Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  He’d broken it three times—probably, I now realized, in prison.

  Speaking of your “Little Friends,” I spent a half hour in the library trying to see what the snakes you caught look like. I saw the picture of the Banded water snake, but I could not find pictures of the Glass snake. I looked at so many snakes that I will probably have nightmares tonight.

  I had to put the letter down because I was crying so hard. “Aw, what is it, Jenny?” Tina asked with a look that told me she already knew.

  “Just imagining him in some prison library,” I wept, “looking up snakes so he could impress his son, who he’s never even seen—my god, it’s so painful to read this. His heart must have been breaking, Tina.” I felt a searing pain in my chest, right above my heart, and I read a little more about turtles and fishing—how he’d gone with Tina when she was five or six, which was a year before the murder—until I got to the last paragraph, which sent me running into the bathroom again to sob in peace:

  Dad would like to touch you and show his love for you, but under these circumstances this is not possible. But, I would like to be your father in more than name only, so though I can’t take you by the hand and take you to stores to buy things, I ask you to do your own shopping until your Dad can make the scene with you.

  Your Nanny is coming to Florida in June, so be sure to give her a nice big hug as a present, and tell her I told you to give it to her. She will just love this. I am going to tell her to take a lot of pictures of all of you, so make sure you get in front of the camera whenever Nanny tells you to take a picture. This is the only way I can see how big my boy is getting.

  Well Son, I guess that’s it for now. Take care of yourself, and be a good boy. I will write again soon.

  Love you,

  Dad

  P. S. You have no idea how much I enjoyed using the word “Son.”

  Love again

  John Mascia #10332

  When I emerged from the bathroom I sat back down on a bar stool in her kitchen and shook my head. “What happened?” I asked. “Was it because we went on the lam? That just ended any opportunity for a relationship? I mean, Tony came to California a few times, and I remember they bonded over their shared love of guns.” As soon as I said it I realized how perverse it sounded, that a killer should have a fascination with guns, but I suppose it made sense.

  “We were all really surprised when you guys skipped town,” she said. “One day you were here, and then one day Angie called me and asked me what I knew about Dad’s arrest, and I was like, ‘What arrest?’ And I went to your house in Plantation but no one answered the door. I peeked in the window and everything was gone. My mom suggested I check the newspaper, so I drove to the Sun-Sentinel and went through some of their back copies, and there it was.”

  “And that was it?” I asked, blowing my nose and reaching for a Diet Coke. “You didn’t hear from us until ’eighty-three?”

  “Actually, he called me from the road,” she said, “and he seemed to know so much about my life. It was really strange—he’d ask me questions about things he couldn’t possibly have known about.”

  “Yeah?” I asked, touched that at least he hadn’t let one of his children drift away.

  “Yeah, it was uncanny. I always thought he had people looking after me,” she said. “You know, wiseguys.” Later, when I told my mother that, she was shocked. “Really? He really did that? I had no idea. Well, she was his oldest daughter,” she reasoned, but the tone of her voice said, “What an idiot. He could have jeopardized everything.”

  “Do you remember when he was arrested for the murder, in 1963?” I asked Tina.

  “No,” she said, “because he wasn’t arrested at the house. I kept getting letters from him, though, saying how he couldn’t get home because there was a hurricane coming, or his car broke down, or this or that. I wish I’d kept those. And I remember my mother taking me out to the causeway on Seventy-ninth Street, and I asked my mom, ‘Is my dad dead or in jail?’ And she had to tell me. Then she took me to Burger King for a chocolate milkshake, and I even told the cashier lady, ‘My daddy’s in jail,’ and I started crying. I remember sending him little presents, like stationery—I mean, what else do you give a guy in jail?” I laughed. “Then there was the PT-109 coconut.”

  “What’s the PT-109 coconut?” I asked.

  “PT-109 was a movie about how John Kennedy’s boat got shot up during World War II,” Tina explained. “He ended up on an island, and all his men were starving and sick, and he comes across these natives and writes a message on a coconut so they can get the word out that they need rescuing. Since my stepfather frowned upon any mention of Johnny, I carved ‘I miss you and I love you Daddy’ on a coconut, and Nanny and Grandpa Frank brought it up to the jail.”

  “He actually received this coconut?” I asked, wishing I could have seen his reaction, though I’m not sure he would have understood the gesture’s reference—the movie was released a few weeks after he murdered Joseph Vitale.

  “Yep, I’m pretty sure he did. And whenever I see that movie now, it reminds me of my childhood. But after that I didn’t really ask my mom about Dad because I was so afraid it would upset her. Like, she was handling so much at once that I didn’t want to remind her of her husband, the murderer.”

  “God, Tina,” I said, my tears drying but capable of being restarted at a moment’s notice. “You were, what, six?”

  “Yep,” she said. “Almost seven.”

  “I was six, too,” I said. “Well, almost six.” It had been May, in 1983, when he was taken from my mother and me and shipped to New York, and it was also in May, exactly twenty years before that, when he’d been taken from Tina and shipped to New York. I was lucky—I got him back in five months. Tina never really got him back—a child’s nightmare come true.

  “Did he ever tell you to keep your boogers in a box?” Tina asked me out of the blue.

  I snorted. “No, but he did tell me that the oceans were formed from dinosaur pee,” I said. I picked up a different album, and the first set of pictures showed the extended family arranged on the beach, with everyone save the newborns holding up a sign with a different letter or number that spelled out “Summer Vacation 1990.” My father isn’t holding up a letter; he wasn’t there. All told, he appears in no more than a half a dozen pictures, a guest star in the family he started. Marie got all the vacations with their spanking-new grandchildren, and he got nothing. Rather, he chose nothing.

  On one of my later trips I handed Tina the album with “My Family” embroidered on the front. “It really belongs to you,” I admitted. “In a way, it’s like your baby book. It doesn’t feel right keeping it.”

  “Are you sure, Jenny?” she asked me.

  “Yes, please take it,” I replied. I’d swiped it without telling my mother, but I decided then and there that perhaps some decisions regarding my father’s memory were up to me, and me alone.

  CHAPTER 12

  July 2004

  • • •

  I SPENT THE NEXT FOUR YEARS MIRED IN A QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS seemingly without end. I waited tables and lamented my lack of direction—acting was a child’s dream, and I was no longer a child. But I had found nothing to replace it, so I coasted, traveling a bit and making repeat visits to Florida to see my family. In 2004 I joined the whole gang on a Caribbean cruise: Angie, Frank, Nicole, Krissy, and Joey; Tina, Bill, and Veronica; and Marie. I was nervous around Marie, unsure of what she really thought of my father, and of my mother for being married to him. He had deep-sixed his relationship with their kids, and while I still loved him I didn’t want to be associated with such neglect, and I didn’t want my sisters to think I excused him for it. But Marie, with her easygoing sandpapery voice and reflexive smile, was never anything but nice to me. I couldn’t shake the way she reminded me of my father whenever her face was in repose. My mother would never forgive me for thinking it, but I wondered whether he and Marie were more suited to each other than he and my mother were. Marie a
nd my father were cut from the same Bay Ridge cloth, easygoing and uncomplicated in manner, while my mother was layered, sophisticated, complex, dramatic. I wondered whether my father’s divorce from Marie went down the way my mother described it, and whether her second husband really did leave because my father wrote from prison that he’d kill him if he continued to terrorize his kids. I wondered many things I didn’t have the nerve to ask about.

  But I finally did gather the nerve to ask about one thing. Just before I was scheduled to fly home after the cruise, I accompanied Angie as she drove Krissy to her high school, where she was getting bused off to cheerleading camp. As Krissy hauled her bag and pillow over her shoulder and sleepily boarded her bus, Angie’s eyes welled with tears. She caught herself and turned to me and laughed, her doe eyes shining.

  “Those were the days,” I said, remembering my own time at cheerleading camp, which I’d also attended with a mouthful of metal.

  “Yeah, god, she’s growin’ up so fast,” Angie said, pulling out of the parking lot and heading toward the house. I wanted to tell Angie how much I admired her life, and the way she had raised her children, given the shit she had to go through as a teenager. But I didn’t. Instead we found ourselves talking about Dad. It was funny—all the brothers and sisters I had begged my mother for when I was growing up were alive, just living in another state. My wish had been fulfilled after all.

  “I know,” I said, “I remember when Nicole was a baby, and you guys brought her out to California. Now look at her—she’s old enough to vote! Dad really missed out.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t let it bother me anymore,” she said. “It used to really bother me, that he didn’t come around more, but I got over it, ya know?”

  I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t fair that I’d gotten to be an entrenched part of his life and they hadn’t, and I wanted to reassure her that it wasn’t personal. If I was Marie’s daughter I would have experienced the same neglect, I was sure of it.

  “He was never going to be what I wanted him to be,” she continued. “I knew we were never going to have the relationship he had with you, so I stopped looking for a father.” She shrugged and looked at me, more tears in her eyes.

  “He fucked up,” I said, at a loss. There was something I’d always wanted to discuss with her, and I figured we had reached a candid, all-bets-are-off kind of moment. “I found your letter,” I said. “The one you wrote to Dad after he didn’t show up at Tony’s wedding. I cried my eyes out when I read the part about his chair being empty all night, and how you expected him to walk in. It just broke my heart. My mother and I were very angry at him for that, I wanted you to know.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, Tony was upset at that, but Carrie was really angry. Actually, when they came to see Dad in the hospital, Carrie had it in her head that she was going to tell Dad off, but then she saw how weak and sick he was and they decided not to say anything.” Wow, I wondered what my mother was going to say when I told her that. Angie must have read my mind: “Don’t tell your mom,” she added.

  “I don’t blame Carrie for being mad,” I said. “I was mad. I just don’t get why he dropped the ball so badly. He could have remained close with you guys after he got paroled, after we’d been on the lam.” It was the first time I’d acknowledged our secret history in front of Angie, which had only been a secret as far as I was concerned. I felt like I’d finally been brought up to speed, albeit a decade or two late.

  “It’s funny, cuz we’d be kinda close, then I wouldn’t hear from him for years,” she said. “He was just like that—he’d fade away.”

  I wondered what it was like to have grown up without a father’s love. As dysfunctional as my parents were, as much as we yelled at each other, I couldn’t imagine not having him in my life. If he had lived until I’d reached Angie’s age, would he have drifted from me, too?

  “I remember once, he came home after a trip to Florida,” I recalled. “I was ten or eleven, and he kept playing this song over and over again because it reminded him of Nicole and Veronica. It was ‘Two Hearts’ by Phil Collins. I guess he’d been playing around with them and dancing to this song. I was almost jealous,” I admitted. “He seemed to really dote on them.”

  “Yeah, but then where did he go?” she said. “When Krissy started asking questions about her other grandfather, I didn’t know what to tell her—like, who is he? Why isn’t he around? I asked him to please write, call, anything, get to know her.”

  Her words made me angry. Here I was, upset that he’d never know the grandchildren I would someday provide, and he hadn’t even paid attention to the ones he already had. None of his six grandchildren had been born after his death. He had no excuse not to get to know them. When Angie had packed her family into their camper and driven up to New York only to stay with Uncle Frankie and Paulette instead of us, it was glaringly obvious just how far their relationship had veered off track. His estrangement had a ripple effect on those only remotely involved, like me. I had nieces and nephews I had never met, until he died and I sought a relationship with them. Didn’t he think of me, of my desire for family? I was an only child, and because of him I nearly stayed that way.

  “I don’t know what happened, I wish I could tell you,” I said mournfully. “Maybe he felt guilty because he killed someone and felt he wasn’t worthy of you guys, or maybe he felt bad that your stepfather was such a monster. Maybe once you began to grow distant he figured the relationship was too far gone to resurrect. Maybe it was just easier for him to do nothing. I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s over now,” she said. “I feel bad for you, though, because you had him and then lost him. I feel bad for your mom, too. She fought for him, hard.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, my automatic response. “I’m fine.” We’d pulled into her driveway a few moments before and sat there, idling under the light over the garage door. After a few moments I decided to go for broke. “Angie?” I asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you ever get the feeling that something happened between Dad and Rita? Because ever since I was a kid, I kinda had this feeling that something did.”

  As soon as it came out of my mouth I realized I’d never said it aloud. I hadn’t even let it evolve into a fully formed thought until that moment; it had lived for years as a feeling, unarticulated. Angie looked down at the steering wheel and said nothing for a long moment, but I could tell what the verdict would be by studying her face.

  “Ugh,” she finally said. “I don’t want to hurt your mom.”

  It was confirmation. I started crying.

  “Jenny,” she said, and started crying, too. “It’s just something we all kind of suspected, you know, because he came here so much, and they were … in business together. Oh, Jenny, don’t cry.”

  “How could they do that to her?” I asked, snot threatening to drip into my mouth. “I knew it! I knew it! I always knew it. For some reason, it’s like I always knew, I don’t know how. Wait—what do you mean, they were in business together?”

  “Oh, boy,” Angie said, rubbing her nose. She breathed in and out a couple of times and stared out the window. “I don’t want your mom to think I’m filling your head with this stuff, I love your mom so much—”

  “No, Angie, really, it’s okay,” I said, sitting up straight and damming my tears through sheer force of will. “You can tell me. I’m fine. Tell me what happened. You mean like the OxyContin they sold together when Dad was sick?”

  “Well, yeah, like that,” she said. “I didn’t know if your mom knew about it, which is why I don’t want to say anything that she wouldn’t want you to know.”

  “Oh, Angie, I know everything,” I said. “She has such a big mouth. I know he killed someone, I know he was in rehab, I know he cheated on my mom with that waitress. I know he dealt drugs in Miami before we went on the lam.” I felt the need to demonstrate that my mother’s mouth was so big that this information might come flying out of it next week even without Angie ti
pping me off.

  “He and Rita were dealing cocaine,” she revealed. “He’d come here and they’d package it up and sell it.” This didn’t surprise me. “This one time, though, he disappeared with Rita for a couple days, and he took my car. While he was gone I was in his room cleaning and I found all this stuff under the bed, brown wrapping paper and packing stuff, like for shipping. My husband came in and saw it and had a fit, like, ‘That’s it, he’s leaving!’ And I begged him, ‘Please, don’t kick Johnny out,’ because he visited so rarely and I finally had a chance to spend time with him.”

  My favorite aunt and my father, Christmas 1987.

  My heart heaved in sympathy. Angie wanted a father so badly she was willing to accept the absentee, drug-dealing version. I started crying again, I couldn’t help it. How could they do this to my mother? She had done so much to keep him alive! To keep him out of jail! And how could Rita have carried on a normal relationship with my mother after screwing her husband?

  “Oh, Jenny,” Angie said, shaking her head and staring out the window.

  “No,” I said, nodding, “I’m fine. I just can’t believe they would do this to her! I loved Rita, I looked up to her, I wanted to be her, and probably so did my mother. And now she can’t even confront him and yell at him because he’s dead.”

  “Jenny, please don’t tell her,” she begged. “Besides, we don’t know for sure, we only suspected.” I brightened a bit.

  “What else made you suspect?” I asked, ready to weigh the evidence myself.

  “Well, they came to Tina’s house once, just the two of them, and they were laughing, and the way they were looking at each other, they were just really playful with each other, and Tina and I looked at each other, like, ‘I wonder what’s going on there?’”

  “You never asked him?” How was I not going to tell my mother this? But how could I? To whom, besides Rita, could she direct her anger? Would she regret the last twenty-five years of her life if I opened my mouth? With one sentence, I had the power to destroy her.