Uncle Al Capone (20 page)

For the next few minutes the world around me disappeared, and I immersed myself in my father’s affection and attention. I filled him in on what was going on at school, recited for him all of the times-tables, up to seven. As I got to seven times eight, his eyes were as big as the bowls that had been set out for the first course, pasta e fagioli. When I succeeded in getting the next two calculations right, he clapped his hands and kissed the top of my head.

“I think you’re ready now for Sette E Mezo,” he announced triumphantly, scanning the room to make sure that everyone had heard.

“Seven and a Half? Really?”

“Here,” my father handed me half of the playing cards. “Take out the face cards, the eights, nines, and tens. Put the rest over here.” He tapped a spot on the lace tablecloth next to his wine glass.

For the next few minutes, he explained the rules of the game to me, an Italian version of blackjack. Every time I got the king of diamonds, the wildcard, my father would slap his forehead and scowl at me in mock indignation. “You’re sure you’ve never played this before?”

We took a break and joined the rest of the family when Aunt Maffie carried out a plate of antipasto. My uncle Mimi stood and raised his glass. He looked at each of us in turn, then inhaled noisily and nodded, “Salute per cento anno.” His high voice was so different from my uncle Al’s deep, raspy staccato. There was a brief silence and then everyone said, “Salute,” in return and downed the red wine. Though he was gone, Uncle Al’s presence still loomed large over everyone.

As soon as the wine glasses met lace, the men’s arms shot out toward the platter of antipasto. I knew enough to wait, but as my father leaned over to stab a slice of proscuitto and an artichoke heart, he whispered to me, “This is the one time it’s not ladies first. When all your uncles are through, then it’s your turn.”

Throughout the rest of the meal, my father instructed me on the finer points of etiquette. When we’d each received a ladleful of broth on top of our pasta, my father told me how to eat it. He stressed that it was important for a lady, with heavy emphasis on the word lady, to not bring her mouth toward the bowl. Instead, a lady should bring the soup to her mouth. Later, when we were down to the last few ounces of soup, he showed me that the proper way to get the last bits was to carefully tilt the bowl away from oneself. He demonstrated for me and I followed suit.

During the interim between courses, he elaborated more on what it meant to be a lady. “Deirdre, I don’t want you to be like your mother. She doesn’t act like a lady at all. You need to have respect for yourself. You don’t go around chasing men and discarding them like they’re a bad card.”

I nodded. Message received.

Though our family dinners generally lasted more than three hours, to me it seemed as if that last dinner with my father was over in an instant. He talked to me the entire time, instructing me more on the importance of getting an education, having respect for my elders and myself, how to not ever be too dependent on any man in my life. From my adult perspective I can see now how odd this behavior was, how strange that I was being given a crash course for a final exam that wasn’t to be handed out until years later. I understood later that my father was saying goodbye to me.

When it came time for me to leave, he didn’t walk me to the hallway. He suspected that my mother might be there. Instead he hugged and kissed me again at the table, told me again how much he missed me and wished that things were different.

When I stepped outside, my mother was standing and talking to one of the two bodyguards the family kept on, more out of loyalty to them than as a necessity. I stood next to my mother while she finished her cigarette and her conversation. She looked at me and said, “You stink of cigars.”

Chicago, 1950

I have read in the papers of bank cashiers being put in cars, with pistols stuck in their slats, and taken to the bank, where they had to open the vault for the fellow with the gun. It really looks like taking a drink is worse than robbing a bank. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it is.

- Al Capone

I spent the day of my father’s death quietly at home. Though my mother had promised she would speak to me about the conversation she had with my aunt Maffie and fill me on whatever details she could, she did not. At some point in the early afternoon, she left the apartment, and I didn’t see her until she returned after what would have normally been dinnertime. To pass the time and to try to quiet my mind, I listened to a few records. Given my mood, I chose to play Bing Crosby’s “After You’ve Gone” several times in succession.

All I knew of my father’s death was that the police had discovered his body. He was alone in his apartment on South Wrightwood. I also knew, even at the age of ten, that thirty-three was far too young to die.

I tried to cheer myself up with “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” and “When Irish Eyes are Smiling,” but I kept coming back to my first choice. Even though the tune had a kind of up-tempo jazz feel, the lyrics still pierced me. At the time, I had no way of knowing that one of the reasons my father committed suicide was because of a broken heart.

My parents divorced a number of years earlier, and my father had fallen on even harder times than the ones that marked their marriage. According to a coroner’s testimony at an inquest my grandfather Ralph requested (in those days you simply needed to pay the $6 fee and the hearing would be held), he suspected foul play as my father’s organs were “flooded with alcohol.”

The most obvious indication of his unhappiness and ultimate despair was the suicide note he left behind. Described in a
Chicago Daily News
article as “barely legible,” the note read, “Dear Jeanie. Jeanie my sweetheart. I love you. I love you. Jeanie only you I love. I’m gone.” Only when I was a grown woman would I learn the circumstances of his tortured relationship with this woman.

Though I wanted to know everything at the time, of course, my family didn’t think it appropriate for a little girl to know the various and somewhat sordid circumstances of her father’s suicide. Today, I find it ironic that the newspapers covered my father’s death and the subsequent inquest. In my mind, what my father was trying to escape for most of his all-too-brief adult life was the notoriety that came with being a Capone. I suspect that to be true both because of what I’ve been told by surviving family members over the years and what I experienced myself. It’s a terrible thing to be ashamed of who you are and where you come from. At the time of his death, he had been working on a memoir he titled
The Sins of the Fathers
.

In one regard, my father did live up to expectations and did not fail. Despite leaving my brother and me at such a young age, in the years when he was with us, he was a spectacularly good father. I adored him. I still love him.

My father was the one who prepared my meals, taught me to read, instructed me in how to conduct myself, and provided me with the kind of encouragement and support that, in the 1940s, would have generally been considered the mother’s role to give. I only have vague recollections of my earliest years, but those memories are always of my father and me. I remember sitting on his lap as he read to me from the Golden Books Series, stories like
Three Little Kittens
,
The Little Red Hen
, and
The Poky Little Puppy
. Because of the plot of the last of those, my father would often serve me rice or chocolate pudding, or our very favorite “Black Cows” for dessert.

I suppose that most children feel safe and protected with their parents, and perhaps it is just that I longed for that same sense of belonging for so many years after his death that I feel that I am twice or thrice blessed for having him for even such a short amount of time.

I know it may seem I have deified my father and demonized my mother. But I know my father was no saint; he was a deeply flawed human being and his suicide was the ultimate expression of that. I understand that some people could look at his decision to end his life and say that choice negated any of the good he might have done as a parent up to that point.

I can’t judge my father so harshly for his actions. I also know that my mother was just as flawed, if not more so, than my father. In her mind, I’m sure, she was more sinned against than a sinner herself. Her choice to leave my father was as much an act of desperation, in her mind, as my father’s choice to leave this earth. After all these years, and all the attempts my mother made to pass me off to one relative or another, after the six marriages that followed her first to my father, after all the histrionics and hurt, I can say that I did love my mother. I loved her in the way that only a child can, knowing that she was not the woman I hoped she’d be, but nevertheless grateful for the lessons she taught me about how
not
to be as a wife, a woman, and a mother myself.

Mostly though, I’m puzzled by their behavior. Almost sixty years removed from the events that lead up to my father’s death, the devastation has diminished its hold on my day-to-day living, but it hasn’t entirely relinquished its grip on my imagination. I don’t know what forces loomed on my parents to shape them into the people they became. What knowledge I’ve gained about my father and mother has come to me sporadically over the years. The slow accumulation of that information and the insights I’ve gained from having lived my own life form a picture as flawed as they were. I understand and accept that.

In many ways, I see my parents as emblematic of an era. Tragedy. Boom. Bust. Recovery. They were like characters in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. My mother was the quintessential flapper from the 20s. Like the proverbial moth to the flame that Fitzgerald used to describe Daisy in
The Great Gatsby
, my mother was drawn to the light of my father’s apparent wealth. That the spring that produced that wealth had a foul source was of no concern to her, and she drank from it greedily. When it dried up, she simply moved onto whatever could satisfy that thirst elsewhere.

My father, by contrast, was expected to be the torchbearer for the family. By his own admission, my grandfather Ralph was tough on his son. While he was glad to see that he led a country club life, he felt my father hadn’t paid his dues. He thought my father needed to be tougher, to have at his disposal the skill set that he himself gained from both a youth lived on the mean streets and a life in the racketeering business. He wanted to shelter his son, and thought my father should have to do the things he had done to attain the level of success he did. I could never quite get my head around that until I had children of my own. It was as if I hoped that somehow, maybe by osmosis, they would gain the insights and learn the painful lessons I learned without actually having to suffer them in reality. I think this is something most parents wrestle with.

When my mother finally came home on that awful day in November of 1950, Aunt Maffie accompanied her. Aunt Maffie’s eyes were red and swollen but, despite her grief, she remained stalwart. She let me know that we were all going to the funeral home to see my father. She wanted me to get dressed so that I would look pretty for him.

Together, we went into the bedroom where my clothes hung neatly with my mother’s. She selected a dress for me, a simple black jersey knit one that she had bought for me a few months earlier from Marshall Field’s. She’d bought it and a few other outfits along with some pairs of underwear and shoes. I’d come home from school to find a shopping bag waiting for me. Along with the clothes was a box of the store’s famous Frango Mint chocolates. I’d always associated that dress with the sweet smell of those candies.

After I dressed, I went into the main living area of the apartment. The two women stood at opposite ends of the room, my mother leaning against the door, my aunt peering vacantly out the window. Both had on their coats and hats, veils pinned up. I knew we weren’t going to church—I didn’t feel that same sense of the familiar I did every Sunday morning—but there was something of the same seriousness in the atmosphere. Aunt Maffie handed me a hat, a pair of red wool mittens, and a patent leather purse that matched my shoes. I shrugged into my pea coat and followed them down the stairs.

My father’s wake was held at the Rago Brothers’ Funeral Home, as Al’s had been three years before. When we pulled up to the building, I was surprised to see a large number of men waiting at the entrance. They swarmed Aunt Maffie’s car.

“G-d- vultures,” I heard Maffie swear under her breath. My aunt got out of the car, using her door as a shield. She then shouldered her way past a few of the men. They were reporters, and like a scene out of a
Hollywood
movie, they were pressing forward, flashbulbs popping, and the mass of them, some with notebooks at the ready, others with microphones, moved like fedora-ed amoeba.

A couple of men I didn’t know came to our rescue and formed an alley for us to pass through. I heard men calling my name and asking how I felt. I could feel my stomach acids rising in my throat. I was torn apart by my father’s death, frightened by what I was about to see and now attacked by strange men asking me how I felt.

I wanted to scream, and when a few of them broke through the human barricade that had formed, I started to swing my purse wildly at these awful men. I felt Aunt Maffie grab my hand, but I shook free of her and hurled my purse, wanting nothing more than to hurt someone, anyone, to make him or her understand some of the pain I felt. A moment later, I felt my aunt’s hand on my forearm, and my feet moved more quickly to keep up with her as she half-dragged me past the gauntlet and into the building’s vestibule. Only then did I see a few police officers standing at the doorway with their arms folded across their chests looking as bored as if they were standing on a quiet corner in the
Loop
on a Sunday morning beat.

My aunt and mother were nearly breathless, and we all stood there for a moment smoothing our hair and gathering ourselves for our entrance in the viewing room. I had no idea what to expect when two of the Rago Brothers’ employees swung the door open for us and somberly nodded. Compared to outside and the vestibule of the building, the viewing room was a hot house. A riot of flowers was displayed throughout the room, the overwhelming odor of gardenias and peonies choking me. The room was dimly lit, and in the wavering candlelight, I saw row after row of formally clad men and women staring soberly at me. A phalanx of black armbands seemed to turn and follow me. I recognized just a few of the faces, but I recognized the expression everyone wore—pity at the poor young thing that’d lost her father.