“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 wall 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.
A realtor named J. W. Randall had sold us the house. He was lean and sharp, a cowboy retired from the saddle. He came to the house and inspected the damage. He crushed the pulpy wood between his fingers, brushing away the termites swarming over the long hairs on the back of his hand.
“Mr. Randall, we’ve been cheated. I’m going to sue.”
“Can’t sue me.”
“You arranged the sale.”
“Smith’s your man. Sue Smith.”
Smith was the termite inspector.
“You hear that, Joyce? Smith’s our man. We’ll drag him through the courts.”
Joyce said, “Mr. Randall, you’re a scoundrel.”
He straightened.
“Now just a minute, young woman.”
She walked away from him. Mr. Randall was injured and angry. He stalked out of the house. I chased after him. He got into his car, surly and breathing heavily through his nose.
“I been in this business thirty years. Hell-fire, man! I
made
Wilshire Boulevard! And she calls me a scoundrel.”
“She’s upset, Mr. Randall. It’s her condition.”
“Son, let me give you a bit of advice. I’m a grandfather. Got four grandchildren. Better calm that young lady down. Pregnant woman’s got to have pure thoughts. No wonder we got so much juvenile delinquency. Watch it, boy. I know what I’m talking about.”
“What about Smith?”
“Sue the man.”
Smith could not be found. I went to the garage that had been his place of business, a stucco shack behind a carpenter shop on Temple Street. He called his company Murder, Inc. He was gone. Nobody knew anything about him, except that he was fond of angelica. I talked to a lawyer. He told me it would be two years before we could get a court date, and without Smith we had no case. A contractor came to the house and gave us an estimate for repairs. He said four thousand.
Joyce: “We could have ten babies with that.”
Four thousand! It was a knife through my heart. I
staggered into the kitchen, sick and wounded. The main damage was there in the kitchen. On hands and knees under the sink I groped, poking around. There was a noise. I put my ear to the floor. Down there, only inches away, I could hear them, the vile beasts, actually gnawing my wood. It was the rhythmic grinding of thousands of tiny jaws, feeding on the flesh and blood of John Fante.
Then, suddenly, I knew what to do. Like cool waters, the thought bathed me. Like parting clouds, the storm had passed and he was there, bold as sunlight, the greatest bricklayer in all California, the noblest builder of them all! Papa! My own flesh and blood, old Nick Fante. I ran to the stairs and called Joyce.
“How blind we are! How stupid!”
“Why?”
“My father!”
“Wonderful!”
She hurried downstairs and we grabbed one another. She loved Papa too, and he adored her.
“He’ll do it for nothing. We’ll save thousands.”
But she grew wistful, serious.
“Promise me something.”
“Certainly.”
“That you’ll never treat our child the way your father treated you.”
“He was a good father, rough but good.”
“Once he beat your bare flesh with a trowel. Your sister Stella told me.”
“I had it coming. I sold his concrete mixer and bought a bicycle.”
“You don’t beat children any more. It’s been disproved. You deny them some privilege.”
“He denied me the bicycle. Besides, it was the only concrete mixer he had.”
“Have you read
Wolf Child and Human Child,
by Gesell?”
I hadn’t.
“Every father should read it. It’s basic.”
“I’ll read it on my way up North.”
M
Y
M
AMA AND
P
APA
lived in San Juan, in the Sacramento Valley, a dozen miles down the road from the state capitol. They were in halcyon retirement now, drawing state pensions, floating through the most placid passage of their lives. They lived in a four-room redwood cottage, with a capacious fig tree shading the back yard. A dozen hens clucked in the chicken yard, loft fowl, glutted by fallen figs and luscious Tokays from vines menacing the back fence. These hens debouched massive eggs whose warmth Mama loved against her palms in ironic nostalgia, for there was once a time in the life of this mother when children outnumbered the eggs.
On a barrel under the fig tree slept Papa’s four cats, glistening Egyptian deities, sleek from beef hearts, calves’ brains and milk. These four cats had replaced four children who had grown up to leave the Valley and marry and acquire enfeebled eyes and partial dentures because in that earlier time work was scarce and Papa never earned enough to feed his children regularly on beef hearts, calves’ brains and milk.
They lived in serene loneliness, my Papa and Mama, reading the
Sacramento Bee
and listening to the radio,
gathering eggs and raking the big green fig leaves, two people in their late sixties, eager for the postman who no longer terrified them with bills and too seldom arrived with letters from the children who were gone.
It wasn’t necessary for Stella to write. She and her husband lived on a farm outside San Juan and came twice a week with baskets of zucchini, tomatoes, peaches, oranges and butter.
Stella brought her little girls, and on hot afternoons Papa sat with them under the fig tree, sneaking them sips of iced wine, telling them stories, and wondering why in the name of Our Lady of Mount Carmel he had no grandsons. For Papa was sixty-seven, and though he admired the non-Italian girls his sons had married, he also suspected them of trickery in the matter of procreation, of not knowing how to work at it.
Once a week Joe Muto came down the road in his Ford truck to deliver two gallons of claret at fifty cents a gallon. He liked bringing his four grandsons, little boys with black eyes and Muto faces, and Papa scowled at them because they were not his.
Life without grandsons was not life at all. Sitting under the fig tree, Papa tilted the claret jug from his shoulder, lapped the cool wine and brooded. In the late afternoon the mailman drove by, and Mama would be at the gate near the box, waiting, pretending to pull weeds here and there. If there was no mail, she pulled another weed or two, peered nervously down the road toward Sacramento, and came back to the house, wincing on arthritic feet. Day after day Papa watched this happen. Finally his patience would break.
“Bring pen and ink!”
Dutifully Mama would come from the house with
a tablet and writing materials, set them on the barrel under the fig tree, and settle herself to take another letter from Papa to her three sons: one in Seattle, another in Susan-ville, and the third in the South. They were letters she never sent, a gesture of appeasement, because Papa derived much satisfaction from the dictation, it soothed his nerves as he paced back and forth through the hissing leaves, now and then stopping to take thoughtful gulps of claret.
“Send it to all of them. Write it plain. Put it down just like I tell you. Don’t change a word.”
She would dip the pen, her knees against the barrel, as she sat uncomfortably on an apple box.
Dear Sons:
Your mother is fine. I’m fine too. We don’t need you boys any more. So have a good time, laugh and play, and forget all about your father. But not your mother. Don’t worry about your father. It’s your mother. Your father worked hard to buy you shoes and put you through school. He don’t regret nothing. He don’t need anything. So have a good time, boys, laugh and play, but think about your mother some time. Write her a letter. Don’t write to your father because he don’t need it, but your mother’s getting old now, boys. You know how they get when they get old. So have a good time while you’re young. Laugh and play and think about your mother some time. Makes no difference about your father. He never did need your help. But your mother gets lonesome. Have a good time. Laugh and play.
Yours truly,
Nick Fante
And when Mama was finished, he would sip from the jug, smack his lips, and add: “Send it air mail.”
I reached San Juan at noon, flying up from Burbank and taking the bus out of Sacramento. The folks lived at the edge of town, where the city pavement ended and the last street light was a hundred feet away. Walking down the road past the old board fence, I could see Papa under the fig tree. His drawing board was spread over the barrel; on it were pencils, rulers, a T square. The cats slept in the swing, piled in hot furry confusion.
Hearing the whine of the gate, Papa turned, his phlegmatic eyes squinting for range through waves of gossamer heat. It was my first visit in six months. Except for his vision, he was superb. He had thick bricky hands and a sun-baked neck, handsome as sewer pipe. I was within fifty feet of him before he recognized me. I dropped my overnight bag and put out my hand.
“Hello, Papa.”
He had the hands of Beelzebub, horny and calloused, the gnarled oft-broken fingers of a bricklayer. He looked down at the grip.
“What you got in there?”
“Shirts and things.”
He inspected me carefully.
“New suit?”
“Fairly new.”
“How much?”
I told him.
“Too much.”
Emotion was piling up inside him. He was very glad I had come home, but he tried not to show it, his chin trembling.
“Smell the peppers? Mama’s frying peppers.”
From the back porch it came, a river of ambrosial redolence, fresh green peppers sizzling in golden olive oil, charmed with the fragrance of garlic and the balm of rosemary, all of it mingled with the scent of magnolias and the deep green richness of vineyards in the back country.
“Smells good. How you feel, Papa?”
He was shrinking. Every year he receded a little, or so it seemed. Neither of us were tall men, but now in his late years he gave me the sense of being taller than he was. The yard was smaller too, and I was surprised at the fig tree. It was not nearly as big as I imagined.
“The baby. How’s the little bambino?”
“Six weeks more or less.”
“And Miss Joyce?” He worshipped her. He could not bring himself to call her simply by her name.
“She’s fine.”
“She carry him high?” He touched the chest. “Or low?” His hand dropped to his stomach.
“High. Way up, Papa.”
“Good. Little boy, that means.”
“I don’t know.”
“How you mean, don’t know?”
“You can’t be sure of these things.”
“You can, if you do the right thing.”
He frowned, looked straight into my eyes.
“You been eating plenty eggs, like I told you?”
“I don’t like eggs, Papa.”
He sighed and shook his head.
“Remember what I told you? Eat plenty eggs. Three, four, every day. Otherwise, it’s a girl.” He made a face as he added: ‘You want a girl?”
“I’d like a boy, Papa. But you have to take what you get.
It worried him. Back and forth he paced through the fig leaves. “That’s no way to talk. That’s no good.”
“But Papa…”
He whirled around.
“Don’t
but
me. Don’t
Papa
me! I told you, and I told you, all of you: Jim, Tony, you. I said: eggs. Plenty eggs. Look at them. Jim: nothing. Married two years. Tony: nothing. Married three years. And you. What you got? Nothing.” He moved close to me, his face near mine, his claret breath bursting at me. “Remember what I said about oysters? You got money now. You can afford oysters.”
I remembered a post card dictated to Mama and sent to Joyce and me on our honeymoon at Lake Tahoe. The card said I should eat oysters twice a week to induce fertility and the conception of male children. But I had not followed the advice because I didn’t like oysters. I had no personal animosity toward oysters. I simply didn’t like their taste.
“I don’t care for oysters, Papa.”
It staggered him. With a limp neck and open jaws, he flung himself into the swing and wiped his forehead. The cats wakened, yawning with sharp pink tongues.
“Holy Mother of Heaven! So this is the end of the Fante line.”
“I think it’s a boy, Papa.”
“You think!” He cursed me, a scathing coruscation of firecracker Italian. He spat at my feet, sneering at my gabardine and my sport moccasins. He took the stub of a Toscanelli cigar from his shirt and jammed it into his teeth. He lit up, flung the match away.
“You think! Who asked you to think? I
told
you: oysters. Eggs. I been through it. I give you advice from experience. What you been eating—candy, ice cream? Writer! Bah! You stink like the plague.”
This was my Papa for sure. He had not shrunk, after all. And the fig tree was as big as ever.
“Go see your Mama.” There was sarcasm in his voice. “Go tell her what a fine big boy she’s got.”
Greeting Mama was always the most difficult task of a homecoming. My Mama was the fainting type, specially if we had been away more than three months. Inside three months there was some control over the situation. Then she only teetered dangerously and appeared about to fall over, giving us time to catch her before the collapse. An absence of a month entailed no problem at all. She merely wept for a few moments before the usual barrage of questions.
But this was a six-month interval and experience had taught me not to burst in on her. The technique was to enter on tiptoe, put your arms around her from behind, quietly announce yourself, and wait for her knees to buckle. Otherwise she would gasp, “Oh, thank God!” and go plummeting to the floor like a stone. Once on the floor she had a trick of sagging in every joint like a mass of quicksilver, and it was impossible to lift her. After futile pawing and grunting on the part of the returned son she got to her feet by her own power and immediately started cooking big dinners. Mama loved fainting. She did it with great artistry. All she needed was a cue.
Mama loved dying, too. Once or twice a year, and
specially at Christmas time, the telegrams would come, announcing that Mama was dying again. But we could not risk the possibility that for once it was true. From all over the Far West we would rush to San Juan to be at her bedside. For a couple of hours she would die, making a clatter of saucers in her throat, showing only the whites of her eyes, calling us by name as she entered the valley of shadows. Suddenly she would feel much better, crawl out of her death bed, and cook up a huge ravioli dinner.
She was at the stove, her back to me, as I entered the kitchen and moved quietly toward her. Midway, she sensed my presence, turning slowly, a spatula in her hand. A kind of nausea seemed to grip her, a disembodiment, the elevator zooming down out of control, the dizzy moment before the plunge from a great height; her eyes rolled, the blood fled from her quick white face, the strength left her fingers and the spatula hit the floor.
“Johnny! Oh, thank God!”
I rushed forward and she fell into my arms, her hair the color of white clouds at my shoulder, her hands around my neck. But she did not lose consciousness. She seemed to be having a heart attack. I knew this from the quick rasping gasps, the quivering of her small frame. Carefully I led her to a chair at the kitchen table. She lay back, her mouth open, smiling bravely, her left arm helpless at her side, and you could see that she was trying to lift the arm and was without strength.
“Water. Water…please.”
I brought her a glass and put it to her lips. She sipped wearily, too far gone, too drained, only seconds from the other shore.
“My arm…no feelings…my chest…pain…
my boy…the baby…I won’t live to see…”
She collapsed face down on the checkered red and white oilcloth. I was reasonably sure she was all right, but when I gently turned her face and saw the gray purple of her cheeks I felt that I was wrong this time, and I yelled for Papa.
“Get a doctor! Hurry.”
It restored her strength. Slowly she raised her head.
“I’m better. It was only a little attack.”
It was my turn to weaken, relieved, suddenly exhausted. I threw myself into a chair and tried to unravel my fingers as I groped for a smoke. Papa entered.
“What’s going on?”
My Mama smiled bravely. She was so pleased to see me distraught. She could not doubt my love now. She felt quite strong again.
“It’s nothing. Nothing at all.”
She was very happy. She purred. She rose and came around to where I sat and took my head in her arms and stroked my hair.
“He’s tired from his trip. Get him a glass of wine.”
We understood, Papa and I. There was a rumble of curses in his throat, scarcely audible, as he opened the icebox and removed a decanter of wine. He took a glass from the cupboard and filled it. Mama smiled, watching. He glanced at her angrily.
“You cut that out.”
The great green eyes of my Mama opened their widest.
“Me?”
“You cut out that stuff.”
I drank the wine. It was very fine wine, out of the
warm soil of those very plains, chilled delicately by ice. Mama was glad to have me in her kitchen. I could see her spine straighten, her shoulders rising. She took the glass from my hand and drained it. Then she looked at me carefully.
“Such a pretty shirt. I’ll wash and iron it before you leave.”
We ate the peppers with goat’s cheese, salted apples, bread and wine. Mama’s tongue whirred incessantly, a trapped moth free at last. Normally Papa would have quieted her down, but the son was home and this was cause for relaxing the rules. In a little while her chatter would suddenly exasperate him, and she would slip back to her cocoon of respectful silence. We ate while Mama talked and walked around the kitchen, filling the room with thought fragments. An electric fan purred on the icebox, turning left and right and back again. It seemed to be following Mama around the room, like a face staring in blank astonishment.