The Brotherhood of the Grape (8 page)

W
ITH HALF AN HOUR
remaining before we took off, I decided to surprise my wife by visiting her mother. Hilda Dietrich was eighty, living alone in a jewel box of a white house a few blocks away. The house was a hundred years old, quite small, a veranda of white pillars encircling it, honeysuckle and climbing roses scaling the trellised portico. The grounds were so clean and neat they resembled a theatrical set. From the white picket fence in front to the tall eugenia hedge bordering the alley there spread an acre of dicondra lawn surrounding flowerbeds and birdbaths. Not a twig or fallen leaf marred that sweep of grass. Regionally the place was famous. Everyone took pictures of it, a California original, passionately cared for by a proud old lady who had made it her life’s work.

Hilda Dietrich and I had one common bond that held us together forever: we loathed each other. She had never forgiven Harriet for becoming my wife, and I had never forgiven her for being my wife’s mother.

It was my Italian side that Hilda found unbearable. San Elmo has changed now, but forty years ago the town was one-third Italian. The bluebloods of the region, the Protestant-Americans—the Schmids, the Eicheldorns, the Kisbergs and the Dietrichs—suddenly found themselves horrified neighbors of noisy Dagos working the tracks of the Southern Pacific. They propagated large and offensively dark families and built a Roman church to administer to their primitive superstitions.

With the coming of Prohibition, many of these guineas moved into the bootleg trade. They bought land, cultivated vineyards, and achieved an annoying respectability despite some bombings and a couple of gang killings. In 1926 the front of the Café Roma was blown out, and in 1931 a hood named Petresini was shot down on the corner of Lincoln and Vernon. The bullets that killed Petresini lodged deeply into a telephone pole at the scene, and every generation of kids thereafter probed the bulletholes like Saint Thomas putting his doubting finger into the Savior’s wounds.

By Franklin Roosevelt’s time Hilda Dietrich was forty, a housewife and mother, married to the Reverend Herman Dietrich, pastor of the Lutheran church. Like her husband, who said as much from his pulpit, Mrs. Dietrich was fully persuaded that Italians were creatures with African blood, that all Italians carried knives, and that the country was in the dutches of the Mafia. It was no extremist theory. A lot of worried people believed it, particularly Italian-Americans.

I met Harriet Dietrich the year after her father died, in the summer of my first book. She was home from Berkeley, working as an assistant in the public library. I autographed the two library copies and she clutched them to her breast and praised my work, the nobility of purpose, the fresh style, et cetera. I was better than Faulkner, she insisted, better than Hemingway. I agreed and went reeling out of the library, intoxicated. What a lovely mind she had! So well informed, so perceptive, with an overview of world literature that took my breath away. As night fell four hours later I was standing on her front porch, eager to continue our stimulating conversation.

Since I had not been invited, she was surprised to see me, smiling her welcome and opening the door to a small Victorian parlor with red velvet chairs and a love seat. In a whisper she explained that her mother had already gone to bed in the next room. I allowed this to alarm me, and I apologized and made for the front door, knowing she would stop me, which she promptly did, steering me back to the love seat, where I kept looking at her noble, smooth, sensuous bottom and wondering if her pubic hair was as blond as her shoulder-length tresses. Her voice was as soft as the night wind, and I fancied her cherry mouth whispering, “Fuck me, please fuck me, Henry!” I saw her golden knees crossing and uncrossing under a short skirt and sighed at the thought of being trapped between them in a scissor lock. With every breath her bosom lifted and I toyed with the reverie of raising her breasts out of her dress in some dramatic way, as if lifting golden goblets toward the sky. Surely I would ball this woman, for already we were beneath each other’s skin, slithering for positions. It was not love, but lust was better.

Then Mrs. Dietrich called from her bedroom, sharply, irritably. “Harriet, will you come here, please?”

Harriet looked threatened, smiling nervously as she excused herself and opened the bedroom door. The room was in darkness. As Harriet closed the door there was a buzz of whispered angry voices. In a moment or two Harriet emerged, eyes blazing with anger. She avoided my glance and calmed herself.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

She smiled. “I hate to ask you this, but are you…armed?”

“You mean, carrying a gun?”

It was so absurd that she laughed. “Mother says you—you might have a knife.”

“Why?”

“You’re Italian.”

1 said, “Oh, shit, she’s crazy.”

The bedroom door opened and Mrs. Dietrich stood there in a housecoat over her nightie, her feet in slippers. It was said that she had been one of the town’s most beautiful women. Not so, then. She had jowls and the cords in her neck protruded, but her figure was rounded and attractive. Raising her arm imperiously, she pointed to the front door.

“Out!” she demanded. “Out of my house, young man, or I shall call the police.”

I glanced at Harriet. “What’s this all about?”

“Please go,” she said, taking my hand. “Please.”

I walked to the door with her. “What’s going on here?”

Gently she pushed me out on the porch. “I’ll see you tomorrow at the library.”

“Close that door,” Mrs. Dietrich snapped.

Harriet was brave, but she had been taught to fear her intractable mother. Mrs. Dietrich of course forbade her to ever see me again, so we were forced to go underground. It wasn’t easy in Placer County. There were Dietrichs everywhere—in towns, on farms and in mountain settlements. Driving separate cars, we used to meet in madhouses, on back roads, in abandoned farmhouses, in orchards and vineyards.

If a Dietrich cousin or uncle spotted us, a report was telephoned to the queen in San Elmo. It was sport at first, but after two months we tired of it. One morning in July I pulled up in front of the public library, took Harriet by the arm, and led her down to the car. We drove to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe and were married by a justice of the peace. We spent our honeymoon at a hotel beside the lake, and the following morning we started back to San Elmo for a confrontation with La Dietrich. It was raining hard as we drew up in front of the Dietrich house.

As we stepped from the car Mrs. Dietrich emerged from the house in a raincoat, carrying an umbrella. Her bleak tight-mouthed glare, the protruding cords in her neck, told us she already knew and that there was nothing to say. Hand in hand we moved up the porch steps. Harriet braved a smile.

“Mother, Henry and I are married.”

Mrs. Dietrich raised her umbrella and whacked me over the head.

That was twenty-five years ago, and Harriet and her mother had long since made an adjustment to the marriage. They corresponded, talked by telephone, and our two sons spent frequent summers with their grandmother in San Elmo. But Henry Molise was anathema. His name, his books, his films were never discussed in the Dietrich house. Whenever we visited San Elmo, Harriet stayed at her mother’s house and I lived with my parents. However, four years ago Hilda Dietrich was laid low by pneumonia and Harriet and I flew up because her doctor said it was critical and advised us to come. It was the first and last time I stayed in the Dietrich house.

I avoided the sick woman as much as possible, playing golf by day, staying out of sight, careful not to agitate her condition. To the doctor’s amazement she was well and on her feet two days after we arrived. He called it a miracle of antibiotics, but I knew better. Hilda Dietrich had simply willed herself back to health in order to get me out from under her roof. As we left for home she stepped out on the porch to kiss Harriet good-bye and thank her for coming.

Ignoring my hand, she said, “Good-bye, Mr. Malice.”

“Molise,” I corrected.

She smiled wickedly. “Oh, what’s the difference!”

We descended the stairs to a waiting taxi.

“Bitch,” I said.

“Be tolerant,” Harriet said.

“Bitch.”

I rang Hilda Dietrich’s door chimes four times before the curtains parted and the old lady’s white face appeared behind the glass door, her cold eyes widening in annoyance. She stood there, staring, making no move to open the door.

I said, “Good morning.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“Harriet asked me to drop by.”

“What on earth for?”

“Just a visit. To see how you’re getting along.”

She hesitated. “I’m very busy now. Tell Harriet I’m getting along fine.”

“I’ll only stay a moment.”

“Some other time, Mr. Malice.”

“Molise,” I pronounced. “With an o.”

“As long as you’re here, I wish you’d take your golf clubs with you.”

I had left the clubs when we visited during her illness. Deliberately, for I liked the local course but not the nuisance of traveling with golf clubs. Besides, I had another set at home.

“I’d rather leave them here, if they’re not in the way.”

“They most certainly are,” she snapped.

“In that case, I’ll take them away,” I said, expecting her to open the door.

“You’ll find them in the toolhouse.”

The conversation came to a frozen halt as we stared at one another and I felt the boil of blood in my throat, the urge to take her corded old neck in my two hands and break it.

The depth of her dislike was unfathomable. Harriet had said she was “changed.” Was this the change, that she hated me more? What had I done to this woman? Had I been cruel to her daughter, or caught in the sack with another woman, the measure of a mother’s bitterness would have been understandable. But there was more than hatred in those aged, glittering eyes. Fear was there, paranoia, a sickening obsession, the dread that I might slash her with a knife, Italian-style. Nothing I said or did would rid it from her mind, and it left me sickened and enraged.

I turned away, quickly descending the porch stairs and hurrying around the house to the toolshed. My golf clubs! I had tucked them out of the way in the far corner of a bedroom closet. My clubs! My beautiful custom-made Stan Thompsons, four woods, nine irons, with special grips, featherlike graphite shafts—expensive, perfectly balanced weapons that fired a ball true and far.

And there they were, on the moist adobe floor of the toolhouse, the leather bag flaking apart as I lifted it. Shocking. A disaster. As sacrilegious as spitting out the sacred host. Only a golfer could comprehend this wanton, brutal crime. Every club was rusted, every grip peeling away from the shaft. It was more than the murder of golf clubs. It was an attack on me, my life, my pleasure. Only a deranged mind could conjure up such a desecration.

I wanted revenge, to strike back, to destroy. I looked around and saw them hanging neatly from hooks—her rakes, shovels, clippers, garden tools. I snatched a saw and a shovel and breathed a gloating sigh as the saw’s teeth ripped apart the handle of the shovel. But after it was done I felt absurd and embarrassed.

Then I discovered the gloves, a woman’s leather gardening gloves hanging from a nail, shaped like the small hands of Hilda Dietrich. I unzipped my fly and poured the golden liquid into them. They had a human form as I hung them up again: they were filled out, grotesque, seeping, the palms open, moist and supplicating.

T
HE THREE SENIORS
were waiting in the Datsun camper when I got back to the house—Zarlingo behind the wheel, my father between him and Cavallaro.

“Where you been?” my father asked thickly, his tongue dragging. “Get a move on.”

I strode up and studied their slowing faces. Cavallaro might have been sober, but Zarlingo and my father were drunk, smoking long cigars. Zarlingo was quite gone, drooling from the corners of his mouth.

He said, “Let’s get out of here.”

“You’re too drunk to drive,” I said.

He smiled moronically.

“Wassa matter, punk? Scared?”

“Scared to death. I’m not going.”

I started toward the house, leaving them staring. My mother watched from behind the screen door. “They’re bad company, Henry. Be a good boy. Don’t go with them.”

She followed me into the kitchen and watched as I made a salami sandwich. “I had an awful dream last night,” she remembered. “The car went over a cliff and you were killed. Your chest was broke wide open, and you kept screaming, but nobody came.”

“Gee, Ma. Thanks for telling me.”

Cavallaro walked through the house and stood hesitantly in the kitchen door.

“What do
you
want?” I said.

“Would you feel any better if I drove?”

“How sober are you?”

“Two beers, so help me God.”

I bit into the sandwich and thought it over. Cavallaro was trying to be reasonable. He had none of Zarlingo’s boorishness.

“Mama,” I said. “Can you trust this man?”

She moved to him and looked up at his face.

“Swear you won’t drink, Louie.”

“I swear,” he said, raising his right hand.

“Swear by the blood of the Blessed Virgin.”

“I swear.”

Mama gave me a confident smile. “Go with them, Henry. Everything’s gonna be all right.” Suddenly the camera of my fate projected a dark sea and I saw fish swimming among my white, clean bones. I looked at Cavallaro, at my mother, and I was mystified. Maybe the man who had pissed into the gloves was the maddest of them all.

They wanted me up front with them in the cab, but I stopped that one immediately.

“Lotsa room,” Papa said. “Sit on my lap.”

“No, thanks, Daddy-O. I’ll make out in the camper.”

It was heaped with Papa’s junk, which I moved this way and that until there was a place to upright the wheelbarrow. I spread a canvas over it and seated myself guru-style. No doubt Zarlingo’s wife had hung the pink organdy curtains. The interior was like a mobile whorehouse where a bricklayer with all his paraphernalia was being serviced. Peering through the window, I saw my mother weeping and waving a handkerchief as I gazed mournfully at what might be my last look at the house. Cavallaro cruised down Pleasant Street to Lincoln, then east on Vernon to Highway 80.

A few miles out of town the old tomcats began harmonizing, belting out the immortals of their youth: “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” “The Prisoner’s Song,” and “Three O’Clock in the Morning.” They were horribly out of tune, but they were happy too, companions of the road, free, going places, adventuring into old times.

Through the window the lovely autumn hillsides glided by, the manzanita, the scrub oak and pine, the farmhouses, the vineyards, cattle and sheep grazing among white stones, the peach and pear orchards. Autumn up here was a strong season when the earth showed its muscle and its fertility, and there was a wild feeling in the air.

There was a knock on the window behind the seat. I opened it. “Want a beer?” my father asked.

“Sure.”

He passed it through, dripping and cold from the cooler, gorgeous in my warm throat, perfection, with the hot sun above, the white peaks of the Sierras in the distance, and the Datsun humming confidently along the wide highway. I felt good now. Perhaps the trip would turn out well after all.