The Brotherhood of the Grape (12 page)

I
N THE MORNING
the storm was gone and so was my father. I checked the jug. Down another pint. I dressed and stepped outside. The rain had washed the giant forest, settled the dust, cleared the air, and changed the world. Birds shrieked and chipmunks with plumed tails leaped from branch to branch like circus aerialists. The whole earth had put on its Sunday best to celebrate the smokehouse fiasco. The news must have reached far into the sky, for curious clouds drifted past, surveying the ruins.

Angry voices came from the smokehouse area. I hurried over. My father stood in the rubble, hurling aside small stones, trying to clear away the glut of debris. Sam Ramponi was yelling at him. He was in his black silk work clothes and chewing a cigar.

“Don’t be a horse’s ass,” he was saying. “Quit while you’re ahead.”

“I ain’t ahead!” my father yelled, heaving a stone. “I’m behind.”

“What’s the trouble?” I said.

“Damn fool wants to start over.” Then to my father: “Quit, you dumb son of a bitch! Get your stuff together and I’ll drive you home!”

Old Nick went right on heaving stones. His bleary eyes showed him a very tired man.

“What’s the deal?” I asked.

“No deal. We do it right, that’s all.”

Ramponi screamed: “I don’t want it right and I don’t want it wrong! I don’t want it period. I never wanted a smokehouse. It was my wife’s idea. I hate deer meat. I hate beef. I hate pork. I like chicken, and I like fish. So leave it alone. Ruined. Don’t touch it! Pack up your gear and I’ll drive you back.”

“No, sir,” Papa said. “We’re staying right here. We’ll build it again, if it takes all winter.” Pooped, he eased himself upon a flat stone.

Let them argue, let them destroy one another; I was through. I would do no more. I left them hollering and walked back to the cabin. I took a shower. I packed our clothes. I read an old paperback. Occasionally I went to the open door and put my ear toward the smokehouse, invisible through the trees. I heard nothing. But I knew he was there, the jug on his knees. I told myself I was doing the right thing, and yet I was troubled and wondering if I were wrong in not helping him.

Around noon Mrs. Ramponi rushed up to the door.

“There’s something wrong with your father.”

She ran toward the forest and I followed. Nick lay on his back beside the creek, his face to the sky, eyes closed, his breathing deep and difficult. I dropped to his side and he opened his eyes and moaned. Mrs. Ramponi sank to her haunches and touched his flushed face.

“Heart attack,” she said flatly. “I’ve seen it before. My own father.”

“How about just plain drunk? I’ve seen that before too.”

“Let’s try artificial respiration.”

She got to her knees beside him, took a deep breath, and pressed her mouth to his, pushing her breath down his throat. It wakened him with a start. He opened his eyes, saw her face, and loosed a cry of protest, fighting her off. She grasped his head firmly and tried again.

“No!” he growled. “Leave me alone, goddamnit!”

I scooped water from the stream and dashed it into his face. He licked the water from his lips.

Mrs. Ramponi got to her feet.

“The man’s dying.”

“The man’s drunk.”

“Don’t move him. I’ll get a blanket. We’ve got to keep him warm.”

She dashed away. I pulled him to a sitting position, but he was as limp as a string, his head flopping. Hoisting him to my shoulder I expected a great heaviness, but he was alarmingly light, no heavier than a sack of toys as I carried him toward the motel. Mrs. Ramponi saw us coming and became very agitated.

“Put him down, man. You’re killing him!”

I carried him past her into the office and lowered him upon a leather couch. She covered him with a light blanket and went for his mouth again with artificial respiration. He gagged and twisted and grimaced and pushed her away.

“Water,” he said.

Water? Incredible. He rarely drank water. He had to be very sick indeed. Mrs. Ramponi brought him a glassful from the kitchen and held it to his lips, and he sucked it down greedily.

“More.”

He drank two glassfuls more and sank into a deep sleep. His face was hot and dry against my fingers. He was not drunk. He seemed very tired and flaccid, overcome with weariness. Mumbling, he opened his eyes and tried to rise.

“Water closet…”

He threw off the blanket and stood up, swaying. I steadied him through the kitchen to the bathroom and he stood before the bowl, asleep and rocking. As I steered him back to the office he veered toward the kitchen sink.

“Water.”

He drank three glassfuls, then returned to the bathroom. I held him erect with my arms around his waist. It was the same interminable business. Finally he was on the leather sofa again, confused by a sinister lethargy, his breathing loud.

Watching, Mrs, Ramponi said, “You know what I think? Cancer of the bladder. My uncle had it. We better call an ambulance. I don’t want him dying here.” She pushed the desk phone toward me. “Tahoe Ambulance Service.” She gave me the number.

Dialing the operator, I asked for Dr. Frank Maselli in San Elmo. For more than forty years my father had been Maselli’s reluctant patient, avoiding him as much as possible, for he had but one unvarying prescription for my father’s good health: stop drinking.

Maselli’s first question over the phone was: “Is he drunk?”

I said he was not drunk, and as I began to explain my father’s condition Dr. Maselli cut me off.

“Is he thirsty?”

“Very.”

“I hope you’re not giving him wine.”

“Just water.”

“Does he piss a lot?”

“Gallons.”

“Smell his breath.”

“What?”

“Smell your father’s breath.”

I put the phone down, bent over my old man, and sniffed his heavy breathing.

“Smells sweet,” I said into the phone.

“So it finally happened.”

“What, Doc?”

“Where are you?” I told him.

“How far from Auburn?” “About fifty miles.”

“Get him to the Auburn Hospital as fast as you can. I’ll meet you there.” He hung up. I turned to Mrs. Ramponi.

“Can you drive us to the Auburn Hospital?”

“Lord God, yes.”

I
T WAS
a diabetic coma.

He had drifted into it slowly over a period of days and it was five hours before Dr. Maselli and a staff physician at the Auburn Hospital could raise him from the abyss of coma and back to consciousness. They purged his bloodstream with intravenous saltwater and infused him with insulin. He had a severe reaction to the insulin, going into shock, and they had to counter with sucrose. The sucrose shot up his blood sugar and they injected insulin again, this time in smaller amounts, until his sugar level was more or less stabilized. Meanwhile I waited in the reception room at Auburn Hospital, watching an angry sun go down.

About eight that night Dr. Maselli walked in. He was small, fat, cherubic and seventy-three; a textbook medic, a good family doctor, with the rosy cheeks of an Angelo Musso boy. He always managed to look cheerful and concerned, but he was actually a cold professional who gave out as little information as possible.

He liked being mysterious. When he took your temperature or your blood pressure he never gave you the numbers. He had treated the Molise family for many years now—their broken bones, measles, mumps, strep infections, clap, colic, influenza, Mama’s gall bladder, her backaches and her bizarre female disorders. From time to time he massaged my writhing father’s prostate and prescribed pills for unstated ailments. My father liked Maselli not for his healing technique but because he told my mother nothing. One thing was certain: Maselli knew more about my father than anybody in the world.

“How is he?”

Maselli flopped into a leather chair.

“He’s out of danger now. The rest is up to him.”

He bit off the end of a cigar and told me what had been done to lift him out of the coma.

“He’s going to be okay, then?”

“Hardly.” He lit the cigar. “Your father’s an alcoholic, you know. A diabetic alcoholic.” That seemed to amuse him. “How’s that for a dichotomy?”

“I didn’t know about the diabetes.”

“A borderline case for years. I kept warning him but he refused treatment. I finally got him on Orinase—that’s a pill, you know—but nothing helps if you’re smashed all the time.”

“What about now?”

“Insulin.”

“And cut down on the wine,” I said.

“Cut down, hell. He’s got to quit cold turkey. After all, wine is nothing more than grape sugar. Deadly. He’ll have to restrict his pasta too, and bread. He eats too much bread anyway.”

“He’ll make it, Doc.” I said it routinely, the usual cliché.

“I’m not so sure. Your father’s will to die is much stronger than his will to live.”

“Wrong, Doc,” I insisted, the cliché again. “He’s got tremendous will power. You should have seen the way he hung in there, finishing that smokehouse.”

Maselli frowned thoughtfully.

“That smokehouse business troubles me. I mean, the way you say he botched it. Your father never built a crooked wall in his life.”

“He was sick, worn out.”

“He’s been sick and worn out and a borderline diabetic for years, but he always delivered, always did a good job. But this last one…I don’t know. Strange business.”

I remembered the IOU to Ramponi, the way it must have humiliated the old man, but I didn’t mention it to the doctor, who suddenly opened up a spider’s nest of facts about my father’s health that left me stunned. Nick Molise had severe high blood pressure. His heart suffered from myocardial insufficiency. His liver was enlarged and malfunctioning. His kidneys had undergone cystic degeneration. He had a chronic bladder infection. His eyes indicated the onset of cataracts. And now, diabetes…

Having said it all, Maselli seemed relieved, as if it should have been said a long time ago, as if shifting responsibility and disclaiming any guilt for the crumbling ruin. It left me depressed and I felt a tightening in my chest as I went to the window and watched the heavy night settling down, the dark trees on the hospital grounds, the slow-moving traffic in the foggy street beyond. Maselli bothered me. Why did he have to tell everything? He had kept silent all these years, now he was copping out. Why did I have to suffer too?

“A matter of survival,” he said vaguely.

“I’d like to see my father now.”

“He’s been sedated. Come back tomorrow.”

I walked out, down the stairs to the front office and outside, dreading the grim business ahead, my mother, her lamentations, her tears. Riding the bus back to San Elmo I considered not getting off, rolling right through that depressing town to the Sacramento airport and a flight home.

How long had I been away now? Was it a month, a year? What had happened to my love for writing, the urgency of it? I groveled in self-pity. My father lay in the hospital, a dying man, and all I felt was a tragic compassion for myself. I was back at the Toyo Fish Company shoveling fertilizer, unloading trucks, I was at the Holy Ghost Mission eating bread and stew, I was in the Lincoln Heights Jail on a vagrancy charge. I was scum again, proletarian scum, the son of an ill-fated mason who had struggled all his life for a bit of space on earth. Like father, like son. Ah, Dostoyevsky! Fyodor could have come walking out of the fog and placed his hand on my shoulder and it would have meant nothing. How could a man live without his father? How could he wake up in the morning and say to himself: my father is gone forever?

T
HE LIGHTS
were out and my mother’s house was in darkness as I turned into the yard, but I saw that the front door was open and I heard the creak of the rocker on the front porch, then my mother’s voice:

“Is he dead?”

There was no anxiety in her voice, no emotion, only a flat acceptance of what had to be.

“No, Mama. I just came from the hospital.”

“How is he?”

“Okay,” I said, finding a bit of her face in the darkness. “Dr. Maselli’s with him.” I sat on the top porch stair and leaned against the post.

“Ifs been coming,” she said. “I’ve known all along. Is it his heart?”

“He’s got diabetes.”

She rose and kissed a white rosary in her hand.

“His father died of diabetes.”

“How old was he?”

“Young. Only eighty. When can we go see him?”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“Are you hungry? I made a meat loaf.”

I followed her into the house. The meat loaf was in the open oven. It didn’t look appetizing, as if it had been prepared for my father, his supper, and I could not eat it. As I spread peanut butter on a slice of bread my mother came to the door. She was in a gray and blue dress with a black shawl over her hair.

“I’m going to church.”

“At this hour? It’s closed.”

“Not anymore. Father Martin keeps the doors open all night.”

“Go in the morning.”

“Now. I want to pray.”

“I’ll call a cab.”

“No. I’d like to walk.”

She left and I felt the peanut butter sticking to my mouth, and I thought of her walking seven blocks in the night, across the railroad tracks, past the lumberyard and out Pacific Street to the frame church in the Mexican neighborhood. I went after her.

As I caught up with her and fell in step she did not acknowledge I was there, moving instead with other thoughts and quiet determination. How beautiful she seemed in that warm night along a dimly lit street of rundown houses, loving that tyrant husband in the hospital, her face like a dove, sweetly moving, reminding me of an old photograph of her in a large hat at Capitol Park in Sacramento when she was twenty, leaning against a tree and smiling, so precious then, so precious now that I wanted to take her into my arms like a lover and carry her through the church door.

Though it was nearly midnight the church was not deserted. It reminded me of an Italian proverb: “If you see a crowd of women, the church is close at hand.” A dozen women knelt in the pews, all wearing shawls, old like my mother, most in prayer before the Virgin’s altar. My mother stayed at the back of the church, entering a pew and kneeling to kiss the cross on her rosary. I knelt beside her and listened to the old wooden edifice crack and wheeze after the heat of the day. There was a smell of layers and layers of incense and fresh flowers, like marriages piled on funerals, and leaping shadows on the walls behind tiers of vigil lights.

Peace smoothed my mother’s face. She had not been married in this church, but her children had been baptized there and educated by the nuns of this parish. Her faith was nourishing her now, and from the way her lips moved you could see her sucking up the magic of the place.

After an hour of kneeling beside her my bones ached and I sat back with folded hands. Presently she sat back too, the beads in her hands. I was very tired now, and sleepy, and I stretched out on the pew and closed my eyes. Her fingers stroked my hair and she drew my head into her lap and smiled down at me. The beads danced over my eyes as I fell asleep. We were there through the night, starting back to the house in the new day, along streets that asked about my father and why he was not with us.