The Brotherhood of the Grape by John Fante Page A

heard her shuffling heavy objects about. She returned with an armful of books, dropping them on the table in front of me. They were my high school textbooks: geometry, American history, English composition, Spanish.
    “Take them home,” she said. “They’re still new.”
    I thanked her. “Just what I need.”
    She studied my face, her fingers touching the delicate bones of her cheeks as she returned to the one obsession of her existence. “You didn’t get him mad? He won’t get into trouble?”
    “He’ll drink too much, that’s all.”
    “I don’t mind the drinking. The boys bring him home.”
    “The boys?”
    “Zarlingo and them. They watch him for me. Thank God you’ll be there. They scare me, those mountains.”
    An angel, a persistent, tiresome angel. No wonder my papa booted her in the ass. I felt strangled, helpless as an infant swaddled and straining in futility. What the hell was I doing here? What was my wife up to? I was having a serious problem with my book. What the hell was it? Had the old man really put up with this crap for half a century? Who said he was impulsive, lacking patience, intolerant? The sun had dropped below the houses beyond the alley and it was cooler now, about ninety-five in the shade, the sky exploding with red and orange clouds.
    “As long as I know where he is,” she was saying. “As long as he lets me know…”
    I filled my glass and went out on the front porch, sat in the creaking rocker, and lit a cigarette. Darkness came fast. Down the street a mother stepped out on her porch and called her children to supper. The corner street lamp burst into light and an old dog trotted under it, hurrying home. The white eyes of television sets shone through the windows across the street, cowboys racing across the screens, gunfire crackling in the San Elmo twilight. A lonesome town. All the valley towns were like it, desolate, mystically impermanent, enclaves of human existence, people clustered behind small fences and flimsy stucco walls, barricaded against the darkness, waiting. I rocked back and forth and felt grief seeping into my bones, grief for man and the pain of loneliness in the house of my mother and father, aging, waiting, marking time.
    Then my mother came quietly to the screen door and stared at me, as if storing up a remembrance of me, as if she might never see me again. I felt her pulsing back and forth, incorporeal and disembodied, sorrowing and lost as she slipped out of reality and back again, ashamed so little time remained.
    “Henry?” Her voice was soft and irresolute. “You mustn’t worry about me and your father. You get a little crazy when you’re older, but it don’t do any harm. Be patient, Henry. You want your supper now?”
    The baked eggplant took me back to the childhood of my life when they were a nickel apiece and a great feast, purple globular marvels bulging jolly and generous, rich Arab uncles eager to fill our stomachs, so beautiful I wanted to cry.
    The thin slices of veal had me fighting tears again as I washed them down with Joe Musso’s magnificent wine from the nearby foothills. And the gnocchi prepared in butter and milk finally did it. I covered my eyes over the plate and wept with joy, sopping my tears with a napkin, gurgling as if in my mother’s womb, so sweet and peaceful and filling my mouth with life forever. She saw my wet eyes, for there was no hiding them.
    “Something in the air,” I said. “Ammonia, maybe? It burns my eyes.”
    “It’s ammonia. I mopped the floor with it.”
    “That’s it. Ammonia.”
    “Your father hates ammonia. He won’t let me use it in the washing machine.”
    “Really?”
    “You know what he likes?”
    “Tell me.”
    “Bubble bath.”
    She veered to questions about Harriet and my boys. I showed her the snapshots in my wallet, the younger twenty-two, the older twenty-four. She studied the pictures under the kitchen light.
    “They don’t look like