Brooklyn Story (39 page)

“We're almost ready,” Mom said a couple of minutes later. She coughed violently and then looked me in the eye. “I'm goin' to stop smoking,” Mom swore as she tamped a cigarette out, “in honor of your graduation, honey. Now go get your grandmother.”

I sprinted down the hall and knocked on Grandma's door. When there was no answer, I called her name a few times but still got no response. She'd been sleeping pretty heavily in
recent months, I remembered. I would have to wake her up as I'd often done.

I opened the door and went to her bedside. Her arm dangled over the edge and her pocketbook was open on the floor. She must have been looking for something, I supposed, and then caught sight of a check sticking out from under the bed. I picked it up and saw that it was made out to me for thirty dollars. My graduation gift, no doubt, I thought. I couldn't wait to thank Grandma and celebrate with her. I shook Grandma but she remained motionless, and when she didn't move after I shook her a second time I screamed. “Mom! Janice! Hurry! It's Grandma!”

My mother rushed into the room with Janice right behind her. Mom placed her head on her mother's chest and listened, and then fell to her knees at the side of the bed and started bawling while clutching her mother. Tears poured onto Grandma's nightgown as Mom kept her head on her mother's chest and wailed.

Janice held me as I collapsed into her arms and burst into tears, unable to believe what had happened. I had been hugging Grandma only two hours earlier at the graduation. She had complained of being tired, but she was often tired, especially after the kind of excitement we had just had. I wasn't ready to let Grandma go. I still needed her.

Grandma must have been a lot sicker than she had let on, I thought as I sobbed. Was she waiting for me to graduate? I wondered. Maybe that was all that had been keeping her alive, I supposed. I dropped to my knees and rested my head on my mother's back. Janice picked up the phone and called the ambulance while I contemplated life without Grandma, the matriarch and calming force of our family.

People lost their lives building that famous bridge, I recalled. Did a piece of me have to die as well before I could finally cross it?

I never liked the inside of hospital emergency rooms much, but that was where I had to be at that very moment. As they rushed Grandma in, I knew in my heart she was only biding time. She saw me graduate, she saw me making a new life for myself, and she saw me writing. She knew that my mom would always be the same and she knew if anyone could save her, well, that would have to be me.

When I saw Grandma on a gurney and hooked up to three different machines, I was devasted. Mom and Janice sat by her side while I just looked on, knowing that for every leap of faith there were always ten obstacles to be reckoned with. That's how life was for me at present, and I was accepting every sad inch of it. When the bald, bulgy-eyed doctor approached us, we knew by the looks of his gloomy face that it wasn't good. “I'm afraid she needs a triple bypass. She is scheduled for surgery now.”

You had to see my mother's face. Full of devastation and more fear. Not only of how we would be paying for this operation, but of what would be the outcome. I was elated that Grandma even had a chance. My mother grabbed onto me with all her might and for the first time, I felt so badly for her. I felt as though a child were crying in my arms.

As Mom cried and hours passed as we awaited Grandma's fate, I engaged in a solid stare at the pasty white walls, which were starting to close in on me. Just then the doctor came out of surgery in his operating greens. His walk was slow and calm, yet had a sense of urgency in every step. I knew, I always knew the bad news when it came. And this time it was certain. “I am so so sorry, we did all we could, her heart was very strong, but her will just wasn't.”

Yes, I knew all too well that Grandma's heart was strong, as strong as a bull. It was her time to leave and in a strange, sad way I was actually happy for her. She got out of this mess and now I was the one who was biding my time. I knew I had
to be there for my mother, now more than ever. Grandma was a vision, a vision that I never wanted to see, yet there it was. Covered in tubes, deceased.

“Sam, what is going to happen to us now?” I held my mother close.

“God will provide, he always does. You told me that.” This time in my young life I felt as though I really were the parent. “Ma, don't worry, we'll make it work. I'll get a job, a good job, you'll see. Things will happen.”

“Ms. Bonti, I'm so sorry. I'm so terribly sorry. If there's anything I can do …” Janice tried her hardest to be there for us, but what could she do. I knew I would hear those words one day, but not like this. Not now; I still needed her one more day. I needed her support, I needed her to read my pages, I just needed her, but I had to stop being selfish and realize that God needed her as well, another angel. I bent over and lay my head on Grandma's soft chest and kissed her lips good-bye.

June 1982

Tony's judgment day in the Brooklyn courthouse arrived a year after Grandma's passing. His trial exposed the mob family he was connected to and made more headlines. So much had been covered up. The papers claimed that Tony himself had been responsible for some of those horrible murders Janice and I had wondered about. I was still incredulous, and yet that—and burglary and drug conspiracy—was what he had been on trial for the previous three weeks. My God, who would have thought it could come to this, all this crime and hatred. For what? The almighty dollar? I could hear Pamela's words echoing through my mind. Money and greed, that's all it was. I wanted nothing to do with it.

Shortly after my graduation and Grandma's passing, Mom was diagnosed with lung cancer, and that explained the early-morning, wrenching coughing. Together with spitting up blood in the kitchen sink, which had gone untended for years. It turned out to be an inoperable tumor enlarged within the walls of her jugular. Years of smoking packs a day finally caught up with her and her self-destructive behavior. Her voice now would truly be silenced. In other words, there was no way out. It was yet another cross I had to bear, but hey, no one was counting anymore. My mother needed me and no
matter what, she was still my mother, who brought me into this world, and I did love her. From diagnosis to death, it became a constant battle for me. My mother never talked much, just feeding me with guilts beyond all forms that my poor imagination could bear. She was of nasty mind during her last stages and who could blame her; she was miserable, miserable about her life and mad that she would die lonely. She had become a bitter woman, a young woman who had made a ton of mistakes.

But what about me, her daughter? I thought I was the most precious gift, the gift of life that God had given her. I needed her, too, though sometimes I thought not. Well, it wasn't until the end that she was telling all the nurses at the hospice how much she loved me and how proud she was of me and my work. My work. She never read a word. What did she know about my writing? It reminded me of when I was ten years old and everyone in my class received an award except me. My mother in all her born craziness swore I was discriminated against because I was poor and the half Jew. And with what I think at the time was bright red hair, she marched right into the classroom the next day wearing skin tight leopard pants and a tube top. She walked right up to the teacher and ripped her a new ass. I got my attendance award the very next day; shiny gold star and all. Who knows what they thought of her, and who cared? That was the one thing she taught me through the years—who cares about what others think of you? I mean, this is the same woman who wouldn't give me a compliment but seemed to always protect her child, even if it was behind my back and even if she did wear tight leopard pants. She was my mom.

It brought me back to her dying day when I would sit and watch her moan with tubes in her arms, the endless morphine drip that somehow would try to deaden the horrible cancer pain. I knew her time was nearing. I could actually feel her
pain as it washed her soul slowly away. I wanted her to be released from this world, she needed to move on. She needed to go. To become another one of God's angels.

Maybe she could help me more from up there, where she could make peace with herself and with me. I knew that every night when I traveled to Calvary Hospice in the Bronx. It was the only place that accepted her, and me for that matter, not having any money to pay for it. At times it became so hard for me. Working all day, then traveling to see her at night.

The one night I didn't go was the night she passed. I was devastated. I don't think she wanted me to say good-bye. That was the night I was busy making funeral plans and filing for Medicaid and Medicare, and to my surprise both accepted her. I had not a bill after she died. Talk about faith and manifesting a miracle! I was free.

Well, almost.

After a year of nursing Mom at hospice and giving her a funeral with borrowed money, I was completely alone. I thought burying Grandma was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but by far my mother's death proved that indeed this would be my worst. She was all I had, besides Grandma. God knows my deadbeat father never stepped up to the plate.

But even at the end, as she lay in her casket in her red dress, she couldn't help but discomfort me one more time. A friend from my childhood named Julia showed up at her wake. God, it had been years. Her nickname was Jules in the neighborhood, and she always looked like a drag queen. I later found out that my mom would party with her behind my back, since Jules supplied and Mom couldn't afford. When she died, Jules placed a small bag of cocaine into her casket along with a joint. Midway through the wake I saw Jules reach into the casket and take a tiny plastic bag out, then she went to the bathroom in the funeral parlor and proceeded to snort a line. The sick bitch.
She came back in and placed the plastic bag back into Mom's casket. Who does that? I just sat there looking without saying a word. My tears suddenly turned to laughter. That was my mom. In a funny way her craziness was what I wanted to remember her as, to cherish; it was all I had. She belonged to me, she was my mother.

She would always be my crazy Joan.

I thought about that when I had stopped at the cemetery on the way to the courthouse. If she had only hooked up with a decent man like the pharmacist who cashed her welfare checks, she wouldn't have been in the ground and I wouldn't have been standing there. After all, could a man really save you from your fate? But then I thought about how everything happens for a reason, be it fate or God or whatever, and maybe if I hadn't had the life I'd had, I wouldn't have had the determination and drive to better myself. That survival instinct.

I asked Mom once again to accept my flaws as I reconciled with hers. I looked upon the grave where she had been buried with her mother, upon a headstone that had both a cross and a Jewish star engraved upon it. Even in their death they still clashed. Somehow I felt my grandmother standing with me as I made peace with the past and my mother. God knows she tried. She couldn't help herself, how on earth was she to help me become a woman? That I learned from the cards I was dealt. And I thanked God that Mom and I made some sort of peace while she was on her deathbed.

I awaited my last cross, Tony's verdict, in the back of the imposing courtroom. “I knew from the moment you were born you were special, and destined for something more than what I had become,” Mom had once said, repeating the words she must have said to others at the nursing home who told me of her praise when I visited. “But I'm so sorry I never gave you the love you deserved. I watched you grow and I envied what
you'd become—a beautiful, smart woman. I had wanted that for myself but instead I got pregnant and had you and had to do things I am not proud of to survive. I'm so sorry, Sammy. I always loved you, you were and are my life. Always know that you are a chosen one.” All that was left from my home then was my spirit.

Amid the courtroom buzz, I hoped my prayers would be answered in Manhattan when the trial was over. The bailiff opened the jury room door and twelve people from Brooklyn took their seats in the jury box. Their faces were somber, and a hush settled over the room.