Uncle Al Capone (15 page)

Uncle Al was sitting in the kitchen with his mother when I came down. Grandmacita placed her hand on his head fondly.

“Deirdre has picked and cleaned the dandelions,” she told him in her thick Italian accent. “What do you think about that, Al?”

Uncle Al smiled and kissed his mother’s hand.

Of course, I had never heard of syphilis then, nor did I know the details about Al’s imprisonment, but I remember noticing Grandmacita and the rest of the family’s concern about Al’s health. She always fussed over him, urged him to eat or drink soup or vegetables or even to take a shot of whiskey. She was a big believer in food as medicine, something passed down the Capone line for generations that I, too, have tried to impart to my children. When we prepared meals, she often said a prayer, her fingers trailing over the cross she wore or the rosary that always seemed to be folded in her hand.

“My spring-time dandelion soup will clean away the unhealthiness of winter,” Grandmacita told Al. I’m sure she didn’t know the scientific details then, but I have since discovered that in addition to vitamin A, calcium, potassium, and iron, dandelions also help cleanse the liver and eliminate toxins from the body.

While Aunt Maffie began kneading bread dough in the kitchen, Grandmacita and I went back outside. Uncle Al joined us, seating himself on the wooden bench near a flowering cherry tree. An apple tree stood at the other end of the yard. In the summers, Aunt Maffie—the baker in the family—would serve cherry pie, and in the fall, apple pie, both of which were made with the fresh fruits of these two trees. We ate the pies straight from the oven, but when she prepared fresh applesauce, we would can it and store it for the winter.

Grandmacita walked over to the bench, sat down next to her son, turned her pale face toward the warm sun, and closed her eyes. She still had a babushka tied around her hair.

Uncle Al looked at his mother and asked, “What are we having for dinner?”

Without opening her eyes, she said, “Dandelion soup, and your favorite, rump roast.”

“Can I climb the tree and smell the blossoms, Uncle Al?” I asked.

“You really think you can climb that tree?” He asked with a smile and a wink.

“Just watch me,” I said bravely. I reached up to a branch and climbed into the leafy arbor umbrella.

A few moments later, I was teetering from a high branch, hollering, “Hey, Grandmacita, Uncle Al, look at me.” They shaded their eyes and looked up. I waved vigorously at them.

“Be careful,” warned Grandmacita.

Suddenly, my foot slipped. I lost my balance and fell heavily to the ground, landing on my back. The air rushed from my lungs, and I gasped for breath, petrified to find that I couldn’t inhale.

“Are you OK?” I heard Uncle Al’s voice near me. I couldn’t reply. I couldn’t breathe. “Take a deep breath, and you’ll be fine,” he told me calmly. I remember the look in his blue eyes—a mixture of concern and bemusement. He reached down and swept me into his big arms, patting me gently on the back. Suddenly, I felt a rush of air return to my lungs. As soon as it did, I burst loudly into tears, my face muffled in his shoulder.

“She’s OK,” Al told Grandmacita.

My father peered through the open kitchen window. “What happened to her?” he asked.

“She just got the wind knocked out of her,” said Uncle Al. “She’ll be fine.”

After I stopped crying, Uncle Al took my hand. “Come with me, Deirdre. I want to show you something.” We walked up the stairs and he placed me on the big sofa in the living room. Uncle Al went into his bedroom and brought back something that looked like a tiny guitar.

“What’s that, Uncle Al?” I asked.

“It’s called a mandolin,” he said, strumming a few chords. “I learned how to play it while I was in California a few years ago.” At that time, I did not know what I know today—he meant Alcatraz.

Using the thick fingers on his large, powerful hands, he strummed each string with a small red pick, and began to sing: My bambino

Go to sleep.

All the stars

Are in the sky

Ready to say goodnight.

And I know my baby’s sleepy too.

So close your little, drowsy eyes

Mamma will say goodnight…

As she sings this lullaby to you.

Uncle Al had a soft, soothing singing voice. He never sang formally, but I think he must have been a tenor. He repeated the words of the song to me one line at a time, and asked me to repeat them back to him until I had them memorized. Then he handed me the mandolin, showing me where to place my fingers to strum the simple tune.

From a young age, Uncle Al told me, he loved music, beginning with the Italian operas Grandmacita would play on her Victrola record player. Later, as a young man in Brooklyn, he would tune to the opera broadcast on the radio, often humming along with his favorite arias.

I never wanted to leave that house that night, and they knew it. I think I sensed the discord between my parents. The Prairie Avenue home was a safe haven, a place where I could forget the tension and unease that had become all-too-familiar in my young life.

As she walked me to the large front door, Grandmacita handed me a bag of sesame cookies and rubbed my back where I’d fallen. I munched those cookies all the way home, nestled in my father’s arms.

I looked up at him and whispered, “Daddy, I was really, really scared today. I couldn’t breathe.”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “But Uncle Al took care of you. You’re OK now, aren’t you?” I gripped his hand more tightly.

“Yes, I am,” I answered proudly. “I’m OK.”

Before I ever picked dandelions again, my mother left my father.

One night not long after, my parents’ fighting kept me awake. My dad was shouting and yelling, banging his fists on the wall. I tried hard not to listen, but after a while, my curiosity and fear overcame me, and I got out of my bed to peek out the door.

He was so angry, and my mother just sat at the table smoking a cigarette. I turned away from them. Through the window, snow fell to the ground quickly. It was probably the last snowfall of that spring, and it was also the last night I would spend in that house, the last night in my dad’s house. I got in bed and cried myself to sleep.

“Deirdre, do you want to have breakfast with me before I go to work?” Dad asked softly, trying to wake me the next morning. My mind was thick with the night’s fitful sleep. I wasn’t sure I had heard him, and I buried deeper into my covers, trying to shut out the light.

My dad and I always had breakfast together. Mom didn’t eat with us. In fact, it was always my dad and never my mother who fixed me breakfast. My favorite was cinnamon and sugar on toast. He would toast a piece of bread, put on lots of butter, let it melt and then sprinkle sugar all over the butter very slowly so the butter was absorbed. When that was perfect, he sprinkled on the cinnamon. When I bit into the toast, the sugared butter would ooze through my teeth. What a sweet memory.

I heard the front door close and jolted out of bed. I went to the door and saw my father walking down the steps. I hurried back to my bedroom, put on some shoes, and ran out the door trying to catch him.

The snow was deep, making it hard for me to run. I got to the bus stop too late. He was on the bus, and I don’t think he knew I had followed him to kiss him goodbye as I always did before he went off to sell used cars on the corner of 73rd and Stony Island.

I made my way back home through the snow. My mom was still in bed and my brother was asleep in his crib. I got back into my bed to try to get warm.

“Come on, Deirdre, get up. We have things to do today.” My mother’s voice cut through my sleep, so different from my father’s tone a short while before.

I crawled out of bed to find my mother going through her closet, putting her clothes into a suitcase. Then she started packing some dishes into boxes.

In a short time she had boxes of dishes and clothes in the middle of the living room. The doorbell rang, and there stood a man I knew as Eddie. He had his car parked in front with a trailer hooked up to the back.

He started loading the boxes onto the trailer.

“Mom, what’s happening?”

“For heaven’s sake, please leave me alone. You don’t understand.”

Eddie started putting our furniture and other belongings into the trailer. My mother told me to get in the back seat. When we pulled away from the curb I remember standing up and looking out the back window screaming, “Daddy won’t be able to find us when he gets home.”

My mother, brother, and I moved into my grandfather and grandmother’s third floor apartment on Jeffery Avenue in the St. Philip Neri Parish. There we were, my mother, my brother—an infant at the time—my grandmother and grandfather, my great-grandmother, and me living in a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment.

My father was left alone. His love story with my mother had ended.

He grew up the young prince of the Capone family, while she was the darling of the Chicago elite. Dad was full of promise. He studied at St. John’s Prep School in Minnesota, went to Notre Dame and Roosevelt, and got his law degree at Loyola. The Capones expected him to play the kind of role that John Fitzgerald Kennedy would one day play for his family. He was brilliant.

My mother, too, came from a very wealthy family. Her father was a real estate tycoon who owned most of the South Side of Chicago. She grew up in a large home with a butler and a maid. Her clothes were hand-made for her.

But in the 1929 stock market crash, her father—my grandfather—lost everything. Like many investors of that decade, he had bought stocks on margin. When the stock prices went crashing down, the investor had to pay up what was owed. In order to do that, my grandfather had to sell all his properties. He eventually had to ask my mother to leave the private school she attended and enroll in a public high school. She did not like that, so she quit school in 1935 at the age of sixteen.

My parents met shortly after in 1937, while my father attended Notre Dame. I believe my mother was largely attracted to him because she hoped, like everyone in his family, that he would become the Capone family lawyer—and restore for her the life she had once enjoyed. Just after they met, she followed him to Indiana and moved into his apartment at Notre Dame.

Her mother and father were furious and disapproved of her behavior and her choices. But, despite the disapproval, my parents married in Williamsport, Indiana, on March 29, 1938. The private ceremony was performed by a justice of the peace. On my parents wedding certificate, my mother listed her address as Warren County, Indiana, and her occupation as “house girl.

My Mother and Father 1938 on his sailboat. Maffie is facing my Dad.

Not long after, my father got into a fight at Notre Dame trying to protect his cousin Sonny from some bullies. The two of them were only a year apart in age, and the shy and often sickly Sonny idolized my father. He followed him to Notre Dame. But after the fight, they both thought it best if they left school and moved back to Chicago.

My mother and father moved into the Prairie Avenue house while my father attended Roosevelt University, where he got a B.S. degree in engineering. He then went on to earn a law degree from Loyola University.