City of Girls (38 page)

I felt stupid—as though I were offering him a chair in my own home, rather than a seat in a public park.

He said, “I’m not good at sitting down. If you don’t mind, can we walk?”

“I don’t mind at all.”

We started walking the perimeter of the park, under the lindens and the elms. He had
a long stride, but that was fine—so do I.

“Frank,” I said, “I apologize for running off the other day.”

“No, I apologize to you.”

“No, I should have stayed and heard you out. That would’ve been the mature thing to do. But you have to understand—meeting you again after all these years gave me quite a start.”

“I knew you would walk away when you found out who I was. You should have.”

“Look,
Frank—all that was long ago.”

“I was a
stupid
kid,” he said. He stopped and turned to face me. “Who the hell did I think I was, talking to you like that?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“I had no right. I was such a stupid goddamn kid.”

“If we’re going to get down to brass tacks about it,” I said, “I was just a stupid kid, too. I was surely the stupidest kid in New York City that week. You may
recall the details of the situation in which I had found myself?”

I was attempting to introduce a little levity, but Frank was all business.

“All I was trying to do was impress your brother, Vivian—you gotta believe that. He’d never talked to me before that day—never took notice of me at all. And why would he talk to me—a popular guy like him? Then all of a sudden, there he is waking me up in
the middle of the night.
Frank, I need your car.
I was the only guy at OCS with a car. He knew that. Everyone knew that. Guys were always wanting to borrow my car. Well, the thing is—it wasn’t my car, Vivian. It was my old man’s car. I was allowed to use it, but I couldn’t give it to anyone. Here I am, middle of the night, talking to Walter Morris for the first time—a guy I admire with all my
heart—telling him that I can’t give him my old man’s car. I’m trying to explain all this from a dead sleep, and I don’t even know what it’s all about.”

As Frank spoke, his native accent thickened. It was as if, by going back in time, he was going back deeper into himself—even deeper into his Brooklyn-ness.

“It’s all right, Frank,” I said. “It’s over.”

“Vivian, you gotta let me say this. You
gotta let me tell you how sorry I am. For years, I wanted to find you, tell you I was sorry. But I
didn’t have the courage to look for you. Please, you gotta let me tell you how it happened. See, I told Walter,
I can’t help you, buddy
. Then he deals me the facts. Tells me his sister’s gone and got herself in trouble. He needs to get her out of the city, pronto. He says I gotta help him save his
sister. What was I gonna do, Vivian? Say no? It was
Walter Morris
. You know how he was.”

I did. I knew how he was.

Nobody ever said no to my brother.

“So I tell him the only way I can lend him the car is if I drive. Thinking to myself,
How am I gonna explain the mileage to my old man
. Thinking to myself,
Maybe me and Walter will be friends after this
. Thinking,
How are we gonna just walk away
from OCS like this, in the middle of the night?
But Walter sorted it all out. Got permission from the commander for both of us to leave for a day—for twenty-four hours only. No one but Walter who could’ve gotten that permission in the middle of the night, but he did it. I don’t know what he had to say, or promise, to get that leave, but he got it. Next thing I know, we’re in midtown, and I’m throwing
your suitcases in my old man’s car, getting ready to drive six hours, to a town I’ve never heard of, for what reason I don’t even know. I don’t even know who you are, but you’re the prettiest-looking girl I ever saw in my life.”

There was nothing flirtatious in the way he said this. He was just relaying the facts, cop that he was.

“Now we’re in the car, I’m driving, and then Walter starts giving
you the fifth degree. I never heard anyone go at someone as hard as that. What am I supposed to do while he’s reaming you out? Where am I supposed to go? I can’t be hearing all this. I’ve never been in a situation like this. I’m from South Brooklyn, Vivian, and it can be a tough neighborhood, but you gotta understand—I’m a bookish kid, I’m a shy kid. I don’t get involved in fights. I’m the kind
of kid who keeps his head down. Something goes on, people start yelling, I leave
the scene. But I can’t leave this scene, ’cause I’m
driving
. And he wasn’t yelling—even though I think it might’ve been better if he was yelling. He was just taking you apart, so cold. Do you remember that?”

Oh, I remembered.

“Add to it all, I don’t know anything about women. The things he was talking about, the
things he said you were up to? I don’t know anything about all that. And your picture is in the papers, he says—a picture of you messing around with
two
people? One of them is a movie star of some kind? Another one is a
showgirl
? I never heard of anything like that. But he just keeps going at you and going at you—and you’re just there in the backseat, smoking cigarettes and taking it. I look in
the rearview mirror, you aren’t even blinking. It’s like water off a duck’s back, everything he’s saying to you. I could see it was making Walter crazy, that you weren’t responding. That was just firing him up more. But I swear to God, I never saw anyone looking so coolheaded as you.”

“I wasn’t coolheaded, Frank,” I said. “I was in shock.”

“Well, whatever it was, you kept your cool. Like you
didn’t even care. Meanwhile, I’m sweating bullets, wondering, is this how you people talk all the time? Is this what rich people are like?”

Rich people,
I thought.
How had Frank been able to tell that Walter and I were rich people?
And then I realized:
Oh, yes, of course. The same way we’d been able to tell that he was a poor person. Someone not even worth acknowledging.

Frank kept going: “And
I’m thinking, they don’t even know I’m here. I’m nothing to these people. Walter Morris isn’t my friend. He’s just using me. And you—you hadn’t even looked at me. Back at the theater, you told me, ‘Take down those two suitcases.’ Like I was a porter, or something. Walter, he didn’t even introduce me. I mean, I know you were all under duress, but it’s like, in his eyes, I’m nobody, you know? I’m
just a tool that he needs—just somebody to drive the machine. And I’m
trying to figure out how to stop being so invisible, you know? So then I think,
Hey, I’ll jump on the bandwagon
. Join the conversation. Try to act like
him
—talk the way he’s talking, the way he’s going after you. So that’s when I said it. That’s when I called you what I called you. Then I see how it lands. I look in the rearview
mirror and I see your face. I see what my words just did to you. It was like I killed you. Then I see his face—it’s like he just got hit by a baseball bat. I thought it was gonna be nothing, me saying that. I thought it was gonna make me seem cool, too—but, no, it was like mustard gas. Because no matter how bad it was, the way your brother was reaming you out, he hadn’t used a word like
that
.
I see him try to figure out what to do about it. Then I see him decide to do nothing. That was the worst part.”

“That was the worst part,” I agreed.

“I gotta tell you, Vivian—hand on the Bible—I never used a word like that to anybody in my life. Never in my
life
. Not before, not since. I’m not that guy. Where did it come from, that day? Over the years, I’ve watched that scene a thousand times
in my mind. I watch myself say it, and I think—Frank, what’s the
matter
with you? But those words, I swear to God, they just came flying out of my mouth. Then Walter clams up. Remember that?”

“I do.”

“He doesn’t defend you, doesn’t tell me to shut my hole. Now we gotta drive for hours in that silence. And I can’t tell anyone I’m sorry, ’cause I feel like I’m never supposed to open my mouth around
the two of you again. Like I wasn’t hired to open my mouth around you in the first place—not that I was
hired,
but you know what I mean. Then we get to your family’s house—and I never saw a house like that in my life—and Walter doesn’t even introduce me to your parents. Like I don’t exist. Back in the car, all the way back to OCS, he doesn’t say a word to me. Doesn’t say a word to me the whole
rest of training. Acts like it never happened. Looks at me like he never saw me before. Then
we graduate, and thank God I never have to see him again. But still, I gotta think about this thing forever, and there’s nothing I can ever do to put it right. Then two years later, I end up transferred to the same ship as him. Of all the luck. Now he outranks me, no surprise there. He acts like he doesn’t
know me. And I gotta sit with it. I gotta live with it all over again, every day.”

At that point, Frank seemed to run out of words.

There was somebody that he’d reminded me of, as he was spinning out his story and struggling to explain himself. Then I realized: it was
myself
. He reminded me of myself that night in Edna Parker Watson’s dressing room, when I had desperately tried to talk my way
out of something that could never be put right. He was doing the same thing I had done. He was trying to talk his way into absolution.

In that moment, I felt overcome by a sense of mercy—not only for Frank, but also for that younger version of myself. I even felt mercy for Walter, with all his pride and condemnation. How humiliated Walter must have felt by me, and how dreadful it must have been
for him to feel exposed like that in front of someone he considered a subordinate—and Walter considered everyone a subordinate. How angry he must have been, to have to clean up my mess in the middle of the night. Then my mercy swelled, and for just a moment I felt mercy for everyone who has ever gotten involved in an impossibly messy story. All those predicaments that we humans find ourselves in—predicaments
that we never see coming, do not know how to handle, and then cannot fix.

“Have you really been thinking about this forever, Frank?” I asked.

“Always.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said—and I meant it.

“You’re not the one who needs to be sorry, Vivian.”

“In some ways I am. There’s a great deal that I’m very sorry about, surrounding that incident. Even more so now that I’ve heard all
this.”

“Have
you
thought about it forever?” he asked.

“I thought about that car ride for a long time,” I admitted. “Your words especially. It was hard on me. I won’t pretend it wasn’t. But I put it away some years ago, and I haven’t thought about it in a long time. So don’t worry, Frank Grecco—you didn’t ruin my life, or anything. How about we just agree to strike this whole sad event from the
books?”

Abruptly, he stopped walking. He spun and looked at me, wide-eyed. “I don’t know if that’s possible.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “Let’s chalk it up to people being young, and not knowing how to behave.”

I put my hand on his arm, wanting him to feel that it was all going to be all right now—that it was over.

Again, just as he had done on the first day we met, he yanked his arm away,
almost violently.

This time, I must have been the one who flinched.

He still finds me repulsive
was how I read it.
Once a dirty little whore, always a dirty little whore.

Seeing my expression, Frank grimaced, and said, “Oh, Jesus, Vivian, I’m sorry. I gotta tell you. It’s not you. I just can’t . . .” He trailed off, looking around the park hopelessly, as though searching for someone who was
going to rescue him from this moment, or explain him to me. Bravely, he tried again. “I don’t know how to say this. I hate like heck to talk about it. But I can’t be touched, Vivian. It’s a problem I have.”

“Oh.” I took a step back.

“It’s not you,” he said. “It’s everybody. I can’t be touched by anybody. It’s been that way ever since
this
.” He waved his hand in a general way over the right side
of his body—where the burn scars came crawling up his neck.

“You were injured,” I said, like an idiot. Of course he was injured. “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand.”

“Yeah, that’s okay, why would you?”

“No, I’m
very
sorry, Frank.”

“You know what? You didn’t do it to me.”

“Nonetheless.”

“Other guys, they were injured that day, too. I woke up on a hospital ship with hundreds of guys—some of them
burned even as bad as me. We were the ones they pulled out of the burning water. But a lot of those guys are fine now. I don’t understand it. They don’t have this thing I have.”

“This thing,” I said.

“This thing of not being able to be touched. Not being able to sit still. That thing I have about enclosed spaces. I can’t do it. I’m okay in a car as long as I’m the one in the driver’s seat, but
anything else, if I have to sit still too long, I can’t do it. I have to stay on my feet, all the time.”

This was why he hadn’t wanted to meet me in a restaurant, or even sit with me on a park bench. He couldn’t be in an enclosed space, and he couldn’t sit still. And he couldn’t be touched. This was probably why he was so thin—from needing to pace all the time.

Dear God, this poor man
.

I could
see that he was getting agitated so I asked, “Would you like to walk around the park with me some more? It’s a nice evening, and I enjoy walking.”

“Please,” he said.

So that’s what we did, Angela.

We just walked and walked and walked.

THIRTY

Of course I fell in love with your father, Angela.

I fell in love with him, and it made no sense for me to fall in love with him. We could not possibly have been more different. But maybe that’s where love grows best—in the deep space that exists between polarities.

I was a woman who had always lived in privilege and comfort, and thus I had always been fortunate enough to skate quite
lightly across life. During the most violent century of human history, I had never really suffered any harm—aside from the small troubles that I brought down upon my own head through my own carelessness. (Lucky is the soul whose only troubles are self-inflicted.) Yes, I had worked hard, but so do a lot of people—and my job was the relatively inconsequential task of sewing pretty dresses for pretty
girls. And in addition to all that, I was a freethinking, unbridled sensualist who had made the pursuit of sexual pleasure one of the guiding forces in her life.

And then there was Frank.

He was such a
weighty
person—by which I mean, heavy in his very
essence. He was a person whose life had been hard from the beginning. He was a man who did nothing casually, thoughtlessly, or carelessly. He
was from a poor immigrant family; he couldn’t afford to make mistakes. He was a devout Catholic, a police officer, and a veteran who had been through hell in service to his country. There was nothing of the sensualist about him. He could not bear to be touched, yes—but it was not only that. He had no hedonic traces within him whatsoever. He dressed in clothing that was purely utilitarian. He ate food
merely in order to fuel his body. He didn’t socialize; he didn’t go out for entertainment; he had never been to a play in his life. He didn’t drink. He didn’t dance. He didn’t smoke. He’d never been in a fight. He was frugal and responsible. He didn’t engage in irony, teasing, or tomfoolery. He only ever told the truth.

And, of course, he was faithfully married—with a beautiful daughter whom
he’d named after God’s angels.

In a sane or reasonable world, how would a serious man like Frank Grecco ever have crossed paths with a lightweight individual like me? What had brought us together? Aside from our shared connection to my brother, Walter—a person who had made both of us feel intimidated and minimized—we had no other commonalities. And our only shared history was a sad one. We had
spent one dreadful day together, back in 1941—a day that had left the both of us shamed and scarred.

Why would that day have led us to falling in love, twenty years later?

I don’t know.

I only know that we don’t live in a sane or reasonable world, Angela.

So here is what happened.

Patrolman Frank Grecco called me a few days after our first meeting and asked if we could go for another walk.

The call came in to L’Atelier rather late at night—well after nine
o’clock. It had startled me to hear the boutique’s phone ringing. I happened to be there, because I had just finished up some alterations. I was feeling stagnant and bleary-eyed. My plan had been to go upstairs and watch television with Marjorie and Nathan, and then call it a night. I had almost ignored the ringing phone. But then
I picked it up, and there was Frank on the line, asking me if I would go walking with him.

“Right now?” I asked. “You want to go for a walk
now
?”

“If you would. I’m feeling restless tonight. I’ll be out walking, anyway, and I hoped maybe you would join me.”

Something about this intrigued me, and touched me, too. I’d gotten plenty of calls from men at this hour of the night—but not because they
wanted to go for a walk.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’ll take the streets, not the expressway.”

We ended up walking all the way over to the East River that night—through some neighborhoods that were not so safe back then, by the way—and then we kept on walking along the deteriorating waterfront until we got to the Brooklyn Bridge. Once we got to the bridge,
we walked right over it. It was cold out, but there was no breeze, and our exercise kept us warm. There was a new moon, and you could almost see some stars.

That was the night when we told each other everything about ourselves.

That was the night I found out that Frank had become a patrolman expressly because of his inability to sit still. Walking a beat for eight hours a day was exactly what
he needed, he said, in order not to crawl out of his own skin. This is also why he took so many extra
shifts—always volunteering to fill in for the other cops who needed a day off. If he was lucky enough to get a double shift, he might be able to walk a beat for sixteen straight hours. Only then might he be sufficiently tired to sleep through the night. Every time he was offered a promotion on
the force, he turned it down. A promotion would have meant a desk job, and he couldn’t manage that.

He told me, “Being a patrolman is the only job beyond street sweeper that I’m qualified to do.”

But it was a job that was far below his mental capacities. Your father was a brilliant man, Angela. I don’t know if you are aware of this, because he was so modest. But he was something close to a genius.
He’d been born to illiterate parents, sure, and he’d been neglected in a tumble of siblings, but he was a mathematical prodigy. As a child, he may have looked like a thousand other kids in Sacred Heart parish—all children of dockworkers and bricklayers, born to be dockworkers and bricklayers, themselves—but Frank was different. Frank was
exceptionally
smart
.

From an early age, he’d been singled
out by the nuns as something special. His own mother and father believed that school was a waste of time—
why study, when you could work?—
and when they did send him to school, they were superstitious enough to tie a knot of garlic around his neck, to keep away the evil spirits. But Frank bloomed in school. And the Irish nuns who taught him—distracted and tough though they were, and often viciously
discriminatory against Italian children—could not help but notice the brains on this kid. They skipped him a few grades ahead, gave him extra assignments, and marveled at his skill with numbers. He excelled at every level.

He got placed in Brooklyn Technical High School, easily. He finished at the top of his class. Then he put in two years at Cooper Union studying aeronautical engineering before
he enrolled in Officer Candidate School and joined the Navy. Why did he even join the Navy? He
was fascinated by airplanes and was studying them; you would’ve thought he’d have wanted to be a flier. But he went into the Navy, because he wanted to see the ocean.

Imagine that, Angela. Imagine being a kid from Brooklyn—a place that is almost entirely surrounded by ocean—and growing up with the dream
of someday
seeing
the ocean. But the thing was, he never had seen it. Not properly, anyhow. All he’d seen of Brooklyn were dirty streets and tenements, and the filthy docks of Red Hook, where his father worked in a longshoreman’s gang. But Frank had romantic dreams of ships and naval heroes. So he quit college and signed up for the Navy, just like my brother had done, before the war had even been
declared.

“What a waste,” he told me that night. “If I’d wanted to see the ocean, I could have just walked to Coney Island. I had no idea it was so close.”

His intention had always been to return to school after the war, finish that degree, and get a good job. But then came the attack on his ship, and he had very nearly been burned alive. And the physical pain was the least of it, to hear him
tell it. While recovering in Pearl Harbor at the Navy hospital with third-degree burns over half his body, he had been served with a court-martial order. Captain Gehres, the captain of the USS
Franklin,
had court-martialed every single man who’d ended up in the water on the day of the attack. The captain claimed that those men had deserted, against direct orders. Those men—many of whom, like Frank,
had been blown off the ship in flames—were accused of being cowards.

This was the worst of it for Frank. The branding of “coward” burned him more deeply than the branding of fire. And even though the Navy eventually dropped the case, recognizing it for what it was (an attempt by an incompetent captain to shift attention from his many errors that fateful day, by blaming innocent men), the psychological
damage had
been done. Frank knew that many of the men who had stayed aboard the ship during the attack still considered the men in the water to have been deserters. The other survivors were given medals of valor. The dead were called heroes. But not the guys in the water—not the guys who had gone overboard in flames. They were the cowards. The shame had never left him.

He came home to Brooklyn
after the war. But because of his injuries and his trauma (they called it a “neuro-psychopathic condition” back then, and had no treatment for it), he was never the same. There was no way he could go back to college now. He couldn’t sit in a classroom anymore. He tried to finish his degree, but he constantly had to leave the building, run outside, and hyperventilate. (“I can’t be in rooms with people,”
as he put it.) And even if he had been able to complete his degree, what kind of job could he have gotten? The man couldn’t sit in an office. He couldn’t sit through a meeting. He could barely sit through a telephone call without feeling like his chest was going to implode from agitation and dread.

How could I—in my easy, comfortable life—understand pain like that?

I couldn’t.

But I could listen.

I’m telling you all this now, Angela, because I promised myself I would tell you everything. But I’m also telling you all this because I’m fairly certain that Frank never told you any of it.

Your father was proud of you and he loved you. But he did not want you to know the details of his life. He was ashamed that he had never made good on his early academic promise. He was embarrassed to be working
in a job that was so far below his intellectual capacities. He was sick in the heart about the fact that he had never finished his
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.

I haven’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.

I learned 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.