The Wine of Youth (14 page)

M
Y MOTHER HAD JUST CARRIED
the last of the supper plates into the kitchen when the doorbell rang. All of us rose like a congregation and rushed to answer the call. Mike reached the door first. He threw it open and we pushed our noses against the screen. There stood a uniformed boy with his cap in his hand and a telegram at the bottom of it.

“Telegram for Maria Toscana,” he said.

“Telegram, Papa!” Mike shouted. “Somebody's dead! Somebody's dead!”

A telegram came to our house only when one of our family passed away. It had happened three times in the lives of us kids. Those three times were the death of my grandfather, of my grandmother, and then the death of my uncle. Once, though, a telegram came to our house by mistake. We found it under the door when we came home late one night. We were all greatly surprised, for it contained birthday greetings to a lady named Elsie, whom none of us knew. But the most astonishing thing about that telegram was that it was not a death notice. Until then it did not occur to us that a telegram might have other uses.

When my father heard Mike shouting, he dropped his napkin and pushed back his chair. We at the door pranced up and down in excitement. In a paralysis of anxiety, Mother stood in the kitchen. My father walked with an important air to the door, and, like a man who had spent his whole life signing for telegrams, he signed for this one. We watched him tear open the yellow envelope so that the paper would separate enough for his heavy fingers to reach the message inside. He frowned at us and walked to the center of the living room, under the chandelier. He held
the message high, almost over his head. Even jumping, we kids could not put our eyes upon it, and my little brother Tony, who was a shrimp and too little to read anyhow, climbed up the side of my father as if the man were a tree, and my father shook himself and Tony fell to the floor.

“Who died?” we asked. “Who died?”

“Down, down, my father said, like one speaking to leaping puppies. “Quiet, there. Down, down.”

Squinting his eyes, he folded the ominous yellow paper and returned to his place at the table. We trailed after him. He told us to go away, but we swarmed around his shoulders, and Tony climbed the chair rungs and burrowed his fingers into his shirt at the collar. My mother stood in the kitchen door biting her lips. Worry crushed her face. Her hands turned round and round like kittens under her checkered apron.

Breathlessly we waited. Breathlessly we tried to guess whom the sad news might concern. We hoped it wasn't our aunt Louise, because she always sent us such wonderful Christmas presents. We didn't mind if it was our aunt Teresa, though, because what good was she around Christmas time? No good whatever. All we ever got from her was a greeting card, and we knew it cost only a penny because that was the very kind our mother bought. If she was dead she deserved it for being so stingy.

Father shook himself from us. Emphatically he told us to go back to our places. My mother quietly took her seat. She held her small worried face between spread fingers like a woman gathering strength for an ordeal. She had many brothers and sisters whom she had not seen since girlhood, for she had married when yet very young. We could see that my father's mind was reaching here and there to find the quickest and best way of releasing the sad shock when at length my mother was ready to receive it. She raised her face and looked at him with eyes opened all the way.

“Who, Guido?” she asked. “Who is it?”

“Clito,” he said. “Your sister Carlotta's boy.”

“Dead?”

“Killed. He was run over. He's dead.”

For many silent moments my mother sat like a statue in
gingham. Then she lifted her face to that place she believed contained life eternal. Her lips were distended as in a kiss of farewell. Her eyes were too grieving to stay open.

“I know his little soul is beautiful in the sight of God,” she whispered.

He was our cousin, the only child of Uncle Frank and Aunt Carlotta, my mother's oldest sister. They lived in Denver, thirty miles south of our small town. Clito was but a day older than our Mike, second in age among us kids. Clito and Mike were born in the same Denver hospital ten years before. They were brought to life by the same physician, and—wonderful thing!—the two boys were remarkably similar in face and form. Among the many members of our scattered clan they were always referred to as the Twins, for they were inseparable when our family lived among the Italians of North Denver three years before, and, though they often quarreled, there seemed a deeper kinship between them than between Mike and me, or between Mike and Tony. But, three years before our family had moved from Denver to the small town in the mountains, and Mike had not seen his cousin since then.

These were the reasons why, in the silence after my father had spoken, my mother stared so passionately, so possessively at Mike, her eyes slowly beginning to float. Mike felt her gaze. He was yet too young to realize the tragic significance of Clito's death, but he felt my mother's eyes upon him, as if to draw him into them, and he fidgeted nervously, glancing at my father for clarity and sustenance. My mother pushed back her chair and went into the bedroom. We heard her lie down, and then we heard her sobbing.

“I bet Clito's in Heaven,” Mike said. “I bet he didn't have to stop off in Purgatory.”

“Sure,” my father said. “He was a good boy. He went right straight to Heaven.”

My mother called from the bedroom.

“Mike,” she called, “come here to Mamma.”

He didn't want to leave the table. But he looked at my father, who nodded, and then he got up and went hesitantly away. We heard my mother draw him beside her upon the bed, and we heard
the wet, violent kissing of his face and neck. We heard the wild sound of smacking lips and my mother's possessive moans.

“But it ain't me!” Mike was saying. “See! I'm not dead.”

“Thank God! Thank Almighty God!”

After my father left the table, the telegram lay open at his place, one corner of it in the salad bowl, the yellow paper drawing salad oil into itself like a blotter. We kids dove for it. I got it first and held it above me, out of reach of my tiptoed sister Clara's clawing fingers. I climbed up on my father's chair and held the paper almost to the ceiling. My sister climbed right up on the chair beside me. Over my head I read the message while she hung on and my little brother Tony tugged at my pants in an effort to dethrone me.

“Let me read it!” he shouted.

“You little fool!” Clara said. “You can't read yet! You're not even in school.”

“Yes, I can too! You don't know everything, so there!”

The message read: “Clito struck by truck while riding bicycle. Died this afternoon four o'clock. Funeral Sunday three o'clock.”

I let it go from my fingers and it floated zigzagging toward the floor. Clara and Tony fell upon it and instantly it was in shreds, all over the floor. The commotion on the linoleum brought my mother and Mike in a hurry from the bedroom. My mother saw the shredded telegram lying about, and, drying her eyes with the hem of her apron, she said: “I didn't get to see it. How did he die?”

“He was run over by a bicycle,” I said.

My father was in the front room, reading the paper.

“No,” he corrected. “The boy was run over by a truck.”

“No, he wasn't,” I said. “He ran into the truck.”

“The truck ran into him.”

So, with constant interruptions, we lost all conception of what had actually taken place. Before long I was insisting that our dead Clito had been riding in the truck bed, the bicycle at his side, and that he had fallen out when the machine struck a bump in the road. My father was quite as inaccurate. He said that little Clito had been knocked down and killed by a man riding a bicycle. Now we were guessing recklessly. Even Tony had an
interpretation to offer. He insisted that he too had read the telegram, but he said that Clito had been killed by a German aviator who dropped bombs from an airplane. In the confusion nobody had anything more to offer.

Then Clara said: “Maybe you're all wrong. Maybe he was run over by a motorcycle.”

In despair my mother asked if there was any mention of a funeral.

“Tuesday.”

“Monday.”

“Friday.”

“Wasn't it Sunday?” Clara said.

While we quibbled hopelessly, my mother and Mike gathered up the bits of yellow paper and pieced them together on the table.

II

After supper my mother wouldn't let Mike go out. The rest of us did, but Mike had to stay in the kitchen with her. He could hear us shouting in the front yard, and he cried and kicked the stove, but my mother was never so firm. Even my father was surprised. When he walked into the kitchen and told her she was crazy and unreasonable, she turned on him, her eyes still crying, and told him to go back to his newspaper and mind his own business. Sucking a toothpick, he stared at the floor, shrugged his shoulders, and then went back to his reading.

“But, Mamma,” Mike said over and over, “I'm not the one that's dead! See?”

“Thank God. Thank Almighty God.”

That evening Uncle Giuseppe and Aunt Christina came to our house. Aunt Christina was the youngest sister of my mother and Aunt Carlotta. She too had received a telegram. My mother dried her wet, dish-watery hands when she saw Christina enter the front door, and the two women locked bosoms in the dining room and stood there crying. My mother put her nose into Aunt Christina's shoulder and sobbed, and Aunt Christina sobbed and stroked Mother's hair.

“Poor Carlotta!” they said. “Poor Carlotta!”

Nobody was watching Mike in the kitchen. He saw his chance and sneaked out the back door. He ran around the house and joined us in the front yard. Our cousins, Aunt Christina's two kids, had come with her, so the whole bunch of us got up a game of kick-the-can.

My mother forgot about Mike. She and my father and Aunt Christina and Uncle Giuseppe sat in the front room, talking about Clito's death. The two women sat side by side in rocking chairs. My mother still held her dish towel, and she let her tears splash into it. Aunt Christina cried into a tiny green handkerchief that smelled of carnations. Over and over they said the same thing.

“Poor Carlotta! Poor Carlotta!”

My father and Uncle Giuseppe smoked cigars in silence. Death was the supreme mystery to these people, and the women feverishly resigned themselves to the workings of the Almighty. But the men clung to those ancient platitudes, ancient as the mind of man. Since he was not a son of theirs, the passing of the little boy did not move them noticeably. They were sorry he was dead, but they were sorry only because it was the proper thing to be, so their sorrow was etiquette and not out of their hearts.

“Ah, well,” my father said, “you never know. Everybody has to go some time.”

Uncle Giuseppe's dark head and screwed-up lips agreed slowly.

“Too bad,” he said. “It's too bad.”

“But he was so young!” Mother said.

Wistfully my father answered: “Maybe he's better off.”

“Ah, Guido! How can you say that? How do you suppose his poor mother feels? And poor Frank?”

“A man never thinks what's in a woman's heart,” Aunt Christina said. “No, they don't know. They never will know. Men are so selfish.”

My father and uncle stared at their cigars in dismal confusion.

“Well,” my father said, “all I know is we all have to go some time.”

Uncle Giuseppe was trying hard to feel grief. He closed his eyes and said, “No. We never know. Tomorrow, the next day, tonight—next year, next month, we never know.”

“Poor Carlotta,” my mother said.

“Poor woman,” Aunt Christina said.

“Too bad for Frank,” my father said. “He'll miss the boy.”

Uncle Giuseppe sat in a helpless way, uncomfortable in a straight-back chair. Many times he looked at the ceiling and walls as though he had never seen them before. Then he would examine his cigar, as though that were a curious object too. My father sat more at ease, since this was his house. He sat with his cigar between his teeth, his feet spread stiffly in front of him, his thumbs in his sweat-stained suspenders, his eyes squinting to evade the curl of cigar smoke. He would have liked to say something different on this subject of death, but there was nothing new he could think about.

“The best of us have to die,” he ventured.

“How true that is,” my uncle said.

My Aunt Christina blew her nose many times and then wrung the tip of it until it was as red as a radish. She was a stout woman who tried but never could cross her fat little legs.

“How does Mike feel?” she asked. “He and Clito were such good friends. They loved one another so.”

My mother's eyes opened in fright, and she turned in her chair and looked behind her in a kind of terror.

“Mike!” she called. “Where are you, Mike?”

No response. She twisted her body and peered tensely into the kitchen. She saw no one. Rising, she slipped her fingers into her deep hair and screamed.

“Mike!” she screamed. “Where are you, Mike? Come back to me, Mike!”

My father jumped to his feet as though he had seen a ghost. He took her into his arms.

“
Dio!
” he panted. “Calm yourself, woman!”

“Find Mike! In God's name, find Mike!”

Uncle Giuseppe went to the front door, and in the twilight he saw us playing our game beneath the black trees of the front yard. Mike was a little apart from the rest of us, leaning against the biggest tree, partly hidden in its shadows.

“Your mother is calling you,” Uncle Giuseppe said. “Can't you hear her?”

All he said was: “Aw, what does she want?”

“Go on, Mike,” we said. “Go see what she wants.” For my mother's screams had stopped our game like an unexpected crash of lightning. Then the screen door was flung open violently, and it banged against the wall that supported it, and my mother dashed wildly from the house. She stooped and lifted Mike like an infant high above her, and, laughing and crying, she kissed him and kissed him and cooed into his throat.