The sky, if I were to step from under the tent and look up, is full of stars. The dark ocean, even, is lit up tonight, because my mother-in-law has thought of everything—has tucked lights into the foliage along the dunes. The night is all twinkles and light and sparkle. The tinkling of crystal, trickles of laughter, silver clinking on porcelain. Seashells carefully picked, artfully scattered on the tables. Off-duty policemen stand in the shadows along the path to the beach. Music floats out and drops on the waves like bubbles. The ocean slaps onto the sand, like faint applause, behind me.
The Polish prince and the small-town, working-class girl. This is the moment when my worlds collide—Kingston, Suffern, American royalty, my ABC News career. This is the crossroads. Everyone raises a glass to futures, beginnings.
My uncle Benny has one arm around the senator, the other stretched out in front of them holding a camera. My mother is talking to the news anchor, my father having a cigarette behind the bar. John poses patiently with two of my cousins. Uncle Jimmy is laughing with the movie director at something one of them has said.
Anthony’s stepfather, Herbert, is elegant in his classic navy suit, sipping champagne from fluted crystal. His gaze is fixed on my mother-in-law, in pale green Armani and white gloves, her light-brown hair brushed back to frame an extraordinary, elegant face.
My uncle Freddy and aunt Marsha are seated next to the Rutherfords of Newport. Marsha is animated, her laugh carries over the music, the Rutherfords quiet. Buddy is here, too—Governor Roemer when I met him in Baton Rouge on a story. “So happy for you,” he whispered to me earlier in the night. He is here with someone, a friend, and I know it’s likely we won’t see each other again. There’s no reason for our paths to cross. I have his letters piled neatly, tied together with string.
Tony, my cousin’s boyfriend, watches everything closely, drinking a beer. He’ll call a popular radio station tomorrow to report the celebrity sightings here in his rough Yonkers accent. They won’t believe he was a guest until he gives them enough detail, describes what Melanie Griffith was wearing. The DJ will make crude jokes about the bride; he’ll call me a gold digger.
I have the vantage point of Fortune. Standing in the middle of this, I now know how it all turns out. There will be love and loss and luck and fate—the tent is lousy with it.
Bobby Muller in his wheelchair is getting a drink from the bar. Six months earlier we crossed the Mekong River on a rickety wooden ferry, heading to the medical clinic he built in Cambodia to make prosthetic limbs for land mine victims. I’ll win an Emmy next year for the story and call him from the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel with the news.
Our friend Judd holds a crowd rapt in the corner with his repertoire of stories from the road. He pulls them out like aces from a deck of cards. He’ll die of a brain tumor soon after his twins are born. Two of the couples dancing will divorce before the year is out. A heart attack will kill my uncle Sal a few weeks shy of his son’s wedding, but tonight he is hearty, slapping someone’s back, telling a joke. The celebrated artist talking to the young girl in the hat will die in three years from a sudden bout of pneumonia.
Fortune. Fate. But there are people here, too, who will fall in love. Our friend Kissy will get assigned to the Balkan war and meet her husband Jamie in a bar in Croatia. I sit Anthony’s friend Beth next to Tony, and they fall in love. My sister marries the boy she came with.
I am watching Anthony now. He is handsome and strong, dashing, like the pictures I’ve seen of his late father, Stas, the gallant prince. His hair is grown out, wavy and brushed back the way I like it. He’ll look up for me, spot me here in a moment, and smile. I will not see the bump tonight. I won’t see it until the end of our honeymoon on a beach in Hawaii.
Women in red lipstick and men in cream-colored pants with dark sport coats are sipping cocktails against the ocean breeze. It is a perfect wedding—the bride and groom in love, a Louis Armstrong song, the air tingling with future. People fall in love with one another all over, and with life and colors and music. They form instant relationships with people they will never see again.
Linda, my oldest friend, is having a baby any day, so her mother, Vivian, has driven out here alone. I spot her chain-smoking Winston menthols, sweet and anxious. A familiar sight, and I am happy she is here. She hugs me tight and quick in the long receiving line, but I lose her in this crowd and don’t speak to her again. She’ll find out she has lung cancer next week while I’m on my honeymoon. Linda will tell me at her funeral that she spoke of tonight often. “You were like another daughter to her,” she will say.
My four-year-old niece Theresa is singing onstage with the band. My brothers are laughing, heads thrown back. Teasing Mike, I suspect, about driving his rusted Duster to the house in the procession of black sedans. Explaining to the valet about the rope around the steering column holding the passenger door shut.
My mother-in-law is dancing with Hamilton, smiling at something he has said. Anthony whispers to Holly, and she gives him a playful punch. They call me over. The handsome groom, the lovely bride. They’ll have beautiful children, someone is surely saying. You do this at weddings, imagine the future.
This is my ball. The carriage arrives in the morning to whisk us away for three weeks. We fly to Australia and dive off the Great Barrier Reef. Anthony teases me about the huge potato codfish. “They’re swarming you, Nut.” Then he says to the dive master, loud enough for me to hear, “Aren’t there sharks in these waters?” I’m new to diving and half-scared, treading water as he takes pictures of me from the boat. “Stop it, Anthony!” I yell at him, and then laugh, trying to be mad. I fix the video camera on him in the car while he’s driving. It’s late, and we are heading down winding country roads to the Mount Cook Lodge. “Tell them,” I say, referring to our imagined audience—all of the people we think are as thrilled as we are about this marriage. “Tell them about the poor little bunnies that got in your way.” He winks at me, at the camera.
How sweet, you would think if you watched it. Look at how sweet they are together. Young and in love, we return to New York and to messages on the answering machine from people who missed us. I write thank-you notes and put the pictures in a scrapbook. We go back to work, flushed from adventure.
I am fortunate, you might say, and that could mean anything. I will tell you what happened and let you judge for yourself.
2
Most people think Fortune is something good—to have a fortune, to be fortunate—a word that implies advantage, like “luck.” We use prefixes for bad fortune: misfortune, ill-fortune, unfortunate, but Fortune goes both ways. The Romans personified it in the form of a clever but dispassionate woman who coolly disperses both the good and bad with a flick of her wrist. The goddess Fortuna. Good fortune from her left hand out of a cornucopia filled with gifts—things like straight teeth, a good job, a two-car garage in the suburbs. Bad fortune from her right hand holding a ship’s rudder that changes direction, triggering car crashes and untimely deaths. A gesture from her, and the place you thought you were going is no longer in front of you. We call it fate when there is no logical path from then to now. When the man misses a train, then shares a taxi with his future wife or when the cautious woman daydreams through a stop sign at a busy intersection and is hit by a speeding truck. When the man who loves to fly dies in a plane crash. We shake our heads. It’s fate, we say.
Every Tuesday afternoon in Suffern I took a bus from Airmont School to Sacred Heart for religion class, where Sister Teresa taught us not to sin. There was an implicit promise of reward for that, but I didn’t think it was so simple or personal. My life at the whim of a fickle, apathetic woman made much more sense to me. As a young girl I thought misfortune would befall my father. I thought he would drive his car off the bridge in an ice storm on his way home from the restaurant he owned in Yonkers. The Tappan Zee Bridge with its thin strip of guardrail and the Hudson below, a blanket of black ice on the asphalt. I stayed up alone on these nights, watching for his hea
dlights in the driveway. Standing on the edge of my bed to see out the window, careful not to wake my sister. When the lights appeared I crawled quietly under the covers and tried to sleep in the restless night. It was never peaceful, and I still dread nights, the quiet. When the unforgiving ring of a telephone is impossible to ignore.
The phone didn’t ring in the house on Madison Hill Road in the middle of the night. My father’s blue Mustang never skidded off the bridge, but twenty-six years later the phone rang late at night in the house on Martha’s Vineyard, and I knew.
In seventh grade I had Mr. Durrwachter for biology, and Caroline Garritano was in my class. It was 1976 and Jaws was the scariest thing most of Suffern Junior High had ever seen. Welcome Back, Kotter was launching John Travolta. My parents were watching Roots and following the Patty Hearst trial. Jimmy Carter was elected president and the Yankees were losing, but I was concerned with other things.
I was a quiet twelve-year-old fascinated with the junior high cool kids. The girls, really. The ones who walked down the halls in twos and threes, glossy-lipped with strawberry flavored Kissing Potion, unaffected by pimples and lunch tables and bus lines after school. The girls with feathered hair who hung out at Sport-a-Rama ice rink on Friday nights watching the older boys play hockey, wearing Puca beads and mood rings. They sat in levels in the bleachers, sideways so they could talk to one another, and flirted with the boys between periods, arranging and rearranging themselves like patterns in a kaleidoscope. They wore Frye boots and chinos and kept Salon Styles in their back pockets. I was still wearing hand-me-downs from my older sister—stiff Wranglers and pilly sweaters—and when I saved up enough to buy carpenter pants, they weren’t the right ones. They were missing the telltale hammer loop on the left side.
My hair was long and straight, and I wasted hours with the curling iron trying to create what they seemed to be born with. They carried cassette recorders and played Peter Frampton on the hill at lunch. They left a trail of Love’s Baby Soft in the halls. And then there were the Garritano twins, Caroline and Suzanne. They wore Charlie.
The twins created energy around them, a palpable squirm of adolescent girls hoping to tag along with them to the mall. Caroline and Suzanne moved through seventh grade as if they had been handed an envelope with directions on the first day. They were not frantically trying to create themselves, like the rest of us. You can see it in Suzanne’s yearbook photo—the one on its own separate page above lines of junior high yearbook prose about life and fate.
Everyone I knew wanted to be where the Garritano girls were—the cafeteria, the movies, or Nicky’s Pizza. They hung around at the school some days after the last bell, and rumors of what went on rippled through lunch tables and slumber parties. They reigned over the playground, sitting on swings. Unhurried, letting their feet brush the ground and watching the boys hop around them like popcorn.
One rainy day after school let out, after I was already on the bus and the school was deserted, Suzanne and Caroline snuck into the old janitor’s quarters at the far end of the hall. It was strictly off-limits, which made them predictably intriguing. There was a dumbwaiter here that dropped from the main floor into the basement—the kind with doors that opened from the top and bottom like a sideways elevator.
They had a boy with them that day—Eddie Meyer from the hockey team. Suzanne’s boyfriend, though the twins weren’t possessive. But he was Suzanne’s boyfriend this day, so he let her in first, watched her squeeze through the horizontal doors, and then followed after her with Caroline. The three of them were cramped, sitting hunched in the tight space, and when the elevator dropped to the basement, Eddie and Caroline got off. Suzanne tried to follow them, sticking her head out awkwardly through the doors, and the top door of the dumbwaiter dropped down on her shiny long hair, crushing her neck. It happened too quickly for her to call out or make a noise. But the dumbwaiter doors, solid metal, were loud when they closed, and Eddie and Caroline turned around. Of course she was dead already.
There was an eruption of grief the next day. Principal Parparella broadcast the news over the crackly public-address system, and clusters of teenage girls formed—sobbing their stories to school counselors and to boys they had crushes on, carefully wiping mascara streaks from their faces. There were legends forming already—romantic stories of Suzanne’s last words. Tell Eddie I love him, echoed through homerooms. Weepy girls who barely knew her pooled in the cafeteria and crowded into big hugs in the halls. And they all got out of class. The school cut a lot of slack in absences for the next few days. It was easier to excuse an absence than to talk about what had happened. It was easier to excuse an absence than to tell a twelve-year-old about Fortune. That it was not personal, really.
I gave a name to these sobbing girls later, when we were grown women. I spotted them again in the wake that shook the world one July when I was too close to Fortune’s rudder. I called them tragedy whores. Even as adults, they cluster in groups, feeding on these occasions, where they reap the reassuring comfort of connected souls. That is the small reward and point of the wake. They are eager participants, playing with Fortune from a safe distance, then going home to husbands and children, unmarked.
Tragedy whores don’t feel the foundation break apart beneath their feet—the reeling blast of emptiness, though to watch them you might think so. They’re voyeurs. They feed like coffin flies on drama, embroiled in virtual grief and the illusion of heartbreak. They all have stories they want to tell, insist on telling, proclaiming their link to tragedy. Emotional rubberneckers.
I didn’t like them at twelve, and I hated them at thirty-five.
Suzanne’s funeral was the Super Bowl of tragedies for Suffern Junior High. The church was standing room only; the young parents sat bravely in the front row beside the spitting image of their dead daughter. Everyone wanted a view. When the young and pretty ones die, the tragedy whores get seats up front. They love the melodramatic story. That the deceased had an identical twin sister still walking around was a windfall.
The climactic moment, however, was not witnessed by the hundreds in the church, but by an unprepared twenty-five seventh-graders in Mr. Durrwachter’s first-period science class. Eighteen hours after the dumbwaiter crushed Suzanne Garritano’s neck, Caroline walked into class with her jacket on, sipping Coke through a straw. The rest of us were frozen, knowing we should turn away, but not quite able to. Caroline was uninterested. She walked to the front of the room, without a glance to the rows of desks, and said in a flat voice, her arm stretched out, holding a piece of paper, “I can’t come for class, Mr. Durrwachter. My mom wrote a note.” Mr. Durrwachter looked at her and nodded. He took the note and stared unblinking as she turned and walked out, unconcerned with his reply.
Caroline Garritano saw her sister dead in the dumbwaiter and then excused herself from class sipping Coke through a straw. She knew about Fortune.
3
There are three places that define my early life, and you can drive to all of them in half a day. The city, where I live now; the Rockland County suburb where I grew up; and another small town about an hour’s drive upstate.
The city, New York, is the place I longed for since the nights in the back bedroom at Tante’s wedged into her trundle bed with four fidgety brothers and sisters, listening to the buses go up First Avenue. Watching the lights in other buildings. Her five-story building was on the corner, with a thick black double door. The corner where my father, on leave in full army uniform, waved down a cab to take my mother, pregnant with me, to the hospital and a man saluted him from the back of a limousine. The corner where Grandma Binder raised my mother, in the building across the street.
Suffern, New York, is the suburb, where I went to school and played the flute and hung a David Cassidy poster on my wall. It was where I lived with my brothers and sisters, my mother and father, and Grandma Binder for most of my young life. It’s a sleepy town forty minutes north of Manhattan, over the George Washington Bridge, up the Palisades Parkway.
A shapeless bundle of families too far from the city to borrow its identity, too close to find its own. Sacred Heart Catholic Church marks the entrance to downtown. The old Lafayette playhouse, the post office, and twelve beauty salons line Main Street. The Avon plant sits just up the road on Route 59.
The small town upstate is Kingston, my moveable feast.
Kingston is anchored by time. Kingston is an era. At the end of the day, no matter where we have been in our lives, the DiFalcos are firmly tethered by the ghosts of Kingston.
Kingston memories flash through my head like old home movies—Grandma Millie mugging for the camera with hands on her hips and her eyes shut in a smile. Her friend Norma, up from Queens for the summer, standing on the back porch in her housedress. People moving in jerks and fast-motion like 8-millimeter frames. Mouths moving, always smiling, happy like they didn’t know better, didn’t know you could be somewhere else. Uncle Joey picking out the chords of “Stairway to Heaven” on his guitar. Grandpa DiFalco at the stove stirring his red sauce, orange fly strips hanging over his head. My father holding a fishing rod off the dock. Aunt Maryann at the oak table in the Knotty Pine room, her cards laid out for solitaire, a wineglass beside her, filled to the rim. It is upstate New York in the seventies. Anything can happen or nothing can happen, and either way is fine.
The city of Kingston was a town with schools and historical sites, restaurants and churches. It had an order—businesses where people wore suits and white shirts to work. There were neighborhoods of houses with paved driveways and aluminum siding, but this was not our Kingston. The closest we came to that Kingston was in August, when my sister and I had our birthdays in the same week, and Grandma Millie took us to Luigi’s for pizza and cannolis.
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