THE NIGHT WAS cold and misty. From half a dozen cabins came the voice of Archie Bunker insulting his wife, the audience shrieking with delight. No doubt about it, Archie belonged in that poker game, his kind of people.
I carried the luggage and a sack of tools from the truck to Cabin 7. The accommodations were routine motel décor: a kitchen with a bar, a divan, a rug, a couple of chairs, a TV and a bed.
The bed I did not like. It was a double bed and it meant I would have to sleep with the old man. Fretting, I sat on it and considered the dilemma. I had never slept with my father. I had rarely in my life even touched him, except for a rare handshake over the years, and now I had no desire to sleep with him. I considered his old bones, his old skin, the lonely, ornery oldness of him, the wine-soaked oldness of him and his sodden, sinful friends, the son of a bitch he had been: unreasonable, tyrannical, boorish, profligate wop who had trapped me on this snafu safari into the mountains, far from wife and home and work, all for his bedizened vanity, to prove to himself he was still a hotshot stonemason.
Then it all began to come back. I was ten years old at a street dance in San Elmo, the night of the Fourth of July. I was in the alley behind the dance, searching trash barrels. In the darkness I saw a man and woman making love against a telephone post, the woman holding up her dress, the man throwing his body at her. I knew what they were doing, but it scared me as I crouched behind a pile of crates. Hand in hand the man and woman walked toward me. The man was my father. The woman was Della Lorenzo, who lived two doors from our house with her husband and two sons, my classmates in school. After that I never played with the Lorenzo kids again. I was ashamed to look into their eyes. I hated my father. I hated Mrs. Lorenzo; she was so common, so frumpy and plain. I hated the Lorenzo house, their yard. I kicked their mongrel dog. I strangled one of their chickens. When Mrs. Lorenzo died of breast cancer the next year I was indifferent. She had it coming. No doubt she was in hell, making a place for my father.
Easter Sunday. I was twelve. We were at the Santucci farm, the entire family. Hordes of Italians from all over the county, long tables sagging with wine, pasta, salad and roast goat, my old man with a goat’s head on his plate, eating the brains and the eyes, laughing and showing off before women screaming in horror. Afterward, a softball game. Somebody hit a ball over the hedge in the outfield. I leaped after it and landed on top of my father, hidden in the tall grass, his bare bottom white as a winter moon as he pumped Mrs. Santucci, who was supposed to be my mother’s best friend. Astounded, I ran toward the orchard, over the creek, down the pear grove. My father came racing after me. I had the speed of a deer. I knew he would never catch me, but he did. He shook me. He was throwing spit in his rage. “One word to your mother and by God I’ll kill you!”
I spent the rest of the long afternoon at my mother’s side while she gossiped on the lawn with the other ladies. I would not leave her. I sat on the grass and clutched the hem of her dress and it annoyed her. “Go play with the other kids,” she said. “You’re bothering me.”
No. I would not lie down in the mountain darkness beside that abominable old man, rewarding him with affection and companionship after a lifetime of unrepentant sensuality at the expense of his wife and family. No wonder my poor mother thought of divorce, and Virgil was ashamed of him, and Mario fled from the sight of him, and Stella disapproved of him.
I found an extra blanket in the closet, kicked off my shoes, and curled up on the divan. Hours later I wakened to voices outside, drunken laughter, the banging of car doors. I went to the window and watched Zarlingo and Cavallaro drive off in the Datsun. It crept along, barely moving in the deep mist as my father ran alongside, waving his arms and shouting, “Turn on your lights!”
The lights speared the mist and the car crawled away. The disappearing taillights through the forest road promised certain doom. I was sure the old dudes would never make it back to San Elmo, that they would drift off the road into some canyon wasteland. But I was wrong. They made it home in four days, traveling ninety-five miles by easy stages, stopping at every saloon that popped up along the perilous route.
It was after one o’clock when my father tumbled into the cabin. He switched on the ugly light in the globed overhead chandelier, left the door open, and marched straight to the bed, where he collapsed. In thirty seconds he was deeply asleep, his breathing heavy, his mouth open. I locked the door, peeled off his clothes, and rolled him under the covers. As I turned off the light and lay down on the divan he began to moan, “Mama mia, mama mia.”
Then he was sobbing. Was this any way for a man to fall asleep, calling for his mother? It seemed he would never stop. It tore me to shreds. I knew nothing of his mother. She had been dead for over sixty years, had expired in Italy after he had left and come to America, still visiting him now in his old man’s sleep, as if he felt her near in his dreams, like one lost and wandering, crying for her.
I lay there tearing my hair and thinking. Stop it, Father, you are drunk and full of self-pity and you must stop it, you have no right to cry, you are my father and the right to cry belongs to my wife and children, to my mother, for it is obscene that you should cry, it humiliates me, I shall die from your grief, I cannot endure your pain, I should be spared your pain for I have enough of my own. I shall have more too, but I shall never cry before others, I shall be strong and face my last days without tears, old man. I need your life and not your death, your joy and not your dismay.
Then I was crying too, on my feet, crossing to him. I gathered his limp head in my arms (as I had seen my mother do), I wiped his tears with a corner of the sheet, I rocked him like a child, and soon he was no longer crying, and I eased him gently to the pillow and he slept quietly.