It was images like that—dreams that now would never become reality—that filled his mind. He knew he needed to keep thinking about good things. Otherwise, some of the other images might creep in. His mother lying facedown on the front seat of the Cadillac, all the blood and warmth and love draining from her. His mother looking out the car window and seeing somebody coming at her with a gun. Did she yell? Why didn’t she run? Why hadn’t they shot his father, too?
The phone kept ringing. Sal Coccaro had volunteered for the job of answering it. Paula Coccaro was trying to comfort John. His father had retreated to his office, where he had a separate phone line. Roby made himself get up and go back downstairs. In early afternoon, his uncle Gene arrived. Being a lawyer, he knew how to act calm, he knew how to be organized. It was good to know that someone was now in charge. That Roby wouldn’t have to be a full-fledged grown-up quite yet. For a few more hours, at least, he could still be a little boy who missed his mother.
Gene and Roby’s father assembled two groups to bear the bad tidings. Gene and Roby and John would go to Philadelphia to break the news to Grandpop and Grandma, Dr. and Mrs. Puszynski, and then bring them back to Toms River. Rob and Joe Moore and Chris’s ex-girlfriend, Melissa Merrill, would go to Lehigh to tell Chris and to bring him home. Poor Joe. He had just walked in for a previously scheduled business meeting, having no idea that Maria had been murdered.
Sal and Paula would stay in the house to answer the phone. Rob talked to Sal just as he would talk to a secretary. “I want you to write down every call,” he said. “And whoever it is, be sure to find out if they want a return call. Keep a separate list of those, so I’ll know who I have to call back.” Paula just couldn’t stop crying, which was starting to get on Roby’s nerves. He dreaded the trip to Philadelphia (actually, what he really dreaded was the trip back, with his aged, unwell grandparents in the car), but it would be good to get out of the house.
Maria’s parents lived in a row house in Philadelphia’s old Polish neighborhood of Port Richmond. It was one of those neighborhoods that look like a foreign country, with narrow, cobblestoned streets and low, brick-front buildings and signs in store windows in Polish. Old people in dark clothing walked the streets slowly. Old people who had been through a lot. Casimir’s Barber Shop and the Polish Army Veterans were across the street from the Puszynski home, and the Syrenka Restaurant was a couple of doors down, enshrouded by the smell of steaming cabbage. Vincent Puszynski, Maria’s father, had been born in Port Richmond and had never found reason to leave. For forty years he’d practiced medicine from an office attached to his house. He’d been one of those doctors who, if a patient was unable to come up with cash, would be happy to accept a crock of soup or some freshly baked bread for services rendered.
In the late 1970s, with the coming of Medicare and all its paperwork and what he felt was government interference in private enterprise, Vincent Puszynski had retired. Since then, he’d had a heart attack. He was in his midseventies, as was Maria’s mother, who in recent years had begun the slow slide into senility.
The two of them had been rock-solid Catholics all their lives, their values those of the old country. Maria had been their only child. They worshipped her just as ardently as they did the Blessed Virgin. The two of them—Maria their daughter and Mary the mother of Jesus—accounted for ninety percent of the pictures that hung in the Puszynski home. Photos of their three grandchildren and an oil painting of the Last Supper that hung above the dinner table and was almost as large as the table itself made up the other ten percent.
Maria, of course, had gone to Catholic schools: St. Adalbert’s for elementary school and high school and then Chestnut Hill College. She’d commuted to it by trolley along Germantown Avenue. Going away to school had not even been considered. Young women away from home were subject to bad influences. The Puszynskis were not the kind of parents to subject their only child to that sort of pressure. In addition, Vincent Puszynski had never forgotten what had happened to his mother.
In 1917, when he was nine years old, his mother had become one of the first residents of Philadelphia to die in a plane crash. His mother and brother, right out there on Roosevelt Boulevard on a Sunday afternoon. There was a pilot with a Flying Jenny, charging five dollars a ride. It was always a treat to go to the Boulevard on Sundays—it put people in a festive mood. Sure, his mother had said, she’d go up. His brother made such a fuss she took him with her. Vincent Puszynski and his father watched the plane go up, his mother smiling and waving, his brother looking grim, a little scared. He watched it in the air, watched it start to fall, watched it drop like a rock a mile up the Boulevard from where he stood. But for years he refused to admit she was dead. He kept saying, “She’s hiding somewhere. She’ll be back.”
With Maria, his only child, he took no chances. Even when she was in college he would not schedule patients for late afternoon on school days. Instead, he would drive up to the intersection of Germantown and Allegheny and meet her trolley. Just to assure himself: she had come back.
But now she’d never be back again. And even the worst of his nightmare fantasies about something terrible happening to her—a car accident, a problem during childbirth, breast cancer—had not included murder. Maria Marshall, faithful only daughter and classic, archetypal suburban mother, existed in a carefully shielded universe where random acts of violence did not occur.
Roby couldn’t tell who took it worse, Grandma or Grandpop. Grandma had started weeping the minute Uncle Gene had said what happened and she hadn’t even tried to make herself stop. She was already so senile, so out of it, so locked into her old Polish dreamworld, that this tragedy might well turn out to be a mortal blow. Grandpop didn’t cry. He didn’t speak. After the first five minutes, he didn’t even ask any questions. All the way back to Toms River he just stared out the window of the car. It was as if Roby and John weren’t even there. No way that Roby could play the radio. Just silence thick as quicksand except for his grandmother’s steady weeping. What made it even worse was the traffic. Friday afternoon commuter traffic. They must have sat at the Cherry Hill circle for half an hour. Roby could hear his uncle Gene, who was driving, start breathing harder, as if he needed to decompress lest he explode. This was a new, painful twist to Roby’s agony: being stuck in traffic with his grandmother’s sobs. It made him want to shatter the car windows with his fists. Roby had always grown angry and impatient in heavy traffic. But that was because there was always somewhere he wanted to go. Surprising, in a way, that it was even worse when you didn’t want to get where you were going.
The traffic stayed heavy all the way. If Roby were driving he would have floored it and whipped around most of those cars. But Uncle Gene apparently did not want to add fear to the Puszynskis’ sorrow. They stayed in line, creeping slowly along Route 70. This was only the first weekend after Labor Day and Friday evening traffic to the shore was still like summer’s.
It was eight o’clock before they pulled into the driveway. Then, before they were even out of the car, Rob, in the station wagon, pulled in behind them. There was just enough light from the open car doors so that Roby could see that his brother Chris was still crying.
They embraced in the driveway and then Roby, too, began to cry again.
“Dad, what is it? Where’s Mom?” Chris had said.
His father looked him squarely in the eye. “We were driving home from Atlantic City, Chris, and somebody followed us and she was shot. She’s dead.”
Chris and Rob were both sitting backward on their chairs, their toes almost touching. Rob leaned forward and put his head down on Chris’s chest. As if he were the one who needed comforting.
In that first moment, Chris was so stunned—this can’t be happening, this can’t be real, nobody could ever shoot my mother, I love her too much for her to die—that the only thought he was able to recall clearly when finally he was able to talk about it was the worst thought he could have had: Dad, if you had something to do with this, I’ll never
forgive you.
Why would he think such a thing? How could such a truly vile and horrible idea occur? He didn’t know, not then or later, and the thought was gone as quickly as it had come.
Chris rode in the backseat going home. He kept falling asleep. It was the only escape open to him. He didn’t know why his father had brought Melissa Merrill. He’d broken up with her back in June. It was good of her to come and he was still friends with her, but he didn’t want to have to talk to her now. Nor to Joe Moore, either. Joe Moore was someone he barely knew. Why hadn’t his father come alone, so the two of them could have talked?
Every time he woke up he asked a question. “What did she say? Did she suffer? Was she afraid?” It was those moments between the time his father was knocked unconscious and the time his mother was shot that tormented him most. His father’s answers were vague. Trying to picture the scene kept Chris awake for a while. How much time had elapsed between his father’s being hit and the shooting? His mother must have been going crazy. Chris had an extremely logical mind and tried to fit the pieces into a pattern that made sense. It didn’t work. Why hadn’t she jumped out of the car, tried to run? He couldn’t imagine her, having just seen his father get knocked out, simply lying facedown on the front seat to wait for whatever happened next. He knew the Oyster Creek picnic area. It sat right between the parkway’s northbound and southbound lanes. Just twenty yards in either direction and she could have been out on the road. Even at one o’clock in the morning there was traffic—especially northbound, heading back from Atlantic City. Sure, they might have shot her as she ran, but why not try it? Anything was better than just lying down and waiting to die.
Then he considered how terrified she must have been. Nothing in the highly polished, well-organized suburban Catholic life she’d always led could have remotely prepared her for dealing with a gunman in the woods in the dark. She would have instinctively reached out to Rob to solve the problem. But Rob was lying unconscious by the trunk of the car. And the gunman was now coming toward her, making it clear that this was not a problem that could be solved. Yes, it was possible that she had simply been paralyzed by her fear. That she’d lain down and shut her eyes in a desperate, pathetic attempt to pretend that it wasn’t really happening.
It was just too awful to contemplate. Chris stopped asking questions. He fell asleep again as the car reached the eastern end of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and crossed the Delaware River and entered New Jersey. At least, thank God, they could take the Jersey Turnpike north to 195. They wouldn’t have to go near the Garden State.
When he awoke the next time, he kept his eyes closed. He didn’t say anything to anybody. He just thought about his mother. If he thought hard enough, and remembered clearly enough, it might be a way of keeping her alive.
He thought about swimming. That had been the biggest thing in Chris’s life since fourth grade, and his mother had been so involved she’d done everything but jump in the pool with him. Before each meet, she would decorate the whole house with banners and crepe paper in school colors and she’d have corsages made up for the mother of every swimmer on the team, passing them out at poolside as Rob set up his video equipment to tape the meet. Rob’s equipment, of course, was the newest and best and most expensive available, and he insisted on setting it up in exactly the same spot every time, as if he were ABC covering the Olympics. That became a little annoying to some people, but Maria’s enthusiasm never did.
She was easy to spot at a swim meet: the blond lady in the expensive clothes (though sometimes she would show up in a red cowboy hat and cowboy boots) cheering the loudest. And after each Friday home meet, win or lose (usually it was win because Roby and especially Chris, who set nine school records and was named Ocean County Swimmer of the Year as a senior, made Toms River East conference champions three years in a row), it was back to the Marshall house for a party. Sometimes eighty or ninety parents and kids. They’d send out to Antonio’s for pizzas—twenty large pizzas, or twenty-five—and watch the videotapes Rob had made at the meet, or play with the fancy new video games and pinball machine in the basement rec room. No surprise that when Chris was a senior, his mother was voted the swim team Mother of the Year.
Chris knew he owed a great deal to his mother. When he was nine years old and didn’t even feel like getting wet, she’d made him join the country club swim team. That had been the start of what was turning out to be a career. As a senior, he’d broken almost every record in the county: the 200 individual medley, the 50 freestyle, the 100 butterfly, the 100 freestyle, the 500 freestyle, the 100 backstroke, just about all of them except for diving. His name had been in the headlines every week. His coach had gotten calls from dozens of colleges. In Toms River he was even mentioned as a 1988 Olympic candidate.
And all of it, Chris felt, was because of his mother. On one wall of his room he had a cartoon torn from a swimming magazine. It depicted the ultimate “swimming parents.” The mother was wearing a school jacket with prize ribbons pinned all over it. She was holding extra bathing suits, extra goggles, extra nose plugs and several stopwatches. The father stood next to her with his video camera. To Chris, it didn’t even seem like a caricature. His parents were exactly like that.
No matter how early he had to get up for an away meet on a Saturday morning, 6 A.M., even 5:30, Maria would be up before him, making pancakes, packing his bag, preparing his lunch. After her death, when trying to explain what a wonderful mother she had been, it was the pancakes that Chris remembered first. “She always used fresh butter for every batch,” he said, “and each pancake always had a crisp little ‘butter edge’ around the outside. She made the best pancakes in the world.”
She would also do things like this: if East had a meet against archrival North, nicknamed the Mariners, Maria would put a sign over the toilet in the boys’ bathroom saying “Flush the Mariners.” And she’d put notes inside the cookie jar, where she knew Chris would be sure to find them. “Go East. Beat North.” Things like that. At the meets, she’d pass out not only corsages for the mothers, but straw boaters for all the fans, festooned with ribbons in the school colors and with signs saying “East Is #1.” She’d also bring oversized foam-rubber fingers that rooters could put on their hands and wave in the air to indicate further that East was Number One.
But it wasn’t just swimming. In elementary school, she would go over his homework with him every night. She would get more excited than he did when he got a good grade on a test. Every night before going to bed, she’d set the table for breakfast and every morning when he came downstairs she’d already be there, making sure that whatever he wanted for breakfast was ready for him.
Chris remembered when he’d turned sixteen and had started working as a pool boy at the club in the summer. He’d have to be there at 8 A.M., which meant that most mornings he raced out of the house without having eaten. An hour later she’d be there, driving up with egg and bacon on a bagel and fresh orange juice. It seemed to him that that had happened hundreds of times.
He had always been less adventurous, more dutiful, even more of a momma’s boy than Rob. But why not, with a mother like that? He remembered her telling him, months after it happened, how on his first day of work at the club, when he’d had to ride his bike across Route 37 and down Washington Street to get there, she had followed him in her car to make sure he got there all right, but being very careful that he didn’t see her, because she hadn’t wanted to embarrass him.
Until he had started falling in love with appropriate regularity, there was no one he’d rather spend time with than his mother. She cared so much about everything he did, about his feelings, about his accomplishments and infrequent setbacks. She would wait up for him when he was out late at away swim meets and then ask him questions for an hour afterward. Who won such-and-such? How did so-and-so do? What did the coach say?
Most nights during high school, he had stayed home to study. Sometimes he’d take a break and watch TV with her. They’d sit on the couch an
d scratch each other’s back for half an hour. Then he’d head back to the books and she, most likely, would fall asleep on the couch, wearing her favorite blue bathrobe. He’d still be up working at one or two in the morning (just like his father, who invariably worked in his den after midnight), and she’d come upstairs and tell him to go to sleep, tell him he was a perfectionist, a workaholic. But he knew how proud of him she was and her joy in his development gave him the happiest feelings he’d ever known.
Chris had a particularly vivid memory of the last race he’d ever swum in high school. It was the 100-yard backstroke, his specialty, and he was up against a swimmer who had beaten him the previous year by touching the edge of the pool just a fraction of a second before him, setting a new county record in the process. For a whole year, often joined by his mother, Chris had watched the videotape of that race, his most galling defeat.
At the final meet of his high school career he’d already won two gold medals. Then, in the 100 backstroke, he swam the best race of his life, not only winning by a wide margin but also cutting two full seconds from the record. That victory earned him his third gold medal of the day and, as soon as it was presented to him, he’d walked over to his mother and put the medal and its ribbon around her neck. The expression on her face was something he would never forget.
Actually, in Chris’s presence, Maria’s expression had almost always reflected happiness. So had her voice. The sound of her singing or humming to herself as she went about her daily household tasks was something else that Chris knew he would carry with him as long as he lived.
He couldn’t tell whether it was hours or days or only minutes later that his father turned onto Brookside Avenue and then left up the hill and left again and up Crest Ridge and then into the driveway. The odd thing was that they arrived just as his brothers and grandparents were starting to climb out of his uncle Gene’s car.
Blind Faith Page 3