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you get.
    It worried him. Back and forth he paced through the fig leaves. “That’s no way to talk. That’s no good.”
    “But Papa…”
    He whirled around.
    “Don’t but me. Don’t Papa me! I told you, and I told you, all of you: Jim, Tony, you. I said: eggs. Plenty eggs. Look at them. Jim: nothing. Married two years. Tony: nothing. Married three years. And you. What you got? Nothing.” He moved close to me, his face near mine, his claret breath bursting at me. “Remember what I said about oysters? You got money now. You can afford oysters.”
    I remembered a post card dictated to Mama and sent to Joyce and me on our honeymoon at Lake Tahoe. The card said I should eat oysters twice a week to induce fertility and the conception of male children. But I had not followed the advice because I didn’t like oysters. I had no personal animosity toward oysters. I simply didn’t like their taste.
    “I don’t care for oysters, Papa.”
    It staggered him. With a limp neck and open jaws, he flung himself into the swing and wiped his forehead. The cats wakened, yawning with sharp pink tongues.
    “Holy Mother of Heaven! So this is the end of the Fante line.”
    “I think it’s a boy, Papa.”
    “You think!” He cursed me, a scathing coruscation of firecracker Italian. He spat at my feet, sneering at my gabardine and my sport moccasins. He took the stub of a Toscanelli cigar from his shirt and jammed it into his teeth. He lit up, flung the match away.
    “You think! Who asked you to think? I told you: oysters. Eggs. I been through it. I give you advice from experience. What you been eating—candy, ice cream? Writer! Bah! You stink like the plague.”
    This was my Papa for sure. He had not shrunk, after all. And the fig tree was as big as ever.
    “Go see your Mama.” There was sarcasm in his voice. “Go tell her what a fine big boy she’s got.”
    Greeting Mama was always the most difficult task of a homecoming. My Mama was the fainting type, specially if we had been away more than three months. Inside three months there was some control over the situation. Then she only teetered dangerously and appeared about to fall over, giving us time to catch her before the collapse. An absence of a month entailed no problem at all. She merely wept for a few moments before the usual barrage of questions.
    But this was a six-month interval and experience had taught me not to burst in on her. The technique was to enter on tiptoe, put your arms around her from behind, quietly announce yourself, and wait for her knees to buckle. Otherwise she would gasp, “Oh, thank God!” and go plummeting to the floor like a stone. Once on the floor she had a trick of sagging in every joint like a mass of quicksilver, and it was impossible to lift her. After futile pawing and grunting on the part of the returned son she got to her feet by her own power and immediately started cooking big dinners. Mama loved fainting. She did it with great artistry. All she needed was a cue.
    Mama loved dying, too. Once or twice a year, andspecially at Christmas time, the telegrams would come, announcing that Mama was dying again. But we could not risk the possibility that for once it was true. From all over the Far West we would rush to San Juan to be at her bedside. For a couple of hours she would die, making a clatter of saucers in her throat, showing only the whites of her eyes, calling us by name as she entered the valley of shadows. Suddenly she would feel much better, crawl out of her death bed, and cook up a huge ravioli dinner.
    She was at the stove, her back to me, as I entered the kitchen and moved quietly toward her. Midway, she sensed my presence, turning slowly, a spatula in her hand. A kind of nausea seemed to grip her, a disembodiment, the elevator zooming down out of control, the dizzy moment before the plunge from a great height; her eyes rolled, the blood fled from her quick white face, the strength left her fingers and the spatula hit the