77

THE HAWTHORNE HILL HOME for the Aged was located on Route 6, about fifteen miles west of downtown Providence, in what was mostly a commercial area of North Scituate. Richardson spotted the nursing home sign at the foot of a driveway that was just beyond the last of the business establishments in that block. She turned off the main road and followed the driveway for about 300 feet as it climbed a gentle hill behind the stores. The Home was an uninviting two-story red brick building. When she got out of her car, she realized that the facility was set far enough back from the road so that the sound of heavy traffic down below was only a muffled hum at that level. Inside, a receptionist fingered through a card file and directed her to the second floor. There, a nurse at the desk led her to John Darling’s room for her appointment with him.

Jenna had worked for several weeks on a nursing industry story just over a year earlier. Her digging uncovered the facts of how a chain of homes owned by one prosperous businessman systematically deprived its patients of various services for which they were being billed. Breaking the story required her to spend hours at a time with some patients, masquerading as a relative. That allowed her to sit alone with them in their rooms and observe the total care administered by nurses and aides. But Jenna still found it very difficult to walk through another facility and witness the vegetative state in which some of the residents were surviving.

She was relieved to find that Darling was remarkably vigorous and healthy-looking for a man in his eighties. He was sitting in a wheelchair, reading a magazine when Jenna entered. Despite her protestations, he lifted himself partway out of the chair to shake hands when she introduced herself.

They engaged in some small talk for a while. Darling got an obvious kick out of describing to her what downtown Providence looked like in the forties, during the war years. It seemed to please him to name many of the current buildings that weren’t there at that time. Jenna likened it to an old man letting his grandchild know what kinds of toys they had to amuse themselves with in “the good old days.” Then, while discussing the difficult traffic patterns that existed before Interstate 95 split the city in half, Darling suddenly stopped short.

“You’d better get down to business,” he said, “or I’ll be ranting and raving until it’s time to go eat.”

Richardson showed him the Tarantino draft records she picked up at City Hall. “Do you have any recollection of the circumstances surrounding this deferment?” she asked.

Darling took his time looking at the documents. “I can tell you that what it says there in the margin with the initials ‘A.B.’ is my handwriting. That note on there about him becoming a lawyer and supporting his parents, that’s not mine, and I don’t remember seeing it at the time.” He was silent for a couple of minutes while he stared straight up at the ceiling, his eyes closed most of the time. Jenna waited patiently. Finally, he looked back at her.

“I’ll tell you everything I remember,” he said. But then he remained silent for a while longer, clasping his hands in front of him before continuing. “The man who came to see us about the Tarantino boy was very powerful in some way or another, but I can’t recall what it was. He was insistent that the young man be given a deferment. I know that Henry and Dip—that’s what everyone called Dillard—had both heard a lot about this fellow, but his name meant nothing to me. Of course I was a scientist most of my life and that’s all I ever cared to read about. I never bothered with the newspapers or most magazines. My wife always said I was a one-dimensional man.

“They were afraid of him for some reason, I remember that. And after he left, we took a vote on it right away. It was two to one to grant the deferment, but we never entered the numbers when we voted. We always left every decision looking like it was unanimous.”

Once again Darling studied the ceiling for a minute or so. “You can ask me more questions if you want,” he told her, “but whatever I say about anything the first time is most always all that’ll come to mind. That’s how it works with me.” Jenna tried to jog his memory about a couple of things, but he was right.

* * *

The draft board records in Narragansett were less revealing. Richardson learned that Fiore was given two consecutive deferments. The first allowed him to continue college after his sophomore year at Princeton, the second to go on to law school. The town clerk couldn’t understand why anything that old could be important, and didn’t hide her annoyance at having to search for the records in a damp basement storage room. Jenna had come on a bad day, the clerk told her, and then only reluctantly entered the names of the three board officials on her computer to see if any of them paid a property tax to the town in the past year.

“That’s the only way of finding out whether they still live in Narragansett, other than just looking them up in the phone book. If they’re not listed, I can’t help you. We have no reason to keep tabs on them.”

It turned out that one of them, a Vincent Curcuruto, resided on Shore Road. Richardson wrote down his address, along with the names of the two other officials, and drove to the white frame house with no shutters that was located on a cul-de-sac a block in from Narragansett Bay.

Virginia Curcuruto let her in and called her husband from the den where he was watching TV. The small living room was furnished entirely in colonial style. As they sat there, Jenna noticed that the stitching in several areas of the brown-toned braided rug were pulled loose. She suspected that the Curcurutos owned a cat at some time. The two of them were probably in their mid-eighties, she figured, but both were full of energy and it wouldn’t have surprised Jenna if they told her they were about to go square dancing. She explained the reason she was there.

“I was actually the oldest of the three of us who sat on the board,” Curcuruto told her, “but I’m the only one who’s still alive and kicking. Neal Wilson died in a boating accident out on Narragansett Bay the same week Nixon resigned as President. And Bobby Silvers had an aneurysm in Bermuda about five years ago. Imagine dying like that while you’re on vacation, being someplace you’ve wanted to see for so long. It was a shame.

“Anyway, let me answer your question. We tried to take care of the kids here and keep them away from Vietnam as long as we could. There was a fair amount of feeling in this town against the war, even in the early days. So if a youngster graduated college and was going to do something else aside from just getting a job, we wanted to do what we could for him.

“Naturally, we couldn’t give everyone a deferment or we’d never meet even the minimum quotas that were set for us. Keep in mind that a high percentage of our boys were going on to graduate school for law or business or something or other. But we checked to see how big a family it was, whether any other sons were already in the service, different things like that. Besides, each of us had close friends who called and asked us to do what we could for their kids, so sometimes we sort of swapped favors among ourselves on the board.”

“That wasn’t very often,” his wife interjected protectively, and Jenna smiled in response.

“Now I’ll get to the point,” Curcuruto continued. “You can see from the record here that only Bobby and I signed off on Fiore’s second deferment. What happened is that just the two of us were in the office that afternoon when who walks in but Anthony Buscatelli. Do you know who he was?”

Jenna assured him that she knew all about Buscatelli.

“Well, anyways, there was him and two other guys, they must have been bodyguards. I’d seen his picture in the papers and I’m Italian too, so I knew who he was even before he said a word. He told us why he was there and the fact that Fiore was going to the same law school as the son of a very close friend of his. The two boys already arranged to live together, and the other one was getting a deferment in Providence. He knew that for sure, he said.

“Then he asked me in Italian if I spoke the language. When I told him I did, almost everything else he said was just to me. Bobby didn’t know what was going on. I won’t say Buscatelli threatened me, but he let me know just who he was. He said that Italians had to stick together because everyone else wanted to crap on us. Here was an Italian boy from a good family who deserved the chance to go on and be a lawyer. After law school he was going to be partners with the son of that best friend he told me about, also Italian. By the time he was through talking, I had nothing to say.”

Jenna now understood what the notation “Defer, Per A. B.” meant on Sandy Tarantino’s draft board record in Providence.

“Bobby saw what I looked like. As soon as Buscatelli and his boys left, he asked me what we were talking about. He got the picture right away and said if I wanted to approve Fiore’s deferment for any reason, he’d go along with me right then and there.

“That’s what we did, and the next day we told Neal about it. I don’t know anything about Fiore, except it looks like he’s got a good shot to be governor. I’m not saying he had anything to do with what happened or even knew about it. He filed the papers asking for another deferment to go to law school, and we approved it. End of story.”

Maybe, Jenna thought to herself, or maybe there’s more to come.