12

FALLING STAR

Sonny was my eternally adolescent uncle. There were times, as I approached my own adolescence, when I tried to imagine him as a grown man who had made something of his life, left something behind, or at least spawned his own children. I imagined birthday cards coming in the mail from Uncle Sonny with twenty bucks inside, just like the ones my other aunts and uncles sent each year.

I knew Uncle Sonny’s story well, so well that I felt I knew him. Sometimes it was like he was still alive, since the older I got, the more I learned about him. Every year, on April 10, his birthday, Ma went to church, even the years it didn’t fall on Easter Sunday or during Holy Week. It was like she was going to visit him. Like he was waiting for her in one of the church pews.

My mother and Sonny were a year and six days apart and looked exactly alike, so much so that some people thought they were twins. Uncle Sonny didn’t like to eat, not that there was ever much to eat in their house. My mother was always hungry, always felt an emptiness in her stomach, so when Uncle Sonny hid his vegetables under his plate, my mother would eat them for him. They had a good thing going.

Grandma was the provider in the family, with help from Sonny, the oldest of the five. Because he was the oldest, Uncle Sonny was very serious. He worked for the local butcher delivering meat to downtown brownstones and tenements and gave all the money he earned to Grandma so she could provide an unsteady diet of lentils and stale Italian bread. While Grandma worked at a local luncheonette, my mother cleaned the house and took care of the younger children—Mary Ann, Robby, and Jerry, whom they used to call Junior, since he was named after Grandpa.

Uncle Sonny’s story starts on a Tuesday night in 1944, when he was fourteen. It had been a hot week in August, with temperatures bubbling over a hundred degrees. It was too hot to sit in the house at night, so the whole family, and everyone in the neighborhood, was out on their stoops. While they were sitting there, Grandma argued with Sonny about what he was doing the next day, his day off. He had plans to work on his clubhouse, in an empty lot on First Street, with his friends. But Grandma wanted him to go to the movies instead. As they argued, a shooting star streaked across the sky. The kids were excited. But Grandma said that whenever you saw a falling star, it meant that someone was going to die.

The next morning, Sonny stubbornly left the house to meet his friends. Before he slammed the door, he turned and looked at his brothers and sisters seated at the wooden kitchen table. My mother got a good look at him before he stormed out, like a slow-motion part in the movies she saw at the Stanley Theatre: his jet-black hair, straight like hers, covered in a sailor hat that he’d borrowed from his brother Junior, striped polo shirt over a skinny seventy-five-pound body, black sneakers, and baggy jeans bulging with swimming trunks underneath. Sonny wore the trunks in case he and his buddies decided to go swimming down by the docks later that day. It was that kind of day, so hot it makes you want to do something stupid, like swim in the dirty Hudson.

Grandma went to work at the luncheonette and told my mother to meet her there when she was done cleaning the house. If her boss wasn’t looking, Grandma could serve my seventy-pound mother a bowl of soup or a ham sandwich, and maybe even give her some food to take home to the others, who were now out playing in the vacant, garbage-strewn lot next door.

That afternoon, while finishing her chores, my mother happened to look out the window and notice a green-and-white police car, the old kind, with running boards and rounded hood popular in gangster movies from the 1930s. Because of the Depression, the war, and Hague’s stolen tax money, new police cars hadn’t been bought in years.

A cop in a dark blue uniform, the badge above his heart glinting in the high summer sun, walked over to the neighbors’ stoop across the street. A group of kids soon gathered around and began looking up at my mother in the window. Her first thought was that Grandpa had broken out of jail. The cop looked up at the window and yelled to her, “Is your mother home?”

“No,” she answered. “She’s at work.”

“Well, tell her to come to the police station after work,” he said, walking back to his car.

After he pulled away, Annie, Grandma’s best friend, called to my mother to come downstairs. When she got to the bottom of the rickety staircase, Annie was standing in the vestibule, closing the door gently behind her. She placed her hand on my mother’s bony shoulder and said, “Junior’s been killed by a truck.”

“My little brother,” my mother thought as a small bomb exploded in her brain. She couldn’t speak. She remembered the shooting star from the night before.

As my mother stood there in the vestibule, dumbstruck, Annie went to find Bill Barrett, a boarder in her house who was one of the few people on Second Street who owned a car. She called Aunt Katie, who lived around the corner. With my despondent mother, they all gathered in Annie’s kitchen and tried to work out a strategy for telling Grandma the bad news. Suddenly, the door opened and Junior walked in. Since he was supposed to be dead, they all flinched when they saw him. For a second, my mother thought it was Junior’s ghost.

“Junior,” my aunt Katie yelled. “What the fuck are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead.” The hopeful thought that maybe this was another family’s burden flashed in their heads. But my mother knew what was happening. She remembered the sailor hat. She knew it was Sonny who was dead. The cops simply had the wrong name, she told Aunt Katie.

Knowing Sonny was the firstborn, the police had thought he was named after his father, and therefore a Junior, the name stitched inside the cap. The cap Sonny had borrowed from Junior.

With the new news, the knowledge that Sonny was dead, Annie, Katie, Bill, and my mother climbed into Bill’s car and headed for Montgomery Street, to the luncheonette.

“Sonny’s been hurt,” Annie hedged when she saw my grandmother behind the counter. “You better come home.” On the short ride, less than a mile, Grandma wrung her hands, and my mother placed her skinny arm around her shoulders.

When they got home, Aunt Katie knelt before Grandma, who sat in a kitchen chair. Katie laid her hands on Grandma’s hands and said slowly, “There’s nothing you can do. Sonny is dead.”

Grandma heard a sound like leaves falling inside her head. Then she fainted and fell off the kitchen chair.

At the morgue, they wouldn’t let Grandma see Sonny, because his chest had been crushed in the accident. But she knew it was her son. She was told he was wearing swimming trunks beneath his pants.

Sonny’s best friend, Vinnie Antoniack, later told my mother what had happened. Sonny and his friends were on their way to the Gypsum Company at the edge of town to try and scam some shingles from the dumping ground for the roof of their clubhouse. Sonny was pulling a wagon, so the trip was slow. Diadato DiTorio, a local truck driver, saw the boys and offered them a ride on the running board. I imagine them as the cast of East Side Kids—dirty, dressed in baggy clothes, always in black and white, jumping onto the running board of the truck. When they jumped off a few minutes later, Vinnie noticed that Sonny wasn’t with them.

“Where’s Sonny?” Vinnie asked the other boys. He looked down the street and saw the frail body of his friend lying in the gutter. Vinnie ran over and knelt down, shouting, “What happened?” to his friend. When he lifted Sonny’s head for an answer, blood gushed out instead.

Diadato was taken into custody while the cops investigated. They determined that Sonny accidentally fell from the truck and was dragged underneath it when his wagon got caught in the wheels. Grandma didn’t press charges. Friends encouraged her to sue, but Dia-dato had five small children of his own. His knowing he had killed her oldest son was punishment enough, Grandma said.

Grandma’s hair began to turn white that night, and would be completely white by winter. Her four remaining children climbed into bed with her like kittens, and stayed up throughout the night crying.

It was standing room only at the Introcaso Funeral Home the next night. Sonny was small for his age, but he was a smart kid, the smartest on the block, and everyone liked him. The front-page story in The Jersey Journal that day told about the clubhouse and the kids’ new plan to name it after Sonny—the Sonny Vena Victory Club. They would place a photo of Sonny inside as a tribute.

Sonny’s popularity and the front-page news brought people who didn’t even know Sonny to the funeral parlor. Italian relatives wailed in the heat of the room, the smell of the embalming chemicals smothered by so many bouquets of flowers. Instead of giving Grandma gardenias, Aunt Katie had gotten Uncle Al to collect money from the other longshoremen down at the docks. Though it was a beautiful gesture, Uncle Al gave Grandma only half of the collection. He and Katie kept the other half.

As soon as he died, stories of the supernatural started to attach themselves to Uncle Sonny. At the wake, people said he had once seen Jesus’ face in the sky and pointed it out to everyone else, and that the Hudson Dispatch had snapped a picture of it and printed it in the paper the next day.

Aunt Katie said that when Sonny was little, he had carved his initials into the hot, black tar on Second Street. While he was bending over, a bee flew over his head and buzzed around three times. Years later, after Sonny died, cousin Chubby went back to the very same spot, took his knife, and cleaned out Sonny’s carved initials. A bee flew over his head and buzzed around three times. It was Sonny’s way of marking Chubby, of letting him know he was waiting for him in heaven and that it wasn’t so bad up there.

At Sonny’s wake, my mother stayed far away from the coffin, because the body inside didn’t resemble her brother. The way she could tell it was really Sonny was by looking at his hands. Those were the hands she knew, their fingernails chewed and bloody, like Grandpa’s. Ma didn’t understand why the women were saying things like “He looks so good. So peaceful.” To her, Sonny looked dead.

In the next room lay a man who had died of a heart attack. His widow was screaming loudly and singing sad songs that seeped through the thin walls. My mother was afraid to stay in the room with Sonny, but because of the sounds outside, she was even more afraid to leave. She wouldn’t even go to the bathroom.

When the wake was almost through, one more guest arrived. It was Grandpa, chained in handcuffs, escorted by prison guards. He cried, tears sliding down his reddened face as he hobbled over to the coffin that held his son’s crushed body. The guards let one hand free from the cuffs so Grandpa could stroke Sonny’s cheek. My mother had no love for her father, but she felt sorry for him, like she would feel sorry for any stranger who sees his dead son for the first time. Some friends of Grandma’s were angry to see him there. Who was he to cry? Never around to feed those kids. How could he even show his face?

At Holy Name Cemetery, where most of my relatives were buried and where Uncle Frankie met his lovers, Sonny’s grave lay under an old apple tree, littered with decaying apples. There was no tombstone, since Grandma didn’t have the money. A house brick marked the grave. My mother and the other children tossed small handfuls of apple-scented soil into Sonny’s grave as his coffin was lowered.

After the funeral, Grandma and her four remaining children went to Annie’s house for ham, rye bread, and potato salad. Grandma never returned to her job at the luncheonette, because it reminded her too much of Sonny. When he was old enough, Uncle Jerry got two jobs to help feed the family—setting up pins at a local bowling alley by night and delivering newspapers by day.

Grandma was never the same after 1944. Sonny had been her favorite, though his birth was the source of most of her life’s pain. It was because of Sonny that Grandma had had to marry Grandpa. Until I was an adolescent, I hadn’t realized that Grandma married Grandpa because she was pregnant. People had said that Grandma “got into trouble.” I thought that simply meant she had met Grandpa.

For me, Grandma was no longer so pure. She was finally human. More important, Grandma had a good excuse for marrying Grandpa.

My mother, to retain Grandma’s saintly image, insisted that she had been the victim of a splash pregnancy. That would make Sonny the blessed child of an immaculate conception, which would make his untimely death more meaningful than it actually was. He was the sacrificial lamb of Second Street, the savior who died too soon.

To make themselves feel better, the family concocted a reason for why Sonny died so young: Had he lived to be an adult, he would have eventually killed Grandpa, and the sin of patricide would have been an even greater tragedy than Sonny’s birth or death. God took him while he was still innocent. But I always thought it would have been a good thing if Sonny had killed Grandpa. Years of pain and suffering could have been avoided.

A sadness, like Sonny’s ghost, stayed with my mother and her siblings in that Second Street apartment for years, until Grandpa came home from Trenton and replaced the sadness with terror. Aunt Mary Ann got enough money together to eventually buy Sonny a tombstone. It infuriated Grandpa, because he wanted the money for himself.

But Grandpa could never lay another hand on Sonny. With a front-page story above the fold all about him, a victory club in his name, and local sainthood granted forever, Sonny was probably better off dead.

Had Sonny lived, he very well may have killed Grandpa. Or maybe Grandpa would have killed him. Or maybe—worse—Uncle Sonny would have lived a mediocre life, working himself to death in a factory or getting beaten up by the cops like Chubby. Instead, Sonny was as prized and as safe as that Virgin Mary behind the glass bubble, canonized and finally above it all.

Almost a half century later, I decided to check out Uncle Sonny’s story for myself, to relive his posthumous, adolescent moment of glory. I walked over to the library on Jersey Avenue, in a huge limestone building, the same library where Sonny and my mother had done their homework together, the same library where I had researched school papers, the same place Grandpa had worked as a security guard in the 1960s, before he tried to shoot us.

Remembering all the objects Grandpa had stolen from there, I nervously took the worn marble stairs to the second-floor reference room two at a time, worried that someone might notice a resemblance and demand I return the encyclopedias and Indian arrowheads. I could have taken the elevator, but it had been one of Grandpa’s jobs to run the elevator when he worked there. It gave off bad vibes. I thought that in a final fit of rage Grandpa might send me hurtling down to the basement to an early death.

The 1944 reel of microfilm was thick, dark, and shiny and felt good in my hand, so heavy with all the stories from that year, with the story of Uncle Sonny. The machine was not easy to operate. I wound the film through the take-up reel and figured out which buttons to push. I sped through winter, January stories passing in a blur, stories of grieving families whose sons were killed in the war, picture after picture of young heroes in uniform. That blurred into spring ads for Easter clothes and hats. And then there was summer. In search of August 10, the day after Sonny died, I sped past the steamy months of June and July, with their baseball stories and weather reports. When I hit August, I slowed down, using my fingers to turn the thick reel. I didn’t want to miss it.

August 7 . . . August 8 . . . my head and eyes hurting from the blurred microfilm, the focus off enough to be annoying. I felt a little nauseated, both from the moving images and the anxiety of getting closer. I found August 9, and then the last page, the editorial page. . . . And then, there, on August 10 . . .

A big black hole where the lead story should have been.

There was a left-hand column story on FDR, a tear, and then nothing. Where was Sonny? Before I even finished asking myself, I knew the answer. I knew what had happened. I knew that Grandpa had torn the story out while working in the library years ago. It felt as if his hand had reached from the grave, through the soil at Holy Name Cemetery, and ripped the clipping right from under my eyes.

I felt a pain, a dull ache in my chest, the pain my mother must have felt whenever her father did something horrible. The pain Aunt Mary Ann still felt, even years later. I’d heard those bad stories about Grandpa so many times, I thought I’d become numb to them. But this was a new one. I felt like Grandpa had whacked me in the gut. My hands shook as I fingered the reel and tried to figure out what to do next. But what could I do? Like Grandma, Ma, and her siblings years ago, I was helpless. I wanted to point to the screen and scream, yell out, tell the people sitting on either side of me what was missing. That Grandpa had stolen it. But no one would understand.

I couldn’t even complain to the librarian. I knew who had stolen this story, this evidence, and I was too embarrassed to even mention it. The story was Sonny’s only glory, his fifteen inches of fame in the local paper, and the family’s only printed news story without an arrest attached to it. Grandpa had wiped it out, in one swift tear. It was Grandpa’s final, posthumous act of stupidity and violence. His sucker punch in the face of family history.

I did the only thing I could do. I pressed the rewind button and watched the microfilm go whizzing back in time. Summer turned to spring turned to winter and the new year, 1944.