Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  One thought halted my racing mind: My mother must have assumed she was going to die, otherwise why would she have relinquished this secret? She’d kept it buried deep despite his dying, despite my insatiable curiosity. I shivered when I considered how close I’d come to never finding out. If I wanted to know the whole story, I realized, I’d have to shut up and stop judging her. Because I was. Because no matter how wonderful a father John had been to me, if I had been his wife I would have left him after such a confession. I marveled at my mother’s choice, to stay with a person who had admitted to murders that were never solved. I felt betrayed for trusting the two of them like I had. Underneath every dinner we shared together, every weekend trip to San Diego, every morning car ride to school, this secret was hiding. I wondered what else there was to discover that could upend my life.

  When I returned to the emergency room my mother was angry with me for being angry, but she didn’t have time to scold me because the attending physician was at her bedside.

  “I think we can release you, you seem to have stabilized,” she was saying. “Your scans don’t show an occlusion.”

  “So what happened to her?” I asked “The resident said it was a mini-stroke?”

  “Yes, well, I don’t really think she had a TIA,” the attending said. “This was more of a global event, while a mini-stroke tends to affect one side of the body. That was not the case here.”

  “Well, um, something happened to her, she was crashing,” I pointed out. “She suffered memory loss. You’re sure it wasn’t a stroke?”

  “It doesn’t appear to be, from her scans,” she said, and reached for my mother’s chart. “Your mother was treated here in September for vasovagal syncope?”

  “Yes, she fainted, essentially, but—”

  “Perhaps this is another reaction to the chemotherapy? Perhaps she needs to build up her nutrients again,” she suggested.

  “But she hasn’t had chemo for months,” I objected. But the attending was convinced, and there was nothing I could do. I sighed and complied with the checkout procedures. It was 3:00 A.M., and after the scene at her apartment six hours before I couldn’t believe she was going home.

  We went back to my place and settled into sleep, neither of us interested in sifting through the past. Or at least that’s what I think we did. I really don’t remember.

  AFTER MY MOTHER’S release from the hospital I persuaded her to stay at my apartment so I could watch her—despite her insistence that she needed to return to Merle Place to clean up all the dirty plates of calamari I’d dumped in her kitchen sink—and every hour I’d ask her questions to make sure she was sentient. She feigned annoyance but patiently complied, leading me to believe she was just as worried about her mental state as I was. As for her dramatic post-stroke confession, concern over my mother’s health had moved it to the back burner, and I didn’t share what I knew with any of my friends. I was alone with the truth, just as she had been, and I buried it, just as she had.

  I came home the next night bearing gifts—fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, basil, baguette, and chicken noodle soup for good measure, none of which she ate. Her throbbing head stole her appetite but proved a powerful sleep aid. After rejecting my mini-feast she poured a glass of water from the Brita filter and took her cocktail of pills—Xanax, Lopressor, Zocor, Zantac, and indomethacin for the fluid around her heart—and sat down at my drop-leaf living room table. She was wearing one of my old T-shirts that was two sizes too big and a pair of fuzzy white socks. Two minutes later she reached for her pills again.

  “Ma, what are you doing?” I asked. “You need another Xanax already?”

  “No, I’m just taking my pills,” she said, and opened her bottle of indomethacin.

  “Ma, you just took those.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Ma! Yes you did! I saw you! Don’t you remember? You got up to get water and took them and drank it.” I rose from the futon and walked over to her to prevent her from swallowing another.

  “Oh, Jenny, you’re lying,” she said, sounding quite convinced.

  “Mom!”

  “Jenny, I did not just take my pills,” she insisted. But she said it without emotion, deadpan, like her heart really wasn’t in this fight. Again I felt helpless and alone; I was the only person in the room who knew the truth and it was like shouting into a wind tunnel.

  “Mother, I just watched you take them! Why would I lie to you?” And again I went for the heartstrings: “Don’t you trust me?”

  “Oh-kaaaay,” she said, overarticulating to let me know she was humoring me. She poured the contents of the bottle on the table and began counting. I paced the living room and wandered into the kitchen while I waited. This was uncharted territory, and it terrified me in ways I wouldn’t allow myself to deeply consider.

  “Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight.” She paused, staring at the pile of pills. “Forty-eight,” she repeated. She looked up at me.

  “I told you that you took them,” I muttered, hardly triumphant over my victory. She leaned back in her chair, then leaned forward slightly, weighing her options. I walked into the living room and sat back down on the futon. “Do you think this is happening when I’m not here?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, wringing her hands slightly. “Maybe.” She met my eyes, leveling with me. Silence. And then, in a voice that once again seemed to float into my ears from someplace else:

  “Jenny, I have lived for seventy-one years.”

  It was a declaration, like seventy-one had been long enough. Well, it wasn’t long enough for me. “Mom, no,” I said. “I can’t lose you, too.” I was sitting up, pleading with her. I didn’t want her to give up. “I already lost Daddy. Please.”

  “Jenny,” she said, “your father and I will always be with you.”

  It was a rare moment; her concern for me seemed to overrule her fear of dying. I don’t know if I would have been capable of such grace in the face of my own demise. It was a generous gesture, and I often wonder now whether it was a promise, and whether she has fulfilled it. Was she explaining why, when I come home from work sometimes and flip on the TV in my living room, my cable box is tuned to her favorite channel—QVC—even though I never watch it? Did she know I’d search for them in the shadows whenever I turned off the lights, or in the gaping blue sky during a particularly clear day, or out over the river from my perch in Carl Schurz Park? Could she see me, in my future incarnation, trying to imagine the two of them sitting across from me on the N train? Was she able to transcend her fear on that late December night and achieve a state of grace? If so, then she was right. After seventy-one years, maybe she was ready to die.

  I MADE STATEN ISLAND my base for the next week, shuttling to and from work on the X1 express bus. I vowed to call her every hour, but as each stroke-free day passed, I relaxed a little, even avoiding her mid-shift calls like I used to. So she rang and rang, wheezing and gasping, frantic for someone to assuage her fears. Or perhaps she called me nearly every hour because she didn’t remember calling me in the first place.

  We had the whole place to ourselves for a change; my mother had taken on a boarder to fill one of the spare bedrooms the year before, but she’d moved out after Thanksgiving. This development deprived me of my favorite of my mother’s quirks: Whenever she came to stay at my place, she brought with her a candy-apple-red gym bag filled with every piece of jewelry she owned.

  “Mom, who is going to steal that from you?” I’d ask. This was especially baffling since she always locked her bedroom door.

  “Jenny, your grandmother Helen’s ring is in here”—a diamond cocktail ring that looked like a starburst—“and I just bought some rings from QVC, including an imperial topaz for you.” She’d become obsessed with jewels, particularly imperial topaz from Brazil. “I also bought that platinum ring with the three rows of diamonds, and you can keep that and sell it one day.” I only half-listened to my mother tell me how she was basically stockpiling
my inheritance. She was charging everything, bills she’d never pay, and she didn’t seem to care. She continued to bring the gym bag over to my house even after the boarder moved out. I guess some habits never die.

  I will always regret that in the week between Christmas and New Year’s I didn’t insist that she stay close to her doctors at Sinai. But in truth, she never felt completely at home in my apartment. Her apartment felt more like home, and it’s where my father died. Maybe that’s why she always gravitated back there, where he reliably returned her gaze from the silver picture frame, unaware that he was dead. But I felt his emptiness there, always. I remembered the difference between May 6, when he lay comatose on a hospital bed in the living room, and May 7, when the coffee table took his place. I always crossed the threshold of that apartment and envisioned the life that should have been unfolding there, the laughing, the fighting, the cooking. Merle Place felt a little bit like home to me only because she lived there, and because it’s where I spent holidays, and it had carpeting, which reminded me of my childhood. But my father’s absence was palpable, and I felt terrible that my mother lived with it. But maybe she liked living with ghosts, just as I am now.

  ——

  I DIDN’T CONFRONT my mother about her confession until after New Year’s. Normally I would have prodded her into telling me everything until she relented, but the way she had scolded my emotional blubbering that night had had a chilling effect. She must have realized I would bring it up again, though, and when I did she was ready for me. I think we were driving when it started. We were always in the car when these things began: the “Your father was in prison before you were born” conversation, the “We used to be fugitives” conversation, the “Mommy, did Daddy have an affair with Rita?” conversation—talk about doorknob therapy. It could have been a nod to our tradition of packing a thousand years of history into a single car ride, or perhaps it unfolded this way so we didn’t have to walk into the living room afterward and hear the echoes of our painful secrets.

  I asked my mother for the final time if those “four, maybe five” people my father had killed were his only victims. She said they were.

  “Who were they?”

  “Like I said, they were drug dealers, people who had done business with your father and crossed him. One guy was black, I remember. And he had a family,” she said.

  And he had a family. She knew that, I suppose, because she asked my father and he told her. “Johnny, how could you do that! Did he have a family?” I’m sure at one time this must have bothered her; the fact that it didn’t now was simply proof that years of dubious morality had desensitized her. When he told her about this man with his family, and the “four or five” others like him, did she take solace in the fact that his victims had been the scum of the earth?

  “This was when he was in Florida? Before we left?” I asked. So, 1978.

  “Yes,” she said. “He was starting up with his shit again, and it was a part of his business.” Again I decided to suppress my judgment. I wanted information, not an argument.

  “And then there was Tommy Palermo,” she said. Tommy Palermo, she explained, was a guy my father occasionally worked with, but who was more closely associated at that time with my father’s dear friend Vinny Cassese, whose last name we had taken on the lam.

  “Wait, Vinny was involved in this stuff, too?” I asked. I never thought to ask where my father had met Vinny, though I’d heard about him my whole life and knew his son was half a wiseguy. They’d called him “Big Vinny” because he was overweight, though I remember my father sadly informing us that cancer had stolen his girth. Vinny shared such a close bond with my father because, as it turned out, they’d met in prison.

  “What?” I asked. “So that’s how Daddy and Vinny met?”

  She nodded. “They were in Sing Sing together,” she admitted. “So Tommy had ripped off a bunch of people, and one of the guys he stole from was a made guy.” This wiseguy naturally wanted to kill Tommy for his foolhardy deed, my mother said, and since Vinny was Tommy’s partner, Vinny was marked for death as well. “We had already moved down to Florida,” she went on. “And your father caught wind of this and went back up to New York to try to reason with this wiseguy who’d been ripped off. He and some members of his crew granted your father an audience because they respected him, because he’d done time, but also because he was known as a shooter.” Great. “They told Daddy they were going to kill Vinny because Vinny was Tommy’s partner, and even though Vinny probably had nothing to do this mess, they couldn’t know that for sure. What’s funny is, Vinny had even been ripped off by Tommy—they all knew he was no good. Johnny had even warned Vinny not to do business with Tommy anymore, but he did. And this is what happened.

  “I didn’t want him to go,” she continued. “I was scared for your father, that this thing might backfire. But he knew these guys. They told Daddy, ‘If you want to save your friend’s life, you can do away with Tommy yourself.’ And he did.”

  “Was he scared?” I asked, enthralled.

  “No, I don’t think so. Your father wasn’t scareda nobody,” she said with her best Goodfellas affect. “But I was.”

  I could just imagine two beefy Italians in dark suits and solid shirts with matching ties and slicked-back black hair sitting across a table from my father in a dimly lit room, offering this compromise in hushed tones. Espresso may have been involved, but I can’t be sure. My father, alone on his side of the table, leans back in his chair, a bit nervous but never betraying his fear, thinks for a second, then leans forward again, looks Wiseguy #1 in the eye, and nods wordlessly. It was the same nod he employed to assure my mother and me that even though the world might be falling down around our ears, “Everything’s gonna be all right.” No wonder I never trusted that nod. In my experience, the security it offered was fleeting, something I realized as my father disappointed us, and himself, over and over again. That nod had made my mother an accomplice, which, technically, was what she was. And she knew it.

  “Vinny never knew what your father did for him,” she said. “But his son Carmine did. He never forgot.” Carmine had followed in his father’s footsteps by spending much of his life in jail. He’d been incarcerated when we moved to New York and he might still be, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t believe Vinny had never known what my father did for him. It seemed like such a waste, in a way.

  Whenever my mother spoke of the life she lived with my father and Rita and her husband in south Florida in the late 1970s, before she was pregnant with me, I always wished I could have known them then, gone on their adventures, too, been a part of their gang. How interesting, then, that I should yearn for what was actually the darkest time in their lives. Or at least in my mother’s life, as she discovered that my father was not who he had purported to be. I recognized that bitter snap of disappointment, when a lover has sold you a shoddy bill of goods dressed up as the perfect man. I’d felt it all my romantic life.

  And that was all I gleaned from my mother, the final mystery. I don’t know what else she hid from the world, because that was our last conversation about it.

  CHAPTER 15

  Friday, January 6, 2006, 10:30 A.M.

  “Jenny, I (gasp) think I’m having a (gasp) heart attack,” my mother said over the phone as I walked in to work.

  “Mom, are you serious?” I asked. “Are you sure you’re having a heart attack?”

  “Jenny,” she said, her voice gravelly, “I’m pretty sure. Yep.”

  “You must call the hospital, then.” I instructed. “Did you?”

  “No, I’m going to do it now. Let me hang up.”

  I had to walk to the back of the emergency room of Staten Island University Hospital to find her, and when I did I encountered a ghost. She looked irritated and miserable, writhing around in search of the most comfortable position, the one from which she could breathe easiest. But she was alive.

  “Hi,” I said, and hugged her awkwardly. She was so frail I could probably have lifted
her off the bed with one hand.

  “Hi,” she said, a bit dazed. She leaned forward and stayed there, inhaling as deeply as she could. She’d stay hunched over like this for days.

  “So what did they say?” I asked, pulling up a chair.

  She shrugged. “They said the EKG didn’t seem to show anything. But Jenny, my stomach hurts. I feel so nauseous.”

  “They said it was nothing?” I asked. Nausea indicated a heart attack. “Okay, then, you just need a stent to open your artery, and you’ll be fine,” I decided. I took in her ghostly pallor: Would she be able to handle another angioplasty in her condition? Like my father, her attention now seemed to be fixed someplace in the middle distance, her ears trained on a tune none of the rest of us could hear.

  “Go get me Xanax,” she said, nudging my arm. I marched up to the nurses’ station and requested Xanax; I ended up chasing nurses down for Xanax half a dozen times that day. Around midday I ran into the bathroom with my cellphone—a no-no in any hospital—and called Arline.

  “Oh, Jenny, not again!” she said, pained.

  “She’s going to be fine, Arline,” I said. “They’re not fussing over her, so I take that as a sign that she’s stable.”