Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  I’d taken an afternoon express bus straight from a dismal $25 lunch shift and arrived at my mother’s apartment around three. Instead of cooking we settled at the last minute on takeout from our old Italian haunt, Trattoria Romana. We returned to the apartment with calamari and zuppa di mussels, and I set the table with napkins, knives, and forks, put ice cubes in our wineglasses, laid out dinner and salad plates, and began to apportion the food. My mother sat down and began picking at a handful of calamari. After squeezing lemon over a piece or two and popping them into her mouth, she said, “Oh, Jenny, my head hurts so much right now.”

  “Do you want me to get you something?” I asked.

  “No, oy, Jenny, I just need some air,” she said and rose suddenly, bolting for the terrace. She opened the door and faced the breeze, rocking gently back and forth, which seemed to calm her. I remained in my seat and squeezed lemon over the calamari, eager for this episode to end so I could stop worrying. But it didn’t end—as she straddled the doorway, one foot in the cold and one in the warmth, her features knotted themselves into a fist and she squinted in agony. She slowly turned around and said, “Jenny? For some reason I can’t picture what the inside of your apartment looks like.”

  “Wh-what?” I asked, the first half of the word carried on a laugh that sank like a stone as I absorbed her words. I’d had that apartment for five years, it was the only place I’d ever lived outside of my parents’ house—and it was where she had just spent the better part of the year recuperating from cancer treatment.

  “Jenny, I can’t picture what the inside of your apartment looks like,” she repeated. She put her hand to her head and massaged her temple. I followed her eyes as they beheld the dinner table, crowded with our feast. “Where did all this food come from?” she asked, mystified.

  And that’s when something sprang up in me like a hot coil my body couldn’t contain; it was as if everything that made me Jennifer, Eleanor’s daughter, stood at attention and threatened to escape through the top of my head. It was panic, surging and rigid, informing me that it would be in charge for the rest of the evening.

  “What do you mean, where did this food come from?” I demanded, sounding almost angry. “Mom, don’t you remember? We drove to Trattoria Romana to get it.”

  “No … we did?”

  “Yes! Mom, this is our Christmas dinner,” I insisted, coming closer to her. She was squinting with pain, and I knew it was a stroke. I half expected her to collapse right there. I had to act fast—I wasn’t going to wait for an ambulance to arrive so she could be taken to a subpar hospital on Staten Island that wasn’t versed in her medical history. I was going to drive her to Sinai. Me, whose license had expired in 2000. Why hadn’t I taken that stupid driver’s ed course she’d been nagging me about for the last five years?

  I ran into her bedroom and swept all twenty of her pill bottles into a bag lying nearby. I emerged having no idea how I was going to persuade her to abandon an untouched dinner and accompany me to Manhattan, but I was determined to make it happen. “Mom,” I said urgently, “we have to go!” As soon as I said it I quickly darted back into the bedroom, grabbing her wallet and keys.

  She flinched. “Why? What is it? Did you see something?”

  Vermin! That’s how I could get her to leave! Nothing scared her more than vermin, roaches, or, even worse, flying roaches. “I saw a rat,” I improvised, “and we have to leave this house right now.”

  “Wha—” she said, her eyes following me as, bag slung over my shoulder, I shoved the dishes into the sink, food and all, and opened the door. I held it open and stood in the doorway, waiting for her to follow.

  “Jenny,” she said, “we can’t just leave! There’s food …”

  “Forget the food!” I said, adrenaline pumping through my body and threatening to paralyze my limbs unless I moved fast enough to burn it off. “Mom, do you trust me?”

  “Jenny, where are we going?” I weighed my options: I could try to explain what was happening to her, or I could continue to alarm her enough so that she would follow me into the car. How could I tell her she was having a stroke? I had no idea what it would ultimately do to her—notifying her of her condition was, to me, the same as leveling with her about her mortality. I couldn’t do it in the summer and I sure as hell couldn’t do it now.

  “Mom!” I yelled, hoping to stun her with volume.

  “What?” she asked, finally paying attention.

  “Do. You. Trust. Me.”

  “Should I?”

  “MOM!” I shouted, almost wanting to laugh. I think it was her attempt at humor, but under the circumstances I couldn’t be sure.

  “Yes?”

  “We have to go.”

  “We do?” Her blithely questioning tone lacked the urgency that could have propelled me to Manhattan on foot, if need be. This disparity was beginning to annoy me.

  “Mom,” I said, “you can stay in here with a rat, but I am taking your car and going to Manhattan. So you can either come with me or be left here without a car. Your choice.”

  She considered this. “Do you have my wallet and my keys?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if you insist.” I peeled out like a stock car driver and somehow averted a dozen fender benders as I raced over the bridge and up the FDR. Around Fourteenth Street, much to my surprise, she seemed to return to me.

  “Jenny, what are we doing?” she asked, joining our regularly scheduled programming, which was already in progress.

  “Mom?” I asked.

  “Yeah, what happened to dinner?” she asked.

  I laughed. Had I overreacted? “Oh, Mom,” I said, “You’re back! Oh, I’m so relieved. Do you know how I had to get you out of the house? Oy, I didn’t think I was going to be able to convince you—”

  “Convince me? Jenny, how did we get into this car?”

  My insides turned to stone. “What? You mean you don’t remember … forgetting? Mom, you looked at the dinner table and didn’t know how the food had gotten there!”

  “Forgetting? What do you mean? We were just sitting at the table, and now we’re here,” she said. “Jenny, what is going on?” I gripped the steering wheel and felt utterly alone. She was gone again.

  Over the course of the drive I kept quizzing her, peppering her with questions I can no longer remember, having lost them years ago in a blur of horror. Her memory seemed to come and go every three or four minutes, moving from fuzzy to self-aware with the onset of each new headache. As I pulled off the FDR and neared Ninety-sixth Street, I realized I’d have to think of a cover story in case she wanted to know why we weren’t going to my apartment as promised.

  “Mom, we need half and half for your coffee, so I’m just going to stop off here, okay?” I said as we raced up Madison. I pulled in to the emergency entrance on 101st Street and instructed her to wait there. I dashed out, hoping she didn’t notice that there weren’t any delis nearby, and rushed headlong into a group of ambulance drivers.

  “Stroke! My mother is having a stroke!” I shouted, and they ushered me inside. A couple of doctors and nurses followed me to the car and opened the passenger side door. I watched as my mother swiveled her head from side to side, probably wondering where she was and how she got there. As they eased her out of the car and onto a waiting gurney I felt relief: She was in their hands now. For a moment I was worried she’d yell at me and demand to know what she was doing there, but she didn’t. Somewhere, perhaps, she understood.

  “Mom, I’m here,” I said as I followed her gurney into the emergency room.

  “What’s going on? Where are we?” she asked, but didn’t seem confused or angry, only curious.

  “Mom, we’re at Sinai,” I said, marveling that I’d gotten us here without getting pulled over or killed. “It’ll be okay now.” They took her to a bed in a corner of the emergency room, and as we waited to be seen she looked at me with clear eyes, and I knew she was right again.

  “Mom? Geez, you scared me,
” I said, stroking her pale, leathery hand, free of liver spots thanks to the laser treatments she’d treated herself to before her cancer diagnosis.

  “I did?” she asked. “What happened?” I went through it all: the dinner, the headache, the rat—“Jenny, you’re brilliant! You know how scared I am of vermin”—and I pulled up a chair, relaxing into it. We sat in silence for a time, bracing ourselves for the interminable wait. Twenty minutes into it my mother muttered, “Ooh, Jenny, my head,” and I saw what the dim lighting in her apartment had obscured: skin that turned deathly white before my eyes. Her head lolled a little to the left and she appeared to be fainting.

  “It’s happening again!” I screamed, which summoned a young intern. He took one look at her and said, “Her BP is dropping.” And then to another doctor nearby: “We need to move her into the code room, her stats are dropping.” And to me: “You’ll have to wait in the hall.”

  “Oh, do I have to?” I asked. During chemo I’d been able to stay with her at all times, just as we’d been able to stay with my father at Sloan.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” he said, and wheeled her into the code room. On my way out I heard, “Eleanor? Eleanor, can you hear me?” I lingered for a few moments more, hoping to bear witness to her revival.

  “You have to leave now, I’m sorry,” a nurse said, and closed the double doors in my face.

  The hallway was empty but for me. After a few stunned moments I shuffled to the nearest bench, where I sat and folded my hands and felt captured in this moment like it was amber. There was no five minutes ago, no five minutes from now—everything hung on this brief pause between concern and catastrophe. I slouched forward and frankly addressed myself: Jennifer, this could be it. She could die right now. You must be prepared. But worse than her suddenly dying was my not being there when she did. I’d vowed to be there when my father died and I’d extended that promise to her, though I’d never voiced this.

  “Ma’am?” a nurse said about ten minutes later. “You can go back in now.” My mother was still in the code room, but stable. Her skin was so translucent I could see blue veins peeking through. They moved us back to ER holding and an ambitious, fresh-faced resident swung by her bed and studied her scans. Since my mother last coded, her memory had stayed intact, probably a result of the drugs they were giving her.

  “I think your mother had what is called a transient ischemic attack,” Fresh-faced Resident said. “It’s commonly referred to as a mini-stroke. That’s when the blood flow to the brain is temporarily interrupted but restored in time to prevent any lasting damage, unlike a real stroke.”

  “So it wasn’t an actual stroke?” I asked.

  “No, and in all probability it didn’t do any serious damage, like, for instance, brain tissue death,” he said. “People often have many of these leading up to an actual stroke, but they can have them for quite some time and not sustain any permanent memory loss.”

  “So she could have a real stroke?”

  “She might, but not immediately. In the meantime, I suggest making an appointment with her cardiologist as soon as possible,” he said, and left.

  For the life of me I wish I could remember how we started talking about my father. Maybe I pointed out that if my father had been there when I was panicking about how to treat my mother’s mini-stroke, he would have turned green. I remembered how helpless he’d seemed during her first heart attack, and maybe I told her that right then, to let her know how she’d been fretted over and loved. But my memory of those few moments in ER holding was erased by what my mother said next as she sat slumped in her dingy hospital bed, a tale delivered in an unnaturally even voice that seemed to come to me across oceans of time and space.

  “Jenny,” she said, “I have to tell you something about Daddy.”

  I looked up from my book. Another affair? I braced myself for the sordid. “What’s up?”

  “You know how I told you he did … what he did?” she asked.

  How could I forget? Every time I brought it up she shamed me into silence, so fearful that this one act would define him. I didn’t repeat it for nearby patients to hear, instead nodding.

  “Well,” she continued, “what if I told you it wasn’t the only time? That he did it other times?”

  “What?” I asked, shocked, but on second thought, not entirely surprised. Her pattern of conveying partial truths had immunized me against expecting any less. “Well, how many other times?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant. You’re a reporter, I told myself. This is just another interview.

  She shrugged slightly, perhaps trying to seem nonchalant as well. “Four, maybe five,” she said hesitantly.

  “When was this?” I asked, skating quickly over my agony.

  “After he left prison, right after you were born,” she said, her whole face seeming to shrug. She sounded so matter-of-fact, her voice so free of affect, it was almost as if she was afraid to place any judgment upon her sentences because after years of defending and advocating for my father, she’d forgotten how.

  “Why? How did it happen?”

  She sighed. Maybe she was already sorry she told me. “You remember how I told you that when I gave birth to you, your father was gone a lot, running around, getting back into The Life? How he was out doing business?”

  I understood business to mean dealing marijuana or cocaine. “Yes,” I said.

  “Well …” she trailed off, expecting me to guess the rest.

  “He was out killing people?” I asked, dropping my restrained tone. This was the reformer I’d been taught to revere, who’d changed his life for us? “Mom! Who were these people?”

  “Drug dealers, mostly,” she said. “People who owed him money, people who double-crossed him. They were bad guys, Jenny.”

  “Mom, how can you say that? I don’t believe in that.” Then a thought even more unbearable reached up and grabbed me around the throat. Perhaps there was a darker reason she’d always tried to discourage my curiosity when it came to his crimes. “Mom, did you know this was going on when it was happening?”

  “No, no, he told me afterward,” she said.

  “Like, the day afterward? The week afterward? What?” I demanded.

  “Like, in the eighties.” It was so vague I almost laughed.

  “In the eighties? Like, when? Before he got arrested again? When he went to rehab? When?”

  “When he went to rehab,” she said, and I cursed myself for giving her an assortment from which to choose. Of course she’d choose the latest possible date. She should have just told me he confessed before he died.

  “And you stayed with him?” I yelled, suddenly not caring about being overheard. What, were they going to charge her as an accessory after the fact? She was already facing a death sentence.

  “Jenny, keep your voice down!” she snapped, for the first time sounding irritated that she’d aroused my anger. And my tears: I was crying now, my composure slipping from my grasp like butter.

  “No! How could you stay with a man you knew was killing people?” I asked, hysterical and dismayed. No wonder she hated me bringing it up—she had known this for the better part of their marriage and done nothing. She’d let a monster raise her child.

  But he wasn’t a monster. Sure, I’d seen his rage race from zero to sixty in .02 seconds, but aside from a few temper tantrums he hadn’t been a monster. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that he was a multiple murderer. Did that make him a serial killer? No, that was different. That was bloodlust. This was … what, exactly?

  “It was a part of that life, Jenny,” she said, trying to calm me down. “He was doing a job, and one of the by-products of that job was to do what he did.”

  Was it possible that my mother was defending murder? I sobbed, erupting in torrents. This was too much. We went back and forth in clipped tones for a few more moments before I fled to the hallway. She yelled after me, asking why I was so mad. I didn’t ever want to return, though I knew I’d have to. How would I explain my defect
ion to her sisters, to her friends? I paced the hallway and stared at my cellphone, but who on earth could I call? Who could withstand a confession like this, and who did I want to know about it? No wonder the three of us had been so close, yet so insulated, moving through life as a unit, ignoring anyone who told us what to do or how to live and instead doing what we felt was right for us. This ugly secret must have bound my parents together, and though I didn’t know it growing up, it bound them to me. I considered with a start whether anyone else knew what he had done. Maybe his other kids, maybe Rita? They’d all been living near us in Miami before we went on the lam. How many people shared this dirty secret?

  “I can’t believe this shit,” I muttered to myself in the very hallway I’d paced in despair just an hour before. How could this be? But then, hadn’t I always sensed that this truth was out there, waiting for me to find it? Why had I asked my mother so many times whether he’d fired his gun into anyone else’s head if I didn’t suspect there was more she was hiding? I’d come to the hospital fearful for my mother’s life only to wind up despising her. How could she defend him? She acted like erasing drug dealers was a necessary duty, like my restaurant side-work. Is systematic elimination—a quick antiseptic hit—any less brutal than the grisly hobbies of Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy? Was there a hierarchy when it came to murder, and was my mother really expecting me to classify my father’s brand of killing? And to think I’d stood before my closest friends and family and eulogized him, calling him a hero who had learned from his mistakes and turned his life around, while my mother listened and nodded approvingly, never suggesting I change a single word. But my eulogy was a lie. He hadn’t changed anything for us. The threat of jail was probably what reversed his killing streak, not a crisis of conscience.