Chapter 5
All the time I was laughing, this auburn-haired nurse whose behind I had just walloped crouched on her knees and with her left palm on the floor and her right hand still rubbing her burning seat, her eyes very wide and her mouth gaping, as if she had just recognized a lunatic. I couldn't really blame her. Here my father had just died, I had given up my job and everything else in San Francisco, and made my father-I guess because of the sentimentality of the occasion, I had called him "Dad" instead of Marcantonio as I'd always done before-and then without showing any respect for the dead at all, I'd grabbed the poor girl and given her a fantailing she hadn't really deserved at all.
"Okay, nurse," I said, "just put it on the bill. If I made a mistake, I'm sorry as hell. And I won't give you any alibi that because my old man just took off for the stars, I lost my head. You can call me whatever you want, you can call the cops and prefer charges against me if you want to." Then I grinned, some of my old devil-may-care arrogance coming back: "But I'll say one thing, whatever I have to pay for spanking your gorgeous butt, it'll be worth it."
She had got up now, and she was still rubbing her bottom, and then she shook her head and began to giggle even through her tears. "If that doesn't beat all!" she finally managed. "I thought your father was a regular heller, and I was only here a few hours, and now this. You know, I don't think I'll be able to sit down for at least a week. And my job's over now anyhow, and here I was going on my vacation."
"Let's have a cup of coffee in the kitchen, since you won't be sitting down for a while anyhow, and talk it over," I proposed. "So old Doc Franklin is still in business. I'll call him right now and let him make all the arrangements."
She glanced rather ruefully at me, and then she went out of the room, and I walked back to the bed and then I did a damn stupid thing which I was just as glad she didn't see. I took my old man's hand and bent my head and kissed it and I said, "Listen, you grouchy old bastard, you sort of trapped me into promising you I'd stick around Fresno. I'm going to do it. I may make some changes, and you may not like them, but I'll keep your name on those bottles of vino. And maybe when it's all over, I'll have a kid for you and name him Marcantonio. And boy, if he misbehaves, will I ever take a razor strap to his ass!" And that was my funeral service for my dad, so far as I was concerned.
I made the phone call. Old Doc Franklin said it was probably best this way and that he hadn't liked the idea of Dad's refusing to go to the hospital, but actually it had probably been good for him to be in his own bed and to feel that he was still boss of his own home. He would have given the nurses at the hospital a tough time, chewing them out and maybe even trying to get his hand under their skirts. Although I personally have always felt that a nurse's white uniform is so damn sexless that a guy has to be pretty hard up to want to make her. Maybe that's exactly why the doctors have the cute nurses dress that way, so that the patients and the visitors won't be propositioning them all the time and will leave them for the doctors to screw.
I went on down to the kitchen. It was getting dark, and from the kitchen you could look out into the huge back yard and see those crazy gourds and then the orange glory of the sunset. You plant seeds, and up come vines, and all of a sudden you've got dozens and dozens of the most outlandish and grotesque gourds which can be dried out and kept almost forever. They're not good eating-in fact, they're poisonous- but they're decorative as hell. I could also see that there were a few gopher holes in the lawn. That I was going to have to do something about later on. Gophers are savage little demons, and once they get into the lawn or a fruit grove or just about anywhere else, they use those sharp teeth to destroy and to dig and to kill roots and even bite through foundation wood. And if they ever latch on to your leg, you'll think a shark has taken a bite.
My spanking victim was standing at the sink, carefully tilting the old iron coffee pot and letting some steaming coffee spout down into two big china mugs. Dad had had that coffee pot, I'll bet, ever since he had come from Cremona, and the mugs were just about as old. They held about two standard cups of coffee, and we both drank ours black and strong and hot. If there's a Freudian symbol there, make the most of it.
"Here you are, Mr. Venturi," the auburn-haired nurse said as she pointed to one of the mugs and picked hers up, swigged a swallow down and then made a face.
"Hot as your bottom, I suppose," I quipped as I picked up my mug, clinked it to hers and then took a swig myself.
"You're a very outspoken person, Mr. Venturi. I think it's time we ought to introduce ourselves to each other. My name is Madge Fryburg. I'm a practical nurse, and I got called here on this job by Dr. Franklin because, as I was trying to tell you, the only registered nurse available came down with appendicitis yesterday. Dr. Franklin called me last night and asked if I could replace her, and so I figured my vacation could be shoved up a week or so and it wouldn't matter. And this is the thanks I get."
"Well, you'll have to admit, Miss Fryburg, we got to know each other better back in Dad's bedroom than if I'd taken you out on a dozen dates." Again I was flip, because I had the same uncomfortable feeling about death that Dad had always had and also because I was sort of grudgingly admiring the philosophical way Madge Fryburg had taken her undeserved paddling. I flexed my right hand, because it still remembered the jouncy amplitude of that beautiful firm ass of hers. "Did you make this coffee?" I asked.
She nodded. "I'm a pretty good cook. But then, even a practical nurse is supposed to know how to prepare a few things. And as for your father's hemorrhaging, he had a mild one this morning and I stayed with him for a whole hour looking after him. Dr. Franklin had told me that something like that might happen anytime, because your father had just suddenly started to deteriorate. He'd been sick, I understand, for over a year, but he'd had such a rugged strength and a will to him that he wouldn't let himself die until he was ready. That's what Dr. Franklin told me, and though I was only here a few short hours, I quite agree with him."
"You're all right, Miss Fryburg. Well, what can a guy say when he's spanked the wrong girl's bottom? Or spanked it for no reason at all? I know it might sound a little ghoulish so soon after Dad's going, but can I buy you a dinner? And of course I'll pay you for the time you've put in. I imagine Dr. Franklin ought to be here in a few minutes, he said he'd come right away."
"I-I think I'd like dinner. I-I've never had a patient die on me before," she suddenly confessed. And all of a sudden she didn't look like such a sultry, haughty bitch as she had when I'd first seen her at the door letting me in as if I were Jack the Ripper. She was just protecting her patient from somebody she didn't know, and she'd probably had her hands full because she was only a practical nurse, and the regular nurse had come down sick and there hadn't been time to find anybody else and she'd been kind enough to give up her vacation to come look after Dad. Boy, I had really started off with a bang my first day back in Fresno after five years."
"However," she showed she had a sense of humor too as, after another swig of coffee, she looked me in the eye and said, "I think we probably ought to find some hamburger joint where we can stand up and eat right off the counter. I don't think I'd dare try sitting down at least until tomorrow."
"I can always ask the waitress for a pillow," I told her. And then she really blushed, and she looked like a much younger girl and a sweet one when she did it. "Don't you dare," she whispered fiercely at me and she gave me a really dirty look, and then she blushed so violently that I'll bet that she was red even under the collar of her nurse's uniform.
"Just trying to be helpful, Miss Fryburg. Well, while we're waiting for Dr. Franklin, tell me a little bit about yourself. How did a gorgeous girl like you decide to go into nursing?"
Now, in this lonely house, with no lights on, and Marcantonio dead upstairs in his bed, waiting for Doc Franklin to come write out the death certificate and make all the arrangements, I suddenly felt empty and useless, as if I had been a pawn in a chess game picked off a board a couple of thousand miles away and suddenly set down on another one with entirely different position about which I knew absolutely nothing. I wasn't quite the tough hard-as-nails, self-sufficient guy Dad was, not by a long shot, even though I had tried to prove it to him by staying away from him for five long years.
She gave me a sharp glance, and her face softened. It was still streaked with tears, and her lips were trembling just a little, and I noticed that one of her hands every so often crept back to her bottom to see if the swelling had gone down any, but maybe she saw me in a new light. Anyway, she gave me some statistics about her life. She was twenty-four, she and her folks had been born in Omaha and her dad had got transferred to Fresno fifteen years ago by a meat packer who had started a branch about a dozen miles out of this hot, dead town. She'd gone to school, fallen in love with Florence Nightingale as a heroine, decided she wanted to go into nursing, but had taken a college major in commerce and business administration. Since she didn't have a boyfriend, most of her evenings were free and so she'd spent them as a volunteer Gray lady for about a year, reading stories to sick people and passing out good cheer and goodies which the rich folks of Fresno contributed to the downtrodden. Then she'd taken a night-school course in nursing, and had got herself listed at a couple of the smaller hospitals and with three or four pretty good doctors as a practical nurse.
Last year, her mother had got fatally sick with a tumor that turned out to be cancer, and she'd nursed her until it had been time to go to the hospital for radium treatments which hadn't done any good. Her father had died just about five months ago and left her about fifteen thousand dollars in life insurance, a little bungalow, and maybe five thousand in savings. She hadn't had a vacation since she and her folks had gone to the Grand Canyon when she was twelve. So she'd been all set to go to Yellowstone Park and maybe wind up in Vancouver, had even bought her tickets and made her reservations and was all set to leave yesterday morning when Doc Franklin had called her and begged her to fill in for Miss Tolson. And that was about it.
She was a brave kid, and now I could see that what I had taken for sultry sex and arrogance was really her defensive way of trying to prove that she too was self-sufficient in spite of all her grief at losing her folks. If I were an orphan, I sure as hell wouldn't want to be stranded in Fresno. But come to think of it, that was exactly what I was. Only I was an overgrown orphan, twenty-eight, not married, not even remembered back in the town where I was born, and I didn't have too much to show for my twenty-eight years when all was said and done. Just the Venturi name and I was the guy who didn't give a damn about wine except maybe to drink a bottle every now and then with a good dinner at Ernie's or Grison's Steak House. I would sure miss those great San Francisco restaurants here in Fresno, because there were only about two or three decent places to eat, like at the Hotel Californian and the Hacienda Motel, unless you wanted to go in heavily for Armenian shish-kebab, and I could always take that or leave it.
About that time, Doc Franklin drove up in his old Nash, which he'd had when I left Fresno and which had then been about eighteen years old, as I recall. He greeted Madge Fryburg warmly, shook hands with me and went on upstairs. Then he came down and asked me a few questions, and I gave him what details he needed to know, and everything was all set. It was a Saturday, and the funeral would be Monday. There was an undertaking parlor in the next block-that kind of business always thrived in a town like Fresno -and Dad had already bought his cemetery plot a long time ago, and he'd be laid to rest next to my mother. He told me he'd stay until the ambulance came from the undertaking parlor, and I told him I was going to live in the house and look after the vineyard.
"That's good, Carl," he looked at me gravely. He was a little fellow, sort of pudgy, with wispy gray hair and great big horn-rimmed spectacles, and big ears, and you wouldn't pick him out in a crowd as one of the best M.D.'s in California, but he was just that. He'd been practicing for over forty years in Fresno, and I happened to know that he'd saved a lot of Dad's braceros and paisanos, as well as their bambini Under very trying conditions. And he'd done all that anyone could do for poor Mom.
I told him that it looked as if I had spoiled Madge Fryburg's vacation and that I was going to take her out to dinner. He gave me a sharp look, then glanced at her, and his lips sort of crinkled in what might have been a smile. "Won't do either of you any harm," he allowed. "Maybe you can talk Miss Fryburg into staying around for another month before she takes that vacation of hers. We're short of nurses here, and Miss Tolson is going to be out of circulation for a couple of weeks. Some complications after that appendicitis. That's what happens with age, because everybody's living so fast they haven't got time to relax and enjoy life. Take good care of her, Carl. Good nurses deserve a special seat in heaven among the angels."
His eyes widened a little when he saw Madge Fryburg blush. I could have told him why. I don't think she could have taken that celestial seat, not if her eternal salvation had depended on it. Because even as he was talking, her slim hand kept edging around her backside to rub and rub again.