His wife also felt like a stranger. Over those missing years, Rosella had transformed from a pretty young girl to a matron—heavyset and serious, dressed always in black. She was the sort of woman who went to Mass every morning, and prayed to her saints all day long. She wanted to have more children. But of course that was now impossible, because Frank could not bear to be touched.
That night as we walked all the way to Brooklyn, Frank told me, “After the war, I started sleeping in a cot out in the shed behind our house. Made a room for myself there, with a coal stove. I’ve been sleeping there for years. It’s better that way. I don’t keep anyone awake with my strange hours. Sometimes I wake up screaming, that sort of thing. My wife and kid, they didn’t need to be hearing that. For me, with sleeping, the whole procedure is a disaster. Better that I do it alone.”
He respected your mother, Angela. I want you to know that.
He never once said a bad word about her. On the contrary—he approved entirely of the way she raised you, and he admired her stoicism in the face of her life’s many disappointments. They never bickered. They were never at each other’s throats. But after the war, they barely ever spoke other than to make arrangements about the family. He deferred to her on all matters, and turned over his paychecks to her without question. She had taken over management of her parents’ greengrocer business, and had inherited the building that housed the shop. She was a good businesswoman, he said. He was happy that you, Angela, had grown up in the store, chatting with everyone. (“The light of the neighborhood,” he called you.) He was always eyeing you for signs that you, too, might someday be an oddball recluse (which is how he saw himself), but you seemed normal and social. Anyway, Frank trusted your mother’s choices around you completely. But he was always at work on patrol, or walking the city at night. Rosella was always working at the greengrocer, or taking care of you. They were married in name only.
At one point, he told me, he had offered her a divorce, so she might have the chance to find a more suitable man. With his inability to uphold his duties of marital consortium and companionship, he felt certain they could secure an annulment. She was still young. With another man, she might still have the big family she had always wanted. But even if the Catholic Church had allowed her to divorce, Rosella would never have gone ahead with it.
“She’s more church than the Church itself,” he said. “She’s not the kind of person who would ever break a vow. And nobody in our neighborhood gets divorced, Vivian, even if things are bad. And with me and Rosella—things were never bad. We just lived separate lives. What you gotta understand about South Brooklyn, is that the neighborhood itself is a family. You can’t break up that family. Really, my wife is married to the neighborhood. It was the neighborhood who took care of her while I was in the service. The neighborhood still takes care of her now—and Angela, too.”
“But do you like the neighborhood?” I asked.
He gave a rueful smile. “It’s not a choice, Vivian. The neighborhood is what I am. I’ll always be part of it. But I’m also not part of it anymore, since the war. You come back, everyone expects you to be the same guy you were before you got blown up. I used to have enthusiasms like everyone else—baseball, movies, what have you. The Church feasts on Fourth Street, the big holidays. But I don’t have enthusiasms anymore. I don’t fit there anymore. It’s not the neighborhood’s fault. They’re good people. They wanted to take care of us guys who came back from the war. Guys like me, if you had a Purple Heart, everyone wants to buy you a beer, give you a salute, give you free tickets to a show. But I can’t do anything with all that. After a while, people learned to leave me alone. Now it’s like I’m a ghost, when I walk down those streets. Still, though, I belong to that place. It’s hard to explain, if you’re not from there.”
I asked him, “Do you ever think about moving away from Brooklyn?”
He said, “Only every day for the last twenty years. But that wouldn’t be fair to Rosella and Angela. Anyhow, I’m not sure I’d be better off anywhere else.”
—
As we walked back over the Brooklyn Bridge that night, he said to me, “What about you, Vivian? You never got married?”
“Almost. But I was saved by the war.”
“What does that mean?”
“Pearl Harbor came, my guy enlisted, we broke off the engagement.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be. He wasn’t right for me, and I would have been a disaster for him. He was a fine person, and he deserved better.”
“And you never found another man?”
I was quiet for a while, trying to think how to answer that. Finally, I decided to just answer it with the truth.
“I’ve found many other men, Frank. More than you could count.”
“Oh,” he said.
He was quiet after that, and I wasn’t sure how that information had landed on him. This was a moment where another sort of woman might have chosen to be discreet. But something stubborn in me insisted that I be even more clear.
“I’ve slept with a lot of men, Frank, is what I’m saying.”
“No, I get it,” he said.
“And I will be sleeping with a lot more men in the future, I expect. Sleeping with men—lots of men—that’s more or less my way of life.”
“Okay,” he said. “I understand.”
He didn’t seem agitated by it. Just thoughtful. But I felt nervous, sharing this truth about myself. And for some reason, I couldn’t stop talking about it.
“I just wanted to tell you this about me,” I said, “because you should know what kind of woman I am. If we’re going to be friends, I don’t want to run into any judgment from you. If this aspect of my life is going to be a problem . . .”
He stopped suddenly in his tracks. “Why would I judge you?”
“Think about where I’m coming from here, Frank. Think about how we first met.”
“Yeah, I see,” he said. “I get it. But you don’t need to worry about that.”
“Good.”
“I’m not that guy, Vivian. I never was.”
“Thank you. I just wanted to be honest.”
“Thank you for the tribute of your honesty,” he said—which I thought then, and still think, was one of the most elegant things I’d ever heard anyone say.
“I’m too old to hide who I am, Frank. And I’m too old to be made to feel ashamed of myself by anyone—do you understand that?”
“I do.”
“But what do you think of it, though?” I asked. I couldn’t believe I was pushing this issue. But I couldn’t help but ask. His poise—his lack of shocked response on the matter—was puzzling.
“What do I think about you sleeping with a lot of men?”
“Yeah.”
He thought for a moment, then said, “There’s something that I know about the world now, Vivian, that I didn’t know when I was young.”
“And what’s that?”
“The world ain’t straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there’s a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn’t care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain’t straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don’t mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”