Full of Life by John Fante

Author:John Fante [John Fante]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780062013071
Publisher: HarperCollins

FOUR

JOYCE WAS IN the living room reading, surrounded with books. I could see Papa in the back yard. He sat under a wide lawn umbrella, a wine jug on the steel table beside him, a cigar in his mouth as he stretched his legs and took his ease, studying the house.

“What did he say about the hole in the kitchen?”

“He wants to consider it,” Joyce said.

“There’s nothing to consider. Just fix the hole.”

She closed the book. “Let him think about it. He’s full of ideas.”

“No matter what he thinks, the hole has to be fixed. It was a mistake to bring him down here. He’s old and set in his ways. I predict trouble.”

“That’s not a very nice way to feel about your own father.”

“I can’t help it. He’s turned into an eccentric.”

“You should have thought of that before you asked him. The Fourth Commandment, you know.”

“The Fourth Commandment?”

“Honor thy father and thy mother.”

I gave her a quick look. She was a picture of enormous placidity, her great tummy sitting proudly on her lap like another person. It gave you the feeling you talked to two people. Behind her reading glasses the gray eyes were clear and beautiful. She sat with a dozen books around her, some on the coffee table, others piled beside her on the divan. She was reading Chesterton and Belloc and Thomas Merton and François Mauriac. There were books by Karl Adam, Fulton Sheen and Evelyn Waugh. I glanced at some of the titles: The Spirit of Catholicism, The Faith of Our Fathers, The Idea of a University. Some of these books were mine, out of a dusty box in the garage, but most were new and fresh from the bookstore. It was incredible to find her with such books, for she was a cold materialist; she belonged to a semantic group; nay, she was practically an atheist, with a hard scientific patience for facts.

“What you doing?”

“I’m thinking of making a change.” She took off her reading glasses. “If God is all-good, why does He permit crippled children to be born?”

It frightened me at once.

“Is something wrong with the baby?”

“Of course not. I’m asking you a question.”

“I don’t know the answer.”

She smiled with satisfaction.

“But I do.”

“That’s just wonderful.”

“Don’t you want to hear it?”

I couldn’t take her seriously. It was but another whim of her pregnancy. Here was the same girl who liked chili sauce on her avocado salad. It would pass as soon as her figure returned. It was a whim. It had to be. I liked an atheistic wife. Her position made matters easy for me. It simplified a planned family. We had no scruples about contraceptives. Ours had been a civil marriage. We were not chained by religious tenets. Divorce was there, any time we wanted it. If she became a Catholic there would be all manner of complications. It was hard to be a good Catholic, very hard, and that was why I had left the Church. To be a good Catholic you had to break through the crowd and help Him pack the cross.

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