Down City

by Leah Carroll

  Sometimes, on the way back from Grandma Ruth’s house, Dad jumps off the highway and we drive through South Providence. The house he grew up in is now a vacant lot. He says a “firebug” had burned it down.

  “What’s a firebug?” I ask.

  “An arsonist,” he says. “Someone who sets a fire to see all the fire trucks come and put it out.”

  “Was it scary?” I ask. “Growing up here?”

  Dad shakes his head. “It wasn’t scary,” he says. “It was different from Baaaarington.”

  Barrington is a lot like how Dad promises it will be. It’s quiet and idyllic with neatly trimmed front yards, Little League games, and even an eighteenth-century clapboard church topped with a white steeple. There are boats anchored along the Barrington River, and a little beach with access to Narragansett Bay. The best thing, I think, about Barrington is that it’s a “dry” town. You can’t legally buy or serve alcohol within the town limits. I’ve recently been told what I already realized—that when Dad comes home late at night acting strangely, it’s because he’s drunk. To me, a dry town seems like the answer to our prayers. It’s a place to really become a family.

  Ann-Marie tells us that technically, we live in West Barrington, not Barrington proper. Years ago, the town had two post offices and two zip codes, but while the post office is gone, the division is still there in spirit. The western side is more modest; there are small streets and lots of construction from the 1960s, and smaller, one-level houses like ours. On the other side the houses are much older, some hundreds of years old, and the yards are bigger. There are many commanding two-story homes with semicircle driveways and pools in the backyard. The epitome of Barringtonian opulence is Rumstick Drive. These houses along Narragansett Bay have huge glass windows overlooking lawns filled with ancient green trees. There are kayaks lashed to the Volvos in the driveways, and ski racks on the roofs of the Mercedes.

  We drive down Rumstick Drive and I imagine what it would be like to live in one of those beautiful homes. I imagine having a four-poster bed and taking horseback riding lessons. I’d want Dad to be just the same: funny, and smart, and handsome, except he’d never drink and instead would come to watch me play sports like soccer. In real life I’ve never even tried to play soccer.

  Dad learned to take pictures from my mom and over the years it has become his passion. Our house is filled with camera equipment: tripods, giant lenses, issues of Shutterbug and Popular Photography. Dad has Derek and me sit for his photo experiments. We make a sad face on one side of the couch and then a happy face on the other for a double exposure. He has Derek leap from a tree and tries to capture his movement frame by frame.

  Dad never goes anywhere without a successive series of Canon cameras hanging from his chest and a giant camera bag overflowing with filters and flashes and lenses stuffed beneath the passenger-side seat of his car. Dad’s cameras are large and expensive and draw the attention of people wherever we go.

  “Are you a photographer?” people ask as he sets up the camera on the tripod at Barrington Beach.

  “Yeah,” he tells them. “Do you take pictures?”

  “Oh no, no,” they answer, looking admiringly at the complicated setup he has rigged to capture the sunset over the gentle waves of the bay. “Where do you work?”

  “The Providence Journal,” Dad answers and begins clicking away, while I stand beside him, fetching items from his camera bag the way a nurse might fetch scalpels for a surgeon, and busting with pride. Because it is true that Dad is a photographer, and it is true that he works at the Providence Journal, and if the guy asking the questions goes away thinking that Dad is a photographer for the Providence Journal, that’s fine with Dad and me. We don’t have to explain ourselves.

  Derek and I enter the third grade at Primrose Hill Elementary. The elementary schools in Barrington go to the third grade, and after that you move on to middle school, so the third graders are the oldest kids at Primrose. Ann-Marie makes sure that Derek and I aren’t in the same class, so we won’t spend too much time together and fight. Mr. Waugh teaches my class. He has an adopted son that he talks about all the time. He tells us that because his son is adopted he gets to have two birthdays: the day of his actual birth and the day of his adoption. I think it would be strange to have a father who teaches elementary school and once I have a nightmare that Dad is teaching my third-grade class and being nice to all of the other kids. I wake in a sweating, jealous fury.

  When school gets out, Derek and I go to the after-school program at the YMCA to wait for Ann-Marie to pick us up on her way home from Blue Cross/Blue Shield, where she works in the claims department. The counselors try to engage us in some physical activity in those few hours between school and home. While most of the other kids play basketball and kickball, I sit in the rec room reading Baby-Sitters Club books and weaving and unweaving potholders on a plastic loom, dodging all attempts the counselors make at getting me to participate.

  I can’t wait for Ann-Marie to come get us at the end of the day. In the winter it’s dark when I finally see her head in the high window of the hallway outside the basement room, her short hair permed and moussed, colorful earrings dangling at the sides of her face as she walks. I envy her dangly earrings fiercely, and she tells me that she’ll convince Dad to let me wear them. Settling into the front seat of her car on the way home from the YMCA I balance the small shopping bag containing her heels and Tupperware in my lap. She presses down on the gas pedal with her sneakered foot, tugging at a run in her pantyhose and slaps Derek’s hand away from the radio.

  Because Ann-Marie works all day, the food she makes for dinner is always fast and easy. I’m a picky eater and bargain every night about how many more bites I have to take. We eat bowls of egg noodles with sirloin tips and peas, chicken thighs covered in cream of mushroom soup and canned green beans, and in the summer, corn on the cob and instant mashed potatoes. Though we eat as a family, we rarely speak during meals, and once we’re done eating Dad wanders away from the table and back into the bedroom to sleep, leaving his empty plate on the table.

  “Good job on dinner, Ann-Mo,” he’ll yell from the hallway.

  There are many nights dad leaves the house and I ask him where he’s going.

  “Out,” he always says. These are the nights he comes home late and wakes up me and Derek to arm-wrestle. It starts out fun but then sometimes he let us win and then tells us he’s pathetic and makes us say it back to him. Whenever he tells me he’s going “out,” I get a sick worried feeling, and on one of those nights I go into their bedroom where Ann-Marie is on the bed watching television.

  “What if Dad gets killed by the serial killer?” I ask.

  “What serial killer?”

  “The New Bedford Serial Killer!” I say. “They can’t find him and he might kill Dad.”

  In 1988 there is a serial killer dropping the bodies of the women he kills off a stretch of highway in nearby New Bedford, Massachusetts. My mind is consumed by this story, fed by the television shows I watch with Ann-Marie all the time: A Current Affair, Unsolved Mysteries, Sally Jessy Raphael, and Oprah. It seems just as likely to me that Dad will walk out the door and be killed by the New Bedford Serial Killer as it does that he’ll come home late, stumbling and drunk.

  “Your dad will be fine,” says Ann-Marie. “He always is.”

  She sees I’m still scared and sighs. “Don’t worry,” she says. “That serial killer only kills women, so your dad is safe.” I feel sorry for those women, but that fact helps put my mind at ease once I know Dad is not a target.

  IN APRIL 2015, I sit in a small private room in the medium-security section of the Rhode Island Adult Correctional Institution. On one side of me is the prison’s PR representative, and on the other is Gerald Mastracchio Jr. He has been in prison most of his life. As a teenager, Junior murdered a thirteen-year-old boy by beating him and throwing his unconscious body off the Jamestown Bridge. As a slightly older teenager he joined his father in the Rhode Isl
and drug trade. A little after that, his father, Gerald Mastracchio Sr., murdered my mother.

  Junior has agreed to see me, to answer my questions. He says he hopes he can provide some closure. He’s clean-shaven. He has a chubby, pleasant face and a small smattering of jailhouse tattoos. The smell of his sweat fills the small room. At my request, Junior reminisces a bit about his dad, who died in 2000. He tells me that in the 1970s Junior’s mom would drop him off at the maximum-security wing of the ACI to visit with his father, and as a little boy he’d hang out in the jail’s garage with an inmate who washed the state vehicles and was serving time for killing his wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and their dog. Sometimes the inmate stopped cleaning the cars for a bit to take Junior frog hunting in the muddy patch behind the garage.

  “I’d never seen prison as a bad thing because when I did go in and visit my father, the prison system was different,” he says. “Inmates pretty much did what they wanted. I’d go in there and there’d be candy and cookies and milk and playing games. That’s pretty much all I’d seen in the gangster type of people. They’re all shaking hands and all that good stuff.”

  HIS FATHER WAS a career criminal. Mastracchio Sr.’s adult police record begins in 1943, when he assaulted a Providence police officer. There were other convictions: attempted rape, assault with intent to rob, assault with a deadly weapon, and in 1969 a second-degree murder charge for shooting a guard during a holdup of the Hood milk plant in Providence.

  “I remember going to visit my dad and saying, ‘Hey, I need a place to get pot.’ The following weekend when I went to see him he gave me a name and an address. I went up to Coventry and met this gentleman who opened up a barn and had bales of marijuana for seventy-five dollars a pound. It was like, ‘Here you go, kid. Take what you want.’ That’s how I got stuck. My father was in jail. I guess I was sixteen. My father overturned his sentence and got out. Then we used to have Sundays at my aunt’s house or my grandmother’s house.”

  Between Sunday dinners, father and son decided to really get into the drug business. They had a connection in New York, and had the best heroin in Rhode Island, all the cocaine they wanted, and as many narcotics in pill form as a pharmacy. Eventually they needed to bring on other guys—mostly prison buddies of Gerry Sr. There was Kevin Hanrahan, Bobby Almonte, Richie Gomes (“Richie started out as John Gotti’s driver in New York. He was kicked out in New York because he wouldn’t leave the cocaine alone,” says Gerry Jr.), and a newer guy, a guy who’d given Gerry Sr. an alibi once: Peter Gilbert. Just a few years after earning Mastracchio Sr.’s trust and becoming his right-hand man in the drug ring, Gilbert would help murder my mom—an act he’d tell authorities had the blessing and protection of Raymond Patriarca.

  And now, three decades after this all happened, Gerry Jr. puffs out his chest at the mention of Patriarca, and at the insinuation that I’m trying to get him to admit his own drug dealing was sanctioned by the New England mob, as the attorney general of Rhode Island would later contend. He may be a killer, he may be a thief and a drug dealer and a liar, but he is no rat.

  “It didn’t have anything to do with Raymond,” Junior says. “I do not glorify my dad or brag about him. The reality was my father was a vicious person.” Then, with barely a pause, he tells me, “But he was the nicest guy in the world.”

  RAYMOND PATRIARCA WAS a legend in Rhode Island, a state founded by Roger Williams, a man who, depending on your viewpoint, was either a religious zealot who’d been kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, or a remarkably forward-thinking leader who advocated for the separation of church and state and respect for the Native Americans before anyone else. Rhode Island was the first colony to renounce the British Crown and the last to ratify the US Constitution; it was a state that was heavily involved in the African slave trade but abolished racial segregation in schools in the 1800s, and a state that had, until very recently, a law that made prostitution legal provided it took place indoors. In this state, Raymond Patriarca was an icon. He was something that made Rhode Island matter.

  Born in 1908, he was in prison by 1928 for breaking and entering, and by the 1930s he was called Rhode Island’s Public Enemy Number One. In 1938 he was back in prison for a robbery in Massachusetts, but was pardoned just three months later by the Governor’s Council. “I guess the board just had the Christmas spirit,” he told a reporter. Later, Patriarca would insist, “I was a bootlegger. I was a gambler. But since I got out of prison in 1945, I’ve done nothing wrong.” That’s when some people started calling him “the mayor of Providence.”

  For the last half of his life, Patriarca controlled the world of organized crime in New England. He answered directly to the “five families” of New York and was in charge of Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, and parts of Connecticut. He was Gennaro Angiulo’s boss, the infamous Boston underboss brought down by RICO in the early 1980s by a series of FBI wiretaps and, most agree, tips from rival Boston gangster Whitey Bulger.

  Patriarca operated his business out of an innocuous storefront for the National Cigarette Service, a vending machine company located on Federal Hill, the Italian section of Boston. From inside the little building, known as “the Office,” Patriarca oversaw loan sharking, gambling, and prostitution. If there was a crime in his jurisdiction, it came with his blessing and a tribute charge, and, it could be argued, if you wanted to be a state politician, you needed his blessing for that as well.

  At his wake in 1984, strangers gathered outside with flowers to pay their respects. A reporter for the Providence Journal covering the wake quoted one bystander, who seemed to speak for the vast majority of onlookers: “I have more respect for this guy, and he never took an oath of office. Some of them who do get elected take an oath of office and steal the taxpayers blind.”

  It seems strange that my mother’s path would cross with this man’s, however peripherally. She was a nice Jewish girl from Cranston, and he was an old-fashioned gangster. They almost certainly never met in person. But in death, her name would be forever tied up with his—though his name is the one that people remember.

  My mother’s funeral didn’t draw hundreds of admiring and curious onlookers. My mother was buried on a cold March day in a plot owned by my grandmother’s employers, the Klitzner family. It had been intended for one of their own, which in a way my mom had been. It’s one of the kindest and most practical gifts I can think of. Who would have expected that a thirty-year-old woman would need a burial plot?

  AT OUR MEETING, I ask Junior if he remembers my mom.

  “See, this stuff now, it sickens me,” he says. “I don’t know. It’s just I don’t want to cry like a victim, but I have a lot of resentment toward my mom and dad. You know what I mean? Why wasn’t I told to go to school? Why wasn’t I taught to get a job and do all that good stuff that normal people do. As far as your mom goes, she was just another customer. She was a happy person. I don’t know… Your mom? She was just an ideal woman. She had an addiction problem. It caused her death.”

  I want to say, no, that’s wrong. It was your father that caused her death. It was him and Peter Gilbert that caused her death by murdering her. It was this culture of bravado and loyalty and getting over that killed her. But I don’t say that because in a way, we are both right.

  I ask him if he thinks there’s any chance my mom actually was an informant, as his father believed.

  “If your mother was the one that gave information about my father, then without a doubt it was because of her addiction,” he says.

  “She probably got pulled over and got caught with the drugs. They were going to arrest her. I can talk from that point of view because I’ve been addicted to heroin. I’ve been addicted to drugs for a long period of time, so I know. At that point in time, you just want to go home. You don’t want to think about going to jail or being dope-sick or something like that. She would have gave the information to get out of there.”

  I’ll never know if my mom gave confidential informa
tion to the police or not. I do know that almost everyone involved—from the men who killed her to the police who arrested them, to the attorney general who would strike a deal with Peter Gilbert—saw her as a disposable person. She was an addict. She prostituted herself for drugs. She sold other drugs to get cocaine. She was a means to an end.

  SEVEN

  One night, soon after we move to Barrington, I feel stabbing pains in my right side during dinner.

  “I don’t feel good,” I say. “Can I be excused?”

  Dad and Ann-Marie roll their eyes at each across the table. It just so happens that we are eating beef stew that night, a dish I hate. The more I chew the chunks of stringy meat to get them down, the more flavorless they become until it feels like I’m gnawing away at gobs of tough leather.

  “Finish your dinner,” says Dad. He always shovels food into his mouth as fast as he can, as if someone is going to steal his plate away. Always suave in other circumstances, his eating habits are embarrassing. A lot of the time, he eats nothing all day and by dinner would be shoving food into his mouth, leaving a giant smear of sauce on his chin. Everything that goes down his throat is first filtered through the salt-and-pepper hairs of his mustache and sometimes hangs there, dangling, until he wipes it away with the back of his hand.

  I take another bite of the stew and this time the pain in my side sharpens. It’s like someone is jabbing a jagged broom handle into my right hip and then wiggling it around for good measure. I jump up from the table to vomit but don’t make it to the bathroom in time. I hunch over, heaving beef stew all over the thick gray carpet in the living room.

  “The toilet, Leah!” screams Ann-Marie, and so, still heaving, I toddle a few steps toward the bathroom dripping a trail of vomit behind me. “No, just stay!” Ann-Marie screams. “Just finish there!” And so I do, on my knees in front of the coffee table heaving and weeping as Dad holds my shoulder-length brown hair away from my face and rubs my back.