Honor Thy Father (30 page)

Within an hour of the call, Rosalie saw Bill’s car pull up in the driveway. She was surprised that he was home at this time of day, not yet 3:00
P.M.
, but she did not tell him about the call when he walked in, followed by Carl. She hoped that Bill would not notice how disconcerted she was, but in a way she hoped that he would; at least that would indicate that he was paying attention to her, was aware of her, cared about her, a feeling that at this moment she needed very much. Instead, Bill informed her that a man would be coming in from California later in the evening and would probably be spending the night on the sofa. Rosalie said nothing. She waited until Bill had tended to a few details in the house and then left again in his car with Carl.

Rosalie went into the bedroom and calmly wrote Bill a note, saying that she was leaving him. Then, after putting into her purse the $350 that she had miraculously managed to save and borrow during the last year, and after packing a few things in paper shopping bags and a small suitcase and carrying them through the kitchen door to the garage, she gathered the children and told them she was taking them for a ride. None of the men seemed to be paying any attention to her as she walked out with the children, started up her 1964 Comet, and headed for the highway toward Manhattan.

She had no idea where she was going, and she did not care. The children must have sensed something different in her manner, a firmness, a cold-eyed vengeance, for they remained very quiet and did not even ask where she was taking them. It was 4:00
P.M.
, the roads to New York were relatively uncongested. It was a warm sunny afternoon but there was a fine breeze in the air and she felt free and oddly in control. Felippa sat beside her, with Charles also in the front seat; in the back were Joseph and Tory.

Within an hour Rosalie had driven past the Triborough Bridge in Manhattan and was heading upstate on the thruway. She was in heavy traffic now, had to stop a few times as cars jammed up at intersections or toll gates, but she remained calm, relaxed, listening to the rock ‘n’ roll music coming from her car radio and the radios of other cars moving slowly next to her with their windows open or their convertible tops down. Convertibles were rare in the world that she knew, and the sight of people driving with the tops down, people who did not fling anxious glances into the rearview mirror every few seconds, reminded her of the reality that she had missed. She also noticed that many people were carrying vacation equipment in their cars—inflatable rubber floats, fishing rods, surfboards—and, suddenly, Rosalie wanted to go to a beach, to inhale the salt air of a seashore town, to walk on soft white sand. In her whole lifetime of miserable summers she could recall only one summer at the shore, and that had been about fifteen years ago at a north Jersey resort when her father was alive. She remembered the soothing sound of the ocean at night, the crashing of the waves, the noise of crickets. She remembered going out on her father’s boat with her brothers and her sister Ann and how her father used to push them into the water to force them to swim; and they all had learned to swim in this manner, except for her. She had been too afraid of the water then, and still was, but this did not make the idea of going to the seashore now seem less enticing. During her years with Bill in East Islip and East Meadow she had noticed the long line of cars on summer weekends heading slowly toward the Hamptons and Montauk, but when she went away for weekends, it seemed always in another direction—away from the ocean toward the interior hills and mountains, possibly because Bill and his friends would have felt trapped on an island resort where the exits and entrances were limited.

Now, as Rosalie continued to drive with her children, it gradually occurred to her that at this very moment she was retracing the familiar route that she had often taken with Bill and her parents: she was headed upstate on the New York Thruway toward Newburgh, where her father’s hillside farmhouse had been, where the convent she had attended still was. Unknowingly, as if driving by rote, she had been on the road for nearly two hours moving back to her past, lured perhaps by the sense of security she once felt within convent walls. As soon as she realized where she was heading, she decided to change her direction. Taking the first exit she saw, she circled around to an opposite route and stopped when she spotted a large luxurious motel with a swimming pool in which people were splashing and diving.

After registering for the night and handing the children their bathing suits, Rosalie sat under a poolside umbrella watching her children play in the shallow end. She ordered a gin and tonic and knew that in a few hours’ time she had come a very long way.

In the morning she checked out and, after consulting a road map, decided that the most convenient beaches for her were back in Long Island. New Jersey seemed too far, New England too unfamiliar, and while she had no specific place in mind on Long Island, she thought she would merely drive through the towns with beaches and stop when she found a place that she liked and a cottage she could afford.

Reentering the thruway, she spent the morning on the road, crossing the Throgs Neck Bridge and headed for the southern shore of Long Island. She soon realized that she was drifting back in the general direction of East Meadow; but having already made one wrong turn on the Bronx Expressway and another on the Cross Island Parkway, she decided that it was wiser for her to remain on those few roads she was familiar with. There was absolutely no chance of her returning to the chaotic atmosphere of her home, her boarding house, and there was little possibility of Bill’s locating her no matter how close she was to him—she doubted that he would even look for her. So she ventured through the beach towns that she knew to be within fifteen to twenty-five miles of her home, stopping at several real estate offices in Atlantic Beach, East Atlantic Beach, and Long Beach. She was astonished at the prices for small houses near the water, rentals of close to $1,000 and more a month, and after a long and discouraging afternoon she considered herself fortunate to have gotten a damp basement apartment for $225 a month in a house within walking distance of the beach.

There were no cooking utensils in the kitchen, no linen or pillows in the bedroom, but Rosalie discovered a few faded bedspreads and sofa pillows in the vacant apartment upstairs, and she bought cheap spoons, forks, and plates at a nearby five-and-ten. From the supermarket she purchased several frozen TV dinners for supper that night, planning to use the tins in which they came for pans later on.

The weather during the first week was sunny and warm, without a drop of rain, and Rosalie was getting a suntan and feeling healthier than she had ever remembered feeling. She lost the two or three pounds that she had gained during the winter; and as she looked in a mirror at herself wearing a bathing suit, she was pleased and impressed with her trim figure. She had always been conscious of gaining weight, which was the tendency among women in her family, a tendency that she resisted through careful dieting. Although she would not easily admit it to others, she was vain and secretly proud of her vanity. Beginning with her sheltered Brooklyn girlhood as the protected pearl of the Profaci family, she had been very aware of herself, sensitive to the impression she was making on others, and she carried within her a mental image of each of her movements. She lived in horror of looking foolish—which was why she had never learned to swim—and she resented being taken for granted or feeling abused—which was why she had left her husband twice in the last four years. In each instance she had determinedly felt no guilt, convinced that her husband’s brazen behavior or the intolerable conditions he imposed upon her were such an affront that they had forced her to leave.

Still, after her first week at Long Beach, she began to wonder when, or if, he would begin to look for her. From a drugstore she telephoned her mother, the only person who knew of her whereabouts, but learned that Bill had not called. Though not surprised, she was nonetheless disturbed and hurt; and even more so when she contemplated the possibility that the German girl was seeing Bill, perhaps sleeping with him, although Rosalie knew that such philandering would never be allowed in East Meadow as long as Mister B. was in residence—and Mister B., she thought petulantly, might be in residence forever.

During the weeks in the sun, with the children playing freely around her on the beach, she looked back on the life she had been forced to live during most of her marriage and she considered it absolutely incredible. She doubted that there was another women in her family or among her in-laws or distant relatives who would have survived such a marriage as long as she had, and this included her heralded sister-in-law, Catherine. Rosalie felt that when Catherine was spoken of in exalted terms, she, Rosalie, indirectly suffered by being unfavorably compared, even though she found no basis for comparison: Catherine, while extremely loyal to her father and brother, and unintimidated by the bad publicity, nevertheless had not married a man who was in and out of jail, who was shot at in the street, who allowed strangers to live in his house while he disappeared for weeks at a time. Catherine had married a hard-working, prosperous dentist, a man whose father had come from Castellammare and had known the Bonannos but who had somehow managed to avoid a career of notoriety. Catherine’s husband led a normal life, came home at predictable hours, and her children would never fret over the word “banana.” Rosalie wondered what Catherine’s reaction would be if she learned of this runaway summer, and she was tempted to write to her, but decided against it. She had already written too many letters complaining and justifying herself to Catherine, and now she wanted to keep this time of independence to herself. She felt free now and less concerned with what people thought. And until she felt differently, she decided to enjoy the summer with her children; to share only with them the sun, the hot dogs on the beach, the unclocked hours of the day.

Rosalie was awakened one night by the sounds of men’s voices and their footsteps in front of the house. She sat up immediately, tense and apprehensive, pulling the bedspread around her, waiting to hear any second the thumping of heavy knuckles against the flimsy screen door. She feared that men had been sent to bring her back, and for the first time since she had left she was afraid of facing Bill again, confronting his explosive temper.

She listened intently to the voices outside, but none seemed familiar. Then she heard the men climbing the staircase along the side of the building, opening the upstairs door, dropping their luggage heavily. Rosalie breathed more easily. They were apparently the new tenants in the upper apartment, and from the noise they made Rosalie guessed that there were four or five of them.
Men
, she thought,
gangs of men. I cannot escape them
.

In the morning, hearing them coming down the steps, Rosalie peeked out from behind her drawn window shade and noticed that these men were not the sort that she was most accustomed to having under her roof. These were obviously college boys, husky young men who were bare-chested and wearing Bermuda shorts and bathing trunks. Two of them were drinking beer out of cans.

Later that afternoon, as Rosalie and the children were walking slowly back from the beach, she noticed them sitting on the upper porch with their bare feet on the railing, again drinking beer. One of them said hello to her, and she looked up, smiled, and returned the greeting. Charles and Joseph, Tory and Felippa, also said hello, and a brief conversation followed in which the young men asked Rosalie if she would like to come up and join them for a beer. She politely refused, and taking Felippa’s hand she entered her apartment.

As she quickly rinsed the sand and salt water off Felippa and instructed the boys to do the same for themselves, she felt pleased and light-hearted. Later, having showered and put on a cotton dress, she prepared a dinner from cans and containers that would hardly have been considered sufficient in her parents’ home or in East Meadow, and she marveled at the joy and simplicity of the exchange with the new tenants. There was nothing to hide from them, nothing to fear, which was ironic, considering that this was the first time in her life that
she
was hiding. She even reveled, as she never had before, in her shortage of money, her limited wardrobe, and the transient condition of her existence. Here she was answerable to no one; and there were no men in the next room waiting expectantly for her to set the table, cook their meals, and wash their dishes while they retired to a smoke-filled living room. Here she did not have to put on stockings each morning or hear snoring at night. The children also seemed happier; and although she did not ignore disciplining them, she was more relaxed, less nagging, permitting them to run barefoot much of the time and to play louder games than she would have allowed at home. They also met other young children on the beach, and the college men upstairs proved to be polite and friendly with her and the children, treating them to ice cream from the Good Humor truck and sometimes taking Charles for rides in their car. It was all a new experience for Rosalie and the children—they were indulging in a kind of American childhood that none of them had had before.

Rosalie often wished that it could continue indefinitely, but it ended abruptly in the middle of August, which was when young Joseph and Felippa were stricken with asthma. Wheezing, struggling to breathe, they were unable to sleep at night, and their crying kept the other children awake. What made matters worse was the change in weather—there had been rain this week and a series of cloudy days that accentuated the dampness and darkness of the apartment, creating an atmosphere that was unrelievedly depressing.

Rosalie held out for a while, nursing the children with medicine from the drugstore, but she knew that Joseph in particular required a doctor’s care. Not wanting to call her mother, who did not drive anyway, Rosalie thought she had no alternative than to notify Bill. She was nearly out of cash and, as galling as it would be for her, returning home was now in the children’s best interest.