“Now that I remember,” I said, faintly recalling how Kara allowed me to overdose on grape jelly sandwiches.
“And when they did come back for him, I told Kara to keep you in your room because I didn’t want you to see him get arrested again.”
“Bad move,” I said. “I remember lunging for that door for what seemed like hours, just trying to get to him.”
“I know,” she said, “but what else could I do? I didn’t want you to see him taken away. They took him to the jail in Santa Ana, and they arranged for his extradition. I didn’t have money for lawyers, so Rita paid for everything.”
“She did?” Now I knew why my father had gotten so angry when I’d criticized her.
“Jenny, she was so very good to us,” she said. “Then a friend of mine from New York found us a lawyer, a good one, to fight his extradition, and because your father had led a crime-free life for the five years he was on the run, a special deal was going to be worked out where he could fight the parole violation from California. But Governor Deukmejian had just taken office, and he wanted to appear tough on crime, so his office called off the deal. So we had two options: go on trial for the parole violation charges in New York, or go to Florida to deal with the five-year-old cocaine charges.”
“That’s why we went to New York?” I asked, remembering my week aboard Amtrak.
“Yes,” she said. “I pushed your father’s lawyers to try their luck in New York, knowing that if he was cleared of the parole violation then maybe Florida would dismiss the charges. So that’s what we did. They took him to New York by bus, and oh, Jenny, it was awful. They’d take him to Burger King for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the ride took days and days, and I had no contact with him until he got to New York. And when it became obvious that all this would take longer than we thought, I sent you down to Florida to stay with Rita, and I stayed with David at his place in the Village.”
“I hated that you left me down there,” I said. “Remember how I cried as the train pulled away?”
“Yeah, and I also remember how Rita said the words ‘ice cream’ and you stopped crying almost immediately,” she said, shooting me a sly smile.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. I also remembered trying to conjure my father from thin air, and Rita’s Turkish cigarettes. “Oh, and thanks, by the way, for leaving me with a druggie and her druggie friends,” I said, finally able to discern the situation.
“Jenny, I didn’t know that,” she said. “If I’d known she was a drug addict I never would have let you stay there.”
“Mom! You did know!” I said. “She told me they were Turkish cigarettes, and you totally backed her up.”
She shrugged. “Well, nothing happened to you, did it?” she asked.
“Well, no,” I admitted, “but it could have! Jesus—coke dealers, pot smokers, members of the Medellìn cartel. Not good. What if someone had come looking for drug money and killed us all?”
“But they didn’t, did they?” she asked, eyebrows cocked.
“No,” I said, defeated.
“No,” she said, vindicated.
“So when did he get out?” I asked. “How long was he in for?”
“He had his hearing in the summer, and a lot of people flew in from California to testify on his behalf. Gay, Maureen,” she said, ticking off clients of his, “his partner Phil …”
“Really?” I asked, surprised. “They knew about him, too?”
“Yes, and it helped,” she said. “Even the FBI agent who arrested your father, I’ll never forget him, his name was John O’Neill, and after he testified he stepped down and, in full view of the judge, shook your father’s hand and wished him luck. It was wonderful, I’ll never forget it.” If anyone could be a murderer and a charmer, it was my father. “But Florida still wanted him,” she went on, “so he got sent down to Florida. But right when he got there they dismissed the charges, and he was released. Just like that. On my birthday. It was the best birthday present I ever got.”
“And that’s when he showed up at Rita’s front door?” I asked. “I still remember the sweater he was wearing.”
“Yep, that’s when he came home,” she said, and slowly shook her head. “Shit, Jenny, we never should have left California.”
“He’d still be sick,” I reminded her. “Location wouldn’t change that.”
“I know,” she said. “But we had a good life there.”
“Tell me about it. So he went back to carpet cleaning, and that was that?” I asked, wondering if murderers can be “cured.”
“Yes,” she said. “Just like that. Jenny, he changed his life for us. For you. He turned his whole life around so he could have a family. He didn’t want what happened with his other children to happen with you. You know, Marie was pregnant with Tony right before your father went away, and he didn’t meet him until he was a teenager. He never wanted Tina or Angie visiting him in jail, seeing him that way. And he didn’t want you to, either, but I said, ‘Absolutely not. Your daughter wants to see you and I’m bringing her.’ And I did, remember?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “I remember the facility where I could sit on his lap, and the one where I had to talk through the phone, through the glass.” I hadn’t thought about this stuff in years. I couldn’t believe it was still there.
“I don’t regret it, and I don’t care if your father was mad at me for it,” she said. “He got over it. But we knew he’d be released eventually. The first time he went away, he thought that was it. He sent Marie a letter asking her to divorce him, to live her life. Doing time is very, very difficult, and he said he had to bury his feelings very deep in order to survive. It’s a certain mindset you have to adopt, and he did: You have to go deep down inside yourself and cut yourself off from the outside world, otherwise it’s too painful. He never thought he was going to be released, and he certainly never thought he’d have another family again. But he did. We had you.”
“Yeah, and you met because he was in jail for murder,” I pointed out. “If he hadn’t killed somebody, I wouldn’t even be here.” The possibilities made me shudder.
“Jesus, Jenny, why do you have to see it that way?” she said, annoyed.
“Mom, I’m just trying to understand,” I said, and I was. I now understood the grisly legacy I’d inherited before I’d even been born. I was the product of a murder, in a way. It was horrifying.
“He felt he could never escape what he was,” she said, “and he doesn’t deserve to have you treat him like everyone else.”
“I’m not, remember?” I said. “I’m not going to talk to him about this, I agreed.”
“Because when we lived in Lake Forest,” she continued, “there was a guy who saw your father working on his carpet cleaning machine in the front yard, and he noticed your father’s tattoos, and he said, ‘So, how much time did you do?’ because the tattoos were a giveaway that he’d been in prison. Maybe the guy had also been in prison, I don’t know. But your father came home that night so demoralized. He said to me, ‘I’ll never escape it, people will always know.’”
“No one knew—did Maria’s parents know? No one from California knows, just people here.”
“Please don’t tell your friends, or, god forbid, your boyfriend,” she pleaded, saying “boyfriend” like the word was gagging her.
“I won’t,” I lied. “I promise. So where is Bobby Wyler now? I mean, did he know what Daddy did for him? Whatever became of him?”
“Dead, I think,” she said. “Lung cancer, maybe? I’m not sure. But your father almost killed him once, and I bet he never knew.”
“What?” I asked. “I thought you said he changed his life for us.”
“He did, he did,” she said. “But when he got out he found out that Bobby, who was supposed to help Marie and the kids with money when he got out of jail, didn’t—he hadn’t done a thing for them. And your father got very angry, because it’s kind of understood that your partner, especially someone you’ve helped out like your fat
her had, is supposed to take care of your family. But he didn’t. So he drove to Bobby’s place with a gun, and he had worked himself up into thinking he was gonna kill him. And I tried to talk him down in the car—”
“You were there?” I tried to imagine my mother desperately trying to talk her new boyfriend out of killing someone as he zigzagged his way through the streets of Brooklyn, his jaw clenched with quiet rage. I remember how quickly my father could conjure fury; it came on without warning, like an earthquake. I now saw how that tornado of rage was honed and perfected, and to what sordid purposes it had been applied.
“Yes, and I managed to talk him down,” she said. “When he got there, he saw that Bobby Wyler wasn’t alone, and he calmed down, because he said, ‘I can’t kill them all.’ Don’t you see, Jenny? He changed his life for us.”
Avoiding a bloodbath because of a logistical headache involving body disposal meant he had changed his life for us? I let it slide. I’d raked her over the coals enough for one afternoon. I still had classes after this, though I’d already decided to ditch them.
“I bet you never knew this,” she said, smiling at the memory, “but when we used to toast at dinner, before you were old enough to understand what we were saying, we used to toast ‘To prison reform!’ If it hadn’t been for the prison reform movement, he never would have been released, and we wouldn’t have been a family. It was so important that he had this chance, Jenny. He wanted another chance so badly. And he was a good father to you.”
“He was,” I agreed. “He is.” He wasn’t dead yet, and I had no intention of burying him with my past tense verbs.
I sighed and cracked my knuckles, a nervous habit since childhood. So my father was a murderer. “Let me ask you something,” I said. “What would you think if I came home with a guy who had done time for murder? You wouldn’t be so happy, would you.”
“No,” she said. “Your father and I would think you were making a big mistake.”
“So why was this so different?” I asked.
At this she smiled again. “Because it’s your father we’re talking about. Your father was different.”
“Well, what did your family say when they found out—Rita? Your mother? David? Your father?”
“Everyone loved Johnny,” she said.
“Even though they knew what he did?”
“Yes,” she said. “He was so magnetic, Jenny, he could make you forget all that. My mother loved Johnny; my father, as far as I know, for the little time he knew him, he liked him, too. And Rita—well, you know how well Johnny and Rita get along.”
“Yes, I remember,” I said.
“You know, Paul used to tell me when we were dating, ‘Johnny will never love anyone as much as he loved Marie. Marie was the love of his life.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, yeah? We’ll see.’ He never told Marie as much as he told me. We were close in a way he never was with anyone else.”
I believed it. The two of them—the three of us, actually—were fused in ways I’d never understood, until now. We’d been fugitives together. Fugitives. Any anger I felt toward my mother for lying to me all these years was superseded by the wonderment I found myself feeling at all that we’d gone through.
“You know, you told me years ago that the reason Dad went to jail in Irvine was because there was another John Mascia and it was a case of mistaken identity,” I reminded her.
“Well, there was a John Mascia in the Bronx,” she said.
“Yeah, you tried for years to pass him off as the reason Dad got pinched.”
“Did I?” she asked, feigning innocence. I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Oh, my god, Mom!” I said with a start. “When you had your heart attack and Daddy told me about your real age, do you know what I said to him?”
“What?” she asked.
“I told him, ‘It’s okay, Dad, because I know your secret, too.’ But Ma, I didn’t know about this. He thought I was talking about this.”
“Well, you don’t have to tell him differently now. Jenny, he’s paid the price,” she said. “He’s had a shitty relationship with his kids—”
“Yeah, but why, do you think?” I asked. “I really want to know. Was it guilt? Like, he let the estrangement get so deep that even trying to mend it only reminded him of what he had done?”
“I don’t know, Jenny,” she said, “but he’s going to die of cancer.”
“Ma! Enough with that, I know!” I looked out the window at the crowd of students on the steps. I had a feeling their Monday was a lot different from mine. “Mom, this guy was the only person Daddy killed, right?”
“Of course, Jenny,” she said.
“I just need to make sure,” I said. “Please understand.” A sob caught in my throat; I swallowed it and kissed my mother goodbye.
“He’s the love of my life, Jenbo,” she said as I slammed the car door.
HIS NAME WAS Joseph Vitale. I discovered the identity of my father’s victim later that week, when I was combing through my mother’s nightstand and found a clipping from the Daily News dated January 9, 1964. It had been there all along, I just hadn’t known what to look for. The headline read MASCIA GIVEN 20-TO-LIFE IN DOPE MURDER, and the story went on to describe him as a big-time narcotics pusher from Miami Beach. Assigning him that provenance was awfully funny, since he’d lived there only a short time when he was arrested for murder. I showed it to my mother, now that I was no longer timid when it came to these matters.
“Your grandparents saved it when he was sentenced,” she said. “And now you know everything, so you can stop looking.”
——
AS SOON AS the semester ended I got a job at Houston’s, a fine-dining restaurant on Park Avenue South that eschewed advertising, instead relying on word of mouth to jam the dining room. And that it did—there was no reservation system, so the waits could be monstrous. It took me the entire summer to make $3,500, which would cover first and last months’ rent, a security deposit, and the real estate agent’s fee. When I was halfway there I knocked on my parents’ bedroom door and sat down on their bed and finally told them what they probably already knew.
“Guys,” I started, but broke down. “Sorry, hang on, I want to do this right.” Memories of running into this very bed during a lightning storm or after a nightmare came flooding back. It would be hard to close this door, but it had to happen.
“Okay, now, what I wanted to say,” I said, blowing my nose, “is that I’m moving out.” I looked at them for a reaction. They listened, patiently. “We just can’t live together anymore. Mom, we’re screaming at each other all the time. It’s not fair to Daddy.” Which was definitely a factor, but not the real reason. The real reason was that I knew I needed to move out before my father got really sick, because I certainly wouldn’t have the courage to leave my mother after he died. I might have ended up living with her into my late twenties, and then we would have killed each other. I didn’t want to always be at odds with my mother. I was doing this to save our relationship, even though I knew it would hurt my father.
“It’s not like I won’t be back all the time,” I assured them. “I have no intention of abandoning my family. But it’s time. I love you guys so much,” I said, breaking down again.
“Jenny, it’ll be fine,” my father said. “You do what you have to do.”
“Let’s see if she can save the money and move without dropping out of school,” my mother murmured to my father.
“I won’t be dropping out of school,” I snapped, “because I’m not moving out alone.”
“I knew it,” my mother said. “You’re moving out with Kareem, right?” I nodded. “Well, at least you’ll be splitting the rent. If he gets his act together.”
“A lot of things are still up in the air,” I said, wanting to take it all back. “But I just wanted to let you know.” I was still crying; I didn’t seem to know how to turn it off.
“Okay,” my mother said.
“Okay,” my father said.
�
�Okay,” I said, and left the room. It was official: I was going to cohabit with my boyfriend.
“I really want to live on my own,” I told my therapist, “but I don’t think I can afford it by myself.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “You’ve worked out the math?”
“The problem is that most of these apartments require that you earn forty to fifty times the monthly rent, and even though I certainly make enough to cover a thousand-a-month rent, I don’t make forty to fifty times that,” I explained. “So I guess Mo and I will move in together. I know, we’ve only been together a few months.”
“Nothing is irreversible,” she said. “Even if you move in together and it doesn’t work out, you can always find another place.”
“I guess,” I said.
“Do you think he’s ready?” She had a point; he didn’t even have a job, and didn’t seem eager to bust his ass like I was.
Kareem remained unemployed throughout the summer, finally landing a gig as telemarketer for a theater company in September. Unfortunately, it paid $9 an hour. I accused him of not taking our life together seriously, and in addition to one-bedrooms, I also started circling studio apartments in the classifieds, ready for the possibility of each.
The first place we looked at was a two-bedroom on East 110th Street in East Harlem. “Such a bargain, thirteen hundred,” the real estate agent informed us at the precise moment that two giant rats scurried past.
“No,” I said, and we returned to school to plot our next move. On the train we continued an argument we’d been having about god knows what, and when we emerged he insisted on continuing the fight, even chasing me down Sixty-eighth Street and over to Third Avenue despite my pleas to leave me alone. It was a side of him I’d never seen before, and it was frightening.
“Is this how it’s going to be when we move in together?” I asked him. “Is this how your parents are with you? Chasing you down until you submit? Haven’t you ever heard of space?”
After he reluctantly returned to campus I was about to throw away the Voice when I glanced at the back page. “1 bdrm, 1 bath, 103rd Street and 2nd Ave, $925.” Could this be real? I wondered as I dialed the agent’s number. She agreed to meet us there in thirty minutes.
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