I waited a few more days before telling my mother, and I didn’t choose the moment; it just spilled out the morning my mother drove into the city to meet my father at Sloan-Kettering, where he had been admitted. The clinical trials he’d been participating in had minimized the amount of cancer in his bones, which nobody expected, but he’d been in and out of the hospital with minor chemo fevers. He was only going to get sicker; I had to act now.
“Mom?” I asked as we pulled up to Thomas Hunter Hall on Lexington Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street. After she dropped me off she would veer east and park the dusty old Subaru in the hospital’s underground garage.
“Yes?” she said. I felt like I was dangling off a precipice. I was going against her now, and I felt it.
“I have to tell you something,” I started. I took a breath and tried to find some comfort in her eyes. They looked tired. “I read an article the other day in the Post that said you could look up criminal records online. And I looked up Daddy’s.” I waited for her reaction. She stared straight ahead. “Do you know what I’m going to say?” I asked, giving her the option of moving first.
She made a “tsk” sound with her tongue and said, “Jenny, why did you do that?”
“Because I wanted to know,” I said. “You know that. I have always wanted to know.” It hadn’t exactly eaten me alive every day for the last six thousand days, but it had always been there, running under our lives like a river, undetected. My desire to know may have been moved to the back burner—by boyfriends, by feeble explanations that satisfied me for a time—but it was always there.
“And what did it say?” she asked, even though she knew the answer. Her tone was slightly angry and gaining steam.
“It said murder, Mom. Murder. Now tell me what happened,” I insisted. “This time you can’t hold out on me. I know the truth.”
“Goddammit, Jenny, he never wanted you to know,” she said. “And you found this where? On the Internet?” Now her tone was angry and mocking.
“Yes, on the New York State Department of Corrections website,” I said, calmly. “His record is there. It said he went in January of ’sixty-four and was paroled in October of ’seventy-five. So I guess he didn’t get twelve years for racketeering?” It was a little snotty, but I felt I had the right. She’d lied to me, long after I was old enough to understand.
“So anyone with an Internet can see this record?” Her computer savvy, I noticed, had not extended to a general awareness of modems and connections.
“Yes, anyone with access to the Internet can see his record,” I clarified.
“Your father would be very upset to know that,” she said. “I think it’s a violation of privacy that anyone can go on there and see that.” She was sulking and staring out the window at the traffic slowly chugging its way down Lex in fits and starts.
“Mom,” I argued, “I’m sorry, but if you kill someone? I think that kind of nullifies your right to privacy, no?”
“No!” she said, staring me down. “No, I do not, especially when the person in question has changed his life for his family and all that is in the past.” She turned toward the traffic again in protest, but she didn’t demand I leave the car.
“Tell me what happened, because I don’t want to go and ask him. In fact,” I said, sweetening the pot, “if you tell me everything, I won’t go to him. How about that?” Then I’d have a built-in excuse not to broach the subject with my father: I had cut a deal with my mother. Maybe I was a coward, but I decided then and there that confronting a (probably) dying man with his past at a time when he was most certainly preoccupied with what would become of him after death was not something I was willing to do. I would not be responsible for his leaving this earth scared. As it was, he must have been terrified, and I worried about what must be going through his head whenever I laid eyes on him.
“Oh, Jenny,” she said. And she told me.
MY MOTHER WAS on the verge of breaking up with David for the last time when she met a man named Paul. He was a black ex-convict, and they began an affair that lasted two years. He was also married with children, but that didn’t stop them. “All the guys in the joint claim to be innocent,” she said of Paul, “but he really was.” Framed, she claimed. Because of Paul my mother had become involved in the prison reform movement, and to that end she joined a Quaker group that ministered to prisoners. Paul told her that if she really wanted to know about prison reform she needed to go speak with a real mover and shaker behind bars up at Fishkill Correctional, a man named John Mascia.
“And that’s how I met your father,” she said, a guilty smile forming on her lips.
“What?” I asked, astonished. “You said you met ‘through friends’!” As I said it I heard how vague it sounded, and realized I’d been duped.
“Yeah, that’s what we told you,” she said, “but everyone else knew the truth.”
“Everyone knows?” I asked. “Rita?” She nodded. “Arline?” Another nod. “Angie?” Nod. “His other kids know?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But I had to tell them.” When my parents first moved down to Florida, my mother explained, Angie was fifteen and working at a fried chicken joint. Her life was drudgery; she hated coming home smelling like chicken every night, and she didn’t have a lot of clothes, so my mother took her shopping. “We bonded, Angie and I.” She smiled. “She must have felt close to me because she eventually asked me, ‘Eleanor, why did my father go to jail?’”
“She didn’t know?” I asked. She had been curious like me, but at least she hadn’t been alone in the dark.
“I guess Marie never told them,” she said. “So I went to your father and said, ‘Johnny, your daughter is asking questions about you. She wants to know why you were in jail.’ He said, ‘You tell her,’ and left the room. So I told her.”
So my instincts had been right, that I shouldn’t go to him with what I’d found. “So what did you tell her?” I asked.
“I told her the truth,” she said.
My father grew up in Bay Ridge at a time when young kids could be lured by “the element,” and some got absorbed into the orbit of the city’s criminal families. My father belonged to a crew of scrappy Italian kids called the Eighth Avenue Boys—he had told me as much when I was younger, but had never revealed their criminal aims—and they brushed up against wiseguys. But he wasn’t a mobster, mostly he robbed houses and sometimes dealt drugs. Like she’d said five years earlier, he resisted being “made.”
When my father was married to his first wife he had a partner named Bobby Wyler. “A Jew, which was rare in those days,” my mother pointed out. Bobby was in prison around the time my father moved his young family down to Florida in 1963. He was going down there, she said, to escape “the life,” and got a job at a restaurant. “But it was owned by a relative of Al Capone, or someone like that, so your father really wasn’t escaping the life.” In any case, the life found him when Bobby needed a favor.
“There was this guy, a drug addict, who was informing on them to the cops,” she said. “Bobby was in jail, so he asked your father to drive up to New York and take care of it. And he did.”
“He killed a guy, for that?” I asked. “How did he do it?” I pictured a saw and a wood chipper.
“Shot him,” she said flatly. “Took him to some park out in Brooklyn and shot him. But Jenny, you have to understand, this isn’t something he did lightly. He had to work himself up to do it. He had to psych himself into thinking he was a monster who could do something like this. He had nightmares about it, you know.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. He’d rescued me from so many of my nightmares, but I hadn’t been wise to any of his.
“He was very upset by what he had to do,” she said. “And after he did it he went back to Florida, but he knew the cops were after him—someone had dropped a dime on him. So he checked himself in to a hotel and waited there, so his family couldn’t see him get arrested.”
“Like I saw him get arrested,” I said quie
tly.
“Your father always liked to think you didn’t remember that,” she said. “He’d say to me, ‘She was so young, there’s no way she remembers.’”
“But I do,” I insisted, flinching at the memory.
“I know,” she said. “You remember everything.”
In order to avoid the electric chair, he pleaded guilty. “He was very scared of getting the chair. And your grandmother was very afraid, too. In those days there were no degrees for murder—like murder one, murder two—there was just life in prison or death. One of the results of the prison reform movement was that degrees were instituted, and sentences were reviewed and some prisoners were retroactively sentenced.”
“Is that why, on his record, it says ‘Degreeless prior to 1974’?”
“It says that?” she asked. “Then I guess that’s what it means.”
“So his sentence was shortened?”
“He was paroled,” she said. “In jail he had been involved in the reform movement and advocated on behalf of prisoners—wrote legal briefs for them, edited the in-house newsletter, even became the warden’s pet.”
“Like Shawshank Redemption?” I asked. It was a movie he loved.
“Sort of,” she said. “But they also staged actions against what they viewed as harsh treatment, and it got your father thrown in solitary a few times. He’d go days without food, and had to live among the rats and the roaches and—oy. You have to remember, Jenny, this was around the time of the uprising at Attica. Even though he was never in Attica, the movement swept all the prisons.”
“No wonder he didn’t go to college,” I said. I’d always wondered about that.
“Well, we used to say he was ‘in college,’” she said.
“Yeah, I remember, you told me,” I said.
“He did get his high school equivalency there,” she said. “Though they didn’t call it a GED then.”
“I thought he quit New Utrecht High School but went back later?” I asked, realizing that this truth, too, had been upended.
“He did go back later,” she said. “In prison.” She smiled.
I sighed. “So, he was paroled …”
“So. When he got out, he was actually seeing another woman in the Quaker group I was with. Her name was Nancy something, I forget her last name, she was married to a television executive, and she was having an affair with your father. At this time, your father and I were just friends.”
“But you liked him,” I said.
“We-e-e-ell,” she said, in her twisty-turny way, “we were friends first, just friends. But I remember the first time I saw him, when he walked up to the glass and sat down, and I thought, ‘He is so graceful, he walks like a panther.’ He moves so gracefully and so silently that he could come up behind you and you wouldn’t even know it.”
“That must have come in handy for certain pursuits,” I said wryly.
“When your father got his parole,” she continued, “I was the one who picked him up, and I drove him to my apartment, but we were still just friends. I drove him to my apartment so he could be with Nancy, because she was still married. And I was still with Paul.”
“You drove your future husband to your apartment so he and his girlfriend could have sex? On your bed?” It was mind-boggling.
“Well, he was technically my boyfriend’s friend. Paul was the reason I lied about my age,” she admitted.
“What? You told me it was because of Dad,” I said.
“Well, I was dating Paul before your father, and Paul was also younger. They were friends, so when I started dating your father I couldn’t exactly tell him I’d lied about my age for Paul.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“It didn’t seem right,” she said. “He knew me one way, and then to tell him I was older, it would have been a huge kasha varnishkes,” she said. “I mean, my driver’s license said I was born in 1939, my birth certificate had been changed, everything.”
“How were you able to forge all that stuff on official documents?” I asked.
“With a pencil,” she said. “There were no computers then. It was easy.”
“Hm. So, you and Daddy got together …”
“So we got together, and I wanted to have a baby, and we did,” she said. “I was already forty, so I was worried I wouldn’t conceive. But I did, and we had you. But then he started up again with his shit.”
“What shit?”
“Oh, dealing,” she said, feigning nonchalance.
“Which drugs?” I asked.
“Pot, mostly,” she said. “He would tell me stories about pulling in bales of marijuana floating in the Intracoastal, just waiting to be picked up. No one had really cracked down yet, not like they did later. And he was staying out later and later, and you were born, and even then he was out somewhere. After I had you I spent three days in the hospital mostly by myself. Rita was there, but he was out doing his thing. And finally I threatened to leave him.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Well, a few months after you were born, he got arrested,” she said. “He was driving in a car with someone, and there was coke in the car. We think he was set up, that the guy with him was an informant who planted it under the seat, because your father was mostly done with that shit by then. But he got arrested. We knew it was a parole violation, and for a murder charge—they could have locked him up for a long time. So I went down to the jail with you in the stroller to try to garner some sympathy—that was Celie’s idea—and begged them to release my husband. And they did. But they made a mistake—he was a parole violator. They shouldn’t have released him, and today they wouldn’t have, because they’d just pull up his record on a computer. But they didn’t do that then, and they let me bail him out. And when we got home he said, ‘I’m going to end up in jail or dead. I have to get out of here. You can either stay here with the baby, or you and the baby can come with me.’”
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘What, are you nuts? Of course I’m coming with you.’ And we went to Houston.”
“Wait—that’s why we went to Houston?” What was she telling me, exactly?
“That’s why we went to Houston,” she said. “But before we left, your father had about sixty thousand dollars’ worth of pot he was supposed to sell, and a cut was supposed to go to these Mafia associates he’d been dealing with. But they never got it, because he sold it all, and that’s how we financed the move. And just like that, he quit everything, he went legit. In Houston he ran a little mailbox franchise, like a Mail Boxes Etc. type of thing. And when I couldn’t take Houston anymore we went to California, which turned out to be perfect timing, because later we found out that the FBI was right on our tail. And a few years later, when you were five and we were living in Turtle Rock, I got a ticket, and that’s how they found us, because—stupid us!—we never sold our old car and they traced the VIN number. And that’s when they came to take Daddy away.”
“Mom, are you saying we went on the lam?” I asked, stunned.
“Jenny, don’t you remember how you were Jennifer Cassese?” she asked. “We used Celie and Vinny’s last name. Daddy took his father’s name, Frank, and was known as Frank Cassese. Before that, in Houston, he used Nicholas.” As she said it I realized that I’d never questioned why we’d gone by Cassese, even when we lived with Celie that summer and my mother told me my father had been in jail before I was born. As a child I’d simply accepted it, and I guess that part of me had remained a child while the rest of me grew up.
“You know, I thought for years that ‘Frank’ and ‘John’ were derivatives of the same name,” I said, putting it together. “I thought Frank was another name for John, like Bill and William, or Richard and Dick.”
“Well, it isn’t,” she said. “I was Eleanor Cassese, and we couldn’t call anyone, have anyone visit—the FBI went to my mother’s house and questioned her, and they questioned David because, before I went to Houston, I came to New York to sell some jewelry, and
we stayed at a very nice hotel, the Pierre or the Plaza, I can’t remember, and they found out. He told them to fuck off,” she said, chuckling at the memory.
“But Rita came to visit,” I pointed out, “and Grandma and Grandpa.”
“They came after we’d been out there a couple of years,” she said. “I was always worried about them opening their mouths, though. Always. And I felt so bad about getting the ticket, like it was my fault we got caught. We should have ditched the car,” she lamented. At least now I knew why they had been using fake Social Security numbers when they went bankrupt.
“Why, so we could be like Running on Empty for the rest of our lives?” I said. “No, thank you. I’d rather this happened, don’t you?” If he’d been arrested when I was older, when I could remember every detail, god only knows how much worse it would have been for me.
“Yes, I suppose,” she said. “And when they came for him the second time, he went willingly. The agents came over and I fed them coffee and pie—”
“I’m sorry, did you say the second time?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “They came for him the first time when you were home with him, just the two of you.”
“What! They did?”
“Yes. The FBI called me at work, and my boss Jesse drove me home,” she said, “because they couldn’t leave you home alone. And I came in and found them cuffing your father, and do you remember what you said to me then?”
“No,” I said, cringing. I felt like an amnesiac being told about a life I could no longer remember.
“You said, ‘Are they arresting my daddy?’ And do you remember what Jesse said?”
“No,” I said, honestly not remembering.
“Jesse said, ‘No, honey, it’s not real. They’re making a movie.’” Jesse’s words struck a vague chord of recognition, shrouded in so much fog it seemed like they were spoken in a past life. “My heart broke for you, Jenny, it really did,” she said. “He was released just in time for Christmas, remember? But they told us they were going to come back for him. And, in mitten drinnen, your aunt Rita decides it’s the perfect time to send Kara there to separate her from Miguel.”
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