The Wine of Youth (16 page)

V

When I finish in the parochial school my people decide to send me to a Jesuit academy in another city. My father comes with me on the first day. Chiseled into the stone coping that skirts the roof of the main building of the academy is the Latin inscription:
Religioni et Bonis Artibus
. My father and I stand at a distance, and he reads it aloud and tells me what it means.

I look up at him in amazement. Is this man my father? Why, look at him! Listen to him! He reads with an Italian inflection! He's wearing an Italian mustache. I have never realized it until this moment, but he looks exactly like a Wop. His suit hangs carelessly in wrinkles upon him. Why the deuce doesn't he buy a new one? And look at his tie! It's crooked. And his shoes: they need a shine. And, for the Lord's sake, will you look at his pants! They're not even buttoned in front. And oh, damn, damn, damn, you can see those dirty old suspenders that he won't throw away. Say, Mister, are you really my father? You there, why, you're such a little guy, such a runt, such an old-looking fellow! You look exactly like one of those immigrants carrying a blanket. You can't be
my
father! Why, I thought…I've always thought…

I'm crying now, the first time I've ever cried for any reason excepting a licking, and I'm glad he's not crying too. I'm glad he's as tough as he is, and we say good-by quickly, and I go down the path quickly, and I do not turn to look back, for I know he's standing there and looking at me.

I enter the administration building and stand in line with strange boys who also wait to register for the autumn term. Some Italian boys stand among them. I am away from home, and I sense the Italians. We look at one another and our eyes meet in an irresistible amalgamation, a suffusive consanguinity; I look away.

A burly Jesuit rises from his chair behind the desk and introduces himself to me. Such a voice for a man! There are a dozen thunderstorms in his chest. He asks my name, and writes it down on a little card.

“Nationality?” he roars,

“American.”

“Your father's name?”

I whisper it: “Guido.”

“How's that? Spell it out. Talk louder.”

I cough. I touch my lips with the back of my hand and spell out the name.

“Ha!” shouts the registrar. “And still they come! Another Wop! Well, young man, you'll be at home here! Yes, sir! Lots of Wops here! We've even got Kikes! And, you know, this place reeks with shanty Irish!”

Dio!
How I hate that priest!

He continues: “Where was your father born?”

“Buenos Aires, Argentina.”

“Your mother?”

At last I can shout with the gusto of truth.

“Denver!” Aye, just like a conductor.

Casually, by way of conversation, he asks: “You speak Italian?”

“Nah! Not a word.”

“Too bad,” he says.

“You're nuts,” I think.

VI

That semester I wait on table to defray my tuition fee. Trouble ahead; the chef and his assistants in the kitchen are all Italians. They know at once that I am of the breed. I ignore the chef's friendly overtures, loathing him from the first. He understands why, and we become enemies. Every word he uses has a knife in it. His remarks cut me to pieces. After two months I can stand it no longer in the kitchen, and so I write a long letter to my mother; I am losing weight, I write; if you don't let me quit this job, I'll get sick and flunk my tests. She telegraphs me some money and tells me to quit at once; oh, I feel so sorry for you, my boy; I didn't dream it would be so hard on you.

I decide to work just one more evening, to wait on table for just one more meal. That evening, after the meal, when the kitchen is deserted save for the cook and his assistants, I remove my apron and take my stand across the kitchen from him, staring at him. This is my moment. Two months I have waited for this
moment. There is a knife stuck into the chopping block. I pick it up, still staring. I want to hurt the cook, square things up.

He sees me, and he says: “Get out of here, Wop!”

An assistant shouts: “Look out, he's got a knife!”

“You won't throw it, Wop,” the cook says. I am not thinking of throwing it, but since he says I won't, I do. It goes over his head and strikes the wall and drops with a clatter to the floor. He picks it up and chases me out of the kitchen. I run, thanking God I didn't hit him.

 

That year the football team is made up of Irish and Italian boys. The linemen are Irish, and we in the backfield are four Italians. We have a good team and win a lot of games, and my teammates are excellent players who are unselfish and work together as one man. But I hate my three fellow-players in the backfield; because of our nationality we seem ridiculous. The team makes a captain of me, and I call signals and see to it my fellow-Italians in the backfield do as little scoring as possible. I hog the play.

The school journal and the town's sport pages begin to refer to us as the Wop Wonders. I think it an insult. Late one afternoon, at the close of an important game, a number of students leave the main grandstand and group themselves at one end of the field, to improvise some yells. They give three big ones for the Wop Wonders. It sickens me. I can feel my stomach move; and after that game I turn in my suit and quit the team.

I am a bad Latinist. Disliking the language, I do not study, and therefore I flunk my examinations regularly. Now a student comes to me and tells me that it is possible to drop Latin from my curriculum if I follow his suggestion, which is that I fail deliberately in the next few examinations, fail hopelessly. If I do this, the student says, the Jesuits will bow to my stupidity and allow me to abandon the language.

This is an agreeable suggestion. I follow it out. But it backtracks, for the Jesuits are wise fellows. They see what I'm doing, and they laugh and tell me that I am not clever enough to fool them, and that I must keep on studying Latin, even if it takes me twenty years to pass. Worse, they double my assignments and I spend my recreation time with Latin syntax.
Before examinations in my junior year the Jesuit who instructs me calls me to his room and says:

“It is a mystery to me that a thoroughbred Italian like yourself should have any trouble with Latin. The language is in your blood and, believe me, you're a darned poor Wop.”

Abbastanza!
I go upstairs and lock my door and sit down with my book in front of me, my Latin book, and I study like a wild man, tearing crazily into the stuff until, lo, what is this? What am I studying here? Sure enough, it's a lot like the Italian my grandmother taught me so long ago—this Latin, it isn't so hard, after all. I pass the examination, I pass it with such an incredibly fine grade that my instructor thinks there is knavery somewhere.

Two weeks before graduation I get sick and go to the infirmary and am quarantined there. I lie in bed and feed my grudges. I bite my thumbs and ponder old grievances. I am running a high fever, and I can't sleep. I think about the principal. He was my close friend during my first two years at the school, but in my third year, last year, he was transferred to another school. I lie in bed thinking of the day we met again in this, the last year. We met again on his return that September, in the principal's room. He said hello to the boys, this fellow and that, and then he turned to me, and said:

“And you, the Wop! So you're still with us.”

Coming from the mouth of the priest, the word had a lumpish sound that shook me all over. I felt the eyes of everyone, and I heard a giggle. So that's how it is! I lie in bed thinking of the priest and now of the fellow who giggled.

All of a sudden I jump out of bed, tear the fly-leaf from a book, find a pencil, and write a note to the priest. I write: “Dear Father: I haven't forgotten your insult. You called me a Wop last September. If you don't apologize right away there's going to be trouble.” I call the brother in charge of the infirmary and tell him to deliver the note to the priest.

After a while I hear the priest's footsteps rising on the stairs. He comes to the door of my room, opens it, looks at me for a long time, not speaking, but only looking querulously. I wait for him to come in and apologize, for this is a grand moment
for me. But he closes the door quietly and walks away. I am astonished. A double insult!

I am well again on the night of graduation. On the platform the principal makes a speech and then begins to distribute the diplomas. We're supposed to say: “Thank you,” when he gives them to us. So thank you, and thank you, and thank you, everyone says in his turn. But when he gives me mine, I look squarely at him, just stand there and look, and I don't say anything, and from that day we never speak to each other again.

The following September I enroll at the university.

“Where was your father born?” asks the registrar.

“Buenos Aires, Argentina.”

Sure, that's it. The same theme, with variations.

VII

Time passes, and so do school days. I am sitting on a wall along the plaza in Los Angeles, watching a Mexican
fiesta
across the street. A man comes along and lifts himself to the wall beside me, and asks if I have a cigarette. I have, and, lighting the cigarette, he makes conversation with me, and we talk of casual things until the
fiesta
is over. Then we get down from the wall and, still talking, go walking through the Los Angeles Tenderloin. This man needs a shave and his clothes do not fit him; it's plain that he's a bum. He tells one lie upon another, and not one is well told. But I am lonesome in this town, and a willing listener.

We step into a restaurant for coffee. Now he becomes intimate. He has bummed his way from Chicago to Los Angeles, and has come in search of his sister; he has her address, but she is not at it, and for two weeks he has been looking for her in vain. He talks on and on about this sister, seeming to gyrate like a buzzard over her, hinting to me that I should ask some questions about her. He wants me to touch off the fuse that will release his feelings.

So I ask: “Is she married?”

And then he rips into her, hammer and tongs. Even if he does find her, he will not live with her. What kind of a sister is she to let him walk these streets without a dime in his pocket, and
she married to a man who has plenty of money and can give him a job? He thinks she has deliberately given him a false address so that he will not find her, and when he gets his hands on her he's going to wring her neck. In the end, after he has completely demolished her; he does exactly what I think he is going to do.

He asks: “Have
you
got a sister?”

I tell him yes, and he waits for my opinion of her; but he doesn't get it.

We meet again a week later.

He has found his sister. Now he begins to praise her. She has induced her husband to give him a job, and tomorrow he goes to work as a waiter in his brother-in-law's restaurant. He tells me the address, but I do not think more of it beyond the fact that it must be somewhere in the Italian quarter.

And so it is, and by a strange coincidence I know his brother-in-law, Rocco Saccone, an old friend of my people and a
paesano
of my father's. I am in Rocco's place one night a fortnight later. Rocco and I are speaking in Italian when the man I have met on the plaza steps out of the kitchen, an apron over his legs. Rocco calls him and he comes over, and Rocco introduces him as his brother-in-law from Chicago. We shake hands.

“We've met before,” I say, but the plaza man doesn't seem to want this known, for he lets go my hand quickly and goes behind the counter, pretending to be busy with something back there. Oh, he's bluffing; you can see that.

In a loud voice, Rocco says to me: “That man is a skunk. He's ashamed of his own flesh and blood.” He turns to the plaza man. “Ain't you?”

“Oh, yeah?” the plaza man sneers.

“How do you mean-he's ashamed? How do you mean?”

“Ashamed of being an Italian,” Rocco says.

“Oh, yeah?” from the plaza man.

“That's all he knows,” Rocco says. “Oh, yeah? That's all he knows. Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? That's all he knows.”

“Oh, yeah?” the plaza man says again.

“Yah,” Rocco says, his face blue. “
Animale codardo!
”

The plaza man looks at me with peaked eyebrows, and he doesn't know it, he standing there with his black, liquid eyes,
he doesn't know that he's as good as a god in his waiter's apron; for he is indeed a god, a miracle worker; no, he doesn't know; no one knows; just the same, he is that—he, of all people. Standing there and looking at him, I feel like my grandfather and my father and the Jesuit cook and Rocco; I seem to have come home, and I am surprised that this return, which I have somehow always expected, should come so quietly, without trumpets and thunder.

“If I were you, I'd get rid of him,” I say to Rocco.

“Oh, yeah?” the plaza man says again.

I'd like to paste him. But that won't do any good. There's no sense in hammering your own corpse.

I
AM SINGING NOW
, for soon I shall be home. There will be a great welcome for me. There will be spaghetti and wine and salami. My mother will spread a great table piled high with the delicacies of my boyhood. It will all be for me. The love of my mother will come over the table, and my brothers and my sister will be happy to see me among them again, for I am to them the big brother who never errs, and they will be a little envious of the welcome that is poured upon me, and how they will laugh at the things I say, and how they will smile when they see me swallow those squirming forkfuls of spaghetti, and shout for more cheese, and roar my pleasure. For they are my people, and I will have returned to them and to the love of my mother.

I shall pass my glass to my father, and I will say: “More of that wine, Pa,” and he will smile and pour the red stuff with a sweet taste into my glass, and I will say: “Atta boy!” and I will swallow it slowly and deeply, feeling it warm my belly, tingling my heart, singing a song to my ears. And my mother will say: “Not too fast, my son,” and I will look upon my mother, and I will see the same eyes that I have caused to weep so many, many times, and my bones will get that blunt feeling of remorse, but it will endure only a second, and I will say to my mother: “Ah, Ma, don't you worry about this guy, he'll be all right,” and my mother will smile with the happiness that only my mother knows, and my father will smile a little too, for he will be looking at his own flesh and blood, and I will get a throb in my chest, and I will avoid my father's eyes, for they will not be able to conceal their happiness.

That will make me feel very tenderly jubilant, but I will not show it in my face, but my eyes, looking down at the yellow
spaghetti, will not be able to hide it, and my father will catch the twinkle there, but he will look away in a flash, for it will make him as bashful as a boy, and I bet he will do some retrospecting, and think about me in the years of my boyhood, and he will see every minute and second of my twenty-one years in the fleeting glance of my eyes, and I will think exactly the same thoughts, for we are of the same flesh and bone, and the stuff of my brain and spine is the stuff of his, and so we will think the same things together, and each will know that the other is thinking the same things.

Our thought will be of a day in Colorado and another welcome spread, when both my father and I got very drunk, and yet remained brutally sober, and I began to curse him for neglecting my mother, and he cursed me for the misery I had flung upon her, and we grew angrier and angrier, and my mother tried to make peace, and presently my father lost himself in an insane passion to make me suffer for the things I had said, and at that same second I too saw scarlet before my eyes, and the two of us leaped upon each other, and we were like two animals, and I knocked my father to the floor, and he fell with a thud, and, lying on the floor, began to cry like a little child.

I was but eighteen then. I looked at my fist that had knocked my father to the floor, and I looked up to the ceiling, my heart pounding, and I lifted my fist to the ceiling, and I saw a blue mark on the knuckles, and I screamed: “Jesus Christ, what have I done? Oh, Jesus Christ, cut my arm off! Quick! Quick! Oh, Jesus Christ, cut it off!” And there on the floor my father lay, and he was crying, and it was not the weeping of the sentimental drunk, but it was the weeping of a man who had seen his little god of wax melt in the blistering sun. And there stood my mother with her hands pressed to her temples, and the gray hair that my father gave her, and the wrinkles and sad eyes that were gifts from me, and my mother knew not what to do, for there were her son and her man fighting over old scars.

The scars could not be healed, but they could be soothed, and now the flesh of her flesh and the man of her life were at each other's guilty throat in the way of fanatics, and in the anger of each there was no defense of her glorious wifehood and
motherhood, but only the beastly whining and snarling of two who shouted at each other and bruised each other. “It is you who are the cause!” “No! It is you.” My mother saw me there, eighteen years out of her womb, and my father was on the floor, and I was his little wax god who had melted in the blistering sun.

So that is why I will not look into the eyes of my father after I gulp my electrifying wine, and that is what each of us will think, and we will not have forgotten, but our spirits will be at peace, and in a whirl of bitter silence that scene of three years past will go through us, and I will make a boisterous pretense at nonsense, and my father will be ready to leap into the unimportance of it, and in the hearts of my brothers and sister will come a merriment that will not last long, and in the mind of my mother…. Ah, God, forgive my father and me!

II

But the wine from fresh grapes, purple-red and bitter-sweet, will bring delight to that hour of welcome, and we shall all have a fill of it. Even my youngest brother, who does not like it, will be allowed to drink perhaps two glasses. He will watch me closely. He will hold his glass as I hold mine, and he will say “Ahhh” when he feels the last drop of it in his mouth, just as I will say it. And he will rub his belly, concealing the unpleasantness, and say: “Boy! That's swell stuff. Gimme some more.” And my mother will say softly: “No more, my son.” And my father will yell: “Hey! Who the hell do you think you are?”

My sister, who has spoken only a little, will primp for me. She will be seated next to my mother, and I will steal glances at her, and I will see that she is becoming more beautiful with every breath. I will be amazed again at the loveliness of her immense brown eyes, which are like those of some giant squirrel, and she will know that I am peeping surreptitiously at her, and she will be inwardly singing with happiness, and I will see that her beauty is that which drew my father to my mother when he came to America thirty years before, a conceited young Italian, conceited even as I am. My mother will be at my sister's side at
the table, and I will study the faces of the two, and I will vow that my sister shall not have the agony which has been my mother's, and I will see my sister lift her chin disdainfully at the remarks of my little brother, and he will shout: “Aw, you're not so smart. You needn't show off just because Jimmy is home.” My sister's face will turn pink-scarlet, and she will look suddenly at me, and I will be delighted by her squirrel eyes, and she will glare at my brother and say: “And what about you? What about you, playing like you like wine, just because he's home?” And my little brother will say: “Aw, keep still.” And my father will say: “Hey! How many times do I have to tell you to cut out that talk?” And my brother will say: “Well, she started it.” And my mother will say softly: “Let's all be nice today. Let's not have one fight.”

My plate will be empty now, the tomato sauce and shreds of cheese having been skillfully mopped up with a lump of bread. My mother will see its glistening emptiness, and she will look at my cheeks and say: “You look awful thin, Jimmy. You better eat a lot.” And I will battle with another dish of the stringy, cheesy spaghetti, for my mother will be injured within if I do not eat until I am left gasping for breath. There will be, too, a dish of salted anchovies to pick at, and there will be salami, the casing already peeled away, and there will be more and more wine, and there will be tomatoes prepared especially for me, drowned in yellow olive oil, touched with the zestful tang of garlic juice, and at my father's plate will be a saucer filled with garlic, toasted to a crisp.

He will eat it with great noise, and as always my sister will say, and we will all laugh: “There goes the garlic!” My father will grin and say the same old thing: “You people don't know what's good…. Try it!” And my sister will turn her lips and draw away from the table and close her big, squirrel eyes and go “Grrrrrrr!” And of course we will all then listen to my father's story of his boyhood when he had nothing to eat but garlic for a week, and long before he has finished we will have gone ahead of him in his story and said aloud the words which he will laboriously, eventually come to, and he will threaten to kill us, and my mother will try to be composed and impartial, but she will not be able to resist the feathers which tickle all but my father, and soon
the table will shake with our laughter, and my father will roar like a wild beast.

My brother Tony will then say: “Cutton, cutton, cutton, where's the cutton?” And that will bring even lustier laughs, for he is mimicking the crippled English of my father, who says “cutton,” but means “cotton.” And then my sister will say: “I love warmelon.” Laughter, laughter, laughter. For that is my father's way of saying “watermelon.” My father will grind his garlic in his teeth and be silent. And my brother will say: “Bose of you are dutty, hoggly hanimals.”

Oh, man! That will be the end of our joy, for my father will now rise from his place and seize my brother by the ear, and kick him in the seat with each step as he leads him to the back porch. My brother will rub his seat and laugh and cry, and my father will return to his place at the table. My brother will shout through the door: “Papa's han hanimal! Papa's han hanimal!” And my father will scrape the chair legs on the floor, and my brother will hear them, and off he will go to his friends, laughing and shouting as he runs: “Papa's han hanimal!”

We will eat in silence for a while, no sound save the tinkling forks and knives, We are settled to the business of eating now, and no one speaks.

My father will say: “Where's the napkins?”

My mother will say, innocently: “Oh, didn't you get one?”

“What kind of a house is this, without napkins?”

My sister will go for the napkins.

“Bring me one,” I will say.

“All right.”

“Me too,” my brother Mike will say.

“What's wrong?” my sister will ask him. “Are you crippled?”

And so I will be among my people, sitting at the welcome supper my mother has prepared, and my father, my sister, and my younger brother will be gathered around the table. My youngest brother, who is thirteen, will have gone away laughing at the stumbling language of my father, who is fifty-two. At his side will be seated my sister, who is seventeen, and next to her my brother Mike, who is nineteen, eating in silence, and my mother, whose eyes are far too large, who is forty-nine, who has
a broken body, who has gray hair at her temples, who is daily losing her hearing. And I am twenty-one, and I understand my people better than they understand one another.

III

I will look at my father over the rim of my wine glass. I will see myself. I will know again the streak of cruelty and treachery within me by looking at my father. I will look at the hands of my father, and a turning and a grinding will go on within me, for my father still has the seeds of greatness in him, but they have been choked by the treachery and cruelty that I know—always too late—crouch in me. My father will catch the feeling in me, and in his eyes it will come out for me to look upon, and he will see the same lurking in my eyes, and we will not have strong enough chins to glare at each other, and let those two pairs of eyes collide, and kill that lurking which lies in both our eyes.

Another feeling will come across the table, and we will not know what to do with it, for we loathe it, and that will be shame. We will sense it, and we will be hurt by it, but we have not hands to slug it or to caress it. And so we will look away, and we will sneak glances at each other. And I know it shall always be so, and my father knows. My father will keep on filling my wine glass, and together we will drink, and we shall always feel that kindredness which is a gorge neither of us can leap.

I will look at my father's hands.

I will say: “Are you working?”

He will answer: “No, I'm not working.”

“No work here, eh?”

“No, no work here.”

“Any work in Sacramento?”

“No, no work in Sacramento.”

I will be silent then, for I will know I have touched a painful spot, and he will not have sympathy. He will fight it away.

I will speak about myself. I will make my father envious. He knows that I, too, have the seeds of greatness in me, but my father believes they will be choked up by the treachery which is the
heritage of both father and son. I am younger than my father: my hopes scream to the skies. His have dwindled to despair. I know my father sees me at fifty-two, and I at fifty-two am my father. What I will say will please him and yet sadden him.

I will say: “Well, in a few days there'll be a check in the mail for me.” I will say this to my father about the manuscript I am now writing.

“You say that a lot.”

I will grow angry at this from my father.

“Yes, yes. Moreover, you'll hear it plenty more.”

My father will drink more wine, and as he lowers his glass I will see a smile turning his lips faintly. He will be amused by my pugnacity.

My mother will say: “Please. Let's all be happy. Let's all hope for the best, and not quarrel.”

I will say: “I'm not quarreling, Ma.”

My sister will say: “I read your story in the magazine. I knew you'd write against the Church.”

I will say: “Don't be dumb. That wasn't against the Church.”

This will not interest my father, for he does not care what I write, nor does he read it. I will drink wine now, for I must prepare myself for the question which my mother will now ask.

She will say: “Do you go to Mass every Sunday, my Jimmy?”

I will answer: “Sometimes, Ma. Sometimes.” I will be lying.

She will ask: “Do you still read books against God?”

I will say, lying again: “Not any more, Ma.”

And I will look at the face of my mother, and I will remember a night when we lived in the South, and I came home, and I saw my mother in tears, and sick unto death, and the doctor was called, and he saved my mother, and he came out of the room wherein my mother lay, and he held a book in his hand, and he handed it to me, and he said: “This is the cause. If you must read such stuff as this, do it where your mother can't see you.” When I looked at the book, I saw that it was the
The Anti-Christ
. Now I will be home soon, and my mother will ask if I read books against God, and I will answer that I do not.