Close Relations (11 page)

I’m not sure why the Italians have it in for the Irish. Maybe it has something to do with the preponderance of Irish priests and nuns who do something to incur the wrath of small Italian children. Maybe it’s a resentment of the acceptance of the Irish. All men wear emerald bow ties on St. Paddy’s Day, but who besides the Italians breaks out the fettucini on October 12? Maybe it’s because the Irish, of all ethnic groups, look so American: they appear clean even before their showers, and they generally have neither shaky lips nor shiny black moles.

“I’d better go find my table,” I said, still smiling cheerily.

“Okay. Great,” said Lyle, smiling broadly at a point someplace behind me. He had obviously caught sight of an individual worthy of a display of intense charm.

“Bye. See you,” I said. I gave my dress a sturdy tug just below my hips, preparatory to walking away from him. But Lyle hadn’t finished with me; I felt his hand on my back.

“Marcia,” he said. As I turned back to him, I saw him wink and hold up an index finger to Larry Woodward, attorney for the diocese of Brooklyn, signaling that he would be with him after a few more words to this broad. Woodward waited for Lyle, a small smile on his mottled pig face as he watched Lyle put his arm around my shoulder, draw me tight beside him, and whisper. “Listen, Marcia, you and I are going to be seeing a lot of each other.” Anticipating my stiffening, he continued quickly, “I’ll probably be giving Bill some help on the campaign. Now I know you might feel awkward about it. You know what I mean. Because you and I have—well, let’s call it a past.”

Sweat began to form. I felt it particularly under my arms but sensed it behind my knees, under my breasts, along my back. I was terrified for Jerry. Paterno had not merely lied to him, he—

“Don’t worry,” soothed Lyle, sensing my panic, “you can rely on me not to say a word about what went on between us. I wouldn’t hurt you or Jer for the world.” I forced myself into casualness, lifting my shoulders in a shrug, glancing around. Woodward, having witnessed this prolonged consultation, had let his smile broaden into a leer. “And listen, Marcia, I’m sure we can work together. Hell, I read the declaration speech you wrote for Bill and it’s really great. I only had a couple of fact changes to add.”

“Lyle, listen,” I began, but before I could continue, Lyle ruffled my hair, gave me a loud kiss on the cheek, and moved over to Woodward, leaving me alone to find Jerry.

As I walked, analyzing LoBello’s words, I noticed former United States Representative Richard Krasnoff, hopping from table to table, thanking all his good friends who had made this wonderful evening possible and in addition had made his continued retention of a law firm of four former assistant United States Attorneys possible. Thinking I was moving toward him, Krasnoff raced over to greet me. “How’re ya doing, sweetheart?” he demanded, grabbing my hand, shaking it with the vigor of the righteous, the as-yet-unindicted. But he dropped it quickly. My hands were drippy with cold sweat. I wiped them on my dress and hurried to the table.

Our host, Mike Mazer, was a second-rate real estate tycoon who had purchased a table—for two thousand dollars—and had given tickets for two of the ten seats to Paterno. Paterno, naturally, could not appear at a dinner honoring a man under heavy federal scrutiny, but by the same token he wanted his presence there, so he sent Jerry. And since Jerry’s eyes and ears and mouth were sufficient for a simple Dollars for Dick dinner, the second ticket went to the person in the office who most wanted to trail after Jerry Morrissey and/or have a free prime ribs dinner.

“Marcia.” Jerry stood about ten feet away, waving, blocking the numbered sign on our table. “Over here.” I waved back and weaved through the crowd of people who had not yet sat down to their scooped-out pineapple half heaped with fruit. As I got closer to him, I saw his coloring was high, bright, indicating he had managed four or five scotches between conversations. He looked loose and happy, his waving hand so relaxed it almost drooped. I smiled at him. I had just finished the final draft of Paterno’s declaration that afternoon and had dropped it on his desk at five thirty, right before Jerry and I left the office to go home and change. That meant LoBello had read the speech probably minutes after we left. Paterno must have called him to tell him the coast was clear—Morrissey had gone.

“Marcia,” Jerry said as I reached the table, reaching out for my hand. “Let me introduce you to everyone.” Like the paterfamilias, he motioned everyone at Table 74 to sit, and they did so. In fact, nearly everyone at Tables 72, 73, 75, and 76 did so also.

“This is Mike Mazer,” he began, nodding toward the mini-mogul. “Of course you’ve heard of him.” I beamed and nodded, as though a day did not pass without someone singing hosannas to Mazer Enterprises. Mazer was small, dark, compact, and wrinkled, like a human cigar. He smiled back. “And his wife, Francine Mazer,” Jerry continued, directing my attention to a woman in her late twenties who was scratching a minute reconstructed nose with a clawlike, dark-painted nail. “Francine manages a belt boutique,” Jerry added, sounding as though he thought it was a marvelous idea. Francine barely glanced at me before returning her bronze-lidded eyes to Jerry, gazing with an intensity bred of a desire to take her dark nails and rake them hard down his back. “And Tom Fitzpatrick,” Jerry continued, as he gave me a tour around the table, remembering each name, reciting everyone’s station as though each were vital to the nation’s peace and security.

“Jerry,” I whispered nervously. Maybe there was no problem. Maybe he had told Paterno to speak with LoBello. Jerry took his maraschino cherry and placed it next to the one on my fruit salad.

“Having a good time, hon?” he asked, giving me a slow glance and a thick-lashed blink and a warm smile—in short, giving me a strong hint that I should be having a delightful evening, just as he was.

“Fine,” I answered. I could hear him exhale gently, in gratitude. I reached for my spoon and shoveled in a few ounces of tart fruit. Jerry rearranged a pineapple chunk, moving it in front of a grape, while he astutely ignored Francine Mazer’s significant looks. “Guess who I saw?” I added.

“Who?”

“Lyle LoBello.”

“No shit. When did he slither into town?” Jerry’s voice contained no concern.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled.

“Well, I guess I’d better say hello to him at some point, just to show I don’t resent his trying to pull a fast one with Bill. I mean, Jesus, he’s such a two-bit little snake. But so obvious.” He stopped and turned his attention to Mike Mazer’s analysis of the problems of the city’s capital budget structure. He nodded several times, seeming awed at Mazer’s profundity.

“Jerry,” I whispered a few minutes later. Beneath the heavy yellow tablecloth, he took my hand and placed it between his legs and gave it an initiatory push. “Jerry, please listen.”

“Make nice to the man,” he murmured. “Don’t worry. The man will make nice to you later on.” His hands were on top of the table now, one relaxed, one grasping his drink.

“Jerry, Lyle read the draft of my declaration speech. The one I just gave to Bill this afternoon.”

For a moment he didn’t move. Jerry was a total politician. He knew he had been betrayed. He could read the signs and knew they forecast evil days for him. Then he stood and, clutching his glass very tight, beamed down at the table and said, “Would you people excuse me for a minute? I’m just going to get a refill.”

J
erry and I were raised by widows, neither of them merry. But at least he had a pocketful of glad Daddy memories, stories he could whip out, family snapshots. There’s handsome Jim Morrissey, bouncing Jerry and brother Denny on his knees, singing, for some reason, “Nothing Could Be Finer Than to Be in Carolina” in an off-key but obviously endearing baritone. Or Jim at the Bronx Zoo, roaring, terrifying the lion that frightened baby Annie. Once again, broad-shouldered and serious in his policeman’s uniform, the day the whole family turned out to see him sworn in as sergeant. Even in his last year, age thirty-three, as he lay in bed weak from the leukemia that was killing him, he kept his eight-year-old son enthralled for hours, reading Tarzan stories. Every half hour or so, Jerry would let his father close his eyes for a few minutes. Then the tales would continue.

I had two years more. A month after my tenth birthday, my father walked into a Glickman Pillow Company truck that was rumbling down Avenue M in Brooklyn.

“Well, what was he like?” Jerry would ask. We’d study our history on weekends as we hiked for miles through Central Park or the Lower East Side or across the Brooklyn Bridge into the Heights.

“I really don’t remember him,” I’d answer, generally a little breathless from keeping up with Jerry’s longer strides.

“Oh, come on. He didn’t die till you were ten.”

“Really, I hardly have any memories.” Victor Green certainly never sang “Nothing Could Be Finer Than to Be in Carolina.” I’d try to look Jerry straight in the eye, and he’d peer back, skeptical. “He must have been quiet,” I’d try to explain.

He must have been. His footsteps are certainly not etched in my memory, but perhaps that’s because he glided through the house in his socks. Thin white socks, sagging around his slender, pale ankles. Our conversations were somewhat terse.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hello, little girl.”

He’d pat me on the head. He wasn’t being condescending. Patting heads was simply an acceptable adult-to-child gesture. He had probably seen it in a Shirley Temple movie.

My mother and my Aunt Estelle would often recount, with sad little smiles and sighs and nods of the head, tales of my papa, who left his little sweetheart half an orphan. “Remember, Marcia, how he taught you long division when you were only in second grade?” Actually I didn’t.

“Remember when you dislocated your thumb, Marcia? You were about six, and for weeks he’d cut your meat for you. Remember?” I do remember the splinted thumb. I can even recall the adhesive tape that turned a sooty gray and curled up at the edges. But I cannot—although I wish I could—recall any role my father had in my thumb crisis.

I sensed that he loved me, but he must have thought it inappropriate to tell me so, although occasionally he tried to show me. In a burst of fellowship, he once tried to teach me pinochle, but I didn’t catch on; he said we’d wait a few years and try again. He seemed annoyed when I cried to watch “Captain Video” instead of a kinescope of the day’s McCarthy harangue and patiently explained why the senator was more important than the captain. But although I agreed to watch the politician, I remained unconvinced, and I knew he realized it. Each bedtime he kissed me good night, but his kisses were dry and pecky. And a couple of times he called me his little towhead, but as I assumed he was calling me a toe-head, my response probably wasn’t encouraging.

“That’s it?” Jerry demanded, raising a doubting eyebrow.

“Honestly, that’s all.” I recall feeling that my father was the pleasanter parent and assumed we could share a father-daughter relationship like Nancy and Mr. Drew as we both grew older and less shy.

I don’t remember hearing about his death, but a few days afterward I overheard some of the details. My mother had sent me outside our apartment building to play, but since it was January I was bundled in a storm coat, gloves, muffler, and pom-pom hat and therefore not easily recognizable. Coming inside after five minutes of solitary fresh air, I waited, wrapped in wool, for the elevator. Two neighbors waited also.

“You heard?” The fatter one asked.

“Horrible,” her companion answered.

“I mean, about what happened after. The truck stopped so fast the back opened up and the pillows fell out. It was a pillow truck. A truck from a pillow company.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, well, better you shouldn’t know from such things.” The blubbery lady’s voice grew softer, not because she realized I was there but out of awe of her terrible insider’s knowledge. “I heard,” she murmured, “the body went flying and when it fell, the head”—she paused—“landed on a pillow.”

“Oy.”

Indeed. Inside the elevator, I pressed 4 and slowly unwrapped my muffler from my face.

Jerry asked, “You don’t even remember the funeral?”

“No. They didn’t take me. They thought it would be traumatic.”

Jerry, naturally, could recall the entire requiem mass, enumerate the number of tears shed both inside the church and at the cemetery, and how his sister Ann had peed in the limousine after the burial.

I do remember my Aunt Estelle whispering to Uncle Julius, “Nothing’s wrong with Marcia. The whole world doesn’t have to cry and carry on the way your family does. She’s in a state of shock.”

But I wasn’t in shock, merely a little frightened about living alone with my mother. I knew she found me an onerous obligation even when my father was alive. But the week of shiva went by quite pleasantly, with lots of neighbors and relatives dropping in, bringing pecan coffee cake and chocolate cookies and prune danish. Mr. Fingerhut, my father’s boss, actually sent over a turkey, carved and put back on the skeleton—the frame, as the caterer called it—the meat held in place with judiciously placed wooden toothpicks.

“The cheap momser,” Aunt Estelle commented to my mother, as she transferred the remaining shreds of turkey onto a small plate and covered it with two layers of waxed paper. “He couldn’t break down and send a roast beef after all those years Victor practically killed himself for him. How much more would a roast beef have cost him?”

A few months later, she sat across our kitchen table from my mother, her rosy index fingernail picking at a chip in the white enamel. “Why are you worrying about a few extra dollars, Hilda?” she demanded.

“Because I don’t have a few extra dollars,” my mother replied. There were no tears in her eyes; even then, she was too dried out to cry. Her sister, opposite her, was fuller and plumper and juicier even than the catered turkey had been. Compared with her, my mother looked dehydrated. Look, the ad would proclaim, a fresh morsel of woman, showing a picture of Aunt Estelle. And beside it, the unappetizing freeze-dried variety. But their features were the same: small noses with oddly rounded nostrils, slightly receding chins, milky brown eyes. But Aunt Estelle’s face was a soft white with pudgy pink-rouged cheeks; my mother’s had yellowed and cracked.