Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

by Jennifer Mascia

  But as darkness fell on the thirty-first I decided I was going up there anyway, and I was taking Jeff with me. We’d just spent Christmas together at his parents’ house in Staten Island and I wanted to return the favor on this, his final New Year’s Eve as a New Yorker. To my surprise I discovered that after thirty-five years of living here, he’d never once been in Times Square on December 31.

  “I have a plan,” I said. “I think I can access the roofbound elevators undetected from the twenty-eighth floor. But, you know, it’s iffy, so I can’t promise anything. Just be here by eleven.”

  Jeff showed up with a bottle of cava, lemon hummus, garlic parmesan pita crisps, and two bunches of fat red grapes. “You’re supposed to eat twelve grapes,” he instructed, “and make twelve wishes.”

  “What? Why?”

  “It’s a Cuban thing,” he explained. “You make a prayer for each grape.” I stuck one in my mouth. It had seeds. “Eat!” he said. “More! All of them!”

  I laughed and prayed he knew the Heimlich in case a grape lodged itself in my throat. In exactly two months and seven days, Jeff would be waving goodbye to me from the doorway of his parents’ house in Staten Island. This man, who had been a boy when we met, was the closest thing I had to a brother. My first friend in New York, he’d known me at eighteen, when I thought I knew everything but had seen nothing. He’d known my parents, played Tucker Carlson to my mother’s James Carville more than once, and most important, he’d been consigned with me to suburban hell in Staten Island, the forgotten borough, where the biggest attractions were a halfway decent mall and a garbage dump. On that night in March I’d also be saying goodbye to that place, as my only reason for returning would be flying off to London. I’d whip down Hylan Boulevard one final time and pass the turnoff to Staten Island University Hospital, reminding me of a week I’d like to put away forever. Then I’d hit the Verrazano and roll back the sunroof and turn up the radio and raise my hands into the wind and yell, “Goodbye, shithole!”—forever free of the place that had taken my parents.

  One by one I ate my dozen grapes and remembered all those nights I’d begged Jeff to drive me into “the city,” walking the Village and eating at the Around the Clock diner, finally returning home at dawn. My mother would rage because I had class that morning and she feared I was putting my education on the back burner. But Jeff was my education: He’d brought me out of my claustrophobic world each night and introduced me to Manhattan, a place I would go on to call my home. I might still live on Staten Island if it hadn’t been for him. He told me years later that I saved his life by forcing him to drive over the Verrazano and down the BQE and across the Brooklyn Bridge every night—the 3:00 A.M. ride home took us twelve minutes without traffic, we timed it—but the truth is that we saved each other. Now he had to follow his love across the Atlantic to a more progressive place than even New York, where two men who love each other can marry. And our lives would progress separately, joined only by phone calls and occasional transatlantic jumps, and, barring a legislative miracle, we’d never live on the same trajectory again.

  “When you say you have no family,” he’d tell me by phone from Newark Airport ten minutes before he boarded his plane, “just remember that I’m your brother.”

  But he hadn’t left for England yet, and here he was, standing beside me in the newsroom of the Paper of Record, demanding I fill my mouth with grapes.

  “Did you make your wishes?” he asked.

  I nodded, but I was fibbing. I didn’t believe in wishes.

  At twenty minutes to midnight, I gathered a motley crew of copy editors, page designers, web producers, and a stray news assistant, and we blazed a trail to the fifty-second floor. We could barely see where we were at first, as the lighting wasn’t yet installed, and the octagons that made up the floor were jagged, and stray bits lay scattered among the concrete. I followed the lights of Times Square, situated far below us. It was a hazy night but luckily it was just above freezing. I led the group to the northeast corner of the building and got as close to the railing as I could without throwing up.

  “Where’s the ball?” asked a voice behind me.

  “We can’t see it from here,” I reported again; it was the same lecture I’d given in the elevator.

  “Then what’s that?” Jeff asked, gesturing toward a hot pink dot in the distance below us. After a moment the dot turned blue, then blinding white. The ball was right in front of us.

  “Oh, my god!” I yelled. “I can’t believe it! It’s right there!” We had the best view in the city, and better yet, we didn’t have to contend with the drunks. At 11:59:50, the ball began to drop, and the crowd began to roar. Even from the fifty-second floor, and with all the wind that howled between us and the street, we could hear wave after wave of voices counting down. It was exciting and also reassuring. It sounded like life, messy and loud.

  JEFF AND I WAITED until 2:00 A.M. to venture into Times Square, knowing full well what awaited us when we got there. “Just think,” he said as we walked north on Broadway, “how different our lives were ten years ago.”

  I didn’t even have to think. I knew exactly where I was ten years ago: standing on the seventh-floor balcony of the apartment on New Lane and gazing upon lower Manhattan, glittering and intact. “You weren’t out of the closet,” I said, reminding him, “It’ll be ten years in March.”

  “You didn’t work at the Times,” he said.

  “I didn’t work at all then, did I?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said. “And I was at Starbucks. God, if I’d stayed I’d probably be corporate vice president by now.”

  “But you’d be in Seattle,” I pointed out, “and you wouldn’t have met Paul.”

  “True,” he said. “And our friendship wouldn’t have survived.”

  “Probably not,” I said. “Ten years ago I had parents.”

  “Just think how proud they would be to see where you are now,” he said. It was a sentiment that often inserted itself into our conversations. What would they think of my life now? I wasn’t inching along on training wheels anymore; this was it. No more practice—for better or worse, my life now was pretty much what it would be.

  “If it was ten years ago,” I said as we deftly dodged drunken tourists and multicolored clumps of confetti on Forty-seventh Street, “we’d be driving back to Staten Island.”

  “Yep,” he said. It had been my dream to live in Manhattan. I thought of the list of goals I’d made at Celie’s house that summer. I had achieved them, but I hadn’t been able to take my parents with me.

  By 2:30 we’d reached Central Park South with the intention of catching a cab. Rather, Jeff held out hope for a cab; I knew better. “Don’t you know New Year’s Eve is notorious for its unavailability of cabs?” I asked him as couples stumbled around us. “Fuck you!” a girl slumped on the sidewalk yelled at someone sitting in a car on Fifty-ninth Street. Her friend knelt down to tend to her as I turned to Jeff and smiled. “Remember the end of When Harry Met Sally?” I asked. “When Harry wants to get to the ball in time to see Sally but there are no cabs, so he has to sprint there?”

  He shook his head and shot me a goofy smile. “I don’t remember that part,” he said.

  “No?” I asked incredulously. It was one of my favorite films. “Well, this is it. I’m headed that way,” I said, pointing east.

  “Safe home,” he said as he started up Central Park West. After a few seconds he called out, “Text me when you get home!”

  “Will do!” I called back, but I wasn’t going home. I had an appointment with the water on this, the last and first night of the year, and after a half hour of brisk walking I was back at Carl Schurz Park. I realized that only a crazy person would venture into a desolate park to sit beside black water topped by thin sheets of fish-flavored ice. But I’d come here—to the little pier on Eighty-first Street where I felt most at peace—to tell my mother and father what I’d wanted to tell them in all the dreams I’d been dreaming since they left me.r />
  “I’ve heard you guys. I know you’re here.”

  I traced the waterfront with my footfalls and thought about the last several months. Behind each answer, another question had lain in wait. Even if the two of them had been standing before me right then I don’t know that I’d have gotten a straight answer. I certainly learned which mistakes of theirs I cared not to repeat. I want my children to know their witty, intelligent, flawed grandparents, even if it’s secondhand. But I also want them to know stability. I don’t want to keep anyone’s secrets. I don’t want to nurse anyone’s hangovers. I don’t want to go bankrupt. I don’t want my children’s father to be arrested in front of them. I can’t promise a perfect childhood for my children, but I can shoot for sanity, sobriety, and calm.

  But as my hair whipped in the wind, I couldn’t help but wonder if marriage and children would ever happen for me. I thought about my apartment and its single bedroom, and my nocturnal existence, and I wondered how long I could keep it up. I’d been living my life in my own bubble, parallel to everyone else, and I’d been doing it while most of the world was asleep. I preferred it to the alternative—fading into the grind with eight million others—but after all these years I can hear my mother’s voice, etched on my brain: “Jenny, why do you insist on living like a vampire?”

  While I may not rise at dawn, I have come to terms with the fact that the life I’m living is happier than hers was—than both of theirs. I am independent and relatively stable, and for that I can’t help but feel proud. But living on my own terms has its price: Every broken relationship is a reminder that I have that much further to go to be part of a family again. But I don’t want to sacrifice my identity for a man, either. My mother was my father’s emotional accomplice, if not his actual accomplice. Johnny provided her sense of self, in the same way that David had. She had followed David into teaching, even helped him build a school in which she never taught. No wonder she made such a smooth transition from college graduate to humanitarian to married man’s mistress to gun moll—she merged with these men. They gave her direction. And once she changed direction, she never looked back, especially after becoming the wife of a fugitive. Her time on the lam taught her to devalue the past, and never to leave her heart in 1978, or 1981, because accountability might be lurking there, hidden in the folds of time. But she must have sensed my appreciation for the past, my need to hold on to what had been, because she told me everything—the good, the bad, and the gory. Thank god for my mother’s big mouth.

  My parents, May 1986.

  Would they have sat me down, maybe one day when their hair was white, and explained it all? Would they have answered my questions? Would the passage of time have neutralized the gory details, producing a confession that we would sift through and learn from, cry over and eventually accept? I’d like to think so. Because that would have meant they were finally at peace with all this. My father ran from his crimes, physically and mentally; my mother ultimately confessed, but it didn’t come from a place of peace. And even her confessions were seasoned with mendacity: My father did not turn his life around for us, not completely. After his parole hearing, he carried on in California as he had in Florida and New York. But I know why she lied to me about this thing, this most important thing: She didn’t want me to hate him. She was so concerned I would grow up and learn the truth and develop a hard heart toward my dad, like she had toward hers, when Sam Sacks disappointed his family by morphing into a vicious drunk. She used to envy my relationship with my father, but in a good-natured way, genuinely happy that I had a dad who loved me to bits. So she lied to me, and tried to defuse my natural curiosity about him and his crimes, and prayed I would forget the times I’d visited him in jail because she wanted me to keep him in my heart, perhaps because she sensed very few people in his life kept him in theirs.

  And this is where I get a little angry. She should have trusted me a little bit more, a little bit sooner, and never should have told me that lie—that he changed his life for us—or the half-truths about his prison sentence, which I was forced go outside the family to correct. I know she omitted the whole truth to protect me, but protection, if never corrected, looks a lot like a lie. If she had been honest with me, she would have appreciated what I am feeling right now, after I’ve dug up nearly every secret they tried to bury: I could never hate my father. Each time I read his testimony, or whenever I imagine him isolated in the Tombs, painstakingly crafting writs of coram nobis, I love him even more. Whenever I imagine him nourishing his weaknesses with cocaine or scotch or extramarital affairs, my heart swells and I want to run into his arms—not yell and judge and slam a door. When I imagine him at his lowest is when I feel for him the most. I know he killed people, yes, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing I could meet him in the kitchen for our traditional 2:00 A.M. bowl of Frosted Flakes. If my mother had trusted me from the beginning with the whole truth, she would have been pleasantly surprised to learn that I am capable of loving my father while also understanding that he was capable of bad things.

  But she also lied because she was ashamed. Loving a reformed criminal provided enough cover for her to be accepted, even admired for her courage. But remaining married to a man she knew had killed after he was supposedly rehabilitated was just too much to ask anyone to swallow. One hasty mistake carried out in the ferocity of youth in a dark park at the foot of the Belt Parkway could be forgiven, but five more? Six? She knew her sisters, even her loyal ex-husband and her handful of lifelong friends, would be horrified, just as I was. I remembered those years after my father died, how it seemed that my belief in her was the only thing keeping her afloat, and I realized it had been. She didn’t want me to stop believing in her. Even though she shielded him, somewhere deep down she knew it was wrong.

  I sat on the steps of the grand staircase at Eighty-first Street and remembered how, after my father died, I’d perform arias to an audience of rippling currents, my voice soaked with grief. I was glad not to be back in that place, so lost after the horror of that first death. It was my mother who pulled me through, patiently letting me cry all night and question the justice of such a tragedy. I smiled bitterly at the thought. There are people who might think his death was just, and while I cried, “Horror! Tragedy!” my one confidante knew it, too. She was the person I loved the most and she lied to me. I suppose she cut me the deepest of anyone I’ve known, and yet, when I call up her betrayal, I feel nothing. And then I think: What was she supposed to tell a child? Bedtime stories starring kilos of cocaine and a .22? How could she have explained that the monster who lived in my closet was the very one who let me dip a finger in his scotch?

  A jogger whizzed past me down the steps. I stood up and leaned over the railing of the pier and closed my eyes, then opened them, fixating on the two or three visible stars over the Triborough. I briefly considered staying a few more hours so I could watch the sunrise, but decided that my vampire days needed to end sometime. I remembered calling my parents from a cab as I passed this very park in 2001 to wish them a happy New Year, my father’s last. I’d made sure to call precisely at midnight, and when they both picked up an extension I cried because I knew we should have all been together. I wished for that moment again, wished for it on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, knowing that any wish I make for them now will never be made with my whole heart because the odds are permanently stacked against its ever coming true.

  I reached into my bag and my fingers skimmed the Ziploc bag of Polaroids I kept with me. But I hadn’t come here to look at pictures. Before I left for work that afternoon I’d slipped the jar holding what was left of my parents ashes into my bag, praying all night that the top wouldn’t come off.

  And it hadn’t. I pulled it out and studied the pattern on the ceramic. “Crabtree & Evelyn, London” was printed underneath. For so long this jar had stayed in my mother’s linen closet. She didn’t put my father’s ashes on top of her baker’s rack like a trophy, so why should I? Letting them go wasn’t tantamount to losing
them. I had them, forever: in my mother’s breathless laugh, now mine; in my father’s silver hair, now sprouting virally along my scalp. My parents were my first memory—standing in my crib, I had watched as their slumbering figures rose and fell with each breath under their blue velour blanket. They could never be erased from my heart. I thought of all the places we’d lived, the life spent in each apartment, each house, the echoes that had bounced off the walls, now forever silenced. All that couldn’t be lost—how could it? I didn’t need their ashes now—I could carry our history with me. I studied my hands, which resembled my mother’s more every day, and understood that I was a part of them. I had been made from their flesh—I could be their memorial.

  I had to let them go.

  “I’ll never forget you,” I whispered to the river as I reached back and threw the whole jar into the black carpet of water. I did it this way so the wind couldn’t blow whatever remained of my parents onto someone’s windshield as they drove along the FDR below—a new kind of New York nightmare. It hurt, sure, but only for a second. I hadn’t lost them—I was releasing them. The tears ran silently down my face, and I didn’t try to stop them. I thought of what my father told me and my mother when he was diagnosed: “I’m not scared of dying. I just want to see my parents again.” If I knew that my parents were awaiting me when this life was through, maybe I wouldn’t be so scared of death.

  It’s funny—I thought I’d be much angrier at Johnny and Eleanor: for their crimes, for their denials, for the veneer of deceit they’d laid over my life. When I talk about it with the people closest to me now, they each have a different take. Ji Young still thinks my parents were the coolest pair to come down the pike, and still thinks my father is hot, no matter what he did. Jeff believes that my father had to feed his family one way or another, and even if his income had a body count attached he should be lauded as a working-class hero. Sarah shakes her head and wonders how I don’t have a needle sticking out of my arm.