Brooklyn Story

by Suzanne Corso

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  I remembered the days when Tony and I were an inseparable item and everyone on the street knew it. Days of discovery and promise, when the excitement in Bensonhurst was as high as the girls’ teased hairdos. …

  Chosen by USA Today as one of their “New Voices” of 2011, Suzanne Corso makes her unforgettable literary debut with

  Brooklyn Story

  “Corso gets the Brooklyn dialect pitch-perfect and keeps the pace brisk.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Wonderful. … You’re hooked from the first sentence.”

  —Olympia Dukakis, Academy Award–winning actress

  “Tragic yet triumphal … a must-read.”

  —Lorraine Bracco, Academy Award–nominated actress

  “This story explores the mind and heart of a young girl struggling for her identity in a soulless world. Heartbreaking and sensitively written. A very unusual coming-of-age story.”

  —Armand Assante, Emmy Award–winning actor

  Gallery Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10020

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Suzanne Corso

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Gallery Books trade paperback edition November 2011

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  Designed by Esther Paradelo

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9022-7

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9023-4 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9024-1 (ebook)

  To the three women who made me who I am today:

  My Grandma Rose

  My Mother Judy

  and The Blessed Mother

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  If you keep thinking “That man has abused me,” holding it as a much-cherished grievance, your anger will never be allayed.

  If you can put down that fury-inducing thought, your anger will lessen. Fury will never end fury, it will just ricochet on and on.

  Only putting it down will end such an abysmal state.

  —Sunnata Vagga,

  from The Pocket Buddha Reader, edited by Anne Bancroft (2001)

  June 1982

  Some people lived in the real world and others lived in Brooklyn. My name is Samantha Bonti and of course I was one of the chosen. At age fifteen, I was seduced into a life that shattered my innocence, a life that tore at my convictions and my very soul, a life that brought me four years later to the sunlit steps of the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn.

  Now, at age nineteen, I stood below the stone facade, watching strangers come and go with purposeful strides; I paused to contemplate how I got there. The dark events of my recent past replayed in my mind in an instant, while thoughts about my disadvantaged beginnings and a lifetime of struggle flooded my consciousness. It had been no small blessing of Providence, I knew, to be born without deformity, to be endowed with a fierce determination to make my own way in the world, and to be favored by His hand, which worked through others as I matured.

  My mother, Joan, tried her best to give me a better life filled with possibility. But she was scarred by her own past, poisoned with cynicism and shackled by addiction and poor health. Mom was a striking woman on the outside and a frail one within. Her beauty was obvious from a distance, but up close one could see that her bottle-dyed, wavy auburn tresses covered deep lines in her face. A witty woman who had had the potential to be brilliant and used to be full of life and spunk, Mom had been beaten down by an abusive husband.

  Vito Bonti was a Catholic immigrant from Italy and as hardheaded a Sicilian as there ever was. A Vietnam vet who owned a pizzeria, he did nothing for Mom and blamed her for his bitter disposition. After all, Mom was nothing more to him than a poor Jewish girl from Brooklyn and he never failed to remind her of that. Despite her willingness to forgo her own faith and take up his beliefs and his customs, he cheated on her with other women as often as he could steal away. When Joan and Vito were alone in their apartment, they argued long and loud enough for neighbors to hear. In a fit of rage one month before I was born, he threw a car jack at my mother’s pregnant belly. The hemorrhaging forced her into premature labor and she was rushed to the hospital. The doctors said if I was lucky enough to be born, I would most likely have severe brain damage from the impact of the blow, or, even worse, be a stillborn. Fate achieved, fear stepped aside, and I survived. Then Vito abandoned her. He never sent a penny for support and never came around. I saw him once by chance when I was six years old when Mom pointed him out in the neighborhood. He was a nice-looking man with long, black hair and a scruffy beard, who wore a brown shirt buttoned to the collar that had pink flowers on it. I ran to my father and hugged his legs tightly. He pulled away, and I never saw him again.

  Maybe it was better that way, I thought. Mom had it tough enough as it was, living off Social Services and living with disease that visited her weakened body; she didn’t need more of Vito’s physical abuse on top of her hardships. Mom may have felt that having a daughter was one of them, but she never said that to me. And although there were moments when I knew she loved me—when she wouldn’t let me hang out in the streets with neighborhood kids and when she kept me away from boys—I only heard her say those words once. Instead, she criticized me at every turn and picked fights with me without any provocation on my part. She would never say I was pretty, but would prove it in other ways by sticking up for me which were flat-out embarrassing. Like walking into the bathroom in elementary school with gold spandex pants yelling at the other girls who were talking about my chipped tooth. My nickname was “Razor Tooth” until Mom saved up enough money to fix it two years later. Mom, of course, set them straight. They never said a word again to me until eighth grade.

  Mom’s only comforts were cigarettes and going unconscious with drink, prescription meds, and the recreational drugs she used on occasi
on. Sniffing glue was what she did because it was cheap—alone, or with seedy friends or even my friends. Over time, illness drained her body and addiction poisoned her spirit. To her credit, Mom kept her worst habits and her demons from me as best she could and told me now and then that there was another way to live.

  Grandma Ruth reinforced that message daily. She never made excuses for her daughter’s shortcomings and never missed an opportunity to take charge of my upbringing. The last straw was when Mom had come home with crabs that she contracted from some man she had been sleeping with for a supply of glue. After a long night in the emergency room, tossing all of our bedding and sleeping on just a cold mattress, Grandma had seen enough and moved in. She then quit her job when I was seven, after Mom and Grandma got robbed at knifepoint when we lived in the projects by Cozine Avenue in Brooklyn. They soon realized it was best to change locations, my mom opting for an Italian neighborhood. Grandma just wanted away from this place.

  Grandma arose every morning to cook my breakfast and send me off to school, letting Mom get a little extra sleep. With a larger-than-life aura, this short, big-boned Jewish woman had sinewy, arthritic hands, rounded shoulders, and burning bunions on her tired feet. Grandma was a steadfast woman who remained true to her religious and social convictions, but her overbearing opinions came with a heart the size of an ocean. Her wisdom, which I had learned to depend upon, was such that she allowed me to make my own choices and make my own mistakes while she remained a constant source of encouragement as I strove to better myself. Grandma was the loudest, most opinionated silver-haired lady you could ever meet, and I loved her completely. Flawed as we three women were, we were family.

  Others came into my life as I sought to escape from the Brooklyn that enveloped me and my contemporaries. Father Rinaldi preached to me as much with his serenity as with his measured words; without speaking, his countenance told me that an inner peace was real and attainable. His neighborhood church, Our Lady of Guadalupe, which I visited for the first time after months of seeing happy people leaving it as I walked home from school, was as constant a presence and as sturdy as my grandma, and was a haven from the confusing, turbulent, and sometimes harsh world I lived in. The church’s solace, mystery, and promise of knowledge that could help me lured me back on occasion. I never told Mom or Grandma about my stops there, or about the saintly priest who welcomed my infrequent visits and my inquiries, drew parallels between biblical parables and my ordeals, and offered an ear and guidance without any strings attached.

  Mr. Wainright, my high school English teacher, looked with soft eyes upon my first, clumsy attempts at creative composition. He extracted and held out to me the kernels of aptitude buried within my clutching words and awkward phrasing as motivation to continue my efforts. He believed in my talent as one believes in God—with scant tangible proof.

  I had met my best friend Janice Caputo on the bus to New Keiser High School when I was a freshman and she a senior, and although she was older, she had taken me under her wing. Janice told me later the reason she had done so was that I wasn’t like other girls and she liked that about me. It hadn’t mattered to her that I was poor and didn’t have the trendy clothes and accessories that everyone else seemed to have, and she sought no pleasure as other classmates did in making fun of me—sometimes to my face. Janice was a constant companion on my circuitous path to a life that was different from the Brooklyn one we knew, the one she accepted for herself but that I longed to leave behind. Corralled in the community of my ancestors, I longed to cross the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan and flee the destiny that was assumed for all in our outer borough. Janice’s generosity of spirit encompassed my writing passion even though she wouldn’t share the world it represented and the reduced closeness it portended. Janice soaked up every word I wrote and nudged me along as we endured the normal growing pains of adolescence and the additional slings and arrows endemic to a self-contained Italian community. Janice stood by me and suffered along with me as I was swallowed up by circumstances that threatened the attainment of my lifelong dream of becoming a writer.

  That some people lived in the real world and others lived in Brooklyn was an understatement. Most of the others were content to stay there and be a member of the group that was appropriate to their station. Mobsters molded their women like Jell-O and controlled everything else in the neighborhood, from gambling, hijacking, robberies, drugs, and prostitution to social conduct. They even exerted a measure of influence over the local cops, who often looked the other way.

  The wannabes—young and old—idolized the mobsters and sought to impress them with their willingness to reject the straight life and engage in anything illegal. Wannabes patterned their mannerisms and activity after the mobsters, orbited as close as possible to them, and celebrated those who were taken into the fold. And then there were the nerds. Young ones buried themselves in their textbooks and their hobbies, and had nothing to do with anyone. Older ones worked in honest, middle-class jobs and honored values that the mobsters and wannabes gave lip service to but disdained.

  Less than a handful of people I knew intended to leave Brooklyn. But I always did, starting when I first learned from books and movies that there was a lot more than the narrow minds and narrow visions of those around me, to that very moment in front of the courthouse. I stood there, beneath the words “Justice” and “Equality” that were etched in the large stones of the facade, and I thought about how the Brooklyn Bridge had always represented freedom and the way to a new life for me. Don’t get me wrong, Brooklyn was a beautiful place for most, but to me it had become a past I had to flee.

  That famous span, far from my family’s humble apartment, was foremost always in my thoughts. Its two massive towers and intricate web of steel cables were a combination of strength, tension, and balance, and the bridge stood as a symbol of how my own life should be fashioned. I needed to be strong, I needed to stretch myself, and I needed to counter-weight the life I was born into with the pull of what lay on the other side of the East River, in Manhattan.

  I thought about the bridge’s origins. The vision of one man, John Roebling, was realized by his son more than ten years later and that meant a lot to me. Dreams could survive generations and come true. The bridge proved that, even if John and a score of others died during its construction. I felt the power of the bridge each time I gazed at it, and it inspired me to look beyond the confinement of my Bensonhurst neighborhood and the humiliation of poverty. I vowed to get past the stereotypes and the welfare checks, food stamps, waiting on line for a block of cheese, only to get there and find them to be gone. The secondhand clothes, and dinners of toast or, on special occasions, Kraft macaroni and cheese.

  I never lost the desire to construct my own bridge to my own future. I knew that wouldn’t be easy for a girl like me, just as building the Brooklyn Bridge had been fraught with hardship, peril, and sacrifice. And although others were there to help, I knew that in the end it would be up to me to endure the trials and setbacks, and to overcome each and every obstacle as the Roeblings had done. I found out just how hard building and crossing a bridge would be.

  An Adonis named Tony Kroon, five years older than I, swept me off my feet when I was a teen. The moment I saw him, when I was starting my junior year of high school, I was captivated by his thick blond hair, stunning blue eyes, and defined jaw. I was flattered by his immediate interest in me and felt an immediate bond with him because his Dutch-Italian heritage mirrored my Italian-Jewish one. In our Bensonhurst neighborhood, being anything but pure Italian was a distinct shortcoming. People like us didn’t belong entirely to either culture and had to endure the prejudices of both. That was the subtext for me in my home, and for a wannabe like Tony, acceptance by his fledgling mob associates was a constant issue.

  I empathized with Tony’s struggles and was smitten by his increasing attention to me. I overlooked his thinking only about himself, high living, and his standing among his contemporaries, the Brooklyn Boys. Like them, h
e forbade independent thinking in his chosen woman, so I kept my hopes and dreams from him. The wannabe boys of Brooklyn kept their “business” away from their girlfriends, who learned from the start not to ask imprudent questions. Tony lived in secrecy the way all his Italian contemporaries did, and treated me the way they treated their women: with minimal information, with impossible demands delivered over a clenched fist, and with clothes and jewelry that had fallen off trucks. I was supposed to remain quiet, feel honored to be on his arm whenever he wanted, and support the decisions he made for both of us, decisions that took me farther from the Brooklyn Bridge that I had been determined to cross.

  It wasn’t as if no one had warned me. Grandma had told me more than once not to trust Tony. “Bubelah,” she would say, using the Yiddish term of affection for a child, “don’t go with that Catholic half-Italian piece of crap. He’s a real charmer, just like your father. He’ll steal your dreams. Find yourself a nice Jewish boy.” But I didn’t listen to her, nor to Father Rinaldi or Mr. Wainright, who tried to gently steer me away from what they also knew. I followed my heart instead of my head, and my heart told me I was in love.

  I had powerful feelings for Tony then and I had powerful feelings for him as I climbed the stairs to the imposing courthouse. Locked in a holding cell beneath the court, Tony would still be thinking about himself, I knew, but his thoughts would be different this day. At the age of twenty-four, he faced a long stretch behind bars if the jury delivered a guilty verdict. He’d be cast into the monstrous world of hard-core criminals with their daily frustrations, rages, and lusts.

  I pulled the handle of a heavy wood door and entered the building where Tony’s fate was to be decided and I would confront my past. The courthouse lobby, with its high ceiling, marble floors, and musky, stone interior reminded me of Father Rinaldi’s church. A different kind of praying took place here, I thought, and I took the elevator to the ninth floor. None of the souls who had risen silently in the lift with me had had any inkling of what I would face there or why I had to be there.