education. And he felt constantly humiliated by his psychological condition. He was disgusted with himself that he couldn’t sit still, or sleep through the night, or be touched, or have a proper career.
He kept all this from you as much as possible because he wanted you to be able to establish your own life—free from his bleak history. He saw you as a fresh and unsullied creation. He thought it was best if he stayed somewhat distant from you so that you would not be infected by his shadows. That’s what he told me, in any case, and I don’t have any reason not to believe it. He didn’t want you to know him very well, Angela, because he didn’t want his life to hurt your life.
I’ve often wondered what it felt like for you, to have a father who cared so much about you, but who deliberately removed himself from your day-to-day existence. When I asked him if perhaps you longed for more attention from him, he said that you probably did. But he didn’t want to come close enough to damage you. He thought of himself as a person who damaged things.
That’s what he told me, anyway.
He thought it was better just to leave you in the care of your mother.
—
Ihaven’t mentioned your mother yet, Angela.
I want you to know that this hasn’t been out of disrespect, but quite the opposite. I’m not sure how to talk about your mother or about your parents’ marriage. I will tread carefully here so as to not offend or hurt you. But I will also try to be thorough in my report. At the least, you deserve to know everything I know.
I must start off by saying that I never met your mother—I never even saw a photo of her—and so I know nothing about her, beyond what Frank told me. I tend to believe that his descriptions of her were truthful, only because he was so truthful. But just because he described your mother truthfully doesn’t necessarily mean he described her accurately. I can only assume that she was like all of us—a complicated being, composed of more than one man’s impressions.
You may have known a completely different woman than the person whom your father described to me, is what I’m saying. I’m sorry if my
story, then, clashes with what you perceived.
But I will convey it to you, nonetheless.
—
Ilearned from Frank that his wife’s name was Rosella, that she was from the neighborhood, and that her parents (also Sicilian
immigrants) owned the grocery store down the street from where Frank grew up. As such, Rosella’s family was of higher social stature than Frank’s family, who were mere manual laborers.
I know that Frank started working for Rosella’s parents when he was in eighth grade, as a delivery boy. He always liked your grandparents, and admired them. They were more gentle and refined people than his own family. And that’s where he met your mother—at the grocery store. She was three years younger. A hard worker. A serious girl. They got married when he was twenty and she was seventeen.
When I asked if he and Rosella had been in love at the time of their marriage, he said, “Everyone in my neighborhood was born on the same block, raised on the same block, and married someone from the same block. It’s just what you did. She was a good person, and I liked her family.”
“But did you love her?” I repeated.
“She was the right sort of person to marry. I trusted her. She knew I would be a good provider. We didn’t go in for luxuries like love.”
They were married right after Pearl Harbor, like so many other couples, and for the same reasons as everyone else.
And of course you, Angela, were born in 1942.
I know that Frank was unable to get much leave during the last few years of the war, so he didn’t see you and Rosella for quite a long time. (It wasn’t easy for the Navy to ship people home from the South Pacific all the way to Brooklyn; a lot of those guys didn’t see their families for years.) Frank spent three Christmases in a row on an aircraft carrier. He wrote letters home but Rosella rarely replied. She had not finished school, and was self-conscious about her handwriting and her spelling.
Because Frank’s family was also barely literate, he was one of the sailors on the aircraft carrier who never got mail.
“Was that painful for you?” I asked him. “Never to hear news from home?”
“I didn’t hold it against anyone,” he said. “My people weren’t the kind to write letters. But even though Rosella never wrote to me, I knew she was faithful, and that she was taking good care of Angela. She was never the type to go around with other boys. That was more than a lot of men on the ship could say about their wives.”
Then there was the kamikaze attack, and Frank was burned over 60 percent of his body. (For all his talk of how other guys on his ship had been just as badly injured as him, the truth is that nobody else with burns as severe as Frank’s had ended up surviving. People didn’t survive burns over 60 percent of their bodies back then, Angela—but your father did.) Then there were the long months of torturous recovery at the naval hospital. When Frank finally came home, it was 1946. He was a changed man. A broken man. You were now four years old, and you didn’t know him except from a photo. He told me that when he met you again after all those years, you were so pretty and bright and kind that he could not believe you belonged to him. He could not believe that anything associated with him could be as pure as you. But you were also a little bit afraid of him. Not nearly so afraid, though, as he was of you.
His wife also felt like a stranger. Over those missing years, Rosella had transformed from a pretty young girl to a matron—heavyset and serious, dressed always in black. She was the sort of woman who went to Mass every morning, and prayed to her saints all day long. She wanted to have more children. But of course that was now impossible, because Frank could not bear to be touched.
That night as we walked all the way to Brooklyn, Frank told me, “After the war, I started sleeping in a cot out in the shed behind our house. Made a room for myself there, with a coal stove. I’ve been sleeping there for years. It’s better that way. I don’t keep anyone awake with my strange hours. Sometimes I wake up screaming, that sort of thing. My wife and kid, they didn’t need to be hearing that. For me, with sleeping, the whole procedure is a disaster. Better that I do it alone.”
He respected your mother, Angela. I want you to know that.
He never once said a bad word about her. On the contrary—he approved entirely of the way she raised you, and he admired her stoicism in the face of her life’s many disappointments. They never bickered. They were never at each other’s throats. But after the war, they barely ever spoke other than to make arrangements about the family. He deferred to her on all matters, and turned over his paychecks to her without question. She had taken over management of her parents’ greengrocer business, and had inherited the building that housed the shop. She was a good businesswoman, he said. He was happy that you, Angela, had grown up in the store, chatting with everyone. (“The light of the neighborhood,” he called you.) He was always eyeing you for signs that you, too, might someday be an oddball recluse (which is how he saw himself), but you seemed normal and social. Anyway, Frank trusted your mother’s choices around you completely. But he was always at work on patrol, or walking the city at night. Rosella was always working at the greengrocer, or taking care of you. They were married in name only.
At one point, he told me, he had offered her a divorce, so she might have the chance to find a more suitable man. With his inability to uphold his duties of marital consortium and companionship, he felt certain they could secure an annulment. She was still young. With another man, she might still have the big family she had always wanted. But even if the Catholic Church had allowed her to divorce, Rosella would never have gone ahead with it.
“She’s more church than the Church itself,” he said. “She’s not the kind of person who would ever break a vow. And nobody in our neighborhood gets divorced, Vivian, even if things are bad. And with me and Rosella—things were never bad. We just lived separate lives. What you gotta understand about South Brooklyn, is that the neighborhood itself is a family. You can’t break up that family. Really, my wife is married to the neighborhood. It was the neighborhood who took care of her while I was in the service. The neighborhood still takes care of her now—and Angela, too.”
“But do you like the neighborhood?” I asked.
He gave a rueful smile. “It’s not a choice, Vivian. The neighborhood is what I am. I’ll always be part of it. But I’m also not part of it anymore, since the war. You come back, everyone expects you to be the
same guy you were before you got blown up. I used to have enthusiasms like everyone else—baseball, movies, what have you. The Church feasts on Fourth Street, the big holidays. But I don’t have enthusiasms anymore. I don’t fit there anymore. It’s not the neighborhood’s fault. They’re good people. They wanted to take care of us guys who came back from the war. Guys like me, if you had a Purple Heart, everyone wants to buy you a beer, give you a salute, give you free tickets to a show. But I can’t do anything with all that. After a while, people learned to leave me alone. Now it’s like I’m a ghost, when I walk down those streets. Still, though, I belong to that place. It’s hard to explain, if you’re not from there.”
I asked him, “Do you ever think about moving away from Brooklyn?”
He said, “Only every day for the last twenty years. But that wouldn’t be fair to Rosella and Angela. Anyhow, I’m not sure I’d be better off anywhere else.”
—
As we walked back over the Brooklyn Bridge that night, he said to me, “What about you, Vivian? You never got married?”
“Almost. But I was saved by the war.”
“What does that mean?”
“Pearl Harbor came, my guy enlisted, we broke off the engagement.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be. He wasn’t right for me, and I would have been a disaster for him. He was a fine person, and he deserved better.”
“And you never found another man?”
I was quiet for a while, trying to think how to answer that. Finally, I decided to just answer it with the truth.
“I’ve found many other men, Frank. More than you could count.”
“Oh,” he said.