The Wine of Youth (15 page)

“Mamma's own little boy,” she moaned. “Never leave me. Never, never, never, never leave me.”

“I'm not Clito,” he said. “I'm not the one that's dead.”

She carried him back to the front room, and they all sat down again, and, though Mike hated it, he had to sit in her lap and be kissed about a million times.

We slept together in the same bed, Mike and I, and very, very late that night—some time after midnight—my mother came to our room and softly slipped between us, but it was still Mike she worried about. And, lying with her back to me, she awakened him by petting him so much. When she went back to her own bed, I had to turn my pillow over because it was so wet from her tears.

III

Who would go to the funeral? Sunday morning in the kitchen there was a fierce argument between my father and mother on this question. My mother wanted to take Mike with her, but my father wanted her to take me.

“No,” my mother said. “I want Mike to come.”

“What's the idea?” my father said. “There's no use making it harder for those people. You know how Carlotta and Frank will feel when they see Mike.”

“Oh,” my mother scoffed, “what on earth are you talking about?”

“I know what I'm talking about,” my father said. “What the devil's the matter with you women?”

“I said Mike was coming with me,” my mother said. “And he is. If Jimmy wants to come, he can.”

“What about me?” Clara said.

“Nothing doing,” my father said.

“Me and Jimmy and Mike,” Tony said.

My father looked at him contemptuously.

“Pooh!” he said. “And who are you?”

“Aw,” Tony said. He was so little he never could answer that question.

The telegram said the funeral was to be at three o'clock. It was only an hour's ride on the electric to Denver, but when any of our family went anywhere we had to turn the house upside down. Mother couldn't find her hairpins and Mike couldn't find his new necktie. When he did find it in the pantry the mice had eaten a hole in it so he had to wear an old one of my father's.

Tucking the endless cravat into his waist, he howled: “I don't like it! Look how big it is! It's an old man's tie.”

“Who said it was an old man's tie?” my father said. “Wear it and keep still.”

But my mother wanted him to look nice. She didn't pay any attention to how I looked, but she wouldn't let Mike wear that necktie. She made Tony go over to Oliver Holmes's and borrow a light blue one for Mike, and while I was gone to borrow hairpins from Mrs. Daley she sat on the bed in her petticoat, her hair streaming down and tangling her fingers as she sewed a button on Tony's coat.

When at last we were ready to go, she couldn't find her hat. Weary and fretting, she stood in a pile of boxes in the clothes closet, calling everyone to search for her black hat. My father found it clear on the other side of the house, under my sister Clara's bed, but Clara said she didn't know how it got there, and that was quite a lie, because Clara is always secretly wearing my mother's things. When my father pushed the hat over my mother's lumps of hair, he sighed and said: “Good God, wipe that powder off your neck. You look like you been baking a cake.”

She wet the end of her handkerchief with spittle and dabbed the powder away. Then she grabbed Mike by the wrist and hurried out the door. I ran after them, her purse in my hand, for she had forgotten it.

My father and Clara and Tony stood on the front porch and
watched us walk down the street. When we were half a block away, my father whistled to us. We three turned around.

“Hurry up!” he yelled, loud enough for even that deaf old Miss Yates to hear and throw open her window and look out. “Hurry up! You only got five minutes to make the train.”

My mother squeezed Mike's hand and walked as fast as the worn heel of her right shoe would permit her, and I could see from the way Mike winced as he scratched his belly that he hated the whole thing and was ready to break into tears.

IV

We reached the electric on time, and an hour later we arrived at the Denver Union Station. From there we took a yellow street car to Aunt Carlotta and Uncle Frank's house. As soon as she sat down in the street car, my mother started to cry, so that her eyes were red-rimmed when we got off at Aunt Carlotta's street. We stopped on the corner a minute while Mother fastened her garter and Mike and I went behind the hedge to wee-wee, and then we started up the street.

There were so many people and automobiles at my aunt's house that it was the biggest funeral in the history of our family, and there was such an abundance of flowers that some of the bouquets had to be spread on the front porch, and you could smell the funeral as soon as you got off the street car.

We went up the front stairs to the little cloakroom, where dozens of Italians in Sunday suits stood with sad faces peering over the shoulders of one another to the parlor where the bier was placed in the center of the scent-suffocated room, the lid off, the waxen and shining face of Clito's corpse sleeping in infinite serenity amid the moans and gasps and supplications of black-draped, dark-skinned, choking women who sometimes knelt and sometimes arose first on one knee and then on the other to kiss the rosary-chained, icy hand of the small thin corpse in the gray box with silver-plated handles.

Mike and I saw it all between the legs of the men in the
cloakroom as my mother dragged us through the crowd and up the stairs to Aunt Carlotta's bedroom.

My aunt arose from the bed, and the two sisters fell upon each other and wept helplessly. Aunt Carlotta had wept so much that her face was as raw as a wound. Her arms were around my mother's neck, the hands hanging loosely, the fingernails gnawed until there were tiny blood tints at the quick. I closed the door, and Mike and I stood watching.

Then we saw Uncle Frank. He was at the window. He did not move when we entered, but stood with his hairy hands in his back pockets. He had seldom spoken to us, but he was gentle and generous, and each year he sent us pajamas for Christmas. We didn't know much about him, except that he was an electrician. He was a tall man with a thin neck; his spinal column rounded out like a rope beneath his brown skin, so that he always seemed to have a trim haircut. His body was not quivering from sobs, and when we saw the dry-eyed reflection of his thin face in the windowpane it amazed us that he was not shedding tears. We could not understand it.

“Why doesn't he cry?” Mike whispered. “He's the papa, isn't he?”

I think Uncle Frank heard him, for he turned around slowly and skeptically, as one turns to heed the note of a new bird. He saw my mother and me, and then he spied Mike. Instantly his knees seemed to buckle, and he backed against the window and clapped his hand over his mouth. The look of him made my brother shriek, and he grabbed my mother around the waist and hid his face in the small of her back.

Uncle Frank moistened his lips.

“Oh,” he said, pressing his eyes. “Oh, it's you, Mike.”

He sat on the bed and panted as he ran his two hands in and out of his hair. Aunt Carlotta saw Mike then, and she spread herself across the bed, her face vibrating in the depths of the pink coverlet. Uncle Frank stroked her shoulder.

“Now, now,” he murmured. “We must be brave,
mia moglia
.”

But he was not crying, and the more I thought of it the stranger it seemed.

My mother bent down to straighten Mike's crooked tie.

“Be a good boy,” she said, “and give your Uncle Frank and Aunt
Carlotta a big kiss. You too, Jimmy.”

I kissed them, but Mike wouldn't go near Uncle Frank. “No, no, no!” he screamed. “No, no!”

He followed me when I walked to the window that overlooked the back yard. We looked out upon the hot Sunday afternoon and saw what Uncle Frank had been staring at when we came in. It was the twisted bicycle. It leaned against the ashpit, a bundle of bent and knotted steel. Mike kept looking over his shoulder at Uncle Frank, as if expecting a blow, and when Uncle Frank arose from the bed and came to the window and stood beside us, Mike crept into my arms and began to whimper in fear. Uncle Frank smiled tragically.

“Don't be afraid. I won't hurt you, Mike.”

He patted my hair, and even through it I felt the dryness of his hand and how sad it was.

“See?” he said. “Jimmy's not afraid of his Uncle Frank, are you, Jimmy?”

“No, Uncle Frank. I'm not afraid.”

But Mike cringed from the man's melancholy hands. Uncle Frank tried very hard to smile, and then of a sudden he drew two half-dollars from his pocket. I took one, but Mike hesitated, looking at my mother on the bed. She nodded. A soft smile broke on the boy's face, and, sniffing, he accepted the coin and went into Uncle Frank's arms.

“Little boy Mike,” Uncle Frank said. “Little boy Mike, so like my little boy Clito.” But he was not crying.

He sat Mike upon his lap, and by the time the procession to the graveyard was ready to begin, my brother was deeply devoted to him. They went down the stairs to the parked cars, Mike holding his hand and looking up at his face in curiosity and admiration.

Uncle Frank was the only one who did not cry during the burial. He stood a little back from the head of the grave, my sobbing Aunt Carlotta clinging to him, his eyes closed, his jaw hard. Around the grave the throng hovered, the men with their hats in their hands, the handkerchiefs of the women fluttering in the lifeless afternoon heat, sobs bursting like unseen bubbles, the priest sprinkling holy water, the undertaker standing in professional
dignity in the background, the bier sinking slowly, the while my brother and I stood side by side and stared at the black ground appearing as the box descended, our eyes flowing and flowing, our chests hurting, our hearts breaking in terror and first grief as the life of Clito rushed from our memories for the last time, vividly, distressingly; our mother whimpering as she chewed her handkerchief, the straps around the box crackling, the silver pulleys squeaking, the sun brilliant against them, the priest murmuring on and on, men coughing in shame, women wailing, Aunt Carlotta weak and near fainting, clinging to Uncle Frank, and he there with a hard jaw and closed, arid eyes, thinking the thoughts of a father, thinking—God knows what he thought.

Then it was over.

We went back to Aunt Carlotta's, and we sat in the living room, Aunt Carlotta still weeping and my mother consoling her. Dazed and white, Uncle Frank stood at the window, Mike watching his face.

Mike said: “Don't you ever cry, Uncle Frank?”

The man only looked down and smiled feebly.

“Well, don't you?”

“Mike!” my mother said.

“Well, why doesn't he? Why don't you, Uncle Frank?”

“Mike!”

“Keep still, Mike,” I said.

“Well, why doesn't he cry?”

Uncle Frank pressed his temples.

“I am crying, Mike,” he said.

“No, you're not.”

“Mike!”

“Well, he's not.”

“Shut up, Mike,” I said.

“But you didn't cry at the graveyard, and everybody else did.”

“Mike!”

“He was the only one who didn't cry, because I was watching.”

“Mike! You go outside.”

He went out indignantly, and sat in the rocker before the window, his back to Uncle Frank. He began to rock furiously, stiffening his legs with the motion backward. Uncle Frank turned
from the window and went outside and bent over Mike's chair, smiling down at him. Then he spoke. I was watching from the window, but I couldn't hear what he said. Mike grinned, and the two of them went down the porch steps and on down the street.

“Where are they going?” my mother asked.

“I don't know,” I said.

A half-hour passed without their return, and my mother and aunt sent me in search of them. I went down the street to the drug-store on the corner, and that was where I found them. They were in an ice-cream booth, Mike drinking a malted milk, sucking it down greedily. Uncle Frank sat across from him, his face cupped in his hands, great tears rolling off his cheeks and falling on the table as he watched Mike sucking down the malted milk.

I
PICK UP
little bits of information about my grandfather. My grandmother tells me of him. She tells me that when he lived he was a good fellow whose goodness evoked not admiration but pity. He was known as a good little Wop. Of an evening he liked to sit at a table in a saloon sipping a tumbler of anisette, all by himself. He sat there like a little girl nipping an ice-cream cone. The old boy loved that green stuff, that anisette. It was his passion, and when folks saw him sitting alone it tickled them, for he was a good little Wop.

One night, my grandmother tells me, my grandfather was sitting in the saloon, he and his anisette. A drunken teamster stumbled through the swinging doors, braced himself at the bar, and bellowed:

“All right, everybody! Come an' get 'em! They're on me!”

And there sat my grandfather, not moving, his old tongue coquetting with the anisette. Everyone but he stood at the bar and drank the teamster's liquor. The teamster swung round. He saw my grandfather. He was insulted.

“You too, Wop!” said he. “Come up and drink!”

Silence. My grandfather arose. He staggered across the floor, passed the teamster, and then what did he do but go through the swinging doors and down the snowy street! He heard laughter coming after him from the saloon and his chest burned. He went home to my father.

“
Mamma mia!
” he blubbered. “Tummy Murray, he calla me Wopa.”

“
Sangue della Madonna!
”

Bareheaded, my father rushed down the street to the saloon.
Tommy Murray was not there. He was in another saloon half a block away, and there my father found him. He drew the teamster aside and spoke under his breath. A fight! Immediately blood and hair began to fly. Chairs were drawn back. The customers applauded. The two men fought for an hour. They rolled over the floor, kicking, cursing, biting. They were in a knot in the middle of the floor, their bodies wrapped around each other. My father's head, chest, and arms buried the teamster's face. The teamster screamed. My father growled. His neck was rigid and trembling. The teamster screamed again, and lay still. My father got to his feet and wiped blood from his open mouth with the back of his hand. On the floor the teamster lay with a loose ear hanging from his head…. This is the story my grandmother tells me.

I think about the two men, my father and the teamster, and I picture them struggling on the floor. Boy!
Can
my father fight!

I get an idea. My two brothers are playing in another room. I leave my grandmother and go to them. They are sprawled on the rug, bent over crayons and drawing-paper. They look up and see my face flaming with my idea.

“What's wrong?” one asks.

“I dare you to do something!”

“Do what?”

“I dare you to call me a Wop!”

My youngest brother, barely six, jumps to his feet, and dancing up and down, screams: “Wop! Wop! Wop! Wop!”

I look at him. Pooh! He's too small. It's that other brother, that bigger brother, I want. He's got ears too, he has.

“I bet
you're
afraid to call me Wop.”

But he senses the devil in the woodpile.

“Nah,” says he. “I don't wanna.”

“Wop! Wop! Wop! Wop!” screams the little brother.

“Shut your mouth, you!”

“I won't neither. You're a Wop! Wop! Woppedy Wop!”

My older brother's box of crayons lies on the floor in front of his nose. I put my heel upon the box and grind it into the carpet. He yells, seizing my leg. I back away, and he begins to cry.

“Aw, that was sure dirty,” he says.

“I dare you to call me a Wop!”

“Wop!”

I charge, seeking his ear. But my grandmother comes into the room flourishing a razor strop.

II

From the beginning, I hear my mother use the words Wop and Dago with such vigor as to denote violent distaste. She spits them out. They leap from her lips. To her, they contain the essence of poverty, squalor, filth. If I don't wash my teeth, or hang up my cap, my mother says: “Don't be like that. Don't be a Wop.” Thus, as I begin to acquire her values, Wop and Dago to me become synonymous with things evil. But she's consistent.

My father isn't. He's loose with his tongue. His moods create his judgments. I at once notice that to him Wop and Dago are without any distinct meaning, though if one not an Italian slaps them onto him, he's instantly insulted. Christopher Columbus was the greatest Wop who ever lived, says my father. So is Caruso. So is this fellow and that. But his very good friend Peter Ladonna is not only a drunken pig, but a Wop on top of it; and of course all his brothers-in-law are good-for-nothing Wops.

He pretends to hate the Irish. He really doesn't, but he likes to think so, and he warns us children against them. Our grocer's name is O'Neil. Frequently and inadvertently he makes errors when my mother is at his store. She tells my father about short weights in meats, and now and then of a stale egg.

Straightway my father grows tense, his lower lip curling. “This is the last time that Irish bum robs me!” And he goes out, goes to the grocery-store, his heels booming.

Soon he returns. He's smiling. His fists bulge with cigars. “From now on,” says he, “everything's gonna be all right.”

I don't like the grocer. My mother sends me to his store every day, and instantly he chokes up my breathing with the greeting: “Hello, you little Dago! What'll you have?” So I detest him, and never enter his store if other customers are to be seen, for to be
called a Dago before others is a ghastly, almost a physical, humiliation. My stomach expands and contracts, and I feel naked.

I steal recklessly when the grocer's back is turned. I enjoy stealing from him—candy bars, cookies, fruit. When he goes into his refrigerator I lean on his meat scales, hoping to snap a spring; I press my toe into egg baskets. Sometimes I pilfer too much. Then, what a pleasure it is to stand on the curb, my appetite gorged, and heave
his
candy bars,
his
cookies,
his
apples into the high yellow weeds across the street!…“Damn you, O'Neil, you can't call me a Dago and get away with it!”

His daughter is of my age. She's cross-eyed. Twice a week she passes our house on her way to her music lesson. Above the street, and high in the branches of an elm tree, I watch her coming down the sidewalk, swinging her violin case. When she is under me, I jeer in sing-song:

III

As I grow older, I find out that Italians use Wop and Dago much more than Americans. My grandmother, whose vocabulary of English is confined to the commonest of nouns, always employs them in discussing contemporary Italians. The words never come forth quietly, unobtrusively. No; they bolt forth. There is a blatant intonation, and then the sense of someone being scathed, stunned.

I enter the parochial school with an awful fear that I will be called Wop. As soon as I find out why people have such things as surnames, I match my own against such typically Italian cognomens as Bianchi, Borello, Pacelli—the names of other students. I am pleasantly relieved by the comparison. After all, I think, people will say I am French. Doesn't my name sound French? Sure! So thereafter, when people ask me my nationality, I tell them I am French. A few boys begin calling me Frenchy. I like that. It feels fine.

Thus I begin to loathe my heritage. I avoid Italian boys and girls who try to be friendly. I thank God for my light skin and hair, and I choose my companions by the Anglo-Saxon ring of their names. If a boy's name is Whitney, Brown, or Smythe, then he's my pal; but I'm always a little breathless when I am with him; he may find me out. At the lunch hour I huddle over my lunch pail, for my mother doesn't wrap my sandwiches in wax paper, and she makes them too large, and the lettuce leaves protrude. Worse, the bread is homemade; not bakery bread, not “American” bread. I make a great fuss because I can't have mayonnaise and other “American” things.

The parish priest is a good friend of my father's. He comes strolling through the school grounds, watching the children at play. He calls to me and asks about my father, and then he tells me I should be proud to be studying about my great countrymen, Columbus, Vespucci, John Cabot. He speaks in a loud, humorous voice. Students gather around us, listening, and I bite my lips and wish to Jesus he'd shut up and move on.

Occasionally now I hear about a fellow named Dante. But when I find out that he was an Italian I hate him as if he were alive and walking through the classrooms, pointing a finger at me. One day I find his picture in a dictionary. I look at it and tell myself that never have I seen an uglier bastard.

We students are at the blackboard one day, and a soft-eyed Italian girl whom I hate but who insists that I am her beau stands beside me. She twitches and shuffles about uneasily, half on tiptoe, smiling queerly at me. I sneer and turn my back, moving as far away from her as I can. The nun sees the wide space separating us and tells me to move nearer the girl. I do so, and the girl draws away, nearer the student on her other side.

Then I look down at my feet, and there I stand in a wet, spreading spot. I look quickly at the girl, and she hangs her head and looks at me in a way that begs me to take the blame for her. We attract the attention of others, and the classroom becomes alive with titters. Here comes the nun. I think I am in for it again, but she embraces me and murmurs that I should have raised two fingers and of course I would have been allowed to leave the room. But, says she, there's no need for that now; the thing for
me to do is go out and get the mop. I do so, and amid the hysteria I nurse my conviction that only a Wop girl, right out of a Wop home, would ever do such a thing as this.

Oh, you Wop! Oh, you Dago! You bother me even when I sleep. I dream of defending myself against tormentors. One day I learn from my mother that my father went to the Argentine in his youth, and lived in Buenos Aires for two years. My mother tells me of his experiences there, and all day I think about them, even to the time I go to sleep. That night I come awake with a jerk. In the darkness I grope my way to my mother's room. My father sleeps at her side, and I awaken her gently, so that he won't be aroused.

I whisper: “Are you sure Papa wasn't
born
in Argentina?”

“No. Your father was born in Italy.”

I go back to bed, disconsolate and disgusted.

IV

During a ball game on the school grounds, a boy who plays on the opposing team begins to ridicule my playing. It is the ninth inning, and I ignore his taunts. We are losing the game, but if I can knock out a hit our chances of winning are pretty strong. I am determined to come through, and I face the pitcher confidently. The tormentor sees me at the plate.

“Ho! Ho!” he shouts. “Look who's up! The Wop's up. Let's get rid of the Wop!”

This is the first time anyone at school has ever flung the word at me, and I am so angry that I strike out foolishly. We fight after the game, this boy and I, and I make him take it back.

Now school days become fighting days. Nearly every afternoon at 3:15 a crowd gathers to watch me make some guy take it back. This is fun; I am getting somewhere now, so come on, you guys, I dare you to call me a Wop! When at length there are no more boys who challenge me, insults come to me by hearsay, and I seek out the culprits. I strut down the corridors. The smaller boys admire me. “Here he comes!” they say, and they gaze and gaze, my two younger brothers attend the same school, and the smallest, a little squirt seven years old, brings his friends
to me and asks me to roll up my sleeve and show them my muscles. Here you are, boys. Look me over.

My brother brings home furious accounts of my battles. My father listens avidly, and I stand by, to clear up any doubtful details. Sadly happy days! My father gives me pointers: how to hold my fist, how to guard my head. My mother, too shocked to hear more, presses her temples and squeezes her eyes and leaves the room.

I am nervous when I bring friends to my house; the place looks so Italian. Here hangs a picture of Victor Emmanuel, and over there is one of the cathedral of Milan, and next to it one of St. Peter's, and on the buffet stands a wine pitcher of medieval design; it's forever brimming, forever red and brilliant with wine. These things are heirlooms belonging to my father, and no matter who may come to our house, he likes to stand under them and brag.

So I begin to shout to him. I tell him to cut out being a Wop and be an American once in a while. Immediately he gets his razor strop and whales hell out of me, clouting me from room to room and finally out the back door. I go into the woodshed and pull down my pants and stretch my neck to examine the blue slices across my rump. A Wop, that's what my father is! Nowhere is there an American father who beats his son this way. Well, he's not going to get away with it; some day I'll get even with him.

I begin to think that my grandmother is hopelessly a Wop. She's a small, stocky peasant who walks with her wrists crisscrossed over her belly, a simple old lady fond of boys. She comes into the room and tries to talk to my friends. She speaks English with a bad accent, her vowels rolling out like hoops. When, in her simple way, she confronts a friend of mine and says, her old eyes smiling: “You lika go the Seester scola?” my heart roars.
Mannaggia!
I'm disgraced; now they all know that I'm an Italian.

My grandmother has taught me to speak her native tongue. By seven, I know it pretty well, and I always address her in it. But when friends are with me, when I am twelve and thirteen, I pretend ignorance of what she says, and smirk stiffly; my friends daren't know that I can speak any language but English. Sometimes this infuriates her. She bristles, the loose skin at her throat knits hard, and she blasphemes with a mighty blasphemy.