Full of Life Read online

  “Feel the head.”

  I found the place; it was the size of a baseball. I felt what I thought were the hands, the feet. Then I got a start, but I said nothing lest I alarm her. There were two baseballs down there, there were two heads!

  I told her it was wonderful, but my throat ached with fear because they were there all right: my adorable Joyce was carrying a most awful burden. I felt the place once more. There could be no doubt about it. The child was a monster. I gritted my teeth and lay back with a heart full of sickness, too frightened to speak. It was not brave to weep at a time like this, but I couldn’t hold back my grief, and when she saw my tears she drenched me with tenderness, pleased with my weeping.

  “You darling! You’re so emotional.”

  I got hold of myself finally, but I wanted to be alone, to think things out, to call Dr. Stanley, to see if something couldn’t be done. Her hunger gave me an excuse. She wanted an avocado sandwich. I rose to get it. But I had to be reassured that I had been wrong, and I came back.

  “Let me feel it once more,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  My palm went over the place. I nearly fainted as the two protrusions pressed my hand. So it was true: we had begot a monster. I staggered downstairs. In the little room off the kitchen where we kept the telephone, in that small place I stood in the darkness, my head against the wall, and began to cry again.

  Many things were clear now, the past revealed like an upturned garbage can. For it was not the fault of Joyce. Her life had been pure, spotless. But the premarital years of John Fante were foolish years of helter-skelter romances. There was much to bring blushes; there had been sins, grievous sins, and somewhere in this evil swirl the penalty had been sown, and now it was time to reap the wicked harvest.

  I prepared the sandwich and brought it upstairs. Joyce was ready, floating in pillows, her arms out to receive the food. I couldn’t bear it. I went downstairs, pulled the telephone into the kitchen, closed the doors, and dialed Dr. Stanley’s number. He was at the hospital, waiting a delivery.

  “I’ve got to see you right away.”

  “How’s Joyce?”

  “She’s fine. It’s me. And the baby.”

  “You?”

  “Ill come down. It’s very important.”

  I went upstairs again. Joyce had finished the sandwich. She lay full length, watching the mound.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Everything’s beautiful.”

  She was soon asleep. I dressed and tiptoed downstairs and out the side door to the garage. It was a quarter to three, the streets deserted, a kind of madness in the weird quiet of that vast metropolis. In ten minutes I pulled up before St. James’s Hospital. The receptionist told me that Dr. Stanley was on the twelfth floor. He delivered so many babies that the hospital reserved a room for him in the maternity ward, where he could take cat naps. The door to his room was open. He lay on a studio couch in his shirt sleeves. My soft knock wakened him instantly and he got to his feet. He was a small man with the face of a baby, the large eyes expressing constant amazement. We shook hands.

  “You pregnant too?”

  I told him it was no joking matter.

  “Really?”

  “I think I’m a very sick man.”

  ‘You look all right to me.”

  “Wait’ll I tell you. It won’t be so funny.”

  “I’m waiting. Sit down.”

  I dropped to his studio couch and fumbled for a smoke. “There’s something terribly wrong with the baby.”

  “I thought you said it was you.”

  “I’m coming to that. My sickness is related to the baby. My disease.”

  “What disease is that?”

  I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t want to tell him.

  He said, “When did you have your last Wasser-mann?”

  I told him about a year ago.

  “But they’re not infallible, Doc. I read it in a magazine article.”

  “Have you been unfaithful to your wife?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. What I mean is, before I was married, there was a girl. I mean some girls. What I mean is, I’m worried, Doc.”

  “What makes you think there’s something wrong with the baby?”

  “I felt him.”

  “Felt him? How?”

  “I put my hand on Joyce’s stomach.”

  “And?”

  “I felt something funny.”

  “What did it feel like?”

  “I read that article in a medical journal, Doc. Sometimes the Wassermann is inaccurate.”

  “What did it feel like?”

  Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about it any more. Suddenly I realized I had been a fool, that the baby was fine, that it didn’t have two heads, that the whole thing had come to my mind in one big undigested hunk of guilt-feeling, and that my being there on the twelfth floor of St. James’s Hospital at three-thirty in the morning talking to Dr. Stanley in the maternity ward was absolutely ridiculous. I wanted to be out of there, in my car, on my way home, to crawl into bed and cover my head with blankets and wake up bright and fresh to a new day. Instead, I stood before this tired doctor, pestering him with my idiocies, and there was nothing to do but make some kind of civilized exit.

  “Dr. Stanley, I think I’ve made a grave mistake.”

  “So you felt the baby, and it felt funny. Tell me about this funny feeling. Describe it.”

  The answer was: two heads. Better to leap from the window than say it.

  “I’m sorry, Doc. I was wrong. I just thought I felt something. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  I began to leave, backing out, but he stopped me and pushed a buzzer in the wall, and in a moment a nurse was there. He ordered me to take off my jacket and roll up my sleeve, because he wanted to reassure me, to rid my mind of any doubts.

  “But it’s preposterous, Doc. There’s nothing wrong with my blood—absolutely nothing.”

  He wound a rubber hose around my arm until the veins bulged and I felt the prick of the needle and watched my own blood being sucked into a syringe.

  “Come back tomorrow night,” he said. “Any time. I’ll be here with your analysis.”

  I rolled down my sleeve and put on my coat.

  “This is silly, Doc. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “Go home. Get some sleep.”

  Through the quiet streets I drove home, thinking of those other girls, sweet Avis and dear Monica, and I was suddenly very lonely for them after all those years, for they had been so beautiful and so tender, with such superb bodies, not bloated by pregnancy, girls I longed for with a ravishing cloying desire now, gone forever, and I almost cried as I realized I could never have them again. This was marriage, this entombment, this vile prison where a man out of an overpowering desire to be good and decent and wholesome allows himself to be made a fool of at three in the morning, with no reward save children, and a thankless brood at that. I could see them now, my children, kicking me into the street in my old age, running me out of the house, signing papers so they could get me an old-age pension and wash their hands of me, a doddering old man who had given the best years of his life in honest toil that they might enjoy the full taste of life. Here was my thanks!

  The next night I was back at the hospital, waiting for Dr. Stanley’s report on my blood analysis. I hated being there. Dr. Stanley was delivering a baby, and the nurse asked me to wait in the Fathers’ Room. Two other fathers were there, one asleep in a leather chair, the other reading a magazine. I smoked cigarettes and paced up and down. It was preposterous. I didn’t belong there—yet. But there I was, going through all the motions, and the man with the magazine thought we shared a common fate.

  “How’s your missus?” he asked.

  “Fine. How’s yours?”

  “Not good.”

  His eyes were slits of red, his face beaten with worry. His hair was long and he needed a shave. “She’s been in labor thirteen hours.”

  “Sorry to hear it
.”

  “They may do a Caesarean.”

  This was no place for me. I was profaning this place where life was born, where women suffered and men worried. These people had real problems, but I was only fooling around, a victim of myself. Then the nurse appeared.

  “Mr. Fante…”

  The Caesarean father shook my hand. The other man got up too and offered his hand. They wished me good luck. I thanked them and went down the hall after the nurse to Dr. Stanley’s little room. He was there, holding a slip of paper.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “I knew it all the time.”

  He smiled.

  “What’d you have for dinner last night?”

  I told him: spaghetti, meat balls, salad, wine, ice cream. “Why, Doc?”

  “Cholesterol. The analysis shows an excess. What you had for dinner explains it.”

  “Cholesterol! Good God, Doc! I read about cholesterol in a magazine. It’s dangerous. It blocks up the arteries and causes heart attacks. I read about it in Hygeia.”

  “Do you have heart trouble?”

  “Not yet, but…”

  “Forget it.”

  “Cholesterol! Me, of all people.”

  He advised me to stop reading medical articles and forget the whole matter, but I could not forget it, staggering down the hall, groping for the elevator button, sweat popping from my palms, going down the elevator shaft, bubbles in my belly, cholesterol, heart attacks, author collapses and dies of sudden attack, down into the street, staggering to my car, sitting behind the wheel, feeling my pulse, counting it against my wrist watch, John Fante, taken suddenly, career cut short, seventy-two beats a minute, my God, cholesterol: I had to look it up, do some more research, get better acquainted with this dread substance.

  Joyce was asleep when I got home. It was around midnight. I went to bed with the light on, making frequent pulse counts. It was a rough night. I remember the coming of daylight, and then I was asleep. At noon I woke feeling fine.

  Joyce was in her room writing letters.

  “How’d you sleep?”

  “Terrible,” she said. “I was awake all night.”

  “Let’s not have spaghetti any more. It’s full of cholesterol.”

  “Is it, really?”

  “Let’s have green salads, carrots. Fresh vegetables right out of the soil, crisp and good for you.”

  I went into the bathroom and took my pulse. It was sixty-eight. Down four. A slow pulse was better than a fast pulse. That was certain. I had read it in several periodicals.

  At 9:27 on the morning of March 18th, in the seventh month of her confinement, Joyce Fante fell through the kitchen floor of our house. The sheer weight of her—she had gained twenty-five pound and tipped the scale at one hundred and forty-four—plus the condition of the woodwork, came to a shuddering climax as the termite-infested floor boards collapsed beneath the tearing linoleum and the woman with the big bump sank to the ground three feet below.

  I was upstairs in the bathtub at the time, and I remember distinctly the minute events coming before and after the calamity. First there was this fine quiet morning, all decked out in the golden gloss of the sun, there was the placidity of the bath, the mysterious evocations of confined water, the conjuring of faraway things, and then, from somewhere, from everywhere, the quivering of the atmosphere, the ominous portent of chain reaction in fissionable materials. A moment later I heard her scream. It was a theater scream, Barbara Stanwyck trapped by a rapist, and it plucked my spinal column like a giant’s fingers.

  I jumped out of the tub and opened the door. Down there I could hear Joyce shrieking. My one thought was the child—the precious white melon.

  “I’m coming, Joyce. Be brave, darling. I’m coming!”

  I had a gun in my room, but in that moment my only thought was her need for me. Even as I dashed downstairs naked and frightened I somehow knew those were my last mortal steps, that we would die together, that we might have lived had I been armed.

  At first I didn’t see her. Then I found her before the kitchen range, even as she had fallen, snug in the neat cave-in, but cut off as if she were a midget, a slice of ham in one hand, a skillet in the other, with many eggs broken and leaking around her. She was more angry than hurt, melted butter trickling from her hair and mingling with her tears, stringy egg yolk dripping from her elbows.

  “Get me out of here, if you please.”

  I pulled her out. She was surprisingly calm. I stood looking down at the floor.

  “Woh hoppen?”

  Her fingers probed the mound, searching for life. She went to the telephone and began dialing. “Tell Dr. Stanley to hurry. It’s an emergency.” She hung up and walked to the stairs.

  “How’d it happen?”

  She didn’t answer. A moment later she was in bed. I buzzed around, trying to get her things. She was white-faced but very calm. Then she closed her eyes. It scared me. I shook her.

  “You all right?”

  “I think so.”

  She closed her eyes again. I got scared again. I ran downstairs and got her some brandy. She didn’t want any. I asked her not to close her eyes.

  “I’m just resting.”

  “I don’t think you ought to close your eyes.”

  “I’m only resting until the doctor comes.”

  Dr. Stanley was there in twenty minutes. I took him upstairs and he began to examine her. The fall had caused no injury to herself or the child. He put away his stethoscope. I went downstairs to the front door with him. I thought we should have a man-to-man talk about all this.

  “Anything I can do, Doc?”

  “No. Not a thing.”

  There was cold glitter in his eyes. He was getting tired of us. We were taking up a lot of his time.

  I went back to the kitchen and stood before the hole in the floor. Fungus and termites had eaten the wood. It crumbled like soft bread in my hands. I crossed the room to the sink and banged my heel against the floor. The blow punctured it, leaving a hole. Apparently the entire floor was rotted. In the breakfast nook I hit the wall with my fist. My knuckles sank through spongy plaster and wood. I climbed the table in the breakfast nook to check the ceiling, but my weight made the table legs sink into the floor. I walked into the dining room and stood before an expanse of a pale green wall, freshly painted, immaculate. I raised my fist to let fly, but inside me there was a great sickness and I was afraid to strike.

  My house! Why had this happened to John Fante? What had I done to upset the rhythm of the stars in their courses? I went back to Joyce’s hole and stared. I picked up a piece of rotten wood. There I saw them, the little white beasties, crawling in the dead wood, the wood of my house, and I took one between my fingers, his little white legs pawing the air—a termite, an inhuman beast, and I killed it; I, who couldn’t bear killing anything, but I had to snuff out his life for what he and his vile breed had done to my house. It was the first termite I had ever killed. All those years I had seen them about, watching them in curious admiration. I was a firm believer in the live-and-let-live philosophy, and this was my thanks, this loathsome treachery. Well, there was something wrong with my thinking, there had to be some change in my relations with insects, the hard reality of the facts had to be reckoned, and I started then and there to kill them, breaking the wood open, squashing them, crushing out their nefarious little lives as they ran panic-stricken through my fingers.

  A realtor named J. W. Randall had sold us the house. He was lean and sharp, a cowboy retired from the saddle. He came to the house and inspected the damage. He crushed the pulpy wood between his fingers, brushing away the termites swarming over the long hairs on the back of his hand.

  “Mr. Randall, we’ve been cheated. I’m going to sue.”

  “Can’t sue me.”

  “You arranged the sale.”

  “Smith’s your man. Sue Smith.”

  Smith was the termite inspector.

  “You hear that, Joyce? Smith’s our
man. We’ll drag him through the courts.”

  Joyce said, “Mr. Randall, you’re a scoundrel.”

  He straightened.

  “Now just a minute, young woman.”

  She walked away from him. Mr. Randall was injured and angry. He stalked out of the house. I chased after him. He got into his car, surly and breathing heavily through his nose.

  “I been in this business thirty years. Hell-fire, man! I made Wilshire Boulevard! And she calls me a scoundrel.”

  “She’s upset, Mr. Randall. It’s her condition.”

  “Son, let me give you a bit of advice. I’m a grandfather. Got four grandchildren. Better calm that young lady down. Pregnant woman’s got to have pure thoughts. No wonder we got so much juvenile delinquency. Watch it, boy. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “What about Smith?”

  “Sue the man.”

  Smith could not be found. I went to the garage that had been his place of business, a stucco shack behind a carpenter shop on Temple Street. He called his company Murder, Inc. He was gone. Nobody knew anything about him, except that he was fond of angelica. I talked to a lawyer. He told me it would be two years before we could get a court date, and without Smith we had no case. A contractor came to the house and gave us an estimate for repairs. He said four thousand.

  Joyce: “We could have ten babies with that.”

  Four thousand! It was a knife through my heart. I staggered into the kitchen, sick and wounded. The main damage was there in the kitchen. On hands and knees under the sink I groped, poking around. There was a noise. I put my ear to the floor. Down there, only inches away, I could hear them, the vile beasts, actually gnawing my wood. It was the rhythmic grinding of thousands of tiny jaws, feeding on the flesh and blood of John Fante.

  Then, suddenly, I knew what to do. Like cool waters, the thought bathed me. Like parting clouds, the storm had passed and he was there, bold as sunlight, the greatest bricklayer in all California, the noblest builder of them all! Papa! My own flesh and blood, old Nick Fante. I ran to the stairs and called Joyce.