Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  My father’s portrait, taken in prison, 1970.

  As the sun was rising in the eastern sky my father drove to Ann Wyler’s house and presented both guns to her. Later that evening, presumably after a night of (restless?) sleep, he and Piracci and a woman named Louise “were together in an automobile. After Piracci departed, defendant showed her a newspaper article concerning Vitale’s death and said that ‘he did it.’” Then, with “a woman not his wife”—presumably Louise—he hopped into his white Pontiac and headed back down to Florida, where he had relocated with his pregnant twenty-two-year-old wife and young daughters just one month earlier. But he never saw them. When he heard that the cops had pinned Piracci to the crime he knew it was a matter of time before they crossed the Mason-Dixon to get him, so he holed himself up at the Dunes Motel so his family wouldn’t have to witness his arrest. When his day of reckoning came he fought extradition, but he was brought back to New York anyway, where he cooled his heels at the Tombs for four months before his trial began.

  “So he is 26 years of age, and this defendant has accumulated quite a bit of experience in the life of crime,” Barshay opined from the bench. “I told him when he pleaded guilty what his sentence would be. It would be twenty years to life, as provided for by law. He deserves, and should get, more, but I am going to keep my promise, as I made it in open court to him.” And with that, my father was committed to prison, where he spent the next decade of his life—first at Sing Sing, then Clinton Correctional, then Greenhaven, then Walkill, then finally Fishkill, where he met my mother.

  I looked up at the clock, only mildly surprised that three hours had passed. As I gazed out the windows of the twenty-third-floor conference room and watched as big tumbleweeds of fog rolled across the sky over downtown Brooklyn, my eyes filled with tears. As a not-yet-thirty-year-old still grieving over her parents’ deaths, I was offended by the cavalier manner with which my father seemed to have taken life. I also marveled at the involvement of his mistress, the aforementioned Louise, who also testified. So this was the woman my mother had told me about, the star of the photos tucked away in my father’s prison scrapbook. And she took the stand—I wonder if Marie ever bumped into her in the courtroom? Did she rip Louise’s oversprayed hair out by the roots? My mother would have. I thought of Rita then, and my persistent suspicions regarding her and my father, and wondered if people do, in fact, change, or whether they simply alter the circumstances slightly so they don’t appear to be repeating their mistakes in perpetuity. The way my mother spoke of it, it was clear that she believed his adulterous behavior to be relegated to the past, when the truth was that she regarded my father, I now realized, with an almost willful ignorance.

  I remembered my mother telling me how she and my father would clink their wineglasses and toast “to prison reform,” the movement that led to his parole in 1975, as if it was the prisons that needed reforming, not a husband who had admitted to committing murder. I tried to see the romance in all this, tried to understand what my mother was attracted to, but I failed to find the seductive mystery in luring someone to a secluded park with the promise of heroin just to whip around and pump him full of bullets. And he definitely did it, despite his protestations of innocence to his parents and sister. Yet he’d sit in the Tombs, and then in his cell in Sing Sing, and pick apart every element of his multiple court proceedings, searching for the technicality that could spring him. He pointed out inconsistencies in the testimony given during his interrupted criminal trial; he even questioned the impartiality of Judge Barshay—who probably became the bane of my father’s existence—by pointing out that in his days as an attorney he had once represented the father of one of the prosecution witnesses. I located each of his legal maneuvers in that seemingly unimportant second pile of papers, and they smacked of earnestness, despite his guilt.

  As I read my father’s words, written from behind bars, I felt the urge to run into his arms and say, “It’s okay, I’ve found you. I’m here.” The same neat, boxy lettering that adorned every birthday card he ever gave me is there, in that alien place and time, respectfully begging the court to grant his motions of appeal. Even though he shot Joe Fish at point-blank range, and probably countless others, I gazed upon his familiar cursive and missed him terribly. When he misspells words like “submittion” and “warrent,” I am reminded that this John Mascia is twenty-six, three years younger than I am now, with only three years of high school behind him. He was trying so hard to get a trial; “a trial,” he wrote in that first handwritten writ, “that could in any real sense be termed fair.” Perhaps he felt that if he got his trial and took the stand, his charisma would cancel out the damning evidence against him. And why not? His seductive demeanor and effortless charm had carried him this far. My father could have been a movie star, he exuded so much “it.”

  “It” is why my mother forgave him the affair he had with that white trash waitress. “It” is how he induced my parents’ friends in California, all sophisticated yuppies, to fly to New York to testify at his parole violation hearing in 1983, and “it” is how he kept those friends after they testified, even after it was revealed in open court that he had been a murderer. “It” is how this gentle ex-convict won over the nuns at my Catholic school, who let him a barter a yearly carpet cleaning for a significant tuition discount. “It” is why his grown children never really gave up on him, even after he cast himself a permanent part in their lives only to evaporate without warning, and “it” is what keeps me from hating him now, if for nothing else than the affair I am convinced he conducted with my aunt. He had so much “it” that it’s still infused in the ether around me, and even though I saw him take his last breath, saw his lips go white, “it” has kept him with me, years after I felt his graceful affability leave my dreams.

  I turned my attention back to the court transcripts and imagined the guilt he must have felt—I hope he felt—at causing so much pain to so many people. I read about how my grandfather visited him in the Tombs twice a week, and on one particular visit Grandpa openly wept at his son’s predicament, and my father wept right along with him. The thought of my grandfather breaking down as he sat opposite my father in some rancid jail cell, only to set my father off on a crying jag of his own, was almost too much to bear. It immediately brought me back to that night in 1996 when my father told me that Grandpa’s prostate cancer had metastasized to the bone. He had picked me up from the Staten Island Ferry after a late night at Hunter and we drove back to New Lane in his powder-blue Ford Econoline. As we stopped for a light at the intersection of Bay Street and Victory Boulevard, he told me his father was going to die. I studied his small olive face, sorrow and helplessness and exhaustion having narrowed his eyes to slits, and started crying.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, though I sensed how inadequate any comfort offered by an eighteen-year-old might be. Nevertheless, he met my eyes and burst into tears, nodding at my attempt, acknowledging his own pain. He sank dejectedly into his big puffy winter jacket and we both cried together, sentimental Italians to the end.

  My father and I were close in ways we didn’t talk about, simply because we sensed that we shared the same emotional DNA. I loved him and he loved me, and even though we didn’t whittle away the hours gabbing and sparring the way my mother and I did, with kindred souls like us, you don’t have to talk about it to know it’s true.

  ON THE SUBWAY RIDE back to work I flipped to the back of my Moleskine notebook and studied the Polaroids I’d been carrying around since my mother died, of my parents in the seventies, when they were either dating or first married. They were tinted blue from the water damage they suffered in the communal basement of Merle Place, lending them an ethereal quality. I’d rescued the waterlogged photo albums against my mother’s wishes not long after my father died. “They’re full of mildew!” she cried. “Throw them away!” I refused, removing the Polaroids and tossing the albums, and I’m so glad I did. Sometimes on the train I’d pull them out and cry. I can easily cry
over my parents in public, when I’m pressed for time and privacy; it’s in the luxury of my own home that I have a problem letting go.

  In the first Polaroid my father has his arm around my mother and they are posing before a wood-paneled wall in my grandparents’ house in Brooklyn. They look so young and beautiful, my mother’s brows plucked into a perfect set of parentheses flipped 90 degrees. The second photo always makes me smile: My father, wearing a chest hair– remember who baring brown zip-up shirt, has his arm around my mother, who is smiling in a carefree way I’d rarely witnessed during my childhood. They are both stoned, I am sure, and the picture seems to have caught my father in mid-sentence, as evidenced by the arm swung around my mother, hand open, fingers splayed, in the midst of making a point. I had forgotten how much Italians loved talking with their hands. I closely examined my father’s face and noted his defined brow and dark eyes that mirrored my own, and I saw love. But for at least half a dozen other people, his face was the last thing they saw before dying, and I bet he wasn’t smiling then. For them, my father’s eyes held no comfort, only a whirling fury that sent them into blackness.

  And I can imagine how easily he summoned that rage—I’d seen it firsthand. But killing was another thing. How did he make the decision to cross the line into such murky territory? If it was like the downward slide of addiction, what type of battle did he wage against it? How did he get to the point where the only answer to certain problems was murder? My mother said he had to “work himself up” to commit these crimes, bringing to mind a method actor prepping for Hamlet or Lear. But whose decision was it to kill Joe Fish? Did my father kill him at the urging of the incarcerated Bobby Wyler, as my mother suggested? Or should I trust the woman who testified that my father had been on the hunt for Joe Fish since the previous winter, when he swore he would “cut off his hands so he won’t shoot up anymore”? According to testimony offered the first few days of the murder trial, my father explained to a friend that he killed Joe Fish because “Vitale was a rat and he had a lot on him, and he could put him away for fifteen years.”

  Well, he did twelve years, and it doesn’t sound like he did them for Bobby Wyler.

  CHAPTER 18

  March 2007

  • • •

  “HEY, ANGIE, LONG TIME NO TALK,” I PROJECTED BREATHLESSLY into the receiver. As I strolled up Third Avenue the wind was howling behind me and forming little tornadoes of leaves and plastic bags at my feet, which meant that a storm was imminent.

  “Hey, Jenny,” my sister Angela murmured in her signature laid-back tones. Everyone in Florida always sounded so relaxed. “When are you coming down?”

  “Soon,” I said. “I’m graduating in May, so I’m free after that. Listen, I need to ask you something. It’s about Dad and Rita.”

  “Yeah,” she said, sounding resigned. She must have expected it.

  “You remember when Rita was up here after Mom died, and I asked her if she’d had an affair with Dad?” I asked. “And she denied it?”

  “Yeah, you told me. She was so messed up that week,” she said with a chuckle.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “I miss the old Rita. Remember the old Rita?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “We all thought she was so exotic, so beautiful.”

  “A life ruined by drugs,” I said. “So in the car that night after the cruise, you told me that you always suspected something happened between two of them. What made you think that? I mean, you said that they seemed very ‘friendly’ with each other, very familiar, but was there anything else?” I suddenly wanted to be having this conversation from my bed, so I could roll over and fall asleep as soon as I hung up.

  She sighed again, and her voice deepened. “I wanted to tell you the whole story that night,” she said, “but you started crying.”

  “I started crying because you started crying!” I protested. Actually, I couldn’t remember who’d started crying first. Either way, we were both broken up.

  “I also didn’t want to say that I knew for sure while your mother was still alive,” she said. “’Cause I knew you’d tell her.”

  Oops. “Yeah, that was probably best,” I agreed. “Wait—did you say ‘for sure’? You’re pretty sure about an affair?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “How?”

  Another sigh. “Because he told me.”

  Oh, Jesus. “He told you? When did he tell you?” I wanted to rip Rita’s hair out, clump by bloody clump.

  “Before he went to rehab,” she said. “He called me up and apologized for keeping all that stuff in my house, and for running off with Rita to deal drugs. Your mom actually called me and said, ‘Your father has something he wants to tell you,’ and put him on the phone, and he told me he had a problem and he was going to get help. And I asked him about what happened that time with Rita, and he said, ‘Yeah, we were sleepin’ together.’”

  How cavalier—yeah, we were sleepin’ together. “My mother handed you the phone?” I asked breathlessly. “Did that mean she was listening to this confession?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but I wondered that. It was a long conversation, I think he may have gone into another room or something. But I also thought, maybe your mom knew and kind of understood, or looked the other way, because Rita had done so much for you guys.”

  Rita had secured lawyers, lent us money, financed numerous vacations—but would my mother allow herself to be bought off like that? “That is disgusting,” I said, visions of the du Pré sisters tormenting my brain. “I cannot believe she would just accept that, or worse, facilitate something like that.”

  “They just seemed so open about it, like they didn’t even try to hide it,” Angie said.

  I immediately called Arline and told her what I’d learned.

  “No!” she said, aghast.

  “Yes!” I insisted.

  “But how can Angie be sure?”

  “Because Johnny told her,” I said, flinching slightly at my use of my father’s first name.

  “He didn’t!” she cried, in her horrified “Can you believe it?” voice.

  “Yes,” I said, “he did. Not only that, Angie and Tina think that Mommy knew.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  Pause.

  “Arline, did Mommy know? I mean, when I asked her about this a few years ago she acted like the idea had never occurred to her. And Mommy and Rita didn’t really have a falling-out, and if Mommy knew about an affair, there would have been a huge blowout over it.” I caught my breath. “The only other explanation I can think of is that Mommy knew, and condoned it for some reason. Would she do that?”

  “No, I can’t imagine that she would,” Arline said, now calm and considering the variables. “But there is something. Right after you asked her whether she thought Rita and Johnny did anything, she called me up and asked me if I thought that, too.”

  “No!” I said.

  “Yes,” Arline said.

  “And what did you say?”

  “Let me see if I can remember this word for word,” she began. “She said, ‘Jenny asked me whether anything ever happened between Rita and Johnny. Did you ever hear anything like that?’ I said to her, ‘No, never. I never heard anything like that.’ She said, ‘If I find out that anything ever happened between them, I don’t care how old I am, I will go down to Florida myself and rip her eyes out of their sockets!’”

  You go, Mom. “Did Rita ever mention an affair?”

  “No, never,” she said, adamant. “She never did. Of course, your mother and Rita were closer at the time than your mother and I were, but Rita never told me anything about that.”

  But how could my mother not have known? Of course, this was the same woman who didn’t know her own sister was a drug addict when everyone around her knew, but how many trips had he taken to Florida without her? How could my mother not suspect, just a little, in her heart of hearts, that her coke-snorting husband, in Florida without her for a week or two at a time, cou
ld maybe—I don’t know—trip and fall into Rita’s bed? Did my mother think that because she had dropped her life to focus on my father, and loved him when he had a different name—and when he was just a carpet cleaner, and broke, and when his teeth were falling out—that he would return her loyalty and stay faithful for once in his life?

  “She would have died for him, Jenny,” Arline added. “If the FBI came to the house and started shooting, she would have put her body in front of his to take the bullets herself.”

  I was hardly impressed. Because how did my father reward her devotion? By shtupping her sister. But maybe that’s what cocaine does. I can just imagine what the drug did for a man with my father’s past. Maybe each pile of powder held a promise for him—a promise to forget. I wondered when he first tried it. Before he went to prison? Maybe while in prison? When I called Tina later that week, she told me that our father used to tip waiters with the drug, probably nestled in the crook of a folded-up dollar bill, handed off with a wink and a smile. She said that when he was high he could open up to her about all he’d done and seen. Perhaps cocaine inserted a layer between him and the rest of the world, supplying the necessary distance he needed in order to exist among everyone else who hadn’t killed.

  As I made the lonely trek to my apartment I began examining my child’s memory through an adult’s microscope, questioning every detail I’d taken for granted—like the way my father had yelled at me when I’d called Rita a selfish drug addict. My mother hadn’t yet told me about all the lawyers Rita paid for, so I was baffled at my father’s show of loyalty. I felt instantly ashamed, sensing I’d missed a piece of information somewhere and silently scolding myself for sounding like such a smartass punk. But if I could have relived that exchange today, this is how it might have gone: