An Invisible Thread (15 page)

My mother had no choice. She started the car, and, with the children screaming for Dad to come back, she drove away from him. Her first responsibility was to get us home safely. When we were far enough away from my father, she stopped the car, giving us all a chance to calm down. She assured us our father would be fine, and she said that once she dropped us off she’d go back and get him. She said she’d also call Uncle Sammy, his brother, to go look for him. This made us feel better, and we finally stopped crying as my mother, slowly and steadily, drove us home through the heavy snow. Still, I couldn’t help but worry about my father walking along the road. When we got home, my mother called Uncle Sammy, then set out to find my father. She told us to get in bed, but we were all too shaken to sleep. An hour passed, and finally I drifted off. I was awakened by the sound of my father coming into the house and
slamming the door. I listened closely, expecting my mother to come in and check on us, but all I heard was my father shuffling around a bit and then silence. It was another half hour before my mother came home. She had been out for over an hour in the heavy snow searching for my father with no luck. It turned out he had flagged a car and paid the driver fifty dollars to take him home. Fortunately, when my mother came in, she found him sound asleep in their bed. Had he been awake, our nightmare would have continued.

My mother came into our bedroom, and Annette and I comforted her, as we always did. We hugged her tightly and told her everything would be okay, just as she had told us many, many times. But of course I knew better, and my mother, six months pregnant with my father’s fifth child, knew better, too.

Once the floats had passed, we went inside and had our Thanksgiving turkey. Maurice loved squeezing around my small table with all of us, talking and laughing and eating. I noticed he ate slowly again, as if he didn’t want the meal to end. Even my father seemed to be having a good time. He drank a little, but not much, and his features never contorted into the dark scowl we knew so well. At the end of the night he shook Maurice’s hand and gave him a tender pat on the shoulder. It made me think about what a great father he sometimes was, and might have been, if only he had known how.

When my mother got really big and round, she checked into Huntington Hospital to have the baby. We sat at home waiting for any news. Finally, late that night, our father called: we had a new baby brother, Steven Jude Carino. He was a hefty little guy, my father said: eight pounds, nine ounces, twenty-one inches long. My father sounded nearly as excited as I was, and I took that to be a hopeful sign. I allowed myself to think an eight-pound, nine-ounce baby could somehow change my father once and for all.

When my mother was strong enough, she went right back to work as a waitress at the Hungtington Townhouse catering hall. We needed the money; my father’s construction business was gone and he was already on to some other venture. So my mother would leave us to watch the baby on Saturdays and work twelve-hour
shifts. Even with both of them working, money was usually tight. My father just wasn’t good with finances; sometimes, on a whim, he’d show up with an extra car, some used Cadillac he bought so he could fix it up. I knew it killed my mother when he threw money away like that, but I also knew she could never confront him about it. All she could do was hand over her checks and hope for the best.

One morning, my mother was supposed to take some of us to the dentist. She’d worked the day before and was exhausted, so she overslept and we missed the appointment. My father could have cared less if we went to the dentist or not; he left all those details to my mother. But, because he was badly hungover from a night of drinking, he used the missed appointment as an excuse to go after her. And this time, he really went crazy.

He started by cursing my mother and screaming at her in front of all of us. “You stupid woman!” My mother came into the bedroom I shared with Annette and got into bed with us, and my father followed her in. He kept yelling and cursing, spit flying out of his mouth. “How could you be so stupid?!” My mother pulled us closer to her and waited for it to pass.

But it didn’t. My father left the room and came back with two full liquor bottles. He threw them right over our heads, and they smashed against the wall. Liquor and glass rained down on us, and we pulled up the covers to shield ourselves. My father hurled the next bottle, and then went back for two more. They shattered just above our heads; the sound was sickening. My father kept screaming and ranting, worse than I’d ever heard him before. When he ran out of bottles, he went into the kitchen and overturned the table and smashed the chairs. Just then the phone rang, and my mother
rushed to get it. I heard her screaming to the caller to get help. My father grabbed the phone from her and ripped the base right out of the wall. My mother ran back to us as my father kept kicking and throwing furniture, unstoppable, out of his mind.

When he finally tired himself out, there was a knock at the door. My father opened it and saw two police officers—it had been my aunt on the phone and she had called 9-1-1.

“We got a call about a disturbance,” one of the officers said. If he had stepped into the house just a bit, he might have seen some of the damage my father caused. Instead, the cops stayed at the door, and my father—by then calm and composed—told them everything was fine. Remarkably, they took him at his word and left. This time, my father had gone too far. The kitchen was absolutely destroyed, like a twister had torn through it. My bed was covered in glass shards and soaked with scotch. My mother quietly rounded up all five children—Steven was just an infant then—and, without bothering to gather any clothes, piled us in the car and drove us to her mother’s house in Huntington. My grandmother took us in, and we stayed there for the next three days. They were three of the best days we ever had. For once, we didn’t have to worry about our father. He couldn’t touch us here.

But then, on the third day, I heard my mother talking to my grandmother, and I saw her start to cry.

“Your place is with your husband,” my grandmother told her. “You must go back to him.”

I cried, too, and begged my grandmother to let us stay, but this wasn’t something that was open to discussion. This was simply the way it was done in those days. Wives didn’t leave their husbands, at
least not in many Italian homes. They just endured. That was what my mother’s mother did, and that was what my mother had to do now. So she put us all in the car and drove us home.

We crept in quietly, terrified to be there. I walked into the kitchen, unsure of what I would find. The mess had been somewhat cleaned up, and my father had dragged in the backyard picnic table to replace what he’d destroyed. The hole in the wall where he’d ripped out the phone was still there. Whatever my father hadn’t cleaned up was left for my mother and Annette and I to deal with. And, as always, no one ever said another word about the fight. We all simply went on with our lives, pretending like nothing had happened.

That was the closest my mother ever came to leaving my father.

After that blowout, my father calmed down. Having baby Steven around surely helped. My father adored him; he really enjoyed how funny and cheerful and smart his new son was. From a very early age Steven showed exceptional intelligence, and because he was so much younger than the rest of us, he got to spend a lot of time alone with my mother. That helped him develop more quickly. My mother read to him and played games with him and encouraged his natural curiosity—by the time he was four, Steven had memorized the names and birthdays and even the
death
dates of every U.S. president. My father got a real kick out of hearing him recite them. I noticed my father did things with Steven he never did with Frank. He took him along to work, and he brought home the 45s of popular songs Steven loved to play—“Winchester Cathedral,” “Barbara Ann,” stuff like that. For the first time in a long time my father
seemed happy to be home, and he didn’t go out to bars as much. He still drank at home, but he’d get drunk much more slowly. And because he wasn’t alone, he didn’t get the chance to work himself into frenzies like he did when he went out. It was when he was in his car on the way home from a bar that he would sit and
stew
. At home he usually just drank until he passed out, and the next day by the couch we’d find his big glass ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, piles of ashes everywhere, and maybe even a burn between the coffee table and sofa. That, we could live with.

Then, when my father quit the construction business, he got back in the bar business full-time—only now he bought his own bar, the Windmill on Jericho Turnpike. My mother went to work there as a waitress, and when Annette and I were in our early teens, we went to work there, too, shucking clams and serving hamburgers. We also left Commack and moved back to Huntington Station, to a two-story colonial home my father built himself. It was set back on a side road, some fifty yards behind another house, and had a long gravel driveway leading up to the front door. Inside, the layout was whimsical. You walked through the front door and into the den, inevitably the busiest and messiest room in the house. The living room, on the right, was hardly ever used and had very little furniture in it. You had to walk through the first-floor laundry room just to get to the bathroom. My father used shingle siding on the exterior, and because he had some left over he shingled a wall in the family room too. Still, there was a cozy little backyard and big elm trees, and I was happy to be back in Huntington and have the chance to make new friends. Besides, between the new house and the new bar, my parents were often too busy or too exhausted to fight.

Around that time my parents began renting a summer beach bungalow on Long Island’s North Fork. These were our first real family vacations in a long while. We’d spend a week on a cliff high above Long Island Sound, and we had to walk down one hundred steps to get to the water. We all
loved
the week we’d spend there by the water. I’ll always remember staying up late playing games and eating breakfast at a picnic table in our pajamas. Life was different out there: happier, more serene. I remember there weren’t as many fights. The beach was a place where all of us could take a deep breath and, for a precious few days at least, relax.

And so, for the first few years of his life, my brother Steven had no idea what my father had been like. He only knew him to be a sweet, gentle, caring dad. It wasn’t until Steven was five years old that he got his first taste of my father’s dark side. My father had a big load of sand in the back of his pickup truck, and he let Steven and a little friend play in the sand with toy shovels. Without realizing it, Steven shoveled some sand into the truck’s gas tank. When my father got in the truck and turned it on, warning lights went off. The engine was dead. My father pulled Steven away from the truck and kicked him hard in the rear. He bawled so loudly my mother rushed out and scooped him up. Not even Steven—this little boy he clearly loved—was immune to my father’s wrath.

Still, we went on, trying to live as normally as we could. I went to junior high school, made new friends, started dating boys. From the outside looking in, my life seemed perfectly ordinary: I spent a lot of time with my friends, hung out at the Huntington Mall, and went to Saturday night dances at Bethany Church. But as I got older, the stress of my family life started to show. I was doing worse
and worse at school. My grades were terrible, and my teachers said I never paid attention. In fact, I was usually too exhausted to focus. For obvious reasons, I had a terrible time falling asleep. When I did fall asleep, it wouldn’t be long before some nightmare shook me awake. Sleep, for me, was never a respite from the terror, only a continuation.

About the only time I could truly escape it was when I had sleepovers with my friends. My best friend was Sue, a funny, peppy girl who shared my sense of mischief. I
loved
sleeping over at Sue’s house. Her mother was a secretary, and her father worked at IBM. To me they seemed like the perfect family. Sue’s dad was home by six, dinner was at seven, and everyone was in bed by nine. The next morning Sue’s mother, who always wore an apron over her skirt or dress, would have scrambled eggs and bacon and sausage waiting for us. Glasses filled with orange juice were lined up on the counter with a row of vitamins sitting next to them. There was always a glass of orange juice and a vitamin for me, too. We all sat around the table and talked and laughed, and everything was just so easy and carefree. I could feel the tension drain right out of my body. At night I’d sleep without worry, fear, or apprehension, and I always woke up rested. I know it sounds shallow, but what I loved the most about going over to Sue’s house was seeing how her father dressed. He’d head out to work in a beautiful dark suit with a crisp white shirt and a narrow dark tie—he looked like something out of a TV commercial. I remember wishing my father was more like him. The truth is, I was embarrassed that my father was a bartender. I hated that he worked at night, and I hated that we all had to walk on eggshells when he came home drunk. I’m sure
Sue’s family had its own problems, but to me they were everything we were not—happy, loving, and normal.