West of Rome Read online

  “Well,” she said. “Smoke it if you like.”

  “Alone? You don’t smoke pot alone. To enjoy it you have to share the pleasure with others.”

  “No one else is here but me.”

  “How about you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  ‘That figures,” I sneered.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Leave it to you, of all people.”

  “But I don’t want any!”

  “You, the most abused, tormented person in this house, you, who made all the sacrifices, your whole world crumbling around you.…”

  “My world isn’t crumbling!”

  “You, who needs it more than anybody else, and you refuse it.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. Better to have will-power, to grit your teeth and hang in there, absorb the punishment. The best steel comes from the hottest forge. Forget it. But I hope you don’t mind if I sit here and drink until I vomit. That’s about all that’s left for an embittered father, unless he goes to a saloon and tries to score with some tramp.”

  She took my hand again. “Oh, come on now. You wouldn’t do a think like that. Get hold of yourself.”

  “What a marriage, what a mockery! A man asks to smoke a little pot with his wife, and she chickens out. My God, I’m not asking you to shoot heroin. All I want is for the two of us—man and wife—to join hands in a journey to happyland, where the miseries of life are cast off for a little while.”

  “I’m afraid it’ll make me sick.”

  “Sick? It’s therapeutic! Relaxes the body, purifies the mind, restores the soul.”

  She was silent awhile, nibbling on a fingernail.

  “All right,” she relented. “But I know it’s going to make me sick.”

  I put my hand over my heart. “I swear to you on my sacred honor you won’t be sick.”

  “All right, then.”

  In the half-light from the tube I rolled two joints and gave her one of them. “Smoke it like a cigarette. Inhale deeply. Don’t wolf it down fast. Take it slow and easy.”

  We lit up and smoked in silence. She took several deep drags.

  “I don’t feel a thing.”

  “Patience. It takes time. Don’t hurry it.”

  After a couple of drags my cigarette went out, but I did not relight it. She smoked hers down to the fingers before snuffing it out. Then she leaned back with beatific indolence, her eyes half closed as she watched the movie. I asked her how she felt.

  “I don’t feel a thing,” she smiled.

  Ten minutes passed.

  “I’m proud of my children,” she said. “I love them dearly. They live in a terrible world, but they have the courage to face the future, and I’m not going to worry about them any more.”

  I knew it was time to tell her.

  “Did Dominic tell you about his marriage?”

  “Dominic, married?”

  “He and Katy were married Christmas day.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Katy’s pregnant.”

  “How nice.”

  I looked at her as she lay back in the big reclining chair. She was crying. She cried for two hours, until the pic-tureless white eye of the tube stared back, glistening on the beads of tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “I’m so happy,” she said over and over again. “So happy.”

  Moving like one spooked and shrouded in cobwebs, she clung to me as we floated back to the bedroom. I eased her to the bed, her neck like a broken doll’s, her hands limp as gloves. She pined for affection, cooing and groping for my face, her head on my shoulder, but she was so high she couldn’t even kiss me. I lowered her to the pillow, removed the rest of her clothes, and marvelled at her whiteness, her nipples sweetly pink and reminding me of the four mouths that had got their sustenance from them. I touched her faintly golden pussy, wondering if she tinted it. Mine, all mine. Suddenly I had to have her and I tore off my clothes and was upon her in a frenzy. It was rape, her helplessness swirling me in an orgiastic delirium and I ravaged her with an evil joy, finding hitherto unviolated crevasses and cracks, the most ecstatic affair I ever had with her, and she slept through the whole thing without memory, recalling none of it when she wakened in the morning.

  NINETEEN

  I never thought much about Jamie. I really didn’t want him born into the world so soon after Tina, who screamed horrifically past all endurance in her infancy, leaving me enraged and frightened. I vowed that three were enough and I pleaded with Harriet, no more for God’s sake, are you wearing that diaphragm, are you sure it’s in place. It was sheer panic with Tina wailing in another room, and when Harriet knew Jamie was coming she was afraid to tell me until the third month.

  I was a real shit about it, busting out of the house and staying away two weeks in Palm Springs with a drunken writer who had six kids and blamed them for his alcoholism. I came home with abortion in mind but it was of course too late, and Harriet despised me and ordered me to get out and never come back. But we made a perilous truce blinded by hate and necessity and the coming child was never mentioned.

  It was a hideous ordeal for Harriet. The bigger she got the bigger the monster in me. I drank wine through days and nights, slumped viciously in a chair, punishing her with the blade of my tongue, sneering, drooped in a chair, recoiling from the larger and larger roundness of her waist.

  Not only did she manage the pregnancy and three other children, she escaped alive from the coil of my despair. Two weeks before the baby was born I was offered a job in Rome. Harriet was so glad to have me out of that chair and I was so eager to get away that I left without packing a suitcase.

  When I returned from Rome Jamie was five months old, and I still detested him because he had the colic and cried even more than Tina. The cry of a child! Give me ground glass and tear out my fingernails, but do not subject me to the cry of a child, for it hurts very deep into my umbilicus, hurts all the way back to the beginning of my life.

  Harriet had named him Joseph after her father, but Joseph he was not, nor did he look like a Joseph, Jamie suited him better, and after a while the name clung, and we had it officially changed.

  There was never enough time for Jamie. It was always Dominic or Tina who churned up the crises, and sometimes Denny, but never this curly-headed, hazel-eyed kid who smiled at the beginning of each new day and didn’t cry like the others that first time we took him to school and who spoke so hesitatingly, so falteringly, because nobody bothered to teach him how. But later we learned that he did cry a little every day, sitting in the schoolyard sandbox by himself, and when his teacher asked him why, he answered that there was something in his eye.

  When he was six years old we took him to a neighborhood Fourth of July party where he wandered among a hundred guests, amazed and pleased at what he saw. On the way home Harriet asked if he had enjoyed himself, and he answered with sparkling eyes that a man had spoken to him, a nice man in a large black hat. Harriet asked what the man had said and Jamie fondled the delicious memory and sighed. “He said, ‘Get out of my way, kid.’”

  That was Jamie, lover of flowers, cactus and trees, spiders, caterpillars, starfish and sea shells, worms and rats and dogs and cats and squirrels, horses and men. We never worried much about Jamie through most of his life. He simply made no demands. He didn’t ditch school or get into fights or come home in the Sheriff’s car with a deputy lecturing his parents on the seriousness of vandalism, or steal or get drunk or wreck cars or have pot parties on the beach or impregnate chicks or run away from home, or lie or steal or cheat.

  He got fine grades, kept himself clean and neatly dressed, ate everything put before him, spent whole days shooting baskets, and always kissed his mother good night. Who paid attention to a kid like that? To fall within my attention span a boy had to do something significant, like wrecking a car, or steal my shotgun to shoot quail out of the pines, or get arrested by the game warden for setting illegal lobster t
raps, or fall off the cliff and plummet to the sand below, or chew his fingernails waiting for a girl to make her next menstrual period, or be rescued from drowning, or throw parties wrecking furniture and breaking windows. Not Jamie. A freak, dullsville, out of the mainstream, a square.

  Then from nowhere came the cruncher, and it appeared that our Jamie was not as unsullied and beautiful as we believed. Maybe he was compelled to it in order to call attention to himself. Possibly that was why he had flunked two major subjects at college and deliberately exposed himself to the curiosity of the draft board. But the complexities of his fabrication were more intricate than we imagined.

  To believe it, we had to see it on paper. The letter, addressed to Jamie, was from the Dean’s office. It was propped near the telephone where Harriet knew he would see it. Sensing its importance I peered through the envelope’s transparency and wondered if I dare open it, thus violating a sacred house rule against reading other people’s mail. The moral issue delayed me about ten seconds before I tore the envelope open.

  The information for James Molise was crisp and impersonal. For absences totaling forty-two days he was herewith notified that he was no longer a student at City College.

  “Sacked. Expelled.”

  “You shouldn’t have opened it,” Harriet frowned.

  “Forty-two days! What’s he up to?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You had no right to open his mail.”

  Around dinner time he was home, empty-handed.

  “No books? How come?”

  His eyes sank into me with a quick worried stare before turning away.

  “What of it?” he asked.

  I picked up the letter and handed it to him, and he made a point of fingering the torn envelope, his face darkening. He tossed the letter on the table without bothering to read it.

  “I’ve quit school.”

  “You didn’t quit, you were kicked out.”

  “I quit!” he insisted.

  “A screw-up like your brothers. And all the time I thought you’d be the one who’d break the mold.”

  “Will you please be quiet?” Harriet cut in. “What happened, Jamie? Why did you leave school?”

  “I took a job,” he said, looking at his hands.

  “How many jobs you got?” I asked. “I thought you were working at the supermarket.”

  “Not any more. I’m working at the Children’s Clinic.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Teaching things. Sports, crafts. Whatever has to be done.”

  I began to see an emerging pattern, a clever maneuver, like Denny’s, and it relieved me. He was using his head after all.

  “Not bad,” I said. “It should get you a deferment with the draft board.”

  “I’m just a volunteer,” he said, a little ashamed. “I don’t get paid at the clinic.”

  “You’re working for nothing?”

  “I like what I’m doing.”

  “You’re off your rocker. Charity begins at home.”

  There was no hostility in his greenish eyes, only warmth and sympathy. “I knew you’d say something like that, Dad. That’s why I couldn’t tell you.”

  At dinner we learned more of his job with the Children’s Clinic. He worked fifty hours a week and was given lunch without charge. To reach the clinic in Culver City he hitch-hiked thirty miles there and back each day, except those times when Denny gave him a ride. He pushed crippled children in wheelchairs, gave them whirlpool baths, and massaged their ailing limbs. Those who could walk or run he taught to kick and throw a ball. Otherwise there was nothing to do, except for cleaning toilets, vacuuming rugs and helping with the laundry.”

  “We’re understaffed,” he said. “We need help.”

  I listened and marveled at how little I understood him and what a mystery he had suddenly become. So now we had another martyr in the family. Dominic immolating himself before the altar of Katy Dann, and now Jamie dedicated to maimed children. How different from their father, who wrote cop-out scenarios for fifteen hundred a week (when employed)! No wonder I understood my dogs and not my children. No wonder I couldn’t finish a novel any more. To write one must love, and to love one must understand. I would never write again until I understood Jamie and Dominic and Denny and Tina, and when I understood and loved them I would love all mankind and my harsh view of the world would soften to the beauty that surrounded me, and it would flow smooth as electricity through my fingers and upon the page.

  TWENTY

  Jamie drove my car to work for a couple of days, and on Friday we made the trip into town together. It was a big day for both of us. At nine-thirty I was due in Santa Monica to pick up my unemployment check, and at eleven he faced the draft board in Brentwood.

  I dropped him off at the Children’s Clinic and doubled back to Santa Monica in plenty of time to join the queue at Window C. The usual faces were there, show biz people who knew how to take the sting out of the humiliation of waiting in line: wise-cracking sitcom writers from television, the gloomy bushy-browed cat who scripted Brando’s last bomb, the pipe-smoker who had written ten Daniel Boones, the sullen pugnacious directors, the nattily tailored character actors, all moving along in three lines together with electronic engineers, farm workers and scientists who liked to let you know they had worked on the Apollo project. The writers were full of optimism and bullshit, and strangely enough many were telling the truth. One week they were present to pick up their sixty-five bucks, and the next they were off to Europe on assignment or closing some deal on the local scene. I wondered if I was the only bona fide liar in the crowd, for I had spread the ancient cliche that I was writing a novel, and when they asked how it was going I always had the same, simple, direct answer, “Fantastic!”

  The sun was bright and the smog an exquisite orange tint as I drove back to Culver City. I parked out in front of the Children’s Clinic. Though it was a new building, two stories of stucco, it had an unwashed, forlorn countenance, as if the sadness within could not be concealed. Not a shrub or tree grew around it. The adjacent playyard was enclosed by a ten-foot plywood fence soiled by political posters from last November’s campaign. It was in a neighborhood of Negroes and Chicanos, the roaring San Diego Freeway two blocks away. On the other side of the plywood children were at play, their small voices fluttering in the air like birds.

  The Negro girl behind the reception desk told me Jamie was in the yard, and nodded toward a side door. A dozen children, mostly blacks, were at play in the dusty hard-panned area. They were on crutches and in leg braces, sitting in swings or pushing a squeaky merry-go-round. A black nurse in a white uniform supervised them.

  I saw Jamie at the far end of the yard in a sandbox with two little girls, one Chicano, the other black. They had a pail of water and some pie tins between them. They were making mud pies, their hands smeared with wet brown earth.

  As I approached, Jamie said, “Sprinkle some cinnamon on it.”

  The one-armed Negro child picked up a handful of sand and trickled it over the wet pie. The other child, a steel brace at her knees, said, “I want coconut.”

  “Fine,” Jamie said. “Coconut too.”

  She scooped sand in both hands and piled it on.

  ‘Time to go,” I interrupted.

  While he washed his hands under a faucet the children stared at me morosely. They stood up and backed off to Jamie, brushing against him like kittens.

  “Don’t go, Jamie. Please.”

  He told them he would be back later.

  “Promisel Promise!”

  “I promise.”

  He took their hands and we walked slowly to accommodate the odd lurch of the child in braces. It was trustful and solemn, the hot sun above, the dusty adobe under our feet, the plywood enclave detached from the rest of the world, yet savagely intruded upon by the roar of trucks on the freeway. I glanced at Jamie and saw the glow of warmth in his eyes and his small smile as he gazed down at the children. They hugged his hands to their breasts as if they embra
ced dolls. He looked at them, beaming, the way he loved puppies and pet rabbits when he was a small boy.

  The Selective Service office was in a brand new highrise building on Barrington off Wilshire. With time to spare, we pulled into the parking lot and I eased the Porsche into a slot. I shut off the engine and we sat there for a moment, gathering our thoughts.

  “Have you planned anything? Do you know what to say?”

  “What’s to plan? They’ll ask the questions, and I’ll answer them.”

  I had given the situation some thought, and now I offered a possible solution. “How about this?” I said. “I’m recuperating from a heart attack, convalescing at home. But the job is too much for your mother, and we need you to take care of me. A hardship case.”

  “You’re out of your tree.”

  “It’s better to be prepared.”

  “I don’t know what they want. Maybe it’s just another questionnaire to fill out.”

  “You’re dreaming, kid. You’ve played hookey for forty-two days and they’re looking for you.”

  He opened the door.

  “We’ll soon find out.”

  “Wait,” I said, coming up with another one. “What about that doctor of Denny’s?”

  “Abercrombie? He’s a crook.”

  “Of course he’s a crook I How do you expect to have kidney trouble or high blood pressure without a crook?”

  He looked at me with eyebrows hunched up.

  “I won’t do that.” He stepped out of the car and slammed the door.

  “How about the truth, the real truth, without a crooked doctor?”

  “What truth?”

  “My ulcer. As you know, I have a duodenal ulcer. Once in a while it bursts into flame. Like right now it feels like it’s going to. Suppose that…”

  “No chance.”

  He stepped away as a blue Thunderbird darted into the adjacent slot directly in his path. The horn blasted, the brakes howled, and Jamie leaped for his life, hurling himself against my car. He was raging as he looked at the man in the Thunderbird.

  ‘You creep!” he yelled. “You stupid creep!”