was probably in Arizona, or else living in seclusion with friends. And his eighteen-year-old brother, Joseph Jr., was a student at Phoenix College. Knowing Joseph, he doubted that he was attending classes very often. Joseph was the wild one of the family, a drag racer, a bronco rider, a nonconformist who was so thoroughly undisciplined that he could never become a member of the organization, Bill Bonanno felt sure. The elder Bonanno had been on the run during much of his younger son’s adolescence, dodging the Kefauver committee or the McClellan committee or some other investigation or threat; and Joseph Jr. had been left under the supervision of his mother, who could not control him. In any case, Joseph Jr. was now in Phoenix, and Rosalie was in Long Island, and Bill Bonanno only hoped that she could manage things alone and not crack under the continued pressure that she had been forced to face in recent years.
He knew that Rosalie would probably be surprised if she knew his thoughts at this moment, having heard her accuse him so often of caring only about “those men” and never about her. But he was sincerely concerned about her, and was also aware of a certain guilt within himself which would be hard to admit, at least to a wife. That he loved her he had no doubt, but the responsibilities that he felt toward his father’s world, and all that had happened to him because of it, had destroyed a part of him, perhaps the better part. He knew that he could not justify much of what he had done with regard to Rosalie since their marriage, nor would he try. To himself he saw it all as a temporary escape from the tight terrifying world that he had inherited, an indulgence to his restlessness between the brief moments of action and interminable hours of boredom, the months of waiting and hiding and the machinations attached to the most routine act, like making a telephone call or answering a doorbell—in such a strange and excruciating world, he had done some damnable things, but now he could only hope that his wife would concentrate on the present, forgetting the past temporarily. He hoped that she would run the home efficiently, borrowing money from her relatives if necessary, and not become overly embarrassed by what she read in the newspapers, saw on television, or heard in the street. This was asking a lot, he knew, particularly since she had not been prepared as a girl for the life she was now leading. He remembered her description of how her family had sought to protect her from reality and of how accustomed she had become as a girl to finding holes in the newspapers around the house, sections cut out where there had been photographs or articles dealing with the activities of the Profaci organization.
His homelife as a boy had been different. His father had never seemed defensive about any aspect of his life, seeming only proud and self-assured. The elder Bonanno had somehow suggested the nature of his life so gradually and casually, at least to Bill, that the ultimate realization of it was neither shocking nor disillusioning. As a boy Bonanno had noticed his father’s rather odd working hours. His father seemed either to be home all day and out at night or to be at home constantly for weeks and then gone for weeks. It was very irregular, unlike the routines of the fathers of the boys Bill had first gone to school with in Long Island. But he was also aware that his father was a busy man, involved in many things, and at first this awareness satisfied his curiosity about his father and seemed to explain why his father kept a private office in the house.
During this period of Bill Bonanno’s life, in the 1940s, his father had a cheese factory in Wisconsin, coat factories and a laundry in Brooklyn, and a dairy farm in Middletown, New York, on which were forty head of cattle and two horses, one named after Bill and the other after Catherine. The family’s home was in Hempstead, Long Island, a spacious two-story red brick Tudor-style house with lovely trees and a garden, not far from East Meadow, where Rosalie and Bill now lived. The family moved to Hempstead from Brooklyn in 1938, and Bill attended school in Long Island for four years, until a serious ear infection, a mastoid condition that required operations,