Brooklyn Story (2 page)

Grandma Ruth reinforced that message daily. She never made excuses for her daughter's shortcomings and never missed an opportunity to take charge of my upbringing. The last straw was when Mom had come home with crabs that she contracted from some man she had been sleeping with for a supply of glue. After a long night in the emergency room, tossing all of our bedding and sleeping on just a cold mattress, Grandma had seen enough and moved in. She then quit her job when I was seven, after Mom and Grandma got robbed at knifepoint when we lived in the projects by Cozine Avenue in Brooklyn. They soon realized it was best to change locations, my mom opting for an Italian neighborhood. Grandma just wanted away from this place.

Grandma arose every morning to cook my breakfast and send me off to school, letting Mom get a little extra sleep. With
a larger-than-life aura, this short, big-boned Jewish woman had sinewy, arthritic hands, rounded shoulders, and burning bunions on her tired feet. Grandma was a steadfast woman who remained true to her religious and social convictions, but her overbearing opinions came with a heart the size of an ocean. Her wisdom, which I had learned to depend upon, was such that she allowed me to make my own choices and make my own mistakes while she remained a constant source of encouragement as I strove to better myself. Grandma was the loudest, most opinionated silver-haired lady you could ever meet, and I loved her completely. Flawed as we three women were, we were family.

Others came into my life as I sought to escape from the Brooklyn that enveloped me and my contemporaries. Father Rinaldi preached to me as much with his serenity as with his measured words; without speaking, his countenance told me that an inner peace was real and attainable. His neighborhood church, Our Lady of Guadalupe, which I visited for the first time after months of seeing happy people leaving it as I walked home from school, was as constant a presence and as sturdy as my grandma, and was a haven from the confusing, turbulent, and sometimes harsh world I lived in. The church's solace, mystery, and promise of knowledge that could help me lured me back on occasion. I never told Mom or Grandma about my stops there, or about the saintly priest who welcomed my infrequent visits and my inquiries, drew parallels between biblical parables and my ordeals, and offered an ear and guidance without any strings attached.

Mr. Wainright, my high school English teacher, looked with soft eyes upon my first, clumsy attempts at creative composition. He extracted and held out to me the kernels of aptitude buried within my clutching words and awkward phrasing as motivation to continue my efforts. He believed in my talent as one believes in God—with scant tangible proof.

I had met my best friend Janice Caputo on the bus to New Keiser High School when I was a freshman and she a senior, and although she was older, she had taken me under her wing. Janice told me later the reason she had done so was that I wasn't like other girls and she liked that about me. It hadn't mattered to her that I was poor and didn't have the trendy clothes and accessories that everyone else seemed to have, and she sought no pleasure as other classmates did in making fun of me—sometimes to my face. Janice was a constant companion on my circuitous path to a life that was different from the Brooklyn one we knew, the one she accepted for herself but that I longed to leave behind. Corralled in the community of my ancestors, I longed to cross the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan and flee the destiny that was assumed for all in our outer borough. Janice's generosity of spirit encompassed my writing passion even though she wouldn't share the world it represented and the reduced closeness it portended. Janice soaked up every word I wrote and nudged me along as we endured the normal growing pains of adolescence and the additional slings and arrows endemic to a self-contained Italian community. Janice stood by me and suffered along with me as I was swallowed up by circumstances that threatened the attainment of my lifelong dream of becoming a writer.

That some people lived in the real world and others lived in Brooklyn was an understatement. Most of the others were content to stay there and be a member of the group that was appropriate to their station. Mobsters molded their women like Jell-O and controlled everything else in the neighborhood, from gambling, hijacking, robberies, drugs, and prostitution to social conduct. They even exerted a measure of influence over the local cops, who often looked the other way.

The wannabes—young and old—idolized the mobsters and sought to impress them with their willingness to reject the straight life and engage in anything illegal. Wannabes
patterned their mannerisms and activity after the mobsters, orbited as close as possible to them, and celebrated those who were taken into the fold. And then there were the nerds. Young ones buried themselves in their textbooks and their hobbies, and had nothing to do with anyone. Older ones worked in honest, middle-class jobs and honored values that the mobsters and wannabes gave lip service to but disdained.

Less than a handful of people I knew intended to leave Brooklyn. But I always did, starting when I first learned from books and movies that there was a lot more than the narrow minds and narrow visions of those around me, to that very moment in front of the courthouse. I stood there, beneath the words “Justice” and “Equality” that were etched in the large stones of the facade, and I thought about how the Brooklyn Bridge had always represented freedom and the way to a new life for me. Don't get me wrong, Brooklyn was a beautiful place for most, but to me it had become a past I had to flee.

That famous span, far from my family's humble apartment, was foremost always in my thoughts. Its two massive towers and intricate web of steel cables were a combination of strength, tension, and balance, and the bridge stood as a symbol of how my own life should be fashioned. I needed to be strong, I needed to stretch myself, and I needed to counter-weight the life I was born into with the pull of what lay on the other side of the East River, in Manhattan.

I thought about the bridge's origins. The vision of one man, John Roebling, was realized by his son more than ten years later and that meant a lot to me. Dreams could survive generations and come true. The bridge proved that, even if John and a score of others died during its construction. I felt the power of the bridge each time I gazed at it, and it inspired me to look beyond the confinement of my Bensonhurst neighborhood and the humiliation of poverty. I vowed to get past
the stereotypes and the welfare checks, food stamps, waiting on line for a block of cheese, only to get there and find them to be gone. The secondhand clothes, and dinners of toast or, on special occasions, Kraft macaroni and cheese.

I never lost the desire to construct my own bridge to my own future. I knew that wouldn't be easy for a girl like me, just as building the Brooklyn Bridge had been fraught with hardship, peril, and sacrifice. And although others were there to help, I knew that in the end it would be up to me to endure the trials and setbacks, and to overcome each and every obstacle as the Roeblings had done. I found out just how hard building and crossing a bridge would be.

An Adonis named Tony Kroon, five years older than I, swept me off my feet when I was a teen. The moment I saw him, when I was starting my junior year of high school, I was captivated by his thick blond hair, stunning blue eyes, and defined jaw. I was flattered by his immediate interest in me and felt an immediate bond with him because his Dutch-Italian heritage mirrored my Italian-Jewish one. In our Bensonhurst neighborhood, being anything but pure Italian was a distinct shortcoming. People like us didn't belong entirely to either culture and had to endure the prejudices of both. That was the subtext for me in my home, and for a wannabe like Tony, acceptance by his fledgling mob associates was a constant issue.

I empathized with Tony's struggles and was smitten by his increasing attention to me. I overlooked his thinking only about himself, high living, and his standing among his contemporaries, the Brooklyn Boys. Like them, he forbade independent thinking in his chosen woman, so I kept my hopes and dreams from him. The wannabe boys of Brooklyn kept their “business” away from their girlfriends, who learned from the start not to ask imprudent questions. Tony lived in secrecy the way all his Italian contemporaries did, and treated me the
way they treated their women: with minimal information, with impossible demands delivered over a clenched fist, and with clothes and jewelry that had fallen off trucks. I was supposed to remain quiet, feel honored to be on his arm whenever he wanted, and support the decisions he made for both of us, decisions that took me farther from the Brooklyn Bridge that I had been determined to cross.

It wasn't as if no one had warned me. Grandma had told me more than once not to trust Tony. “
Bubelah,
” she would say, using the Yiddish term of affection for a child, “don't go with that Catholic half-Italian piece of crap. He's a real charmer, just like your father. He'll steal your dreams. Find yourself a nice Jewish boy.” But I didn't listen to her, nor to Father Rinaldi or Mr. Wainright, who tried to gently steer me away from what they also knew. I followed my heart instead of my head, and my heart told me I was in love.

I had powerful feelings for Tony then and I had powerful feelings for him as I climbed the stairs to the imposing courthouse. Locked in a holding cell beneath the court, Tony would still be thinking about himself, I knew, but his thoughts would be different this day. At the age of twenty-four, he faced a long stretch behind bars if the jury delivered a guilty verdict. He'd be cast into the monstrous world of hard-core criminals with their daily frustrations, rages, and lusts.

I pulled the handle of a heavy wood door and entered the building where Tony's fate was to be decided and I would confront my past. The courthouse lobby, with its high ceiling, marble floors, and musky, stone interior reminded me of Father Rinaldi's church. A different kind of praying took place here, I thought, and I took the elevator to the ninth floor. None of the souls who had risen silently in the lift with me had had any inkling of what I would face there or why I had to be there.

The tall, dark-stained courtroom door closed behind me
without a sound. I squinted in the glaring fluorescent light of a large chamber with walls and a floor that matched its entry doors. The judge's raised bench and the jury box were vacant. A low hum wafted through the sparsely filled room as lawyers huddled around massive desks beyond a wood railing and spectators milled about or sat whispering with tilted necks. The prosecutors looked upbeat. I slipped into a seat in the last row and felt as though I were on trial, too, for all of my lies and deceptions—to everyone, including myself—of recent years. I looked at the spectators up front who had played their parts in bringing me to that judgment day.

The Kroon family occupied the front row as if they were at a funeral. Pamela, Tony's mother and aging wannabe bombshell with multishaded dyed blond hair, sat erect in a dark, tight-fitting designer pantsuit. Philip, his father, wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt and his head was bowed between his hunched, slight shoulders. Tony's fourteen-year-old chubby sister, Katrina, bobbed in her seat as if she was enjoying the spectacle. Vin Priganti, known to everyone in Bensonhurst as “the Son” of local mob boss Tino Priganti, fidgeted in a chair behind the Kroons. Vin took occasional beatings from his father's heavy fists along with the wads of cash he slipped into his son's hand. Vin ran the crew to which Tony and his friends belonged. Richie Sparto, a crew member and Tony's best friend, sat alone three rows farther back.

All of these people lived in the Brooklyn that stifled my dream. None had lifted a hand to help me. None cared if I made it across the bridge that stood a few blocks away from the courthouse. Truth be told, they probably preferred that I never tried or, even better, never thought to do so in the first place. In my own backyard, they were as far from me as the life on the other side of that bridge. They hadn't seen me come into the courtroom, just as they had never seen who I was.

The door beyond the jury box opened. All eyes were on
Tony's stoic face as he was led by the bailiff to a chair at the defendant's table, and he sat down without looking directly at anyone. Although his shoulders no longer stretched the silk material of his custom-tailored suit as they had when I first met him, I couldn't help thinking that he was still much too good-looking for prison. But for a half-breed wannabe like Tony who honored
omerta
—the mafia code of silence—that was what he confronted as everyone looked on.

I sighed, and remembered the days when Tony and I were an inseparable item and everyone on the street knew it. Days of discovery and promise, when I had had those different feelings about everything and when the excitement in Bensonhurst was as high as the girls' teased hairdos …

August 1978

“C'mon, Sam,” Janice said as she reached down and took my hand. “Sorry I'm late.”

“That's okay,” I said, rising from the stoop in front of the three-story apartment house where I lived on the top floor with my mother and grandmother. The building on Seventy-third Street was indistinguishable from the dozen others it was connected to on the long block, save for the fire escape that was affixed to the front of the structure instead of the rear and its arched entrance that reminded me of the stained-glass windows at Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Gothic towers of the Brooklyn Bridge.