The Wine of Youth (17 page)

My sister will say: “Why do you write about your family all the time?”

I will shrug. “Why not?”

“You haven't any pride.”

“Sez you.”

I will be conscious of the splendid beauty of my flowering sister, and will be proud that she has accused me of unpride.

My taciturn brother Mike will assert himself now. He will tell of his feats on the diamond.

He will say: “Pitched a three-hit game last Sunday.”

My father, who roots for my brother and gets great praise for the ability of my brother, will say, “He's some boy, that Mike. The best pitcher in this town.”

I will say then: “Well, if Mike can do it, I guess I'm able to hold them to
two
hits.”

My father will not answer, for he knows that I am a better pitcher than my brother, and my brother knows it too, but I have put baseball behind me now, and they know it, and they respect me, and they will not comment.

Now my mother will ask if all are finished, the plates will be passed to her, and she will scrape them and carry them into the kitchen. My sister, her squirrel eyes flashing over the tablecloth for spots, will rise and help my mother. My father will refill the wine glasses. We will drink in silence, conscious that my sister and mother have gone.

IV

Then will come the triumph of the meal—a sweetmeat made by my mother. It will be a cake of eggs, cheese, lemon peel, and cinnamon. We will shout when my mother carries it in, her face happy in this, her little moment.

She will say: “For Jimmy.” I will leap to my feet and kiss my mother where her shoulder curves to meet her neck, where a kiss tickles, and she will laugh in ecstasy, and I will turn her face to look upon it, and there will be tears, and she will say: “Thank God for my Jimmy!”

My father and my brother will not look at us, for neither of them has ever gone away to return to sentimental embraces.
Those are things which they see only in picture shows.

I will say to my mother. “Thank whatever gods there be for you.”

“Listen to the atheist,” my sister will say.

I will answer: “Atheist? When I use the plural? You mean polytheist.”

“I told you a million times I don't know what that means.”

“Look it up, squirrel eyes.” And that will bring smiles.

And my father will surely say: “You better leave them books alone.”

My brother Mike will say: “Do you think the Yanks have a chance?”

My sister will now say what she has been bubbling to tell all this time.

“I have a new boy friend. Gee, he's keen!”

And then the whole family will attack her.

My mother: “You're too young for boy friends.”

My father: “I'll kill that bum if he hangs around here.”

My brother: “Aw, he's no good.”

How my sister will defend her new boy friend! Her face will change to pink, her arms will grow hard, and her white teeth will bite the words. She will threaten to run away and never return. She will seize her napkin, twisting it in her fingers. She will fire denunciations at each reviler, and I will understand that she is right, and that my people are unfair and wrong.

I will say: “Why don't you bring him here to meet your father and mother? Maybe that would help.”

And she will stare at the four bare walls, at the stiff furniture, the curtainless windows, the carpetless floors gone gray with age and with the cracks between boards pressed smooth with dirt.

I will say nothing. No one will speak, but around the table will be four people who feel the great pain of poverty, and my father, whose hopes are despairs, will be hurt most painfully.

Maybe, as he sometimes does, he will say: “Ah, well, better days are coming.” But that, I will remember from Nietzsche, is hope—the first sign of defeat. My father will tremblingly, avidly drain his glass, fill it, and drain it again. His hand will go out to my sister, and he will chuck her under the chin.

“Your father's no good,” he will say.

And my sister: “Don't be silly.”

My mother will cut away a huge piece of cake and carry it into the kitchen. That will be for my little brother Tony, who has run laughing at the bungling speech of my father. Tonight he will come home and find his cake in the pantry. Maybe before he returns I will go into the pantry and steal it for myself. Everyone but my mother will be likely to do that.

The dinner will be ended now. The wine pitcher, a huge thing with a capacity of half a gallon, will be drained. Outside, darkness will be coming. A car or two will pass, with lights glassy and glaring.

My brother will say: “I wish we had a radio.”

My father will put on his hat, and in shirt-sleeves he will go away to the poolhall.

My mother will come out of the kitchen to the front door and say to my father as he descends the porch steps: “Aren't you going to stay home this one night when Jimmy is home?”

“What for?” he will answer. “There ain't nothing for me here.”

And I will hear him, and I will know that he is right. He will go down the street, and I will know what is in his mind. Maybe he will meet my little brother, and my brother will run, and my father will shake his fist at him and shout: “Dutty hanimal!”

In the kitchen, my mother and sister will wash the dishes, my sister singing as she dries them, my mother before the sink, her apron with a round wet spot where she presses against the sink. My brother Mike will go to the back yard to oil his ball glove.

I will go to the front yard, light a cigarette, lie on my back on the lawn, and grow restless. The stars will begin to twinkle, and I will think of a favorite line in
The Mysterious Universe:
“And the total number of stars in the universe is probably something like the total number of grains of sand on all the seashores of the world.” I will linger with the words, and wish that I could have written such a line. I will think about my girl Claudia, who is far away, and I will see her in a red dress, and I will think about kissing her. She will come between me and the stars, and the whole sky will be filled with her.

I will get up on my feet and flip my cigarette, and wish I were with her, and not in this goddamned, godforsaken, one-horse town.

C
LAUDIA'S APARTMENT
was the last on the second floor. Fifteen minutes before the first quake I sat reading in the living room, but I wasn't interested in the book because Claudia was so near. She was a woman who impulsively loved to cook, and now she was in the kitchen making marmalade. It was turning out with such success that every few minutes she exclaimed so, and I sat there pleased with her happiness.

She always came without a sound, and coming from the kitchenette she stood in the door. I thought how beautiful she was, and yet I knew she was fading. In her thirty-sixth year, her beauty was dying like the setting sun coming across the Pacific and pouring so richly through the chintz curtains behind her. She wore the green dress I always requested because it did such wonderful things to her figure.

“Come and see!” she said. “Hurry!”

I tossed the book on the chesterfield and got up. Instantly her hands went to her hips.

“Jimmy! Put that book back in the case! How many times must I tell you that?”

“I'm not through with it,” I said.

“It doesn't matter.”

I put the book in the case, but it got me. I couldn't stand it when she harped on small details. Her requests were always expressed as demands, and they implied that big difference in our ages. The clock on the bookcase said ten minutes to six, and I was hungry. We usually ate at five but today she had closed her millinery shop an hour later. I followed her into the kitchenette that blended so well with her green dress. She stirred the
marmalade with a bright spoon. Leaning upon her from behind, I dovetailed my hands across her waist and pressed her carefully. She lifted her Slavic face and rubbed her forehead into my throat. I knew she could never possess me, this small woman who I liked to believe had lured me from my Faith. Ever since I was a kid who served at Mass I had wanted a sinful woman, someone to lure me like a siren. Now I was tiring of it. The feeling of sinfulness was all right for a while, but in the end it was tiresome. I felt a need for Confession again, for Holy Communion, symbols which Claudia thought stupid and superstitious and barbaric.

“Look!” she said. “Isn't it wonderful?”

I put my finger into the golden marmalade and tasted it. She waited breathlessly for my verdict. I thought the mixture was acrid, the apricots unripe and bitter.

“Not bad,” I said.

Which was too prosaic. She had expected bombast and flattery, which was my style, but I had lost all feeling for it. She looked at me and I saw the bluish-white spots where her temples met her eyes, and again I told myself the Church would be amused and shocked in the delight I took in those marks of maturity upon a woman fourteen years my senior. Leaning against the sink, I watched her sleek hips as she furiously stirred the marmalade. I hadn't been to Confessions and Communion since I met her, two years before. I hadn't been to Mass, either. I would have a lot to tell Father Driscoll about her and me. I knew what he would say, that cynical, intelligent priest. He would tell me that two years with Claudia was not adultery but absurdity. He would tell me it was not sinful but silly. He would raise hell about my missing Mass for two years, though. He would say, take it easy, Jimmy; and he would warn me about youthful excesses. As for Claudia, he would think her ridiculous, a silly woman with a crush on a kid. He was so wise; non-Catholic women were so absurd to him, they were outside the Church and they hadn't the intelligence to come in; they weren't like the women inside the Church, who knew the answers, knew the ground upon which they walked. He would say, if you've got to go helling around, Jimmy, get yourself a Catholic girl—it's more fun, you'll have more in common; and he would tell me Catholic
women had more on the ball; they were as women should be, sad and mystical.

At that moment the first tremendous shock came. Just before it hit there seemed a paralysis of death in the air. It seemed the atmosphere was palsied and even suffocating a tenth of a second before the shock came. Then it hit us.

Claudia looked around, eyes shrieking. The floor rolled. I spread my legs and clung to the sink. The floor rolled. The swaying was deep and beautiful, a colossal gracefulness. I felt like laughing, it was so beautiful. I heard creaking and cracking like the twisting of bones. Plaster fell. The floor was like a mad sea. Somewhere there was screaming. Claudia fell upon me, clawing my neck. The boiling marmalade fell to the floor, and I dragged her away from the toppling stove. The walls wept and wailed. There was a boom when the piano hit the floor. The carpets crept. Windows broke. Cupboards fell. Dodging dishes, we were knocked down.

“God save me!” Claudia screamed. “Earthquake!”

I got up and pulled her after me. In the corridor people were running. Clouds of dust and smoke wafted after them like ghosts through open doors. The swaying continued and the women screamed. We ran down the back stairs. The face of the earth was veiled in dust in the twilight. From everywhere came the gleeful laughter of breaking glass. When we reached the bottom I stared at the quivering earth and tried to subdue a revolution of thought and sensation. And the women screamed. Claudia lay on her back and panted. The dust hovering over the ground was like fog blooming from an agonized soil.

“God have mercy!” Claudia moaned.

We were in an empty parking lot surrounded by tall palm and eucalyptus trees. Beyond the line of trees to the south I noticed the gaping horizon, and at once I knew the tall Protestant church had been knocked down and out of sight. I wondered about Father Driscoll's parish and St. Vincent's. I turned quickly and looked beyond the trees to the north. It was still there—that golden cross. My blood howled with joy, but my thought raced up and I said, it's a coincidence; Aquinas would call it that, and so would Augustine, and St. Ignatius, and Father Driscoll, and
so must you; remember what Aquinas wrote about superstition; be rational. And I laughed because I was so scared, and because I was praying with instant familiarity a prayer I hadn't remembered for fifteen years:

I had my Faith, it was still there, strong as ever, right there in my blood, fighting off my fear of the quake, beating it down with a forgotten Latin and making me laugh for joy that it should guard me so selfishly, protecting me in a film of blood-prayer.

The temblors were ceaseless. The earth quivered like a horse-rump flicking flies. It was a jabbing, sickening vibration, as though someone pulled wires fastened to your ankles. It stirred up that nausea that comes before retching. And the women screamed. With every shake they screamed. I saw a lot of grotesque stuff: the old lady embracing the palm tree with arms and legs, as though to shinny it; the woman slugging herself furiously with both fists; the dog crawling flat on his belly, his snout lifted beseechingly to the inscrutable sky.

Claudia lay with eyes wide to the twilight, her fingers tearing tufts of grass from the earth. She had got her breath at last.

“Afraid?” she asked.

“Scared to death,” I said.

Kneeling, I lifted her head into my lap.

“I love you so much,” she said.

How often she had said that, yet never had I the talent to believe her! It was simply not in me. She was an instrument of sin; my only talent with her was a capacity for willing to believe she had lured me awhile into a wasteland of evil, not too far from the outposts of my spiritual beginnings.

Suddenly in front of us in a circle a group of men and women gathered in prayer. There was a stout woman in a housedress in the center of the circle. Her arms stretched to the sky, she wept as she led their propitiations. Then they sang hymns. Claudia
joined in the singing. I had to smile: they seemed like savages crawling back to their pristine altars: they were denying intelligence and reason. I said, not for me this voodooism, not for me this slobbering at the feet of catastrophe; my Church fostered this civilization and if God wills that an earthquake destroy it I will at least refrain from singing hymns and acting like a Holy Roller. The praying folk were indeed like Holy Rollers. They kissed the earth with their faces, got dirt in their mouths, and let out weird noises to the first stars of that incredible night. I felt ashamed and turned my back on the scene.

It infuriated Claudia, and I could feel her shame before me, her anger that I should witness her sudden return to God, for a thousand times she had ridiculed all religion and proclaimed herself a fearless atheist. She lifted her head from my lap and sat up, her elbows on her knees. The temblors rocked her, and she spread her legs to keep from being bowled over, and when she did so one of the men in the circle looked at her hungrily, his eyes softening and he forgetting to pray as he stared at Claudia's spread legs. I pulled off my leather coat and threw it over her knees.

“Was that necessary?” she asked.

“You're corrupting his earthquake morals,” I said.

“You prude!” she sneered. “You Catholic!”

While I laughed she glanced around the tree-confined lot. I knew she wanted someone different from me to sustain her, that she wanted to go nearer the group and give herself heart and soul to the prayers and hymns. I said something about the worst being over now, but she shrugged contemptuously and began polishing her nails against her thigh. Suddenly she jumped to her feet.

“My jewels!” she said. “Heavens! All my jewels are up there on the dressing table!”

The apartment building still stood, but all the windows were smashed and the walls were split asunder in a dozen places. The incinerator chimney lay in debris, much of the back wall torn away with it. The building had withstood the quake, but at the moment it was unsafe to enter it. Slight temblors kept knocking away brick and stucco, and a severe jolt could easily sink the
upper floors. I thought it stupid to enter the building after her jewels; anyhow, they were not particularly valuable.

“You're a filthy coward!” she said.

“No one will touch the jewels,” I said.

“But the fire!” she said. “They had a fire after the San Francisco quake, didn't they?”

“No danger,” I said. “By now all gas mains and power lines are obviously disconnected.”

She thought a moment. “Of course you left the door wide open.”

“I don't remember.”

“Of course you did! Someone will steal the jewels!”

“No thief will enter that building tonight,” I said.

“Thieves aren't cowards.”

I wanted to tear her to pieces.

“All right,” I said. “I'll get them.”

II

I started for the darkened apartment house. The late evening was bathed in the white light of the moon, and for the first time I saw the real havoc of earthquake. Across the street on the hotel lawn the dead were laid out in rows and covered with blood-soaked sheets. The wounded were on the other side of the lawn. The writhing of bodies bespoke great pain, but I heard only the drone of airplanes, the roar of automobiles, the wailing of sirens. For the wounded there was no escape, the earth still quivering in spasms everywhere within a radius of a hundred miles.

Then I saw the three newsreel cameramen. They were shooting a woman crushed to death beneath a fallen wall. Lying on her side, she was half buried in tons of masonry. The cameras were poised six feet above her, the boys standing with feet braced, red-tipped cigarettes in their mouths as they ground out the shot. It was like a bullet between the eyes to watch them. I buckled and ran inside the dark apartment. Lighting matches, I found my way to the stairs in the foyer. The floor was solid but buried in six inches of fallen plaster. Intermittent temblors sprinkled me with plaster. I was scared stiff, but I had to smile at the gush
of forgotten Latin that came from memory. It was not prayer, for prayer means propitiation. It was memory set to the music of fine Latin stanzas. It was a beautiful way to be frightened and I was grateful. I wondered what Father Driscoll would say if he were to see me there, risking my neck for Claudia's jewels, and I knew he would laugh and call me a sucker.

Claudia's apartment was an impassable heap of overturned furniture, broken pictures, and fallen plaster. I found a candle under the table in the breakfast nook, and as I stepped back to the living room I felt the soles of my feet covered with sticky marmalade; it clung like dead fingers, as if to imprison me. I scraped it off on a chair rung.

Claudia's jewels were buried under a heap of perfume bottles. As I gathered them a shock came. I lost my balance and the candle wavered, and it seemed my heart sprang and struck me like a snake. But I got the jewels. At the door I stooped for one last look around. Before the fireplace I was surprised to find the chesterfield unmoved, the only piece of furniture undisturbed by the quake. A long time ago Claudia and I had christened it “The Field of Honor.” We used to lie there by the hour, talking and sipping gin fizzes on hot summer afternoons. I went up to it and turned it over and shoved it across the room, thinking all the time of the laughter of Father Driscoll.

By the time I got downstairs and into the open again the Marines had taken charge and the town was under martial law. They ordered me away from the wrecked walls and I moved to the middle of the lot. I couldn't find Claudia. Someone had built a big bonfire, where the refugees of that district now huddled. I walked around the fire, looking into frightened, flame-shadowed faces. She wasn't there, so I began a systematic search of the lot, starting at one corner and walking down the crowded sidewalk. Then I heard my name called. I turned toward the street and saw Claudia seated with someone in a car. I walked over. A man was at the wheel beside her, but I didn't know him; I'd never seen him before. With eyes lowered, she open her palms and I emptied my pockets of the jewels.