Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  “I don’t understand why this is hap-p-p-pening to h-h-him,” I’d call my mother and cry when I found myself unable to conform to the rigors of academia.

  “I don’t know, either, Jenny Penny,” she’d say, her voice low so my father couldn’t hear.

  “It’s just so unfair,” I said. “I can’t believe that after all of our separations, now it’s for real. This is it. He’s going to die.” The fact that he had taken life didn’t factor into my grief; my mother and I discussed his past in these conversations, even the unflattering bits, but we didn’t feel it made him less worthy of our love, and we didn’t feel he deserved to die because of it. The fact that he had killed didn’t diminish our pain one iota.

  “I know, Jenny, stop crying, it’s gonna be all right,” she’d coo into the phone. She never cried when I cried, as if we were rationing tears.

  “Mommy, you’ll be there when this is over, right?”

  “Of course I will, baby. Now make your daddy proud and finish your paper. Steven is leaving now and I have to see if Daddy needs anything before Yaw comes, okay?”

  “I love you so much, Mommy,” I sobbed.

  “I love you, and Daddy loves you, too.”

  I set to work on my paper, a piece for my honors class, which was due in a matter of hours. My father had been so proud of my honors status, and his pride inspired me as I finessed my final act of procrastination, capping a career of leaving things to the last minute. I wanted to see how long I could put a paper off and still turn it in on time; the answer was three in the morning. I laughed despite a throat full of sobs—my academic career was finally over.

  The sun was high in the sky as I printed out my paper, and I parted the shades in my living room—which was now completely mine, how I’d really wanted it all along—and basked in the warmth of the sun. It seemed especially cruel that a brilliant New York spring waited right outside my window but I couldn’t enjoy it. Worse—neither could my father. As I sailed down the FDR that afternoon on the express bus and beheld the sparkling river and the fluttering leaves on the trees that lined the East River Walk, I understood that this spring wasn’t for me. I’d catch the next one, though, and the one after that. And just like that, I realized that the black cloud above me would, in fact, lift. This crushing pain in my chest would not last forever. My father—my beloved Bruce Springboard—might be leaving this earth, but I was not. It was simply not my turn. This gave me a kind of perverse comfort, because I knew one day it would be me sucking on a morphine dropper in a hospital bed in the living room. On that day I wouldn’t be getting a pass, but this time I was. It was incredibly unfair for him, but death was not yet coming for me. I was still alive.

  “JENNY, COME HERE,” my mother said one night about two weeks before my father died. She brought me into her bedroom and closed the door. She’d placed one of our dining room chairs in front of the closet.

  “Ma, what—”

  “Hush,” she said, climbing onto the chair and reaching to the back of the closet, past my father’s sewing kit—how funny that he’d been the mender in the family, while my mother couldn’t even thread a needle. She pulled out what looked like a photo album, but it didn’t have a cover, just weathered black pages covered with snapshots. It was wrapped in a plastic linen bag.

  “Is that construction paper?” I asked, unzipping the bag. I flipped through pages adorned with photographs of Angie and Tina when they were young—class pictures, pictures of the girls with Grandpa Frank and Grandma Helen.

  “What’s that?” I asked. She had something in her other hand, what looked like another homemade photo album, the cover of which spelled “My Family” in red embroidery. I opened that one and gasped: It was my teenaged father and his first wife, Marie, beaming in black-and-white. “Ma, she looks just like Angie!” I said. The resemblance was uncanny. “And Tina looks like Daddy!” Tina began as an adorably petulant duckling and blossomed into a voluptuous yet self-effacing teen; Angie wore her gregarious personality on her sleeve but matured into a steely cool surfer chick with a chipped front tooth. There were pages and pages of Marie and my father holding my sisters when they were babies, their faces angelic and eager. It was hard to believe that a few years after these photos were taken my father would shoot a man to death. I pointed to long-forgotten relatives posing with the young family. “Who are these people?” I asked.

  “I haven’t a clue, my dear,” my mother replied. I turned my attention back to the other album, thumbing through the soft black pages.

  “Who are these kids?” I asked, pointing to a photo of Angie, Tony, and Tina with two younger children.

  “Those are Marie’s other kids, Cindy and Marty, the ones she had with her second husband,” she said. I turned one of the photographs over and noticed a stamp on the back.

  “Correspondence Department, SSP?” I asked.

  “Sing Sing Prison,” she said. “He never wanted you to find this. It was the photo album he kept in prison. Most of these pictures were sent to him by his parents, who stayed close with your brother and sisters when your father was in jail. They were close to Cindy and Marty, too, when they were young.” I flipped to a page covered with Polaroids; they were of my father with a very young Frankie, Paulette, and their kids, and others I didn’t recognize. In each they stood before a pale blue background. “Taken in prison,” my mother said. “See? The background is the same.” In every photo he had a cigarette dangling from his fingers, just as he did in many of the photos taken during my childhood. Damn Pall Malls.

  “Wow,” I said. “This was here the whole time and I never knew?” To think that my curious little fingers had been inches away from discovery all those times I’d gone rummaging through their closet. A piece of paper fell out of the big album; it was a program from a piano recital at Robert Whitford Music School. I opened it and skimmed the performers for a familiar name. Lo and behold, an eleven-year-old named Angie Mascia had played Tchaikovsky on May 12, 1972, at 7:00 P.M.

  “Mommy, he saved this?” I asked, holding it out for her to see. Just like he’d saved my report cards and articles from the school paper and even the scripts from shows I’d starred in.

  “I guess he did,” she said, taking the delicate paper.

  “He really did care about them,” I said. “What happened?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t know,” she said, clipped, as if too much thought on the topic might cause her to get angry at him, a feeling she was not about to indulge now. I flipped through white-bordered photos of Uncle Frankie in his Navy uniform, posing with an infant Tony; Angie and Tina captured in each of their young life stages, complete with frizzy hair, braces, and bikinis; and Grandma and Grandpa posing in the driveway of their old house in Brooklyn and poolside with their grandkids in Miami. I retrieved a photo from the back of the album and held it up for my mother to see: It was my father, looking to be in his early twenties—with teeth! A full set of white teeth!—standing with his arm around a brunette with heavily drawn eyebrows.

  “Who’s this with Daddy?” I asked.

  “Ah, that was the mistress,” she said, studying the photo. “A friend of Marie’s, I think.”

  So he really had cheated on Marie with all of her friends. “He had pictures of the two of them just lying around?” I asked, spotting her in another picture; in it she was wearing a sequined dress and had a fur stole draped around her shoulders.

  “I guess,” she said, “and Marie found them and left him because of it.”

  “Really? He was that stupid?” When I was younger he’d warned me that “all men are snakes. Well, except me.” Looks like he was right about the first part and wrong about the second.

  “Yeah, and I don’t know why, she hardly seemed worth it,” my mother said, holding up a picture of my father and Marie, whose round eyes and angelic face were beyond compare. “A real facia bruta, the other one was,” she said.

  “Yeah, my god, Marie is so much prettier,” I said. “I don’t understand.” />
  My mother shrugged. “That was the life,” she said. “It was accepted behavior in that line of work.”

  “But he didn’t do that with you,” I said, reaching for a manila folder filled with black-and-white eight-by-ten photos.

  “Oh, no,” my mother said, following my eyes. “He was way past that shit when he met me.” As she spoke I pulled out one glossy photo after another, some of my father with two dozen other men, lined up in three rows, all wearing cardigans or sweatshirts. A sign in the front row read SPARTANS FOOTBALL, 1965 CHAMPS.

  “Ma?” I asked, and she chuckled.

  “Prison,” she said, anticipating my question. “It looks like an Ivy League sports team, doesn’t it?” I nodded. All of his teammates were white; times certainly had changed. There were other photos, some with fewer players, some with signs that trumpeted their baseball successes as well. In another picture my father looks like he’s in an auditorium and he’s cradling a frame in his hand—perhaps it’s a diploma?—and he’s shaking someone’s hand; there’s a band playing behind him and a banquet table with food off to his right. Another photo depicts what looks like a talent show—there are two men wearing suits who look like they’re performing a skit while someone plays a piano behind them; yet another photo features my grandparents and some other people seated around a table, and I deduced that this one was taken on visiting day. My father is also at the table, sporting seventies-era sideburns and laughing over his plate of food.

  “That’s her, that’s Nancy,” my mother said, pointing to a compact blonde with a faraway look on her face and a head full of curls. “The one your father was seeing.”

  “That’s her?” I asked. She looked like a young Bette Midler.

  “And that,” she said, pointing to another photo, “is Paul.” I could see why she’d been so stuck on him—a six-inch-tall Afro framed genial eyes, a neat black mustache, and a dazzling smile. He was lean, like my father, and sitting with a white woman—could that have been his wife, the one who confronted my mother, or another mistress?

  “Cute,” I said, handing her the picture. “But then, you’ve always had impeccable taste.” She smiled.

  As the hourglass ran out I kept in constant contact with Angie and Tina, calling them so often that my mother began to resent the time I spent away from her. Because my mother was busy with my father I supplanted her as the Florida liaison, and I grew closer to my sisters because of it. Since they were nurses they knew what questions to ask, and when I told them about the liquid morphine and the fentanyl they knew it wouldn’t be long. They weren’t flying up, though. They really didn’t need to, I explained, as he was barely lucid and they had both seen him in December.

  “I wish you would come down this summer, Jenny,” Angie said. “You have a family here, too, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “Well, now I know.”

  “We’ve always been here,” she said. “We’ll always be here.”

  I took to sleeping in the living room on an inflatable mattress, and Steven would watch TV while I watched my father’s chest rise and fall dramatically. It looked like his heart was trying to escape, because his stick-figure physique made his rib cage more prominent. In the morning I would wake to the sounds of my mother trying in vain to feed him applesauce. I glanced at the seat he’d occupied at the dining room table and remembered him sitting there just two years before, assuring us that he wasn’t scared to die. I couldn’t believe the man in the bed was the same person.

  “Good morning, Daddy,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Hey, did I tell you I’m going to visit my family this summer?” My mother shot me a look when I said “my family.”

  “Really?” he asked, far away.

  “Yeah, my sisters and brother and nieces and nephews—they’re all waiting for me, Dad.” The family he’d jettisoned, for whatever reason, was now mine. As an inheritance, it was priceless. My mother came around to the foot of the bed and fixed my father in her sights. I read it clearly: These might be his final lucid moments.

  “We love you so much, Johnny,” she said. “Jenny loves you so, so much, Johnny, and she knows what you did, and she loves you anyway.”

  “Ma!” I said, but pushed it down. “Yes, Daddy, I love you so much, it doesn’t matter what you did,” I said, but it had a bitter tinge. I grabbed her arm and took her into the bedroom.

  “Why did you tell him that?” I asked, furious. “He’s barely lucid. He can’t even ask me anything or answer me back. He’s trapped in his head and you’re telling him his youngest daughter knows he killed someone.”

  “Jenny, I’m sorry, I just wanted him to know.”

  “This isn’t knowing, Ma,” I said. “He doesn’t talk anymore, and I bet he only sometimes understands what we’re saying.” I closed my eyes. “You know how much I love you, Mom. I’m sorry, I just wish you hadn’t done that.” She nodded and left the room.

  THE DEATH RATTLE began the morning of May 5, a Saturday, and it sounded just like coffee percolating. Thankfully, it didn’t last for weeks. When my father hadn’t woken by noon, my mother hovered over him and made a pronouncement: “I think he’s in a coma.” His breathing was exactly like Dr. Meier described—deep breaths followed by long pauses.

  “Ooh, Jenny, look at his mouth,” she said, pointing a long nail at his lips.

  “No, Ma, just tell me,” I said, keeping my distance at the foot of the bed.

  “It’s swollen, with what looks like cold sores,” she said, and stood up. “Like he gets when he’s stressed. Oh, Jenny, he’s stressed. His whole mouth is broken out in those things.”

  “His body is fighting death,” I mused. I slept on and off all day and sulked through dinner, which we’d ordered from the Italian place down the street.

  “Why did you have to get so much food?” my mother asked when she saw my pasta, bruschetta, and Caesar salad, which I couldn’t shovel into my mouth fast enough, prompting endless sniping between my mother and me for the remainder of the evening. My size 14 jeans were tight on me by this point, but I didn’t give a shit, eating her portion, too. Just to prove how little I cared about my body, I made rigatoni with garlic, oil, and parmesan for breakfast the next morning. I brought it into my old bedroom and ate a few pieces while my mother sat down next to me.

  “Jen, we need to get along right now,” she said. “Your father is dying out there. We cannot fight in front of him anymore. Please.” I hemmed and hawed and sulked for a good ten minutes before I gave in and handed her the pasta dish, realizing I didn’t even want it. I reluctantly hauled my girth into the living room, where my mother and I watched TV—and my father’s rising and falling chest—for the next seven hours. Around eight o’clock his breath caught for a moment, and we thought that was it. Yaw stood up from the couch and soundlessly went out onto the terrace, his head bowed respectfully. My mother leapt off the couch and ran toward her bedroom, bypassing the hospital bed altogether. She hovered in the doorway, watching. I sat in the chair next to the bed and was too frightened to move; I started shaking all over. We both peered at his body and waited. And waited.

  “Jenny!” my mother shouted from the doorway. “What’s happening? Is it happening?!”

  I met her eyes for a moment, then returned my gaze to my father. And just like Dr. Meier predicted, he exhaled a ragged breath.

  “Sometimes the spirit wants to leave the body,” Yaw said, emerging from the terrace, “and it can’t, because it will cause pain to those it will leave behind.”

  “Are you saying we should leave?” I asked, popping two of my mother’s Xanax with lightning-fast fingers.

  “Maybe, yes,” Yaw said. “Maybe he wants to go, but he can’t because you and your mother are so distressed.” It was all he had to say; I grabbed my mother’s purse and in ten minutes flat we were sitting at Royal Crown Bakery over a plate of tuna and onion sandwiches on ciabatta.

  “I got so scared when I thought that was it, Mommy,” I said, too wired to cry, despite the Xanax. I was s
till shaking.

  “Me, too, Jenny,” she said. “All I wanted to do was crawl in the bed with him, but I got so scared. Oh, I got so scared.”

  “It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay to be scared.” I picked at the sandwich, my favorite, but I couldn’t summon an appetite. “What do you think we’ll find when we get back? Do you think he’ll be gone?”

  “I don’t know,” my mother said sorrowfully. If we’d been in our right minds we never would have left his bedside to go for a sandwich, so that should tell you how panic-stricken we were. When we got back Yaw was standing over him, and he shook his head; my father was still alive. I guess he did want his girls with him at the end. I took the phone and lay on my mother’s bed and called Angie, then Tina, and told them our father was close to death. My mother sat on the couch and waited.

  “Jenny!” she yelled in the middle of a particularly deep conversation I was having with Tina.

  “Wait, Tina, hang on,” I said, and took the phone into the living room. “Ma, what’s up?”

  “Jenny, I think he just … Yaw said he, he went to the bathroom.” My father was wearing diapers, so there was no mess, but Tina overheard and said, “Jenny? Jenny?”

  “Yeah, Tina, Mom said—”

  “Jenny, this is what happens,” she said. “The muscles relax and the bowel empties. You should go.” I threw down the phone and resumed my place on the chair by his bed. My mother stood behind me, close enough to her bedroom that she could dash back inside if it became too overwhelming. Together we watched his breath go in and out, deeper and longer, until it caught. It released, then caught again. It released, then nothing.

  “Oh, Jenny,” my mother said, and darted into her bedroom. I expected the fear to overtake me again, and I was surprised when it didn’t. Instead I was filled with a surge of calm; it’s as if my fight-or-flight response had flipped in the two hours since it was first tested, and all I felt was peace. I had a choice: I could stay with my father’s body as his spirit departed, or I could look after my mother, who needed me.