“Can I have the Los Angeles Times, please?” I asked the man behind the counter.
“Oh, Jenny, for Christ’s sake,” my mother said. “You’re in New York, we have a much better paper here.” I defiantly handed over my money, but when I saw the front page my face fell: It was the national edition.
“No Orange County news,” I said sadly.
“Oh, who gives a shit?” my mother replied. “Jenny, look where you are.”
My head snapped up: She was right. I was in Manhattan, where all my friends probably wished they could be. After I trashed my newspaper we walked east to the New York Public Library, where my mother showed me the resplendent reading room. “Shh,” she whispered. “We have to be very quiet. But isn’t it marvelous?” It was. To me it resembled a prestigious law library, with its grand ceilings and smart brass lamps. When we emerged we continued north, gazing at the busy street scene that unfolded before us, and then west, stopping in a café.
“That’s Carnegie Hall,” she said, pointing out the window at the sturdy brick building on West Fifty-seventh Street.
“Would you like me to wrap the rest of your lunch?” our server asked, pointing to my mother’s leftover sandwich.
“No, it’s okay,” I started, but my mother interjected.
“Yes, we will,” she said to our server. Then, to me: “You can take it with you to rehearsal,” loud enough for the waitress and the tables around us to hear.
“Mom! What are you doing?” I asked, embarrassed.
“Let them think you’re a famous opera singer, on a break from practicing your aria next door.” But I wasn’t in rehearsals for anything, and I had nothing to look forward to. My life was empty. I wondered if I would ever live up to all that my mother wished for me.
SOON AFTER THAT my father returned in the middle of the night from his two-week painting stint, and I waited up on the couch for him. When I heard him and Anthony being dropped off outside, I bounded down the steps two at a time.
“Daddy!” I said, greeting him with a hug.
“Hey, baby!” he said. His stay would be brief; he was set to hit the road less than a week later. To celebrate his return my parents and I went out to dinner, but before we left I heard my father scolding my mother in the guest room with a suppressed yell that came out as a throaty whisper.
“Eleanor, how could you spend the eight hundred dollars I sent you in two weeks?” he asked, clutching the bundle of cash he was about to hand her, his haul from the last trip. “That was supposed to go toward an apartment. What the fuck were you thinking?”
“I don’t know, Johnny,” she said, looking bewildered. I watched from the hallway, peering through a crack in the door, and saw her face crumple and give way to tears. She had little recourse; I guess our little jaunts around Long Island and into the city had run us into the red. “I’m so sorry, Johnny,” she said. He pulled her into his arms.
“It’s all right, El,” he said, patting her back gently. “Let’s go to dinner.”
As we crawled toward autumn we still had no idea where we were going to live. My mother found a real estate agent on Staten Island who showed us a number of apartments, none impressing me as much as the first. It was down the road from the Staten Island Ferry, just off a street called Bay Street. The agent took us up the elevator to the seventh floor, where we were greeted by Flo, a butch, bleach-blond school bus driver in her fifties. The place was gorgeous. Opening up into a kitchen area and a bright living room set against mirrored walls that made it appear twice its size, the apartment featured marble tile in the hallway, which led to a full bathroom opposite a small bedroom, with a master bedroom in the back. The big pink wall in the living room looked like Pepto-Bismol, but the second I stepped onto the balcony I knew we had to live there. There awaited a spectacular view of the sapphire harbor with downtown Manhattan just beyond. The skyline rose majestically over the water, anchored by the World Trade Center, which dominated the view. It was five miles away yet seemed close enough for me to grasp.
“Mommy, this is it,” I said, hypnotized by the sight.
“It’s a start,” my mother conceded, ushering me out. But I knew we would live there, and I was going to make it happen even if I had to beg.
When my father returned from his next trip he informed us it would be a few weeks before he would be on the road again. Even though we had more than enough money for first and last month’s rent and a security deposit, we still didn’t have enough for the real estate agent’s fee, meaning we’d have to wait until he went out on the road again before committing to an apartment. Because both he and Anthony would be out of work for a while, my father went back to Grandpa’s place so we could all have a bed to sleep in. It was yet another separation and it upset my mother, so we traveled to Brooklyn every day to see him. One afternoon my father handed me the phone. “Here, talk to your sister, she just had a baby,” he said, and I found myself chatting with Angie, still in the hospital after popping out her third child.
“Hey, Jenny,” she said lazily.
“Hey, Angie!” I hadn’t spoken to my half-sister in years. Could her visit with infant Nicole have been the last time? Did I see her when my father and I took a trip to Florida in ’89? For the life of me, I couldn’t remember. In fact, I didn’t even know she had just been pregnant until my father handed me the phone. I did remember that, like her mother and sister, she was now a nurse.
“How do you like New York?” she asked.
I looked around Grandpa’s dingy kitchen, with its coffee-splattered countertops. “It’s okay, I guess. You must be so tired. When did you give birth, exactly?” I remembered then that she had another daughter, Krissy, but I couldn’t remember when she’d been born. Sometime in the early nineties, maybe?
“Yesterday,” she said. “It was a boy. We named him Joey.”
“Oh, cool,” I said. I handed my mother the phone and watched her face light up as she quizzed her stepdaughter about her delivery. It was strange to think my mother even had a stepdaughter—two, actually, and a stepson—because we’d been so removed from that side of the family.
After the phone call my father escorted us out into the piping hot day. Our first stop was Spumoni Gardens, an old-school pizzeria in Brooklyn with outside tables. “They sell Italian ices here,” he said as we waited in line for a slice. I looked around and realized that Brooklyn was also exactly as it appeared in the movies. Other days when we came to Gravesend my father would take me to the neighborhood butcher, where we’d pick up smoked mozzarella and sopressata, a spicy salami my father pronounced “supersod.” Then we’d hit the neighborhood pastry shop, where we’d get lemon drop cookies and cannoli, and then the bodega, where we’d get coffee filters and cigarettes. “In Brooklyn you don’t need a supermarket,” my father proudly declared. “You can go from shop to shop and get everything you need.”
One afternoon right before one of our Brooklyn visits I hopped in the shower, and after ten minutes I heard someone stomping on the steps between the two apartments and yelling. A few minutes later the bathroom door flew open and Celie implored, “Jenny, please, you can’t take too long in the shower!” I heard a woman’s deep voice shouting in the background, and Celie turned away for a moment to address her: “All right, all right, I’ll tell her.” She turned back to me and said quietly, “Please, Jenny, come out of there now.” Apparently Big Vinny’s sister paid the water bill and got out her stopwatch every time someone turned on the faucet. When I emerged from the bathroom with my head hung low Celie was gone, but my mother was irate.
“Did she forget?” she said, aiming her words at the now-empty stairwell. “Huh? Did they forget what your father did for them? Is their memory that short? Huh? Do they have no respect?”
“Mom,” I said, my wet hair dripping onto the floor, “what are you talking about?”
“I’m about to get very mad,” she said, grabbing her purse. “Let’s get the fuck outta here. Come on, get ready, I’ll meet you in the car.
”
The drive to Brooklyn was fraught with my mother’s anger: We needed to move, and fast. “We can’t stay there anymore,” she said frantically. “We need to get the fuck outta there. How can she come up the stairs like that and yell at you? Doesn’t she remember what your father is capable of?”
“Which is—? Mom, what is Daddy capable of?” I asked, feeling proud that my father would protect my honor but nervous about how far my mother was suggesting he’d go to do it.
“Never mind, I’ll just be happy when we see Daddy,” she said. When we got to the basement in Gravesend my mother launched into a tirade about the shower incident. As my father listened he didn’t seem to get angry, just pensive, like he was storing the information for future use.
“Let’s just stay here, with you,” she said, climbing onto his lap and mounting him. Thank god they had their clothes on.
“Sorry to rain on your parade, guys, but no,” I said. “We can’t all stay here.” The basement was dank and contained a single bedroom. There was no way I was sleeping there, or on the couch; it smelled like mildew and I didn’t even want to consider what lurked under the cushions.
“Jenny, shut up,” my mother said, wrapping her arms around my father’s neck. “I don’t want to go back to Celie’s ever again.”
“Well, we have to,” I said, and addressed my father. “I’m sorry, Dad, but there’s no room here.” That evening my mother reluctantly drove back to Celie’s while I sulked in the car. She was chilly toward me because I was “making” her go back. “Mom, we can’t stay at Grandpa’s, that place is awful,” I argued.
“I just want to be with your father,” she said. “And you want to go back. You know, I just don’t get you.” As we searched for a gas station I decided that I felt bold enough to ask the question I’d held to my chest for years—so many years, in fact, that I had buried my desire for answers, until this afternoon, when my mother had intimated that my father was capable of much more than painting and carpet cleaning.
“Mom, can I ask you something?”
“What, Jenny?” She sounded annoyed, but thawing.
“Why was Daddy arrested that time in Irvine?”
“What?” she said, pretending to scope the horizon for an Exxon.
“You heard me,” I said.
“Jenny, we’ve been over this,” she said. “There was another John Mascia, a connected guy in the Bronx.”
“Really?” I asked, slightly sarcastic. “You never told me that, that the other John Mascia was a mob guy.” It was the first time I’d heard my father’s name associated with the Mafia, whether it belonged to him or someone else.
“Yes,” she said, at once adopting a reluctantly revelatory tone. She sighed for emphasis. “He was from a family in the Bronx, and your father was mistaken for him.”
“Really?” I said, incredulous. “It took five months to figure out that they didn’t have the right John Mascia? They couldn’t just run his fingerprints and figure it out?” I had her, finally. My intellect had caught up to my memories.
“Well, they did, eventually,” she said. “Where is this fucking gas station? Celie said it was—”
“Mom, you know where the gas station is!” I said, suddenly angry. “We go there every day!” She had taken away my summer, stolen me from my home and my friends; the least she could do was stop bullshitting me.
“Jenny, what do you want?” she asked, matching my irritation.
“I want you to tell me what Daddy did to get arrested!”
“You remember that?” she asked quietly.
“Mom, you know I do!” I said, frustrated. I let a few moments pass before I started again, more gently this time. “I remember when they came to Turtle Rock and Kara took me upstairs and tried to play with me, but I kept running for the door. And she pulled me back, but it didn’t matter. I kept running, I wanted to see him, I kept going for that door, over and over again, I just wanted to say goodbye …” But the last part of my sentence became entangled in my sobs, which surprised even me. I didn’t realize the memory was so raw that it could prompt such spontaneous emotion. But then, I hadn’t discussed that night with anyone, ever. The five-year-old in me was finally reacting to having her daddy taken away.
My mother pulled in to the gas station and parked far from the pumps, signaling that she was ready to talk. “I deserve to know what happened,” I sobbed, staring at the dashboard. “We live in a place now where everyone knows but me. I want to know, too.” Not that I socialized with my father’s side of the family enough to risk an accidental revelation about his criminal past, but I did feel left out. I cursed my sudden display of emotion, which made me feel like I was staging a tantrum, like I wasn’t entitled to react this way. Too many years of my mother calling bullshit on my tears had taken its toll. But I didn’t want her to think I was trying to manipulate the truth out of her with my sobs, because I really wanted to know, apparently much more than I thought I did.
“Your father was in jail before you were born,” she began, suddenly calm. “And he was arrested in California when you were young because he had violated his parole. It was a parole violation, for an offense he had already gone to jail for. That was what your father did to get arrested in Irvine.”
It didn’t sound so terrible; I’d imagined far more sinister stuff. “How long was he in jail before I was born?” I asked.
She stared out the windshield and gave me the slightly comical “I know I’m incriminating myself by saying this but I guess I’m cornered” face scrunch.
“Twelve years,” she said.
“Twelve years!” I exclaimed. “Twelve years? Mom! That’s such a long time! He missed out on so much! Oh, my god.” I couldn’t imagine losing twelve years of my life. And he’d lost years in his prime: If I was born when he was forty, that meant he’d been locked up for most of his twenties and thirties. I was forced to immediately reevaluate my father, and realized that he had a piece missing.
“Yes, he was away for that long. ‘College,’ we used to call it,” she said with a smirk. “Your father went away to college.” She must have sensed my next question. I couldn’t imagine what my father could have done that would have landed him in prison for so long.
“What did he do?” I asked. “It wasn’t … rape, was it?” Whenever I thought back to his arrest and tried to imagine what he’d done, I’d become terrified at the possibility that my father had sexually violated someone. It was the worst crime I could think of.
My mother laughed. “Oh, god, no, Jenny,” she said. “What would make you think that?”
I was so relieved that I laughed. “Just something I’ve always feared, I guess.” Her reaction seemed genuine enough that I believed her. And anyway, would my mother really have stayed married to a rapist, even a reformed one?
She read my mind. “I wouldn’t have married a rapist!” she said, shooing away the idea with her long nails.
“So what did he do?” I asked as the air conditioner chilled the tears on my face.
She exhaled. “I need a cigarette for this,” she said, and rummaged through her relaxed black leather purse for her pack of Benson & Hedges Ultra Light Menthol Deluxe in the box. After years of smoking Carltons she’d gone back to her first love. “Your father was an associate of one of the criminal families in New York,” she finally said.
“He was a mobster?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” she said. “He was an associate. He wasn’t a made guy, but he worked with made guys. Remember in Goodfellas, how they weren’t ‘made’ guys?” Being “made” involved an induction ceremony that signified inclusion into a clan. Like Boy Scouts, but with guns.
“Which families?” I asked, wondering if my father was famous.
“I think he was associated with the Gambino family, but before John Gotti controlled it,” she said. “Or maybe it was the Profacis, I’m not sure.”
“Who?” I asked. I’d heard of the Gambinos but not the Profacis. The name reminded me of my mo
ther’s favorite insult, facia bruta, meaning “ugly face.”
“They worked out of Staten Island, I think,” she said. “I don’t really know. Actually, one of the families he worked with wanted to make him, but he said no. When I asked him why, he said, ‘I didn’t want to be running around making money for some fat guy sitting on the corner eating salami all day.’” we shared the same She grinned.
“Is that why, when you guys would watch those mob documentaries on the History Channel, Daddy would know who all those guys were?” I asked. I’d hear them both commenting from the living room. “Total nutcase,” my father said about one.
“Well, one of your father’s cousins was also in the business,” she said. “So he knew a lot of those guys through him. But your father was in prison with Joey Gallo.”
“Who is Joey Gallo?” I asked. I was more intimately acquainted with Vito Corleone than any real-life mobsters.
Young Johnny, about seventeen, circa 1955.
“Oh, he was a real nutsy fruitcake, Joey Gallo,” my mother said. “He murdered Albert Anastasia, the head of Murder Incorporated. You know that Bruce Springsteen song, ‘Murder Incorporated’? It was a reference to this famous group of hit men from Brooklyn. Well, Anastasia was the head of Murder Inc., and Joey Gallo killed him.”
“Wow,” I said, not really knowing what it all meant. A year later, when my grandfather would die of prostate cancer, my father and my uncle Frankie would scour the rows at Green-Wood Cemetery until they found Anastasia’s unremarkable gravestone and set down two red roses in memoriam. Though I’d recall this conversation, I wouldn’t ask him about it, but I’d remember how they both smirked their way to the tomb and back in recognition of their off-kilter tradition.
“Your father was also in prison with a guy who knew where Jimmy Hoffa’s body was buried,” she revealed.
“Really?” Now that I understood. “Where? Tell me!”
Never Tell Our Business to Strangers Page 9