19

NO FILTERS

One afternoon, I got a call from my mother that my favorite cousin, Gerri, was “in trouble.” I knew right away Ma didn’t mean that Gerri was pregnant. I knew it was worse than that. Before I even heard what she’d done wrong, I was ready to defend her, write letters to her in prison or in rehab or wherever she was headed, to let her know that I’d be there for her. We were a forgiving family, after all, who had seen much worse. What with Grandpa, and Great-Grandpa Peter, Uncle Frankie, and Uncle Henry, Uncle Andrew, George, and all the crooked politicians.

Gerri wasn’t even the first in her immediate family to get into trouble. In 1988, one of her sisters was indicted on charges of stealing money from the Hyundai dealership where she worked, but no one really paid much attention. It was just another blot on the family name. And besides, the charges were later dismissed.

But Gerri was different. Her trouble hit us hard, like a sock in the mouth you didn’t see coming.

We all loved her. My father had loved her because she loved his hot roast beef sandwiches. My mother loved her like a godmother; my sister, like a Confirmation sponsor. I loved her because she always had time to play with me and never ignored me. She had the patience to teach me to ride a two-wheeler on the dead-end streets of North Bergen. Our birthdays were the same week. She had even given me that journal to take to Alaska. I thought maybe I could send her a journal so she could record her troubled thoughts. But I thought better of it. They were probably memories she’d much rather forget.

When Ma called to tell me about Gerri, I remembered last Christmas. Gerri had had her annual holiday gathering in her bachelorette pad, but the spread she put out seemed much more elaborate than usual. There was top-shelf liquor and shrimp—not the swag off-the-back-of-the-truck kind but expensive, store-bought shrimp. Since Daddy had died, shellfish was off our family menu. It cost too much.

Between stories of Grandpa throwing the Blessed Mother salesman down the stairs and Ma and Aunt Mary Ann dropping that big chunk of ice, Gerri showed us all the new furniture she had bought. Having recently suffered through the purchase of my first couch, I knew how expensive furniture could be. And this was nice stuff. Big. Real wood. Plus, there was a new bedroom set, with a fancy Christmas bedspread. There was Christmas china kept in a kitchen cabinet that my brother-in-law accidentally leaned on and almost knocked over. Gerri had a state-of-the-art CD player with multiple carts. I remember coveting it and the many Christmas CDs revolving around inside. Gerri had diamond earrings and a tennis bracelet. She drove a Lexus.

Even with a nice car like that, Gerri picked my mother and her father up at the airport in a limousine. Ma and Uncle Jerry had gone to Florida to visit Aunt Mary Ann, and there was Gerri at Newark Airport with a limo, a wet bar and all, ready to bring them home in luxury. My mother bragged about it, and it made me feel a little envious. Why couldn’t I pick my mother up in a stretch limo? What kind of daughter was I anyway? Why didn’t I get a real job that paid real money?

And then it occurred to me.

Gerri was up to something. I told my mother I suspected that Gerri was dealing drugs. I guess I was being catty, jealous that she had enough money to pick Ma up in style. But Ma didn’t believe Gerri was running drugs. I didn’t want to believe it myself. Doing drugs was your personal prerogative, but selling drugs was scummy. Gerri wasn’t scummy. But something did seem strange.

Time passed, and I’d actually forgotten all about the limo episode and my drug theory until my mother called me long-distance to tell me about Gerri’s trouble. She had been arrested. Not for drugs, Ma said, but for swindling her company out of $219,792.55. Nearly a quarter-million dollars. It wasn’t just that she stole the money, but how she stole it that was the problem.

Gerri was the accounts-payable clerk at a laundry-supply company in Saddlebrook, New Jersey. It was her job to pay vendors. Instead of paying them, she placed the company checks in her own account, bit by bit, over a two-year period. No money laundering or elaborate schemes: Once a week or once every two weeks, she would take a company check, no matter who it was made out to, and deposit it into her account.

When the company discovered the missing money, they traced it to Gerri. They blamed the bank and held it liable for accepting checks that weren’t even made out to Gerri. The big problem, what made Gerri’s crime a problem for us all, was that the bank where she made the deposits was the same one where my brother-in-law, Basil, worked.

Basil was a bank vice-president. One terrible morning, he came across Gerri’s name in a news flash that the bank had circulated about the crime. He almost fell off his ergonomic chair. Basil had worked all his life to rise above his Hudson County heritage. With my sister’s help, he had bought a house, launched a respectable career, and had two exceptional children, one of whom went on to Harvard Law School, just like cousin Mike.

Basil and Paula had worked for years to separate themselves from the bad reputation of Hudson County and the criminals in our family. They even tried to get rid of their accents. They did everything to blend in with the yuppies who bought brownstones on either side of them. They stopped putting colored Christmas lights on the tree; only tasteful tiny white lights would do. And the tree itself was no longer fake, but fresh and green. They stopped making sausage and meatballs for Sunday dinner and instead went out for brunch, toasting each other with mimosas.

They took Gerri’s crime personally. And I couldn’t blame them. The tellers in Basil’s bank all knew Gerri as a familiar face, the vice-president’s cousin, so they never asked any questions when she showed up at their windows with her deposit slips and her dirty laundry-company checks. Like us, they probably liked Gerri and trusted her fresh, open face and wide, white smile.

When Gerri’s arrest report turned up on Basil’s desk, he debated whether to keep quiet about being related to her or own up to it. If he stepped forward to face the heat voluntarily, maybe the boss would commend him for his honesty. He went to his boss and told him about the relation. Better that than let them discover it on their own and accuse him of being an accomplice.

Basil was investigated. But most of all, he was embarrassed. He had worked hard, trying to rise above his roots, his Hoboken days, and his long, difficult-to-pronounce last name. But he hadn’t distanced himself from the family stories. He was now part of one. And so were we.

To prove his loyalty to the bank, and to punish her for what she did, Basil didn’t defend Gerri. He showed no mercy. The bank went all the way with its prosecution.

At first Gerri pleaded not guilty, but then changed her mind and pleaded out to second-degree theft. She agreed to pay all the money back.

At her hearing, the judge asked if she had a family. Gerri said yes, meaning her parents, siblings, and us. But the judge wanted to know if Gerri had any children, because, he announced, she was going to prison. Second-degree theft carried a maximum of three years in jail.

Basil, meanwhile, got a promotion at an upscale suburban regional bank. His title was president. He’d started as a teller and was now making six figures, the hard way, the legal way, the non–Hudson County way. The white-collar way. But Gerri hadn’t thought of that, I suppose. Or maybe she just didn’t care. That was my sister’s take on it, and the reason she couldn’t forgive Gerri. It was one thing to screw people you didn’t know. But it was another thing to screw your relatives.

I felt bad for Gerri and had a feeling she hadn’t involved us on purpose. I secretly sent her a card once, no real message inside, just “Love, Helene,” to let her know I was thinking about her and was sorry for what was happening to her. But I felt guilty for weeks. My sister would have been pissed if she’d found out.

I figured that working so closely with all that money, day after day, the temptation to steal was just too great. That was Gerri’s only excuse. But I tried to find others for her.

Aunt Millie had been sick, so maybe Gerri stole most of the money to help her pay her medical bills. Maybe she didn’t realize how much money she had actually taken, since she stole it a little at a time.

Maybe growing up in North Bergen had done Gerri in: North Bergen High School, the White Castle, or running wild and being able to cook breakfast in the morning on her own. Maybe she went wrong because North Bergen was shaped like a gun, because it was filled with so many dead-end streets, or because it didn’t get good television reception. Maybe it was because she didn’t go to church every Sunday when she was little.

There were dozens of excuses. I could blame what happened to Gerri on local politics, on people like McCann and Mocco, who set bad examples for our generation just like Hague and Kenny had done years ago for Beansie’s generation.

What I feared most was that Gerri was responding to a deep genetic pull passed on from Grandpa. She was, after all, named after him. Grandpa Jerry. And he did come and live with her longer than he had lived with us.

When it came down to it, maybe it was all just a matter of odds, like betting the number. With a grandfather like Beansie, one of us was bound to get into trouble. The criminal gene was just too strong and was sure to be passed down.

Maybe Gerri did what she did because she was there that night Grandpa tried to kill us. It was as if Grandpa had actually climbed those stairs back in 1970, past the dust bunnies and broken floor tiles, but had only one bullet in his gun. And Gerri got it. Point-blank.

She said she couldn’t really remember that night, but the memory was back there, lingering like those antique bullets Frank shot into his head. Like George’s forgotten memory of his father, invisible but potent, dragging him to an early death.

Stanley, Paula, and I remembered the night Grandpa tried to shoot us, and savored each unfiltered detail. Maybe it was the remembering—or not remembering—that made the difference.

Before she “went away,” Gerri half-jokingly threatened to run Basil over in her car. Paula stood by her husband. And so did I. We weren’t allowed to go anywhere near Gerri, especially Basil, who took extra care in looking both ways before he crossed the street.

Because of the bad blood between my sister and Gerri, we couldn’t go to North Bergen and laugh about the family stories for fear that Gerri would come up in conversation or show up in the flesh, out on bail. As if she were waiting, revving her Lexus’s engine.

Our other relatives didn’t know about Gerri’s crime or why my sister was mad. Ma was afraid of hurting her brother Jerry, so she kept quiet about the whole affair and suffered in silence. Our other cousins and aunts invited us all—including Gerri—to family engagements. We couldn’t attend weddings or funerals, christenings or showers, since Gerri might be there. And we couldn’t say why we weren’t coming, since Uncle Jerry would have been devastated if everyone knew about Gerri. We loved Uncle Jerry too much to cause him such grief.

For seven years we stayed away and kept quiet. Our cousins thought we were just being snobby, that we didn’t want to bother with them. The whole mess took its biggest toll on my mother and Uncle Jerry, who carried on their normal relationship for years, pretending not to know what the other one knew. They still traveled together to visit Aunt Mary Ann in Florida. Uncle Jerry came to my mother’s house to do her taxes, and she repaid him with a big macaroni dinner. They pretended nothing was wrong. But without the family’s comfort, and with that secret weighing him down, Uncle Jerry aged. And Ma grieved terribly for those lost family gatherings.

I was surprised I felt bad about missing the family functions. For years I had complained about all those baby showers where bows were taped onto paper plates and placed on the heads of my pregnant cousins as their friends oohed and ahhed. But now that the family gatherings were off-limits, I missed them. They left a strange vacuum in my life. My family was a pain in the ass, but they were my family and mine alone to complain about or avoid. I had thought they’d always be there to mock or cherish, depending on my mood.

It felt like a piece of furniture was missing from my living room. It was mostly crummy, secondhand furniture, but it was mine and had its particular place in the room. I couldn’t get used to the brand-new hole it left when it was gone. And it seemed that every time I went out, there was something else missing when I got back.

During the family blackout, Aunt Katie died. My Brooklyn apartment was only a few miles from Jersey City and from the funeral parlor but two rivers, two tunnels, and one family fight removed. I was close enough to Jersey City that from my living room window I could tell the time on the red, glowing Colgate clock. I could see the stepped buildings of the Medical Center and the railroad terminal that Irene and Vita had passed through over a century ago.

From that same window I could see the Statue of Liberty—not the back view like the one on Warren Street or the tired version outside City Hall Park, but the real thing, her face, green and glowing, staring straight at me, daring me to cross New York Harbor for Aunt Katie’s wake.

Feeling sad and homesick, I got up the courage and went.

The first thing I noticed was that Aunt Katie had on a pink dress that matched the drapes behind her. I imagined her getting up and joking about it, making a reference to Scarlett O’Hara sewing her outfit from the curtains.

Aunt Katie had always looked all wrong in a dress, too formal and ladylike. Now she looked especially wrong. I wondered if she had her strange-looking partial dentures in, too, for this special occasion. The last of Aunt Katie’s special occasions. I tried to get close enough to see, but stopped short of sticking a finger into her mouth. It wouldn’t have gone over well, even in my family.

As I knelt before the casket I pretended to pray, but instead, I just gazed at Aunt Katie. Her body looked especially small in its coffin, shrunken almost, and so awkward in that dress.

Great-Aunt Katie. She had seemed so much taller in life. She was so wise, with her advice on how to stop a mad dog and how to get your husband to stop drinking. But she was never full of herself. Aunt Katie was flawed, and was always the first to admit it.

I remembered her reciting a poem when I was a kid. She said she wrote it, but knowing Aunt Katie, it was probably plagiarized. It was about getting a chance to live your life over again. And it all came back to me now in the funeral home. In metered verse, Aunt Katie said she would be more careful the next time around, tell her sons that she loved them, take more long walks. I remember her stopping and choking back tears before she was done. We likely didn’t get our lives to live over, she said, “but knowing me, I’d make the same damn mistakes again.”

They weren’t such bad mistakes, especially in the context of our family. There were worse things you could do.

Hardly anyone came to Aunt Katie’s funeral. When I looked around and saw all those empty seats, I winced. Had the family been on speaking terms, there would have been more people there. But I wondered where all those men and women were that Aunt Katie had helped during four decades as a committeewoman. It was time for all those favors to be repaid. All those potholes she got filled, the broken traffic lights she got repaired, all the people she helped move in to the neighborhood, all those she helped get jobs and food baskets, the couples she counseled through family fights, the pastors whose raffles she sold. Where were they now, the ungrateful bastards?

But then I realized where they were. All those people were dead, of course, their souls joining the long parade of barely missed Jersey Citizens, marching on with the sad subjects of all those feature obituaries toward permanent oblivion.

At eighty-six, Aunt Katie had outlived them. I smiled my half smile, blessed myself, and got up from the kneeler, no longer so upset about the empty seats behind me. I sat in one of them and stared at Aunt Katie some more.

She had talked for years about how one shot of Canadian Club a day would keep her going. And she was right. Maybe Aunt Katie was even right about those Lucky Strikes.

It was the filters that killed you.