I have some last wishes. Please try to keep Daddy’s ring—the one around my neck. Please offer Arline anything she wants—jewelry and/or furniture, etc., and if you are ever in a position to help her with anything please do. I’m sure there is lots more I wish I could do for you or others.
I loved you very much. I loved you very much. I was astonished that at my age I could have had such a lovely, funny, beautiful child. Your father and I both loved you so much. I hope you really know this, that in spite of the times we were separated, or fought with you and each other, we showed you that love again and again, in spite of imagined or real hurts. I hope you remember that we three were a family, a real one that sat down to eat dinner together, that explored and traveled together, even if we didn’t go to the Grand Canyon, and showed each other the real love we felt.
Wherever I am, even though I am not a believer, I know that part of me will belong to this earth somewhere, and thus part of the earth will always remember and love you.
CHAPTER 16
February 2006
• • •
I AWOKE WITH A GASP. IT WAS NEARLY THREE IN THE AFTERNOON and I’d let myself sleep the day away. I stumbled into the living room and tried to avoid the detritus in my path but bashed into everything anyway. Boxes of books stacked atop boxes of pans, my mother’s beloved baker’s rack—which had cracked in the U-Haul—her dining room table, and dishes upon glasses upon silverware now crowded my tiny flat. It had been this way for a month and I had no desire to move it. I pictured how the place looked before all of this and realized that if my mother somehow rose from the dead, she wouldn’t recognize it.
“Jenny, I can’t picture what the inside of your apartment looks like.”
I now understood how this day connected to the beginning of the end on Christmas Eve, how I was standing at the terminus of that line. I could never have imagined that that night in the hospital, with her dramatic confession about my father, would culminate in this, a life without her. With this newest loss, I suddenly faced three distinct types of grieving: the loss of my father, the loss of my mother, and the loss of the two of them—the loss of parents. Each of these felt different from the others, and when one of them became too overwhelming I simply switched gears.
And what of that awful confession? The scant details she’d conveyed about the other murders my father committed were already fading, just as I wanted them to. I remembered my dream and understood with a shudder that my mother was a permanent part of my imagination now, never to be laughed with or quarreled with again. She belonged to my dreams, joining my father, who’d lived there for the last five years. From now on, if I ever needed her, I’d have to contend with her ghost.
Meanwhile, I was still living. I treated the vice president of the Redeye Grill to a letter explaining that while waitressing was a fine and noble profession, I wasn’t in the most stable frame of mind to upsell lobster cobb salads to the Botoxed masses. I just couldn’t stomach the possibility of waiting on families now that mine had been disbanded. I feared breaking down in tears in full view of the dining room. But I didn’t spend my free time staring at the walls, either. I returned to school eleven days after her death, just as she would have wanted, and I earned honors that semester. But with only two classes to occupy my time I found myself floating through the remainder of the spring pretending that nothing major had happened. My way of feeling sorry for myself was by not feeling sorry for myself, and quickly brushing off the pity and concern of others. If I regarded myself as everyone else did—orphaned and alone—I might have gone mad.
Sarah wasn’t the only one of my friends who recommended therapy to cope with my mother’s death—and her surprising role as my father’s accessory—but her voice was the loudest, perhaps because I told her that I’d begun popping my mother’s Vicodin to brighten up my day. So in April I marched myself over to Columbia’s mental health services and landed on the couch of a psychologist. Dr. Feldman was gentle, patient—and blind. He took notes anyway, and halfway through each session his computer spoke to him: “Shutting down,” it would say as it went into sleep mode.
“So, Ms. Mascia,” he said, “what brings you here?” The lighting was soft, the walls were draped in decorative shawls, and candles dotted the shelves. It seemed a shame to ruin the atmosphere.
“Well, Dr. Feldman, my mother died two months ago, and I’ve started helping myself to her Vicodin. Cancer patients get the mother lode, so my supply is holding steady at around, oh, two hundred fifty? Two seventy-five? My father died five years ago. He had lung cancer, and I’m an only child. My mother was my best friend in the world and I probably feel guilty for surviving without her. I guess our unusual closeness began the day the FBI came to arrest my dad when I was five. For years I wanted to know what he did but my mother refused to tell me. He ended up spending a year in jail for what I later learned was a parole violation. Turns out he’d served twelve years before I was born, for murder, a fact I discovered on the Internet when I was twenty-two. After that I confronted my mother and she admitted the truth: They hadn’t met ‘through friends,’ like they’d always said, but she actually met my father while he was incarcerated—she was a teacher-slash-activist whose pet cause was prison reform and they fell in love behind the glass at Fishkill Correctional. After he was released they got married and had me. My mother counted on the redemptive power of love to straighten him out, but it didn’t quite pan out that way, and when I was a few months old he was arrested for cocaine possession. He knew he’d get shipped back to jail, so my parents and I went on the lam and lived under assumed names, first in Houston, then in California, until I was five and the Feds cuffed him right in front of me. They extradited him to New York but after several months he was released, thank god, and we moved back to California, where my mother made sure we lived well beyond our means. We went bankrupt twice, and when times got really tough my father teamed up with my mother’s sister in Florida to sell cocaine via FedEx, an arrangement that lasted until he snorted more than he sold and landed himself in rehab. I also suspect they had an affair in the process. We moved back to New York eleven years ago because my father’s carpet cleaning business was failing. Though he was relegated to blue-collar jobs like painting Taco Bells and Exxons, things seemed to be going okay, but then my mom had a heart attack, my dad got terminal cancer and died, and my mom got cancer, had another heart attack, and died. Three weeks before I took her off life support she confessed that my father didn’t just kill that one guy in the 1960s, he actually killed half a dozen guys, and she knew about it all those years but stayed married to him anyway.” It was unexpectedly satisfying to finally coalesce the chaotic elements of my history into a single narrative. “So, whaddya think?”
His pen was poised over his notebook; he’d stopped taking notes about thirty seconds in. “My honest opinion?” he asked.
“Please,” I said.
“I think you need to see a psychiatrist on a permanent and consistent basis.”
Without peers to whom I could relate, my sole sources of comfort came from occasionally publishing my class assignments and plopping down on the couch at six o’clock with a freshly chopped salad to watch two hours’ worth of Friends and Seinfeld in syndication. It was a quiet life, and just as my mother made do with a sad, solitary lamb chop after my father died, I learned that a pancake or a bowl of cereal could be dinner. I was still maneuvering around boxes, which I’d begun using as end tables, when Monika came to visit during a late spring snowstorm.
“What the hell is this?” she demanded.
“What?” I asked, reclining on my futon with a Diet Coke in one hand and a box of chocolate-covered graham crackers in the other.
“Get up!” she commanded. “No more! We are cleaning this place, now.” We worked through the night, and three bottles of Windex later we gradually unearthed the foundations of a sophisticated, organized apartment. We placed my mother’s baker’s rack against the wall between the front hallway and the kitc
hen, where it slid perfectly into a little nook. I filled my living room bookcase with all the cookbooks she’d handpicked during her fevered bouts of conspicuous consumption. We fit her dining room table snugly against a living room wall so it didn’t look so oversized and out of place, and relocated my drop-leaf table to the kitchen for use as a cooking prep table. It was all very grown up; my mother would have approved. And just so there was never any doubt that I was, at one time, part of a family, I placed framed pictures of my parents everywhere, which prompted me to nickname the place “the Museum of Grief.”
With my apartment under control I focused on my body, which put on weight whenever one of my parents was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Since shin splints had ended my once-stellar running career, I joined a 24-hour gym ten blocks south of my apartment. Because it was open all the time I didn’t have an excuse not to go, and I worked up to an hour of cardio a night. In six months I had slimmed down enough to fit back into the size 6 jeans I’d been wearing before cancer had come calling.
My mother didn’t want to wait forever to float with my father around the Pacific Rim, so I fulfilled her wish. In April I flew to California to distribute a third of my mother’s ashes from a beach in Laguna, the same place where I’d scattered my father’s in 2004. When I arrived home I scattered another third of her ashes in Central Park, in a lake in full view of Bow Bridge. I decided against putting the rest of her ashes on the grave in Green-Wood because of her suspicion that my father’s had been removed by his relatives (don’t ask), so on what would have been their thirtieth wedding anniversary I mixed the final third of her ashes in with the final third of my father’s, per her wishes, and placed the blue and white ceramic jar atop my mother’s baker’s rack.
But I didn’t ignore Green-Wood entirely. On the fifth anniversary of my father’s death I woke up before noon, bought a bunch of lilacs, and MapQuested myself to the far reaches of Brooklyn, where I stood before the nondescript plot that held four of my relatives. The fifth anniversary would have meant so much to her, so I went in her place and cried tears for both of us, because she couldn’t.
And I wondered, was this what my life would become? A minefield of grim anniversaries? After my mother died, lighting the Yahrzeit candles fell to me, and I soon realized that I couldn’t go more than a couple of months without tripping over one tortured milestone or another. There was January 12: Mom’s death. April 10: Dad’s birthday and David’s death. May 6: Dad’s death. October 11: Grandma Vivian’s death. October 12: Mom’s birthday. October 14: Vivian’s birthday. November 14: Grandpa Frank’s death. November 19: My parents’ wedding anniversary. I kept so many tall candles around the house I began to feel like a Dominican widow. That’s not including Thanksgiving, Christmas, and, most important to us three agnostics, New Year’s Eve. The only promise in which we ever stored faith was that the new year would arrive.
I didn’t have much time to contemplate my status as a professional widow, however, because about a week later I ran out of money. It happened right as the semester ended, and on the last day of class I hit the pavement in search of restaurant work. Even though graduate school was slowly overqualifying me for this industry, it was still the quickest way to make the most cash. Through networking I maneuvered my way into a job at Gramercy Tavern, one of the highest-rated fine-dining restaurants in New York. I was really biding my time until a news assistant position opened at The New York Times. I’d learned about the job during a newsroom field trip with my reporting class a year earlier, and though it was largely clerical it paid better than waitressing. And it was, after all, the Paper of Record. I’d been email-stalking the clerical supervisor for six months at my mother’s urging, and continued to do so for six months after she died. After I’d been at Gramercy for a month and a half I got the call.
“So, the way it works is this,” Erika and Alexis, my prospective bosses, explained. “You’re hired as a floater, which means we put you wherever we need you—Metro, Foreign, Culture—until a permanent spot opens up, and if that happens, you get benefits and paid vacation and sick days.”
“Um, so, does this mean I don’t have to be a waitress anymore?” I asked them.
“Yes,” they said, giggling good-naturedly at my naïveté. I was saved. Even though I was starting at the bottom of the food chain—I went from being the smartest person in the room to, well, not being the smartest person in the room—it was the only room I wanted to be in. If only my mother could have seen it.
I was reminded most acutely of her absence when I was offered a permanent position some months later and went to human resources to fill out paperwork. I paused when I reached “Emergency Contact.” Who should I list now that my mother was gone? I settled on Sarah, the most responsible choice.
In addition to a decent medical plan, Times employees are also offered free life insurance. But when I got to “Beneficiaries” I had to pause again.
“Um, what do I put here?” I asked, peering up from my forms.
“I don’t have any beneficiaries yet.”
“Oh, you can just put your parents,” the HR director offered.
“I don’t have parents,” I said bluntly. “Oh,” she said.
What could she say to that? But instead of mourning my plight, or even crying at all, I kept going, gratefully locked in by the drudgery of routine—work, gym, sleep, repeat. Just when the predictability of my new, leaner life threatened to bore me to death, I began to think of all I wasn’t doing: escaping into a toxic romantic relationship, or dissolving into drugs (Sarah made me flush all that Vicodin), or ditching class, my high school M.O. I had imagined that my mother dying would cripple me, but—was it possible?—it had made me stronger. I was filled with a sense of purpose, and it began in that hospital bathroom, when I glanced in the mirror and searched my face for signs of the loss that had just wrenched me in two. I wasn’t bankrupt, as my parents had been; I wasn’t hiding money under the carpet; I wasn’t coupled with a man whose mistakes had, on more than one occasion, sent me fleeing to another state; I wasn’t married to a murderer, sharing his guilt so he didn’t have to shoulder it all on his own; and I wasn’t hiding all of it from my kid. And, though it was bittersweet relief, I was no longer caring for two terminally ill people as they waited their turn to die.
One night after a predawn workout I walked home along Second Avenue and watched as the night sky almost imperceptibly faded into a paler shade of blue, and for the first time in years I felt hope. I followed the sunrise all the way up to my roof, and as sapphire gave way to canary I understood how lucky I was to have survived. All the mistakes my parents had made—the detours outside the law, the hand-to-mouth lifestyle honed from years living as fugitives, the guilt at having respectively committed and abetted murder, and the outsider status it had fostered in all three of us—I had somehow transcended them. It was something of a shock that I should be the last one standing; I’d always imagined that my father was the strong one, my mother his spine when his spirit sagged. But by some mix of cosmic or existential or corporeal default, I was the survivor. As the stars gave way to sun, I realized that I had outrun their past, and I was free to create my own narrative. My life—finally, blessedly—was up to me, and no one else.
CHAPTER 17
August 2006
• • •
“METRO.”
“Hi, my name is Stella and I am calling from New Jersey, and I called last week. I may have talked to you. Did I speak to you? It was at night.”
Like all of them, she had the urgency of someone running to catch a train. “Um, I don’t think so,” I said, a wary eye trained on gawker.com. “What is this regarding?”
“I am calling from New Jersey, and I need to tell you what the band U2 has been doing here. They’ve been putting people in hospitals. I need you to come down to the state hospital and walk me out—”
Slam.
I’d been on the job only two months and already the wingnuts who called the Metro desk were the h
ighlight of my day. Ordinarily I would have entertained her loopy logic for at least another five minutes, but today was different—I’d finally drawn up the courage to do what I’d spent the last two months thinking about. After Googling everyone I’d ever met, dated, or loathed, I did what everyone does when they work in a cathedral of information: I began to dig. I logged on to the LexisNexis newspaper and public record database, and my limited access revealed the party affiliations of all of my friends, every address I’d ever had, and which of my damaged exes had moved and where. But I was stalling, because what I was really after was the Big Prize: information about my father. It’s one thing to have an oral history; it’s quite another to see it in print. I dismissed the voice of my mother, which echoed in my head—“But Jenny, why do you want to know all these things?”—and plugged my father’s name into Lexis.
His obituary popped up, but the quick one I wrote for him right after he died, not the longer, more unconventional one I called in a couple of days later. But his big crime was committed in the 1960s, and Lexis only went back so far. So I searched ProQuest, the database for historical news articles. After a few seconds, I came up with this:
The New York Times, March 8, 1957
TWO “WRONG” MEN FREED
Convictions Set Aside After 3d Prisoner Admits Holdup
Two Brooklyn men who had been convicted of holding up a Brooklyn gasoline station were released from jail yesterday as the victims of mistaken identity.
The men are John Gilbert, a 20-year-old trucker, of 1648 East Eighth Street, and Carmine Gotti, 22, a presser, of 2282 Dean Street, Brooklyn. A jury found them guilty Jan. 23 of robbing Henry J. Allison, 63, of $260 in his station at 9317 Third Avenue, Brooklyn, on Sept. 29.
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