Honor Thy Father (41 page)

“Bill, I’m sorry,” Rosalie said, standing in front of the stove. “It was a mistake. It’s an impossible situation.”

“Don’t worry,” Bill said, in a jocular way, “the difficult I do immediately, the impossible takes me a little longer.”

“Let’s be serious,” she said. “We can’t afford it.”

“We can’t afford
anything
if you look at it that way,” he said. “I can’t afford to fly to New York, I can’t afford to drive to Arizona, I can’t afford or justify any of the things I do. And if I can’t justify what I do, what right do I have in not letting them have music lessons.”

“Yes,” Rosalie said, “but we have so many others things to do. We have the house to worry about.”

“Don’t worry about the house. I’ll get the money for the house.”

“Where?”

“Don’t worry.”

“I
am
worried. We’re talking here about a thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. Before I put that money toward that, I’d rather put it toward the house.”

“Look,” he said, “where there’s a will there’s a way. When you want something badly enough, you always find a way to get it, right? Just like you somehow managed to find the money for your computer class.”

He was touching on a sensitive subject now, and Rosalie said nothing. He had never encouraged her to go to computer school, had tried to avoid the subject whenever she mentioned it during the previous summer. But in the fall, with no financial help from him, she came up with the $1,250. He could only assume that she had gotten it from her mother, not knowing who else could have given it to her, and not really wanting to know.

“Look,” he said finally, more softly, “I’m not saying you did anything wrong in taking these computer classes. I’m just saying that when you want to do something, you do it. You find a way. You wanted a career, and now you’re getting one, right?”

“I’m doing it because I need the money,” she said.

“You’re going to be spending more money than you’ll ever make out of this career,” he said, “when you consider the cost of the baby-sitter every day, the cost of your clothes, and the transportation, and all the extras—it’d be cheaper if you didn’t work.” It was an old argument that she had heard before, and she was tired of talking about it.

“Who’s going to pay for the things I need?” she asked. “I need fifty dollars a week for myself. I want…”

“You want…” he interrupted.

“I’m tired of
asking
for everything,” she cried out.

“And I’m tired of hearing this,” he said. He paced through the kitchen as Rosalie took dishes from the cabinet and placed them around the kitchen table where the children would eat supper.

“Rosalie,” Bill said, calmly and authoritatively, “stop worrying. You don’t see me worrying do you? After all I’ve been through these past few years, you think
this
is worth worrying about? After all I’ve been through, I’m now supposed to worry about a guitar school? I’ll get the money. I’ll beg, steal, or borrow it, but I’ll get it. I’ve been living on borrowed time for years, and I’ve learned to survive in dangerous situations, and I’ve lived with bullets flying around, with bombs going off, with cars coming at you, and
I have survived
. And you think I’m going to worry now about two lousy electric guitars?”

“Who,” Rosalie asked, wearily, “is going to pay?”

“I said I’d get the money.”

“How?”

“Somehow I’ll get it. Have I ever failed you before?”

She looked at him with astonishment.

“Sure,” he said, sharply, “sure you always can remember the bad times, can’t you? You never remember all the times I’ve come through, but you sure can remember any little failure!”

“All right,” she said, after a pause, “but suppose you have to go away to jail, then what? Who will meet the monthly payments for the music school if you’re in jail?”

Before he could reply, a child’s voice cried out, “
Jail?
”

Bill and Rosalie both turned suddenly toward the door between the kitchen and dining room and saw Joseph standing there. He appeared pale, shaken, and behind him stood Tory, confused. Charles was still in the living room playing the guitar.

“Daddy’s only kidding,” Rosalie said, trying to smile. “We’re just talking, but we’re kidding.”

“Daddy said there was shooting in the street,” Joseph repeated, solemnly.

Bill said nothing. He wanted to say
Yes, there is shooting in the street, and that’s the way it is
, but he could see how upset Rosalie and the boys were now, and he did not interrupt her as she repeated, “Daddy was kidding—there is no shooting in the street.”

“There’s shooting in the hills on television,” Tory said, nodding.

“There is shooting in the street,” Joseph said.

“Look,” Bill said, finally, “you kids are supposed to be going to Cub Scouts, right? So why aren’t you getting dressed? And,” he added, looking at Joseph, “before you and Chuckie go out, I want those guitars to be put away in their cases and put in the closet. And you, Tory, I don’t want you to touch anything, you understand?”

“Yes,” Tory said.

After the children left, Bill said to Rosalie, “Let’s end this, OK? I’ll get the money for the music lessons somehow and let’s just not talk anymore.”

“And the house?” she asked. “What about the house?”

Bill was surprised by her persistence. Years ago, he thought, she would not have been talking back to him this way; but years ago, he reminded himself, he had not been home so often.

“What house are you talking about?” he asked.

“The one I asked you to look at, on Forest Ridge Drive, the one with five bedrooms.”

“Is that the house with the lot next door to it?”

“What do I know about a lot next door?”

“You don’t,” he said, “but I do. It has a lot next door and too many bushes all around the place.

“You always think of yourself,” she said, “but
I’m
the one that has to live there.”

“I’ll be living there, too,” he said.

“For how long?”

“Rosalie,” he said, insistently, “those
bushes
.”

“Its a five-bedroom house,” she said, “and I’ve looked around, and its the best I’ve seen, and we don’t have much time left to look.”

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“Oh, I’d like my
own
house for a change, I’m sick and tired of renting,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “I want the security of my own house if you have to go away.”

“There is no security in things like a house,” he said. “A house is not security. Money is not security.
You
measure security in dollar signs, but it doesn’t work that way. If you ever think you’ve found security in life, you’re dying. When you feel secure, you’re receding. Security is boring. I’ve never known security, and so far…”

The doorbell rang. It was the baby-sitter. Rosalie and Bill stopped talking. Rosalie called the children to come in to eat, and while the baby-sitter took over in the kitchen, Rosalie went to her room to dress for class. Bill watched the news on television for a while, and then a man came by to pick him up. Without saying good-bye Bill left the house.

On the following day, the telephone rang several times but Rosalie did not answer it. Some of the calls might have been from real estate agents responding to her previous inquiries about homes advertised in the newspaper, but she felt sure that the music store was also calling and she did not want to face the situation. The children were in school, and Bill had taken the car earlier in the morning and, as usual, had not told her when he would return. They had not discussed the guitars at breakfast but she had refused to let the boys play with them before going to school. She did not want the instruments scratched because she knew—and imagined that Bill also knew even though he would not express it in words—that the guitars would be returned to the store. Bill was going to Arizona early tomorrow morning and Rosalie hoped to settle the situation before that, but she preferred waiting until Bill returned today before daring to answer the telephone. She did not want the music store to reach her when she was alone.

Bill returned shortly after 5:00
P.M.
, and they sat down to an early dinner with the children because he would start the drive to Tucson at dawn, wanting to reach at least Phoenix before nightfall. Dinner was very quiet, and the boys also seemed to sense and to accept the fact that they would not be keeping the guitars, for neither of them had asked for the instruments after they came home from school. Bill was preoccupied at the table and irritable; twice he corrected Tory’s manners, and he was unresponsive to most of what Rosalie said about a number of different subjects.

As she was pouring the coffee, the phone rang, and she could not resist saying, “Oh, I’ll bet its the music man.”

“Well, answer it,” Bill said.

She walked into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and after a few moments of silence Bill could hear her saying, softly, “I’m sorry about that, but I just wasn’t able to arrange for the transportation. And I’m going to have to return them.” There was another pause before Rosalie said, “Yes, yes—I’ll get them there tonight, before nine.” She hung up and returned to the table, saying, “Well, that’s taken care of.” Nobody said anything.

S
HORTLY AFTER 6:00 A.M.
B
ILL
B
ONANNO DROVE
through the San Joaquin Valley in central California heading southeast toward Bakersfield, planning to turn east near Burbank past the San Bernadino Mountains into the desert at Palm Springs toward Phoenix. It was a beautiful drive over smooth wide roads through green hills and valleys, and as the sun began to rise in a cloudless sky Bill Bonanno felt very remote from the trivial tensions of his home in the town he had left behind. The automobile was his true home, his opiate, and long trips like this filled him with a sense of pleasure and movement in a life that was standing still.

Nothing seemed to be happening now; he had no immediate goals or plans, days passed uneventfully, the hours were long, yet he never felt that his time was his own. Within a day or week or month he would be notified again to appear in court, and as always he had to be free and available, but this time it was the summons he dreaded most, for it would ultimately lead to the moment when he would learn whether or not he was going to prison. He imagined that it was the same now with his father, and Peter Notaro, and dozens of others who had made headlines during the Banana War but were presently inactive, waiting or hiding, pondering an uncertain future.

When the average American citizen thought about the Mafia, he usually contemplated scenes of action and violence, of dramatic intrigue and million-dollar schemes, of big black limousines screeching around corners with machine gun bullets spraying the sidewalk—this was the Hollywood version and while much of it was based on reality it also wildly exaggerated that reality, totally ignoring the dominant mood of Mafia existence; a routine of endless waiting, tedium, hiding, excessive smoking, overeating, lack of physical exercise, reclining in rooms behind drawn shades being bored to death while trying to stay alive. With so much time and so little to do with it, the Mafia man tended to become self-consumed and self-absorbed, focusing on minutiae and magnifying them, overreacting to each sound, overinterpreting what was said and done around him, losing perspective of the larger world beyond and his very small place in that world, but nonetheless being aware of the exaggerated image that the world had of him. And he responded to that image, believed it, preferred to believe it, for it made him larger than he was, more powerful, more romantic, more respected and feared. He could trade on this and profit from it in neighborhoods where he ran the rackets and in other areas where he hoped his inflated ego would allow him to expand; he could, if he was sufficiently bold and lucky, exploit the fact and fantasy of Mafia mythology as effectively as the FBI director did at budget time, and the politicians before election day, and the press whenever organized crime was topical, and the movie makers whenever they could merchandise the myth for a public that invariably wanted its characters larger than life—tough-talking, big-spending Little Caesars.

No less than anyone else, Bill Bonanno was influenced by the myth and often chose to live the lie. It fed his compulsion to travel first-class on airplanes, to lease a Cadillac when he could barely afford payments on a Volkswagen, to stroll into a courtroom with a suntan that he claimed to have gotten while playing golf at Pebble Beach. It was essential, if one wished to succeed in the secret society, to at least give the appearance of prosperity and power, to exude confidence and a carefree spirit; although in so doing, the Mafia man’s life became more difficult for him in the larger world where government agents were watching him, tapping his phone, bugging his home, seeking to determine the source of his illegitimate income so that he might be indicted for income tax evasion. The Mafia man was consequently forced into an almost schizophrenic situation—while he was pleading poverty to Internal Revenue and was attempting to conceal his resources, he was also attempting to impress his friends by picking up checks, driving a new Cadillac or Lincoln, and by otherwise living beyond his means. But he really had no alternative if he wanted to maintain the respect of his colleagues in the underworld, or indeed in the larger world of American capitalism, where there has traditionally existed a grudging admiration for the truly wealthy gangsters, possibly because their success reaffirmed every tycoon’s belief in the free-enterprise system or possibly because the gangster’s shrewdness and initiative reminded some industrialists, bankers, and statesmen of how their grandfathers had begun. Thus it was not difficult to understand why Frank Costello had been on friendly terms with the Wall Street leaders and merchant princes with whom he took his daily steam bath at the Bilt-more, or why Lucky Luciano had been a respected resident of the Waldorf, or why such an avowed enemy of the Mafia in Italy as Benito Mussolini would have bestowed the title of commendatore on a fugitive from America, Vito Genovese, after Genovese had made generous contributions to municipal construction projects near Naples.

But there were undoubtedly other Mafia veterans who had been portrayed in the press as millionaires but who were relatively impecunious, adroitly concealing this fact behind a pretense of Old World modesty or a convincing aura of effrontery. He remembered from his boyhood the many well-dressed men who used to visit his father, men who drove up in big cars and wore diamond rings on their pinkies, and he wondered if he had been beguiled as a boy merely by their appearance or if they had indeed been substantial men of power. He would never know. But he was aware through his personal knowledge that the newspapers invariably overestimated the value of the homes of nearly all reputed Mafia leaders, describing most of the dwellings as “palatial.” His father’s rather modest brick home in Tucson, worth in the neighborhood of $40,000, was in no sense palatial though it was often called that; and the same was true of the residences of most other prominent dons in the 1960s, including Genovese. Those who preferred a more ostentatious hermitage, such as Magliocco and Joseph Profaci, were both proprietors of several successful legitimate businesses, principally in beverages and foods, and they lived on a scale and style roughly comparable to that of the New York head of a large corporation. Bill Bonanno also believed that newspapers had a fixation about building up all Mafia feuds into “wars,” and, in the case of
The New York Times
, of sometimes giving as much space to a Mafia “war,” which rarely produced two corpses a week, as to the Vietnamese war that produced thousands. The Banana War, beginning with the shooting on Troutman Street in 1966 and extending into 1969, had so far produced only nine deaths; and the Profaci-Gallo rivalry in Brooklyn between 1961 and 1963 accounted for only a dozen murders, which Bill assumed was probably less than the number of murders each month among married American couples. If compared with some of the publicized atrocities by Allied troops on civilians in Southeast Asia or with the intrigues of the CIA or the tactics of Green Berets (which in 1969 disposed of one disloyal spy by weighting him with chains and tire rims and dumping him into a river), the exploits of the Mafia would hardly seem to justify the elaborate news coverage that it received. And it would not be receiving it were it not for the mythology factor, the George Raft reality, the fact that the Mafia in the sixties, like Communism in the fifties, had become part of a national illusory complex shaped by curved mirrors that gave an enlarged and distorted view of everything it reflected, a view that was widely believed because it filled some strange need among average American citizens for grotesque portraits of murderous villains who bore absolutely no resemblance to themselves.

Bill Bonanno’s ponderings on this subject during his twelve-hour trip to Phoenix was partly inspired by the radio news reports that he had been listening to, the announcement of President Nixon’s message to Congress requesting $61 million to combat the Mafia and other elements in organized crime. Nixon told Congress that the Mafia was now “more secure than ever before,” had “deeply penetrated broad segments of American life,” and was causing the “moral and legal subversion of our society.” The annual “take” from illegal gambling, Nixon said, was between $20 billion to $50 billion—a figure that impressed Bill Bonanno mainly for its lack of preciseness—and it was the president’s wish that the federal government be given wider power in law enforcement, extending into jurisdictions now largely run by state and local authorities. The president called for the establishment of twenty federal racketeering field offices, to be known as “strike forces,” in major cities, and also the creation of a special federal-state racket squad in the Southern District of New York State to focus on the “heavy concentration of criminal elements in the nation’s largest city.” In requesting a budgetary increase of $24.7 million over the $36 million that former President Johnson had requested for the fight on organized crime, President Nixon explained that about $9 million of the new money would go mainly for more FBI agents, Justice Department lawyers, and federal marshals; and that approximately $8 million would be added to the Internal Revenue Service to strengthen its attack on tax evasion by criminals.

As Bill Bonanno listened to the various broadcasts, and later read the newspapers at roadside restaurants, he was awed by the government’s escalating crusade against an organization whose demigods were a half dozen tired old dons trying to think big, and he could not help but speculate that the main problem of the government was not that the Mafia was alive but that it may well be dying and that perhaps the only thing that might save these rare creatures from extinction would be a government subsidy of some sort. Since great cathedrals could not have been built without devils and since to diminish the size of the antihero was to diminish the size of the hero, it would be in the interest of future crime-busting budgetary increases to preserve the dons and underbosses from the natural forces of attrition; unless of course some other group like the Black Panthers, or societies of radical students, could be magnified into such proportions to replace the menacing image of the Mafia. But Bill Bonanno doubted that this could be done.

The Panthers were too rootless ever to unify, too small in number to ever amount to much, and its leadership had already exaggerated its power so much that it could not really stand any further stretching or inflating from the government. Most student radicals were too soft to be heavies, and while their membership was potentially large, they were too self-centered to cooperate for long in the kind of national syndicate that Bill believed was necessary to survive outside the system. Their greatest vice, marijuana, which many of them imported and distributed along with hard drugs without Mafia affiliation, would in time become a less punishable crime, perhaps no crime at all. Since so many sons of politicians and prominent citizens had been arrested for its possession, the ruling class in America would undoubtedly use its influence to try to change the law rather than to enforce it. Marijuana use had become a crime of the middle class and upper middle class, and it would not be enforced so strictly as the lower-class crime of betting on the numbers.

So for the present, Bill thought, the government was stuck with the Mafia as a national symbol of sin, and most members of the brotherhood were doing their best to live up to their roles, brandishing their bravado in public and contemplating their private domain in universal terms, as Stefano Magaddino was doing when he complained about the elder Bonanno: “He’s planting flags all over the world!” Even when talking with one another on the telephone, it seemed that the men conversed in an unnatural way, faking their voices to sound more gruff or affecting a Brooklynese speech that was characterized by double negatives and a coarseness that seemed befitting a grade-B gangster film but which Bill knew was not the way they normally spoke in person to their wives or nonprofessional friends. Their hoodlumlike speech pattern seemed to be a subconscious mannerism, and it had nothing to do with trying to conceal their identity from the wiretappers. When they wished to do that, they were marvels of confusion, mixing Sicilian metaphors and slang with pidgin English and obscure references, and no one was more skilled at this than his father. In fact, one reason why Bill was driving to Arizona now was that his father had been so vague and incomprehensible on the telephone the other night that Bill had no idea what he was talking about, and he therefore decided that a personal visit was in order.

By midafternoon Bill had crossed the California border into Arizona at Ehrenberg, a small town near an Indian reservation on the Colorado River. It had been a smooth journey interrupted only by a brief sandstorm outside Palm Springs, and by 6:00
P.M.
he was driving into Phoenix, deciding to spend the night at the Desert Sky Motel. He could have gone on to Tucson, but there was a favorite little restaurant of his in Phoenix where he knew he would meet a few friends, and that was where he went after showering and changing clothes at the motel.

The headwaiter greeted him cordially at the door, patting him on the back, and then the owner joined Bill at the bar and bought him a drink. Three other dapper dark-haired men, accompanied by two blondes, also stopped by to say hello, and one of them expressed regret that Bill was not going to be in town longer because he had something he wanted to discuss. Bill said he would get in touch the next time he was passing through.

After dinner Bill drove to a supper club where the buxom waitresses wore leather shorts and black net stockings. The proprietor smiled as Bill walked in. They talked for a half hour at the bar, which glowed under pale blue light, and in one corner of the room a jazz quintet entertained the customers who sat at small tables and banquettes.

During the intermission the musicians came by to say hello to Bill, and one of them asked to be remembered to a mutual friend in San Francisco. Bill asked the musician how his bookings were going, and when he said that things could be better Bill suggested that if he planned to be in northern California to give him a call.