Then the bus turned down an alley alongside the church and pulled up behind it. To our right were picnic tables shaded by trees with shiny green spring leaves. Birds sang from their branches. To our left was the rear entrance of the church. No security back here.
We piled off, and I was surprised to see John’s son and his girlfriend get out of a car and hurry over to us. They hugged us both hello, and I introduced them to Isabella. Nick and Nina fell into step beside us, gushing with excitement about watching the filming, meeting the cast, the whole nine yards. And John was obviously delighted that they’d made it.
As we approached the rear entrance, a tall, gray-haired priest moved toward us, and for a moment, I thought that I was hallucinating, that he wasn’t real. Then he stopped in front of us and said, “Samantha!”
“Father Rinaldi?” I whispered. “Oh, my God . . .”
He laughed and hugged me hello, and waves of emotion crashed over me. I nearly cried. “But how . . .”
“It’s still my church. When the producers requested permission to film here, the bishop told me about it, and as soon as I heard it was Brooklyn Story, I knew I had to be here.”
I quickly introduced him to Isabella and John and the others, and for a few minutes we all stood out there in the warm light, talking. Then he drew me aside. “I just want to reassure you, Sam, that there won’t be any reprisals from the old Brooklyn Boys against you because of the movie. The word in the neighborhood is that everyone is thrilled they’re going to hit the big screen. Most of them have read your novels, too. So don’t ever hesitate to admit the story is true.”
“Of all the things you might have said to me, Father Rinaldi, this is the best.”
“Good.” He slipped his arm through mine, and we walked to the door. De Niro stood just inside the door, decked out like Father Rinaldi, and ushered us all into the church. “So Father Rinaldi,” De Niro said. “Do I pass the muster?”
Rinaldi laughed. “Absolutely.”
When De Niro saw Isabella, he held out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Isabella. You’re the spitting image of your mother.”
“Wow, thank you, Mr. De Niro. And you’re a convincing-looking priest!” She whipped out her phone. “May I take a photo of the two of us together?”
“Definitely.”
He slipped his arm around her, and Isabella held her camera out in front of her and snapped three pictures. “Do you, uh, mind if I put them on Facebook?”
“Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—do the whole thing. And text them to Brian, okay? He has my number. We’ll use them to advertise the film.”
They laughed and high-fived each other, and we moved on into the church. Habit prompted me to dip my fingers into the bowl of holy water. I blessed myself, then continued deeper into the church.
The crew began setting up their equipment, and Father Rinaldi, Isabella, Liza, and I slid into the last pew, where I had often sat during my visits to the church. One of the scenes that would be shot today was when Rinaldi and I had sat in that very pew and he had asked me how my writing was going. I could remember the conversation so clearly—and not because I’d just looked at the dialogue in the script. I could remember the aroma of Rinaldi’s aftershave, the way he combed his hair, the intensity in his eyes, and the tone of his voice. This man was like the faith I never had. He was a rock for me.
So, you have a new boyfriend, he’d said that day.
It hadn’t been a question. Rinaldi had known everyone and everything in our corner of Bensonhurst. He would have been in the mob if he hadn’t become a priest, I was sure of that much. I wondered how some men ended up on Tony’s path and how others, like Rinaldi, ended up on a spiritual path.
Tony, I had told him.
That strapping young blond man.
Yes!
The same young man who cuffed a boy at Outer Skates yesterday?
Yes. And I remembered the sinking feeling in my stomach that Rinaldi even knew about that. I knew how the incident looked to the priest, how it colored his opinion of Tony.
And that’s the type of person you should be with, child?
He’s just like everybody else, Father. Only different, too, you’ll see.
I tapped Rinaldi’s arm. “Do you remember that day as clearly as I do? When we sat here and you asked how my writing was going?”
“Of course I do.”
“Your encouragement meant a lot to me, Father Rinaldi.”
Thinking back about that conversation now, hearing it in my head, I was struck mostly by my own naïveté, my youthful hope that Tony Kroon spelled true love. Had I really been that brainwashed by my life in Brooklyn, by such a gross lack of expectation? This lack of expectation probably had been the very impetus I had needed to write myself out of Brooklyn.
I see a lot. And I hear even more. I don’t like a lot of what I hear. I don’t want you to get hurt.
I won’t, Father.
I have faith in you, child. And he had glanced toward the statue of Mary at the front of the church. And I have faith that our Blessed Mother will watch over you. The moment he’d uttered those words, I knew he sensed my own connection to the Blessed Mother.
As it turned out, Rinaldi had been right about Tony Kroon. He had known what kind of shit Tony was. He had known and tried to warn me. But I was driven by hormones, a need to be loved, to be accepted, and to belong somewhere, anywhere.
I often wondered how my life would be different if I’d never met Tony, what unimagined paths I might have taken. For that matter, what path might things have taken if I’d never met Alec? Would I have had Isabella with another man? Was the soul bond between a mother and her child so powerful that she would have come to me regardless of who her father was?
These questions were the kind I had asked for as long as I can remember, in the privacy of my own mind. These inner dialogues had fueled my imagination as a writer and enabled me to at least articulate what I was feeling and to get it down on paper. I had kept voluminous journals over the year and still had them.
Some people carted furniture around with them from place to place, or photo albums or their favorite shoes. But my personal history was in those journals, and maybe someday in the distant future, when I was very old and looking back over my life, those journals would help me recall some detail that age had stolen from me. Or perhaps they would sustain me in some other way. One of my future projects was to have the journals turned into computer files so they could never be lost, so I wouldn’t have to worry about the paper turning yellow.
As the shooting began, John, Nick, and Nina joined us in the pew, and we all sat spellbound, watching Jenean and De Niro doing their thing. They were both masterly actors. She had captured my younger self so perfectly, it was as if she had zipped herself up inside my skin and bones. She even talked like I did, fast, and had my hand gestures down pat. She moved as I did, flicked her hair with her hand the way I did. Spooky.
Just as it had been disturbing to see her playing those scenes with my mother and Grandma Ruth, it was now eerie to watch her play my younger self, that self who had been so conflicted about everything and so deeply insecure. Jenean had captured that insecurity in her expressions, her eyes, in the tone of her voice, in her very presence.
Just as De Niro/Rinaldi was telling the younger Sam that he didn’t like what he’d heard about Tony Kroon, the rear door of the church suddenly exploded open. A thin, haggard man with a scraggly beard and soiled clothes stumbled inside, shouting, “I’m her father, I have every right to be in here, I’m her fuckin’ father.”
What the hell. Vito? Here? Now? How? What hole had he crawled out of ? How had he known where to find me?
Since no one knew if Vito was armed, and because he sounded as if he’d just escaped a nuthouse, bedlam erupted inside the church—people shouting, four cops racing in after Vito, more security personnel p
ouring in behind them. Vito was a wild man, a madman, waving his skinny little arms, yelling—just as Paul had yelled during that terrible scene in front of Blu Jam. Cameramen and other members of the crew scrambled to get out of Vito’s way.
I was so shocked that I was paralyzed, incapable of movement, barely breathing, while everyone else around me shot to their feet, dived for cover, got out of the way. Vito moved like the wind, and kept shouting and waving his arms, wild with rage, hatred, ferocity. It was like a scene from a nightmare, one of those horrid dreams from which you suddenly awaken, covered in sweat, your heart hammering, its vividness so real that you’re sure the dream has followed you into waking life.
He got halfway up the aisle before one of the cops tackled him, and they both crashed to the floor, Vito shrieking, kicking, biting. It took three cops to hold him down, while a fourth cop cuffed him.
“You broke my hand, you bastards,” he shrieked.
My paralysis shattered. I shot to my feet and moved toward him, my father, Isabella’s grandfather. Waves of revulsion swept through me. I was mortified and ashamed that my daughter now knew the truth, that the crazy, scrawny man who had confronted her all those weeks ago at her school was here now, screaming the same thing he had then. I couldn’t wrench my eyes away from him.
And then Vito spotted me, saw me walking toward him, rapidly. “Bitch, you bitch! Tell them who I am! Tell them the truth!”
Seeing me seemed to infuse him with adrenaline, and he somehow managed to break away from the cops and stumble toward me, his hands cuffed behind him so that he moved awkwardly, like some grotesque, mutant spider scrambling toward its prey. His shouts echoed in the cavernous church, bounced off the walls and between the stained-glass windows, between the towering statues of the Blessed Mother and Christ, from one station of the cross to another, from one confessional to the next. A travesty. A sacrilege.
It infuriated me that he had burst into a place of worship and into this sacrosanct bastion of peace and harmony from my childhood. This church was one of the few places in my childhood where I’d felt safe. And then he stopped, and I stopped; we were only a yard apart.
“Tell ’em, Sam!” he shrieked. “Tell ’em who I am!”
I was aware of Vito’s erratic, ragged breathing, of the cops shouting, of people still scrambling to get out of the crazy man’s way. Tears flooded my eyes. Everything around me faded into a blur. The only thing that existed was Vito’s tragic, haunted face—the rheumy eyes, the unshaven jaw, the flaring of his nostrils, the spittle caught in a corner of his mouth.
“Tell them, Sam, tell them who I am,” he shouted again.
His words echoed inside my skull.
Tell them!
The world screeched into a slow-motion nightmare, my eyes bored into his. His nostrils flared again. One of his legs shot out and narrowly missed kicking me in the stomach. Then two cops tackled him again, and the three of them fell into one of the pews, Vito still shrieking and screaming, kicking and biting like a rabid dog. His face burned as red as a radish, the tendons in his neck stood out like cords of rope, his eyes bulged in their sockets. I knew this image of Vito would stick with me for the rest of my life.
The cops finally restrained Vito once more and jerked him to his feet. They pushed him out of the pew, into the aisle where I was standing.
“Tell them who I am,” he hissed, blood blooming in a corner of his mouth and streaming from a gash over his left eye. “I’m your father, admit it, say it, tell them, tell them. . . .”
His words throbbed in my ears. Why was it so important to him that I tell anyone who he was? Was it public recognition that he craved? A public acknowledgment? What the hell did he want from me?
I let him have it. I said it exactly as I saw it. “You’re not my father. You’re the man who slammed a car jack across my mother’s pregnant belly, who used to beat her senseless, who abandoned his family, who left us so poor we went on public assistance. Because of you, we needed food stamps to eat. Because of you, my mother drank herself into a stupor every night. Because of you, all of us were damaged. That’s who you are. That’s the only thing you are. That’s the only thing you ever were and the only thing you ever will be.”
I took great satisfaction in the fact that he was shocked into muteness, that his haunted eyes looked as though they would pop out of their sockets, that his mouth fell open. In the silence, in the utter, fragile silence that spread throughout the church, his gasp sounded preternaturally loud. I knew he never expected me to say what I’d said, to reveal the truth about what kind of man he was, to expose him in such a public way. Never mind that he had burst in here to demand that I acknowledge him. Never mind that he probably had expected me to fall to my knees in front of him, sobbing with gratitude that he’d found me, that he’d entered my life again.
What total bullshit, Vito.
Then I swept past him and headed for the nearest door.
• • •
The instant I stepped into the deserted alley, I burst into tears and covered my face with my hands. Now everyone knew the truth. Everyone—even Isabella—whom I had tried so hard to protect from him, from his toxic being.
A part of me desperately yearned to feel compassion for Vito. I wanted to go back inside the church and put my arms around him and pat him on the back as though he were a small child in need of comfort.
But how do you forgive the unforgivable?
Forgiveness was a spiritual practice advocated and taught by Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and many other spiritual teachers. Years ago, Priti had told me a Tibetan Buddhist story that came to mind now about two Buddhist priests who ran into each other some years after they’d both been released from prison, where they had been ruthlessly tortured by their captors.
The first monk asked the other monk: “Have you forgiven them yet?”
The second monk drew back in horror. “Never! I’ll never forgive them!”
And the first monk remarked, “Well, I guess they still have you in prison, don’t they?”
I was like that second monk. I had never forgiven Vito, Tony, Alec, or even my mother. Not really. I liked to believe I had, but deep down, the core of resentment had remained for all these years, festering, flaring up, maintaining the endless internal loop, the pattern, the vibe that ultimately had attracted Paul.
After Alec’s death and the insurance money that had enabled Isabella and me to move to Malibu, it was as if God, the universe, some greater force, had tossed one more challenge my way. Paul. Let’s see how you deal with this. And as long as it kept happening, it meant the pattern hadn’t been broken.
In a sense, Paul was the embodiment of Vito, Tony, Alec. He was the darkest embodiment of their collective soul.
Even though I couldn’t bring myself to run after the cops and forgive Vito to his face, I whispered, “I forgive you, Vito. I forgive you.”
If words have power, then these words would ripple through the invisible net that Priti believed connected us all and he would feel them, wouldn’t he? He would understand, wouldn’t he? He would change, right?
That wasn’t the point. I couldn’t change Vito. My forgiveness couldn’t change him. He had to forgive himself, just as I did.
The door behind me opened and whispered shut, and my daughter’s arms reached around me, holding me tightly. We stood there like that for several long moments, until the rhythms of our breathing became one. Then she pulled back and looked up at me with those wide, beautiful eyes, her father’s eyes. “I understand,” she whispered. “I understand why you didn’t tell me the truth that day.”
I hugged her, kissed the top of her head, and inhaled the scent of her hair, her youth, the tangible reality of my daughter, the greatest gift of my life. “I . . . I just couldn’t allow him to poison your life the way he did mine. Some people are just so consumed with rage, it takes over their lives
. That’s how I think it is for him, love.”
And for Paul.
“I know, Mom, I understand.” She stepped back, wiped at my tears with her hand. “They took him away, and he shrieked and fought them the entire time. The whole thing was pretty sad.”
Sad, pathetic, tragic. But not for Isabella or for me.
“Have they started filming again?”
“In a few minutes.”
The door opened once more, and John and Liza came out, their expressions concerned, worried. “You okay?” John slipped his arm around me.
“Yes.” Not maybe, but a resounding yes.
“And here we thought Paul was going to show up,” Liza remarked.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” John said. “You prepare for one thing and something else happens.”
“Life,” Liza remarked. “You can’t anticipate everything. You can try, but the best-laid plans and so on . . . We’re just glad you’re okay.”
“We should have had security at the rear of the church,” John said, as if thinking aloud. “I’m not sure why we all overlooked that.”
“Who would think that a madman would come through the back door of the church?” Liza asked, then touched my arm. “Let’s take a walk. “It’s a gorgeous day. We could use some fresh air.”
“You two go on,” Isabella said. “I’d like to watch the rest of the filming.”
John leaned forward, kissed me quickly. “Isabella and I will save your seats.”
As they turned away to go back inside, I heard Isabella say, “So you like my mom, huh?”
John glanced back at me and winked. “I’m crazy about her.”
“She’s a great person, you know.”
“So are you,” John said.
“I hear you’re pretty awesome, too.”
He laughed. “Well, that’s good to know.”
Hello Hollywood Page 22
