John Fante: Mama's dream

MAMA ANDRILLI SAT at the kitchen table preparing lunch. The hot white sun of the Sacramento Valley hurst into the room from the south windows

— big cascades of sunshine over the red linoleum floor where slept Papa's cats, Philomina and Costanza. Both were males, but Papa recognized only one sex in cats.

In less than an hour he would be home from work. Papa was seventy now, and worse than ever; except for a weakening of his eyes, he still laid brick and stone as fast as a young mason. But the years — no matter how blasphemous his denials

— had taken their toll, and by now Mama had given up all hope of a quiet old age.

When a man reaches seventy you would think he might mellow. But no: the past ten years, with their three sons married and gone, had been the worst. Now Papa would never soften and grow gentle. Until his last breath he would go raging and shouting, with Mama always there, patient to the end. It had been so for forty years, and now Mama was sixty-eight, with white hair and sometimes excruciating agony in her withered hands. Papa still had his red mustache and only traces of grey at his temples. He still pounded his chest with furious blows as he entreated God to strike him down and remove him from this valley of travail. Years ago, when she was young and strong, Mama took comfort in the thought that she would leave her noisy husband as soon as her children were grown. The notion was a tiny jewel she hoarded in secret. But it was lost now, misplaced in some teapot of the past, and Mama had forgotten it.

On the table stood a bowl of bell peppers, green and fat. Mama cut them into strips for frying and thought again of last night's dream. Papa had slept badly, his kidneys heckling him, tumbling him from bed half a dozen times. Naturally he blamed Mama. Not enough peppers in his diet. Papa was a sort of primitive medicine man with some ancient Italian notions about food. You ate fish for the brain, cheese for the teeth, eggplant for the blood, beans for the bowels, bread for the brawn, chicory for the nerves, garlic for purity, olive oil for strength, and peppers for the kidneys. Without these a man faced quick decay.

For a week he had demanded peppers without avail. Phis was the result. Coming back to dump his tired body beside her, he had accused her of trying to destroy him, of deliberately withholding peppers so that his kidneys would become diseased, a malady which had cut down his cousin Rocco at the age of thirty-five, thus ending the career of the man who made the best zinfandel in California.

The dream had come after that, a product of shattered sleep, lucid through her husband's grumbling. In it Mama saw herself naked at the side of Highway 99 as a speeding car approached. Nick, her oldest son, was driving the car. Beside him sat his wife Hild. She was laughing hysterically as she blew her nose into a large piece of lace. For all her nudity and shame Mama could not help seeing in horror that the lace was an altar's boy's surplice. Hild tossed the surplice out of the speeding car, Nick honked the horn madly, and the surplice came flying back to Mama. At that moment the car went over a cliff with Nick screaming, «Mama, Mama».

Frightened and suddenly aware of her nudity, Mama ran away, the surplice shielding her loins, her backside exposed and gleaming in the moonlight as she ran across a field. In a little while she reached a graveyard where a funeral service was being conducted. In the descending coffin she saw her son Nick. The coffin was open, but Nick was not dead. He was on his knees before a typewriter, his fingers tapping out a message on a yellow Western Union blank. The message read: They won't give me the last sacraments. Mama began to scream for a priest, and the mourners around the grave turned to glare at her in annoyance. Once more she was aware of her nakedness and rushed off in shame, her backside shining like a diamond in the moonlight. This ended the dream.

Mama cut the last of the peppers and probed for a meaning to the dream. She was a lonely woman and her dreams fascinated her. She did not believe in dreams, since the Church forbade it, but there was a desire to believe and a wonder at their portent.

Nick at his typewriter she understood, for her son was a writer. The surplice meant Nick as a youngster, when he was an altar boy. The disgusting and sacrilegious spectacle of her daughter-in-law blowing her nose into the surplice symbolized the fact that Nick had married a Protestant girl. As for the funeral, Mama dared not make any conjecture. It could mean that Nick was dead back in Los Angeles, just as previous coffin dreams had presaged the deaths of her mother and father, her brother Gino, and her sister Cathy. The telegram was of course bad news. Mama always dreaded telegram dreams. But the most confusing part of the dream was her own nudity. For the last ten years Mama had been dreaming of herself walking around the countryside without a titch to cover her, and it was completely baffling. For a while she presumed it meant a cold was coming on. She fortified herself with aspirin and put on an extra sweater, but the cold never materialized and she was left more confused than ever.

The peppers were cut now, and ready for frying. Mama put Cathy's pot over the gas jet and lit the flame. Cathy's pot was not a pot, nor did it belong to Cathy.

It was a heavy iron skillet Mama's sister Cathy gave her as a wedding present forty years ago, and yet throughout the years it was ever known as Cathy's pot. Mama's little house was full of things described in that fashion. For the years of sacrifice in the life of mama Andrilli had removed all sense of possession from her nature. Living around her, one quickly got the false impression that everything was borrowed.

In truth, all the things the house were hers — and many were gifts from her sons, her brothers and sisters. There were no strings attached to these gifts, they belonged to her completely, but Mama Andrilli had long ago lost any sense of possession. For this reason, the three-room bungalow contained Nick's radio, Stella's sheets, Mike's towels, Ralph's lamp, Rosie's coffee pot, Tony's dress, Bettina's shoes, and Vito's bathrobe. There were also Mike's suitcase, Nettie's tablecloth, Joe's dishes, and Angelo's rugs. A notable omission was anything belonging to Papa, except, of course, Papa's breakfast, Papa's laundry, Papa's hash. But these were not concrete possessions. They were things Mama had to get done.

And now, Papa's peppers. They had to be prepared with solemn precision. Though Mama did all the cooking and was excellent in the Neapolitan style, Papa had altered her technique to suit the tastes of his Abruzzian origins. The difference was a matter of quantity. Where Mama used one clove of garlic, he demanded two. These she cut up now, dropping the small bits into hot olive oil in Cathy's pot. She added sweet basil and rosemary, spicing the oil with breathless caution. After forty years, Papa still sampled his wife's cooking with the darkest suspicions, lest she concoct some unpalatable thing to lay him low.

There was an angry swoosh as she dumped the peppers into the hot oil. Shielding her face, she saw the cats spring up from the floor, their backs arched as they hissed like snakes.

Philomina and Costanza knew that Mama's hearing was poor and failing, and they always assumed this hostile position to warn her that someone was at the front door.

It was the man from Western Union. He was no less alarming than an angel of death, and she stared at him with her face suddenly white as he said, «Telegram for Mr. Andrilli».

He opened the screen and pushed the yellow envelope toward her, but she refused to accept it, her arm failing to go out after that missive so symbolic of death somewhere in the clan. The memory of all the telegrams in her past blocked the reflexes of her arm and she stood with bulging eyes while the frightened cats brushed against her and hissed their hatred of the man on the porch. Finally he thrust the message into her hands and she accepted it weakly.

A few more telegrams showed inside his hat and as he hurried away she thought of how many others besides Nick had suddenly gone to their God. Nick! Her

Nicola, her first-born. For now she knew the meaning of last night's dream. Her son was dead. She dragged herself to the kitchen table and began to cry, the deep wailing lament that only death can arouse. The crushed telegram fell in a ball to the floor and the cats made sport with it.

Thirty minutes later Papa Andrilli turned into the yard from the back alley and sniffed the odor of burning peppers. He wore a mangled felt hat, tan shirt and trousers. All of him was smeared with gray mortar, for he had just come off the scaffold after a morning of bricklaying. His nostrils flared at the smell. Already tasting his burnt lunch, he slammed the back gate and went charging up the porch steps.

The kitchen was smudged with black smoke. At the table sat his weeping wife, oblivious to the choking fumes. Quickly he turned off the flame under the skillet. The peppers were black and shriveled, but the tragic face of Mama Andrilli drove the anger out of him.

«What happened?» He asked.

Her chin trembled and the torrent from her eyes made him afraid. His own eyes began to sting as he forced himself to be calm and took a chair at the table opposite her. They sat in the heavy pall and he twisted his thick battered fingers and prepared for the worst.

«What is it, mia moglia?» He asked again. «Tellyour husband the trouble».

«Our Nicola».

It sounded ominous. When in trouble he was always Nicola, otherwise he was just plain Nick.

«What's he done now?»

«The telegram. He's dead».

Papa looked for the telegram, the shock of her words choking his vision with blinding tears. The crushed message skittered across the smooth floor, pursued by the cats. He rose to pick it up, but he could not bear to read it. He could only sit opposite his wife, numbed by the pain in his soul. Then a fresh burst of grief surged from her, and he set his jaw and determined to he strong.

Even now he told himself again that weeping was for women, but the pain in his chest was very great as he threw open the windows to let the smoke escape. Like a thing of horror, the telegram slid crazily over the floor, the cats pouncing upon it and snarling at one another. Mama Andrilli shuddered, her face buried in her arms. He turned from her in misery, wanting to comfort her. But Italo Andrilli was not familiar with sen-timent, nor had he ever practiced tenderness.

Ashamed of his inadequacy, he opened the refrigerator door and grabbed a decanter of

red wine. He drank quickly, desperately, the shock of cold wine down his throat as he recalled the face of his son, his very hands and feet. There was nobody like Nick, dead before his time, the first and favorite of his children. There was even a touch of genius in Nick, the story-writer, with his books and wild ideas and the reckless ways he spent money. Papa Andrilli had not always approved of the things in his son's books, tales of his own family and their friends. He had been enraged about the theme of one of Nick's books, a tale of infidelity involving an Italian stonemason and his wife. Even though there was considerable truth in the story, he had torn the book in half and burned it and even thought of launching a lawsuit against his son. But that was in the past; all was forgiven now, forgiven and for-gotten. For better or worse, it was not given to all men to be set down in books by their sons.

But Nick's death took away irrevocably one stirring ambition in the final days of Italo Andrilli. Remembering it now, Papa went to his desk in the living room and pulled out a set of building plans. He had made these sketches in pencil on rolled sheets of drawing paper. He placed the wine bottle on the desk

and unrolled the plans. Here in neat black lines was his scheme of a master house for Nick and his wife. For weeks at odd moments he had worked over these plans, hoping to show them to his son when he visited Sacramento again.

Papa studied them and wept bitterly as from the kitchen came the pitiful moans of his wife. Gulping down more wine, Papa wept without shame. But his grief was suffused with rising indignation. It was not right that Nick should die so young. No man should be taken at thirty-seven, not even a bad man, and Nick was good. With both fists in the air he cried to his God and demanded an explanation of his terrible tragedy. His mortal-splattered fingers clawed at the drawings, tearing them to shreds as he sobbed helplessly.

From the alley came the clatter and belch of an engine. Only one car in Sacramento made such a noise, his son Tony's.

Two years younger than Nick, Tony had a temperament to match his red hair. He too was a bricklayer, having served an apprenticeship under his father. They were in business together, a stormy partnership in which even the smallest matters were never settled. Unlike Nick, or Vito, Tony stood toe to toe with Papa in arguments that frequently ended with fists flying. In spite of his seventy years, Papa still held his ground against a son half his age, but not without a club or a trowel with which to defend himself.

Tony had married at seventeen and soon divorced. It set a pattern in his life. He was now with his fourth wife, a man of intense jealousies, insecure with his women. He worked very hard, never satisfied to get a job done in any fashion. He was always in need of money, for his was a hopeless integrity in a trade where speed and trickery were the measures of success.

Tony and his latest wife lived in a nearby hotel, for Tony always contrived to be as near his mother's cooking as possible. His craving for the Italian food upon which he had been raised brought him back home for at least one meal a day, but Mama Andrilli never knew when he was coming, and infuriated him when she asked.

As Tony opened the kitchen door Mama rose with a cry so piteous that he stopped in his tracks. She lurched toward him, her hair loosed from his braids, her face thickened by weeping. With fierce strength she clung to him, her hands around his neck, her tortured mouth crushing kisses to his throat and now on his hands as he fought her off and tried to learn the reason for her hysteria. Shouting and struggling across the waxed linoleum floor, it took all his strength to break the locked hands behind his neck.

«What's happened?» He yelled. Then he sniffed the burnt peppers and saw the room still clouded with smoke. «For God's sake, what's going on around here?»

Suddenly Mama was calm, limp in his arms, and he dragged her back to her chair. He blew into her face and fanned her with wild hands. Her eyes were closed, her chin resting on her breast.

«Mama» he bagged. «0h, Mama. Please».

She opened her eyes and began to cry again and Papa staggered from the living room. With bloodshot eyes he leaned in the doorway, the wine bottle almost empty in his limp hand.

«So that's how it is» Pony concluded. Quickly he was across the room, his fists in Papa's collar, shaking him. «What'd you do

to my mother?» He demanded. «You drunkard, you dirty old man».

That hurt Papa. He covered his eyes and wept softly. Tony let him go. Mystified, he looked from one parent to the other. The confusion was more than he could cope with. He seized his thumb with his teeth and pounded his own head with heavy blows, now his jaw, now his temple, staggering clouts that left one side of his face crimson. Then he calmed down and dropped to his knees before Mama Andrilli. He touched her gently.

«Tell me, Mama. What happened?»

She sat back, panting, unable to speak.

«It's Nick» Papa intervened. «Your own brother».

«Is he sick?»

Mama flung herself upon the table and began to cry again. Papa's lips quivered, but he could not say more. Tony waited until Mama got control of herself. She crossed her arms over her bosom, one hand on each shoulder, and spoke with careful deli-beration, her eyes toward heaven.

«Last night I had a dream» she began. «There was my Nick, in his coffin, with his typewriter...»

Tony leaped to his feet, bit his thumb, and started slugging himself again.

«Dreams!» He yelled. «Always dreams. What do I care about your dreams? I want to know what happened. Is Nick alright? Is he alive, or dead, or in jail, or what?»

But Mama kept talking with the same somber deliberation. «And then the telegram came».

«Telegram? What telegram?»

They looked around. The telegram was not in sight. Tony got down on his knees and peered under the stove. One of the cats was playing with the wadded telegram. Tony swept the animal aside and picked up the crushed yellow ball.

«Why» he said «it ain't even open yet».

«Don't open it, Tony» Mama begged. «0h, God in heaven, don't read it!»

Tony tore the envelope apart and read the message aloud. He read it with con-sternation, fury and horror.

It said: Arriving tomorrow. Fix ravioli. Love and kisses. Nick.

For a moment there was silence. Then from Mama there came a long, penetrating wail. She threw back her arms and head and let it

pour from her throat. Even the cats responded, their backs arching.

«Thank God» Mama cried. «0h thank Our Blessed Lord for this miracle from heaven».

Papa sighed and smiled gratefully, but Tony's disgust was inarticulate. Exhausted, he threw himself into a chair and methodically pulled at his red hair. Mama's face was bright with elation, yet still puffed from so much weeping.

Seeing her like that, Tony turned his eyes away with an expression of wrenching nausea.

«Fix me something to eat» he said.

Papa Andrilli drained the wine decanter and studied the telegram, his eyes squinting from the bright sunlight. The blood moved up his cheeks and nose as his anger flowed steadily.

«He's crazy» he said, crushing the telegram. «He never did have any brains».

«What's wrong ivith you, now?» Tony asked.

«Him» Papa said, shaking the telegram. «Writing books, writing telegrams, scaring people to death. Who does he think he is, sending telegrams?»

«Why not?»

Papa went to the window and looked out at the fig tree with the young fruit no larger than marbles.

The wine had reached him fast in the heat of the day. lie shook his head in confusion.

«What's going on in the world?» He asked the fig tree. «Telegrams, and war, and hamburger eighty cents a pound. When I was a boy I worked for one lira a week. I never got any telegrams in those days. I never sent any either. One lira a week, I made».

«Last time was one lira a day» Tony said.

«Let's have a glass of wine» Papa said.

He opened the trap door near the stove and the cool musty air came from the cellar. He went down the steps and Tony listened to the wine gurgling from the spigot. In a moment Papa was back, the ruby red beads of wine gleaming in the sunlight.

They drank in silence, father and son. Mama put a new batch of peppers in Cathy's pot, and the aroma of garlic and rosemary and olive oil pervaded the kitchen. Papa got a round ball of goat's cheese from the refrigerator and cut up thick chunks of sourdough bread. They sat and drank in silence, thinking about Nick.