The night before, when Angie and Frankie had attended Christmas Eve Mass, the church was packed, and Frankie found himself looking from face to face until he realized that he was hoping to spot his grandmother sitting in one of the pews, mumbling her prayers and ignoring the priests.
Gennaro slid his hands under Frankie’s open jacket and drew him close. “Now for the Christmas gift I was telling you about,” he said. He kissed Frankie long, hard, and slow in front of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; in front of the Virgin Mary; in front of a host of angels, saints, shepherds, the Magi, and beasts of burden.
“Notice anything, Francesco?”
“You mean aside from the fact that a crazy person just kissed me in a church?”
“No ... I mean that I kissed you, and the church is still standing. Five months ago, a jackass squirted lighting fluid into a fire, blew up the can he was holding, and thought that he was being punished for loving you.”
Frankie recalled the explosion and remembered pleading with God for Gennaro to live and promised to change how he felt about Gennaro. He had no idea that Gennaro was feeling the same conflicts. So much time wasted, Frankie thought.
“God didn’t punish me for loving you, Frankie. I punished myself,” Gennaro said. “Don’t expect too much from me; you’ll be disappointed, but I love you. I do.”
Frankie stepped back just a little so he could look into Gennaro’s eyes. “Do you know what you just said next to an altar in church?”
“I do,” Gennaro said. “Guess it’s permanent now.” They both laughed.
Frankie felt the cool of the Saint Francis medal against his chest. He pointed towards the far end of the nave. “There’s a statue of Saint Francis over there. I spent hours in front of that statue praying for you after the explosion.” He touched the medal through his shirt. “Funny that you bought me this.”
Again, Gennaro drew Frankie close. They embraced and Frankie closed his eyes. He felt the stubble on Gennaro’s cheek and the rise of their desire. Their breaths coalesced — one body, one blood.
“What about Rodriguez?” Frankie said.
“What about him,” Gennaro said. “I’m beginning to get what you like about this place.”
Shouting came from the sacristy — a mix of English and Spanish. Rodriguez’s voice, but the second voice was unfamiliar, younger, higher, but also with a heavy accent. The tone of each word became shriller, until it was punctuated by the sound of a gunshot, then silence.
Frankie tried to speak, but Gennaro pressed the palm of his hand against Frankie’s mouth. Over Gennaro’s shoulder, Frankie saw someone enter the church through the door from the sacristy. It was the boy from the convenience store, the one who stared at Gennaro, and like the Dickens Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, he pointed a shadowy, accusatory finger, but the finger glinted dark and ominous, and as Frankie struggled to scream “No!” more gunshots rang out like death knells, and Gennaro slumped against him, his fingers like vices tearing into Frankie’s shoulders. Two more gunshots, and Frankie felt a sharp burning in his neck and thigh. Gennaro’s grip loosened. His body peeled away from Frankie like a shedding skin, and the surrounding icons looked on in mournful horror — their necks twisted, lips contorted, and eyes glistening with tears.
“Noooo ...” A primal scream vibrated in Frankie’s throat and echoed through the Basilica, until he lost his breath and his knees crashed onto the marble floor. “You can’t do this,” he screamed. “What kind of a monster are you?”
Blood, a deeper red and more precious than the wounds and stigmata painted on plaster statues, rushed from Gennaro’s quivering body. Frankie collapsed onto him, embraced him, and cupped his hands beneath Gennaro to stem the blood’s flow.
“Don’t go.” Frankie’s voice grew small, barely audible. “Please don’t go. This isn’t real.” The pain in his thigh and neck clouded his thoughts, but he managed to press his blood-drenched palms against Gennaro’s back. Gennaro’s life oozed through Frankie’s fingers. “Don’t go. Please don’t leave me ... Please ... please ... plea ...” Frankie mouthed, until he lost consciousness.
21
“Are you Mr. Lasante?”
Not fully awake, Lenny shivered at the cold and asked the young police officer to step inside. He wondered if this was about Big Vinny’s bribe money, and expected to hear, You have the right to remain silent, but instead the officer, looking more like a boy in a Halloween costume than a real police officer, cleared his throat, removed his cap, and asked: “Are you Frankie Lasante’s father?” After he said that there had been a shooting at Most Precious Blood and explained what the police discovered when they entered the church, Lenny stepped back and stumbled over the mother bear and her cubs, and Angie grabbed his arm.
With one hand Angie clutched at her chenille robe, and with the other she held onto Lenny as he tried to balance himself. Had Big Vinny been in the room, Lenny might have killed him. He didn’t know how, but he was sure that this horror was connected to Big Vinny — a vendetta. Angie’s grip was the anchor that moored Lenny and kept him from telling the young officer that the real killer lived down the block.
Angie quickly changed out of her nightclothes and the young officer drove them to the hospital where they learned that, when the police had arrived at Most Precious Blood, it was too late for Mr. Rodriguez and Gennaro, but Frankie, though unconscious, was alive. Had Mrs. Rodriguez not called the police when her husband didn’t answer his cellphone, Frankie would have bled to death.
He was in surgery having two bullets removed, one in his neck, just missing the carotid artery and one in his thigh. A plain-clothes officer questioned Lenny, but Lenny shook so violently that she called a nurse. After a shot of Valium, he was at least able to tell the officer that he had no idea why anyone would harm Gennaro or Frankie, but the officer persisted, including questions about Big Vinny, Michael, and Jimmy, and all of Lenny’s answers were some version of sorry all I know is what was in the paper or on television. The next morning the police learned all they needed to know, or at least most of it. The convenience store proprietor saw the news on television and called the police about a teenager who on Christmas night had asked him if one of the boys he saw leaving the store was a DiCico. The police arrested the teenager who turned out to be the murdered cabdriver’s son.
Several hours after surgery, as the dark hospital windows faded to a pale lavender, Frankie lay in bed semiconscious, Angie and Lenny sat next to him staring at multiple monitors and machines with blinking lights, and Lenny received a text message from Vi: Just heard the news on the radio. This is terrible. I will do whatever you want me to do.
Too late for that, Lenny thought and slipped his cellphone back into his pocket without mentioning the text to Angie. But throughout the day, Vi continued to text and left voicemails until Lenny finally responded and agreed to meet her for coffee in the hospital cafeteria. His only stipulation was that they wait until Frankie’s condition stabilized. For several days Frankie slipped in and out of consciousness, and Lenny left his bedside only to use the toilet and shower. Lenny’s sisters and brother brought food, which he barely touched. They offered to stay with Frankie while Lenny went home to rest, but he refused.
Angie made an appearance at Gennaro’s wake, standing for hours in the line of mourners, which meandered at a snail’s pace through Romano’s Funeral Home. The mourners wept, and some said that Gennaro looked like a sleeping Prince Charming. The old timers compared him to Valentino. Big Vinny, Marie, and Lena were inconsolable, especially when four police officers escorted Michael and Jimmy into the funeral parlor in orange prison garb and their ankles and wrists shackled.
Angie apologized for Lenny’s absence, explaining that he wouldn’t leave Frankie while his condition was still serious. Marie said she understood. At the High Funeral Mass, Gennaro’s casket, ebony with enough gilt to rival a pharaoh’s sarcophagus, lay only a few feet from where he had died. The church was more crowded than it had been on Christmas Eve. P
eople stood around the parameter of the nave and poured out into the vestibules.
As Angie explained the details of Gennaro’s wake and funeral to Lenny, he felt some compassion, but mostly rage for the DiCicos, especially for Big Vinny. The same rage he had felt when the detectives questioned him on and off for hours about possible suspects and motives. What could he have told them? That years ago his grandfather should never have welcomed a DiCico into his home; that after his father died he should have left — if not for college then for anywhere far from 104th Street; that he should have followed Vi to California. Or should he have told them that knowing the DiCicos meant you would do things you would otherwise never do, like give an envelope stuffed with cash to a stranger in a train station or get shot in a church on Christmas night?
22
Fleeting images — of machines and wires; of family members, especially Lenny; of strangers wearing white or pastel colored jackets, their expressions doleful and frozen like cemetery statuary — appeared then vanished. But for the most part, Frankie floated on dreamlike waves, euphoric images of times and places distant, where shepherds, fishermen, artisans, and water bearers posed against a backdrop of sea cliffs and idyllic beaches that gave way to the Ionian Sea.
Gennaro, with dirt-encrusted fingernails, tattered dress, and a mane of curls as wild as medusa’s, stood before the crumbling Greek theater and smoking Mount Etna. He took Frankie’s hand. Their hands were chafed and calloused. They led a donkey along rocky cliffs and down a dirt road, where they paused and shot stones from the precipice. Above them were buildings thirsting for whitewash and stacked like children’s blocks, precariously clinging to a lush, sun-bathed mountainside. One tremble and they’d come tumbling down.
They resumed their walk until they came upon a fork in the road and bore left, away from the cliffs and down a steep slope where they entered the shade of a citrus grove, thick with the heady fragrance of lemon and orange blossoms.
Gennaro tethered the donkey to a tree and removed a burlap sack from the donkey’s back. On the earth beneath wizened limbs, Gennaro spread a modest feast of bread, cheese, olives, and a bottle of wine. They leaned against the trunk of a lemon tree, their shoulders kissed, and they ate, drank, and spoke in soft fatalistic intonations: Do this in memory of me. In this faraway place, to the distant, mythical sound of Pan’s flute, Gennaro’s tattered rags fell away, exposing scars and bruises and his glistening bronze.
There were many dreams like this one, but there were also nightmares — a speeding taxicab, fire works gone mad, Big Vinny cradling Gennaro’s limp body, gargoyles spiriting Gennaro out of Big Vinny’s arms and dropping him onto a bloodied altar.
On the third day, Frankie’s dreams and nightmares ebbed long enough for him to learn of what had happened on Christmas night.
“And Gennaro?” Frankie asked, but Lenny’s expression was all the answer that he needed, and gagging on his own tears, he returned to the salty tranquility of the Ionian Sea.
Medications were decreased, and Frankie’s flashbacks of what had happened Christmas night increased. Gennaro’s gasping for air, his eyes unfocused and shifting up away from Frankie, his lips contorted. Frankie’s own screams filled his ears, and he didn’t know if they were memories of Christmas night or if he were in fact screaming, but it didn’t matter. No one heard him. They propped his pillows, washed him, and fed him as if he were to recover, though recovering was the last thing that Frankie wanted.
23
It was New Year’s Eve when Vi and Lenny finally met in the crowded and noisy hospital cafeteria — the same hospital where they were last together almost 18 years ago. Lenny raised his hand, but didn’t wave — just held it above his head, fingers cupped, like a child trying to get his teacher’s attention without the other students noticing. She smiled and approached the table. She was thinner and her style more sophisticated than when they had first met.
It was an unremarkable reunion, and Lenny believed it would prove to be pointless, as if the abyss between then and now — the girl Vi and the woman and the Lenny before being awakened by a police officer and Lenny now — was insurmountable. Lenny remembered their lovemaking, but he couldn’t feel it. He felt nothing.
“Hello,” she said.
Simple enough, and Lenny responded in kind, stood, and pulled a chair from the table for her to take a seat. No hug. No handshake. He just stood, with his hand clutching the back of the hard, plastic chair.
“Thank you,” she said. She sat erect, placed her purse on the table, crossed her legs, and rested her hands on her lap with her fingers laced together. She was no longer Lenny’s uninhibited Carmen, but what difference did that make.
“I was glad when you called me this morning. Glad to hear that Frankie’s condition is stable and that the doctors are so optimistic.”
Listening to Vi, Lenny recalled something Frankie had once said years ago while watching the movie Peter Pan on television. “Too bad Wendy had to grow up.”
Now Lenny felt as if he were Peter Pan, and he resented Vi. Not so much for leaving him or for leaving Frankie, but for moving on with her life. She reminded him of his childhood friends who stopped in the store whenever they visited the old neighborhood. In her eyes, like in theirs, he saw pity and the tone of her voice sounded patronizing.
“He’s still on a lot of pain medication,” Lenny said. “Mostly he sleeps. When he’s awake he cries. He knows Gennaro’s dead. I wanted to wait to tell him, but he kept asking.”
Vi pulled her chair closer to the table and took Lenny’s hand. She seemed smug, and he wanted to smack her. “Hopefully the pain medication is also dulling the emotional pain, but time’s the ultimate healer, Lenny.”
Really, he thought, you’re going to lecture me about time and healing. He looked at her hand — the small softness barely covered the spread of his knuckles. They might have been any parents waiting and worrying about their son’s recovery, but they weren’t, and Lenny pulled his hand away, slipped it into his pocket, and glanced around the cafeteria. There was something macabre about the white jackets, stethoscopes, and Happy New Year party hats. He drank the last of his coffee and met Vi’s eyes — Frankie’s eyes. “Maybe I’ll get another coffee. Can I get you something?”
“No thank you.” She smiled.
“Yes, I guess you’re right. I mean I’ve also had enough,” he said. Lenny clinched his fists and then stretched out his fingers. “All this caffeine is making me jumpy.”
“I read that the police have a suspect in custody,” Vi said.
“Yes. Yes, they do. They showed Frankie the mug shot. He was able to identify him.”
“I’m sure that was difficult.”
Lenny didn’t respond.
“So what do we do now?”
She sounded sensible. What do we do? There’s no “we” making decisions here, Lenny thought, but he just stared at her until his brow felt tight.
“I mean, should you tell Frankie that I’m here? Should I visit him? Might this be too much for him, especially considering what he’s going through? Do you think he wants to see me?”
“He has your eyes,” Lenny said.
Vi blushed.
“And your thing for religion,” Lenny added. “I mean, given some of the courses you teach.” He smiled, but his cheek gave a subversive twitch.
Vi also smiled. She was still very pretty. No bangles and bells or flowing skirts, and no longer coquettish, but still very pretty.
“I’ll explain the situation to the doctor and get her advice.”
“One more thing, Lenny.” Vi paused and folded her fingers as if she were about to recite here’s the church, here’s the steeple ... She took a slow, deep breath. “You see ... I have a child.”
You mean another child, Lenny thought. He wasn’t surprised. In fact, he had assumed that Vi might have remarried and had a family even though her surname was still the same. However, she didn’t mention anything about a husband, and Lenny didn’t ask.
&n
bsp; “A little girl,” Vi said.
“How old is she?”
Vi fished through her bag and took out a wallet. She opened it and handed it to Lenny. “Just turned seven,”
The chubby little girl in the photo more closely resembled the Vi who once shopped in Lasante’s than the staid academic who sat across from Lenny now.
“So you’re not upset?” Vi asked, but there was no short answer to this question. “After I finished my Ph.D., I thought to contact you, to see if in some small way I could be a part of Frankie’s life, but then I thought better of it. I didn’t know what to do so I didn’t do anything.”
Lenny heard little after Ph.D. Instead, he wondered if having a sister might be of some small consolation to Frankie, like a window opening after a door had shut. “What’s her name?” Lenny returned Vi’s wallet.
“Oh ... Ina, after my mother.”
“Your mother?” Vi had never spoken to Lenny of family except to say that her parents had died and that other relatives lived in Lithuania. That had been her excuse for not inviting her family to their wedding.
“Ina’s at my parents’ apartment now in Rego Park. It’s where we spent Christmas.”
“I thought your parents were dead.”
Vi shook her head. “Is that what I told you? We were estranged for years. In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, I was a bit of a mess back then.”
Lenny’s attention shifted to the noisy cafeteria, the cacophony of chairs scraping on tile, competing conversations, plastic trays hitting metal tables. All these years, Frankie had grandparents who lived about a dozen miles away, and Vi visited them regularly with Frankie’s sister. They probably didn’t know about him. This was too much for Lenny to absorb. He was startled by the sound of a toy noisemaker and noticed a woman scolding a child. “I should get back to Frankie.”
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