Mike’s unseeing gaze slowly scanned the room as he came down from this heady memory, and finally settled on me. One of the last things he said to me was so disorienting, and I guess so sweet in its intent, that I laughed out loud: “You got good genes.”
16
The Winner
MY MOTHER SURPRISED everyone.
She was always the stronger of the two. As far back as I can remember, Tony seesawed, emotionally and, in later life, physically. Rita was the anchor, the steady force. Then—this was about a year after Mike Gulino died—she had a knee replacement and wound up with a staph infection in the joint. Suddenly we were caught up in a full-on life-threatening situation: infectious-disease specialists, lengthy hospital stays, cannonades of antibiotics.
It was while my family’s attention was thus diverted that Tony decided that he, too, would sign up for elective surgery, on his prostate. My siblings and I were so focused on my mother’s condition nobody paid much attention. Had we been aware of what was happening one of us would have put a stop to it—called the urologist and asked what the hell he was thinking by selling an elderly man in poor health a risky surgery whose sole purpose was to help him pee a little better. Tony’s general practitioner had made clear a few years before that his health was so compromised that he should only undergo surgery as a last resort.
The antibiotics treatments eventually did what they were meant to do for my mother. Her health improved and she went home. But for Tony the unwarranted operation set off a chain of medical crises. To stop the incessant bleeding in his bladder they took him off blood thinners. A day later, he had a stroke. He couldn’t open his eyes, couldn’t do much of anything, but he could talk a little. We had our heads bent over his hospital bed.
“Dad, you had a stroke. Do you understand?”
“I had a stroke,” he whispered.
His personality seemed intact. A male nurse came into the room and told him he was looking pretty good. “You’re full of shit,” he replied.
The neurologist told us the hopeful thing about a stroke was that all the damage happened at once. Over the coming days, we could reasonably expect to see some improvement.
But a day later he was worse. In the hours I spent in the waiting area outside the intensive care unit, I ruminated. Naturally I thought about Tony as a man, and about my dad as my dad. But I couldn’t help but see what was happening in light of everything that he and I had been exploring these past four years. Even a week before I would not have thought of this as likely material for the last chapter of a book, but suddenly it was feeling like the end of a story, one that had begun in the hills of Sicily a century and a half earlier.
My mind went back to where it had been during my dad’s sudden decline of four years earlier—that long, sleepless night of regret—and to the surprise that followed, when my father got a reprieve, a gift of a basketful of years and months and minutes in which to breathe the air and wince in pain and laugh sometimes, to watch his grandchildren’s lives unfurl a bit further. I thought of how he and I had put that time to use—the flawed but earnest effort we had made to understand the enigmatic father who had come before both of us. And lately we had shifted to Tony, his own life, and how it had spun away from his father’s. We had gone through his early years, the power-of-positive-thinking period, the young salesman on the rise. But his body had decided to give out just as we were reaching the next phase of his life, when his career came to a halt.
There was a central event to that period. He lost the family house. Tony was a hot local entrepreneur and this was supposed to be his biggest business deal yet. He had hooked up with a couple of out-of-town guys, go-getters like him, and they were going to build a shopping center in the suburbs. For some reason he was the one who had to put up the collateral for the loan: our house. But the going got tough, and the other partners skipped out. The bank took what it could.
And Tony proceeded to blame himself in the most ornate fashion. He became a superhero of self-blame. This all began as I was heading off to college, and I couldn’t deal with the steaming pile of drama. I simply pushed it all away. I threw myself into the persona of a college freshman, which I felt almost totally justified in doing, scouring the readings for Poli-Sci 101 and Intro to English Lit as if the key to my future was to be found encoded in them. It took a few years for my parents’ financial crisis to play out, during which time I did everything I could to wall myself off from Johnstown. As if physically ricocheting from the epicenter of family ruin, I decided, on graduation, that I had a longstanding desire, of which I was previously unaware, to live in Japan. My mother was quietly packing up the dishes and books and keepsakes; the moving truck was backing out of the driveway. I was on the other side of the world, learning the characters for the Tokyo subway stops and teaching English as a second language, doing a thorough job of not thinking about what was happening.
Losing the house proved to be a crisp dividing line. My parents’ life ever after was shrunken and hollowed-out compared with the razzmatazz of the family Tony had led through my childhood.
Disappointment. That was what colored my adult relationship with my father. Wicked, stinging disappointment. But not about him losing the house.
Or no. Something stronger. Betrayal. A feeling of having been strung along.
Because he quit. It was amazing to realize, as I paced the hospital halls, that he was only in his mid-forties when he lost the house and filed for bankruptcy. Still young, able to bounce back. But he collapsed inside himself, became lost in guilt and remorse and failure. When I went home over school breaks, to spend a few hasty days in their rental house, I couldn’t look at him. My mother eventually found work—as a bank teller, then selling real estate—to make ends meet. Eventually he slipped into the guise of a semi-functioning adult, getting work flogging life insurance. But his heart wasn’t in it. He wallowed for decades. Over time he became a font of a different kind of wisdom, which came from the AA meetings he now attended religiously. Humility and forgiveness. Those became his bywords. He was very big on forgiveness. I assumed it was meant reflexively: it was what he craved.
I never gave it to him. I couldn’t have cared less about losing the house. As he himself had taught me, things like that might well happen when you took risks. It was the other thing I couldn’t forgive him for: setting me up. Because, without my quite being conscious of it, I had drunk the Kool-Aid. A winner never quits. Except he quit and stayed quit. At the very moment I was heading out the door, ready to take the directive that had been hammered into me through my childhood and begin applying it in my own struggles with the world, he reversed course. He left me standing there. He conned me.
The balance of his life spooled slowly out. AA meetings, bowing out of visits with old friends. Altering his personality: becoming a bit of a clown, endlessly repeating the same silly jokes. Sitting at home with the television, the volume set to drown out conversation and reflection.
I wasn’t conscious of the con at the time, let alone of how I had internalized it. I never had it out with him. Had I been able to do so, maybe I could have been close to him. Instead, in terms of our relationship throughout my adulthood, I opted for pleasantness, a lack of friction. I established my distance, set up the perimeters, and patrolled them. Sitting there, looking out from the fifth-floor hospital window onto the remains of the once-mighty little city where we were both born, I realized that this whole business between us—my feeling burned by my father’s failure to live up to the “wisdom” he had instilled in me, my taking it out on him, on both of us—had been working its way into my consciousness over these last four years, when we spent so much time together, digging at the roots of our family tree. While we were looking for Russ, trying, as far as my dad’s psyche would allow, to piece together his relationship with his father, I was engaged in the same thing, working at the knot that had lodged between the two of us. But I never brought that awareness to the surface. I didn’t broach the subject with him.
It occurred to me that my sisters might not have heard the elopement story. I started telling it—Tony and Rita dashing off down South in a loaner car, with Tony’s infamous pal Rip as their wingman. I could tell he was following along so I kept going, adding whatever details I could think of: Virginia Beach, the sea air, getting hitched. The justice of the peace had been a man named Harry Umphlet. “You and mom laughed at that name, right?” Tony nodded. He was enjoying this, it seemed.
“And then you called your parents and told them you had gotten married.”
Nod.
Something occurred to me, something I hadn’t asked before. “Did you tell your parents that Mom was pregnant, that that was why you’d run off?”
He gave a very vigorous shake of the head. No way.
So there. Breaking news. We were still at it, still mining the past. Doing history.
A WHILE LATER, I was alone with him. He was quiet and so was I. I was thinking about how we were very different, he and I, but at the same time we had so much in common. Including the fact that we had each spent our adult lives blaming our fathers.
But even as I thought that—there, in that ugly room, with the soulless beeping of the machines and the fluorescently sad lighting—I realized it wasn’t true. I suddenly found that I now believed something he had been telling me for years, which I had insisted on rejecting: that he didn’t blame his father. He’d overcome that, long ago. Wasn’t that part of the AA motto, which he quoted with regularity: … grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change …?
We had spent more time together in these years than at any period since my childhood, but, as meaningful as it had been for both of us, I had continued to dismiss his pat philosophizing. I believed it to be a variety of laziness. The aphorisms, I felt, were a way of short-circuiting hard work, jumping right to the payoff. Whatever the situation, whatever stage I was at in life, he always had his selection of pablum on offer. My irritation was decades-old, knee-jerk.
And, suddenly, it didn’t exist. Acceptance. Simply that. The serenity to accept. It spread through me as I watched him lying there, helplessly intubated—horrible word—as he alternated between periods of calm and wracking pain. Maybe it is so commonplace a thing as to be not worth noting: when you are losing someone, you are flooded with an appreciation of what you took for granted. But it didn’t feel commonplace. It felt true and solid and important.
And just like that, over the course of a long second or two, like that footage on TV of an iceberg shelf that has been quietly melting for years suddenly collapsing into the sea, I felt the absurd mass of expectation and disappointment I had been holding on to for so long simply give way. I allowed him to be the person he had been all the time. I became quietly but intensely aware of what suddenly seemed a mind-numbingly obvious realization: that he had dealt with the seriously dysfunctional family of his childhood by injecting an effervescent energy into the family that he and my mother reared. We weren’t the scarred victims of his troubled past but rather the beneficiaries of it. And not only that. Those things he said, the cheap paperback wisdom, all those trite sayings: they were true. I had clung to some petty wish that he would express himself more loftily, or with more nuance. It used to piss me off that he didn’t have the patience for nuance. I thought that that meant he was wrong—that he had, I don’t know, skipped over genuine understanding. What bullshit. This man had lived a real life. He had done precisely what he could with what he had been given. And he was entitled to derive the insight out of it that he had distilled.
I started jabbering. Holding his hand, I said every damn thing I could think of, the cheesier the better. I’m here with you. Thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for the bright and bold ride you took us on. Thank you for suddenly upping stakes when I was eight years old and moving us to California for a year, which happened to overlap with the Summer of Love. Thank you for making us eat pasta sauce with snails.
And, yes, OK: thank you for telling me that you forgave Russ, for saying that the poor guy (your expression) had a heavy bag of rocks to carry around (your expression) and that you forgave him for the pain he inflicted on seemingly a whole village worth of people. For concluding that the psychic wreckage he had dealt out had been coiled up in him by circumstances. And for apparently believing that this awareness on your part somehow absolved him. I don’t agree with you on that, but thank you for believing it. Thank you for taking the work we did together to heart—not for your own sake, because it wasn’t something you needed, but because you realized I did. Thank you for showing me how to do history, which, it suddenly occurs to me, is nothing if it doesn’t involve a consideration of how human beings try to balance their inevitable failures and stay afloat amid currents that are destined to sink them.
THE TIMING MY dad selected for his death meant that his funeral ended up being a bit of a reunion of all the people I’d been spending time with these past few years—or those who were left, anyway. All the cousins and siblings and children were there at the funeral home, of course. The Panera Bread guys hung out together near the back, commenting on who came and went like a Greek chorus. As we filed up to the coffin, I held the hand of my nine-year-old son, Anthony, and heard him whisper a sobbing farewell to his namesake using his term for his grandfather: “I love you, Tap-tap.” Maybe all Italian funeral homes end the viewing by pumping Sinatra’s “My Way” through the sound system; maybe we should have expected it. But it hit us with the force of Grade-A schmaltz. The cheesy stuff is real.
Afterward, there was a luncheon at the country club. One by one, people stood up and told stories about Tony. Knowing chuckles skittered around the room, occasionally expanding into full laughter.
Suddenly I wanted something. I went over to Frank Filia and asked if maybe he would like to sing a song. “Ah, Russell, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t do a cappella.”
I surprised myself: “Please, Frank.”
“I’m sorry.”
I sat down. Some more stories, more gentle laughs. Then Frank shuffled over, stood behind me, his hand on my shoulder. Everybody fell silent.
Sky, so vast is the sky, with faraway clouds just wandering by …
Almost in a whisper, he gave us the song he’d sung a while back at the Holiday Inn—Tony’s favorite, the moody, brooding, impressionistic melody that my dad, channeling Sinatra, would intone for my mother in the car when they took their backseat full of small children for a Sunday drive. A song about wind and trees and sky and clouds. A meditation on being human, on having a heart that longs for individual meaning in the midst of nature’s imponderable vastness. A song that ached of love and impermanence.
Frank looked around the room as he finished and saw what he had done. It was a love song, but everyone was in tears. And just like that he switched gears, broke into “C’è la Luna Mezz’o Mare,” the song Italian Americans sing at weddings, with a bouncing beat that pretty much compels you to clap along idiotically, makes you feel like you’re a peasant on some vine-covered hillside. Everyone knew it, everyone sang, though I don’t think many knew the meaning of the words—which are about a girl who has to marry but isn’t sure which suitor to take, so she asks her mother to choose for her. The chorus cycles between the different options, which all end up being the same: marry the shoemaker and he’ll hammer you, marry the farmer and he’ll plow you, marry the butcher and he’ll “sausage” you.
Frank was a pro. At the end everyone was laughing, exhaling, letting go of something.
AFTER THE CARS ha
d wound up the hill to the east of Johnstown and followed the hearse into St. Anthony’s Cemetery, we stood under a tent to listen while the priest intoned a few words. Then the funeral director explained why we were not actually gathered at the gravesite but a hundred yards from it. It seemed that when they started to dig they encountered an enormous boulder, which would take considerable time to remove. People chuckled: Tony was known for his stubbornness. He would have enjoyed the metaphor.
The family members walked over to the burial spot. We stared into the pit the diggers had begun. We held hands. This was where he would be. I turned to my right, attracted by something. The anomaly that had caught my eye was an object that should have been a gravestone but instead was a metal spike sticking out of the ground. It was a placeholder. Apparently when someone dies and is buried, you have to let time go by, a year or two, to let the ground settle, before installing a permanent stone. There was a card attached to it. I read it.
Michael Gulino. That was the name on the card that marked the burial spot right beside my father. I looked at it again. There was a little picture of Mike on it, too, taken maybe ten years before I’d met him.
I looked up, let my eyes sweep over the rolling acreage that the cemetery occupied. The gravestones went on and on, a somber, tasteful, unmoving parade. It was beyond logic to think that the placement was coincidental. Yes, this was the Italian cemetery in town. But there were more than four thousand gravestones, well over ten thousand people buried here.
The answer to the riddle of the placement of the two graves, or part of the answer anyway, would seem to have been right in front of me. Carved into a charcoal-colored stone in the row behind Tony and Mike were the names of Russell and Mary. I had not been so thorough in my questioning of Mike as to ask whether his close relationship with my grandfather carried as far as his final resting place. I would never know the details of the arrangement Russ made with his protégé, whether he had given or sold Mike a portion of the burial plot that had come into his possession.
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