This was why he hadn’t wanted to meet me in a restaurant, or even sit with me on a park bench. He couldn’t be in an enclosed space, and he couldn’t sit still. And he couldn’t be touched. This was probably why he was so thin—from needing to pace all the time.
Dear God, this poor man.
I could see that he was getting agitated so I asked, “Would you like to walk around the park with me some more? It’s a nice evening, and I enjoy walking.”
“Please,” he said.
So that’s what we did, Angela.
We just walked and walked and walked.
THIRTY
Of course I fell in love with your father, Angela.
I fell in love with him, and it made no sense for me to fall in love with him. We could not possibly have been more different. But maybe that’s where love grows best—in the deep space that exists between polarities.
I was a woman who had always lived in privilege and comfort, and thus I had always been fortunate enough to skate quite lightly across life. During the most violent century of human history, I had never really suffered any harm—aside from the small troubles that I brought down upon my own head through my own carelessness. (Lucky is the soul whose only troubles are self-inflicted.) Yes, I had worked hard, but so do a lot of people—and my job was the relatively inconsequential task of sewing pretty dresses for pretty girls. And in addition to all that, I was a freethinking, unbridled sensualist who had made the pursuit of sexual pleasure one of the guiding forces in her life.
And then there was Frank.
He was such a weighty person—by which I mean, heavy in his very essence. He was a person whose life had been hard from the beginning. He was a man who did nothing casually, thoughtlessly, or carelessly. He was from a poor immigrant family; he couldn’t afford to make mistakes. He was a devout Catholic, a police officer, and a veteran who had been through hell in service to his country. There was nothing of the sensualist about him. He could not bear to be touched, yes—but it was not only that. He had no hedonic traces within him whatsoever. He dressed in clothing that was purely utilitarian. He ate food merely in order to fuel his body. He didn’t socialize; he didn’t go out for entertainment; he had never been to a play in his life. He didn’t drink. He didn’t dance. He didn’t smoke. He’d never been in a fight. He was frugal and responsible. He didn’t engage in irony, teasing, or tomfoolery. He only ever told the truth.
And, of course, he was faithfully married—with a beautiful daughter whom he’d named after God’s angels.
In a sane or reasonable world, how would a serious man like Frank Grecco ever have crossed paths with a lightweight individual like me? What had brought us together? Aside from our shared connection to my brother, Walter—a person who had made both of us feel intimidated and minimized—we had no other commonalities. And our only shared history was a sad one. We had spent one dreadful day together, back in 1941—a day that had left the both of us shamed and scarred.
Why would that day have led us to falling in love, twenty years later?
I don’t know.
I only know that we don’t live in a sane or reasonable world, Angela.
—
So here is what happened.
Patrolman Frank Grecco called me a few days after our first meeting and asked if we could go for another walk.
The call came in to L’Atelier rather late at night—well after nine o’clock. It had startled me to hear the boutique’s phone ringing. I happened to be there, because I had just finished up some alterations. I was feeling stagnant and bleary-eyed. My plan had been to go upstairs and watch television with Marjorie and Nathan, and then call it a night. I had almost ignored the ringing phone. But then I picked it up, and there was Frank on the line, asking me if I would go walking with him.
“Right now?” I asked. “You want to go for a walk now?”
“If you would. I’m feeling restless tonight. I’ll be out walking, anyway, and I hoped maybe you would join me.”
Something about this intrigued me, and touched me, too. I’d gotten plenty of calls from men at this hour of the night—but not because they wanted to go for a walk.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’ll take the streets, not the expressway.”
We ended up walking all the way over to the East River that night—through some neighborhoods that were not so safe back then, by the way—and then we kept on walking along the deteriorating waterfront until we got to the Brooklyn Bridge. Once we got to the bridge, we walked right over it. It was cold out, but there was no breeze, and our exercise kept us warm. There was a new moon, and you could almost see some stars.
That was the night when we told each other everything about ourselves.
—
That was the night I found out that Frank had become a patrolman expressly because of his inability to sit still. Walking a beat for eight hours a day was exactly what he needed, he said, in order not to crawl out of his own skin. This is also why he took so many extra shifts—always volunteering to fill in for the other cops who needed a day off. If he was lucky enough to get a double shift, he might be able to walk a beat for sixteen straight hours. Only then might he be sufficiently tired to sleep through the night. Every time he was offered a promotion on the force, he turned it down. A promotion would have meant a desk job, and he couldn’t manage that.
He told me, “Being a patrolman is the only job beyond street sweeper that I’m qualified to do.”
But it was a job that was far below his mental capacities. Your father was a brilliant man, Angela. I don’t know if you are aware of this, because he was so modest. But he was something close to a genius. He’d been born to illiterate parents, sure, and he’d been neglected in a tumble of siblings, but he was a mathematical prodigy. As a child, he may have looked like a thousand other kids in Sacred Heart parish—all children of dockworkers and bricklayers, born to be dockworkers and bricklayers, themselves—but Frank was different. Frank was exceptionally smart.
From an early age, he’d been singled out by the nuns as something special. His own mother and father believed that school was a waste of time—why study, when you could work?—and when they did send him to school, they were superstitious enough to tie a knot of garlic around his neck, to keep away the evil spirits. But Frank bloomed in school. And the Irish nuns who taught him—distracted and tough though they were, and often viciously discriminatory against Italian children—could not help but notice the brains on this kid. They skipped him a few grades ahead, gave him extra assignments, and marveled at his skill with numbers. He excelled at every level.
He got placed in Brooklyn Technical High School, easily. He finished at the top of his class. Then he put in two years at Cooper Union studying aeronautical engineering before he enrolled in Officer Candidate School and joined the Navy. Why did he even join the Navy? He was fascinated by airplanes and was studying them; you would’ve thought he’d have wanted to be a flier. But he went into the Navy, because he wanted to see the ocean.
Imagine that, Angela. Imagine being a kid from Brooklyn—a place that is almost entirely surrounded by ocean—and growing up with the dream of someday seeing the ocean. But the thing was, he never had seen it. Not properly, anyhow. All he’d seen of Brooklyn were dirty streets and tenements, and the filthy docks of Red Hook, where his father worked in a longshoreman’s gang. But Frank had romantic dreams of ships and naval heroes. So he quit college and signed up for the Navy, just like my brother had done, before the war had even been declared.