Uncle Al Capone (14 page)

That was the last time I ever went near that closet. One of my cousins told me years later that he believed it was a staircase that went downstairs, underground, and into the garage. The house was way out in the middle of Ralph’s vast property, and it was so remote and quiet there that it would be impossible to sneak up to it. You could see headlights coming from the main road and hear the car engine even before you saw the lights. You could hear the boats on the lake. You could almost hear a fly touch the water. So, my cousin thought this secret passage was an escape route. He is sure that, even today, if someone were to do an exhaustive search of the building, they’d still find relics of the Outfit in nooks and crannies in that house.

But these little reminders of the Capone profession were few and far between. Mostly, my time there was innocent and free. My grandfather Ralph always made room in his life for me, especially after the death of my father when I was almost eleven. My aunt Maffie told me that I was his favorite because I looked so much like his first wife, Florence.

I remember best the country drives we took along the back roads at night with the headlights of his station wagon off. He’d point out the constellations—the sky was always so clear in the country—and teach me the names of the different stars.

Al took me on one of these night drives once. He told me he wanted to show me something, and we got in the car and drove away from the lodge and down the main road. He parked the car in a wide field. There was a spotlight hooked up to the side of the car, and when he cut the engine, he aimed it out into the field and turned it on. The moment he did, all these deer appeared out of the darkness. He dragged it around the field, and the deer stood immobilized in the light—unable to run, but so beautiful.

“Deirdre,” Al said to me, “some people use spotlights to kill deer. That’s unfair. It’s something you should never do, nor should you ever associate with anybody that would harm an animal unfairly.”

Al and my grandfather were sportsmen and hunters. To them, hunting deer or other game to feed the family was honorable—but to shoot deer after immobilizing them was taking unfair advantage. These were the kinds of messages I grew up hearing from the Capones.

We spent summers fishing and swimming in Big Martha Lake. It was too weedy for swimming near our lodge, but on the other side, where our friends the Krumdicks lived, swimming holes were plentiful and we were always welcome.

The fishing was good. We usually caught northern pike, bass, and sunfish. Grandpa Ralph taught me how to filet the fish and we would bread them and pan-fry them while they were fresh. It was some of the best fish I ever tasted.

A loaded pistol and a rifle always accompanied us in the boat, and I was not allowed to touch them. My grandfather told me the pistol was there in case we caught a musky. He said they were so ferocious they could bite you when you got them in the boat, so we’d have to shoot them. Remembering that today, I have to laugh that I fell for it. I never saw anyone catch a musky, but I doubt you have to shoot them. That pistol was there for protection against much bigger threats than muskies.

The rifle, on the other hand, was actually there for a woodsman’s reason. They kept it in case we encountered a bear. I never ran into one in the woods, but actually, a big bear did try to get into the lodge one night. It scared me half to death.

The grown-ups were having a party downstairs as I slept in one of the Pullman beds on the porch. I heard a scratching sound and went downstairs to tell my grandfather. He told me there was nothing to worry about and to go back to sleep. I went back to bed but kept hearing the same sound—getting louder by the moment. I again went downstairs, interrupting the party one more time. My uncle Bites got very annoyed with me and brought me upstairs with a flashlight. He made me stand up on the bed and look out the window. He planned to shine the light and show me that nothing was wrong. As he did, a big bear stood up on its hind legs and stared into the light. Bites let out a huge yell, “Holy Shit”! which brought my grandfather and cousin Sherman running. The bear took off, but it had been trying to claw its way into the house. The next day, the men tracked the bear, found it wounded, and shot it.

My little brother, Dennis, who was four years younger, and I had great fun at the lodge in the winter, too. Ralph kept two reindeer in a stable on one side of the building, and in the winter, he would take us on enchanting sleigh rides around the surrounding acres. We built snowmen, made snow angels, sledded, skated, and hurled snowballs. We didn’t know about cross-country skis in those days, but I did have my own snowshoes, which
I used often.

On cold mornings in the lodge, Grandma poured hot sugared coffee into large cups half-filled with milk. Uncle Al would pick up a brown bag of Biscotti that he had baked the night before. We each took a cup of coffee and a few cookies and dunked them while eating in front of the fireplace in the living room.

Back in those days, listening to mysteries, comedies, and music on the radio were our only entertainment options. Some of my most memorable moments with Uncle Al were when my dad, Aunt Maffie, and I would prepare for an evening of radio.

We had a kind of ritual. We would always make popcorn first—in our own unique, Capone way. Al would bring out this big gunnysack, or burlap bag, filled with ears of popcorn. He had a farmer friend who grew popcorn, and he would bring a couple of these huge bags to him every year with the corn still on the cobs.

Popcorn, unlike sweet corn, is extremely hard and dry. We would remove the corn from the cob by holding an ear in both hands and then pressing our thumbs on an angle against the corn until it loosened and came off the cob. It took a lot of pressure to remove the corn, and I was just a kid, so I couldn’t do it as well as Al, Maffie, or my dad, so they did most of the work.

Uncle Al would then take a small pot, put in lard or Crisco, and heat it on the stove. He dropped in three kernels of corn and when those popped, he grabbed a big handful of popcorn and dropped it in the hot oil and put on the lid. The popping began almost immediately, and in a minute forced the lid up. Al put the pot over a large bowl and began to shake the popped corn out by lifting the lid to prevent the corn from flying all over, which it did anyway. He quickly returned the pot to the stove and the popping resumed. Believe me, we got many, many quarts of popped corn from that little pot. He kept this up until there were no more pops. He then emptied the pot and melted butter in it to pour over the corn. Finally, he sprinkled on the salt.

Then we would all sit down around the radio. One of our favorite shows was
Red Skelton
—though I thought as a girl that his name was “skel-e-ton.” All of us thought he was so funny. Red created all these different characters, and each had a different voice and personality. One was Clem Kadiddelhopper, a kind of simple country bumpkin guy who came out with some really clever remarks out of nowhere. Another was a nasty little kid who was always getting into trouble. Red referred to him, in a form of baby-talk, as that “mean little kid’ who would always say the same thing just before he did something mischievous: “If I dood it, I’d get a lickin.” (Pause.) “I dood it!”

Uncle Al’s favorite show was
Fred Allen
. Some of Allen’s humor was a little sophisticated for me at that age, so I didn’t always get his jokes, but I laughed with the adults anyway. Once something struck Al as funny, he often started laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. He would wheeze when he laughed that hard, but one time it was different.

“Are you OK?” Maffie asked. “Are you OK?”

In a minute, he started breathing again, pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped his eyes. He laughed so hard he was crying. He really had us scared for a minute.

Al said “Now I know what they mean when they say ‘I laughed so hard I thought I’d die.’”

After my father’s death, I often went up to Mercer with Aunt Maffie, where she spent a lot of time reminding me of some of these stories, telling me about our family, and teaching me to cook. She taught me how to cook chicken and noodles, which was my dad’s all-time favorite dish, and we baked biscotti—the Al Capone way. We also had popcorn, of course.

I found out later in life that after my father committed suicide, my grandfather offered to give my mother the lodge, but she said no because she didn’t want to leave Chicago. That was only one of the many differences between my mother and me.

Chicago, 1944

I’ve been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor. I’ve given people the light pleasures, shown them a good time. And all I get is abuse.

- Al Capone

My family had much to celebrate one sunny Saturday morning in April, 1944. The war in Europe seemed to be going well, and even as a small child, I could feel the optimism in the air. In fact, D-Day was only weeks away, and there was a sense of excitement that America was about to liberate the world from the tyranny of the Third Reich. The sudden warm weather in Chicago made everyone smile and, after a long, cold Chicago winter, the dandelions were pushing up through frosty flowerbeds.

I was especially grateful for those long, green-stemmed dandelions. All over Chicago, the spring-time sun tugged the slender stems upward. Their yellow petals hadn’t yet bloomed, so that’s when they stood tall for harvesting. If I ever picked a petaled dandelion and gave it to my grandmacita Theresa for soup, she’d refuse it, saying it was too late—all the plant’s goodness had gone into growing the petals.

The air was refreshingly warm, and I wore a pair of sun shorts, a colored jersey, and play shoes. As my father and I walked down Prairie Avenue, we passed kids fooling around in their back yards. One boy threw a baseball against a brick wall and caught it in his mitt. I can still hear the loud thump as the ball hit the wall and the slap as it hit the boy’s glove. Thump, slap. Thump, slap. Thump, slap.

I lived on Indiana Avenue and 71st Street in Chicago with my parents and infant brother in the rented first level of a two-story brownstone, where things were always tense between my parents. It was just a ten-minute walk from Grandma’s house, but it may as well have been from one planet to another. Just a few months later, my parents would split up, and I would be left to live with a mother who always seemed to resent me.

In contrast, at the Prairie Avenue house, I was surrounded by warmth, the perpetual smell of cooking, and laughter. Money really did seem to grow on trees. The bill of choice at 7244 South Prairie was the hundred-dollar bill. One hundred dollars was a lot of money back then, according to inflation tables, $100 then was the equivalent of $1,440 today. My dad was always asking Al and Ralph for money, and I never saw either one of them pull from their pocket anything less than a hundred.

“Look, Dad!” I shouted happily that particular Saturday, showing him how my skipping technique had improved. I think there was an extra bounce to my step because I had his attention to myself, my mother having stayed home with my colicky brother.

“I’m going to pick dandelions today and help Grandmacita and Aunt Maffie make soup!”

My father caught up with me and smiled. “Save your energy. There will be so many dandelions in the yard, Grandma and Aunt Maffie won’t be able to pick them all without your help.”

“And we’ll bathe them,” I added. “I’m the only one who can clean dandelions right.”

I hummed a popular song “Mairzy Doats” to myself as we approached the house, hopping up the nine front steps. I barely noticed the two burly men standing guard on the street, though they made no attempt to hide the machine guns slung over their shoulders. During those years, Uncle Al and Aunt Mae spent most of their time at their home in Palm Island, Florida, but whenever they were in Chicago, two or more bodyguards would appear.

“My brother is an important man,” Aunt Maffie explained to me. “There are always bad men who want to hurt him.”

But I wasn’t scared. My family would keep me safe, as would my uncle Al. I certainly wasn’t scared of guns, even machine guns. My grandfather Ralph had already given me a small pump rifle. With it, I would kill my first squirrel a few months later during a visit to the house in Mercer—though seeing that squirrel die upset me so much that I never shot another animal.

“Hi, Grandmacita. Hi, Aunt Maffie,” I called out as I skipped down the long corridor to the kitchen. “Are you ready to pick dandelions?”

There were a few “jobs” that Grandma asked me to do for her. Picking dandelions was one and dusting under the dining room table was another. The table was a heavy walnut table with ornate legs. Grandma and Aunt Maffie could not crawl under it like they used to, so that became my job almost every week.

A few minutes later, I was bent over in the wide grass yard with Grandmacita and Aunt Maffie. I was a lot closer to the ground than the two women, and because of that, I considered myself to be the best dandelion picker of all of us. Aunt Maffie insisted on bending at the waist, saying that picking dandelions helped to exercise her stomach muscles. Wisely, Grandmacita dropped to her knees to make it easier on her back. I simply plopped the dandelions into my apron, which I held with my other hand to form a bowl.

It took us about an hour to pick all we needed. Then we brought the dandelions to the upstairs bathroom. While Grandmacita filled the bathtub with cold water, we dropped our dandelions onto the water’s surface. There, we let them soak for an hour while all the dirt sunk to the bottom. My job was to submerge the dandelions every fifteen minutes or so after they rose to the top.

“The stems have to be really clean or I can’t make good soup,” Grandmacita reminded me. She was always fussy about cleaning the dandelions just right.

Finally, we wrapped them in a wet towel and brought them back downstairs for Grandmacita to inspect. Grandmacita was very much in charge of her kitchen and, therefore, the household. After she died, at the end of 1952, nothing was ever the same, certainly not our Sunday meals. But at that time, she directed traffic. She was in the middle of preparing various dishes—a roast in the oven, water simmering on the stove waiting for the dandelions, fresh pasta hanging to dry in the pantry, and garlic, cheese, and onions laid out for chopping on the kitchen table.