Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  “Oh, I don’t think your father ever asked him that,” she said, in a tone that communicated that such a query would be uncouth.

  “What was it like in prison?” I asked. “I mean, did Dad ever, like, drop the soap, if you know what I mean?” It had to be asked.

  “No, nothing like that ever happened,” she said. “Most of the guys he was in prison with were Italian, wiseguys from the neighborhood.” I pictured Paul Sorvino slicing garlic with a razor blade so it melted into his pasta sauce. “Your father was respected in prison. When he first arrived in Sing Sing, the guys there applauded him. He could have ratted on a lot of people, but he kept his mouth shut. That’s why he got twelve years.”

  “Sing Sing, wow,” I said, impressed. She still hadn’t clarified what exactly he’d gotten twelve years for. “Mom, what did he do? Twelve years is a long time.” She stared ahead for a few moments and said nothing. “Mom,” I prodded.

  “Jenny, he was into a lot of stuff, okay?” she said. “When we met he was selling clothes that came off the back of a truck.”

  “Like in Married to the Mob?” My mother and I always laughed when Michelle Pfeiffer exasperatedly screamed at her gangster husband, “Everything we own fell off a truck!”

  “Yes, like Married to the Mob,” she said. “Your father had a number of odd jobs then, some of them were crooked. He did try construction once, but the first time he was sent up onto a high beam he turned green and said, ‘Never again.’” So we shared the same fear of heights. “It’s a shame, really, because when he was a kid he wanted to be an electrician, but his teacher told him he needed to be good at math. He wasn’t, so the teacher told him he couldn’t be an electrician. Can you believe that? Instead of helping him with math, he just told your father, ‘You can’t do it.’ Do you have any idea how much electricians make?”

  “How much?”

  “A lot,” she said, irritated.

  “That sucks.”

  “Did I ever tell you how my uncle Harry got me a job at Zales, in the diamond counting room?”

  “No.”

  “My mother’s brother Harry, who had a very successful jewelry business on Forty-seventh Street, made his fortune by sweeping up gold dust from the fillings at dentists’ offices,” she said. “Those were the days they used real gold to fill teeth.” Her tone took on a playful air and she became animated, talking with her hands like a true Italian, not just an Italian-in-law. She got this way whenever she delved into her past and retrieved a particularly amusing memory for my enjoyment. She wanted a companion in remembrance, and I was it. “After my divorce from David,” she continued, “Harry got me a job in the diamond counting room at Zales. This is when I was dating your father. And I would, you know, once in a while, sneak out some small stones for your father to fence.” She giggled. “I didn’t last long there.”

  “Did you get caught?” I asked, incredulous. I couldn’t believe what she was telling me—my mother? The do-gooder from Manhattan Beach who chose to teach in the ghetto? Who wouldn’t let me go out on school nights—ever?

  “No,” she said. “They had security guards, but I was discreet. I put my hands under the table, pretended like I was scratching my leg or something like that.”

  “You’d never get away with that with today’s technology,” I said.

  “I was dating your father, but we weren’t serious yet,” she went on. “And I hadn’t heard from him for a while, so I called him up and told him I had something for him.” She giggled again. “He started returning my calls after that. Hey, did I ever tell you how your father ran up seventeen flights of stairs with an ice cream cone because the elevator was broken?”

  “Only a thousand times,” I said.

  “You know how he proposed to me?” she asked. “We had just gotten into a huge fight, and I told him to get out, and he said, ‘Let’s get married.’ Just like that: ‘Let’s get married.’ I was fine without getting married, you know, he was staying over more and more, moving his wardrobe over to my place, one pair of socks at a time. Your grandmother Helen was confused because all of his clothes kept disappearing.”

  “He was living at home?” It made sense, I guess, for someone who had just gotten out of jail.

  “But he knew I wanted a baby,” she went on, ignoring me, “and he said, ‘If you want to have a baby, we have to get married.’ He was traditional that way. But, oh, I almost killed him once, when he was supposed to take me out and never showed up, and I found your uncle Frankie and asked him where the hell your father was, and he said, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll come around.’ And you know why he stood me up?”

  “Because he was broke and didn’t want to tell you.” I knew this story by heart.

  “Yes,” she said, nodding reverentially. I imagined she must have nodded this way when one of her students finally grasped an elusive concept.

  My parents embarking on a new life in California, 1980.

  “How did you guys meet, again?” I asked, wondering if her disclosure had altered other parts of our narrative arc.

  “Through friends, like I said,” she said. “We were very good friends, until this one night when we were over someone’s house eating dinner, and we started playing footsie under the table. Well, we went straight home after that and—”

  “Mom, ew!” I said, just as I had years ago. Though I always enjoyed trips with my mother down memory lane, this was not the time. “Mommy, what did he do?” I asked, frustrated. “It couldn’t be that bad,” I offered, “or he’d still be in jail. I mean, come on. What did he do? Rob the wrong guy? Pull off the Lufthansa heist? What?”

  She laughed, and when her laughter stopped her face was still frozen in a forced smile. I knew her expressions all too well: She was deciding what to tell me, or perhaps how to tell me. “Like I said, it was mob shit, you know, petty theft, racketeering, that kind of shit,” she finally said. “You know, when he was married to Marie, he used to rob houses. When Tina was a baby he got sent away for stealing a car. That’s why there’s three years between Tina and Angie’s births. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said. “So you mean to tell me that my father has been in and out of prison his whole life?”

  “Oh, Jenny, please, ya gotta promise me you won’t say anything to him, that I told you all this,” she implored, her voice soaked in desperation. “He never, ever wanted you to know,” she said, pained. “He liked to think you didn’t remember when he got arrested. He used to tell me, ‘She doesn’t remember, she was too young.’”

  “I do remember,” I said. “I wouldn’t say anything to him now—how would I start that kind of conversation, anyway? ‘Hey, Dad, why don’t you tell me about your time in Attica?’”

  “It was actually Sing Sing, Greenhaven, and Fishkill,” she corrected. “They tend to transfer prisoners a lot. Your grandmother was always traveling upstate to visit him. Once he got sent to a facility close to the Canadian border. He froze his ass off for years. His brother and his wonderful sister”—she was being sarcastic—“must have loved that—that no matter what he did, he was still his parents’ favorite.”

  “Maybe it’s because they never saw him,” I said.

  “You know, your father, when he was younger, he was just like his family, had the same racist views they did,” she said.

  “No. Daddy?”

  “Yes, Daddy. Prison changed him. Being in jail opened him up to other walks of life. He was thrown together with blacks and Hispanics, and they learned how to get along. Prison is the great equalizer—it made him a better person, more accepting of different kinds of people.” I’d never heard an argument defending imprisonment as a successful tool of social integration. It certainly wasn’t depicted that way on TV. “He never wanted you to know,” she repeated, sounding forlorn. “You’re the only one of his kids who doesn’t know any of it.” I realized that my sisters knew and I didn’t, Rita knew and I didn’t, Celie knew and I didn’t, my aunts and uncles knew—my father was
the black sheep in his family, a criminal, and I was truly the last to know. Perhaps that was because, no matter what he had done to spend fifteen years of his life behind bars, he was still so revered by everyone. Charisma goes a long way.

  “Why can’t you tell me exactly what he did?” I asked, sensing she was still withholding. “So it was theft, fine. What did he steal?”

  “Jenny, he made a mistake,” she said, facing me. “He made a lot of mistakes. But don’t you see, Jenny? That all ended after we got back from Florida, when you were five. Don’t you remember how happy you were to see him that night at Rita’s? All of that shit ended that night when he came back to us. He changed his life for us, Jenny. He turned it around—for us, because of us, because he didn’t want to lose his family again.”

  “Again?” Now I understood why he and his kids were so distant—jail had separated them.

  “Yes, again,” she said, with a little fight in her, like a defense attorney. “Please, Jenny, no more. Now you know, okay?”

  “So it was theft,” I said. “He was a thief. Mom, what is so horrible about that?” I said. “Why was that so hard to tell me?

  “Well, it was kind of like theft,” she said. “It involved racketeering, that’s all I’ll say.”

  “Fine,” I said. I knew there was more—maybe he’d knocked someone’s teeth out as he was stealing their car—but she’d told me all I could handle for one filthy, humid evening. On our way home from the gas station, to cheer me up, my mother began to sing. “‘Even though we ain’t got money, I’m so in love with you, honey …’”

  “‘And everything will bring a chain of lo-o-o-o-ove,’” I finished for her. She joined me for the rest of the verse: “‘And in the morning when I rise, you bring a tear of joy to my eyes, / And tell me everything is gonna be all right.’”

  “It’s all gonna be all right, Jenny,” she said, and smiled. “Do you trust me?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said with a smirk.

  CHAPTER 8

  New Lane

  Staten Island, New York

  September 1995

  • • •

  AFTER THE SHOWER INCIDENT OF 1995 MY MOTHER DECIDED we had to leave Celie’s yesterday. Not that staying at Celie’s place was all bad—she made an excellent egg salad that was silky smooth from whipping the mayo and mustard together—but my mother was desperate to flee after the perceived lack of respect Celie’s sister-in-law seemed to display toward my father and his family, as if some sacred code had been violated. I took advantage of the situation and rallied hard for the apartment on the water; my persistence paid off and we got it around the same time my father returned to work. It was mid-September and Flo wouldn’t be ready to move out until October 1, but my mother decided we couldn’t wait, so while my father was still on the road we decamped for our real estate agent’s place across the street from the legendary Staten Island garbage dump. Once again we had no choice but to rely on the generosity of others. Because the agent was essentially living with her boyfriend in Brooklyn Heights, she took pity on us—“I get a good feeling about you guys,” she said as she handed us the keys, although she probably felt differently by the end of the month, when we were only able to give her half of her fee. Either way, my mother and I were finally, blessedly alone.

  In the middle of our fortnight by the dump, my father returned for two days. He wasn’t going to be moving us, though; that we were going to do on our own. But while he was between jobs he took us to Flo’s to sign the lease, fanning the cash out on her long marble dining room table like we were playing a mid-afternoon hand of poker. Afterward my father went to run errands and my mother and I went shopping for dinner, and as we pulled in to the parking lot of our temporary apartment building we began to argue about a film we’d rented. The conflict devolved into a frenzy of mutual slapping, ending with my mother threatening, “I’m gonna tell your father when he comes home and he’s going to kill you!” Of course, she didn’t mean it literally, but I knew I might get hit or spanked. Never mind that I was seventeen, it was old-school—whether I was five or twenty-five, the same punishment applied.

  I was tired of my mother’s side of the story being the only one my father believed, so I wrote a note that said something like, “Don’t bother looking for me, I can’t deal with her anymore,” swiped my mother’s latest library book, and hid in the building’s parking garage. I figured I’d scare them for a few hours, after which my sudden reappearance would come as such a relief that they’d forgive all of my sins. What I didn’t anticipate was that the absence of clocks or sunlight might give a false impression of the passage of time. When I thought a couple of hours might have passed I emerged and called my mother from a pay phone in the mini-mall across the street. She sounded so relieved she was crying a little. “Mom, what’s the big deal?” I asked.

  “Where are you?” she asked wearily.

  “Across the street,” I said. “I was reading in the garage. Is dinner almost ready?”

  “Dinner? Jennifer, your father has been driving around looking for you for four hours!” she said, distressed. “We even called the police! They kept asking us if you had a boyfriend in the city or something.”

  Yeah, fat chance. “I’m fine, Ma,” I said. “But, wait—did you say four hours?” I’d plopped down in a darkened corner of the garage at around seven.

  “Yes! Jenny, you have your father so worried. Do you see his truck around anywhere?”

  “No. Ma, what time is it? Ten? Eleven?” I asked, glancing at the invisible watch on my naked wrist.

  “Jenny, it’s three in the morning!” she boomed. A surge of shame slid down my back like ice. All I’d wanted was to force her to respect me, but instead I’d threatened to tank our fragile new life, which was being held together with fishing line. That much was evident when I entered the apartment to find my mother sitting at the dining room table, looking forlorn.

  “Ma,” I said. She looked up and shot me an “I’m glad you’re all right but I’m going to kill you” look. I took a seat at the table and waited for my father to come home. The phone rang. “Yeah, she’s here,” my mother murmured into the receiver. I didn’t want to cause my father any more heartache; he’d had so much already in the past year. Plus, he was scheduled to drive out early the next morning. Not only had I ruined his last hearty meal, but I’d also robbed him of sleep.

  When he trudged in a few minutes later I kept my head hung low, afraid to antagonize him. He barely acknowledged me as he very patiently opened the cupboard, removed a glass, dropped in two ice cubes, and poured three fingers of scotch. He sat down at the head of the table, joining me and my mother in our moment of silence. Finally, he spoke.

  “Jenny,” he said. His booming bass was deep with exhaustion, and as I raised my head I noticed how bloodshot his eyes were. “I’m going to tell you the same thing I told your mother a few hours ago. It’s the same thing I tell everyone. All I have in this life are my girls. You and your mother—that’s the only thing I live for, the only thing I work for. If that’s taken away, then there’s no point to it. Any of it. All I have are my girls.” His voice broke at the end of that last sentence, and as if on cue, my mother and I ran over to him and buried our heads in his neck.

  “I love you guys so much,” I said, weeping openly.

  “Oh, Johnny,” my mother said, wiping her tears away with her hands. My bad behavior had caused this scene, and even as I stood there holding my parents I knew I’d spend the next day on the toilet, saddled with diarrhea because of what I had done.

  But maybe we needed this—it was the emotional catharsis we hadn’t made time for. We were mourning our lost year, mourning our lost life, the one we’d so abruptly left behind. I hadn’t realized it before, because my parents were in such a rush to leave, but they were probably grieving that loss harder than I was. I was still young enough that I could easily adapt to a new place, but my parents had chosen California, pointed to it on a map and said, “There.” I had seen t
hem as monsters for making me leave, but they didn’t want to leave paradise, either. They felt they had no choice.

  After that night I believed that the three of us had been properly reunited and were now working toward a common goal: keeping our family together, in spirit if not in body. My father left the next day as planned, and my mother and I moved onto New Lane. I was in love with our new apartment and all of its expensive touches, like the glass chandelier that I dismantled and soaked in soapy water every six months. I was so proud that we’d found such nice appointments that I’d get down on my hands and knees and Windex the tile floors every month, and when I’d finished the bathrooms and the vacuuming—no more free carpet cleaning, unfortunately—I’d stand on the patio furniture on the balcony and scrub the sliding glass doors, praying I didn’t stumble and plummet seven stories. I’d spend hours on the mirrored walls in the living room because it only took two or three weeks for my parents’ cigarette smoke to coat them in a hazy yellow sheen. I took pride in keeping our place clean because I understood how quickly we could lose it. Before the inevitable happened I was determined to appreciate what we had, so every morning I would peer out my bedroom window and gaze upon the glorious downtown skyline, and it was the last thing I saw before going to bed. Sometimes I’d stare out at Manhattan to the north and the hills of Staten Island to the south and all the sky in between and wonder what force begat the universe, and what force begat that force, and so on. I spent hours this way, on my knees in bed with my elbows on the windowsill, contemplating the night sky like a stoner without the pot.

  Right before our first Christmas in New York I got a job at the Staten Island mall, though I surrendered the bulk of my paychecks to my parents. I actually didn’t mind; I liked feeling that I was contributing to our new life. Besides, I didn’t need money for anything because I had no life. We were actually treading water financially, until it started snowing. And snowing. And snowing. When it didn’t stop, the Weather Channel gave it a name: the Blizzard of ’96. It immediately put a halt to my father’s work and sank us all into a familiar depression.