ONE NIGHT last September my brother phoned from San Elmo to report that Mama and Papa were again talking about divorce.
“So what else is new?”
“This time it’s for real,” Mario said.
Nicholas and Maria Molise had been married for fifty-one years, and though it had been a wretched relationship from the beginning, held together by the relentless Catholicism of my mother who punished her husband with exasperating tolerance of his selfishness and contempt, it now seemed utter madness for these old people to leave each other at such a late time in their lives, for my mother was seventy-four and my father two years older.
I asked Mario what the trouble was this time.
“Adultery. She caught him red-handed.”
I laughed. “That old man? How can he commit adultery?”
In truth it was the first accusation of this type in many years, the previous one having to do with my father’s forays upon Adele Horner, a postal employee—“a crooked little witch,” my mother had described—a woman of fifty with a slight limp. But that was years ago, and Papa wasn’t the man he used to be. Indeed, on his birthday in April I had seen him hunched on the floor, groaning and pounding the rug with both fists as he fought off an attack from his prostate gland.
“Come on, Mario,” I chided. “You’re talking about a burned-out old man.”
He answered that Mama had discovered lipstick on Papa’s underwear, and upon confronting him with this evidence (I could see her thrusting it under his nose), he had seized her by the neck and throttled her, bending her over the kitchen table and booting her in the buttocks. Though he had been barefoot, the kick had left a purple bruise on Mama’s hip and there were red blotches at her throat.
Ashamed of the cowardly attack on his wife, my father fled the house as Mario entered the back door. The sight of Mama’s abrasions so enraged him that he rushed outside, leaped into his truck, and sped off to the police station where he sought a complaint against his father, Nicholas Joseph Molise, charging him with assault and battery.
Chief Regan of the San Elmo police tried to dissuade Mario from such drastic action, for he was an old drinking crony of my father’s and a fellow member of the Elks Club. But Mario pounded the desk and held to his demands, forcing the chief to do his duty. Accompanied by a deputy, Chief Regan drove to the Molise house on Pleasant Street.
To Mario’s disgust, my old man refused to submit to arrest and stood his ground on the front porch, armed with a shovel. A crowd of neighbors quickly gathered and my father and the chief slipped into the house and sat at the kitchen table, drinking wine and discussing the situation while Mama wept piteously from the bedroom.
By now the crowd in front of the Molise residence had spread into the street and two extra police cars were summoned to cordon off the whole block. Suddenly the camaraderie between Papa and the chief came to an abrupt end. The chief produced handcuffs and hostilities broke out. Deputies rushed in when Regan yelled for help, and my father was pinned to the floor and shackled. Breathing heavily, he was dragged outside to a police car.
The sight of her spouse in irons drew cries of anguish from my mother. She rushed the police, swinging and clawing with such frenzy that she fainted on the sidewalk, where her neighbors, Mrs. Credenza and Mrs. Petropolos, dragged her, heels bumping, into the house.
My brother Mario, having reverted to his helpless fear of my father, now reappeared from behind the garbage cans in the alley and hurried to Mama’s side as she lay on the couch, consoling her and holding her hand.
Trembling with a desire to forgive her husband, Mama rose haltingly, reeling across the room to drop to her knees before the statue of Saint Teresa, imploring the Little Flower not to punish her wayward spouse, to look with pity once more on his transgressions, and to plead before the court of Almighty God for his immortal soul.
She begged Mario to drop the charges against the old man and secure his release from the San Elmo jail. “He’s old, Mario. He don’t mean no harm, but he’s losing his mind.”
At first Mario refused to consider freeing his father, preferring that Papa remain in the slammer for a few hours to cool off. But my mother’s lamentations, her noble forbearance, and her warning that Papa would tear his son to pieces unless quickly freed made Mario relent. She and Mario drove downtown to spring the old man.
“What else could I do?” Mario implored over the telephone. “He’s a mean, vicious old man, and the longer you lock him up, the meaner he gets. He’s a mad dog.”
To their astonishment, and to the disgust of Chief Regan, Nick Molise did not wish to be released, nor would he hear of a dismissal of the charges. Cursing Mario and Mama, sneering at his captors, he freely accepted captivity, vowing to fight his case through every court in the land, even to the Supreme Court, to prove that there was still justice in America.
“Then he spit in my face,” Mario said. “He said I was Judas who killed Christ. He said I wasn’t his son anymore. And then he kicked me in the stomach.”
With that Chief Regan blew his cool, tore up the arrest complaint, and ordered Papa, Mama and Mario out of the police station. Nick Molise wouldn’t budge, his big fists clinging to the cell bars. Three police rapped his knuckles as they jumped him, pushed him down the hall, and flung him into the street.
Here a fight flared between the old man and Mario as they rolled down the station steps and across the sidewalk to the gutter. The police tore them apart and would have booked them for disturbing the peace, but the chief, anxious to avoid further involvement, ordered his staff inside and the door bolted. And then my brother Mario, a peaceful man of forty, a trifle bombastic but hardly a brawler, took an unmerciful clouting from the old man, for Mario would as soon strike our Lord Himself as his own father.
The dreadful imbroglio ended with Mario slumped in the gutter, holding a bloody handkerchief to his nose, while Mama cried out to a gathering of San Elmo citizens watching the spectacle in silence and careful not to become involved.
In truth, this wasn’t the first time the head of the Molise family had made a fool of himself in public. Only a few months before he had taken on a young bartender at the Onyx Club who punched him soundly and threw him into the street, whereupon he had heaved a bench through the saloon’s window. The ruckus cost me a hundred, which I paid by check and, thanks to Regan, the matter never went to court.
In fact, over the years, on street corners, in saloons and polling places, Nick Molise had engaged in so many disputes that the family’s good name was grievously compromised in the town. Even so, the citizens manifested tolerance and good will, for everyone liked the old man and enjoyed his explosive ways. Cranky, noisy, taking advantage of their patience, drunk a good deal of the time, he had free rein in San Elmo, and at night people heard him lurching home along deserted streets, singing bad renditions of “O Sole Mio,” people untroubled in their beds, saying, “There goes old Nick,” and smiling, for he was a part of their lives.
Everyone, that is, except his sons Mario and Virgil. Manager of the Loan Department of the First National Bank, my brother Virgil was convinced that Papa’s antics had ruined his banking career. Mario blamed his father for denying him a college education as well as the opportunity to become a bricklayer and stonemason. As for my sister Stella, she never ceased her disapproval of the old man—his drinking, his gambling, his wenching, and his cruelty toward our mother. She had an uncanny ability to intimidate him. A flash of her dark eyes and he cringed like a dog. Though she loved him, she despised him too, determined to remember all that Mama tried but failed to forget.
But to return to my brother’s telephone call.
After his assault on Mario, my father stood on the steps of the police station and delivered a violent speech to the gathering crowd. He denounced the treachery of his own son for having him arrested, he called the police criminals for abusing a law-abiding citizen, and he castigated Mama as an insane old fool who persecuted an honorable man who only wished to live in peace.
Mario gagged in disgust as he told of Mama’s shrieks of denial while she moved frantically toward the onlookers, snatching at their sleeves as they drew away and she went on and on about the lipstick on her husband’s underwear. “You think that’s the way for a married man to behave?” she beseeched. “Who does his laundry, cleans his house, cooks his meals? Is that the thanks I get—lipstick from the mouth of some slut?”
The crowd dispersed in horror. Even Papa fled the vulgar scene, dashing down Oak Street and across the Southern Pacific tracks to the Café Roma, a hideaway for elderly Italian males.
Bloodied and embarrassed, Mario helped Mama into the truck. As fate would have it, the battery was dead and the car refused to start. Like refugees of war, mother and son trudged across town to the redwood house on Pleasant Street. Later Mario picked up a loan battery from the Shell station and returned to the truck. The police had affixed a parking ticket to his windshield. He drove back to Pleasant Street.
Arriving home, Mama began packing a suitcase, determined to board a bus to Denver, where she planned to move in with her sister Carmelina. She knew she would be welcome, for Carmelina, our ancient aunt, detested my father and had made a lifetime hobby of sabotaging his marriage.
In the midst of my mother’s packing, my sister Stella and my brother Virgil stormed into the house, having heard from many sources of the wild scene in front of the police station. My mother, never one to waste a dramatic improvisation in the presence of her children, promptly passed out on the kitchen floor, thus heading off the hasty and ill-conceived bus ride over the Sierras to Denver, a journey she would have found exceedingly difficult, for she suffered from backache and chronic urinary frequency.
A sniff of crushed garlic against her nostrils brought Mama around, and with the pluck of a Saint Bernadette she began to stagger about, bringing wine and Genoa tarts to the table, where a discussion of her problems with Papa ensued.
These dialogues, I well remembered, had taken place frequently over the years and had never come to anything fruitful. Old bones were excavated and strewn about, everyone talked at the top of his voice, and the emotional mess left only bitterness and gloom. Like the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, the problem of my father was simply insoluble, defying logic, making no sense at all.
My brother Virgil was in a special frenzy. The police station spectacle had been witnessed by his employer, J. K. Eicheldorn, president of the bank, and the distinguished first citizen of San Elmo was not pleased. Calling Virgil into his office, J. K. asserted bluntly that the antics of Mr. and Mrs. Molise were a slur upon the bank’s reputation, and if they continued Virgil’s position would be in jeopardy.
Pounding the kitchen table, Virgil wept as he accused Mama and Papa of being out of their heads, socially irresponsible and doddering old fools who should be put away.
This brought more lamentations from my mother as she wrung her hands and implored Our Lord to come and get her. Mario rushed to her defense, cursing Virgil, damning him as a stuffed shirt and a coward, deserting his own parents for the sake of social approval.
Gifted with a vicious tongue, Virgil quickly put Mario in his place by calling him “the lowest form of human being known to man—a railroad brakeman.” It was too much. Mario struck Virgil in the mouth, and Virgil retaliated with a blow to the nose. Then they were grappling all over the kitchen, overturning chairs, toppling pots and pans from the pantry, Mama shrieking and Stella dashing to her house across the alley to get the help of her husband, John DiMasio, the bricklayer. By the time she returned with John the fight was over. Virgil was gone and Mario stood over the kitchen sink, ministering to a bloody nose for the second time on that eventful day.
Calm was restored, but Mama quickly stirred things up again.
“What am I going to do with that dirty old goat?” she asked. It was an ugly way to provoke a subject that nobody wanted to discuss anymore, and it was so repugnant to DiMasio that he walked out of the house. From the alley he called on Stella to get her ass home.
Stella ignored him. “Mama,” she said, “you have no actual proof that Papa was unfaithful. It’s all circumstantial evidence.”
Mama threw up her hands in shock. “Circumstantial evidence? Oh, Mother of God, protect me from my own children!”
She staggered into the bedroom and returned with the telltale shorts, pushing aside dishes and glasses and spreading the underwear over the center of the checkered tablecloth like a shameless centerpiece. The reddish smears staining the crotch were quite visible.
“It was lipstick sure as hell,” Mario said over the telephone. “The kiss of some tart.”
My sister Stella, married to her wayward, urbane bricklayer, insisted that the stain was from a red mouthwash she had seen in the bathroom. “That’s all it is—plain mouthwash.”
It was as if she had felled Mama with a club. Her face dropped forward on the table, her head thudding.
“I’m so tired,” she moaned. “Oh, Blessed Lord, deliver me from this cross. I just can’t take it anymore. Fifty-one years I’ve done my best, and now I’ve run out of patience. I want out. I want some peace in my old age. I want a divorce.”
She leaped to her feet, electrified by her own words. “Divorce! Divorce!” She raced through the house and out the front door, down the porch steps, and into the middle of the street, screaming at the top of her voice, pulling at her hair.
“Divorce, divorce! I’m getting a divorce!”
Doors opened on both sides of the street and wives spilled out onto front porches, young wives and old, watching in silence and sympathy, the problems in the Molise household having been theirs too for many years.
Next door Mrs. Romano shook her finger approvingly.
“You’re doing the right thing, Maria. Get rid of the old bastard!”
Mario and Virgil dashed from the house, seized Mama, and hustled her back up the porch steps and through the front door.
Center stage and inspired, Mama snatched up the telephone and called Harry Anderson, the family lawyer. “Draw up the papers, Harry. I mean it this time. I’m divorcing the animal.”
Anderson tried to discourage her as usual, and Stella tore the telephone from her grasp, but Mama seized it again. “I’ll sign anything, Harry. Get the papers ready. I want the house. He can’t come in here anymore. Let him sleep in the tool shed. Tell him to come and get his clothes. I’m throwing all his junk in the alley, and that goes for his dirty underwear. The concrete mixer in the backyard, I want it moved by tomorrow or I’ll give it to the Good Will!”
Anderson agreed to meet her at his office the following day.
“So that’s where it’s at,” Mario finished off, his voice trembling and desolate. “I can’t believe it, Henry! The end of our family. They won’t live a month without each other.”
“It won’t happen,” I told him.
“You’ve got to save them, Henry. You’re the only one who can.”
I could understand why they were afraid of this ludicrous divorce, of what chaos it would create in their quiet small-town lives. They were no longer in their youth, their hopes for the future were exhausted, and they were already burdened enough with swarms of children crammed into three-bedroom stucco houses with small backyards, a lemon tree in the corner, tomato vines up the back fence, and teen-age daughters in misery for a bedroom of their own. If divorced, where would my mother and father go? Who had spare bedrooms to house them?
True, Mama had queasy, halfhearted plans to share her sister’s flat in Denver, but such a ménage wouldn’t last forty-eight hours, for the daft Carmelina (always in the same black shawl and dress) was a kinky arthritic confined to a wheelchair, in need of constant attention, and she was an even worse tyrant than Nick Molise. A couple of nights in Carmelina’s unventilated apartment and Mama would flee back to San Elmo, to live alone in the crumbling shingle house on Pleasant Street, careless about gas jets in the kitchen stove and prone to falling asleep with the wall furnace going full blast. My old man may have been a poor excuse for a husband, but he at least had sense enough to lower the furnace and open a window in order to survive the night.
What of him? Where would he go after a divorce?
“You’re the oldest son,” Mario said. “He’s your problem.”
“It cannot happen,” I wearily assured him. “A husband and wife bonded together for fifty-one years of marriage are inseparable, like Siamese twins. If they split they die, and they know it.”
“I told you—she’s seeing the lawyer tomorrow.”
“It won’t happen. She’ll see him, but it’ll be for show. Nothing serious.”
“Listen, Henry. You’ve got that nice house at Redondo Beach, all those bedrooms, your kids are grown and gone, you’re sitting pretty, you’ve got space, and we were wondering, me and Stella, if you could help us until this crisis is over, maybe take the old man off our hands for a few days.”
“I’ll take them both.”
“You can’t. They’re talking about divorce. They’ll fight all the time. You don’t want that.”
“I’ll take them anyway, married or divorced.”
“Talk it over with Harriet.”
“What’s to talk about? I’m master of my own house.”
“Just old Nick. Give me your word.”
“Mario, this is a collect call. We’ve been talking for an hour, and it’s costing me.”
The phone flooded with the swoosh of his anger. “A crisis like this and all you think about is the phone bill! Is money that important? Don’t you have any sympathy for the woman who brought you into the world, or the man who raised you by the sweat of his brow, bought your shoes and clothes, put bread in your mouth and sent you to school? You think you’d be a writer today if it wasn’t for those two wonderful people? You always were number one. What about me and Virgil and Stella? You think we enjoyed it seeing you always the favorite? You think I enjoyed it, wearing your hand-me-down shirts and socks? I woulda worn your pants too, only you’re so fuckin’ short they barely covered my knees. You think I forgot who got the bike, and not me or Virgil? We had to sleep together, me and that farting Virgil. But not you! Oh, no, you had your own little room on the back porch with your books and your typewriter and the special light. I won’t forget that, Henry! I never forget anything! I know how you live, you phony. Laying around on that beach all day long, playing like you’re somebody important just because you’re a writer, writing bullshit lies about your family while I slave like a wetback in the yards, eight, ten hours a day—and for what? For nothing but trouble and debts while you’re out of it and far away, listening to the waves, and when I call to tell you that your mother and father are getting a divorce, the best you can do is beef about the phone bill. Okay, buster. Drop dead!”
He hung up with a crash.
I found Harriet under a blanket on the little porch above the beach. Mounds of fog meandered toward the shore like a herd of wandering polar bears. The night was cold and moonless; even the stars would have no part of it. I slipped under the blanket beside her and related the conversation with my brother.
“Hurray for your mother,” Harriet said. “She should have divorced the old bastard fifty years ago.”
“She’s a devout Catholic. There won’t be a divorce.”
“I hope she does. Think of it, free from that old satyr at last.”
“Harriet, she’s seventy-four…”
“She’ll make out just fine. There’s Stella and your brothers, and of course you’ll help out too. It’s your duty.”
“What happens to Nick?”
“What’s the difference? He’s always been a bachelor anyway.”
I paused to consider an innocuous way of saying it, but there really wasn’t any, so I simply said, “I’m thinking of bringing him down here for a while.”
Her body stiffened under the blanket. She turned and studied me with a startled glance as paleness washed the color from her face. Peering into the tunnels of her eyes was like staring at an arctic landscape, frozen and silent as her breathing stopped.
“It’s getting chilly,” she said. “I think I’ll fix a hot drink.”
She must have fixed quite a few, for as I sat at my typewriter an hour later she blossomed in the doorway like a ghost, wearing a white robe and a wavering smile, a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said, addressing my stare. “A divorce between your mother and father makes no sense at all.”
“Of course not.”
“You’d better go up to San Elmo, Henry. Talk to them.”
“Did you ever try to talk to my father?”
“Your mother. After all, it’s her idea.”
“Are you changing your mind because you don’t want my father down here?”
“You’re damn right. You better get up there before they do something stupid. They’re both weird and you know it.”
She was right. We were an impulsive, unpredictable clan, prone to rash decisions and terrible remorse. Even if my mother dropped the divorce idea, my father might take revenge by leaving home and arriving without notice in Redondo Beach. Grimly Harriet crossed the room to the telephone, the extension cord uncoiling as she brought the instrument to my desk.
“Call your brother. Tell him you’re coming.”
I dialed San Elmo. Mario answered so swiftly his hand must have been on the receiver, as if expecting the call.
“What the hell do you want now?” he snarled.
I told him I would fly up in the morning.
“What is this, some kind of a trick?”
“No trick. I think I should come up, that’s all. I’ll take the eleven o’clock flight. Meet me in Sacramento at noon.”
“How come you changed your mind, Henry?”
“Reasons.”
“Harriet?” He laughed. “It figures.”
“Twelve o’clock. Sacramento airport.”
“I’ll be there.”
I hung up and looked at Harriet. She smiled as she came toward me. She stood behind me with her arms around my waist. “Thank you,” she said, her hands slipping past my navel and into my pants. She fondled me, pressed the tip of her tongue into my ear, gently squeezed and stroked me with ten wise, evocative fingers fashioning a fugue for fucking on my flute, and when she breathed, “Let’s do it,” I hurried after her into the bedroom, struggling to peel off my jeans, fearful that the music would stop suddenly as it often had these past months.
Like two serpents we writhed around each other, her breath coming in gasps. “Do something for me!” she begged. And thinking perhaps she might want me to eat her, I said, “Yes, anything, honey. Anything!”
“While you’re in San Elmo, promise you’ll pay my mother a visit. She’s changed, Henry. She likes you now.”
That did it. The flute pooped out, the music stopped, and I was raging.
“No,” I said, pushing myself away, rising from the bed.
“What’s the matter with you?”
I was ashamed to tell her the old bitterness still festered in me. How could a mature man, a supposedly compassionate person, stark naked, turn and say to his wife, “I hate your mother.” With my clothes on I might have said it; instead, I went down the hall to the linen closet, snatched a blanket, and spent the night on the divan.
Next morning we passed one another in the hall.
“Good morning,” I said.
“What’s good about it?”
I went into the bathroom to shave. The face in the mirror was that of an escaped lunatic. The days no longer brought peace but ugliness—the veins in my eyes, the beginning of jowls. I glanced at the rumpled bed where we had lain in flawed love, the crushed pillows, the twisted sheets. I remembered seeing them exactly that way in my parents’ bedroom when I was seven, and hating my father for it, for the stale smell of his cigar, and his work pants lying grotesquely on the floor, and the desire to kill him.