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Yosef Bar-On is an art photographer and a short story writer.
Born and educated in New York and from 1952 a member of Kibbutz Gal-On. His photographs are in private collections and in the permanent collection of the Eretz Israel Museum. He won the Nikon world photography competition in 1970. Bar-On has exhibited in Israel and the United States.
Bar-On has been writing short stories for some years, though only lately has he felt ready to seek publication. Many of his stories are inspired by life experiences. Others are totally the product of his imagination, and there are stories, which simply came to him almost full-blown, in dreams.
The following work is copyright © 2011. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Concord Grapes
Every Autumn when I was a young boy, my neighbors, all Italian immigrant families originally from two small Calabrese villages, went by truck to pick Concord grapes in Connecticut for the next year’s Easter wine. They hired a beat-up old Ford truck and loaded it with all the sacks and boxes they could find. Then they all climbed aboard, everybody, old folks, kids and all, and drove off, in a cloud of raucous laughing and singing. Late at night I’d run downstairs when I heard the farting of that old motor to see them returning, tired and sunburned, with all the boxes and sacks filled completely with sticky black-purple grapes.
Boy, did I ever envy them!
The next morning would be a neighborhood holiday. We all cut classes that day and we’d go to watch the grapes being crushed and pressed. We’d file down into Mr. Savarese’s huge dark basement and crowd around the big old dusty wooden tub which stood there waiting all year round. Now it had been hosed down and all the sacks and boxes of purple grapes, almost bursting with ripeness, were piled up alongside and then were slowly dumped in one by one. Three or four of the neighborhood men, their trousers legs rolled all the way up, were in the tub stamping the grapes up and down, up and down, around and around. Their legs and trousers were soon purple and a rich moldy scent of sun-ripened grapes filled the air. There’d be a lot of bantering and joking going on, mostly of course in Italian unfortunately, so I didn’t really understand it all. When I was still really young I wouldn’t have understood even if I were Italian. Later on, I began to get the jokes.
When the men got tired of stamping down the grapes, others replaced them, including some of the younger women. Women of that generation never wore trousers and they had to tuck their skirts up somewhere away from the grapes and soon their legs and thighs were purple too. The joking of course increased a lot then.
I always wanted to help stamp the grapes too. But it took years until Tony Bisignano, my best friend and I were old enough, and strong enough for the stamping and were allowed to join in. It was hard work; some of the grapes were still hard and green. We’d end up with charley-horses in our thigh muscles by evening. It was rough too, on the soles of our feet; there were enough thorns and stems mixed in with the grapes so that our feet often became cut up and sore. But it was an awful lot of fun.
It was even more fun when we got into the tub with some of the women. Then the laughing mounted, literally snowballed. By now I understood some Italian, but not this kind, but I laughed along anyway. I did notice that some of the women in the tub with us, were blushing. I couldn’t even be sure if it was because of the exertion or because of the bantering and giggling going on around us.
I loved watching some of the girls, especially RoseMarie, Tony’s older sister. I had a crush on her and I thought that I kept it secret. I had to; I didn’t want to have to fight Tony. But I did notice that she’d never get into the tub when I was in there. Never mind; when I got tired and climbed out, she often climbed in to replace some other woman and I’d watch her strong and smooth olive legs now stained purple stamping down the grapes. She wore a gold chain around one ankle and once it twinkled at me as she pulled her leg out of the sticky dark mash.
I was quite susceptible then and got excited often, of course. I pressed against the outside of the vat to hide. We were all a bit exhilarated, even intoxicated, I guess, from the joking and the sharp winy odor in the basement air.
It seemed to me that RoseMarie always avoided me. She was older, of course, probably two or three years older. She was so beautiful that she brought a lump to my throat whenever I sneaked a peek at her. I dared not let her know my feelings; at that age two or three years is an enormous gap and I knew I was just a kid to her.
I used to follow her around though, like a puppy and that probably was the reason she avoided me. I thought I was being discreet, but I just couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I must have been a real pest.
RoseMarie was tall and slender. Her family, her parents and her brother, like all our neighbors were short and wide. She had a heavenly figure with legs that never ended. I dreamed about her creamy olive skin. There was something very quiet about her. When she looked at you, and that was rare for me since I really did make a pest of myself around her, but when she did, it was like, well, it was like that time at the zoo.
One day our class at school went on a field trip, an excursion we called it, to the zoo in Prospect Park. I had never been there before and what struck me most was the smell. It made me ill and I had to wait outside while the other kids followed Miss Friend, our teacher around the cages. After a while I got used to the smell and so I went looking for the class.
The first animals I encountered were a group of Zebras. They didn’t impress me much, they stood quietly far away at the end of their paddock underneath an awning, just switching their tails and kicking their feet to keep off the flies. But at least I lost the fear of animals that had been the real cause of the nausea. They looked just like the horse which pulled the old-clothes peddlar’s wagon through our neighborhood once a week. Then I saw a painted sign: ‘To the Lions and Tigers’ pointing to a big stone building and that was something that I wanted to see. I pushed open the heavy door and went inside. I thought it was like a jungle. Everything was quiet and very warm and the stink was awful.
At first I couldn’t see anything. The first cage had a big sign on it: Bengal Tiger, but there wasn’t anything there to see, just some big piles of cat shit on the stone floor and what I guessed was the tip of the tiger’s tail sticking out of a dark concrete cave. I went to the next cage and there was a black panther pacing back and forth, back and forth along the thick iron grill. Wow! that’s more like it! I stood watching, hoping that the panther would look at me, growl at me, something. But all it did was to pace back and forth along the grill and I could see that the concrete below its paws alongside the fence was polished and smooth. It wouldn’t look at me. I got bored and went to the next cage.
There was a big lion there, a male I supposed by its black mane. It sat gracefully in the middle of the cage just looking at me as I came into sight. I stopped for a second and then I came up to the grill. I couldn’t get really close since there was an iron bar preventing that. I stood there looking at the lion. It really was big, I thought, just sitting there quietly. I wonder what it does all the time? The lion got up, yawned and stretched just like a house cat, one hind leg at a time, and then it slowly came over close to the grill were I stood and it looked at me.
My mouth was dry. The lion didn’t frighten me; after all there was that thick iron grill between us. It just stood there looking at me curiously. But there was something in those quiet deep eyes that made me feel very small.
‘Jackie!’ Miss Friend called out. ‘We’ve been looking for you! Wherever did you go! Come along now!’
‘Yes, Miss Friend,’ I mumbled and I followed her out of the building, casting one last glance back but the lion had gone back out of sight into his concrete cave.
RoseMarie’s eyes were something like that.
One day, a Saturday afternoon it was, I followed her and her boyfriend to the Tuxedo moviehouse. Tony and I almost never went there; they only showed yucky romantic movies, while the Lakeland where we went had all kinds of war and adventure films. But I followed her there—I just had to find out what she did with her boyfriend. I didn’t want to believe that he really was her boyfriend. I wanted to be her boyfriend even though I knew that I was altogether too young for her. They sat up in the balcony, near the back wall, below the projectionist’s port where all the couples went to neck. I didn’t want to be caught by them so I sat in the orchestra area downstairs and I kept sneaking looks up there, but of course I couldn’t see them. I don’t know what the movie was that day; I was too obsessed by what they might be doing behind me on the balcony. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I went up there and stood against the wall, behind a pillar and peeked around to see what was going on. At first I couldn’t find them; there were a lot of couples busily necking there in the dark. There wasn’t anywhere else to go and parents were strict then. Then I saw them and my heart sank. They were necking too, alright, but what chilled my blood was that I could make out the shape of the boyfriend’s hand inside her flowered white blouse. He was touching her, on the breast!
For a long time I just hated her. I couldn’t accept that she’d allow him, a perfect stranger to touch her person that way. How could she, when I didn’t even dare to look at her?
It must have been a relief for her when I stopped following her around. Now it was my turn to try to avoid her. It wasn’t easy; don’t forget that Tony was my buddy and most of the time after school we played together, either at his place or mine.
There was a big wooden bung let into the side of the vat and every few minutes Mr. Savarese would twist the handle open to allow the rich bubbly grape juice to cascade out into one of a whole line of big straw-wrapped glass carboys. Eventually all the carboys were filled and the remains of the crushed grapes would be collected by the old man, Tony’s grandfather, who made Grappa from it.
I knew what the wine tasted like, of course. Whenever I’d visit Tony, his grandfather would carefully take a bottle from the back shelf of the glass closet in their living room and ceremoniously pour me a drop or two into the bottom of a wine glass. It was sweet, overly so and probably would be rejected by any real wine aficionado. But I liked it, though I guess I loved the idea of it, the whole business, the songs and jokes, the stamping, more than the taste.
Only twice was I allowed to taste that harsh, strong smelling Grappa. The old man said it was a drink for grown men and not for kids. He and Tony’s father had set up a small still underneath a gas ring in the basement, not far from the pile of Anthracite coal for the stove which heated the whole house. The old man would stay down there for days at a time, carefully puttering around, sometimes adding more of the stinking mash to the copper vat and now and then tasting the strong clear liquid dripping out of the end of the shiny copper coil. Vito, Tony’s father didn’t like us being down there. He said that it might explode in our faces but we loved sitting there in the warm cellar, especially in the cold winter months, watching and hearing the mash bubbling away under the blue flame of the ring. Nearby in the cellar, along the wall there were rows and rows of old whiskey bottles, their labels carefully washed away and now filled with Grappa from previous years aging away slowly.
The old man always took a pint whiskey bottle filled with the stuff with him when he went to the Bocce court. He kept a small silver jigger in his vest pocket and he’d pour his cronies nips until the bottle was empty while they gently and skillfully rolled those stone balls the length of the court.
The first time I tasted that fiery drink was when Tony came home from Fort Pendleton just before shipping off to Korea. There was a small party for him and it wasn’t a very happy one. Tony’s mother and RoseMarie were teary-eyed and his father was sober, for a change. Tony’s grandfather was proud, however, and kept on pouring out thimbles of that oily transparent liquor, toasting me and Tony and making little speeches about Garibaldi and Italo Balbo. He had decided that if Tony was a soldier now, a soldat, he called him, then we were old enough for his Grappa. I don’t think that he knew exactly what was going on.
I guess that Tony was secretly pleased when he got his induction notice. He had dropped out of school and managed to get working papers. He wasn’t getting anywhere, neither of the Bisignano children were; RoseMarie had dropped out of school the year before and now worked as a cashier at the Five and Dime on Surf Avenue. I tried to convince him to finish high school but he was adamant. I guess he was right—he really was just a dumb kid. He even tried to get me to join up with him. Huh, fat chance. But of course I still wish that I could have changed his mind.
He wrote home sometimes, his mother showed me some of his short letters whenever I ran into her on the stairs. I felt very uncomfortable with her; she couldn’t or wouldn’t understand why her Tony was over there in Korea and I was still here in the neighborhood. I wasn’t able to explain to her that I had other plans. Tony didn’t write much; mostly weather reports, always cold and snowy. His letters were bald and empty. He never wrote about the war, maybe he was afraid of the censor.
One day right in the middle of a tough final exam in my French class I was summoned to the Dean’s office. I couldn’t figure out why; I was a good kid and never caused any problems. My marks were good and I had made the Dean’s List the term before. But when I got there I suddenly guessed why I was there. RoseMarie was sitting on the bench outside the Dean’s office.
I gulped. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
She looked at me, her big eyes were full of tears and her mascara was streaked. ‘We’ve just got a telegram about Tony,’ she said in a broken voice.
‘Jesus,’ I muttered and slumped down next to her. She was shaking terribly and I patted her shoulder awkwardly and then I put my arm around her. A crazy thought went through my head and I was ashamed; this wasn’t the way I wanted to hold her. ‘C’mon,’ I said, ‘Let’s go home.’
It was terrible. There were a lot of the old widow women from the neighborhood there, all in black, keening and screaming. They scared the wits out of me. Vito, Tony’s father sat in his easy chair looking stunned. I tried to say something to him, but I don’t think he heard me. No matter, I didn’t know what to say anyway.
I couldn’t face Tony’s mother. She sat in the midst of the black-clad old women who kept on screaming. She wasn’t crying; she just looked at me white-faced as I sat there on a kitchen chair and I couldn’t take it. Suddenly tears were running down my face though I suppose that what I felt was mostly guilt and embarrassment. Thankfully, RoseMarie took my arm and led me out of the parlor.
We sat in her room for a long time, RoseMarie and I, and she just talked about growing up with Tony. She wasn’t crying anymore and she seemed relaxed. It was as if we were just having a pleasant nostalgic conversation about somebody long gone. Finally I nodded and got up.
‘Don’t go,’ she whispered. ‘Please stay. I can’t be alone.’
‘Alright,’ I nodded, ‘I’ll just go downstairs and tell them that I’m here.’
I came back and sat with RoseMarie in her room. We didn’t talk much now and I just watched the room grow dark as the sun set outside.
I’m not proud of what happened, of what I did. It was terribly wrong and I should have had more sense. But I, we, both of us, I guess, just got carried away. RoseMarie got out a folding cot for me and set it up alongside her bed. We both went to bed fully dressed, just having taken off our shoes. I held her hand for a few minutes and then we both fell asleep.
I woke up to the sound of her snuffling. I got up and sat on the edge of her bed. I don’t know how it happened but somehow we were in her bed and I hugged her as she cried and cried. I cried too and finally we fell asleep again.
I woke as the sky began to turn grey outside and I was aroused. I was still half-drowsy and I hugged her tightly, differently. It sounds crazy but somehow it happened. I didn’t plan it; I swear it just happened.
We couldn’t look at each other the next day. I got up courage and I told RoseMarie that I loved her but she just shook her head sadly. She wouldn’t listen to my apologies and soon we were like strangers. She moved out of the house a month later, taking an apartment downtown with two other girls from work.
The second time I tasted the grandfather’s Grappa was at the wake after Tony’s body was shipped home from Korea over a year later. Vito had asked for me and I knew I had to be there. Tony was to be buried at Arlington and the family would accompany the casket by train and so, thankfully the wake was short. Vito had asked me if I wanted to come along with them but I begged out.
We sat in their living room and the only sound was the clicking of rosary beads. RoseMarie and her husband sat on the sofa opposite me. She was obviously pregnant now and was slowly growing to look like her mother. The old man, Tony’s grandfather suddenly sighed loudly. He got up and brought out a bottle of the Grappa. He poured out measures to Vito, to the young Army priest who declined, and to me. I looked at the old man and there were tears in both our eyes.
The Grappa was strong and burned going down. I coughed and then, suddenly, once again I smelled and tasted those Concord Grapes. I got up and ran out, down the stairs.
Once, many years later, I tasted Grappa again in a Third avenue bar. I came in out of a sudden autumn shower and spotted a dusty bottle sitting on the rack behind the bar. It wasn’t home-made of course. I can’t recall the name but it was imported from Tuscany. The bartender, a young black guy with a fashionably sculpted hairdo, was amused; he had never even heard of the stuff. He poured us both ponies of the fiery liquor. He made a face after one small sip and never quite finished his drink.
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