City of Girls (39 page)

“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.

He was quiet after that, and I wasn’t sure how that information had landed on him. This was a moment where another sort of woman might have chosen to be discreet. But something stubborn in me insisted that I be even more clear.

“I’ve slept with a lot of men,
Frank, is what I’m saying.”

“No, I get it,” he said.

“And I will be sleeping with a lot more men in the future, I expect. Sleeping with men—lots of men—that’s more or less my way of life.”

“Okay,” he said. “I understand.”

He didn’t seem agitated by it. Just thoughtful. But I felt nervous, sharing this truth about myself. And for some reason, I couldn’t stop talking about it.

“I just wanted
to tell you this about me,” I said, “because you should know what kind of woman I am. If we’re going to be friends, I don’t
want to run into any judgment from you. If this aspect of my life is going to be a problem . . .”

He stopped suddenly in his tracks. “Why would I judge you?”

“Think about where I’m coming from here, Frank. Think about how we first met.”

“Yeah, I see,” he said. “I get it.
But you don’t need to worry about that.”

“Good.”

“I’m not that guy, Vivian. I never was.”

“Thank you. I just wanted to be honest.”

“Thank you for the tribute of your honesty,” he said—which I thought then, and still think, was one of the most elegant things I’d ever heard anyone say.

“I’m too old to hide who I am, Frank. And I’m too old to be made to feel ashamed of myself by anyone—do you
understand that?”

“I do.”

“But what do you think of it, though?” I asked. I couldn’t believe I was pushing this issue. But I couldn’t help but ask. His poise—his lack of shocked response on the matter—was puzzling.

“What do I think about you sleeping with a lot of men?”

“Yeah.”

He thought for a moment, then said, “There’s something that I know about the world now, Vivian, that I didn’t know
when I was young.”

“And what’s that?”

“The world ain’t straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there’s a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn’t care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain’t straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don’t mean a thing. The world just
happens
to you
sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”

“I don’t think I ever believed that the world was straight,” I said.

“Well, I did. And I was wrong.”

We walked on. Below us, the East River—dark and cold—progressed steadily toward the sea, carrying away the pollution of the whole city with its currents.

“Can I ask you something, Vivian?” he said after
a while.

“Certainly.”

“Does it make you happy?”

“Being with all those men, you mean?”

“Yes.”

I gave this question real consideration. He hadn’t asked it in an accusing way. I think he genuinely wished to comprehend me. And I’m not sure I’d ever pondered it before. I didn’t want to take the question lightly.

“It makes me
satisfied,
Frank,” I finally replied. “It’s like this: I believe I have
a certain darkness within me, that nobody can see. It’s always in there, far out of reach. And being with all those different men—it satisfies that darkness.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “I think I can maybe understand that.”

I had never before spoken this vulnerably about myself. I had never before tried to put words to my experience. But still, I felt that my words fell short. How could I explain
that by “darkness” I didn’t mean “sin” or “evil”—I only meant that there was a place within my imagination so fathomlessly deep that the light of the real world could never touch it. Nothing but sex had ever been able to reach it. This place within me was prehuman, almost. Certainly, it was precivilization. It was a place beyond language. Friendship could not reach it. My creative endeavors could
not reach it. Awe and joy could not reach it. This
hidden part of me could only be reached through sexual intercourse. And when a man went to that darkest, secret place within me, I felt as though I had landed in the very beginning of myself.

Curiously, it was in that place of dark abandon where I felt the least sullied and most true.

“But as for
happy
?” I went on. “You asked if it makes me
happy. I don’t think so. Other things in my life make me happy. My work makes me happy. My friendships and the family that I’ve created, they make me happy. New York City makes me happy. Walking over this bridge with you right now makes me happy. But being with all those men, that makes me
satisfied,
Frank. And I’ve come to learn that this kind of satisfaction is something I need, or else I will
become unhappy. I’m not saying that it’s right. I’m just saying—that’s how it is with me, and it’s not something that’s ever going to change. I’m at peace with it. The world ain’t straight, as you say.”

Frank nodded, listening. Wanting to understand. Able to understand.

After another long silence, Frank said, “Well, I think you’re fortunate, then.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Because not many
people know how to be satisfied.”

THIRTY-ONE

I have never loved the people I was supposed to love, Angela.

Nothing that was ever arranged for me worked out the way it was planned. My parents had pointed me in a specific direction—toward a respectable boarding school and an elite college—such that I could meet the community I was meant to belong to. But apparently, I didn’t belong there, because to this day, I don’t have a single
friend from those worlds. Nor did I meet a husband for myself at one of my many school proms.

Nor did I ever really feel like I belonged to my parents, or that I was meant to reside in the small town where I grew up. I still don’t keep in touch with anybody from Clinton. My mother and I had only the most superficial of relationships, right up until her death. And my father, of course, was never
much more than a grumbling political commentator at the far end of the dinner table.

But then I moved to New York City, and I came to know my Aunt Peg, an unconventional and irresponsible lesbian, who drank too much and spent too much money, and who only wanted to cavort through
life with a sort of
hop-skip-tralala
—and
I loved her
. She gave me nothing less than my entire world.

And I also met
Olive, who didn’t seem lovable—but whom I came to love, nonetheless. Far more than I loved my own mother or father. Olive was not warm or affectionate, but she was loyal and good. She was something of a bodyguard to me. She was our anchoress. She taught me whatever morality I possess.

Then I met Marjorie Lowtsky—an eccentric Hell’s Kitchen teenager whose immigrant parents were in the rag trade.
She was not at all the sort of person I was supposed to befriend. But she became not only my business partner, but my sister. I loved her, Angela, with all my heart. I would do anything for her, and she for me.

Then came Marjorie’s son, Nathan—this weak little boy who was allergic to life itself. He was Marjorie’s child, but he was my child, too. If my parents’ vision for my life had gone according
to plan, I would surely have had my own children—big, strong, horseback-riding future captains of industry—but instead I got Nathan, and that was better. I chose Nathan and he chose me. I loved him, too.

These random-seeming people were my family, Angela. These people were my
real
family. I’m telling you all this because I want you to understand that—over the next few years—I came to love your
father just as much as I loved any of them.

My heart cannot offer him higher praise than that. He became as close to me as my own, beautiful, random, and
real
family.

Love like that is a deep well, with steep sides.

Once you fall in, that’s it—you will love that person always.

A few nights a week, for years on end, your father would call me at some odd hour and say, “Do you want to get out?
I can’t sleep.”

I’d say, “You can never sleep, Frank.”

And he’d say, “Yeah, but tonight I can’t sleep worse than usual.”

It didn’t matter what the season was, or the time of night. I always said yes. I’ve always enjoyed exploring this city, and I have always liked the nighttime. What’s more, I’ve never been a person who needed much sleep. But most of all, I just loved being with Frank. So he
would call me, and I would agree to see him, and he would drive over from Brooklyn to pick me up, and we would go someplace together and walk.

It didn’t take us long to walk every neighborhood in Manhattan, and so pretty soon we started exploring the outer boroughs, as well. I never met anybody who knew the city better. He took me to neighborhoods I’d never even heard of, and we would explore
them on foot in the wee hours of the morning, talking all the while. We walked all the cemeteries and all the industrial yards. We walked the waterfronts. We walked by the row houses and through the projects. We eventually walked over every single bridge in the greater New York metropolitan area—and there are a lot of them.

Nobody ever bothered us. It was the strangest thing. The city was not
a safe place back then, but we walked through it as though we were untouchable. We were often so deep in our own conversations that we often didn’t even notice our surroundings. Miraculously, the streets kept us safe and the people let us be. I wondered at times if people could even see us at all. But then sometimes the police would stop us and ask what we were doing, and Frank would show his badge.
He would say, “I’m walking this lady home”—even if we were in a Jamaican neighborhood in Crown Heights. He was always walking me home. That was always the story.

Sometimes, late at night, he would drive me to Long Island to buy fried clams at a place he knew—a twenty-four-hour diner where you could pull right up to the window and order your food from the car. Or we’d go to Sheepshead Bay for
littlenecks. We’d eat them while parked
on the dock, watching the fishing boats head out to sea. In the spring, he would drive me out to the countryside in New Jersey to pick dandelion leaves in the moonlight, for making bitter salads. It’s something Sicilians enjoy, he taught me.

Driving and walking—those were the things that he could do, without getting too anxious.

He always listened to me.
He became the most trusted confidant of my life. There was a clarity about Frank—a deep and unshakable integrity. It was soothing to be with a man who never boasted about himself (so rare, in men of that generation!) and who did not impose himself on the world in any way. If he ever had a fault, or made a mistake, he would tell you before you could find out for yourself. And there was nothing I
could ever tell him about myself that he would judge or criticize. My own glints of darkness did not frighten him; he had such darkness of his own that nobody else’s shadows scared him.

Most of all, though, he
listened
.

I told him everything. When I had a new lover, I told him. When I had a fear, I told him. When I had a victory, I told him. I was not accustomed, Angela, to having men listen
to me.

And as for your father, he was not accustomed to being with a woman who would walk five miles with him in the middle of the night, in the rain, in Queens, just to keep him company when he could not sleep.

He was never going to leave his wife and daughter. I knew that, Angela. That’s not who he was. And I was never going to lure him into bed. Aside from the fact that his injuries and his
trauma made a sexual life impossible for him, I was not a woman who could have an affair with a married man. That’s not who I was. Not anymore.

Moreover, I can’t say I ever fantasized about marrying him. In general, of course, the thought of marriage gave me a hemmed-in feeling, and I didn’t long for it with anyone. But certainly not with Frank. I couldn’t imagine us sitting at a breakfast table,
talking over a newspaper. Planning vacations. That picture didn’t look like either of us.

Lastly, I can’t be certain that Frank and I would have shared the same depth of love and tenderness for each other, had sex ever been part of our story. Sex is so often a cheat—a shortcut of intimacy. A way to skip over knowing somebody’s heart by knowing, instead, their mere body.

So we were devoted to
each other, in our own way, but we kept our lives separate. The one New York City neighborhood that we never explored together on foot was his—South Brooklyn. (Or Carroll Gardens, as the realtors eventually named it, although your father never called it that.) This was the neighborhood that belonged to his family—to his tribe, really. Out of respect, we left it quietly untouched by our footsteps.

He never came to know my people and I never came to know his.

I introduced him briefly to Marjorie—and certainly my friends knew
about
him—but Frank was not somebody who could socialize. (What was I going to do—have a dinner party, and show him off? Expect a man with his nervous condition to stand in a crowded room and make idle chitchat with strangers while holding a cocktail? No.) To my friends,
Frank was just the walking phantom. They accepted that he was important to me because I said that he was important to me. But they never understood him. How could they have?

For a while, I’ll admit, I’d indulged a fantasy that he and Nathan might meet someday, and that he could become a father figure to that dear little boy. But that wasn’t going to work, either. He could barely be a father figure
to
you,
Angela—his actual child, whom he loved with all his heart. Why would I ask him to take on another child to feel guilty about?

I asked nothing of him, Angela. And he asked nothing of me. (Other than, “Do you want to go for a walk?”)

So what were we to each other? What would you call it? We were something more than friends—that was certain. Was he my boyfriend? Was I his mistress?

Those
words all fall short.

Those words all describe something that we were not.

Yet I can tell you that there was a lonely and untenanted corner of my heart that I’d never known was there—and Frank moved right into it. Holding him in my heart made me feel like I belonged to love itself. Although we never lived together or shared a bed, he was always a part of me. I saved stories for him all week,
so I would have good things to tell him. I asked for his opinions, because I respected his ethics. I came to cherish his face precisely because it was his. Even his burn scars became beautiful to my eye. (His skin looked like the weathered binding of some ancient, sacred book.) I was enchanted by the hours that we kept and the mysterious places we went—both in the course of our conversations, and
in the city itself.

The time we spent together happened outside of the world, is how it felt.

Nothing about us was normal.

We always ate in the car.

What
were
we?

We were Frank and Vivian, walking through New York City together, while everyone else slept.

Frank normally reached out to me at night, but on one roastingly hot day in the summer of 1966, I got a call from him in the middle of
the afternoon, asking if he could please see me immediately. He sounded frantic, and when he arrived at L’Atelier, he leapt out of the car and
started pacing in front of the boutique with more nervousness than I’d ever before witnessed. I quickly handed over my work to an assistant, and hopped into the car, saying, “Let’s go, Frank. Come, now. Just drive.”

He drove all the way out to Floyd Bennett
Field in Brooklyn—speeding the entire time, and not saying a word. He parked in a patch of dirt at the end of a runway, where we could watch the Naval Air Reserve planes come in for landings. I knew that he must have been profoundly agitated: he always went to Floyd Bennett Field to watch the planes land when nothing else would calm him. The roar of the engines settled his nerves.

I knew better
than to ask him what was wrong. Eventually, once he had caught his breath, I knew he would tell me.

So we sat in the crushing July heat with the car off, listening to the engine tick and cool. Silence, then a landing plane, then silence again. I cranked down my window, to bring in some air, but Frank didn’t seem to notice. He hadn’t yet taken his white-knuckled hands off the steering wheel. He
was wearing his patrolman’s uniform, which must’ve been sweltering. But again, he didn’t appear to notice. Another plane landed and shook the ground.

“I went to court today,” he said.

“All right,” I said—just to let him know that I was listening.

“I had to testify about a break-in last year. A hardware store. Some kids on dope, looking for things to fence. They beat up the owner, so there were
assault charges. I was the first officer on the scene, so.”

“I understand.”

Your father often had to appear in court, Angela, on some police matter or another. He never liked it (sitting in a crowded courtroom was hell for him, of course), but it had never caused him to have a panicked reaction like this. Something more troubling must have occurred.

I waited for it.

“I saw somebody I used
to know today, Vivian,” he said at last. His hands were still not off the wheel, and he was still staring straight ahead. “A guy from the Navy. Southern guy. He was on the
Franklin
with me. Tom Denno. I haven’t thought of that name in years. He was a guy who came from Tennessee. I didn’t even know he lived up here. Those southern guys, you’d think they would’ve all gone back home after the war,
right? But he didn’t, I guess. Moved here to New York. Lives way the hell up on West End Avenue. He’s a lawyer now. He was in court today, representing one of the kids who broke into the hardware store. I guess that kid’s parents must have some money. They got a lawyer. Tom Denno. Of all people.”

“That must have surprised you.” Again, just letting him know I was there.

“I can still remember
Tom when he was brand new on the ship,” Frank went on. “I don’t know the date—don’t own me to it—but he come on in something like early forty-four. He came straight off the farm. Country boy. You think city kids are tough, but you should see those country boys. Most of them, they came from such poverty, you never saw anything like it. I thought
I
grew up poor, but it was nothing compared to these
kids. They never saw food before, like the amounts of food on the ship. They ate like they were starving, I remember. First time in their lives they hadn’t shared dinner with ten brothers. Some of them had hardly ever worn shoes. Accents like you never heard. You could barely understand them. But they were tough as hell in battle. Even when we weren’t under fire, they were tough. Fighting with
one another all the time, or mouthing off to the marines who were guarding the admiral, when the admiral was onboard. They didn’t know how to do anything except come at life hard, you know? Tom Denno was the hardest of them all.”

I nodded. Frank rarely talked in such detail about life onboard the
ship, or about anyone he’d known in the war. I didn’t know where this was all going, but I knew it
was important.

“Vivian, I was never tough like those guys.” He was still gripping that steering wheel like it was a life preserver—like it was the only thing in the world keeping him afloat. “One day on the flight deck, one of my men—young kid from Maryland—stopped paying attention for a second. He took a step in the wrong direction, and his head got sucked right off his body, right into a plane
propeller. Just pulled his head right off him, right in front of me. We weren’t even under fire—just a routine day on the deck. Now we have a headless body on the deck, and you better hurry and clean it up, because more planes are coming in, landing every two minutes. You gotta keep the flight deck clear at all times. But I just freeze. Now here comes Tom Denno, and he grabs the body by its feet
and drags it away—probably the way he used to drag pig carcasses back on the farm. He doesn’t even flinch, just knows what to do. Meanwhile, I can’t even move. And then Tom’s gotta come and pull me out of the way, too, so I won’t be the next one killed. Me—an officer! Him, an enlisted kid. This was a kid who’d never been to a
dentist,
Vivian. How the hell did he end up as a Manhattan lawyer?”