uncle Mingo had red hair,” he said. “He lived in a stone house with walls three feet thick. …”

  Joyce brought a plate of cheeses and salami.

  “One time I said, ‘Uncle Mingo, what makes you so strong?’ Uncle Mingo, he picked me up with one hand, held me straight out, and he said, ‘Olive oil.’”

  We sampled the Galliano, Joyce and I.

  “Uncle Mingo’s brother, he was the mayor of Torcelli. We had poor roads in those days. Five thousand people. My cousin Aldo died when he was four. Everybody came to the fiesta. Cheese. Antonio didn’t like the priest. Some wheat, but mostly oats. I went up there, and I said, ‘Vico, what’s going on here?’ “That was before we had electric lights …”

  Darkness came. The phone rang many times, and Joyce tiptoed to answer it. She wouldn’t let me move. I had to stay there and listen, get the facts. Papa put the Galliano aside and drank the brandy straight. The doorbell rang; some friends of Joyce. She whisked them past us quietly, to the den.

  “Uncle Mingo’s sister, Della, she married Giuseppe Marcosa. One day I seen d’Annunzio in town, riding a bicycle. Hot in summer, cold in winter. Big man, Uncle Mingo. Chocolate sometimes, but no coffee. Walls, three feet thick. Maybe two acres. Plenty of rock. Six feet six, maybe. Good man. Strong. Tile roof. When Italo died, whole town was there. I said to myself, they could bring the fish from Bari, but he was no good, that Luigi. How could a man steal his own daughter’s dowry? I knew there was trouble …”

  Joyce left her guests to bring my supper on a tray. Papa wasn’t hungry. I gritted my teeth and kept listening. Joyce went back to the den and her friends. Their laughter came through. Papa was half finished with the brandy.

  “We didn’t get no rain that year. My cousin went to Naples. Oh, we had a few grapes but the crop was poor. Olive country, rock in the soil. No barber shops in Torcelli, you cut your own. It didn’t snow till the 19th of January. Uncle Mingo came over to the house, and he was mad …”

  The doorbell rang again. It was the delivery man from the liquor store. He piled sacks and cases in the hall. Papa staggered into the kitchen and returned with a corkscrew. He opened a bottle of Chianti. For a moment I thought the ordeal was over. He swayed uncertainly, pulling at the bottle, but he came back to the living room and sat down again.

  “Let me see now-where was I?”

  I would see it through to the end. I would die in that room, chained to that chair, but I would hear it all. “Your Uncle Mingo came to the house, and he was mad.”

  “Sure he was mad! How much can a man stand? You don’t know. You sit here in Los Angeles, with plenty to eat, but what do you know about a man’s problems? All those rock, falling on his land. The little boy was sick. My mother went over. Wind blowing all the time. The goat died, and Dino went to Rome to be a priest. The taxes were too high. I was seventeen before I got to Naples. Had trouble with my eyes. Uncle Mingo took off his shoe, and his foot was bleeding. We had olive oil, but the frost ruined the grape. No lights, no gas.
Elena, my brother’s wife, had a baby. Uncle Mingo got him by the neck, and he said, ‘Alfredo, I’ll break every bone in your body’ That was the night it rained. They were all afraid of Uncle Mingo. …”

  He never got to the bandits. Joyce’s friends departed in respectful silence; he drank two bottles of Chianti, and he spoke of many things, but I never heard the details of Uncle Mingo and the bandits. Nearing midnight, Joyce tiptoed upstairs. We sat in the small light from a table lamp. Slowly, interminably, he went to sleep. I roused him, but still asleep he climbed the stairs, his arm around my shoulder. I helped him to his room, pulled off his clothes, and covered him up, long underwear and all.

  My work was not yet finished. In the morning he would ask for the story. I went to my room and uncovered the portable. I set down the date and wrote it in the form of a letter.

  Dear Child to Be Born:

  Tonight your Grandpa told me the story of his Uncle Mingo and the bandits. Uncle Mingo was your great-great-uncle. I write this tale because your Grandpa wishes it preserved for the day when you will be able to read and possibly enjoy it …

  I thought it could be done in twenty minutes. But out of that chaos of jumbled anecdotes something had to emerge. It came, a mood. At four in the morning, my teeth afire from cigarettes, I was still pounding away. To hell with the kid; I could sell this one to the Saturday Evening Post. Through the night I heard Papa snore. I heard him rise and groan and make his way to the bathroom. There was much commotion in the hall, and the pattering of many feet. If Papa was not in possession of the bathroom, Joyce was. Out of their rooms these two people kept coming in a steady procession to the bathroom. Once I heard rapid pacing in the hall. It was Joyce, awaiting her turn. Papa emerged in his long underwear. They looked at one another, smiled in somnambulistic understanding, and went their separate ways.

  I came downstairs next day at noon. I had it with me, twenty good pages about an Italian bandit, a heroic figure with red hair. I found Papa in the dining room. He had a sheet of drawing paper spread across the table, and he worked closely with a pencil and a ruler.

  “Here it is, Papa. Uncle Mingo’s story.”

  I tossed it on the drawing paper. He picked up the sheets and handed them back. “Save it for the boy.”

  “Don’t you want to read it?”

  “What I got to read it for? Good God, kid, I lived it.”

  —Full of Life

  I THOUGHT IT WAS A WHIM OF HERS, a passing fancy, but now she saw no reason to hide the facts. Since the beginning of pregnancy she had felt the pull of religion, the urgency for change. It had grown stronger with the child. At first she had concealed it, even from herself, but the deception made her miserable and she began to read, searching, the mysterious urge increasing. She had kept it from me, but during my absence up North she had made the decision: she was going to join the Church.

  She was so ripe now, so juicy, so huge. The gray eyes devoured you with the child she bore, you felt yourself drowning in their hypnotic depths if you stared too long, and the passion of faith throbbed in them. I often found her staring past me, entranced in some spiritual pipe dream. At noon the Angelus sounded in the steeple of St. Boniface, the parish church. She instantly dropped whatever was at hand, her book, her comb, the dustcloth, and recited the Angelus prayers. It made me uneasy.

  “Why are you embarrassed?” she asked. “You’re supposed to be a liberal. Prove it, right here in your own home.”

  At meals she announced that we would now say grace, and I would look at Papa and he would shrug at me, and we would stare foolishly at our plates until grace was said. She was in deadly earnest. She spent hours in her room, smoking cigarettes as she lay on the bed and reflected on the fleeting quality of life. I could not fathom it. Sometimes I thought it was the fear of death in relation to childbirth. One night the old passion returned, and I slipped in beside her and put my arms around her. She was sound asleep. Then she woke, snapped on the bed lamp, got to one elbow, and stared down at me, vapors of warm piety coming from her eyes.

  “You should practice self-denial,” she smiled. “It will make you very strong.”

  “Who cares about being strong?”

  “Today I read a poem. It went like this:

  Take all the pleasures of all the spheres

  And multiply each through endless years—

  One minute of heaven is worth them all.”

  I made the most dignified exit possible under the circumstances, and crawled back into my own bed, wondering where it all would end.

  Twice a week she went to the rectory of St. Boniface for religious instruction. She read the catechism and a few simple tracts the priest had offered. But these were not enough. She was a rapid, voracious reader, wolfing everything she could find on the subject. She read canon law, Aquinas, $aG Kempis, St. Augustine, the papal encyclicals, and the Catholic Encyclopedia.

  One evening as I lolled in the bathtub, she knocked on the door and came in.

  “Do you believe in free will?”

  I could answer that one, remembering it from my schoolboy catechism.

  “Certainly I believe in free will.”

  “Do idiots have free will? The insane?”

  That wasn’t in the catechism.

  “I don’t know about idiots.”

  She beamed in serenity.

  “But I do.”

  “Hurray for you!”

  In four weeks, a few days before entering the hospital, she planned to be baptized. She was having a most absorbing and difficult time selecting a patron saint. She screened them down, and out of hundreds she reduced her choice to one of two: Saint Elizabeth and Saint Anne. I did not wish to become involved in this business, but she was always talking about it.

  Finally I said, “What’s wrong with Saint Teresa? She’s got a big reputation, all over the world.”

  “Too popular,” Joyce said. “Not obscure, not mysterious enough. Besides, she was an awfully plain woman. Personally I lean toward Saint Elizabeth. She was very rich and very beautiful. She wrote well, too. I feel very close to Saint Elizabeth. I think she understands me better that anyone in the world.”

  “Isn’t that just ducky.”

  She gave me a sweet tolerant smile.

  “I’m ready for your scoffs. I’ve prepared myself.”

  “I’m not scoffing. I just don’t want to become involved. I got plenty of troubles of my own.”

  “You’re in my prayers constantly,” she said. “I know how troubled you are. I was that way too, once.”

  “Oh, stop it.”

  “But I do pray for you. And for the baby. And for world peace.”

  She was suddenly irresistible, and I made a lunge for her, but all I got was a fat kiss on the cheek as the white balloon poked me in the stomach.

  She went shopping for rosaries, a statue of Saint Elizabeth, and a number of crucifixes. She brought little bottles of holy water and attached a bronze font inside the door of her bedroom, within easy reach of her hand, so that she could make the sign of the cross with consecrated water whenever she entered the room. The statue of Saint Elizabeth went on an elaborate knickknack shelf in the corner. She heaped flowers before it, lit candles, and read the saint’s works.

  I said to Papa, “What do you think about Joyce becoming a Catholic?”

  “Good. Fine.”

  “What’s good about it?”

  “Is it bad?”

  “I like to plan my family.”

  “Then plan it. Get going. Babies.”

  “Babies, sure. Lots of babies. But I want them when I want them, Papa. No birth control in the Church, Papa.”

  “Birth control?”

  “You can’t stop them from coming. They just keep coming, on and on.”

  “Is that bad? That’s good.”

  “We’re not peasants any more, Papa. We got to stop someplace.”

  His eyes squinted.

  “I don’t like that kind of talk.”

  “A man shou
ld be able to say when he wants a baby.”

  “You heard me, kid. I don’t like it.”

  “Suppose they come, and we got no money?”

  “Get money.”

  “It’s rough, Papa.”

  Up came his fist, the fingers splayed, grabbing my shirt.

  “Not my grandchildren, understand? You leave them alone. Let them come. They got as much right here as you.”

  I took his fist away.

  “It has nothing to do with rights, Papa. It’s a question of economics.”

  “Cut out reading them books.”

  “Books—what books? I can’t support too many.”

  “We couldn’t afford none either, me and Mama. Not one. But we had four. We did it without money, a few dollars, but never enough money. You want we should use something from the drugstore, and you not even born today, without your sister and brothers, and me and Mama alone in the world? For what?”

  Stated that way, it was unanswerable.

  “I guess you’re basically a religious man, Papa. You really believe.”

  “Grandchildren. That’s what I believe in. And leave them books alone.”

  Yes, she was in deadly earnest, with the passion of a convert. She liked walking up and down before the statue of Saint Elizabeth, saying the rosary. Through the half-open door I saw her moving back and forth, she and the child, her lips reciting the beads, her eyes catching a view of herself in the mirror as she tried to pull her tummy in and up.

  One morning she walked with me out to the garage.

  “You know of course that we must get married as soon as possible.”

  “We’re already married. The justice of the peace married us in Reno.”

  “It was a civil ceremony. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t count.”

  “It counts with me.”

  “I want my marriage sanctified.”