The Godmothers

by Camille Aubray

  The blue-suited man looked worried. “It should have been here by now. Pop will have my hide if that fish don’t show up. I’d better check on this myself. I need a car.”

  “Take my truck,” Chris said, handing him the keys. “It’s got plenty of ice and coolers. If you find the fish, better haul it over here yourself.” The well-dressed man took the keys.

  “Hi, ladies,” the man said on his way out, looking nonplussed at their presence.

  That made Chris look up, astonished to recognize his mother and aunt. “What are you two doing here?” he asked, looking annoyed.

  Lucy said, “You forgot the soda, you idiot. Why’d you bring Vinnie and Paulie up here? Are you crazy? Amie will be furious, and she’ll tell Frankie what you did.”

  “You can’t tell them we were here!” Vinnie spoke up in pure panic.

  “Saints above, do you hooligans have any idea what’s going on in this place?” Lucy hissed at Chris. “You’re in the belly of the beast, with the country’s biggest criminals!”

  “Which is why this is no place for women,” Chris said urgently, pulling her aside. “You must go home, Ma. Take Vinnie and Paulie if you have to.”

  “I’m not leaving without you, young fella,” Lucy insisted, “even if I have to drag you by your nose.” To prove she meant it, she reached out to tweak it, but Chris ducked.

  “I’m not your little boy anymore!” he said severely. “And you will not embarrass me in front of this crew. What good would my rep be if word got out that my mama showed up at Apalachin to drag me back home?”

  At that moment, they all heard a shrill whistle. Everyone paused. Within seconds, they heard a stampede of running feet in the house, loud voices shouting, and the slamming of doors. Then a kitchen worker burst into the room, looking terrified.

  “It’s a raid!” he cried out, looking stricken. “A police raid!”

  “We’d better get the hell out, Chris,” Paulie pleaded.

  “Relax!” Chris said, waving a spatula. “The cops are probably harassing them about all the parked cars, just to get a payoff. You think I can just leave this cooking?”

  Filomena had gone to the doorway and looked out. “The guests are all running into the woods in their wing-tipped shoes,” she reported. Chris peered out and saw that, indeed, most of these well-dressed big shots had fled the house in an ungainly way, their coats flapping, making them look like a flock of startled crows. Furthermore, there were police cars everywhere, with cops stopping anyone they spotted trying to drive off.

  Lucy snapped, “You thickhead! Nobody’s staying for dinner. And neither are we.”

  Vinnie and Paulie had gone pale with terror, but even now they didn’t want to leave their older cousin in the lurch. “Chris, what do you want us to do?” they asked, looking at him so trustfully that Chris suddenly realized the foolish jeopardy he’d put his younger cousins into. If they got arrested in this roundup, they’d be tagged for life as criminals, and they could surely kiss goodbye any dreams of university admission and a respectable profession after that. It was a betrayal of the whole family, bringing them here in the first place. And what kind of man didn’t protect his own family?

  “Let’s scram,” Chris said hastily. Vinnie and Paulie dropped everything, turned off the stoves, and helped him shut off the ovens and rapidly put the food away. “Maybe we should head for the woods, too,” Chris said, peering out apprehensively.

  “No. It will make us look guilty if we run,” Filomena warned. “But you gave away your truck. So we’ll have to put you boys in the soda van. Andiamo!”

  When Filomena climbed in front and Lucy slid behind the wheel, Chris said in disbelief, “Ma, you can’t drive this thing!”

  “And how on God’s green earth do you think we got here?” Lucy said crisply.

  Filomena said quickly, “You boys can’t be seen by the police. They’ll mistake you for a bunch of mobsters. Climb in back, and duck down behind the soda pallets.”

  “Key-hrist!” Vinnie moaned as they obeyed and shut the door.

  Lucy put her foot down on the accelerator and took off. But they didn’t get very far. At the bottom of the drive, the cars were barely inching forward, being forced to stop at a police cordon. “Holy Mother of God. It’s not just cops here,” Lucy said tensely. “There’s also state troopers. And some grim-looking men in suits.”

  “G-men!” Chris said in a muffled voice. “FBI or the narcotics bureau!”

  “They’re checking every car and writing things down on a list,” Filomena reported.

  Lucy saw the drivers being forced to hand over something she didn’t have. “They’re asking for driver’s licenses,” she said in a small voice. “I haven’t got one.”

  “Great, we’re all going to jail,” Paulie muttered.

  “Get down, you fools!” Lucy snapped. She moved the van forward at the excruciating snail’s pace allowed. Inch by inch, they made their way to the front of the line. Lucy could just imagine the headlines tomorrow, with her name in the story. The hospital would fire her on the spot. But now it was her turn to face the young cop.

  Steeling herself, she rolled down her window and said sweetly, “Hello there, young man. Goodness, what a holy fuss today! We’re just the caterers. We have to get ourselves back to the city, or our employer will be so mad at us.”

  As the policeman peered in at them, he looked surprised to see two women, about his mother’s age. He glanced questioningly at an older cop, who walked over to the soda van.

  “Whaddaya got here?” the older man asked sharply.

  “Only a couple of lady cooks,” the young officer said. The older cop peered in appraisingly, seeing two middle-aged matrons with crates of soda stacked behind them.

  Lucy silently prayed to all the saints and angels she could think of, then vowed, Mother Mary, get us out of here and I’ll make a novena every week for a whole year.

  “Okay, let ’em go,” the older officer said, “we got bigger fish to fry.”

  Lucy drove through the gate, forcing herself to go at a normal pace, worried that the older one might find out that the first cop hadn’t asked for her license. But apparently she and Filomena looked so insignificant that they weren’t even worth noting. Lucy held her breath until she was finally away from the police cordon and onto the main country road.

  She accelerated again and did not slow down until Chris said, “Stop, I’m getting carsick back here. I have to sit up front, or else I’ll puke.”

  “He will, too,” Lucy said. “Boats don’t bother him, but backseats do. He was always that way.” She pulled to the side of the road, which had thick woodlands on both sides. “Fine, you drive, laddie, I’m exhausted, and me nerves are shot,” she declared.

  Chris hopped out, and she slid over for him. But just as Chris had settled in at the steering wheel, a man in a three-piece suit and fedora, with a camel-hair coat flung over his shoulders, came walking calmly out of the woods. He raised his left hand with his thumb up. If a king were hitchhiking, this is how he would do it.

  “See what you’ve done?” Lucy hissed. “This guy thinks we stopped for him.”

  “I’ve never seen a hitchhiker dressed like that,” Chris observed. For the man had an unmistakable aura that indicated that he was clearly one of the gangster guests.

  “It will surely be more dangerous to refuse him this favor than it would be to pick him up,” Filomena murmured astutely. The man approached the driver’s side, and Chris reluctantly lowered his window partway, to hear what he had to say.

  “Pardon me,” the man said in a deep, low voice. “My car broke down while I was visiting a sick friend. Had to leave it with him, for now. I’m heading to New York City. Can you give me a lift?”

  Chris thought that there was something familiar about this guy. He had neatly combed hair above a high forehead and alert, slightly squinted eyes. He had a small cleft parting his chin. Chris said cautiously, “Sure. Ma, you ladies sit in the back.”

  “N
o, no,” said the man, peering into the van with a quick, assessing look, “don’t disturb the ladies. I can sit back there with these two fine boys. Twins, are you?” he asked, as if mentally assessing their age and reliability. But he glanced doubtfully at all the soda pallets and fold-down benches.

  “It’s okay,” Lucy said hastily, comprehending that Chris was somehow trying to protect them all. “You ride up front. We’ll sit in the back with our kids.”

  The man tipped his hat to her. “Much obliged,” he said in a debonair way.

  He settled in beside Chris. As they drove off, the hitchhiker glanced all around, peering out the windows, looking to see who was in every car they passed. He took out a fine linen handkerchief to wipe his perspiring brow.

  They took off without another word. The radio was playing Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are.” At one point, a state trooper’s car went rushing by in the other direction, its lights flashing, and Chris saw his tense passenger flinch before finally exhaling with relief as it passed them by.

  The man sat rigidly for about a half hour, then he appeared to relax and doze. Chris had seen men in the navy do this, from pure exhaustion, but also as a kind of defense mechanism, to ward off having to talk to a stranger. But men in war, even when asleep, always kept “one eye open,” as if their bodies were forever on alert.

  After a while, the radio was playing a Pat Boone song, which Chris despised. He reached out to search for something better. As he adjusted the tuning, he glanced down and saw his passenger’s right hand, which was missing its thumb and forefinger. Just two stumps in their place. Chris glanced away hastily, but this did not escape the notice of the hitchhiker, who, without moving, had opened his eyes and was watching him carefully.

  “You know who I am?” the man said quietly.

  “Yes,” Chris said. After a pause he added, “But I never saw you today.”

  “Good.” The man jerked his head toward the back of the soda van, where the others were murmuring in subdued conversations of their own. “What about them?” he asked. “Are they smart enough to keep quiet about what they’ve seen up here?”

  Chris heard the stern, implicit threat. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll see to it.”

  The man nodded. “This all you do, deliver soda?” he asked. “Who’s your boss?”

  “My aunt back in Westchester,” Chris said carefully. “I cook in her restaurant.”

  “That right?” his passenger said. He wore a casual expression but was still watching very keenly and listening very closely. “It’s good to have a profession. Something you can do well. A lot of kids today, they see the big men around town who make it look easy, and they think, Hell, that’s the ticket! I want that guy’s life! They never get wise to the fact that if you want the big boys’ ‘ups,’ you also gotta take the big ‘downs.’”

  Chris said, “I guess that’s fair, to take the bad with the good.”

  “There’s nothing fair about the jungle,” the man shot back, a bit agitated now. “It’s full of animals that will tear your head off. If that’s where you were born and you got no skills, then you can’t help it. Best I could do as a kid was work in a machine shop. So, of course I got hurt. Then I had to look for something else to do. I washed windows. There’s no easy way, kid. Especially now. The old days are gone. You can’t even trust the cops and the government no more,” he said, sounding disgusted. “And it’s only gonna get uglier.”

  Now Chris was certain that he knew who his passenger was—a man who’d turned window-washing into the kind of enterprise where if you didn’t let him wash your windows, they’d get broken. And if you still didn’t pay up, you’d get broken.

  The man’s gaze was darting vigilantly out the window, as if he’d spent a lifetime glancing over his shoulder to see who was gaining on him. He looked exhausted.

  Chris dropped off his hitchhiker in midtown, as instructed.

  “Thanks, kid,” the man said briskly. “I owe you one.”

  Chris nodded and drove on. His other passengers had dozed off and didn’t rouse themselves until he pulled up to the house in Greenwich Village.

  “You’d better call Godmother Amie and say you’re on the way to Mamaroneck,” Chris advised them. “Then all of you should catch the next train there and stay put until Thanksgiving weekend. Just lay low, you understand? It may get rough here in town.”

  “What about you?” Lucy demanded. “Aren’t you spending the holiday with us? Frankie is already up there, waiting for you.”

  “Don’t worry, Ma. I’ll be there, but first I have to make some calls about getting my truck back and returning this van,” Chris said. He tilted his head to address the twins with a warning stare. “Now, listen. Not a word about where we’ve been. You understand me, guys?”

  “Who the hell was that man we picked up, anyway?” Paulie demanded.

  Chris drew a deep breath. “He’s the Big Boss of his own crime family. He’s got his hand in the garment district, trucking, unions . . . and kosher chickens. To name a few. You just met Tommy ‘Three-Finger’ Lucchese.”

  “God! Does he really only have three fingers?” Lucy asked, aghast.

  Filomena said quietly, “He’s an old friend of Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello.”

  “Whoa. He’s the real deal!” Paulie said, suitably chastened.

  “What were you guys talking about so much?” Vinnie asked curiously.

  “The future,” Chris said soberly, thinking of how absurd and undignified those big gangsters had looked running into the woods. Why had he ever imagined that their life was something to aspire to? With a wry grin, Chris added, “He says it’s not a great time to be a racketeer. And I figure, he ought to know the score. See ya later, folks.”

  As the others went inside, Lucy murmured to Filomena, “I never thought I’d say this, but I thank my saints and angels for planting Mr. Lucchese in our path! And I’m going to light a candle to Mother Mary, because this crazy day just may have been the only way to save my son from a life of crime.”

  35

  Mamaroneck, Thanksgiving 1957

  “Always listen to your godmothers,” Amie told the young ones as they gathered at Filomena’s house by the sea. The dining room’s big windows overlooked the drowsy Long Island Sound as its pewter-colored waves softly rolled onto a little beach in the cove below. Mute swans and bufflehead ducks floated serenely at the inlets, unperturbed by the gentle swells of the tides. The dappled, glowing autumn sunlight streamed inside as the entire family took their seats around the big table.

  “You should especially listen to this godmother,” Mario continued, pulling a chair out for Filomena to sit upon. “She practically predicted the Apalachin Conference,” he announced, holding up a newspaper headline that screamed:

  Feds Nab Over Sixty Mobsters In Apalachin Meeting

  “What’s Apple—Appa—?” Teresa asked, then gave up on pronouncing the word.

  “App-eh-lay-kin,” Mario said as Amie passed around the first-course platter of pumpkin ravioli made with sage butter and Parmesan. “More than sixty big-time mobsters and their henchmen were arrested, it says,” Mario reported. “They even nabbed Vito Genovese! And Profaci, and some Bonanno people, too. This is some crackdown. There’s a whole list here.” He paused. “Naturally, the papers didn’t spell all their names right.”

  He scanned the article further. “Apparently the upstate police took the names and license numbers of all the men who showed up there. What a rogue’s gallery!” Mario said, tossing the newspaper aside. “Everybody who’s anybody in the rackets was there.”

  By now Vinnie and Paulie could not resist elbowing each other, then snickering, and they had to put their heads down to stop. Lucy gave them a quick warning look.

  “If you ask me,” said Pippa, “it was just plain stupid for all the Bosses to park their big swanky cars around some old farmhouse. So conspicuous, among the cows!”

  “My friend George says that it was a state trooper who first got wis
e to the gangsters, because he noticed that the ‘host’ of the party had booked a whole lot of motel rooms for his guests,” Gemma volunteered.

  Frankie sighed. “Your ‘friend George’ says so, eh? Never thought my daughter would fall for a cop. That guy danced almost every dance with you at Petrina’s wedding.”

  “George happens to be a detective,” Gemma said stoutly. “And a good dancer!”

  “I take one vacation in my life, and this is what comes of it,” said Frankie, undeterred.

  “Maybe it wasn’t just a bright-eyed trooper who figured out that the mobsters were up there,” Petrina suggested slyly. “Maybe someone tipped him off. Possibly to spoil it for Genovese, who wants to be crowned king of New York.”

  “Well, now there will be hell to pay,” Mario said soberly. “The narcotics bureau is on it, and Hoover and the FBI are getting into the act. There’s talk of a Senate hearing, too. Sounds like the beginning of the end of things.”

  “Makes Costello look real smart. He got out just in time,” Amie observed.

  “So did we. So now it’s none of our business,” Filomena said firmly. “Anymore.”

  “Salute! Now, where the hell is that turkey?” Frankie demanded. “I’m hungry.”

  As Chris appeared carrying a big roasted turkey on a platter, Pippa said, “Uncle Frankie, pour some more champagne. Uncle Mario says he wants to make the toast this year.”

  Frankie obligingly popped open another bottle and poured the lively golden wine into the tall glasses. Everyone turned expectantly to Mario, who smiled tenderly at Filomena and said, “I raise my glass today to my beautiful, wise wife.”

  Everyone else lifted their glasses and clinked, smiling at Filomena. She noticed that for the first time, she had stopped seeing numbers for her family members. Only their happy faces now. Perhaps this means they are finally safe, she thought.