A Glass of Grappa

From his hospice bed Angelo Donato says to Kerrigan, in whisper shorn of the bristle of his roaring speeches to roaring workers, “Remember me with a glass of X,” and names a specific Sicilian grappa.

Beside Kerrigan, a union local Business Manager, sit Business Managers from other locals, Dominguez at right, Wu at left. Two nurses and a doctor have just entered. Kerrigan therefore understands the request not as particular to him, but general. Hundreds will attend the memorial, which Kerrigan guesses to be only days away. The restaurant in North Beach where Donato often dined kept a bottle of the grappa just for him and poured a digestivo from it. Kerrigan sometimes joined him there and knows the grappa. He calculates: 750-milliliter bottles, eight small glasses per, four hundred-plus drinking mourners; five cases, to be safe. Screw the expense. The movement owes the old lion’s memory his wish.

Leaving the hospice, Kerrigan gets to work.

The restaurateur raises narrow shoulders and thrusts out lips, little pink O in dark-dyed Vandyke. He explains: Mr. Donato provided his own bottles and just smiled when asked their course from Mediterranean to San Francisco. The restaurateur assures Kerrigan that his vendors are the best, though. He provides telephone numbers.

At breaks between grievance hearings the next day and between joint labor-management interviews of prospective apprentices during another, Kerrigan telephones the vendors. Several know of the grappa but have never carried it. Three have. Oddly, all have sold out on the same day Donato whispered his request, three cases from one, two each from the others.

“Who to?” Kerrigan asks.

All three reply that they are unsure if they are at liberty to say.

When Kerrigan calls, the agent for the Retail Clerks says, “Anything for Mr. Donato.” Donato once in a hard moment sent impressively large members from his local to reinforce the Clerks’ picket lines. The agent knows a former member, once supermarket stocker, now buyer for a major chain. They’ve remained friendly; the negotiated health plan once saved simultaneously the stocker’s baby girl and his finances.

The product is too specialized for his chain, the former stocker tells Kerrigan, but he will see what he can learn about availability.

Donato passes on a Tuesday. The family announces a schedule: Wake Wednesday evening, Mass Thursday morning, interment that afternoon, memorial Friday evening.

Kerrigan’s office manager Natalia meanwhile has developed a list of vendors in New York, New Jersey, Boston, Rhode Island, Chicago, Baltimore, even New Orleans. She works the phones Thursday morning. Kerrigan joins her after lunch. By the end of the Central Time workday they have found three cases, not enough, and none sure to be on flights reaching San Francisco by Friday afternoon.

It is then that Kerrigan receives the two calls.

One of the three San Francisco vendors who sold out their stock reports that he is free now to say that a Mr. Compton has bought it.

The former stocker, too, says that a Mr. Compton of Revolute Holdings has bought out all the grappa from every local source where he’s inquired.

Both men ask Kerrigan if he needs a phone number.

Kerrigan does not.

Compton’s executive assistant answers his call. Yes, Kerrigan is welcome to come to the office. Mr. Compton is working late.

The Revolute Holdings office is two stories below the roof of a Financial District high rise. Compton sits with dark hair freshly trimmed, his back to the floor-to-ceiling window’s view of Angel and Alcatraz Islands, ships coming and going on the Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower, and Donato’s natal North Beach. Kerrigan understands: The view is to impress visitors, and Compton can take it for granted.

On the vast walnut desktop – remarkably uncluttered, Kerrigan notes – stands a bottle of Donato’s grappa.

Compton seems entirely at ease, his oxford-cloth sleeves rolled up past the elbow, his collar tieless and unbuttoned. “Angelo and I had our disagreements,” he says, “and not minor.”

Kerrigan hardens at the use of the given name.

Compton continues, “The inflatable rat outside my investors meeting. The pickets that kept the mayor from my groundbreaking. The flyers to my tenants and buyers claiming shoddy work. That fire….” Compton awaits a response that Kerrigan withholds. Compton says, “But I’m not vengeful. You have a need.”

“What makes you think this?” says Kerrigan. He avoids looking at the bottle.

Compton shrugs. “Knowing people who know people. And I can help.”

“What do you want?” says Kerrigan.

“Almost a nothing. Too much would just anger everyone. You’d gain nothing. I’d gain nothing.”

Kerrigan is silent.

“Negotiation, it’s about compromise,” Compton says. “Nobody gets everything they want. Angelo taught me that.”

Now Kerrigan looks at the bottle, filled with a dying man’s request.

“A little deposit on memory,” says Compton. “Memory is a conversation, after all. A little addition to the conversation, that’s all I want, to make space for an alternative narrative. Useful to my business, harmless to yours.”

The text of the program for the memorial is finalized the next morning, barely in time for five hundred copies from the printer. At center bottom outside back cover, just above the union bug, in eleven-point Times New Roman italics it reads:

Grappa courtesy of Jerome Compton, Revolute Holdings

For Angelo Donato and the City we loved together

BIO: Michael Thériault has been an Ironworker, union organizer, and union representative at various levels. He published fiction in his twenties, six stories in literary magazines, but abandoned it for decades to support first a family, then a movement. In his recent return, since 2022 his stories have been accepted by more than three dozen publications, among them Pacifica Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, and New World Writing. His story “An Invitation to the Gulls” was shortlisted lately for the Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration. Popula.com has published his brief memoir of Ironworker organizing. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Santa Fe and San Francisco native and resident.

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