The Brotherhood of the Grape
For Joyce, of course
ONE NIGHT last September my brother phoned from San Elmo to…
WE CHOSE to be silent as I drove to the…
IT WAS A COMFORTABLE flight, serene and reflective, up the…
MY OLD MAN had never wanted children. He had wanted…
THE JET HIT the Sacramento runway on schedule and the…
THE ONLY CHANGE in the Café Roma in over a…
HALF A BLOCK from my parents’ house on Pleasant Street…
I WAS TOO TIRED to care. Like all the rooms…
MY FIRST DAY in Los Angeles I took a job…
I WAS A FAILURE at the Toyo Fish Company. A…
NOISE WAKENED ME in the morning—the shuffle of thick shoes…
WITH HALF AN HOUR remaining before we took off, I…
THE THREE SENIORS were waiting in the Datsun camper when…
TWENTY MILES EAST of San Elmo the camper slowed as Cavallero…
BY NECESSITY it became my turn to drive, with Zarlingo…
IT WAS DARK when I finished unloading the truck. A…
THE NIGHT WAS cold and misty. From half a dozen…
THE WAS SOMBER and wretched in the morning, eyes smoldering…
THEN A peculiar thing happened. My father died. We were…
THUNDER AND lightning wakened me. The slant roof rumbled as…
IN THE MORNING the storm was gone and so was…
IT WAS a diabetic coma.
THE LIGHTS were out and my mother’s house was in…
AFTER BREAKFAST I telephoned Virgil and told him that the…
WE WAITED for him at dinner, seated around the kitchen…
TWO BY TWO we trooped past the reception desk and…
THREE NIGHTS later I dreamed of my father’s funeral. Miss…
IT WAS TEN minutes down Highway 80 to the turnoff…
THE DAY BEFORE the funeral Harriet arrived from Redondo Beach…
I THOUGHT MY father’s funeral would bring out the whole…
TEN CARS of mourners followed the hearse across town to…
O
NE NIGHT
last September my brother phoned from San Elmo to report that Mama and Papa were again talking about divorce.
“So what else is new?”
“This time it’s for real,” Mario said.
Nicholas and Maria Molise had been married for fifty-one years, and though it had been a wretched relationship from the beginning, held together by the relentless Catholicism of my mother who punished her husband with exasperating tolerance of his selfishness and contempt, it now seemed utter madness for these old people to leave each other at such a late time in their lives, for my mother was seventy-four and my father two years older.
I asked Mario what the trouble was this time.
“Adultery. She caught him red-handed.”
I laughed. “That old man? How can he commit adultery?”
In truth it was the first accusation of this type in many years, the previous one having to do with my father’s forays upon Adele Horner, a postal employee—“a crooked little witch,” my mother had described—a woman of fifty with a slight limp. But that was years ago, and Papa wasn’t the man he used to be. Indeed, on his birthday in April I had seen him hunched on the floor, groaning and pounding the rug with both fists as he fought off an attack from his prostate gland.
“Come on, Mario,” I chided. “You’re talking about a burned-out old man.”
He answered that Mama had discovered lipstick on Papa’s underwear, and upon confronting him with this evidence (I could see her thrusting it under his nose), he had seized her by the neck and throttled her, bending her over the kitchen table and booting her in the buttocks. Though he had been barefoot, the kick had left a purple bruise on Mama’s hip and there were red blotches at her throat.
Ashamed of the cowardly attack on his wife, my father fled the house as Mario entered the back door. The sight of Mama’s abrasions so enraged him that he rushed outside, leaped into his truck, and sped off to the police station where he sought a complaint against his father, Nicholas Joseph Molise, charging him with assault and battery.
Chief Regan of the San Elmo police tried to dissuade Mario from such drastic action, for he was an old drinking crony of my father’s and a fellow member of the Elks Club. But Mario pounded the desk and held to his demands, forcing the chief to do his duty. Accompanied by a deputy, Chief Regan drove to the Molise house on Pleasant Street.
To Mario’s disgust, my old man refused to submit to arrest and stood his ground on the front porch, armed with a shovel. A crowd of neighbors quickly gathered and my father and the chief slipped into the house and sat at the kitchen table, drinking wine and discussing the situation while Mama wept piteously from the bedroom.
By now the crowd in front of the Molise residence had spread into the street and two extra police cars were summoned to cordon off the whole block. Suddenly the camaraderie between Papa and the chief came to an abrupt end. The chief produced handcuffs and hostilities broke out. Deputies rushed in when Regan yelled for help, and my father was pinned to the floor and shackled. Breathing heavily, he was dragged outside to a police car.
The sight of her spouse in irons drew cries of anguish from my mother. She rushed the police, swinging and clawing with such frenzy that she fainted on the sidewalk, where her neighbors, Mrs. Credenza and Mrs. Petropolos, dragged her, heels bumping, into the house.
My brother Mario, having reverted to his helpless fear of my father, now reappeared from behind the garbage cans in the alley and hurried to Mama’s side as she lay on the couch, consoling her and holding her hand.
Trembling with a desire to forgive her husband, Mama rose haltingly, reeling across the room to drop to her knees before the statue of Saint Teresa, imploring the Little Flower not to punish her wayward spouse, to look with pity once more on his transgressions, and to plead before the court of Almighty God for his immortal soul.
She begged Mario to drop the charges against the old man and secure his release from the San Elmo jail. “He’s old, Mario. He don’t mean no harm, but he’s losing his mind.”
At first Mario refused to consider freeing his father, preferring that Papa remain in the slammer for a few hours to cool off. But my mother’s lamentations, her noble forbearance, and her warning that Papa would tear his son to pieces unless quickly freed made Mario relent. She and Mario drove downtown to spring the old man.
“What else could I do?” Mario implored over the telephone. “He’s a mean, vicious old man, and the longer you lock him up, the meaner he gets. He’s a mad dog.”
To their astonishment, and to the disgust of Chief Regan, Nick Molise did not wish to be released, nor would he hear of a dismissal of the charges. Cursing Mario and Mama, sneering at his captors, he freely accepted captivity, vowing to fight his case through every court in the land, even to the Supreme Court, to prove that there was still justice in America.
“Then he spit in my face,” Mario said. “He said I was Judas who killed Christ. He said I wasn’t his son anymore. And then he kicked me in the stomach.”
With that Chief Regan blew his cool, tore up the arrest complaint, and ordered Papa, Mama and Mario out of the police station. Nick Molise wouldn’t budge, his big fists clinging to the cell bars. Three police rapped his knuckles as they jumped him, pushed him down the hall, and flung him into the street.
Here a fight flared between the old man and Mario as they rolled down the station steps and across the sidewalk to the gutter. The police tore them apart and would have booked them for disturbing the peace, but the chief, anxious to avoid further involvement, ordered his staff inside and the door bolted. And then my brother Mario, a peaceful man of forty, a trifle bombastic but hardly a brawler, took an unmerciful clouting from the old man, for Mario would as soon strike our Lord Himself as his own father.
The dreadful imbroglio ended with Mario slumped in the gutter, holding a bloody handkerchief to his nose, while Mama cried out to a gathering of San Elmo citizens watching the spectacle in silence and careful not to become involved.
In truth, this wasn’t the first time the head of the Molise family had made a fool of himself in public. Only a few months before he had taken on a young bartender at the Onyx Club who punched him soundly and threw him into the street, whereupon he had heaved a bench through the saloon’s window. The ruckus cost me a hundred, which I paid by check and, thanks to Regan, the matter never went to court.
In fact, over the years, on street corners, in saloons and polling places, Nick Molise had engaged in so many disputes that the family’s good name was grievously compromised in the town. Even so, the citizens manifested tolerance and good will, for everyone liked the old man and enjoyed his explosive ways. Cranky, noisy, taking advantage of their patience, drunk a good deal of the time, he had free rein in San Elmo, and at night people heard him lurching home along deserted streets, singing bad renditions of “O Sole Mio,” people untroubled in their beds, saying, “There goes old Nick,” and smiling, for he was a part of their lives.
Everyone, that is, except his sons Mario and Virgil. Manager of the Loan Department of the First National Bank, my brother Virgil was convinced that Papa’s antics had ruined his banking career. Mario blamed his father for denying him a college education as well as the opportunity to become a bricklayer and stonemason. As for my sister Stella, she never ceased her disapproval of the old man—his drinking, his gambling, his wenching, and his cruelty toward our mother. She had an uncanny ability to intimidate him. A flash of her dark eyes and he cringed like a dog. Though she loved him, she despised him too, determined to remember all that Mama tried but failed to forget.
But to return to my brother’s telephone call.
After his assault on Mario, my father stood on the steps of the police station and delivered a violent speech to the gathering crowd. He denounced the treachery of his own son for having him arrested, he called the police criminals for abusing a law-abiding citizen, and he castigated Mama as an insane old fool who persecuted an honorable man who only wished to live in peace.
Mario gagged in disgust as he told of Mama’s shrieks of denial while she moved frantically toward the onlookers, snatching at their sleeves as they drew away and she went on and on about the lipstick on her husband’s underwear. “You think that’s the way for a married man to behave?” she beseeched. “Who does his laundry, cleans his house, cooks his meals? Is that the thanks I get—lipstick from the mouth of some slut?”
The crowd dispersed in horror. Even Papa fled the vulgar scene, dashing down Oak Street and across the Southern Pacific tracks to the Café Roma, a hideaway for elderly Italian males.
Bloodied and embarrassed, Mario helped Mama into the truck. As fate would have it, the battery was dead and the car refused to start. Like refugees of war, mother and son trudged across town to the redwood house on Pleasant Street. Later Mario picked up a loan battery from the Shell station and returned to the truck. The police had affixed a parking ticket to his windshield. He drove back to Pleasant Street.
Arriving home, Mama began packing a suitcase, determined to board a bus to Denver, where she planned to move in with her sister Carmelina. She knew she would be welcome, for Carmelina, our ancient aunt, detested my father and had made a lifetime hobby of sabotaging his marriage.
In the midst of my mother’s packing, my sister Stella and my brother Virgil stormed into the house, having heard from many sources of the wild scene in front of the police station. My mother, never one to waste a dramatic improvisation in the presence of her children, promptly passed out on the kitchen floor, thus heading off the hasty and ill-conceived bus ride over the Sierras to Denver, a journey she would have found exceedingly difficult, for she suffered from backache and chronic urinary frequency.
A sniff of crushed garlic against her nostrils brought Mama around, and with the pluck of a Saint Bernadette she began to stagger about, bringing wine and Genoa tarts to the table, where a discussion of her problems with Papa ensued.
These dialogues, I well remembered, had taken place frequently over the years and had never come to anything fruitful. Old bones were excavated and strewn about, everyone talked at the top of his voice, and the emotional mess left only bitterness and gloom. Like the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, the problem of my father was simply insoluble, defying logic, making no sense at all.
My brother Virgil was in a special frenzy. The police station spectacle had been witnessed by his employer, J. K. Eicheldorn, president of the bank, and the distinguished first citizen of San Elmo was not pleased. Calling Virgil into his office, J. K. asserted bluntly that the antics of Mr. and Mrs. Molise were a slur upon the bank’s reputation, and if they continued Virgil’s position would be in jeopardy.
Pounding the kitchen table, Virgil wept as he accused Mama and Papa of being out of their heads, socially irresponsible and doddering old fools who should be put away.
This brought more lamentations from my mother as she wrung her hands and implored Our Lord to come and get her. Mario rushed to her defense, cursing Virgil, damning him as a stuffed shirt and a coward, deserting his own parents for the sake of social approval.
Gifted with a vicious tongue, Virgil quickly put Mario in his place by calling him “the lowest form of human being known to man—a railroad brakeman.” It was too much. Mario struck Virgil in the mouth, and Virgil retaliated with a blow to the nose. Then they were grappling all over the kitchen, overturning chairs, toppling pots and pans from the pantry, Mama shrieking and Stella dashing to her house across the alley to get the help of her husband, John DiMasio, the bricklayer. By the time she returned with John the fight was over. Virgil was gone and Mario stood over the kitchen sink, ministering to a bloody nose for the second time on that eventful day.
Calm was restored, but Mama quickly stirred things up again.
“What am I going to do with that dirty old goat?” she asked. It was an ugly way to provoke a subject that nobody wanted to discuss anymore, and it was so repugnant to DiMasio that he walked out of the house. From the alley he called on Stella to get her ass home.
Stella ignored him. “Mama,” she said, “you have no actual proof that Papa was unfaithful. It’s all circumstantial evidence.”
Mama threw up her hands in shock. “Circumstantial evidence? Oh, Mother of God, protect me from my own children!”
She staggered into the bedroom and returned with the telltale shorts, pushing aside dishes and glasses and spreading the underwear over the center of the checkered tablecloth like a shameless centerpiece. The reddish smears staining the crotch were quite visible.
“It was lipstick sure as hell,” Mario said over the telephone. “The kiss of some tart.”
My sister Stella, married to her wayward, urbane bricklayer, insisted that the stain was from a red mouthwash she had seen in the bathroom. “That’s all it is—plain mouthwash.”
It was as if she had felled Mama with a club. Her face dropped forward on the table, her head thudding.
“I’m so tired,” she moaned. “Oh, Blessed Lord, deliver me from this cross. I just can’t take it anymore. Fifty-one years I’ve done my best, and now I’ve run out of patience. I want out. I want some peace in my old age. I want a divorce.”
She leaped to her feet, electrified by her own words. “Divorce! Divorce!” She raced through the house and out the front door, down the porch steps, and into the middle of the street, screaming at the top of her voice, pulling at her hair.
“Divorce, divorce! I’m getting a divorce!”
Doors opened on both sides of the street and wives spilled out onto front porches, young wives and old, watching in silence and sympathy, the problems in the Molise household having been theirs too for many years.
Next door Mrs. Romano shook her finger approvingly.
“You’re doing the right thing, Maria. Get rid of the old bastard!”
Mario and Virgil dashed from the house, seized Mama, and hustled her back up the porch steps and through the front door.