Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  I am crying now because I feel so lost and terribly afraid that I won’t find the strength to find my way back. You were, and still remain, the only woman I ever loved, trusted, respected, and I am disgusted at all the pain I’ve caused you because I wanted to push you from my life and leave me free to ingest the poison I chose.

  I’m sorry for making you feel inadequate, belittling you, punishing you terribly for no just cause. I resented you for being stronger than me—the strong one! I did terrible things, and I’m sorry. If I lose you I think I’ll be sorry. I say I “think” because in my confused mind, and in my love for substances I can’t think clearly enough to know what I feel. But I remember a friend, a wonderful girl of so long ago who gave freely of herself for me, and through my haze of liquor and drugs I now reach out to her. I am so strong, but so weak, because I fear that I can’t get back! I fear I lack the strength and conviction to be a better man than I am now. I feel so totally lost and fear to be left alone after detox. I can’t go through every day of my life holding your hand or Jenny’s hand to give me strength.

  I’ve seen so much, endured so much, with overpowering strength, yet today I must be convinced that this strength even existed. I’m always tense, explosive, irrational, short-tempered, cold, and just a bad guy in general. Why am I this way? How did I get here? God help me! Mom help me!

  It was the first time I’d seen cocaine-induced motormouth on the page. It was impressive. I hope my mother rolled her eyes when she read this and found him as insufferable as I suddenly did. Why do all Italian men cry out for their mothers in times of crisis? And I love how he laments his drug-addled lifestyle and then claims it’s a cross he must bear in order to keep me and my mother in Gucci. “The life that you and Jenny enjoyed”? We weren’t exactly riding around in Beemers—we drove a car that was forever leaking coolant and we always had trouble keeping up with the rent. Concealed in my father’s tight, inebriated scrawl was rare access into the mind of an addict, and I still couldn’t believe this was my father. But the person who wrote these words was not my father. This was “Johnny” on his downtime, when I wasn’t in the room. This was not the father who hoisted me onto his shoulders and surprised me with clandestine Twix bars. Whatever this shit was, it didn’t spill over into our relationship.

  Or did it? Those dozen or so times when he’d smacked my backside with the force of a car crash, was he high on coke? I never smelled alcohol on him, so it must have been coke. Was he under the influence of cocaine when he chipped away at my mother’s self-esteem with his vicious insults—“Oh, Eleanor, shut yuh fuckin’ mouth!!” She never feared him, and gave it right back when he screamed and foamed at the mouth, but after a while this must have eroded her soul.

  The next letter was similar, and more accusatory than the first, blaming my mother’s penchant for conspicuous consumption for what he was “forced” to do. There was a letter clipped to it, and I steeled myself for another rambling attack on my mother, thoughtless materialism, and free-market capitalism. But when I opened it I was blindsided.

  It was from my mother.

  Dearest Jennifer—

  Someday you will read this letter, probably when I am gone.

  There is truth in it, but also a drug user’s self-pity and his willingness to blame everything on someone else. I became that someone else. I’m not just making excuses, although I was hurt and in pain also, especially when I read this letter.

  We did not have the perfect marriage, but we loved each other—much. I sometimes think I really don’t want to go on without him, but then I think of you—and also how much death scares me.

  Please don’t get hurt by this letter. His anger at me is justified—not his anger at you—the “life you and Jenny enjoyed.”

  Please don’t hate either of us. We both loved you so much.

  Mom

  I couldn’t breathe, I was crying so hard. I looked in the mirror and saw that my face and chest had broken out in splotchy pink hives, something I thought only my father’s yelling could do. This was the last letter I would ever receive from my mother—there were no more hidden wills to find—and I immediately wished I hadn’t read it so I could experience it for the first time all over again.

  I could tell that it was written after my father died, because she writes about how she’s living in a world without him, but I don’t think she was sick yet. I pictured her going through his papers in the hope that seeing his familiar script would make her feel less lonely for him. I marveled at the way she blamed herself. All of his weaknesses became her fault. If he took drugs, or killed, or continued his estrangement from his kids, it was because of her, and she absorbed the fallout as well as the blame. I can’t reconcile this vision of my mother as a blank page for my father’s dominance because I saw her in action. But over the years and even on her deathbed, she related his sins to me without affect, as if she didn’t know what to make of them and wanted to see what I thought before committing to an emotion either way. Years of living by my father’s warped morals, followed by four and a half years of living on her own, had left her without a moral compass. She was in limbo, even when discussing murder.

  Why was she so obsessed with defending this man’s humanity? I lived with the guy—he was more Roberto Benigni than Benito Mussolini. Didn’t she know by my words and actions that I could never hate him? And why did she keep these letters? She could have thrown them away and disposed of this murkiness, but she didn’t. She knew I would go snooping through their papers one day, after they had gone—is it possible that she wanted me to get the full story? Maybe she didn’t want to be alone with the truth. When she was diagnosed with cancer she could have taken care of the evidence, but she left it for me, her daughter, who, raised in a household of subterfuge, was always hungry for the truth, even when it hurt us all.

  But there’s spin there, too, paper-clipped to the historical artifacts. True to form, she always had to have the last word, and she used it to protect Johnny. To paraphrase my father, how did she get here?

  CHAPTER 20

  June 2007

  • • •

  THE FLORIDA AIR WAS WARM AND SOFT AND SURPRISINGLY FREE of humidity as it gently jostled my hair on I-95. Every time I flew down here I became seized by the same thought: Could I live here? Why not be closer to my remaining family? I was taken to New York by force, and though I have incorporated the city’s rhythms into my own, it was a love born of necessity. Every night I return to my apartment and face the emptiness left by those who have gone.

  But here—everything can begin again here, warm and sun-kissed and clean. Driving up and down the freeway I could feel my parents with me in a way I couldn’t before. How many times during their brief stay in Florida did they drive I-95 to Fort Lauderdale, or take the Sawgrass to their house on North Commodore Drive? Back then they were only ten years older than I am now. Would we have been friends? What would an ex-con and his bad-boy-loving Jewish sophisticate wife have in common with an Ivy League grad cum journalist? These are people I probably would have covered for the paper: EX-CON FLEES BROWARD AFTER COCAINE BUST; BOUNTY HUNTERS ON THEIR TAIL. And for the ironic Day Two story: WIFE OF COCAINE CON STARTED DRUG REHAB HIGH SCHOOL IN NEW YORK. With her first husband. Who was gay. Connecting the dots from David Margulis to John Mascia began here, just off A1A in Fort Lauderdale, with Donald Halsband.

  “Jennifah! Oh my gawd, you look just like Eleanor!” Donald held out his arms at the entrance to the oceanfront tower that housed his nineteenth-floor apartment. He was balder and older than I’d imagined. I had only met my mother’s lifelong friend once, when I was ten, but I didn’t really remember him, just as I didn’t really remember David.

  My mother had visited Donald during our Florida trip in 2002 after I’d branched off to see my sisters, and she’d warned me that Donald’s apartment was envy-inspiring. Well, she was right. It was stunning: elegantly appointed yet comfortable, equal parts Ethan Allen and Bombay Company. The living room and eat-in kitchen fa
ced the soft blue surf and the bedroom overlooked the low-lying city lights. If the apartment was located in Chelsea, Donald’s home for most of the eighties and nineties, it would easily fetch $6,000 a month.

  Before we sat down to talk he fixed me a lunch consisting of four types of organic salad from Whole Foods and sugar-free iced tea. Apparently a smorgasbord of tofu and tabbouleh awaited me in my golden years. After lunch I sat on his downy, velvety couch as he fetched a treasure from his bedroom: his senior yearbook from 1951, with a picture of my mother in her cheerleading uniform.

  “My mother was a cheerleader?” I’d asked him on the phone a few weeks before, incredulous. Yet there she was, smack in the middle of the pack, smiling eyes peering out from a smart brown bob. She was remarkably pretty. It was as if the word was coined especially for her.

  “You can have it, if you want,” he said, rising to fetch a pair of scissors.

  “Really?” I asked. “Are you sure?” I felt like I was defacing a library book; the Lincoln High yearbook from 1951 looked nothing like the flashy, hulking Guinness Book-type volumes handed out when I was in high school. This was a thin volume, demure. I lifted it up to my nose and inhaled dust accumulated over five decades; I relished the smell. Next he handed me an 8½-by-11 piece of construction paper covered with a collage of small photos he’d put together. In the upper left-hand corner was my mother and David’s wedding photo. I’d never seen it before. David stood behind her, all dark hair and spectacles, and she smiled through a thick set of eyebrows. She was twenty-five.

  “She was always so thin,” I said, a little envious.

  “David loved her body,” he said. Probably because she was built like a boy, I thought. He let me keep that photograph, too. “So,” he said in his effeminate Manhattan Beach drawl. “What can I tell you? I don’t know about your father, but I do know about your mother and David and I growing up in Manhattan Beach.”

  “Well,” I started, still shaking from the single hour of sleep I’d managed on the plane, “I’m trying to understand how my mother married a gay man—twice—and then went on the lam with a man who killed people.”

  He managed a wry chuckle. “Jenny,” he said, “none of us understood how Eleanor and David could get married in the first place. But twice? I mean, we were always gay. It was me, David, and Milton, who’s dead now. We would go cruising together.”

  My mother’s first wedding, to

  David Margulis, 1959.

  “If you guys were always gay, then why did David marry my mom?” I asked.

  “In those days,” he said, “David felt that if he married a woman, he’d go straight. I don’t know if your mother knew during the first marriage, but I know she knew later.”

  “Oh, she knew,” I said. “Arline, her other sister—did you ever meet her?” He shook his head. “Arline said that my mom thought she could straighten David out. Can you believe that?”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “In the fifties it was a lot harder than it is today to come out.”

  “But you did,” I pointed out.

  “Yes,” he said. “But you have to understand, David was a highly disturbed guy.”

  “Really?” I asked, though my mother had once told me that David’s mother was schizophrenic.

  “Did you know David tried to kill himself twice?” Donald asked me.

  “No. When was this?” I guess my mother liked her men gay, homicidal, and suicidal.

  “David didn’t finish with us at Lincoln High School,” Donald explained. “During his senior year he was sent to the Hartford Retreat, a sanitarium in Connecticut, after sticking his head in the oven.”

  I shivered; shades of Sylvia Plath. “Jesus,” I said.

  “When David and your mother got married, we said to David, ‘What are you doing?’ I mean, we were gay. But he wanted to try marriage, and he really loved her. But their sex life was not great. After they got married he’d be bitterly upset over the quality of the sex, and she was frustrated, too. He had a hard time maintaining an erection. And your mother had this rape fantasy that David couldn’t fulfill. That’s probably why she liked your father. He was very sexual.”

  I was puking in my mouth. But Donald’s revelation, though squirm-inducing, couldn’t be discarded. My mother was married to a flaccid homosexual for twelve years, and my father had been in prison for twelve years. Their union must have resulted in sexual dynamite. But was that enough to carry a marriage? And one with so many caveats?

  “I spoke with one of my mother’s friends from her teaching days recently, and she told me that while my mom would wait for David to come home at night, David would be parked in some guy’s car right downstairs, having sex.”

  “Oh, sure,” Donald said. “We’d go cruising all the time. David got a job at this gay bar called Main Street, on Eighth Street in the West Village. After he got off work, we’d go cruising. He’d tell Eleanor he was somewhere else, and we’d go find guys. Look, David adored Eleanor,” he said, rising to fetch two Diet Cokes from the fridge. “She called him at all hours to talk about her life, and he loved it. Just loved it. Even when I’d be over at his apartment on Horatio Street, he would be talking to her on the phone. For hours.” The way he said it, I could tell it once annoyed him. But now he sounded like he had come to respect the friendship, probably relieved that my mother had married again and had a child and wouldn’t be showing up at David’s door for a third go-round.

  “You know,” I said, “I’ve spoken to some people who worked at Alpha School, and I was surprised to hear that my mom never taught there. I always thought she did because of the way she talked about it. They all remember her, but said that she only helped David craft the proposal and never taught there herself.” Just about everyone I’d spoken to also said it was pretty obvious to anyone with a set of eyes that David was gay. But each and every one raved about her teaching style at her previous school, from which David had poached half the staff. She really knew how to reach the kids, in a way David never even did.

  “No,” he said, “she never taught there. Eleanor’s favorite pastime was smoking, sitting in her bathrobe and reading all day, then cooking for David when he got home. She liked staying home and David did Alpha School.”

  Just like when she was married to my father. “Wait,” I said. “I think I have something you might find funny.” I’d brought pictures to show him, too, and there was one in particular that seemed to illustrate exactly what he was describing. I shuffled through the bleached-blue Polaroids and communion and cheerleading pictures and held one up for his perusal: my bathrobe-clad mother, circa 1990, lying on the couch with a cigarette in one hand and her big round ashtray resting on a thick book. Donald knew of what he spoke.

  “That’s it,” he said. “That’s Eleanor. Wow.”

  “My father was always on her case about ‘contributing.’ I guess he didn’t recognize that she was in the throes of depression,” I said. “Yeah, I guess that’s what it was,” he said.

  “He threatened to leave her once if she didn’t get a job,” I admitted.

  “Well, we all lent her money,” he said. That didn’t surprise me. I had found a letter from David bundled with my mother’s papers that began, “This money is a loan, but pay it back only when you can.” If my father was a part-time coke dealer and full-time carpet cleaner, why did my parents never have money?

  “I remember one time,” Donald continued, “I came to California when you were little, and we ate at a Chinese restaurant—”

  Finally, a shared memory. “Mandarin Gourmet,” I chirped. “I was ten.”

  “Yes, that place your parents loved,” he said. “I remember she felt so guilty because she owed me money and didn’t have it, so she gave me a nice gram of coke.”

  “She did?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said serenely.

  “My mother gave it to you?” I’d assumed my mother’s involvement in my father’s drug operation consisted of tacit approval at most. But the fact that she cupped th
e baggie of poison in her hands, carried it with her in the car on the way to the restaurant, let it into her possession even for a minute—didn’t she know better? She helped start Alpha School!

  I had to ask. “Was it good? Like, pure?”

  “Oh, very,” he said, smiling at the memory. “I remember getting on the plane to fly home and feeling very, very happy.”

  At least it made someone happy. All cocaine ever did for me was perch me on the edge of anxiety and keep me there until I fell asleep. My jaw clenched at the memory. “I don’t do it anymore,” he added. “But I used to do it while I watched TV. I miss my coke. I miss my pot, too. I haven’t smoked in five years.”

  Too bad. I wished he had some now. “Donald?”

  “Yes?”

  I repeated the question I’d first posed to him on the phone a few weeks back. “How did a woman who’d started a drug rehabilitation program for high school heroin addicts hook up with an ex-con coke dealer, go on the lam, and stay with him knowing that he’d killed people?”

  Donald sighed. “I have a theory,” he said. “There was an element of adventure in it, for all of us. David lived vicariously through your mother with all those phone conversations. I think it’s more surprising that she married David twice than your father, to tell you the truth, because her marriage to David was stale.”

  I let that sit for a moment. I guess I’d gotten what I came for. I remembered then something my mother once said to me during her final year of life, during some frivolous argument: “When I die, you’re just going to be sad you don’t have your Mommy anymore. You’re not going to really mourn me as a person.”

  Oh, Eleanor, how wrong you were.

  “Are you hungry?” Donald asked, breaking the silence. “We should make dinner.”

  I couldn’t believe it was already seven and I still hadn’t slept. It might have been a record for me. After a dinner of steamed chicken breast, sun-dried tomatoes, and broccoli—if I ate like this every day I’d weigh 95 pounds—we talked a little about the rest of David’s life, how he left teaching in 1975 and opened an antique jewelry booth on Forty-seventh Street, following in his father’s footsteps. The business became very successful and David ran it until he got sick. Donald said that both he and David were very promiscuous, and David knew who had given him AIDS: a cokehead called Snow. “He was very cute,” Donald said. David didn’t show symptoms until right before he died. Donald picked up the photo collage and showed me a picture of a tan, smiling David and a mustached Donald with a woman and another man. They are all laughing.