West of Rome Read online

  Looking pleased, Harriet sat down.

  “I’m glad it happened,” she said. “I think they both learned their lesson.”

  “What lesson?” I said. “I don’t see any lesson. I don’t even know what the hell happened.”

  “They don’t like whites stealing their women any more than we like them stealing ours.”

  “Nonsense. The world is full of black and white lovers. You see them everywhere, even in church. You never give them a second glance any more.”

  “He hates her!” Harriet said delighted. “Oh, how he hates her!”

  “I doubt it.’”

  “How can you possibly doubt it? Didn’t you see the way he looked at her? He loathes her.”

  “I doubt it. He’s an ass man, and Katy Dunn has an ass you can’t hate for long.”

  “It sticks way out, and you know it.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “How wrong you are! How little you know your own son! He’s not that way at all.”

  She had plans too, romantic mother plans in her mother’s mind for her boy. Her name was Linda Erickson, a blonde goddess on Broad Beach Road, fresh out of Arizona State, still wrapped in the cellophane of virginity, unattached, the daughter of one of Harriet’s friends.

  “It’s folly,” I warned. “Don’t start anything.”

  “He’ll adore Linda.”

  “He does not adore white women.”

  “He hasn’t met the right kind. She’s a lady.”

  “The last thing he wants is a lady.”

  “You’ll see.”

  She had the telephone in her lap, and as she dialled I went outside and dropped on the lawn beside my dog. I rubbed his belly (he had gained ten pounds since coming to us) and told him we were in a hell of a mess, himself included.

  SEVENTEEN

  In the evening we gathered for supper, Denny, Jamie, Harriet and I. Dominic failed to appear and Denny went after him, clumping down the hall, his sixth week on crutches. He returned to report that Dominic wanted to see me in his room.

  “Ill come with you,” Harriet said.

  But Denny said, “Not you, Mother. Just Dad.”

  Harriet froze, silent and hurt.

  Dominic lay real loose on the bed, his feet propped against the wall. I closed the door. The room reeked of grass which he smoked in a fat curved pipe. He had the ridiculous spaced out grin of a totally potted cat.

  “Sit down, Father,” he invited, swinging his legs to the floor. One of his eyes was purple and the other red, and the purple one was swollen shut. There was no point in asking how he felt. Despite his bruises he was in cloudland, his smile grotesque and puffy and rather stupid. I dropped into a chair.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  He drew a plastic sack of marijuana from his pajama pocket and tossed it in my lap. “Help yourself.”

  “I don’t want any,” I said, tossing the stuff on the desk.

  He laughed. “You old bastard.” He reached over and slapped my knee. “I like you, Dad. I like you a lot. How’s the screenplay coming?”

  His pipe went out and he lit it again, clouds of smoke billowing from the hot weed as he sucked enough of it into his lungs to floor a man. It almost put him out of action as he reeled back and forth with the open eye glittering like a glass jewel, his smile imbecilic and slack-jawed, the pipe drooping from his busted lips.

  “You want to tell me about the fight?” I asked.

  “What fight?”

  “Who were the people who busted you up?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  “It was Katy.”

  “Katy messed you up? That little thing?”

  “Little Katy.” He seemed pleased.

  I glared at him in disgust.

  “And you let her get away with it!” I jumped to my feet and clawed my hair. “My own son gets beat up by a hundred-pound girl, and has the gall to smile about it! Jesus, how low can you sink? What kind of a freak are you?”

  Suddenly he began to sob.

  “Sit down, Dad.”

  I sat down and watched him trying to put the pieces of his mind together, the tears streaking to his chin.

  “Poor blind old Papa,” he sighed. “Remember when you sent me to judo school?”

  “You didn’t learn a goddamn thing.”

  ‘You wanted me to clobber every kid on Point Dume, didn’t you, Papa?”

  “That was a mistake. You haven’t won a fight in your life, the last one included. With a girl.”

  He wept, the closed eye gushing more tears than the open one.

  “I can’t fight,” he choked. “I never could, I don’t like to hit people.”

  The pipe fell out of his mouth to the floor and I picked it up and he tried to puff it, but it was out and wet with his tears. He cried and puffed. It was preposterous and embarrassing. I lit a match and held it over the bowl as he swayed and cried, the match following the sway of the pipe.

  Softly, reasonably, I said, “What I mean is, once in a while in a man’s life he has to fight back, even if he doesn’t like it, even against a girl. Don’t you think so, Dominic?”

  “She’s not a girl. She’s my wife.”

  I stared until the match burned my fingers.

  “Since when?”

  “Since the beginning of time. Since life first began in our mother, the sea. Since the burst of the first galaxy…”

  “Oh, shit! How long have you been married?”

  “Since December.”

  I let out a wail.

  His head drooped to his knees and shook with sobs. I felt his pain, not that he had married a black girl, but the pain to come, the tormenting adjustments, the pain if he begat children, the pointless futile pain that could have been avoided, the pain that began with me as his father.

  “Still and all,” I said, merely talking as a diversion. “Still and all, even if she is your wife, you can’t allow her to assault you. A man has to control his woman.”

  He raised his head and the one wet dilated eye met mine.

  “Katy’s pregnant.”

  “Pregnant too?”

  He nodded and more tears fell into the puddle at his lap.

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “That’s no problem. How pregnant is she?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Good timing. You can get an abortion.”

  ‘That’s what she says.”

  “Good for Katy!”

  “You don’t understand. I want the baby. She doesn’t. That’s what the fight was all about.”

  “What do you want the baby for?”

  “It’s mine. I want it.”

  Wearily I looked at him, too weary to comprehend, suddenly longing for a hole somewhere, a nice deep hole behind the corral next to Rocco would suit me fine, with a blanket of dirt I could pull over myself, a hole in which to hide with the agony for my son.

  Why couldn’t he have simply screwed her and let it go at that? Why couldn’t he take advantage of a doctor’s knife and have the thing scraped out? What right had he to inflict pain on himself and his child and my grandchild? Black or white, it was bad enough to be born at all, but black and white? A pity the baby couldn’t make the decision himself.

  There he sat, blubbering, potted, beseeching me for understanding. A bright lad too. At fourteen months he knew the alphabet, he could read when he was three, and at four he played excellent chess, and now he was thumbing his nose at the world, my world.

  He frightened me. He looked spooked, bizarre. My God, maybe he was a saint, a throw-back to Margaret of Cortona, the kind of holy fanatics who loved washing corpses, licking pus from the wounded, crawling on their bellies over medieval cobblestones to kiss another nail on the true cross. I looked at his smashed face and the open eye in his head and it scared me. I could feel the enormous weight of the cross he longed to carry, and it crushed me to the ground.

  One-eye was grinning, his putty face taking on a
new shape. “Poor old man. You’re ashamed, aren’t you, ashamed of your first born.”

  “No more than usual,” I said.

  “What if he’s another Willie Mays? Will that ease the pain, Dad? Or Diana Ross, will that help?”

  “Oh, shut up,” I said. “What’s bugging me now is—how do we tell your mother?”

  “My father tells my mother everything. It’s part of the pact. Holy wedlock, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.” He waved toward the door. “Go, man. Do your duty.”

  “I don’t have much choice.”

  “Go, man. Whisper the good tidings to my white Anglo-Saxon protestant mother. Tell her this day in Bethlehem is born a child, and there is no room at the inn, and the angels sing above the stable where the child lies in swaddling clothes in a manger. Tell her not to knock it, because he might be the Savior of the world.”

  The pipe fell out of his mouth and hit the floor. I picked it up and set it aside.

  “Why don’t you go home and get squared away with your wife?” I said.

  “Think good of me, Dad. Please.”

  He sat there with his thick legs and wide shoulders, a roll of fat at his belly, his face bloated and out of shape, and suddenly I wanted to take him in my arms and make him very small again, all the way back to a sunny afternoon in Golden Gate Park when he took his first steps into my outstretched arms.

  “You want some supper?”

  He said no, and I left him.

  EIGHTEEN

  In the kitchen Harriet had Dominic’s meal laid out on a fancy tray, with wine and even a fresh rose in a long-stemmed vase. She looked at me darkly.

  “What did he say that I’m not supposed to hear?”

  “Nothing personal.”

  “What’d you talk about?”

  “Things in general.”

  “I see,” she said coldly.

  “Harriet, he’s very depressed.”

  “Can you blame him, after what he’s been through?” She picked up the tray. “Did you mention Linda Erickson?”

  “Don’t. It’s the wrong time.”

  “You leave that to me.”

  She went off toward his bedroom and I joined Denny and Jamie in the dining room.

  “What’s wrong with Linda Erickson?” Denny asked.

  “Your mother’s promoting something.”

  “For Dominic?” Jamie smiled. ‘That’ll be the day.”

  I took my place and served myself a couple of lamb chops. “How’s your leg, Denny?”

  “The prognosis is not good.”

  “What prognosis?”

  “I got a new doctor.”

  “Who is it this time?”

  “Abercrombie. He’s an orthopedist.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s in Compton.”

  “Compton? Is he a Negro?”

  “So what? He’s good too. He zeroed right in on the problem.”

  “What does he say?”

  He gnawed on a bone. “I’ll probably be crippled for the rest of my life,” he said pleasantly, staring at me across the bone.

  “Gee, that’s tough,” Jamie said.

  “You’re certainly taking it in the right spirit,” I said.

  “I’ll make out.”

  “I guess you will at that,” Jamie said. “It all depends on the right doctor.”

  “Abercrombie’s the greatest. I’ll give you his address, just in case.”

  “Thanks,” Jamie said. “You never know.”

  “You’ll never get away with this,” I said. “You’re not dealing with kids, you’re bucking the United States Army, and they know every trick in the book.”

  His eyes bugged out in shock.

  “What’s the army got to do with this?”

  “Cut it out, Denny. You think I’m some kind of boob? I know what you’re up to. Stop trying to put me on.”

  He shook his head in tragic disbelief.

  “How do you like that…my own father!”

  By now I was bored and sick of the whole charade. It seemed endless, this deferring to a cripple who wasn’t a cripple at all and who enjoyed the solicitude and sympathy of everyone around him. It was the actor in action again, his staggering vanity and faith in his own unreality. He was spoiling my dinner. Besides, Dominic’s problems troubled me more.

  The two had spent an hour with Dominic in his room before supper, and it was significant that they did not speak a word about the crisis in their brother’s life. That was the code of brotherhood, never to reveal anything about one another, particularly to Harriet and me. It was a rotten, lousy cabal, but it was impregnable and necessary, and I never knocked it.

  Denny climbed aboard his crutches and limped out of the room, but Jamie lingered to smoke a cigarette with his coffee, thoughtful and not speaking, something troubling him.

  “I think you ought to see this,” he said, pulling a folded paper from his pocket and handing it to me. It was a letter from the Santa Monica draft board asking him to appear on May 1st, a week hence, for a review of his status.

  “Looks routine,” I said, folding the letter and giving it back to him. “With your grades there’s nothing to worry about.”

  He rubbed his neck guiltily.

  ‘That’s what you think.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I flunked history and English.”

  “You told me you passed.”

  He smiled weakly. “Did I?”

  “So you lied.”

  He nodded.

  “So you’re a jerk. So you might get drafted. So take your medicine like a man.”

  “Will you come to the draft board with me?”

  “No chance.”

  But I knew I would, and so did he.

  Then Harriet returned crackling from Dominic’s room and I listened to the upheaval in the kitchen, the slamming of pots and pans, the clatter of dishes, a crash of broken glass. I left the table and found her on her knees, picking up pieces of glass.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Screw him. I give up.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said some horrible things about Linda Erickson. I can’t even repeat the things he said, and he doesn’t even know her.”

  I hoped that he had at least hinted about his marriage and Katy’s pregnancy, but obviously the problem was still mine to reveal. It was then that I thought of a way out, a painless deliverance for Harriet, painless for me.

  I left her picking up pieces of glass and went back to Dominic’s room. He was packing things into a suitcase.

  “Leave me some pot.”

  “Help yourself,” he said.

  I poured about an ounce from the plastic pouch into an envelope and added a few cigarette papers.

  “That’s bad stuff for writers,” he said. “Norman Mailer claims it leaves holes in your head and all the right words leak out.”

  “They leak out anyway.” I looked at the suitcase. “1 guess you’re leaving for good this time.”

  “My car’s at Katy’s. Denny’s driving me into town.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “You said you’d handle it.”

  “Aren’t you going to say goodbye?”

  “I’m going out the side door, soon as Denny’s ready.” The one-eyed face ventured a fractured smile. “So long, Dad. Thanks for everything.”

  Like that. Thanks for everything. Thanks for bringing him into life without his permission. Thanks for forcing him into a world of war and hate and bigotry. Thanks for marching him off to schools that taught him cheating, lying, prejudice and cruelty. Thanks for saddling him with a god he never believed in, and the only true church, all others be damned. Thanks for inculcating in him a passion for motor cars that might one day destroy him. Thanks for a father who wrote cop-out screenplays where boy meets girl and the good guys always triumph over the bad guys. Thanks for everything.

  “So long, kid. Keep in touch.”

  I w
alked out, thinking: two down and two to go, thinking, poor Harriet, God help her.

  Denny and Dominic had gone, Jamie was in bed, and we sat in the living room watching the eleven o’clock movie. She was sipping sherry while I smoked my pipe and drank hot tea. The grass was in my shirt pocket. Question was, how did I get it down her lungs? She was one of those iron-spined people who would no more trifle with grass than smoke opium. I was no expert with the stuff, though I had taken it half a dozen times in my life. I could wish that I had been fortified by it when I learned of my father’s death, for I had gotten sickeningly drunk instead, deepening my grief. In truth, my father had been dead for ten years, and I still grieved over the loss of him. Marijuana might have made a difference. It was supposed to be the sure cure for a world falling apart.

  The movie gave me a clue. It was literally a film about the dead. It starred Carole Lombard, who was dead. So were the others in the cast, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Eugene Palette and the supporting players. So were the director, the writer, and the producer. There they were, moving on film, now rotting in their graves, poor, lovely, beautiful creatures, and it was very sad, and I told Harriet I thought it was so very sad.

  I got up and put some scotch in my tea, and at the commercial I got up and did it again. It’s sad, I told her, it’s heartbreaking. I said life was sad too, short and sad, and she agreed. I said it made me melancholy and unhappy, and she took my hand and smiled and said, don’t be.

  I said, “If we could only break out of this trap, go somewhere, do something, forget our troubles for a while.”

  She said, “It’s only eleven-thirty. Do you want to drive in to the Cock ‘N’ Bull?”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean finding peace, some euphoria to take us past this moment of crisis.”

  “Why don’t you get drunk?” she said.

  I told her I didn’t mean getting drunk. I meant total escape, the way the kids did it. Like smoking marijuana.

  “Why don’t you?” she said. “I’m sure you’ll find some in the back bedrooms.”

  “I have some here,” I said, patting my shirt.