“I guess the cat’s got our young friend’s tongue tonight. Look at those lashes,” she said, tousling his hair and admiring his bright blue eyes. “Watch out, ladies. This one is going to be a real heartbreaker.”
He was too excited for bed when the magical evening ended and begged to be allowed to stay up to listen to the album his little brother had given him for his birthday. He kept the volume on the hi-fi console turned low so he wouldn’t disturb Papa and Miss Eileen sleeping one floor above. He played the entire record twice, from beginning to end, dancing around the living room in his pajamas, miming the lyrics to “America” and “I Feel Pretty,” oblivious to his stepmother standing in the doorway, smiling as she watched him perform.
“I love this song! Please don’t stop!” she pleaded, but he was too embarrassed to continue, mortified at being discovered acting like such a sissy, fearful she’d tell his father, who barely tolerated his oldest son’s interest in actresses and singers.
“Come on then, come over here and sit beside me,” she insisted as she settled on the sofa, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke across the room. “Did you have a good time tonight? Your father tried to argue with me, saying you and your brother were too young to go to a nightclub, but I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I wanted you to have a birthday you’d remember the rest of your life.”
If she’d been anyone else, an aunt or a neighbor, the mother of one of his schoolboy friends, Miss Eileen, glamorous and elegant, would have been irresistible to a starstruck boy like her stepson. He would have sat at her feet, a willing captive, enthralled by her tales of eating clams with Frank Sinatra in Atlantic City, drinking daiquiris with Sammy Davis, Jr., at the Latin Casino, borrowing lipstick from Natalie Wood in a powder room in Miami Beach. She’d left her home in the Holmesburg section of the city at sixteen and found her way to New York, where she’d danced in the chorus of Broadway musicals, The Pajama Game and L’il Abner. She claimed her first husband had died under mysterious circumstances, hinting of gangster connections and Mafia hits, but Papa scoffed at the story, saying he was nothing but a lowlife drunk who broke his neck in a fall down the stairs. A youngish widow, she’d supported herself giving dance lessons at Palumbo’s where she’d met Papa. Frankie would have worshiped her, hung on her every word, lit her cigarettes, and brought her Pepsi-Colas, if only she hadn’t married his father. She was an intruder, the woman who’d encouraged his little brother, unable to remember the mother who had died before his third birthday, to call her Mama.
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, surrendering to the arm she draped around his shoulder, pulling him in for a hug.
She looked different without her makeup, pale and drawn, with black circles under her eyes. Her skin appeared dry, almost chapped, translucent, the bright blue blood vessels shimmering just below the surface. She took a drag off her cigarette before stubbing it in the ashtray, coughing as she sucked the smoke deep into her chest.
“Wasn’t the show tonight wonderful?” she asked, sounding wistful, as if she missed her long ago days on the stage.
“Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, not resisting the kiss she planted on his forehead. The tobacco and talcum powder couldn’t completely mask the unpleasant sour milk-smell of her breath.
“Don’t stay up too late, Frankie. Your father wants to go to eight o’clock Mass in the morning,” she said as she rose, a bit unsteady on her feet, and said good night. After she’d gone, he stared at the bloody tissue on the coffee table, the one she’d used to cover her mouth when she coughed. She would be bedridden by midsummer and dead before Thanksgiving. Frankie wore the tie clip she’d given him on his birthday to her funeral, then put it in his sock drawer and never took it out again.
MICHAEL, 1974
Michael was tired and irritable. He missed the routine of his everyday life, spending his days at school, his evenings at the kitchen table doing his homework before Happy Days, then reading in bed until he fell asleep, rousing adventures like Kidnapped and The Hobbit that swept him away to more exciting worlds. Papa had insisted on a three-night viewing for his third wife, grousing that the younger generation had no respect for the dead, hardly waiting until they were cold before putting them in the ground, out of sight and out of mind. Michael had overheard Sal Pinto telling his wife that Luigi couldn’t bear the thought of letting her go. Tomorrow would be a long day: the funeral Mass, the long trip to the cemetery, the catered lunch in a banquet room at Palumbo’s.
“Mikey, Papa is looking for you. He wants you in the viewing room. You better hurry up. Father Parisi is going to start the rosary.”
His half sister Polly had found him sitting alone, hiding in a dark, quiet corner in a back room of the funeral home. He resented her bossing him around, trying to take charge while Papa was preoccupied.
“I have to go back to the house to help Mrs. Pontarelli and Mrs. Delvecchia put out the food.” The women of the neighborhood had prepared an elaborate feast of hams and turkeys, trays of ziti and pots of meatballs and sauce, cakes and pies and mountains of cookies, to feed the visitors who came back to the house after viewing hours to eat and drink and smoke, staying long after Michael and Frankie had been sent to their beds. “Don’t make him come get you if you want to be able to sit tomorrow,” she warned.
As soon as Polly left, he ran up a wide, carpeted staircase, certain no one would follow. He reached the landing and slowly made his way down the hall to find somewhere to hide, the prospect of getting caught by Papa being far scarier than meeting a flesh-eating zombie in search of fresh blood. At least he could fight back against a zombie, killing it by bashing in its brain. He saw light from an open door and heard music, not the funereal organ dirges piped through the speakers on the floor below. The radio was tuned to “Fridays with Frank,” the same station Papa and Miss Eileen listened to during dinner. Mr. Casano was sitting at his desk, his glasses pushed up on his head, singing along to “That’s Life” as he worked.
“You like Mr. Sinatra, young man?” he asked, smiling as he looked up and found Michael standing in the doorway.
“He’s okay, I guess.”
“I suppose you like the more modern music, don’t you? Who’s your favorite singer?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have one,” Michael mumbled, stricken by an attack of awkward shyness.
“You don’t like music? That’s a shame.” Mr. Casano clucked. “Music is one of the great joys of life.”
“I like Fleetwood Mac,” Michael insisted, citing Frankie’s favorite group, not wanting to disappoint Mr. Casano.
“Well, I don’t know who that is, but I’m sure he’s very good,” Mr. Casano agreed, reaching into his desk drawer for a Snickers bar to hand to Michael as he waved him to a chair. “I need to go back downstairs, but you can stay up here while you finish your candy bar. You can change the radio station, if you like.”
Mr. Casano had rescued him from being forced to do the awful thing against his will. He sat in the chair, swinging his legs, eating slowly to make the candy bar last. He found a station that played the Top 40, “Bennie and the Jets,” “You’re Sixteen,” humming along as he chewed. He thought he was safe, that he’d never be found, only to see Frankie standing in the doorway.
“Papa says you have to come downstairs now.”
He knew better than to argue. He’d run out of options.
“It’s not so terrible, Mikey. I’ll do it first. It only takes a second.”
He swallowed the last bite of Snickers and followed his brother into the viewing room, where they knelt beside their father on the floor while Father Parisi droned through the Five Sorrowful Mysteries. After the prayer, they took their place beside the casket, thanking the visitors again for coming, nodding their heads as their friends and neighbors shook their hands and embraced them, assuring them she looks so peaceful, at least she isn’t suffering now, Casano did a beautiful job. And then, after the last condolence had been shared and the three of them were alone, father and sons appr
oached the stiff, cold woman lying in the open casket. The strange lady in a bright orange wig, with ruby-red lips and robin’s-egg-blue eyelids, looked nothing like the sweet and gentle stepmother who had sung “Mr. Sandman” when she put Michael to bed. He’d heard the old black-clad crones from the parish whispering among themselves, scandalized by the plunging neckline of the emerald-green burial dress chosen by Papa because his wife looked like Angie Dickinson in Ocean’s 11 whenever she had worn it.
Frankie, as commanded, bent down and kissed Miss Eileen on the lips. He whispered in his brother’s ear, offering encouragement, telling him there was no reason to be scared. Miss Eileen couldn’t hurt him.
“Why do I have to do it, Boo?”
At times, when Michael was exhausted or frightened, he would regress and become a needy little boy again, using the name he’d stopped calling his brother after starting school.
“You don’t have to kiss her on the mouth, Mikey. Just do it quick and it will be over.”
Michael felt Frankie drape his arm around his shoulders to steady and reassure him. With his brother standing beside him, he found the courage to lean over and barely touch his lips to his stepmother’s cold, smooth forehead.
FRANKIE, 1974
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession.
“Is that all you have to confess, young man?”
“Yes.”
Frankie’s voice was wobbly, strained and high-pitched. Father Parisi would know he wasn’t telling the truth. It’s another sin, lying to the priest in confession.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Father.”
He’d already run through the litany of pardonable transgressions. Lying to his father six times. Being mean to his little brother twice. Cheating at Monopoly.
“Remember, there’s nothing Jesus hasn’t heard before. Nothing He won’t forgive.”
Father Parisi was wrong. Jesus would never forgive Frankie for praying for Miss Eileen to die.
“Your penance is two Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. I know you’re a good boy, Frankie. Don’t ever be afraid to come talk to me if you’re ever worried you’ve done something wrong.”
But Frankie had known as long as he could remember there are some things that couldn’t be shared and to trust no one with his secrets. He knelt in the front pew before the altar, head bowed, back straight, hands folded in prayer, promising to never wish anyone dead again, the picture of saintliness to the approving old women of the parish waiting to make their confession.
FRANKIE, 1975
They’d been inseparable as boys, their lives intertwined since their first day at Saint Catherine of Siena Elementary School. Jack, left sallow by chronic anemia, had shyly approached and asked if he could join Frankie at the lunch table. The girl sitting with Frankie picked up her tray and walked away, claiming the unwelcome intruder smelled funny, which he did. Jack had an odd scent that lingered after he left a room, reminiscent of mothballs and dirty clothes and, strangely enough, licorice. He was a weird-looking kid, with pointy ears and a mouthful of sharp, crooked teeth. His nose was runny and he breathed though his mouth, whistling as he inhaled. He’d been a change-of-life baby, his only brother almost twenty years older, and was a lonely child, left on his own, his parents preoccupied with running their corner market. Miss Eileen had set a place for him at the dinner table most evenings and he spent many nights sleeping on a makeshift bed on the floor in Frankie and Michael’s room. Papa never objected to his presence since Jack was quick to offer to help Frankie with the chores in the shop, sweeping the cuttings from the floor, stacking the magazines, emptying ashtrays, always soliciting favorable comparisons to Papa’s lazy and ungrateful eldest son.
Their friendship deepened as they grew older and became even more isolated and estranged from the cliques that absorbed their classmates, each dependent on the other for companionship. Frankie thought of Jack as a second brother. He never suspected Jack had different, stronger feelings until a blistering August afternoon in 1975. They lay side by side, working on their Hollywood tans, only a beach towel protecting them from the scorching concrete of the deck of the Montrose Street municipal pool. Frankie’s transistor radio was tuned to WFIL and the hottest hits of the summer. “Jive Talkin’.” “That’s the Way (I Like It).” “The Hustle.” Frankie was roused from his stupor when the lifeguard blew on his shrill whistle, checking to be sure Michael wasn’t drowning in the deep end of the pool. He squinted into the sun, half asleep. Jack was lying on his side, propped up on an elbow, staring at him. Frankie felt exposed and awkward. He closed his eyes and faced the sun, acting as if he hadn’t noticed the bulge in Jack’s trunks, and reached for a towel to hide the obvious one in his own. Later that afternoon, the first of many times, they locked themselves in Jack’s bedroom in the apartment above his parents’ store. One day, when Jack’s mother was upstairs recovering from the flu, Jack suggested they go to Frankie’s house, but Frannie Merlino kept knocking on the bedroom door, asking what they were up to and why they were so quiet, insisting they let Michael join them.
It became a routine and began to feel like a dreaded chore to Frankie. Jack was always the instigator. Frankie was the passive one, lying on his back as Jack unbuckled his belt and slipped his hand into his underpants. Frankie was a reluctant participant, needing to be begged and cajoled, agreeing only to spare Jack the humiliation of rejection. He would close his eyes while Jack was blowing him, pretending it was Paul Ottaviano or Joey Criniti, the handsome boys he fantasized about whenever he stuck his finger up his ass when he lay in bed at night, unable to sleep. But he never let Jack kiss him again after the first time they had done it. He always turned his face and clenched his jaw, repulsed by the vivid memory of Jack’s sharp teeth and the unpleasant taste of his mouth.
FRANKIE AND MICHAEL, 1976
Things were different after the night the old priest showed up, unannounced and uninvited, and insisted on speaking to Papa. Frankie and Michael were sent to their bedroom and told to shut the door. They heard loud, angry male voices downstairs, but couldn’t distinguish the words. Frannie Merlino’s pleas, though, were clear and distinct, begging her husband not to argue with a man of God.
“I showed Father Parisi the back of my legs,” Frankie confided. Michael could smell his brother’s terror, fearing Papa’s wrath for daring to reveal family secrets to an outsider. His punishment would be swift and severe.
Frankie ran to his closet and began stuffing as many clothes as he could in his St. Philip Neri High School gym bag. He dropped to his knees and hugged his little brother.
“I’ll come back for you as soon as I can, Mikey. I promise you.”
Michael, confused and frightened, begged Frankie to take him with him. Frankie flinched when the bedroom door was flung open, expecting the sting of leather on his back. Papa was clearly enraged, too angry to even speak, but he didn’t raise a hand or take a step toward his son. He spit out some phrase in Italian, then turned and walked away, slamming the door behind him.
Father Parisi’s threat to report his most devout parishioner to Protective Services kept him from ever striking his sons again. But Papa was creative, finding ways to punish his children that were far crueler than any beating. The list of offenses was exhaustive. Disrespect. Unreliability. Failure to obey. But the worst transgressions imaginable to the man of many wives were the sins of the flesh, which included a pre-pubescent boy’s healthy and normal curiosity about the human body.
Michael learned how to swear on the asphalt parking lot that served as a schoolyard. He took great delight in hearing the sound of his voice forming the forbidden words. He was still too young to understand the mechanics of blow me or to know exactly which bodily fluid cream referred to. He and his friends spent their entire lunch hour in the damp, smelly restroom, arguing about the physical differences between boys and girls. He’d begun noticing the sullen teenage girls in their high school uniforms, palming lit cigarettes
as they sauntered along the sidewalk. They wore tight, clingy sweaters and their blouses were unbuttoned to expose the crucifixes dangling in their cleavage. Titties, he knew for sure what titties were, and titties were what he committed to paper, drawing stick girls with every shape and size breast imaginable. Round ones as big as basketballs. Long, skinny ones that drooped to their knees. Every girl had identical heart-shaped lips and wavy, long hair and fried-egg eyes. Only their titties were different.
“Disgusting. Filthy, disgusting boy,” Papa spit as he tore the drawings into shreds, threatening to make Michael chew and swallow the pieces. The actual punishment was worse. Michael pleaded for mercy, promising to confess his impure thoughts on Saturday, to do whatever penance the priest required, as his father slammed the door in his face and turned his key in the lock.
It was just a basement, ordinary, no different from the cellars of every house on the block, with a dirt floor, exposed ceiling beams, and cinder-block walls that had never been whitewashed. A single hundred-watt bare bulb cast a circle of stark, bright light in the center of the room. An entire nocturnal world existed at the bottom of the stairs. Silverfish slithered across the floor and centipedes climbed the surfaces of the walls. In the summer, crickets chirped in their hiding places and, come winter, tiny field mice took refuge from the snow and ice, seeking warmth and food.
Michael spent hours in exile, without clocks or a watch to measure time. Soon enough he felt pangs of hunger and his mouth was dry with thirst. He cupped water from the faucet of the utility sink into his hands and tipped it into his mouth. It tasted putrid, like rust and chemicals. The floorboards above creaked as Papa readied the shop for his first customer in the morning. He heard the echo of his father’s footsteps fading as he climbed the stairs to the kitchen, where his dinner and a glass of dago red awaited. Michael refused to cry. Only babies cried. He couldn’t shout or scream. No one could hear him. Papa wouldn’t return until morning. The dirt floor was cold and there was nothing to use as a sheet or a blanket. He sat crouched on the staircase until his back ached, cradling himself with his arms for warmth. He pissed in the sink when his bladder was full and tried to ignore the stabbing stomach cramps from the dirty water he had drunk. The pains grew sharper and he gripped his belly, gritting his teeth until his jaw ached. He fought the terrible urge as long as he could, until he couldn’t control it any longer. He cursed his father for making him lay in his own shit and surrendered to tears.
The Boys from Eighth and Carpenter Page 7