Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  “Did it, but?”

  “Yeah. The facts back it up—she hardly ever came to visit us after that. I only saw her once when I was in high school.”

  “It almost makes me change my opinion of your father, but,” he said. “It doesn’t, in the end, but almost. You know?”

  “Believe me, I know. It’s like it’s another person we’re talking about. I think it’s because he’s dead. I can’t question him about this, so for me, he’ll always be the person I thought he was.” I could barely eat. My wine was untouched, and it was my favorite, a Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. “What kills me the most,” I continued, “was how materialistic they were. Jeff, I had no idea how much of this was about money and greed. I never want to live my life like they did.”

  “I know, Jen. But at the end of the day, they were good to you. They were just a little bit selfish.”

  “How did they find the time to be good parents? It was almost like they were good parents in spite of themselves.” I picked at my salad, separating the romaine from the chicken. I couldn’t register taste or texture. It was all just matter to me.

  “They gave you whatever you wanted,” Jeff said. “They put you through private school.”

  “Yeah, with drug money,” I pointed out.

  “Believe me, you wouldn’t be the first,” he said.

  “True. Especially in Southern California,” I conceded. “But, my god, those years? From 1995 to 1998, before my father got cancer, when I was dating you, remember?”

  “Yeah,” he said, picking at his rice.

  “I always considered them the best years of my life,” I said, “because we were finally together, after being separated and on welfare. But I think I only thought that because of what came after—heart attack, lung cancer, more lung cancer, another heart attack … In reality, we were broke, fighting, and not six months into our new lives in New York my father finds a mistress who he proceeds to drag across the country. I’m living in the same house and I don’t even know all of this is going on. I just wish,” I said, my forehead crumpling, “I just wish that the ten percent I knew of them, the good, legitimate part, could compensate for the rest. I wish they could have been the people I thought they were on a full-time basis.” I put my hand over my eyes. I thought I might come close to crying but didn’t expect to actually do it. Jeff put his hand on my arm.

  “Hey,” he said, “let it out. You need to cry over this.”

  I was really too wired to cry, but I choked out a sob or two before quickly recovering. “Now that I know what my mother went through, I wish so much that I could sit across this table from her and look her in the eye and tell her that I finally understand all she had to deal with.” Just like I wanted to do in the hospital, to tell her all I went through trying to keep her alive, and how I survived her death. There was so much I wanted to tell her, but this suddenly popped to the top of the list.

  “She was a smart woman,” he said. “At the end of the day, she wanted to keep her family together. She stayed with your father, and every time he dabbled in the coke she spent his money shopping. She wasn’t stupid. It was her way of acting out.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Well, why do you think she stayed with him? You knew her best.”

  “Well, she—” I said, and stopped. I could answer the right way—that she was older and didn’t want to be alone. But while that may have been the truth, my mother didn’t see it like that. “If you asked her, she would say it was because she loved him. She loved him so much, Jeff, and he loved her. I’ve read all the letters he wrote her, and the cards. All the affairs, they didn’t change how much he loved her.”

  “I bet he had a lot of affairs, too,” he said. “A lot. But nothing substantial.”

  “Oh, I’m sure.” In fact, I was growing more certain of it by the hour. “I mean, she knew the deal. She knew what she was getting into. I guess when you know somebody’s deepest secrets it binds you together. Jeff, nobody else knew about the murders.”

  “Really?” he asked, his face scrunched in disbelief. “No!”

  “Yes. She didn’t tell Rita, she didn’t tell Arline. She only told me.”

  “She wanted you to know who they really were,” he said. “You had a real mother-daughter friendship. Very deep.”

  “It’s not just that, though. Maybe she didn’t want to be alone with it anymore. And I never would have known any of it if I hadn’t seen the FBI arrest my dad. If it had happened when I was two, it would have been off my radar. And I wouldn’t have known the rest if I hadn’t searched the Internet and found his record. That’s when I became her confidante. People seem offended when I tell them that she told me so much, like she broke some unspoken child-rearing rule. ‘Don’t tell your children where the bodies are buried.’”

  “It isn’t strange to me,” Jeff said. “We’re just different, I guess.”

  “New Yorkers,” I said, smiling. My mind was a jumble of questions and emotions, of disbelief. Jeff must have sensed the synapses firing.

  “I can’t imagine what’s going on in your head,” he said. “How you must feel.”

  “I can’t believe it: My father was a cocaine addict. He did it, off and on, his whole life. And I see why. How do you continue to live your life when you’ve killed people? I might turn to drugs, too. And the only way he could open up and talk about anything substantial was when he was high.”

  “He had a hard life, you know?” he said.

  “But he did it when he was on the road, painting buildings,” I said. “My god, he was an old man then, no?”

  “He was sixty,” I said.

  “He was doing such hard work at that age, he needed an escape, you know?” Jeff was starting to make excuses for him, just like everyone did. I knew he said it to make me feel better, so I let it slide. “A man goes from twenty to sixty and he doesn’t change,” he continued. “He’s the same person. People don’t change.”

  “You thought you were straight when you were twenty,” I objected.

  “Ha ha,” he said.

  Ah, the age-old debate: Can people really change? My father did change, in a way, because of my mother. He became more tolerant, more cultured, better read, a better judge of cuisine. He lost his bigotry and became a better father. But in some ways he remained the same man who dated all of Marie’s teenaged friends when she left for summer camp.

  “My mother looked me in the eyes and told me that my father changed his life for us,” I said. “But he didn’t, Jeff. He never changed. The scary part is that I think she convinced herself that he did, even when the evidence said otherwise.”

  “But didn’t he?” Jeff asked.

  “No,” I said. “Just for the five years we were fugitives. He had to keep his nose clean, so to speak, because he knew they would come for him one day. Jeff, those were the best years of my life.”

  “Wait, tell me when that was again?”

  “1978 to 1983,” I said. “I only remember a couple years of it, of course, but he was a carpet cleaner, he wasn’t doing anything illegal. He stayed legit because he was building a résumé, so when he went to court one day—because he must have known that day would come—he could say, ‘Look, I’m a law-abiding citizen now, I’ve given up the criminal life.’ And it worked—he was released. But after that he went right back into doing coke and dealing it, and the only thing that finally ended all of it was cancer.” I thought for a moment. “You know something?” I said wistfully. “The FBI finding him was probably the worst thing that could have happened to him.” I thought about the life he could have had as Frank Cassese, always looking over his shoulder, yes, but always keeping his nose clean, literally. Of course, he’d still be dead.

  “You’re finding more out about them,” Jeff said, “but you’ll never know for sure, because you weren’t there. You’re skimming the surface of it, but who knows what’s really inside? Who knows why they did what they did?”

  “That’s the hardest part,” I said. �
��I’ll never know it all.” Our plates were cleared and our waiter dropped the check. “You know what he’d say if he knew I was doing this, researching his life? He would tell me to mind my own fucking business.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” Jeff said.

  “Oh yes he would.”

  “No, they would both be proud,” he said. “They’d want to be able to tell their side, but they’d ultimately stand back and let you do your thing.” I knew he was wrong, but at least someone believed it. It made me feel better. “You were his pride and joy, you know that, Jen,” he added.

  “Yes, but I always sensed that there was a distance between us,” I said. “I mean, we were close, but we could just as easily have been estranged, like he was with his other children, if he’d gotten arrested for dealing. And what was my mother thinking, getting my father into dealing coke when he was still on parole?”

  “She turned a blind eye to it,” he said.

  “Which reminds me of someone else,” I said. “How many blind eyes did I turn when it came to men—to Kareem, to you? I’ve been with liars ever since I started dating. I thought the only way to break the pattern was to find out where it came from.”

  “And you have,” he said.

  “We’ll see,” I said. I laughed.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Of all the things I could have been, John and Eleanor Mascia’s daughter had to be a journalist. Of all things.” Jeff laughed. He paid the bill.

  I DRAGGED MYSELF home and dropped like a sack of potatoes on my leather futon. I was ready to fall asleep right there when I spotted the contents of the cardboard box I’d rescued from my mother’s basement, which was still spread out on my living room floor. I decided I could either torture myself by picking through its remnants or watch The Daily Show and Colbert. I made it halfway to my bedroom before I turned around and headed back toward the living room, where I sat on the floor and flipped through the day planner I’d used in high school. My mother’s Mobil card was still inside, as was my first learner’s permit, a white piece of paper with just my vital information typed on it and no photo. I glanced at my high school diploma, various term papers, and all the other files I felt deserved preservation. What on earth would I ever need them for? After a few minutes my fingertips turned brown from the dust. I got up to wash my hands and spotted a VHS tape out of the corner of my eye. I knew what it was before I even picked it up and saw “Eleanor’s Childhood Movies” on the label in my father’s cursive. It was now or never. I tiptoed to my bedroom and slid the tape into my VCR, which I never used anymore, and there she was.

  Pigtailed, bespectacled, freckled—I could see them dotting her nose and cheeks through the grainy black-and-white haze—she waves to the camera from her spot on the grass before she returns to the magazine in her lap, which she studies contentedly as Arline dances for the camera behind her. “CAMP” had ignited the blackness before the movie began, and when I saw Vivian enter the frame I assumed that it was visiting day in the Catskills, circa 1940. My future grandmother is blond and perfectly coiffed, wearing dark lipstick even in the heat of summer, her enviable waist defined by high-waisted riding pants and her sparkling eyes concealed by Harold Lloyd–style sunglasses. She looks like a cross between Ginger Rogers and Gillian Anderson, and she is never without a thousand-watt smile. Strains of big-band music, added years later, accompany the silent action, and some scenes are so dark they hurt my eyes, almost as if they were filmed during a solar eclipse. When the camera pans to my grandfather Sam, he waves vigorously and smiles broadly. His torso is egg-shaped and his pants are halfway up to his armpits, but he has a certain rugged appeal, with his five o’clock shadow and dark brown hair. This must have been before he started drinking, because my mother was twelve when Vivian had her breakdown and she looks to be about six here. My great-grandmother Fanny, who my mother had dubbed “the Pit Bull,” lurks in the background in her full-length black schmatte, her stubby arms folded across her thick waist. Fanny really did look like a pit bull, with her straggly gray hair and scrunched-up face. She never bothered with her grandchildren, though she is seen sharing a giggle with a woman her own age.

  As boats full of little girls and their counselors make their way across the lake behind them, my mother runs up to Vivian, who pulls her closer so she can plant kisses all over her face. A jump-cut later, my mother and Arline are dancing in their matching white sailor outfits, their heads topped with white sailor hats. After they swing each other around, my mother plops down on the grass and reads aloud from a magazine or comic book, her mouth chewing each and every consonant and vowel. After that loses its excitement, she conducts an invisible orchestra while her mother looks on adoringly. Then suddenly my mother is swimming, her straight brown hair obscured by her bathing cap, and she waves excitedly from the water. She looks—dare I say it?—happy. She’s certainly giddy and hyperactive, as I was at that age, dipping in and out of the water in a state of undisturbed bliss. A moment later, as she climbs out of the lake, she becomes animated and lectures someone off-camera, straining with her whole body to punctuate her point. When she sees that she’s not getting her point across she waves her arm dismissively and abruptly turns away, and in that single moment I recognized my mother. She was a little know-it-all! I knew it! My arms and legs melted as I watched her happy face dancing before the lens, and as she blended with a gaggle of her nearly identical fellow campers I felt pride at always being able to pick her out of the crowd. There is something regal about her as she prances about in her blouse and skirt and saddle shoes—she was a princess of privilege, but a goofy, charming one.

  As the seasons fly by—winter flashes to summer, black-and-white to color, the years zigzagging back and forth through time because of the uneven editing—she sulks, she pouts, she dismisses, she glowers, and she becomes quite pleased with herself, all in the space of a minute. As an instrumental version of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” plays, the entire extended family—few of whom I recognize—gathers before the lens and waves, giving the impression that primitive movie cameras were used as little more than an extension of still photography. Arline is the only one who appreciates the medium’s potential, grasping every opportunity to exhibit her considerable dance moves, whereas my mother is only vaguely aware of the camera’s presence, preferring the company of a book or her mother’s arms. As she plants one peck after another on her mother’s lips in rapid succession, I saw a closeness I didn’t expect to find, an intimacy that seemed more like what she and I had. “We had anything and everything we wanted—except affection,” Arline had told me over the phone one night. But that must have come later, because here even her father seems warm, tossing my mother up to the sky the way my father tossed me and then pulling her in for a kiss. By the look on my mother’s face, I could tell that this was a little girl very much in love with her parents. Where was the unhappy family I’d heard so much about? Half a dozen years in the future, a time period I glimpsed when the tape skipped ahead to Rita’s infancy. Vivian looks tired as she holds her newest addition up to the camera, but in a flash Rita is three or four and attended to by Clotie, who looks to be about twenty. Clotie loads Rita onto a homemade toboggan and pushes her into a snowbank that put the Blizzard of ’96 to shame. A jump-cut later we’ve entered drier months, and my teenaged mother appears behind Rita, grabs her tiny hands, and swings them up and down.

  Watching how my mother doted on her baby sister, I got mad all over again at Rita’s betrayal. How could they do that to her? My mother, who put both my father and Rita to shame in every way—she was more intelligent, more cultured, more sophisticated than the both of them put together. For the first time I faced the hard fact that my mother might have been too good for my father. Did my mother ever imagine that the adorable little pudgepie bouncing around their home movies would grow up to sleep with her husband? But then, did my mother ever imagine as she was running around the Coney Island boardwalk or the grounds of the Arcadia Lake Hotel or Loch She
ldrake that her daughter would one day grow up to watch her after she’d gone, that this battered videocassette would be the only place left to find her? Did she ever imagine I’d be crying as hard as I was? Because I burst into tears as soon as I caught sight of her carefree pigtails. She is the child I could only hope to have, everything I imagined when I imagined being a mother. How I’d love to raise a charismatic, self-possessed yet sensitive bookworm. Seeing my mother as a child, in the shoes I was so used to inhabiting, turned my brain upside down. I cried until my face throbbed, and I slid quickly into bed so the pain didn’t migrate to my head.

  As I mercifully drifted into sleep my mind journeyed back to a day seven years before, during my final summer with my parents on Merle Place, when I was enjoying the last few minutes of a pre-dinner nap. The sun had set for the most part, and the last rays of light lingered in the blackening sky with all their stubborn futility. Laughter from the Albanian children playing catch in the sun-baked parking lot floated its way up to my ears, competing with the clash of pots and pans and my parents’ conversation in the kitchen. In those last moments before I groggily joined them at the dinner table, I’d felt a lightness, and some peace: Life was moving, the world was turning, and even though my father had less than a year to live, it was the last time I can remember when death was far enough away for me to be able to breathe.

  I was jarred back to my bed on 103rd Street by a truck clanging its way down Second Avenue. My reverie had been so real that leaving it unleashed another round of tears. It was the first time in months that I had given in to the ache. I might not have felt it every day, but the love was still there—so much love, rising to the surface, as though my parents were in the next room waiting to receive it. I hadn’t expected to feel that again. It was a nice surprise.

  CHAPTER 21

  August 2007