around with other boys. That was more than a lot of men on the ship could say about their wives.”
Then there was the kamikaze attack, and Frank was burned over 60 percent of his body. (For all his talk of how other guys on his ship had been just as badly injured as him, the truth is that nobody else with burns as severe as Frank’s had ended up surviving. People didn’t survive burns over 60 percent of their bodies back then, Angela—but your father did.) Then there were the long months of torturous recovery at the naval hospital. When Frank finally came home, it was 1946. He was a changed man. A broken man. You were now four years old, and you didn’t know him except from a photo. He told me that when he met you again after all those years, you were so pretty and bright and kind that he could not believe you belonged to him. He could not believe that anything associated with him could be as pure as you. But you were also a little bit afraid of him. Not nearly so afraid, though, as he was of you.
His wife also felt like a stranger. Over those missing years, Rosella had transformed from a pretty young girl to a matron—heavyset and serious, dressed always in black. She was the sort of woman who went to Mass every morning, and prayed to her saints all day long. She wanted to have more children. But of course that was now impossible, because Frank could not bear to be touched.
That night as we walked all the way to Brooklyn, Frank told me, “After the war, I started sleeping in a cot out in the shed behind our house. Made a room for myself there, with a coal stove. I’ve been sleeping there for years. It’s better that way. I don’t keep anyone awake with my strange hours. Sometimes I wake up screaming, that sort of thing. My wife and kid, they didn’t need to be hearing that. For me, with sleeping, the whole procedure is a disaster. Better that I do it alone.”
He respected your mother, Angela. I want you to know that.
He never once said a bad word about her. On the contrary—he approved entirely of the way she raised you, and he admired her stoicism in the face of her life’s many disappointments. They never bickered. They were never at each other’s throats. But after the war, they barely ever spoke other than to make arrangements about the family. He deferred to her on all matters, and turned over his paychecks to her without question. She had taken over management of her parents’ greengrocer business, and had inherited the building that housed the shop. She was a good businesswoman, he said. He was happy that you, Angela, had grown up in the store, chatting with everyone. (“The light of the neighborhood,” he called you.) He was always eyeing you for signs that you, too, might someday be an oddball recluse (which is how he saw himself), but you seemed normal and social. Anyway, Frank trusted your mother’s choices around you completely. But he was always at work on patrol, or walking the city at night. Rosella was always working at the greengrocer, or taking care of you. They were married in name only.
At one point, he told me, he had offered her a divorce, so she might have the chance to find a more suitable man. With his inability to uphold his duties of marital consortium and companionship, he felt certain they could secure an annulment. She was still young. With another man, she might still have the big family she had always wanted. But even if the Catholic Church had allowed her to divorce, Rosella would never have gone ahead with it.
“She’s more church than the Church itself,” he said. “She’s not the kind of person who would ever break a vow. And nobody in our neighborhood gets divorced, Vivian, even if things are bad. And with me and Rosella—things were never bad. We just lived separate lives. What you gotta understand about South Brooklyn, is that the neighborhood itself is a family. You can’t break up that family. Really, my wife is married to the neighborhood. It was the neighborhood who took care of her while I was in the service. The neighborhood still takes care of her now—and Angela, too.”