He started by cursing my mother and screaming at her in front of all of us. “You stupid woman!” My mother came into the bedroom I shared with Annette and got into bed with us, and my father followed her in. He kept yelling and cursing, spit flying out of his mouth. “How could you be so stupid?!” My mother pulled us closer to her and waited for it to pass.
But it didn’t. My father left the room and came back with two full liquor bottles. He threw them right over our heads, and they smashed against the wall. Liquor and glass rained down on us, and we pulled up the covers to shield ourselves. My father hurled the next bottle, and then went back for two more. They shattered just above our heads; the sound was sickening. My father kept screaming and ranting, worse than I’d ever heard him before. When he ran out of bottles, he went into the kitchen and overturned the table and smashed the chairs. Just then the phone rang, and my mother rushed to get it. I heard her screaming to the caller to get help. My father grabbed the phone from her and ripped the base right out of the wall. My mother ran back to us as my father kept kicking and throwing furniture, unstoppable, out of his mind.
When he finally tired himself out, there was a knock at the door. My father opened it and saw two police officers—it had been my aunt on the phone and she had called 9-1-1.
“We got a call about a disturbance,” one of the officers said. If he had stepped into the house just a bit, he might have seen some of the damage my father caused. Instead, the cops stayed at the door, and my father—by then calm and composed—told them everything was fine. Remarkably, they took him at his word and left. This time, my father had gone too far. The kitchen was absolutely destroyed, like a twister had torn through it. My bed was covered in glass shards and soaked with scotch. My mother quietly rounded up all five children—Steven was just an infant then—and, without bothering to gather any clothes, piled us in the car and drove us to her mother’s house in Huntington. My grandmother took us in, and we stayed there for the next three days. They were three of the best days we ever had. For once, we didn’t have to worry about our father. He couldn’t touch us here.
But then, on the third day, I heard my mother talking to my grandmother, and I saw her start to cry.
“Your place is with your husband,” my grandmother told her. “You must go back to him.”
I cried, too, and begged my grandmother to let us stay, but this wasn’t something that was open to discussion. This was simply the way it was done in those days. Wives didn’t leave their husbands, at least not in many Italian homes. They just endured. That was what my mother’s mother did, and that was what my mother had to do now. So she put us all in the car and drove us home.
We crept in quietly, terrified to be there. I walked into the kitchen, unsure of what I would find. The mess had been somewhat cleaned up, and my father had dragged in the backyard picnic table to replace what he’d destroyed. The hole in the wall where he’d ripped out the phone was still there. Whatever my father hadn’t cleaned up was left for my mother and Annette and I to deal with. And, as always, no one ever said another word about the fight. We all simply went on with our lives, pretending like nothing had happened.
That was the closest my mother ever came to leaving my father.
After that blowout, my father calmed down. Having baby Steven around surely helped. My father adored him; he really enjoyed how funny and cheerful and smart his new son was. From a very early age Steven showed exceptional intelligence, and because he was so much younger than the rest of us, he got to spend a lot of time alone with my mother. That helped him develop more quickly. My mother read to him and played games with him and encouraged his natural curiosity—by the time he was four, Steven had memorized the names and birthdays and even the death dates of every U.S. president. My father got a real kick out of hearing him recite them. I noticed my father did things with Steven he never did with Frank. He took him along to work, and he brought home the 45s of popular songs Steven loved to play—“Winchester Cathedral,” “Barbara Ann,” stuff like that. For the first time in a long time my father seemed happy to be home, and he didn’t go out to bars as much. He still drank at home, but he’d get drunk much more slowly. And because he wasn’t alone, he didn’t get the chance to work himself into frenzies like he did when he went out. It was when he was in his car on the way home from a bar that he would sit and stew. At home he usually just drank until he passed out, and the next day by the couch we’d find his big glass ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, piles of ashes everywhere, and maybe even a burn between the coffee table and sofa. That, we could live with.
Then, when my father quit the construction business, he got back in the bar business full-time—only now he bought his own bar, the Windmill on Jericho Turnpike. My mother went to work there as a waitress, and when Annette and I were in our early teens, we went to work there, too, shucking clams and serving hamburgers. We also left Commack and moved back to Huntington Station, to a two-story colonial home my father built himself. It was set back on a side road, some fifty yards behind another house, and had a long gravel driveway leading up to the front door. Inside, the layout was whimsical. You walked through the front door and into the den, inevitably the busiest and messiest room in the house. The living room, on the right, was hardly ever used and had very little furniture in it. You had to walk through the first-floor laundry room just to get to the bathroom. My father used shingle siding on the exterior, and because he had some left over he shingled a wall in the family room too. Still, there was a cozy little backyard and big elm trees, and I was happy to be back in Huntington and have the chance to make new friends. Besides, between the new house and the new bar, my parents were often too busy or too exhausted to fight.
Around that time my parents began renting a summer beach bungalow on Long Island’s North Fork. These were our first real family vacations in a long while. We’d spend a week on a cliff high above Long Island Sound, and we had to walk down one hundred steps to get to the water. We all loved the week we’d spend there by the water. I’ll always remember staying up late playing games and eating breakfast at a picnic table in our pajamas. Life was different out there: happier, more serene. I remember there weren’t as many fights. The beach was a place where all of us could take a deep breath and, for a precious few days at least, relax.
And so, for the first few years of his life, my brother Steven had no idea what my father had been like. He only knew him to be a sweet, gentle, caring dad. It wasn’t until Steven was five years old that he got his first taste of my father’s dark side. My father had a big load of sand in the back of his pickup truck, and he let Steven and a little friend play in the sand with toy shovels. Without realizing it, Steven shoveled some sand into the truck’s gas tank. When my father got in the truck and turned it on, warning lights went off. The engine was dead. My father pulled Steven away from the truck and kicked him hard in the rear. He bawled so loudly my mother rushed out and scooped him up. Not even Steven—this little boy he clearly loved—was immune to my father’s wrath.
Still, we went on, trying to live as normally as we could. I went to junior high school, made new friends, started dating boys. From the outside looking in, my life seemed perfectly ordinary: I spent a lot of time with my friends, hung out at the Huntington Mall, and went to Saturday night dances at Bethany Church. But as I got older, the stress of my family life started to show. I was doing worse and worse at school. My grades were terrible, and my teachers said I never paid attention. In fact, I was usually too exhausted to focus. For obvious reasons, I had a terrible time falling asleep. When I did fall asleep, it wouldn’t be long before some nightmare shook me awake. Sleep, for me, was never a respite from the terror, only a continuation.
About the only time I could truly escape it was when I had sleepovers with my friends. My best friend was Sue, a funny, peppy girl who shared my sense of mischief. I loved sleeping over at Sue’s house. Her mother was a secretary, and her father worked at IBM. To me they seemed like the perfe
ct family. Sue’s dad was home by six, dinner was at seven, and everyone was in bed by nine. The next morning Sue’s mother, who always wore an apron over her skirt or dress, would have scrambled eggs and bacon and sausage waiting for us. Glasses filled with orange juice were lined up on the counter with a row of vitamins sitting next to them. There was always a glass of orange juice and a vitamin for me, too. We all sat around the table and talked and laughed, and everything was just so easy and carefree. I could feel the tension drain right out of my body. At night I’d sleep without worry, fear, or apprehension, and I always woke up rested. I know it sounds shallow, but what I loved the most about going over to Sue’s house was seeing how her father dressed. He’d head out to work in a beautiful dark suit with a crisp white shirt and a narrow dark tie—he looked like something out of a TV commercial. I remember wishing my father was more like him. The truth is, I was embarrassed that my father was a bartender. I hated that he worked at night, and I hated that we all had to walk on eggshells when he came home drunk. I’m sure Sue’s family had its own problems, but to me they were everything we were not—happy, loving, and normal.
Sometimes, but not often, I’d invite Sue to sleep over at my house. This was always a gamble—I never knew if my father would explode when she was around. One night, Sue and I were fast asleep in my bedroom when I was awakened by the sound of my father’s voice downstairs. I couldn’t tell what he was saying, but it didn’t matter. I knew what was coming. I shook Sue out of her sound sleep and told her to get dressed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked groggily.
“Just get dressed. You have to go home.”
I hustled Sue out of the house at two in the morning, and Annette and I drove her home. I never told her why I did it, or at least not until many years later. I didn’t want any of my friends to see my father in one of his rages. I couldn’t bear to have them know I lived this way.
Around that time, business at the Windmill started going south. I’m sure my father gave away thousands and thousands of dollars worth of free drinks. Slowly and steadily, the Windmill dragged him under. At home, money was tight; my parents worked longer hours with fewer rewards. The screw was tightening. We hadn’t had a major blowout in a while, but we could all sense one was coming. It was only a matter of time.
I was at Sue’s house one afternoon when the phone rang. She told me it was my sister Annette. I took the phone, and I could tell by Annette’s voice that something was terribly wrong.
“Get home right now,” she said. “Right now.”
I jumped on my bike and furiously pedaled the few blocks home. When I walked through the front door, the first thing I noticed was the fake plastic mimosa tree we usually kept in the foyer upended and lying in the middle of the den. I held my breath as I walked in the direction of the screaming. Usually my father’s rages happened at night, so I could hide in my bedroom, shut off all the lights, and disappear in the darkness. But this was broad daylight, the middle of the afternoon. There was no place to hide. I heard my mother pleading with my father. Part of me wanted to run upstairs, where the other children were huddled, but I just couldn’t do it. I was sixteen years old now. I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening anymore.
I walked into the kitchen. The table and chairs, relatively new replacements for the ones my father had destroyed, were in pieces again. My mother was lying on the floor, curled into a ball. My father was standing over her, ruthlessly kicking her.
Something in me snapped. I had tried to break up their screaming matches before and I had yelled at my father to stop bullying Frankie, but this was different. I ran up to him and told him to stop and started hitting him with my fists. With one arm, he swatted me away, and I flew across the room, crashing against a wall. He went right back to kicking my mother.
I shocked myself by getting right back up. I didn’t know if I was hurt, and I didn’t care. I was running on adrenaline. I went up to my father and clenched my hand into a fist. I put my fist in his face and held it there, inches from his nose, and I yelled at him louder than I ever had before. I heard my mother begging me to go away, to leave him alone. I knew she didn’t want my father to hurt me, too. But I held my ground and shook my fist in his face and flew into my own terrible rage.
“Stop or I will call the police!” I screamed. “Stop right now or I will have you arrested!!”
I don’t know if it was my rage, an echo of his own, that did it. I don’t know if my father saw the lack of fear in my face. I don’t know if it was my threat to call the cops—surely the first time any of us threatened him in that way. But, whatever it was, it worked. My father stopped kicking my mother and just shut down. The power went out of him. His shoulders slumped, and he stood there harmlessly, looking confused and defeated. Finally he shuffled away. I went to my mother. Soon Annette came down, and then Nancy and Frankie and even little Steven. We all sat in the wreckage of the kitchen with my mother, watching her cry. Later that day she drove herself to the hospital.
She had a dozen bruises and three broken ribs.
They bandaged her up and sent her back home with no questions asked.
Over time, my mother’s bruises healed. She didn’t leave my father after that, and she never would. But something changed for me that day. Something was different now that I had stood up to him. It was like I’d found a weapon I could use against him. It was as if, for the first time, I saw a way out.
In many ways, that was the day I grew up.
Not long after our Thanksgiving together, I asked Maurice what he usually did for Christmas.
“Nothing,” he said with a shrug.
“What do you mean? Don’t you celebrate Christmas?”
“Nope.”
I pressed him on this, and Maurice told me his family didn’t usually do anything. He could remember a couple of times when his mother cooked something special around the holidays, but Maurice spent his last Christmas all by himself at the Salvation Army. He had the free meal they offered, and a staffer took him over to a bin filled with toys for poor children. Maurice had picked out a stuffed white teddy bear for himself.
That was the closest he’d ever come to getting a Christmas gift.
I asked him if he wanted to spend this Christmas with me and my family. He quickly said yes and smiled his biggest smile.
The Saturday before Christmas, Maurice and I went together to buy a Christmas tree. We picked out a nice one from a sidewalk vendor and lugged it home. I pulled out my decorations, which included little red apple ornaments, tinsel, and colored lights. Then I played an album of Christmas carols, and we drank hot chocolate while we trimmed the tree.
After we finished decorating the tree we had dinner and, of course, baked cookies. Then I handed Maurice a piece of paper and told him to write down what he wanted Santa Claus to bring him this year.
“There ain’t no Santa Claus,” he stated, laughing.
“Maybe not,” I said, “but you still have to make a list for him.”
Maurice scribbled something down. At the top of his list he wrote remote-control racecar.
Maurice asked if he could just sit and look at the tree for a while. I dimmed the lights in the apartment, and, with the Christmas carols still playing, we sat on the sofa and stared at the tree, saying nothing. We sat like that, with the glow of the tree lighting up our faces, for quite a long time. Then Maurice finally spoke.
“Thank you for making my Christmas so nice,” he said. “Kids like me—we know everything that’s going on out there. We see it on TV. But we’re always on the outside looking in. We know about stuff like Christmas, but kids like me, we know we can never have it for ourselves, so we don’t think about it.”
I marveled again at how wise Maurice was, given his circumstances. He was still so young, but he had a definite outlook on life, a perspective shaped by his experience. He understood precisely where he fit in society. He may not have known how to blow his nose, but he understood the way of the world better than a lot of
people twice his age.
A few days later, on Christmas Eve, Maurice came over to my apartment. My sister Nancy, who lived by herself about thirty blocks south of me, was there, too. She had gotten to know Maurice and really liked spending time with him. When Maurice came into my apartment, he saw ten or twelve wrapped presents under the tree, and his eyes grew wide. He must have known at least some of them were for him. We had a lovely dinner, and afterward we sat by the tree listening to Christmas carols again. I let Maurice open one of his presents. I knew there were a lot of basic things he needed—socks, T-shirts, underwear, gloves, a hat, a winter jacket, things like that. Over the months since I’d met him I’d been mindful not to buy him things he didn’t really need; I didn’t want to be the “rich lady” who bought him stuff. But Maurice had never really celebrated Christmas, and this was just too good an opportunity to spoil him a little. I did buy him a lot of clothes that Christmas, but there was one special gift I let him open on Christmas Eve.
Maurice carefully unwrapped the box. He let out a little squeal when he saw the remote-control racecar. He and Nancy assembled it while I got dinner ready, and Maurice asked if he could bring it to my sister Annette’s house so he and Derek could play with it.
Incredibly, that was the first wrapped present he had ever received.
Maurice and Nancy came over again on Christmas morning, and we all drove to Annette’s house. When we got there, Maurice couldn’t believe how big Annette’s tree was—probably twice the size of mine. Beneath it lay a million dazzling gifts, or so it seemed. Annette loved to decorate the house for the holidays: wreaths, a manger, tinsel everywhere. Maurice walked around in wonder. Before long it was time for all of us to gather in the living room and open presents. Everyone had a present for Maurice, including my nieces and nephew. I’d helped Maurice pick out presents for them, too. The children were nearly lost in a flurry of wrapping paper, but I could see Maurice got T-shirts, underwear, a hat and gloves, a winter jacket, even a shirt by Tommy Hilfiger, which absolutely floored him. He got his own basketball, a pair of sneakers, and lots of other little gifts. He couldn’t believe all of it was for him.
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