Uncle Al Capone (19 page)

Overnight, my entire second grade class stopped talking to me. I was shunned and I’d never felt so alone. A couple of weeks later, all my classmates were invited to a girl’s birthday party at the South Shore Country Club—every boy and girl, that is, except me. I was devastated and overcome by the unfairness of it all. I didn’t understand it then, but this would become a regular pattern in my life, a little girl made to pay for the sins of her elders.

The nun who taught our class—not the one who chastised me about the shoes—felt so sorry for me that she had a party just for me on the last day of school. I found out later that she had been one of my father’s teachers when he attended school at St. Columbanus School on 71st Street. It didn’t work to change anyone’s mind about me. These children were simply not allowed to play with me.

Not until the sixth grade, four endless years later, when Barbara Werntz transferred to St. Philip Neri from another Catholic elementary school, did I finally make a real friend. By then, I guess, whispers of my real last name had subsided. Barbara and I remain friends today.

Next to the elementary school at St. Philip’s stood an all girls high school, named Aquinas Dominican. There, I finally was able to escape the Capone legacy. I attended that school along with many other girls from
St. Philip’s, who continued to shun me, but there were also girls there from other elementary schools, and I made friends with them. To my second grade classmates, however, I was forever “that Capone.” The sins of the father lasted a very long time.

Even at only ten years old, when the telephone’s ringing startled all of us awake, I was overwhelmed by the sense that no good could come of it. Now, nearly sixty years later, I know that a late night phone call generally bears ill tidings of great sorrow. Good news has the patience and the good sense to wait for a decent hour. Bad news is rudely impatient.

On the morning of November 10, 1950, the phone set off an adrenaline buzz that worked its way up from my bladder to my brain in an instant. The apartment was dark, and though I’d shot upright before the echo of the first ring had stilled, my grandmother Marie Barsaloux and my grandfather Paul Barsaloux still lay sleeping, their chests rising and falling in peaceful slumber. Knowing that my grandfather was ill, I clambered over him, figuring that his sick sleep was less likely to be unsettled than my grandmother’s. Only when my feet left the living room rug and hit the hardwood floor did it register how cold it was in the apartment. I ran down the long hallway to the phone nook, tugging my flannel nightdress up to my mouth to keep the chill from overwhelming me. I could feel my gooseflesh rising from my feet up my legs and spreading across my chest, as much caused by distress as the room’s chill air.

In the near dark, I made out a shadowy figure coming from the opposite end of the apartment. I knew that my mother would be the only one in the household besides me who’d be awakened by the phone. A bit of a night owl, she probably had just drifted off into a light doze. As we approached one another, I was overwhelmed by a single thought.

“Mother, don’t answer that phone.”

By the time those words had torn their way past vocal chords as
taught and tangled as wire, my mother had already put her hand on the phone.

“What are you talking about?” she half-whispered and half-snarled.

“They’re going to tell you that my father is dead.”

My mother’s face distorted into a kaleidoscope of confusion, disgust, and impatience. I tugged at her arm, but she twisted away from me. I let go of her silk pajamas and stood slump shouldered for the inevitable.

“Hello?”

My mother’s agitation was evident and her smoker’s late-night congestion added a note of roughness that she probably hadn’t intended. From the living room, a weak light spilled across the floor and pooled just shy of our feet. I heard my grandmother asking, “Betty?”

My mother cupped the phone more tightly against her ear and shrugged her shoulder up to the other unoccupied ear. She was so contorted that I couldn’t see her face.

“Oh, that’s too bad. What will happen next?”

That morning when I first heard her speak those words, and to an even greater degree a few minutes later when I learned that my premonition was accurate, my mother’s calm shattered my equilibrium. It was as if, instead of learning of her ex-husband’s death by suicide, she’d just been informed that a dress she’d dropped off at a dry cleaner had a wine stain too stubborn to be removed. The night’s party would go on, but she’d have to find something else to wear.

As she casually leaned against the wall, I tried to read her face, how she held her body, but it was as if my mother had transformed herself into inscrutable script, whose shape I could vaguely make out as something intended to communicate but which conveyed no sense to me, no matter how hard I tried to read it. When she set the phone down and turned to tell me that my father was dead, I felt something similar—that she was speaking to me in a language I did not know but whose emotional meaning somehow resonated within my core.

Hearing that he was dead didn’t surprise me—I had sensed that was the case. My father wasn’t ill; the last time I had seen him was only a few days before, but the knowing I experienced in those pre-dawn hours was as profound as anything else I had ever known to be true. My mother continued to speak to me, relating the very few things that Aunt Maffie told her. I had the sense that she was speaking to me from a place high above me, like she was a judge raised on a dais, and I was being declared guilty of the charge that I’d brought against myself.

My father hadn’t merely died. I’d killed him.

My mother instructed me to go back to sleep, a pointless task, but ever the dutiful little girl, I obeyed. Everyone else, with the exception of my younger brother who was still asleep, convened in the kitchen. I sat on the recently vacated Pullman bed I shared with my maternal grandparents. The tangled bedclothes lay in a human-shaped clump. I smoothed my hand across them, feeling their warmth recede.

From the kitchen I heard the white noise of my family’s voices, punctuated by the percolations of the coffee pot. In my mind’s eye, I could see the brown liquid leaping up through the glass bulb in the lid, steady as a heartbeat.

The smell of the brewing reached my nostrils, and I was instantly back in my grandmother’s house on Prairie Avenue. Though Uncle Al had been dead for a few years and the family had begun to fracture, one essential element of the Capone family’s traditional ways had remained. Sunday dinner at Theresa Capone’s house was served promptly at 1 p.m., and everyone was expected to attend.

That previous Sunday, my mother relented and allowed me to go. I hadn’t been allowed to attend in nearly two months, and in that same span of time, I hadn’t seen my father. I remember that I was torn. As much as I wanted to see my father and his family, I knew how much my mother disapproved of my devotion to him and to them. One of the reasons why I frequently felt that I shouldn’t implore my mother too strongly about attending Capone family Sunday dinners was that I feared she would be able to see my sin-stained soul. Every night when I knelt alongside the bed, I prayed that I would be able to go and live with my father. He adored me, and I adored him.

Today, I can see why my mother finally conceded to my request and let me attend that Sunday dinner. Thanksgiving was only a few weeks away. She’d be able to make a better case for my not spending the holiday with my father’s family if I had just spent a Sunday with them.

As my mother walked me over to Grandmacita’s house, I could tell that her having to give in a bit stung her. The closer we got to Prairie Avenue, the quicker her pace, as if she was eager to get this distasteful errand over with. We walked up the front steps, opened the outside door and she rapped sharply at the massive oak door, telling me to behave and then strutting away, smacking her hands together to rid them of the dust of the
Capones.

In my ten-year-old mind, my mother’s instructions to “Behave yourself,” meant one thing: I was to be polite but distant. I mustn’t say or do anything that would indicate that I was anything less than thrilled to be living with her, that I was as happy and content as any child could possibly be to be living alongside five other people in a cramped five hundred-square-foot walk-up. I wasn’t to tell anyone that because of not only my name but also our poverty, I was considered even more of an outsider in that tightly knit parish community. The worse thing I could do, in my mind, was simply to act pleased to see my father, to let him know how much I loved him and missed him. To do so, I thought, would be an act of betrayal against my mother, the kind of thing for which I’d been punished before. To be honest, I don’t know if I felt any loyalty to my mother, but I do know that I
feared her.

I walked into the Capone house on autopilot. Even though I’d been away for many weeks, I was comforted by the fact that nothing appeared to have changed in my absence. The house was still somewhat dimly-lit. Even though Al was gone and the rest of his original Outfit either disbanded or landed in prison (Paul “The Waiter” Ricca and Tony Accardo were now running things.), Theresa continued her habit of shrouding the first floor windows in heavy brocade draperies. Still, the house felt warm and welcoming, not mysterious. I’d spent some of the happiest hours of my life in that home.

I knew as I made my way to the Capone family dining room, that the object of so many of my prayers would be waiting for me there—my father, Ralph Gabriel Capone. In the years since his untimely death at his own hand at the age of thirty-three, I have made it my mission to better understand why he took himself from my life. Though he was never able to achieve in his life all that he aspired to and all that his family expected (or perhaps demanded), he did accomplish one thing that made all the difference to me—he was a wonderful father who loved me, if not long then certainly very, very well.

That’s why what I did next that Sunday afternoon made me believe for many years after his death that I had killed him. Instead of running up to him and throwing my arms around his neck and allowing him to envelope me in a life-and-love-affirming hug, I ignored him. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him in three-quarter profile sitting in the dining room, idly rifling a deck of cards, a cigarette dangling out of one corner of his mouth, a glass of some amber liquid raised halfway to his lips. Our eyes met briefly, mine wide as saucers, his squinting past the smoke of his ash-tipped Herbert Tareyton. I have to imagine what happened next because my eyes flitted away from him. I imagine him sitting straight up in his seat, taking his glasses off and rubbing the twin kidney shaped indentations on either side of his nose, and sadly shaking his head.

I landed in the arms of my uncle Matty, who pulled me in and then pushed me back to arm’s length and told me how wonderful I looked. He kissed both my cheeks, and with each pass alongside his head, the smell of his sweat and the beeswax from the Brylcreem that held his hair, nearly overpowered me. He called his wife Annette over, proclaiming that I was growing into a real beauty before pinching my cheek and laughing, his breath smelling of wine.

I greeted the rest of my uncle Al’s siblings—my uncle Bites and his beautiful wife Larry. My cousin Delores came to greet me, as did Uncle Mimi and Aunt Mary. After I ran the gauntlet of kisses and squeezed cheeks, I went into the kitchen. As usual, Grandma Theresa and Aunt Maffie were both hard at work preparing the dinner in a sauna-like environment.

Before I could ask for something to drink, root beer for me and the very few other non-drinkers, Aunt Maffie and Grandmacita looked at me, disapproval dripping from their sweating brows. They each stopped what they were doing, wiped their hands on the aprons that covered their Sunday best dresses, and walked over to me, shaking their heads. Instead of the usual, “Buongiorno,” they stood over me scowling.

Aunt Maffie wrapped her strong fingers around my biceps and shook me. “Don’t you know who’s sitting out there?”

“My dad?”

“Yes. Why don’t you talk to him?”

“I was saving him for last.” I stammered searching for the excuse, and heard the tell-tale quiver in my own voice.

The two women looked at one another, their eyebrows rising and their eyes rolling in unison. Grandmacita brought the crucifix of her rosary beads that were always in her hand to her lips and walked back to the pot she had been tending.

“Can’t you see how hurt your father is? Can’t you see how upset he is?” Aunt Maffie pointed toward the dining room with the spoon she’d been using to stir the gravy. A drop of red sauce fell to the checkerboard tile. I continued to stare at it, afraid to make contact with my aunt’s accusing gaze.

She was telling me to do what every fiber of my being had wanted to do. Maffie released me from her grip, turned me around, and with a gentle push, nudged me toward the dining room. All thoughts of my mother’s anger melted in the moist air of that kitchen. I ran toward my father and watched as his face lit up. I climbed into his lap and snuggled against his chest and neck. He kissed me, telling me how much he missed me.