“What does that mean for me?” I asked. “Obviously I have this pattern with men, which I am trying to break, but other than that … What I’m trying to ask is, did they fuck me for life here?”
He laughed. “Look, you can stop any behavior known to mankind. But, honestly, I would advise that you shouldn’t ever really drink or do drugs, because you know where that led your father. I would also suggest that you have some therapy intermittently throughout your life, to recognize the patterns and stop them before they have a chance to take root.”
I nodded, thanked Dr. B., let myself out of his office, and almost walked into a wall on my way to the waiting room. I hit the street, which was steamy with the humidity that signaled a coming storm. I was tired, drained, and changed. I had never realized just how much I had going against me until I sat down on Dr. B.’s black leather couch. I knew it was going to sink in on the train ride back to Manhattan, and I had a decision to make: cry now, or save it for when I got home.
My tears made the decision for me. I wiped away eyeliner-tinted sobs as I sat hunched over on the 4 train, listening to my iPod. It was her I couldn’t stop thinking about, how she’d put herself in lockstep with a killer and stayed there, never questioning him or his crimes, even in the privacy of her own head. Just as easily as she’d told her father to “fuck off” as he terrorized and rejected her, so she effortlessly slipped into my father’s orbit, and together the two of them taught me that love meant saving damaged men from their own self-destructive tendencies.
My father always existed on the margins of society, in a little lawless niche he had carved out for himself, but he was no Ted Bundy—he wasn’t even Sammy the Bull. I knew him not to be someone who was indifferent to the pain of others, because I saw how the death of his parents had moved him, and how he’d shed tears when I ran and hid in the parking garage for four hours, or after my mother’s heart attack. I’d seen him moved by the plight of others. Perhaps he started out indifferent, but he didn’t stay that way. Maybe before he killed Joe Vitale he did “see people as obstacles to be eliminated,” in the words of Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist whose studies I researched online, but he didn’t treat my mother that way, and he didn’t treat me that way. At one time murder was an option for settling disputes, but over time his tempestuous reactions became muted. I remembered the way he was with me, and there was love there. We were attached to each other, even if we often had little to say to each other. The tears he shed the day I left home, the way he gave himself over to his sobs, that was real. I believe my father had a heart and a conscience when it came to his family.
But I couldn’t deny the fact that at one time in his life, he treated outsiders with less regard, including sometimes his own children. They never understood the way he could disappear and reappear with little explanation, and he never shared his anguish with us over the decisions he made—or simply didn’t make—regarding his older children. “I just don’t understand,” my mother would admit to me, baffled, when I brought it up, like the time I found Angie’s letter. She didn’t get it either, and when she mentioned it to my father—delicately, gingerly, so as not to piss him off—he would say, “Eleanor, mind your own fucking business. They are my blood, and you are not my blood.” In fact, he’d use this refrain often whenever he deflected one of her arguments. “You are not my blood. My daughter is my blood”—here he’d gesture to me, dying of embarrassment over my plate of chicken wings—“but you aren’t.” It was very antiquated, this obsession with blood, this paranoia regarding outside interference.
“Jen, don’t let the opinion of one expert negate the relationship you had with your parents,” Ji Young said after I dialed her number with shaking fingers. “There was a lot of love there. I remember your dad! He was so sweet, and he loved you guys so much.”
“Maybe he softened with age,” I said, testing out this new theory. “He was older when you knew him.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But psychologists like to put people in categories, and people are way more complex than that.”
“I know,” I said wearily, “but what he said about my father—it’s all true. Sure, there’s more to the story, but he did kill people. He did manipulate my aunt into sleeping with him. He did foster a cultlike atmosphere, making my mother his only confidante and trying to hide everything from me and expecting I wouldn’t tell. I know there was love there, but there was also this.”
“But that’s not the whole story,” she insisted. “I don’t want you to get upset and regret your whole childhood.” She was right. Because that was exactly what I was doing. Like when I had come home from my appointment with Dr. B. ready to climb into bed and take a nap before work, but instead found myself surrounded by pictures of them—the happy couple—and of the three of us together: sick, sicker, and sickest. I couldn’t escape the photographs, and they were everywhere: on my living room windowsill, the baker’s rack, nailed to my walls. My Museum of Grief, which I’d proudly erected to mourn my lost love, had suddenly become confining. Maybe it was time to dismantle it. I certainly felt like smashing the framed photos as soon as I entered my humid apartment, where the air never moves, even when it’s 20 degrees outside. Jesus, I carried pictures of them with me; it was her wedding ring I had chosen to wear around my neck, the symbol of their union. Their sick, “pathological” union, or so said Dr. B.
I finally truly understood how my twisted relationships were a direct outgrowth of my life with my parents. Of course, “Shut the fuck up, Eleanor” and “Oh, Johnny, go fuck yourself” were practically the theme music to my childhood, but it ran deeper than that. My household had been pervaded by sickness—no, conceived in it. I knew what they’d say to me as I cried openly on the 4 train that day, for once not caring who saw me: “What are you crying for? Our relationship is none of your goddamn business.” But I recognized the limits of that argument, and I saw that I had surpassed them. And for the first time, I actually believed it.
CHAPTER 22
August 2007
• • •
THE SUN WAS HIGH IN THE SKY AS I SAILED DOWN THE SOUTHERN State Parkway. As I fiddled with the radio I floated back to that first summer at Cecilia Cassese’s house and remembered how it felt to be perched between one life and another, with no clue how it would all turn out. From where I stood now, I was pleased with the results—excepting the obvious—but it made me more aware of the fact that at seventeen, when I was pinned by my own summer sweat to Celie’s couch, I was just floating in the ether, directionless. That earlier version of myself very much interested me as I pulled onto Celie’s street with tears in my eyes; that person was still a relic of her parents’ world, a world I’d fooled myself into thinking I’d left behind. I might live in “the city,” and I might have my master’s degree, but that girl was still alive inside me, and it took returning to Lockwood Avenue to figure that out.
I cradled my shopping bag—which contained a bottle of red, a bottle of white, and rugelach for dessert—climbed up the darkened staircase that ran along the side of the house, and knocked on Celie’s door.
“Come in,” came her muffled reply. She’d been expecting me. I opened the door and within seconds Celie was in my arms, and we were both crying.
“Oh, Celie,” I said.
“Jenny, Jenny, Jenny,” she said, sniffling. I pulled away and beheld a plumper Celie with a pin-straight bob, a bit more Angie Dickinson than Ellen Barkin now. But her blue eyes still shone with the same openhearted tenderness. As she took my bag and walked over to the counter I studied her apartment, which was more homey than it had been thirteen years ago: Her TV rested in an oak entertainment center filled with wineglasses and champagne flutes; a white hand-painted sign that read NANA’S HOUSE hung over the small dining room table; she’d installed carpeting.
“Oh, my God,” she said, examining my face. “You look so much like your father from here down,” she said, tracing a line in the air from my nose to my chin, “and your mother from here up.
”
“A perfect hybrid,” I said. “And, just like Dad, I have some grays,” I said, pointing to the front of my head, where doll-like white strands had sprouted. I needed to get my roots done, badly. “Celie, I am so thankful you agreed to talk to me. I mean, this isn’t something we’re supposed to talk about. I’m surprised, actually.”
“Oh, I don’t mind, but like I said, I just hope I remember everything,” she said as she made her way to the kitchen. “Listen, I have chicken and I have pasta because I wasn’t sure which you’d prefer.”
“Oh, pasta’s fine,” I said, even though I was far from hungry. “How is Carmine doing?”
“Oh, Jenny, he’s doing okay,” she said. “Like I said on the phone, it’s so hard having this cloud hanging over my head. I just wish he’d be sentenced already.”
“Is it true he’s a made guy, Celie?” I’d rehearsed this line in my head many times, but saying it was easier than I’d expected.
“Jennifer, I couldn’t even tell you,” she said as she fiddled with the pilot light on the stove. “You know, I told Carmine, you wanna live this life, fine.” She returned to her seat at the table. “But you have a child now. This is no life for a child.” Tears sprang to her eyes.
“I can relate to that,” I said.
“But your father, he was always a gentleman,” she said, pausing after “always” for emphasis. “So respectful, so dapper.”
“He really was,” I said. It was true: To my father, everyone was “dear” or “sweetheart,” even strangers, and not in a pervy way.
“I was on the stoop downstairs waiting for you before, and my brother-in-law came out and said, ‘They stopped making men like her father.’ Your father went away for something where he could have gotten off, all he had to do was talk, but instead he did over thirteen years!”
“They wanted him to talk, but he refused,” I said.
“Of course he refused,” she said passionately. “It never would have occurred to him.” Her words wrapped around me like a blanket. I couldn’t tell if it was her familiar accent or the syllables that could have just as easily come from my father’s mouth, but Celie felt like home.
“And I hate to say it,” she continued, “but I said to Carmine, ‘You can’t have two families. You’ve got to protect the one that you’re in, this one’”—meaning the mob—“‘or you have to protect your own family. You have a child.’ It’s a very hard decision. For him. Not for me. I think he’s made the wrong decision,” she said, and choked up again.
“Aw, god, Celie,” I said. She was such a kindhearted woman, always. My heart leapt across the table toward her.
Celie cleared her throat. “I’m a little tired of it, so if I sound a little bitter …”
“No, I understand,” I said. She began eating her salad, so I followed suit, picking at the fresh romaine.
“It’s only because today, in this day and age, I don’t even talk to anybody who’s affiliated like that, or who’s ‘in the mob.’ I can’t even look at them.”
I nodded. “What did you think about the fact that my mother, of all people, got mixed up with my father?” I asked.
“We were all shocked!” she said. “We used to laugh about it—your father, me, and my husband. She would laugh about it, too. I think she liked the … oh, what word am I looking for?”
“The excitement?” I ventured.
“The excitement,” Celie said. “Trying to outsmart them. You know, like, us against them. In those days it wasn’t so cutthroat.”
“She told me how they met, too,” I said.
Celie emitted a brief chuckle. “You see, I only met your dad when my husband went away.”
“Sing Sing?”
“Sing Sing,” she replied. “That’s how Vinny and Johnny met. They were only together a few months there. I think your dad got in touch with my husband when he came home, and your father and my husband decided to sell pot together. And, of course, they weren’t selling a pound, they were selling tons.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Oh, they had boats coming in,” she said with a knowing look.
“I’m glad it was pot and not, like, heroin,” I said.
“Nope, it was pot,” she said, toying with her penne. “They had someone in Miami that they knew and they used to make these arrangements for the pot to come in, and I can’t tell you how many times the rudder on the boat was broken,” she said, drawing a circle in the air with her finger, “or the boat was going around in circles, all that.” I could just imagine these New York guys, never been camping in their lives, fancying themselves masters of the high seas, all in the name of marijuana. The Good Ship Lollipot.
“How long did they do that for?” I asked. “Couple years?”
“Oh, they had quite a run,” she said. “They really did. They had a good run.”
“Where did it come in?” I asked. “One of the piers in Chelsea or something?”
“No,” she said through a mouthful of pasta. “It came in from Miami.”
“Oh,” I said, realizing that this was what my mother had described, the bales of marijuana floating in the Intracoastal.
“And then they would send cars to get it,” she said. “They started out small at first, each shipment was, like, barrel-sized. Your mother had it in her closet.”
“My mother?” I asked, laughing.
Celie nodded and started laughing. “In her apartment. They started having problems with the smell, and the people downstairs started to complain. So they had to move it.”
“And my mother just went along with this?” I asked, still mildly surprised despite all I’d learned.
“Yeah. So they moved it to my place. And again, the odor,” she said, rolling her eyes. I had to laugh. My father and mother running a “grassroots” marijuana operation? It was official: I was pot royalty. I’d never feel guilty about smoking the stuff again.
“When your father got arrested that time,” she said, “my husband told your mother, ‘You go to court tomorrow and go to the bail bondsman and you cry,” she said. “You be an actress and you cry.”
“She brought me in, I was in my stroller,” I said.
“She did,” Celie said. “And she got him out,” we said in sync.
“’Cause they shouldn’t have,” Celie said. “They got him out before the warrant fell. And that’s when yous took off.”
“It was a week later, right?”
“A couple days later,” she corrected. “And your father went to North Carolina, and your mother had to fly back up here to get some extra money. I think I had to give her money and she was gonna give me this pot. I guess we were more involved than I ever remembered,” she said with a shrug. “I had to meet your mother in Manhattan, and she called me, I think she was at the Ritz, and she’d ordered oysters Rockefeller …” Celie’s laughter ate up the rest of her words.
“Typical,” I said.
“That’s what I thought! I said, ‘You’re where?’” Celie said.
“She always did have expensive taste,” I said. “Hey, when we were living in Texas, my father was kind of straight, though, right? What was our name then? Was it Angelo? Because I found that name in the FBI record, and I was, like, what’s Angelo? Another alias? I know we used your name.” My father’s FBI record, which I’d obtained through a Freedom of Information request—thanks, Bush administration!—also informed me that we had bounty hunters on our tail for years. And there was this nugget, from a report issued right as they were closing in on us: “Subject and wife have a child, JENNIFER NICOLE MASCIA, white female, approximately 3–4 years old. Subject is reportedly most attentive towards this child.” As soon as I read that I began hyperventilating tears again—our closeness was so obvious that the Department of Justice couldn’t help but notice it.
“I think that’s when he started to use ‘Frank Cassese,’” Celie said. “Frank after his father, along with our last name.” We ate pasta and filled in the blanks for each other, since we kn
ew different halves of the same history. She said she never saw my father use drugs, and hadn’t pegged him for an addict, but she had heard that he occasionally used, thanks to her other son, who’d served on the same paint crew. She was also shocked that my mother didn’t know Rita used drugs—“I knew Rita used,” she said—and when we got to her affair with my father, Celie was adamant.
“Oh, Jenny, I know he loved your mother,” Celie said apologetically. “But when I heard about Rita, I was shocked. That’s a horrible, horrible thing Rita did. And your dad was wrong for doing that, too. Very, very wrong. You don’t come between sisters like that. And then, as a sister, you don’t betray your sister.”
It was like the voice of reason washing over me. Celie, who sprang from the same milieu as my father, was advocating for my mother, acknowledging her betrayal. I wish my mother could have heard her words. “But I always felt like Rita wanted what your mother had,” she went on, “and your mother wanted what Rita had. She loved the way Rita dressed, she thought Rita was the most stylish, the funniest—she just loved Rita’s whole life. She wanted to be her.”
“She thought Rita was the pretty one, but my mother was so beautiful,” I said.
“She was,” Celie agreed, and I saw the sadness in the situation: My mother had chosen the wrong person to emulate. Her values were lopsided. My mother putting Rita on a pedestal was like Meryl Streep emulating Shannon Tweed.
“Listen, can I ask you about something?” I said, deciding to go full throttle.
“Sure,” she said, clearing the table. “Go ahead, whatever you wanna ask.”
“Right after that mini-stroke, my mother told me that before we went on the lam, when my father was in Florida dealing drugs, in the course of his work, you know, he, uh, he killed some guys,” I said, dropping an octave. “People who had double-crossed him, or whatever. She told me that one of them was a hit ordered by some mob guys that was carried out in order to save Vinny’s life.”
Never Tell Our Business to Strangers Page 42