Second Skin (38 page)

Michael stood tall and handsome and absolutely unafraid, but she could feel her terror like a second skin, crawling over her like a skein being drawn by an invisible insect.

Michael,
she cried.
Help me. I’m afraid!

He smiled at her with that peculiar, goofy smile he directed only at her.

Michael
! she screamed, more loudly.

But he could not hear her, and now she realized that she was mute. She heard the rhythmic liturgical chanting of Latin prayers, and she grabbed Michael’s hand and fled with him into the darkness of the woods.

And in that darkness, she could hear the twin beatings of their hearts, synchronized and harmonized, like the choral voices of the liturgical song. Deeper and deeper into the dangerous woods she drew him until both glade and moonlight were but a memory. Why? Why? What was she seeking?

She awoke knowing they were about to be attacked, and the thought in her head, revolving like a wheel: I’ve done this to him. It’s all my fault.

This dream was alive and glowing in her mind that hot June night in 1961 when she found Michael up on the roof of their apartment building in Ozone Park. Grandpa had given him a telescope, the perfect present for a boy longing to outpace the boundaries of his limited world. But then Grandpa always seemed to know just what his grandchildren wanted most. On her last birthday, Valentine’s Day, when she had turned nineteen, he had given her a book on the birth of Italy. For Caesare’s birthday, he had chosen a gun.

There was a peculiar kind of fever coming off Michael that night, as if he, too, possessed that second skin beneath which a hitherto unknown person was thirsting to emerge. That night, he was by turns avid and unresponsive, as if a central question in his mind had not yet been resolved.

She had evinced an interest in the stars even though they seemed as remote and dead as Latin. But even Latin, when sung in chant, possessed a certain formal beauty that the stars, in their coldness, could not. They were far too alien for her. Still, she was desperate to talk and she did not know how else to prolong her presence up on the roof. Michael liked to be alone; perhaps he even thrived in his solitude. This was another element about him that frightened her. Solitude was too demanding; it required a certain concentration she was only now beginning to explore with Bernice in her studies at Santa Maria.

She had been so stupid that night! She had gotten so close to him, she could feel all her defenses crumbling. She longed to confide in him, to tell him about the extraordinary journey on which she was about to embark, but at the last instant, she had wrenched herself back from the brink. What had she been thinking of? Living with secrets was now an integral part of her life. If she could break her vow to Bernice and the order so easily, then she had made a terrible mistake and must abandon her training now.

But she knew she would do no such thing. The order was for her. It was her destiny to replace Bernice, she knew that as surely as she drew each breath. But what was it about Michael that made her want to confide in him?

That night, in the intimacy of the rooftop encounter with him, in the aftermath of the subsequent tragedy, she came to know. Seeing how he responded so instinctively, so much more
intelligently
than Caesare did to Grandpa’s murder, convinced her that the beast in him had been released by some mysterious alchemy. Perhaps being an eyewitness to Grandpa’s death had given birth to the creature of the second skin lurking beneath the surface. And standing with him in the bloody courtyard while the flashbulbs lit the walls of the buildings with their lurid light, she understood everything. Her dream and reality merged to form an entirely new reality. She was standing with him in the darkness of the chittering woods, and she knew why she had taken his hand, had run with him from the softness of the moonlight into the dangerous dark. It was this very beast, so terrifying to her, that drew her to him.

Caesare, on the other hand, was an open book. He was scary to everyone on the street, but he wasn’t to her, even though he yelled at her. Often, she suspected it was because he knew she could see right through him. Understanding Caesare was simple: he adored their mother and was almost destroyed by his conflicting feelings about their father. It was typical of him that he conveniently ignored their mother’s failings – her extreme passivity, the long-suffering mask that had become part of her. She thought she was nurturing her family, but all she was doing was stifling them. Her passivity threatened to make them passive or – as in Caesare’s case – excessively violent.

If only Johnny had not abandoned them to his wild schemes, Jaqui thought, for in her heart she was certain that her wayward father had found himself a woman younger and prettier than Mama and was living with her somewhere warm and tropical. How else to explain the rumors and innuendos of great humiliation? How else to explain the fact that Grandfather Caesare never spoke of him? It was as if Johnny Leonforte never existed. If Grandfather knew his son’s dreadful secret, he kept it locked away inside his heart.

And what of Mama? Did even she know what had happened to her husband, whether he was alive or dead? Jaqui had asked herself those questions so often that when one long and dreary afternoon she discovered her mother sitting on their big four-poster bed, weeping, she had no inkling that the answers were merely a handbreadth away.

It was a year before she entered the Convent of the Sacred Heart of Santa Maria, and Mama had started when Jaqui came in the room and slid something behind her into the bedclothes. Thinking at first that it was some kind of game, Jaqui had scrambled across the bed and, making an end run around Mama, had snatched from beneath the coverlet an opened letter.

‘No!’ Mama had cried with such unexpected ferocity that Jaqui allowed her to snatch it back. Mama immediately crumpled it between reddened hands.

‘Who is the letter from, Mama? Tell me.’

‘I can’t.’ Mama’s face was filled with a kind of anguish Jaqui had only read about in books.

With the teenager’s preternatural sense of emotion, she blurted the first thing that entered her mind: ‘It’s from Johnny.’

Even as she said it, it sounded absurd. Johnny Leonforte, if he was still alive, was at this moment no doubt sunning himself on some beach with a blonde with big breasts and –

But then something that was odd about the scene hit her. ‘It
is
from Johnny.’

‘I wish you’d call him Papa.’ Now Mama’s eyes were filled with tears. Jaqui, who had become frightened without quite knowing why, kneed across the bed to wrap her arms around Mama’s shaking shoulders.

‘My little girl.’ Mama wept. ‘You see too much. You know too much.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not right, you’re all I have to confide in.’

Jaqui put her head close to her mother’s. ‘Johnny’s alive?’

‘Swear to me, Jaqui. Swear before God and the Virgin Mary that you will tell no one.’

‘But why not?’

‘Swear!’
Again Jaqui felt that unexpected force of will from her mother, and she swore even while she was wondering from what deep well that force sprang.

‘He’s alive.’ Mama said it in a sigh, and Jaqui, her heart unaccountably breaking, used the pad of her thumb to wipe the tears from her mother’s eyes. ‘No, darling, leave them. It’s good for me to cry. So much feeling bottled up inside for so long – it’s not healthy. Ask your grandfather.’

‘He knows Johnny’s alive?’

Mama nodded. ‘He knows everything. Every detail. But don’t ever ask him to admit it. He’d rather slit his own throat. And he’d be terribly angry with me if he knew I’d told you.’

Jaqui clutched her mother’s meaty shoulder. ‘But what
happened
? Where
is
Johnny?’

Mama had put her head down, defeated. ‘I don’t know. His letters used to come from Japan, but now the postmarks are from here, cities all around the country. But I don’t think he’s in any of them.’

‘Is he coming back?’

‘I don’t know.’ The whisper was so low, Jaqui had to lean closer to hear it.

‘Mama, why did he go away?’ She took her mother by the shoulders and shook her. ‘Why did he leave us?’

Mama was shaking her head as if she were a dripping dog coming in out of the rain.

‘Mama!’ Jaqui screamed, and her mother shook as if jolted by lightning.

‘He – you know your father was in the Army during the war. Afterward, he – stayed on in Japan for a time.’ Mama was sobbing, but Jaqui felt no inclination to stop her. She felt as if she were standing in a drought-dry stream bed looking up at a long-awaited torrent of water about to inundate her. ‘He tried to do something. It was business, so don’t ask me what, I was never told. It was clever, it was stupid. It would have made the entire Leonforte family, Grandfather said.’

None of this made any sense to Jaqui. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. Events fell out the wrong way or someone was more clever – in any case, it was a terrible disaster from which your grandfather never quite recovered. Neither did the family.’

So the rumors and innuendo were true – at least part of them, Jaqui thought. ‘But what does it matter? Why isn’t Johnny here where he’s needed?’

Mama’s head came up and her bloodshot eyes looked bleak. She tried to smile, stroking her daughter’s gleaming hair. ‘You’re so beautiful, you remind me so much of–’

‘Mama!’

‘It was your grandfather’s wish, that’s all I can say.’

‘You mean Grandfather banished him for life?’

‘For life?’ Mama’s eyes had gone vague. ‘I don’t know. It’s business and that’s the end of it. I have accepted it and now so must you.’

After she had burned the letter – she would not let Jaqui read it – Mama felt better. She went about her household chores as if nothing had happened. And that night, when Grandfather Caesare returned home, to Jaqui’s astonishment, Mama greeted him at the front door with her customary warmth and effusiveness.

‘When the hell is Pop coming back?’ Caesare said to Jaqui the morning after Grandfather Caesare’s funeral as he drove her to Santa Maria. ‘If he was here now, I wouldn’t be havin’ t’make a deal with Uncle Alphonse.’

Jaqui was so astonished that he had confided in her that she did something stupid – she told him the truth: ‘Johnny’s never coming back. Face it, he left us, Mama, you, me, Mick – all of us. He just walked out. Why should he come back now?’

Which was when Caesare hit her.

Afterward, she could see that he had had no other choice. In Caesare’s black-and-white world, Johnny was not merely his father, but the head of the family, his idol – not to mention a don who commanded a whole other kind of respect and loyalty.

They sat in silence the rest of the way to Astoria. Jaqui was acutely aware of her flaming cheek. It was the heat she felt, not the pain. And when the car drew up in front of Santa Maria, she was so humiliated she could not summon up the Christian kindness to offer him her other cheek and forgive him. Bernice would, no doubt, have been disappointed in her.

But, later, she understood so clearly the lesson she had learned that day. The truth, like everything else in life, had its place. It was not to be dispensed indiscriminately like cannoli at a street fair because it could cause as much pain and suffering as a well-placed lie.

She had been halfway out the door of his car when he said to her, ‘This is the last time you go to Santa Maria.’

She turned back to him, stunned. ‘What?’

‘I’m only letting you go this time because of Mama.’

Jaqui shook her head as if she could not believe her ears. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Fuck you mean?’ he snapped. ‘Santa Maria is in Goldoni territory.’

‘So what?’

His patience gave out. ‘So we fuckin’ hate the Goldonis!’ he shouted with such ferocity that Jaqui flinched.

‘I’m not involved in your stupid vendettas,’ she said after a moment. Her heart was beating so fast she was quite certain it would burst through her chest. ‘This is a
convent.
A place of God.’

‘Maybe so, but the Goldonis have made it theirs.’ Caesare sat back with that self-satisfied expression he got when he knew something you didn’t. ‘They give a ton of money to Santa Maria’s. Christ, it wouldn’t even be in existence today if it wasn’t for the Goldonis.’

‘Don’t talk like that here,’ she said evenly. ‘It’s sacred ground.’

He stared at her for a minute. ‘You really believe in all this, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

He launched himself forward on the seat. ‘But you’re a Leonforte, damnit!’

‘Not inside Santa Maria’s. Don’t you get it? That’s why I want to be there.’

He threw up his arms, his big hands banging off the inside of the car’s roof. ‘Those nuns!’ He shook his head. ‘Forget the nuns for a minute and use your head that’s supposed to be so smart. The Goldonis will never let you forget who you are.’

‘You’re wrong.’

Caesare sighed. ‘Mom made a mistake bringing you here. Jaqui, this comes straight from the top. From Uncle Alphonse. He wants you back home.’

They stared at each other for a long time, and who could say what images of their father ran through their minds.

At last, Jaqui said, ‘I don’t care.’

‘Well, you’d better care,’ he said, returning to the well-worn role of unthinking bully.

‘Why?’ She slid off the seat and out of the car. ‘You’re the one who wants to be like him, not me.’

‘Hey, Sis, you can’t run away!’ he shouted at her through the window. ‘You were born a Leonforte and you’ll die a Leonforte! Goddamnit, there’s no escape! Not at Santa Maria’s or anywhere else!’

Jaqui was lost in prayer. It was a prayer for the dying, a prayer of the order that had been taught her by Bernice because it did not exist in Scripture.

Light like liquid honey filtered lazily through the chapel’s stained-glass windows. Tall and narrow as spears, there was about them a certain medieval quality and more: a hint of fortication, an ancient garrison’s slitted window. The chapel held all sound as if it were sacred, preserving even the most minute echo.