Honor Thy Father (17 page)

But after the government began its campaign following Apalachin and after the Arizona press focused on her husband and father-in-law, Rosalie suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable. In the vast open spaces of Arizona there was no place to hide, there was no large family within which to lose herself, and she began to yearn for the protectiveness she once had. When Bill was away she felt not only lost but resentful, and when Bill was home she complained incessantly. The arrival of her son Charles was her salvation for a while, but then after they moved from Tucson to Phoenix she slowly began to suspect that Bill had another woman. She sensed this initially by certain small remarks he made: once he said that her body, which she had always pridefully maintained, was getting soft; and on another occasion he observed that she was rather short, a remark that she let pass, but she felt sure that she was being compared with some tall, lean woman.

One day while visiting her husband’s supper club, the Romulus, Rosalie noticed the German girl behind the cash register, and from the way the girl looked at her, awkwardly, nervously, Rosalie decided that she was the one Bill was seeing. Rosalie’s suspicions were later confirmed when she impulsively visited the girl’s apartment, noticed Bill’s clothing in the closet, heard the phone ring and the girl whisper, “Your wife is here.”

Rosalie learned much about her husband on that day but she learned more about herself. She became aware of her aggressiveness in pursuing the girl—it was so out of character for her to find out where the girl lived, to boldly appear at her door, and to walk directly into the living room expecting to find Bill. She knew that she must have been driven by sheer desperation—her marriage was breaking up, another woman was replacing her, she saw herself abandoned and humiliated, but instead of accepting these grim circumstances, submitting like the stoical convent creature she imagined she was, she had angrily fought back to reclaim her husband. For one who had no experience in the maneuvers of love, she had been remarkably decisive and deft; and after she won her husband back, after he admitted that he did not want to lose her, she surprised herself still further by her coolness and aloofness, deciding that she did not want him after all, at least not immediately. She wanted him to pay for his indiscretion, to linger in doubt for a while. She had suffered too much, had become ill from an overdose of sleeping pills, and after her recovery she awoke in a state of alienation, and it was in that state that she left him and returned to Brooklyn with her children and mother, vowing
the only way I am going back to Arizona is in a box
.

Now, nearly two years later, Rosalie knew that the bitterness was still with her, and she made no secret of her dissatisfaction with Bill in the letters she wrote to Catherine in California during 1963 and 1964, and frequently referring to him as “your brother,” as if she wished to disclaim any relationship with him. Catherine did not reply in her own letters to Rosalie’s ill temper; Catherine’s replies were warm and friendly, stressing the need for love and loyalty particularly now, reminding Rosalie of the burdens that Bill had borne from boyhood because of his name and his ties to his father.

There were times when Rosalie agreed with Catherine’s reasoning and conceded the possibility that she had perhaps failed him in ways as a wife in Arizona and that the additional trouble he was involved in since his return to the East was in part related to her. While the newspapers, the FBI, and the Mafia perhaps all believed that Bill had returned to live in New York solely because of the activities of the Bonanno organization, Rosalie knew that one compelling reason for his return to a city he disliked and his willingness to move into the house of Magliocco was that he wanted to win her back, a fact that his Sicilian pride would probably not allow him to admit. If he had not moved East in 1963, he might not be where he was now, in jail, although Rosalie sometimes thought that jail was the best place for him. At least she knew where he was at night, and as she thought about this she was amused—for the first time in seven years of marriage, she knew where her husband was each and every night of the week.

She also thought that her husband looked very well in jail—during her recent visits she had noticed that he had lost weight and seemed quite relaxed, calm, and self-assured. She sensed a pride in his manner, he was doing his duty, was doing
not what he wanted to do but what he had to do
—one of his favorite phrases—and Rosalie came away from each visit thinking that her husband was becoming increasingly like his father, proud, philosophical, preoccupied with and strengthened by values of another world at another time. And yet she responded to this, as much as one could respond through the glass wall in the visitors’ room, and she found herself physically attracted to him in a way she had not been in years. His hair was longer and he had lost so much weight that he now looked like the man she had married. He weighed 245 pounds when he was arrested in the barber shop in Tucson last January; by March, partly as the result of an attack of mononucleosis, his weight had fallen to 218, and now after two months in jail it was 203.

He said that his weight had dropped because he was getting plenty of rest in jail, but Rosalie thought that perhaps the opposite was true—in jail he was not allowed to rest, he had to walk a lot, lift things, burn up energy; he did not have people like herself waiting on him constantly, getting him a sandwich, turning off the television set, bringing him a glass of water. He had to get his own water in jail, which meant getting up and walking to a distant fountain, and on the assumption that he was too proud and lazy to do this, even though he normally drank enormous amounts of water, he had cut down on his water consumption in jail, thus losing weight.

Rosalie kept this little theory mainly to herself, however, not because her husband lacked the humor to appreciate it but because it was yet another example of her carping, a habit she had fallen into that she hoped to correct. She did not like herself when she was this way, even when she repressed it, nor was she tolerant of this trait in others. And yet there had been times when her unrelieved frustration turned her into a chronic complainer, but she felt justified because, unlike most chronic complainers, she really had something to complain about. Of all the tearful heroines in the television dramas she had watched to help escape the loneliness, none could match the misery and tension of the life she had led in recent years and was still leading now in East Meadow, snugly trapped on a tidy block of ranch houses that resembled her own except that they were not bugged, not tapped, not ambush-trimmed, not equipped with arsenals, did not have a private grocery store in the basement, plastic tubes of quarters in the bedroom, did not have a jailed husband, a vanished father-in-law, and strange men scrutinizing the property from across the street. It was weird, incredible, she was a marked woman in her own home, she acted like a house guest, always properly dressed when not in the bedroom, never in her bathrobe or with curlers in her hair because she could never be sure who was watching her or who might intrude at any moment of the day or night.

Although the press had reported that her husband and father-in-law were millionaires, no one could prove it by her. She was forced to borrow from her mother this year and she was constantly unnerved by the uncertainty of money. She wondered who would provide for her and the children if something happened to her husband, and she thought often about Anastasia’s young widow, whom she had met years ago through her family. Rosalie sometimes thought of herself as a young widow, devoting herself to her children, living with the memory of a husband that in many ways she did not know. If only she could go out and get a job, she would be more financially independent. At twenty-nine she felt sufficiently young and qualified and even eager to go out into the world and earn money, but she could not have live-in help at this time; she had not had anyone since the birth of Felippa. Rosalie remembered with fondness the last mother’s-helper she had, a Puerto Rican girl named Elisa, a very gentle and capable person with whom she had been so compatible. Since Elisa did not understand English, Rosalie spoke in Spanish, making use of the language she had studied years ago to communicate with the cadet that her brother had brought home. But after the disappearance of Joseph Bonanno, the agents began to approach Elisa as she waited for the bus at the corner, using Puerto Rican detectives to interrogate her. Elisa knew nothing about the elder Bonanno or his son, and she presumably told the agents little of interest, but not long afterward Elisa left Rosalie for another job.

Now whenever Rosalie had to go out, taking one of the children to the doctor or visiting Bill, she relied on the babysitting of a teen-age daughter of a family friend who lived a few miles away. But during the winter of 1965 Rosalie had rarely gone out. With four young children to care for, with a new house that was not yet organized, she was kept constantly busy indoors. She had begun to unpack the cardboard cartons in the garage that had been sent from Arizona, containing such things as the holiday china her mother had given her and the dolls from the many weddings at which she had been the maid-of-honor and other mementos from happier days. She needed a carpenter to build shelves in the children’s rooms, and she wanted a new dining room table—the old one belonging to Mrs. Bonanno was in the basement, too large and sturdy for the dining area that adjoined the sunken living room with its modern furniture and gold-colored draperies. The living room, which had wall-to-wall carpeting and an impressive polished driftwood sculpture done by an artist Bill knew in California, also contained a large Sylvania, stereophonic high-fidelity record player that her husband had brought home within the last year despite her protests. She thought it was absurd of him to spend close to $1,500 on a stereo when so many more important things were needed for the house, such as a dining room table, and even now her anger was renewed every time she looked at the stereo.

It was typical of him to spend large sums of money on nonessentials, she thought, reminding herself of the life-sized toy bear on wheels that he had brought home one day from F. A. O. Schwartz. As he later explained it, he had been walking along Fifth Avenue when he noticed in the toy store’s window a huge giraffe and wondered how much it was. The clerk inside told him it was $300 and spoke in a manner that Bill took to imply the price was beyond his means. Bill then spotted the bear, which seemed smaller than the giraffe and was presumably cheaper—and was told that it, too, was $300. Whether it was the clerk’s manner or Bill’s hypersensitivity that made him react, Rosalie never knew; she just remembered him opening the front door one day for delivery men rolling in an enormous toy bear on wheels. The bear was now in the basement next to the three-horse merry-go-round that took up nearly half the floor space and had been given to the children by Bill’s father.

Rosalie endured the winter. She nursed her children through three rounds of colds each. She resigned herself to the fact that her son Charles would not be promoted at the end of the school term to the second grade. Charles was marvelous with his hands, creative in the way he constructed huts in the yard out of broken branches and built igloos out of hardened snow blocks collected in the neighborhood and loaded on his sleigh; but he was failing in reading and spelling.

Hoping to break the monotony of her depression, Rosalie dyed her hair blonde, having heard on television commercials that blondes had more fun. But her life did not change. It was still governed by the needs of her children, the ritual of her visits to Bill, and the endless cycle of birthdays, anniversaries, feast days, name days, and reminders of death that she had noted on the calendar that hung on the kitchen wall. With so many aunts and uncles, cousins and nephews and nieces around the nation, to say nothing of her married sister, brothers, and in-laws, there seemed hardly a day that was not in some way associated with a person she knew. Although she had not seen most of these kin and
compare
in years, they kept in touch through the mail, exchanging snapshots of their children, mourning the passing of their old folks, commenting on the commonplace happenings of their lives, but revealing little that would be of interest—or use—to outsiders.

B
ILL
B
ONANNO WAS RELEASED FROM PRISON ON
J
UNE
5, 1965, after he decided to tell the federal grand jury what he had told Maloney on the telephone during the previous December. Bill had been in jail for three months, and he saw no reason why he should remain longer. There was no further word about his father during that time, he received no sign indicating that his secrecy and imprisonment was acknowledged or appreciated by anyone, and he no longer considered it a risk or violation of confidence to reveal to the jury that on a Thursday night in December he had received a call from a stranger at a coinbox in Long Island reporting that Joseph Bonanno was alive and that he had relayed this information to Maloney on the following day. Bill had made a second call a day later to Maloney, after the lawyer’s ill-advised news conference, urging him to say nothing more to the press until the elder Bonanno’s safety was assured.

This was the substance of the whole telephone episode, Bill Bonanno told the grand jury during the first week in June, and after the questioning was over—even though the whereabouts of the elder Bonanno remained as much a mystery as before—Judge Tenney ruled that the younger Bonanno had purged himself of contempt, and Krieger asked that his client be released from prison. The judge agreed to do so, overruling objections by legal representatives of the United States Attorney, and Bill Bonanno walked out of the courtroom a free man. He was still subject to recall, however, and the judge reminded him that he could face contempt charges again if he refused to answer grand jury questions.

Bill telephoned Rosalie from Krieger’s office, and although the tone of her voice was unchanged after hearing that he was free, he was confident that she was pleased. She promised to convey the news to certain relatives and friends, and on the following evening, a Saturday, a dozen people were invited to the Bonanno home in East Meadow for a celebration dinner.

Bill Bonanno stood in the living room greeting people as they walked in and embraced him, kissed him, and told him how well he looked. One of his aunts, his mother’s oldest sister, had cried when she saw him, but now she was drying her tears in her handkerchief, standing in the kitchen with Bill’s other aunts and his mother-in-law, who were preparing the large dinner. The women, gray-haired and with matronly figures, were making soup and pasta, roasting a variety of meat, and cooking stuffed peppers and mushrooms with side dishes of string beans and other vegetables. Rosalie moved between the kitchen and dining room, setting the table, having put a heavy linen cloth over two sizable folding aluminum tables that had been placed end to end. She wore a bright yellow dress, had a flower in her hair, and she seemed sprightly and in concert with the excitement around her.

She heard her husband in the living room recounting his jail experiences to the other men, and she knew that he was enjoying the attention he was receiving, the laughter he was provoking by his comic descriptions of the characters he had met. She was privately elated that he was home, had liked waking up in the morning and finding him beside her, and when one of the men in the living room called to her, “How you feeling, Rosalie?” she smiled and replied, “Like a bride.”

As the aroma from the kitchen carried through the house, the children ran freely from room to room, pushing wagons, waving plastic guns, riding the giant bear, competing for their father’s attention. The color television set in the den was loudly tuned to the “Lawrence Welk Show,” which no one was watching, and in one corner of the dining room sat an elderly white-haired uncle, a tailor, sewing up the seams of Bill’s trousers that had been reduced in girth. The only young person among the guests was Rosalie’s teen-age sister, Josephine, who was being sent in the fall to college in Santa Clara, California, a Jesuit school about which Josephine already had some doubts.

Josephine was a serene brown-eyed girl who wore her long dark hair in a ponytail, and she possessed, but managed to conceal in front of her elders, an inquiring mind. She was beginning to question certain edicts of the Catholic church and certain values and goals that her two older sisters and brothers and her other relatives had accepted unquestioningly—namely, the quest for financial security and middle-class respectability. Josephine, who was eleven years younger than Rosalie, was only seven when her father had died, and she had not been subjected to the insularity and strictness as Rosalie had or her other sister, Ann. who was now married to a young man of Sicilian origin and living near Santa Clara. Josephine was beginning to identify with the style of a new generation. She was reading books and thinking thoughts that she was sure her family would neither understand nor appreciate; she could not accept the submissive role of women and all the prerogatives of men in the Italo-American society she had observed at close range, and she did not wish to condone the hardship and suffering that had been experienced by her mother and her sister Rosalie.

Josephine had been acutely aware of the marital difficulties between Rosalie and Bill, and she remembered how frightened she was two years ago on the night that Bill and Labruzzo came to the Profaci home to reclaim Rosalie. Hearing the shouting and commotion after Bill was told by her mother that Rosalie was not at home and would not be going with him, Josephine locked herself in the upstairs bathroom with Bill’s two-year-old son, Joseph; when she heard Bill climbing the steps, she quickly turned on the bathtub tap, answering his angry pounding against the door with cries that she was bathing, begging him to leave her alone, and praying meanwhile that the little boy would remain silent. Josephine did not again breathe easily until long after Bill had left the house.

Josephine’s opinion of Bill was far from flattering even now, but she veiled her emotions as she helped Rosalie set the table, and she was as friendly to Bill as she was capable of being. She knew how much her mother wanted to end the family friction, to stand behind Rosalie and Bill and forget the past. Watching her mother in the kitchen, a large smiling woman of great generosity and warmth, Josephine was again impressed by her mother’s capacity to withstand a lifetime of ordeals; she had been an orphan as a young girl after both parents had died in an accident, a widow before she was forty, a woman who had moved through life without bitterness with a controversial name that one of her sons would change and that another of her sons would keep in public circulation by being charged with gambling in Brooklyn. Her daughters had also been a source of suffering—Rosalie, the model child, nearly dying from an overdose of pills, and Ann, the second girl, rebelling as a teen-ager after the death of her father, keeping her own hours until her mother in a rare moment of frustration threw a plate of spaghetti at her—an incident that the family now considered amusing, one of the few amusing incidents that Josephine could recall from her childhood.

After the table was set for dinner and Bill had opened the wine and the women had come in from the kitchen carrying steaming plates, everyone sat down, and one of the aunts looked at Bill adoringly, and said, “Oh, Bill, you look wonderful,” to which he smiled and said, “In jail the food was terrible.”

“Did you have any Italian cooks in there?” one of the men asked.

“We had one,” Bill said. “He was an illegal entry from Naples. For the few weeks he was there, the food was better, but then they shipped him back and it suddenly got worse. It was so bad that there was a hunger strike for two and half days, and then it got better, but not much better. There was one dish in jail called Baked Manzanetti, which was macaroni and wasn’t bad—years ago there was a cook named Manzanetti who used to make it, and he put his name on the menu and its still there. But the conditions were so bad, the filth, the rats, that sometimes you just couldn’t eat no matter what they were serving.”

“Rats!” one of the women exclaimed.

“Yes, rats,” Bill repeated. “They were all over. I had one rat that used to come into my cell at night, and I’d tie a piece of food on a string and play with him, and…”

“
Bill
,” Rosalie interrupted, wanting to change the subject.

“Some of the men really got depressed in that place,” Bill continued, “especially the junkies, and we had plenty of them. We also had a few suicides when I was there—one night this Puerto Rican fellow climbed up on a stool, tied his belt around his neck and hooked it to the ceiling, and told his cellmate—who was playing solitaire—that he didn’t want him to call anybody or do anything. The cellmate looked up from his game and said, ‘Don’t worry.’ The guy on the stool tightened the belt, waited for a few moments, then again looked at his cellmate and said, ‘Now don’t cut me down.’ The guy playing solitaire became irritated, and he said, ‘Look, you want to talk or you want to jump?’ The guy jumped. After he was dead, the cellmate called the guards.”

“Oh, how terrible,” one of the women said, “how could he do such a horrible thing?”

“In jail,” Bill said, “you do things. And you don’t care.”

As they continued to eat, Bill felt something poking him in the back. Turning, he saw his son Salvatore, smiling, wearing a cowboy hat, pointing a toy gun at him.

“Hey, cut that out!” Bill shouted, laughing, and the little boy ran giggling into the kitchen. Bill then resumed talking, telling his guests that there were many interesting aspects to his jail experience, such as how naturally the prisoners seemed to divide themselves into social classes that were roughly equivalent to the level of social acceptability that they had enjoyed in the outside world: the crooked lawyers in jail associated with other crooked lawyers or stock swindlers; the pimps associated with other pimps or smalltime pushers; and the same was true of the truck hijackers and other thieves.

“Birds of a feather stick together,” somebody said, and one of the men asked, smiling, “And where did you fit in, Bill?”

Bill lifted his wine glass in a mock toast and said, “I enjoyed great social mobility.” He then added, “Shortly after I arrived in prison, an interviewer who was responsible for assigning us jobs asked me what I did on the outside, and I said, ‘Nothing that would be of any use in here.’ But I did tell him I could type, thinking he might put me in the records room, but that didn’t work. Later on, after I’d worked as a painter, I got to work in the library, which I enjoyed, although there was not much to read in there. They had books by Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy that I’d read in school, but the reading level was very low. I did reread Barry Goldwater’s
Conscience of a Conservative
, and I agree with a lot of points he makes—especially his point that the federal government today has entirely too much power, and the individual citizen’s rights are being ignored…” There were nods of agreement from around the table, although none from Josephine who had listened quietly throughout dinner but had not offered a comment or revealed in any way what she was thinking. Mrs. Profaci smiled often at Bill during the evening, and no one would have guessed that their relationship had been strained in the recent past. Rosalie also continued to be in good spirits, listening attentatively and keeping her husband’s water glass filled and the food within his reach.

Although they sat for nearly two hours and discussed many subjects, there was never a mention of Bill’s father during the entire evening. It was as if the subject was too delicate, too private to be raised in front of so many people, too awkward or implicating. Perhaps they were also aware that the house might be bugged. Bill’s mother, who had been reported missing immediately after the incident and was later speculated to be living with friends or relatives in Arizona or California, was now at her home in Tucson with her son Joseph. Bill said that his mother was ill and rarely left the house. He had no idea what his brother was doing these days; he had not received a letter from him in jail, and although Bill had written Catherine inquiring about Joseph he had received no word of him in her reply, and he was worried. Bill also felt a certain guilt with regard to his younger brother. Shortly before his father had disappeared, the subject of Joseph came up and Bill sensed that his father held him partially responsible for Joseph’s drifting existence and the long-haired youths Joseph often associated with in Arizona, an element that neither the elder Bonanno nor Bill could relate to. Bill had been too busy with his own problems in the last few years to worry about Joseph, and still he did worry about him and wonder about him; but on this evening Bill did not seek information from his aunts about his brother—he was in a festive mood and wanted to remain so, and he preferred to divert his guests and himself with general conversation related to his experiences in prison. He described for them his caution after receiving the gift candy bar from Kayo Konigsberg, he repeated words that were part of prison parlance, and he told of his acquaintanceships with such varied prisoners as Lowell M. Birrell, the stock swindler; with an oil executive from Long Island accused of selling secrets to the Russians; with three black militants suspected of plotting to blow up the Statue of Liberty; and with a movie producer who had recently fled Mexico, where he was sought for questioning in the murder of a cast member with an underwater fishing spear. It was this producer, Bill said, who had taught him how to play chess.

Bill also told how the inmates made coffee and whiskey in jail and described the night when an explosion was caused because the whiskey makers neglected to let sufficent air into the jar during fermentation.

“It sounded like muffled gun shots,” Bill recalled, “and suddenly the red telephones lit up, the guards started yelling through the intercom, and all the steel doors slammed shut. The prison-break warning was sounded and any prisoner caught outside his cell was in real trouble. We all waited to see what would happen. Soon we saw about nine guards with billy clubs dragging some Negroes away with their buckets and broken jars.”