The Brotherhood of the Grape Read Online Free Page A

dollars for the completion of a stone house, piles of tens and twenties on the kitchen table as he wet a pencil with his tongue and marked the numbers on a piece of paper. When my mother asked for money to buy groceries he offered her five dollars, his face wincing in pain as she stuffed it into her apron. His credit status among merchants was disgraceful, for he never paid his bills unless backed to the wall. He didn’t believe in banking. He liked the sensuality of a big roll of greenbacks in his pocket. He flashed the money, a big shot, and predators in the saloons licked their chops, waiting for him to take a seat at the gaming tables. The Elks Club, the Onyx, the Café Roma, Kelly’s—all the dives beside the railroad tracks on Atlantic Street. Nick drifted from one to another, trying to change his luck—poker at the Elks, blackjack at Kelly’s, pinochle at the Café Roma, and finally, down to his last dollar or so, a penny hearts game in the lobby of the Elmo Hotel. Tenacious, tireless, expectant, he hung in there until his pockets were empty. Then he stumbled home, weary and debauched from wine, falling upon the bed, where my mother pulled off his clothes and searched his pockets, finding nails, matches, the stub of a pencil, but never so much as a dime.
    Next morning he was on the job an hour before his fellow workers arrived, sweat oozing through his shirt as he screened sand or mixed mortar, or hefted a hod of brick to the scaffold, dangerous as a dog with distemper, sick with the nausea of his own affliction. Why this passion for gambling? Virgil believed it stemmed from his poverty in childhood. But that was too easy an explanation. I believed it was his rage at the world, his desire for triumph over the Establishment, his immigrant sense of being an outsider.
    But he never had a chance, for he was a miserable player, desperate, terrifying, playing a pair of deuces like a pat hand, never backing down, raising and reraising the bet until his last chip was pushed into the pot. Of course luck was with him sometimes, when he won everything in sight and broke up the game. Exultant, laughing, he bought drinks on the house and hurried off down Atlantic Street to another game, for he could not quit. He had to go on until his final destruction, like a man determined to sacrifice himself to a fatal passion. Many was the night when Mama, knowing he carried a large sum of money after the completion of a job, sent us to search for him in one of the saloons. We never got to him, for he had established a rule with the house man: his kids were not allowed in the back room where the gamblers gathered.
    Sometimes in the evenings after supper my father would trap one of us boys as we sat on the front porch and he came swinging out the door, pausing to light a long black Toscanelli and snapping, “Okay, kid. On your feet. Let’s go.”
    “Where to?”
    “Follow me.”
    Down the street he’d move on quick feet as I hurried to keep pace. It was the Grand Tour, the complete works of Nick Molise. Everybody took it except Mama and my sister. Apparently he regarded it as inappropriate for women.
    In those days San Elmo was a town of twelve thousand split by railroad tracks down the middle, the business district and the aristocrats on one side, the railroad machine shops, the roundhouse and the peasants on the other. My father’s first stop on the tour was across town in the neighborhood of the rich, where the public library was situated, a white brick structure, pure New England, with four stone columns above a cascade of red sandstone steps.
    Pausing across the street, hands on hips, his face softened reverently as he stared at the building.
    “There she is, kid. Isn’t she pretty? You know who built her?”
    “You did, Papa.”
    “Not bad. Not bad at all.”
    “It’s a beauty. Papa.”
    “Last a thousand years.”
    “At least.”
    “Look at that stone, those steps. They flow like water.”
    “Great.”
    “Hell of a