sipped coffee, her eyes troubled, uncertain of my identity.
“You don’t have to work for your father. Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“I know.”
“Do what’s right—for yourself.”
The morality of it was not the question. What mattered was that I had seen death glowing through the face of an old man clinging fiercely to life. No wonder he was stubborn, capricious, self-serving and touched with madness. But he was still my father. If I turned from him in his last cry for achievement it might bring a swifter death, and I did not want that shadow over the rest of my life. I had never actually refused to go to the mountains with him. I had simply allowed him and my mother to draw me into the plan. My father was entitled to this last paltry triumph, this little house of stone in the Sierras.
12
W ITH HALF AN HOUR remaining before we took off, I decided to surprise my wife by visiting her mother. Hilda Dietrich was eighty, living alone in a jewel box of a white house a few blocks away. The house was a hundred years old, quite small, a veranda of white pillars encircling it, honeysuckle and climbing roses scaling the trellised portico. The grounds were so clean and neat they resembled a theatrical set. From the white picket fence in front to the tall eugenia hedge bordering the alley there spread an acre of dicondra lawn surrounding flowerbeds and birdbaths. Not a twig or fallen leaf marred that sweep of grass. Regionally the place was famous. Everyone took pictures of it, a California original, passionately cared for by a proud old lady who had made it her life’s work.
Hilda Dietrich and I had one common bond that held us together forever: we loathed each other. She had never forgiven Harriet for becoming my wife, and I had never forgiven her for being my wife’s mother.
It was my Italian side that Hilda found unbearable. San Elmo has changed now, but forty years ago the town was one-third Italian. The bluebloods of the region, the Protestant-Americans—the Schmids, the Eicheldorns, the Kisbergs and the Dietrichs—suddenly found themselves horrified neighbors of noisy Dagos working the tracks of the Southern Pacific. They propagated large and offensively dark families and built a Roman church to administer to their primitive superstitions.
With the coming of Prohibition, many of these guineas moved into the bootleg trade. They bought land, cultivated vineyards, and achieved an annoying respectability despite some bombings and a couple of gang killings. In 1926 the front of the Café Roma was blown out, and in 1931 a hood named Petresini was shot down on the corner of Lincoln and Vernon. The bullets that killed Petresini lodged deeply into a telephone pole at the scene, and every generation of kids thereafter probed the bulletholes like Saint Thomas putting his doubting finger into the Savior’s wounds.
By Franklin Roosevelt’s time Hilda Dietrich was forty, a housewife and mother, married to the Reverend Herman Dietrich, pastor of the Lutheran church. Like her husband, who said as much from his pulpit, Mrs. Dietrich was fully persuaded that Italians were creatures with African blood, that all Italians carried knives, and that the country was in the dutches of the Mafia. It was no extremist theory. A lot of worried people believed it, particularly Italian-Americans.
I met Harriet Dietrich the year after her father died, in the summer of my first book. She was home from Berkeley, working as an assistant in the public library. I autographed the two library copies and she clutched them to her breast and praised my work, the nobility of purpose, the fresh style, et cetera. I was better than Faulkner, she insisted, better than Hemingway. I agreed and went reeling out of the library, intoxicated. What a lovely mind she had! So well informed, so perceptive, with an overview of world literature that took my breath away. As night fell four hours later I was standing on her front porch, eager to continue our
“You don’t have to work for your father. Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“I know.”
“Do what’s right—for yourself.”
The morality of it was not the question. What mattered was that I had seen death glowing through the face of an old man clinging fiercely to life. No wonder he was stubborn, capricious, self-serving and touched with madness. But he was still my father. If I turned from him in his last cry for achievement it might bring a swifter death, and I did not want that shadow over the rest of my life. I had never actually refused to go to the mountains with him. I had simply allowed him and my mother to draw me into the plan. My father was entitled to this last paltry triumph, this little house of stone in the Sierras.
12
W ITH HALF AN HOUR remaining before we took off, I decided to surprise my wife by visiting her mother. Hilda Dietrich was eighty, living alone in a jewel box of a white house a few blocks away. The house was a hundred years old, quite small, a veranda of white pillars encircling it, honeysuckle and climbing roses scaling the trellised portico. The grounds were so clean and neat they resembled a theatrical set. From the white picket fence in front to the tall eugenia hedge bordering the alley there spread an acre of dicondra lawn surrounding flowerbeds and birdbaths. Not a twig or fallen leaf marred that sweep of grass. Regionally the place was famous. Everyone took pictures of it, a California original, passionately cared for by a proud old lady who had made it her life’s work.
Hilda Dietrich and I had one common bond that held us together forever: we loathed each other. She had never forgiven Harriet for becoming my wife, and I had never forgiven her for being my wife’s mother.
It was my Italian side that Hilda found unbearable. San Elmo has changed now, but forty years ago the town was one-third Italian. The bluebloods of the region, the Protestant-Americans—the Schmids, the Eicheldorns, the Kisbergs and the Dietrichs—suddenly found themselves horrified neighbors of noisy Dagos working the tracks of the Southern Pacific. They propagated large and offensively dark families and built a Roman church to administer to their primitive superstitions.
With the coming of Prohibition, many of these guineas moved into the bootleg trade. They bought land, cultivated vineyards, and achieved an annoying respectability despite some bombings and a couple of gang killings. In 1926 the front of the Café Roma was blown out, and in 1931 a hood named Petresini was shot down on the corner of Lincoln and Vernon. The bullets that killed Petresini lodged deeply into a telephone pole at the scene, and every generation of kids thereafter probed the bulletholes like Saint Thomas putting his doubting finger into the Savior’s wounds.
By Franklin Roosevelt’s time Hilda Dietrich was forty, a housewife and mother, married to the Reverend Herman Dietrich, pastor of the Lutheran church. Like her husband, who said as much from his pulpit, Mrs. Dietrich was fully persuaded that Italians were creatures with African blood, that all Italians carried knives, and that the country was in the dutches of the Mafia. It was no extremist theory. A lot of worried people believed it, particularly Italian-Americans.
I met Harriet Dietrich the year after her father died, in the summer of my first book. She was home from Berkeley, working as an assistant in the public library. I autographed the two library copies and she clutched them to her breast and praised my work, the nobility of purpose, the fresh style, et cetera. I was better than Faulkner, she insisted, better than Hemingway. I agreed and went reeling out of the library, intoxicated. What a lovely mind she had! So well informed, so perceptive, with an overview of world literature that took my breath away. As night fell four hours later I was standing on her front porch, eager to continue our
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