by Jim Sano
David sat back with his palms flat down on the seat shaking his head. “Angelo, I want to believe everything you just told me, but if that were all true, why didn’t he contact me over all this time?”
Angelo finished his beer in one gulp, stood up, and said to David, “Come with me.”
David and Tom glanced at each other in puzzlement and got up to follow Angelo back to St. Anthony’s, where he led them to his modest quarters. Inside the small room, David saw a cot, a chair, some tools Angelo was working on, a bureau and a small desk. Angelo was down on his knees pulling out two white boxes that looked like they once held work boots and put them on the bed. “Open the lid.”
David opened the lid and saw what appeared to be thousands of neatly filed small envelopes. David’s eyes squinted slightly as he reached in to pull one of the envelopes out: Mr. David John Fidele, 16 Lewis St. Apt 3, Boston MA, 02113. Below the 8 cent Eisenhower stamp were the large red words: “Return to Sender. No forwarding address.” David stood paralyzed as he held the very thing he had always hoped for, a letter to him from his father. Angelo put the lids back on the boxes, picked them up, and placed them in David’s hands, saying, “Take them home, David. They are yours.”
When David returned home, he laid the boxes full of letters on the coffee table in front of his leather chair. Trooper sat down next to the chair, encouraging David to sit beside him. David lifted the top of one of the boxes of neatly organized letters to his mother, Bobby, Abbie and him. All were unopened and returned, never reaching their destination, yet his dad kept writing. David opened some of the letters to his mom, letters from a man who was still in love with his bride. He apologized for the pain she must be going through and for not doing enough to follow his instincts to protect Jimmy. David finally sat down with the first letter, taking his time to open it and unfold the thin paper his father had written on thirty-one years earlier.
Dearest David,
You are much too young to make any sense of what has happened. I know that you loved your brother Jimmy and will miss him tremendously. Please know that he is safe, loved, and not in any pain right now in heaven or on his way there. That may not take away the pain you are feeling right now, but it might help as time goes by. Also, please know in your heart that much of what you might hear about what happened is not going to be true. I would never hurt your brother or anyone in the family. It will be hard, but it is important that you trust that I love your mom, Jimmy, Bobby, Abbie and especially you.
I don’t know how long it will take but I will see you again. In the meantime, try to be strong and believe that you are loved and that I’m very proud of you. Also, believe that God loves you no matter what and you can always ask him for help with anything at any time. I will try to write to you often and hope you can write to me as well. Please tell your mom, brother, and sister that I love them too. I miss you, David, but trust that I will see you again.
Much Love,
Dad
David wept.
He couldn’t remember crying like this since he was a boy, but the events of the last several weeks had touched a place deep inside of him. To David, crying had seemed like a weakness, not something a man should do. But thinking of his father physically writing this letter to him reached right through the walls he worked so hard to build. There were so many letters. David felt ashamed that his father had never given up on him while he had lost trust in him so easily. Not only had he lost trust in his dad, but he even came to feel hate and indifference as he grew up and charted his own controlled path in life.
David stayed up the entire evening reading one letter after another. It was as if Gianni had tried to be the father and role model he was meant to be through his writing since he could not be there in person. He would write about things he wanted David to know as he grew up to see how wonderfully made he was, to enjoy the wonder of the world, to be a young man he’d be proud of, and to practice virtues. David’s dad also gave him pointers on how to build confidence in himself, how to stand when hitting a baseball or shooting a basketball and recommended great books to read for his age. He even drew pictures to illustrate his messages. In some letters, he told jokes or included riddles to solve, but most of all, he let David know that he was always thinking of him and would always love him. As the weeks approached the date for Gianni’s scheduled execution, the letters to David’s mom got more emotional, describing an intense fear paralleled with a sense of peace that God would take care of him.
David sobbed uncontrollably. For the first time in his life, he felt a bond with his dad as a human being with feelings of happiness and joy, but also fear and anxiety. His chest shook as he tried to catch his breath. He felt himself wanting to cry out for his father as if he could hear him through all the years.
As years of letters went by, David’s dad tried to teach him about how important his faith would be throughout his life, how much God truly loved him and had a plan for him. He taught him about being a man of honesty, courage, fortitude, love, joy, faith, and family. Each letter felt as if it were written in love and would touch on one or two points to let it sink in. David could tell from his father’s letters how much he missed each one of them, and how often he thought of them and prayed for them—and despite the returns, he never stopped writing.
His dad wrote about the man who shared his cell. The relationship was difficult and rocky in the beginning as his dad tried to forge a friendship with a hardened criminal. Angelo Salvato was a thief from an early age, growing up in a loveless family. He lost his dad early in life and tried to fend for himself. He buried any sense of conscience he may have had and became an extremely skilled criminal, spending his time with other criminals. There was no love, no happiness, and no sense of direction in Angelo’s life, and as far as he knew, it was over when he began his forty-year sentence with someone who didn’t think as he did. Angelo was no longer feeling bitter, but feeling nothing at all, looking forward to nothing but existing each day. He wasn’t interested in hearing about anything that went beyond that reality. David was curious how this man his father described became the man that he shared a beer with at Dempsey’s.
Chapter 35
David was so engrossed with the letters, the night passed into the morning without sleep. On the way to work, his thoughts volleyed back and forth from the good news that his dad was alive and innocent to the old familiar feeling of hurt, betrayal, and wishing he hadn’t found out. Instead of not feeling much of anything, David felt overloaded with a battle of conflicted feelings and headed over to St. Anthony’s without realizing his change in direction. Tom was outside greeting people as they were entering the church for morning Mass. As Tom shook the hand of a man in a dark suit, he noticed David walking towards him and moved to greet him. “Hi, David. How are you after last night?”
“I stayed up all night reading letter after letter. I know I should be feeling incredibly happy right now, but instead, I’m feeling confused. I know this isn’t a good time.”
“I do need to say Mass in a few minutes, but I want to hear about your feelings. Try not to be hard on yourself. Remember that you just received shocking news. You’re probably still mentally processing it against a deeply felt experience as a boy that is completely different and the basis for everything you’ve believed to be true.”
“Thanks, Tom. I‘m a bit ashamed of how I feel and maybe even about who I am. I don’t know. If you have some time later, I’d appreciate an ear.”
“Any time after four is good for me, and David, I truly believe that things are going to be more than okay for you.”
David halfway smiled, thanked Tom, and headed towards work.
After a day in which David felt as if he was barely present, he told Izzie that he was leaving a bit early for an appointment. He walked into the empty driveway at St. Anthony’s and knocked on the door of the rectory, but there was no answer. David was a little early, so he walked around the building towards the garden and noticed the door was open to Angelo’s
small quarters. He peered in, knocked on the old wooden door, and Angelo appeared with a welcoming smile.
“David! I hope that I didn’t drop too much on you all at once last night. It’s good news, yes?”
“Don’t worry, Angelo. You’ve been a loyal friend to my father to do everything you have, and I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate it. I read the letters most of the night. It was quite an emotional ride. I do have a question for you, though, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“For Gianni’s son, I’d be happy to answer any question.”
Angelo sat on the edge of his bed as David took the only chair in the room. David scanned the simple quarters Angelo had been living in. He could understand, after living in a small, cold cell of cinder blocks and steel bars for thirty years it must have felt homier, regardless of how it compared to David’s high-end, spacious apartment. At the same time, it hit David that it may have felt lonely after sharing a space every day with his dad.
“So, tell me what you want to know.”
David took a deep breath. “As much as I’d like to know everything about my father, I did read something in one of the letters that made me curious about you. He described the man who first came to share his cell, but you seem to be a very different man from that man he described.”
Angelo sat forward and chuckled. “That’s because I am a very different man than that man. That man was self-made on the outside and empty on the inside, and far from the person he was created to be, far from his true authentic self, and mind you, still working on it.
“David, your dad is the best man I’ve ever met, but I didn’t like a thing about him when I first entered that cell. Despite his prison sentence, he was a good man who suffered a great injustice and never complained. I, on the other hand, had decided to be anything but a good man and cared about no one but myself. I was bitter, angry, and had a heart of stone. Your father never pushed but showed interest just beyond what I felt like sharing. At first, he would try to get me to talk about sports or some safe topic. Over time he realized that I was reconciled with the fact I was going to hell because Satan at least wanted me, and I was fairly certain that God didn’t. Now mind you, your father would read stories like the Iliad and the Odyssey, Lord of the Rings, Don Quixote, or poems by Elliot, Yeats, Poe, and Shakespeare. I’d never heard them before, and it would pass the time. When he began to understand my belief that Satan wanted me and cared more about me than God did, he got Dante’s Divine Comedy out of the library. He told me it was a story by an Italian writer whose true love had died. Your dad carefully read the opening line: ‘Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself, in dark woods, the right road lost.’”
“You see, your dad was smart,” Angelo said as he pointed to his head. “He knew it might strike a chord.”
David smiled as Angelo continued.
“Dante was taking a journey with the poet Virgil into the depths of hell to see sin for what it really was. Now, there were nine circles in the inferno, each tighter and narrower than the previous showing the narrowing of the soul that comes from sin and turning inwards with self-preoccupation. In the first circles, Dante was chased by three beasts, representing the sins of self-indulgence, like lust and gluttony. The circles moved then to greed, anger, heresy, and violence, and finally the sins of maliciousness such as fraud and betrayal being the worst. The punishments were not arbitrary cruelty but expressions of justice with each sinner experiencing the negatives that are natural results of the person’s dysfunctional behavior.
“What struck me was what sins were the gravest. Fraud, that violated the natural trust between people, and betrayal, which violates a special trust in a relationship where loyalty is critical. These last sins of betrayal act against the nature of love, God’s greatest gift to man, and they saw the worst sinners: Brutus, Cassius, and Judas. Finally, at the center, the narrowest part of the cone-shaped inferno, was Satan himself. I used to think he would be waiting there anxiously for me, but no! Instead, he was pathetically stuck in solid ice with huge wings that would take him nowhere as he was locked in the narrow confines of his own ego. I realized right then and there that he was completely indifferent and uninterested in me. I don’t know how your father knew that image would shake me to my core, but it did.”
David was thinking about the betrayal of trust in a close relationship being considered the worst of all sins, and how that might be why he struggled so much with his broken relationship with his father. That broken trust felt like a heavy door that shut him off from any relationships getting too intimate, too close to risk that pain again. Angelo asked, “Are you okay, David?”
David shook his head. “Oh, sure. You were saying that Dante escaped hell, which is a neat trick.”
“Your dad continued the story the next day when Dante and Virgil entered purgatory, where there was a seven-story mountain to climb with seven terraces representing the seven deadly sins.” Angelo rattled them off with the help of his fingers. “Pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. You see, pride is the worst and the basis for all other sins. Pride is distorted will and self-trust, putting yourself at the center instead of God. Pride prevents you from seeing that you have something to learn and that you don’t determine what’s true. When Dante came across the prideful penitents, he saw that they were carrying massive weights on their backs and were permanently hunched over, to bring them down to earth.”
Angelo waved a hand for emphasis. “Your father didn’t judge me. He helped me see my sin of pride. The opposite of pride is humility, and he showed me its strength by his example. Humility ended up not being the weakness I thought it was. He showed me that humility was not thinking less of yourself, but thinking less about yourself, recognizing your strengths and where they came from. The enemy of intelligence is failing to realize that you have more to know and pride had kept me from asking questions.
“Purgatory means hope because of God’s unceasing love and mercy. I just needed to see myself as I was and repent about where I had turned my back on Him. Sin had made me less, it made me blind, and it made me think of myself as less. Little by little your dad and I talked about truth, God, Christ, and love. The story ends as Dante finally reaches heaven, where he meets a woman he recognizes named Piccarda. She explains to Dante that the essence of heaven is to dwell in God’s holy will, ‘In his will is our peace.’ That line really hit me after I understood it. It took me a lot of years, but I’m no longer the man your father first described. I’m now or at least trying to be, the man God made me to be. I owe my life to your father, and that’s why I’d do anything for him or his family. Anything.”
David was genuinely moved by Angelo’s story, and despite normally being wary of fully trusting anyone, he completely believed every word Angelo spoke. Suddenly, David realized that a good deal of time had passed as it was getting darker outside Angelo’s window. He thanked Angelo for sharing his story and insights into his father.
Angelo unexpectedly stood up and hugged David. “I’m not much of a hugger, but I promised that one from your dad.”
David smiled unreservedly as he peered directly into Angelo's eyes, wondering if he was getting a tiny glimpse of his dad.
David made his way back to the rectory and found a note on the door that said Father Tom was in the church. David thought of just heading back to work or home, but at the end of the driveway, the doors were staring right at him. He slowly climbed the seven stairs and gently opened the large wooden door to the church. The inside was lit and seemed both magnificently beautiful and quietly peaceful. David walked up the side aisle looking at each station, the statues, and paintings of those that had dedicated or given their lives to the Church. When David reached the front of the tabernacle, he felt a tug to do something but continued to walk slowly across the altar as Tom came out from the sacristy.
“Ah, David, I thought you might’ve changed your mind. I’m glad that you came in.” He peered up at the strikingly beautiful ceilings
and across the church. “It’s nice this time of night, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. Sorry if I kept you waiting. I was talking with Angelo for a while. I think I’m getting to like him after all.”
Tom stepped down from the altar area to the pews where David was now standing and shook his hand. “How did you fare today?”
“I was okay. Just a little restless, I guess. My talk with Angelo made me feel a bit better.”
Tom gently squeezed his shoulder. “Well, that’s good to hear. I was thinking of you all day. I was actually praying for you much of the day.” David just rolled his eyes a little but didn’t protest.
Tom sat in the pew and David joined him.
“You said you were feeling a lot of conflicting emotions. How are you now?”
“Still confused. How can I find out my father is alive, that he’s actually innocent, but feel leery of seeing him and angry he is alive?”
Tom straightened out some hymnals in the bench before responding. “We started talking a bit about this earlier. You had no small traumatic event for a young boy, and most likely looked for ways to cope with the pain of incredible broken trust and feeling of abandonment. From what you told me, that abandonment wasn’t just physical but emotional from both your parents. Your mom was probably trying to cope herself and protect you and your siblings at the same time. My guess is that she truly believed letting you know he was alive would open up those painful wounds again. People find different ways to cope with fear and a sense of shame or self-worthlessness.”
He paused, and the quiet of the church settled around them. “I talk with many people who feel a deep sense of emptiness and anxiety they try to fill with socially approved venues like work, exercise, power, wealth, success, or popularity, others by addictions to drugs, alcohol, or sex, but they never cure the emptiness or soothe the anxiety for long. Avoidance tactics taken to protect oneself tend to amplify the conflict and negative emotions, so people look to soothe or escape themselves more. I don’t know if any of this applies to your situation, but it would be completely understandable with what you experienced.”
