Full of Life (5 page)

Papa wasn’t there. The table was set in the kitchen—plates for three of us. Seated at the window, Mama was reciting the rosary. Twilight dimmed the room. She smiled without speaking, indicating that she had spoken to Papa. I waited for her to finish the beads. Dinner warmed on the stove: liver and bacon, peas cooked in onion, spinach and cheese. I sampled everything, drank a glass of wine, and waited. She told the last bead, kissed the cross, and put the rosary in her apron pocket.

“What’d he say?”

“Nothing. Not a word. He just walked out.”

“Where is he?”

She rolled her eyes and rocked her head. Papa was on the town, drinking to forget his troubles.

“I don’t blame him, Mama.”

“He took ten dollars.”

“What’s the difference?”

“He’ll drink brandy. He’ll spend it all.”

“Good. He has it coming.”

“Oh, I’m not worried. I said the rosary. He’ll be all right. But he’ll spend ten dollars.”

I took out my wallet and gave her five new twenty-dollar bills.

“I can’t take it,” she said. “You’ll need it for the baby.” She folded the money and put it inside her blouse. “I really shouldn’t take it. I don’t know what’s come over me.” I knew of course what would happen to that hundred. The moment I left town she would air mail it to my brother Jim, who was having a rough time in Susanville.

She served my dinner. She had me alone, all to herself, and I prepared for it, feeling it coming on. Sure enough, she began making passes at me, those mother-passes that leave you helpless. She stood behind me and touched my hair. She fondled my ears. She let her arms drop over my shoulders, her palms rubbing my chest. I kept reaching for things, extricating myelf from every new hold. She finally took my left hand and began exploring the fingers. I tried tugging it away, gently, but she would not let go, kissing each finger. I felt great pity for her, for all women with their great consuming mother passion. Then she found a little mark on my neck where a cat had scratched me as a boy, and this brought a fresh facet of her loneliness, and she hurried to the trunk in the bedroom, and I knew it was coming, a picture of me at six months, popeyed and naked on a velvet pedestal. I jumped up from the table.

“Please, Mama. For God’s sake, not that.”

She put the picture away and began clearing the table. I drank wine, watched the clock on the stove, and read the
Sacramento Bee.
Mama took a colander of scraps out to the chicken yard. Pretty soon she was back with three egs. One in particular she singled out and brought to me at the table.

“Feel. It’s warm, from the mother hen.”

I didn’t want to feel it. Warm or cold, I wanted nothing to do with it.

“Feel how nice and warm it is.”

I wouldn’t. I just stared at it. The egg stared back like a white oval eye, melancholy, stupid.

“They’re good for you. Eat lots of them.”

“Take it away. Put it some place else.”

Time passed. I watched the clock and listened for footsteps in the yard. It was good to see my people again, but now I wanted to get away. Though I had plane reservations for the next day, and a ticket for Papa, I considered leaving that night. I had brought unhappiness to Papa. Best now to leave and let time and distance restore him.

Mama had unpacked my grip that afternoon. Now she began another inspection of the contents. She wanted to know the price of everything. I had brought an extra pair of slacks. She carried them out of the closet and flung them on the table. She examined the cuffs, the seat, the zipper. There was a food spot in front. With an exclamation she discovered this spot.

“What on earth do you suppose it is?”

“Don’t worry about it, Mama. Just put it away.”

She spread the trousers on the table and made a production out of it. She got a small cloth and soap and water and began scrubbing the place.

“I wonder what it is.”

“Please, Mama. Leave it alone.”

“It won’t come off.”

She kept probing around. I leaped out of the chair and took the trousers away from her.

“I’ll send them to the cleaners.”

“That costs money.”

“I don’t care.”

“Doesn’t Joyce look after your clothes?”

“Of course.”

“Sending them to the cleaners—that’s the American style.”

I went out on the front porch and sat in the moonlight. The stars floated low and cool. Thirty miles to the east shone the Sierra snows, star-stuff, distant and lonely. A passenger plane droned through the sky, green and red lights blinking. I was homesick for my wife, and worried about my father. It was ten o’clock. There was a midnight plane out of Sacramento for the South. I made a decision: I would find Papa, bring him home, and take that plane.

Then this car with feeble headlights came clattering down the road. It was Joe Muto’s old Ford. Joe was driving. He pulled up in front of the house. I went down to the fence and we greeted one another.

“You look for your father?” he said.

“Have you seen him?”

“On my land. Now. I think he have too much to drink.”

I climbed into the truck and he turned it around. We went bumping down the broken road I had traveled that afternoon with my father.

“I hear him in there,” Joe said. “He feel pretty bad.”

We descended the small hill where the road turned left until we came to the section of uncultivated land. Joe stopped the car and I jumped out. Everything was clear in the moonlight. A community of bullfrogs and crickets filled the air with mating calls. Then I saw my father. He was sitting under one of the old lemon trees, a bottle in his hand. If he saw me, he paid no attention. Joe Muto stayed in the car and I went forward through the whistling weeds.

My father was talking to himself.

“Don’t you worry about your Grandpa. He’s not so old like they think. You’ll get your house, little boy. Your Grandpa, he’s not dead yet. Everybody tries to kill an old man, but your Grandpa ain’t through yet.”

I clenched my teeth to hold back the pain.

“Papa.”

He saw me before him and cast the bottle aside in the weeds. Then he turned his head to the tree and wept in gusts of bitterness. I could not move toward him. Joe called from the car, asking if all was well. I waded through the weeds, back to the road.

“He’s all right. I’ll get him home okay.”

“You have fight with your old man?”

“You go ahead. No fight. Thanks.”

He drove away. I sat down at the side of the road to wait, lighting a cigarette. I was helpless. After about twenty minutes my father came plowing through the weeds. He knew I was there. He was not surprised to see me.

“Let’s go home,” he said.

He was sober, sighing heavily as his feet touched the road. In silence we walked side by side. The night was warm and sweet. To the north glowed the huge gold dome of the state capitol. It was set in a red haze rising out of the city lights.

“How you feel, Papa?”

“Me? I’m used to it. Some day you’ll be old, and you’ll have sons—thirty-five years from now, forty. You remember what your Papa said tonight: they hurt you every time.”

“It’s too bad.”

For a while he didn’t say any more. We neared the
house. The light was on, showing the front porch. We could see Mama, a shawl around her shoulders, looking for us.

“What’s these termites doing in your house?” Papa said.

“You know—termites.”

“Didn’t you have the house inspected before you bought it?”

I told him about it. “Could you come down, Papa? You could help us. I got tickets for you on the plane.”

“No plane for me. No, sir.”

“Will you come, Papa? We’ll take the train.”

“Train, yes. Plane, no.”

“Fine, Papa. Wonderful.”

So he was coming to fix my house. I wanted Mama to come too, but she decreed that she should stay home and mind the cats and chickens. She was really glad, for trains filled her with dread. Only once in her life had she traveled by rail. That was in the summer of 1912, a thirty-five-mile honeymoon excursion from Denver to Colorado Springs. Our family didn’t reach California by train. We loaded all we could haul into Papa’s truck and rambled straight out Highway 40 until we got to San Juan.

My father, however, was an experienced railroad traveler. As far back as 1910 he had had train experience, coming out to Colorado from New York by rail, traversing the entire distance in a railroad coach. Nor was this the end of his rail travels. Three years later, alone, he boarded a narrow-gauge train from Denver to Boulder, a distance of thirty miles. Following this, he made the honeymoon
jaunt to Colorado Springs with Mama. With such a background, he exhibited a fine fearlessness about trains. Frequently now—two or three times a year—he swung aboard a Sacramento local for trips to the state capital and back. Trains held no fear whatever for this man.

The Los Angeles train—the West Coaster—left Sacramento at six every evening. We decided at breakfast to take the next train. I borrowed my brother-in-law’s car and drove to Sacramento to make arrangements. I cancelled the plane reservations and got space on that evening’s West Coaster. The train was almost solidly booked, but I managed to get a section for us on the Pullman. I wanted the old man to be comfortable, and I made sure he had a lower berth.

An hour before train time I was back in San Juan. Stella was there with her children and Steve, her husband. Papa was dressed and ready to go. He wore an odd assortment of things: blue overalls with a bib, a black shirt topped by a white tie, and a double-breasted brown coat. I recognized the coat as part of a suit I had given him the year before. In fact, he had a large wardrobe of his sons’ suits and topcoats, for we were of the same measurements as he. Certainly he had four or five suits of clothes, any one of which would have been fine for travel.

“Why the overalls?” I asked.

He glanced at himself.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Don’t you have the pants to that suit?”

“Don’t like ‘em.”

He sat at the kitchen table, his face shaved and powdered, his hair neatly parted. His bull neck under the black shirt looked puffy from the strain of the white tie.
Yet he had that distinguished appearance of a man about to embark on a long journey.

Stella said, “He’s stubborn. He doesn’t want to look nice and clean.”

“I
am
clean. What I got on is clean and just washed.”

“But overalls! On the train.”

“I rode trains before you was born. So don’t tell your Papa about trains.”

“No use going around like an old bricklayer.”

“What’s wrong with laying brick?”

“How about that gray suit?” I suggested. “It might be cooler on the train.”

He got to his feet with a reddened angry face.

“You want me to come down? You want me to help you with the house?”

I certainly did.

“Then don’t tell me what to wear. You ain’t so smart, and don’t forget it. Buying a house with termites!”

That ended the matter. I didn’t want to lose him.

His luggage was piled near the door, two paint-scarred suitcases of imitation leather tied with clothesline, and a canvas mason’s kit. Meanwhile Mama kept out of the discussion, busying herself putting things into a grocer’s carton that once held canned milk. I went over to see what she was doing. She was packing this stuff for me to take back to Los Angeles. The box contained four quarts of home-canned tomato preserves and four quarts of fig jelly. There was also a head of goat’s cheese and a freshly baked chocolate cake.

‘They don’t have good cake in Los Angeles,” she said.

I could not imagine how she came upon this information, but I didn’t say anything. Now she showed me a
small bouquet of sweet basil freshly cut from her herb garden, and tied with a red ribbon from which hung two lead medals of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

“It’s to make the baby born alive. Every night, hang it at the foot of your bed.”

I said I would do this.

Papa came forward with a coil of clothesline and began tying the carton. Mama drew me to the sink for a little confidential talk. She opened a drawer filled with spices and drew out a garlic clove. With her fingernail she peeled the clove naked and white. Then she kissed it and shoved it into the lapel pocket of my coat.

“Keep some in your pocket all the time, day and night. Never be without it.”

“I know. It makes boys.”

She smiled tolerantly, shrugging her hands.

“Me—I don’t care. Boy or girl, he’s my grandchild. I’ll love him just the same. But your Papa wants a boy. It’s to please him, the garlic.”

The fierce fumes of the garlic stabbed my nostrils, and I knew I would have to dump the bulb as soon as possible or it would pervade my clothes. Now it was time to leave. Steve and Papa carried the luggage to the car. I distinctly heard the glub-glub of wine bottles in one of the grips. Mama didn’t see me remove the garlic from my pocket and flip it into the grape hedge. She went down to the car with me. Because of the children, she and Stella weren’t going to the station with us.

Papa kissed the two little girls, and then Mama, and he cried a little, telling her not to forget to put a bit of parsley in the cat’s food during the hot weather. Mama was being brave and fighting off collapse as we embraced and kissed
good-by. Steve turned the car around, honking the horn as we waved, and then Mama collapsed. She sank neatly to the road beside the fence as the car rolled away. Stella was there beside her, quite unperturbed, waving to us, and Mama looked thoroughly insensible, her head on her breast, her hand struggling bravely to wave at us, and finally floundering in the dust. We should have stopped to “revive” her, but time was short, and Papa was anxious to make contact with the train.

“Nothing wrong with her. Let’s go.”

We turned the corner and the tires hummed evenly on the fine highway toward Sacramento. I sighed with relief and reached for a cigarette. My hand came upon something warm and sticky in my pocket. I pulled out a clove of garlic. It lay in my hand, naked and white and ferocious. I would have thrown it away but Papa was looking at it too.

“Good,” he said. “Now you’re talking. I got mine too.”