“Mama! Don't go! Mama!”
“I'm here baby,” she assured him as she held his hand. “I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere.
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“Is Papa allowed to get married again?”
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No one expected Luigi to take another wife. Eileen Costello's death seemed to have broken him. His sons would hear him sitting alone in the darkened living room, having one-sided conversations with her about the events of the day. His hair had turned white; his face was gaunt and haunted, his back more stooped. His quick temper returned, unrestrained by any calming influence, and he began swinging his belt again out of anger and frustration at the slightest provocation.
His sons said nothing when he brought a woman home one Sunday evening and announced the banns of marriage would be published in the next week's parish bulletin. Frannie Merlino, recently widowed, was a constant complainer, happy only when Luigi conceded to her demands that he spend money on a Mediterranean color television console and a pale blue Ford Fairlane with the title in her name. Knowing he'd spoiled
that dance hall girl
(an insult she never dared utter in his presence) with annual vacations, she insisted her husband take her on expensive trips; cruises in the Caribbean and a fifth anniversary excursion to Europe. Luigi even agreed to spend one week each July sweltering in a vacation trailer in Virginia left to her by her first husband. She tried to win Michael's affection, but he would never grow attached to another of his father's wives after losing Miss Eileen. She was cold and arrogant towards Frankie, treating him as something vile and disgusting, stalking him like a starving cat, waiting for any opportunity to expose him as a disgusting degenerate who should be cast from their home. She was a patient woman, knowing the day would come when she would hold the evidence in her hand.
Papa was waiting for Frankie as he let himself in the back door. He assumed his father was angry because it was long past midnight. Frankie and his friend Jack Centafore had gone to see Barbra Streisand in
A Star is Born,
both agreeing once wasn't enough, and had stayed to watch it from beginning to end a second time. But when he saw Frannie Merlino standing behind her husband, clutching the torn pages from a magazine in her hand, he knew he was being confronted with something far more serious than breaking his curfew.
“I found this under your mattress,” she hissed, gleeful in her triumph. “Do you think we don't know what you're doing with this in your bedroom,” she said, tearing a photograph of a bare-chested Robby Benson into shreds as if it were the vilest pornography.
Papa seethed with rage, his face flush with blood. He held his clenched fists at his side, having been warned by the priest of the consequences if he ever left marks on his sons again. Michael, awakened by the shouting, wearing only his underwear, stood on the staircase, ready to attack if his father dared to raise a hand against his brother.
“
Finocchio.
Queer. Thank God your mother is dead or this would kill her.”
Frannie Merlino, too self-absorbed to gauge her husband's fleeting moods and shifting loyalties, gloated over her victory, seizing an opportunity to continue the humiliation.
“At least you can be grateful one of your boys is growing up to be a man and not an embarrassing faggot.”
Papa's voice was even, but cold and chilling. Frannie Merlino's face blanched at her husband's reproach.
“This is my house. You live under my roof. If you cannot respect my children, pack your suitcase and leave.”
As fate would have it, Luigi's most miserable marriage was the longest, lasting fifteen years until she made him a widower a fourth time. Obsessed with clean teeth and fresh breath, Frannie Merlino Gagliano had been too engrossed in searching her pocketbook for a Chicklet to see the Number 57 bus jump the curb. Neither father nor sons mourned her passing and rarely spoke her name after the day she was buried.
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“Do Papa's wives sleep in the same bed in heaven?”
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Helen Constanza. Luigi's last wife, was happiest working in the kitchen, standing at the stove from morning until night. She treated his sons with deference, insisting on feeding them whenever they walked through the door, regardless of the hour of the day or night. Michael, then a hard-working assistant prosecutor residing less than a mile away in an apartment he shared with the young nurse he intended to marry, returned infrequently and then only to see his brother, a grown man who, though a successful stylist, still lived under his father's roof. It was the great mystery of the family at Eighth and Carpenter that Michael, who had only occasionally suffered from the barber's temper and moods, despised the man while Frankie, the brother their father had treated so harshly, had remained the loyal son.
Both boys were genuinely fond of Helen Constanza, Frankie in particular. Frankie invited her to nights at the Forrest Theater and dinners with his friends, the ugly priest and the fat school teacher he affectionately referred to as his “husband” except, of course, in the presence of Papa. Luigi began to become confused and forgetful, sometimes referring to his wife as Eileen and insisting she wear the green dress he admired so much. He would scoff, becoming angry when she reminded him that Eileen Costello had passed many years ago and would accuse her of thinking him an idiot. Of course he knew who was dead and who was living flesh and blood. Helen's daughter in California insisted on moving her out west after she suffered a mild stroke, fearing that Papa, then in the obvious early stages of Alzheimer's, was unable to care for her. Luigi refused to consider a request from Helen's children that he agree to an annulment and they remained married until a fatal aneurysm did them part. He'd raged at his son the lawyer, calling him useless, when Michael refused to sue the Constanza family for cremating their mother, whose remains Luigi insisted were his legal property as the widower, and scattering her ashes at a marina in San Diego.
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“Is Papa going to be nice to us in heaven?”
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All but his most loyal customers gradually began drifting away. Even Sal Pinto feared his shaking hands and dreaded his lapses into irrational rants about the Polish Pope being a plant by the Kremlin. Frankie argued, but finally conceded, when Michael insisted their father surrender his driver's license. But he was adamant he would never condemn him to a nursing facility where Michael argued he could be cared for and protected from himself. Frankie kept him at home as long as he could, up until the day Michael received a phone call from a colleague in the Philly DA's office, saying he was having a hard time persuading an irate family from pursuing a private complaint against their father.
“I know I told you about it,” Frankie insisted when his brother confronted him. “You must have forgotten it, Mikey.”
“No,” Michael assured him. “I'm goddamn certain I would remember hearing my father had been arrested in a school zone, sitting in a parked car with his limp pecker in his hand.”
“Not arrested,” Frankie corrected him. “He was picked up,” meaning he'd been rescued and escorted safely home by the Ottaviano boy on the force, who was kind enough to wrap an Eagles commemorative fleece blanket around his waist to preserve his modesty.
“Paul Ottaviano,” Frankie explained. “The one who looked like Elvis. He had an older brother Bobby. Their parents had that luncheonette at 15th and Dickinson.
You're a very lucky man Papa
, I told him.
You'd be sitting in the lock-up if some stranger had picked you up, some Irish cop or a moulinyan.
They would have hauled his flabby, pale ass to the roundhouse, called him a
vecchio schifoso
and charged him with indecent exposure.”
“Did Paul Ottaviano accuse him of that?”
“He just said he found him holding his sausage with his pants and boxers on the passenger seat, neatly folded, and his shoes and socks on the floor. He didn't accuse Papa of anything. He said Papa must be confused. I thanked him and told him how much I appreciated him looking out for the old man. After he left, I asked Papa why he was driving around South Philly bare-assed. He stood there with his big fat shlong resting against his thigh and told me I was crazy. He said I was his curse, a
zia,
and that only an ungrateful
finocchio
would make up such hateful lies about his own father.”
Luigi lost his ability to speak even the most basic English after being admitted to a dementia unit. Frankie was secretly relieved to be rid of the responsibility of caring for him, no longer torn between the demands of his father and those of Charlie Haldermann, his school teacher “husband.” He dedicated three evenings a week and Sunday afternoons to sitting with Luigi. Michael, at his brother's insistence, came to the nursing home on his father's birthday and Christmas and an occasional weekend when he couldn't bear Frankie's nagging any longer. His sons were puzzled by their father's frequent crying jags. Frankie could make out a few of his words, but they amounted to nonsense, something about a red wagon. Michael shrugged, not terribly interested, and said whatever memories tortured him would forever remain a mystery. Maybe they'd been fooling themselves and Papa had known all along about the secret they and Miss Eileen had conspired to keep from him that long ago Christmas Day. Luigi faded slowly, his limbs withering with atrophy, refusing even small bites of food. He died two days short of his eighty-first birthday. His funeral Mass was 10:00
A.M
. on Tuesday, the eleventh of September 2001.
Only his sons and the pallbearers accompanied the body to the cemetery. The other mourners had raced directly to The Speakeasy where the staff brought television sets into the private dining room Frankie had reserved for the funeral lunch. Luigi was an afterthought at his own wake, the guests too preoccupied by the unimaginable images of horror ninety miles to the north to mourn him. The booze flowed and everyone lingered long after the meal, eyes riveted to the screens.
It felt like an eternity before Frankie was able to collapse on the sofa with a vodka tonic, his first drink of the day. He remembered Helen Constanza had had a son who worked at the Trade Center and offered a quick prayer he wasn't among the many lying in the rubble. He reached for the remote, having seen enough death and tragedy for one day. He heard Jack Centafore's heavy footsteps on the back staircase, returning with Indian take-out despite Frankie's protest he had no appetite. The vodka went to his head quickly and he decided he shouldn't have a second, knowing his embarrassing tendency to get sad and sentimental when under the influence. But he didn't argue when Jack poured him a refill, even stronger than the first.
“Can I ask you something?” Frankie ventured, emboldened by the liquor.
Jack nodded his head without looking away from Peter Jennings reporting live from the smoking rubble.
“Were the terrorists good men?” he asked.
Jack looked at him as if he were crazy.
“What do you think? I can't believe you would even ask.”
“Do you think they're burning in hell?”
“That's a better fate than they deserve.”
“Was my father a good man?”
Jack carefully chewed his food, cogitating, trying to compose a diplomatic answer.
“That's not for us to judge, Frankie. The only opinion that counts is God's,” he said, contradicting his own knee-jerk condemnation of the men who had brought down the tallest buildings in New York.
“What would you say if I told you I didn't believe in heaven or hell? That when you die, you die, and there's nothing more to it.”
This time Jack was quick to respond.
“I'd say you're exhausted, you're grieving your father's death, and you're starting to get a little tipsy.”
It was pointless to argue and Jack was right. He was a little drunk.
“You know what I've never understood?” Jack asked, finally asking a question that had perplexed him for years. “Why did your little brother hate your father so much? If anyone had a reason to despise the old man it was you.”
“It's my fault. I'm to blame. Even when he was a little boy he thought he had to protect me. He would cling to Papa's leg, crying when Papa would hit me with the strap, begging him to stop. When he was six, Mikey threw a can of tomatoes at his head for slapping my face. God only knows what Papa would have done if it weren't for Miss Eileen. Mikey hated Papa because of me.”