Honor Thy Father (39 page)

Entering the 707 jet, he removed his jacket and handed it to a stewardess; then he sat back in a soft seat in the front row where there was maximum leg room and loosened his tie. After buckling his seat belt, he looked at his watch—it was exactly noon; 9:00
A.M.
in California, and Rosalie and the children were up and about, and he was sure that Chuckie’s rabbits were still running wild in the yard. Bill was looking forward to getting home, cognizant of the fact that “home” now was a place that he did not know well, San Jose; and he also reminded himself that during his thirty-seven years he had never been in one house for very long. As a child he had moved from place to place like an “army brat”—an infancy in Brooklyn, an early boyhood in Hempstead, then at the age of ten to Tucson where he lived alone in motels, later in the winter homes that his father had rented or bought there at various times, homes that were abandoned during the summers as Bill returned with his family to New York. Perhaps the only home with which he had identified personally was the one in Flagstaff that he and Rosalie had moved into on returning from their honeymoon in 1956. That was the one year in his adult life when he had tried to blend in with what he regarded as conventional society, joining Kiwanis, investing in a small radio station, associating with people who worked nine-to-five. During that period he had gone weeks, sometimes months, without being reminded of his father’s activities or his own dark secret. But then the scandal of Apalachin the following year abruptly terminated his masquerading in middle-class America; and since that year, with all his traveling and shifting from one address to another, he began to identify his “home” not in the strict terms of a particular house but rather with the airport in the town in which he was residing. After leaving Flagstaff he was “home” every time his plane landed at the airport in Tucson or Phoenix; or, after 1963, at La Guardia or Kennedy; and now it was the terminal in San Francisco or San Jose.

But at this moment he was obviously going nowhere; his plane was immobile on the runway at JFK, and the stewardess had just announced that there would be a delay due to the excessive air traffic. Bill looked out the window and counted at least a dozen planes lined up ahead of the one he was in, flight 41, and he knew that it might be another hour before takeoff. He thought again of his aunt Marion’s remark at the dinner table last night, and he was still bothered by it.
Oh, you used to be such fun when you came to town. What happened?
He knew the time she was referring to—it was before East Meadow, a period in the late fifties and early sixties when the Bonanno organization was thriving, when he had more cash that he knew what to do with, and more problems than he recognized. He would fly into New York from Phoenix every few weeks on one pretense or another, and would take his aunt and other relatives to the Copacabana, to Broadway shows, to expensive restaurants. He recalled one night when his bill at the Copacabana was approximately $900, which he casually paid out of a thick wad in his pocket, loving the feeling at that moment. It was not a sense of opulence, power, egotism, or a satisfaction in having so much cash; it was almost a contempt of money that he had felt, a wanton disregard for the thing that others craved, an easy-come-easy-go attitude that mocked the miser in mankind and demonstrated a recklessness about life and a fearlessness about the future—all this and more had contributed to the private joy that Bill felt on that night when he had placed nine hundred-dollar bills and a hundred-dollar tip on a silver tray at the Copacabana, not caring that the lights were dim and that nobody was watching except the waiter. Fun. His father had undoubtedly felt the same thing a thousand times during his lush years, and Bill remembered hearing of an occasion when, after another man had beaten his father to a check in a restaurant, a rare instance, his father nonchalantly took the hundred-dollar bill that he held, ripped it up, and left it in an ashtray.

What piqued Bill about his aunt’s remark was the inference that without his pockets full of money he had lost something of his character, his humor, his impulsiveness, or whatever it had been that had made him different from the ordinary people that were most of his relatives and friends. He thought that his aunt was wrong—he had not lost his humor, and the fact that he was officially bankrupt did not bother him. It merely required that he be extremely careful in how he spent whatever income he still received from private sources; it meant that he had to borrow money for his air fare, being always prepared to identify the relatives or friends who lent it to him; and it meant that he could leave no trace of his other expenses, could not even patronize the same gas station too often lest the attendant become a witness to the amount that Bill spent on his car. Without a sense of humor Bill knew that he could never have slept peacefully at night with the absurd knowledge that at the end of every day the government added $168 in interest and penalties to the nearly $100,000 it claimed he owed in various tax suits in Arizona and New York.

After nearly a two-hour delay, the plane was in the air; and as it rose higher Bill watched the city fading below the clouds, and one of the last things he saw was a section of Queens that was once considered Bonanno territory. But now, like so many neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn, it was splintered into blocks of confusion. He could not remember a time in New York when there seemed to be so few mafiosi in sight, when hundreds of men had apparently been driven underground, which had made it possible for him to do such sightseeing as he had done yesterday. If he had done that even a few months before, he reminded himself that it would probably have been fatal.

The plane ride was smooth and pleasant, and Bill sat reading
Time
and
Newsweek
and sipping Chevas Regal Scotch. He also flipped through a glossy magazine distributed by the airlines and was amused by one item in a column of jokes and oddities.

After a lunch of filet mignon, he watched the film
Bullitt
, starring Steve McQueen, in which McQueen played a detective in a murder mystery that also featured a few Mafia types, one of whom reminded Bill very much of Sonny Franzese. Unlike such films as
The Brotherhood
, this film captured certain scenes of violence that Bill found to be impressively realistic, such as when a mob informer is riddled with machine-gun bullets in a hotel room. The most awesome scene in the movie featured a wild car chase up and down the hilly streets of San Francisco, with bullets flying and tires screeching, and Bill was aware throughout the picture of how intently the other passengers were engrossed in the film. This is what these business executives really like, he thought—bullets in the air, murder at high speed.

Bill was met at the airport, and on the way back to San Jose he stopped at his sister Catherine’s house in Atherton. He wanted to know what Catherine thought of their father’s recently expressed deliberations about leaving Tucson and buying a house in Atherton, a move prompted by Mrs. Bonanno’s anxiety over the prospects of more bombings in Arizona in the future. Even if his father could obtain court permission to leave Arizona, Bill knew that his moving to the exclusive community of Atherton would undoubtedly provoke controversy among certain citizens in Atherton, and it could seriously influence Catherine’s social position there, as well as the continued acceptance of her children and husband.

Catherine’s husband had through hard work built up a large, prosperous dental practice in suburban San Francisco, and because of his success he had recently gained entrance into social organizations, friendships with the more affluent elements in town, and he had been able to purchase an impressive home surrounded by acres of verdant land and trees. But because of his marriage and his friendship with Bill and the elder Bonanno, his income tax returns were regularly audited, his home and office telephones were believed to be tapped—a supposition more or less confirmed by a friend claiming to be in a position to know—and he and his wife had received considerable unwanted publicity in the press. Both had been subpoenaed by federal investigators after the elder Bonanno’s disappearance in 1964, with Catherine being referred to in headlines as the “gangster’s daughter”; and both were somewhat concerned about the effect this sort of publicity, if it continued, would have on their three young children.

Still their concern up to now had not prompted either of them to shy away from Bill or any other publicized family member or friend. Since Bill had moved to San Jose, he had been in almost daily contact with Catherine on the telephone or in person, and if a few days passed without her hearing from him she usually took the initiative to find out why. Bill enjoyed a compatibility with her that he had with no other woman. She understood him as Rosalie could not, and she understood his relationship with his father from a position that was curiously both loving and detached. She was a perceptive and wise young woman.

When Bill arrived at her home, passing through two white stone posts and rows of flowers along the driveway, he rang the bell a few times, and after a short delay he heard her voice through the outside intercom. After he identified himself, she came to the door, expressed delight on seeing him, and kissed him on the cheek. Tall, lean, her dark reddish hair teased and coiffed, her dark eyes alert and alive, she explained apologetically that she had been playing the piano as he rang, adding that she had been surprised to discover earlier in the piano bench certain pieces of old sheet music that she and Bill had played at school concerts in Long Island back in 1940 and 1941. Bill was nine years old at the time, and Catherine seven, and as she now led her brother into the large step-down living room he noticed that the piano on which she had been playing was the one from the Hempstead house on which he had taken lessons for five years. He had stopped after leaving for boarding school in Arizona in 1942, but his sister had continued with her music through most of her school years, and she played very well.

“Do you remember these?” she asked, handing him two programs from children’s concerts at which they had played a duet.

“How could I forget?” he said, smiling, recognizing them immediately. “It was the highpoint of my career.” He scanned through the programs, noting that on the back page among the list of sponsors were the names Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Bonanno. “I remember walking into the Garden City Hotel wearing my navy blue jacket, white flannel pants, white shoes, and you were wearing a long white dress. I remember the applause after we finished, how nervous and excited we were, and how proud mom and dad seemed afterward. I never wanted to take piano lessons, really hated it at first, but he made me do it; and I wish that he hadn’t stopped.”

Bill bent over the keyboard, pressing a few chords; but failing to get the desired results, he stopped and backed away.

“Rusty,” he announced, “rusty and too old for a comeback.”

As Catherine went into the kitchen to get coffee, he was greeted by two of his nephews who had been in the den watching television. Bill grabbed them one at a time, tossed them in the air as they shrieked with pleasure. Then, after he put them down, they hurried back to their television show, and Bill stood in the large room pacing slowly across the thick soft carpet, looking around. Through the sliding glass doors he could see the sprawling lawn and trees that the gardeners were now trimming and clipping, as another workman was skimming the pool. The maintenance and taxes on this property must be tremendous, he thought, which was probably why his brother-in-law, Greg, was working this weekend, drilling teeth at his clinic while the slow-moving gardeners were soaking up the California sunshine and earning $20 an hour. Bill wished that his brother-in-law would relax and enjoy himself more, and he had often thought of urging him to change his routine, but Bill had finally decided against giving advice to the one member of the family who was obviously doing well. Bill remembered from his college days at Arizona that Greg had always been hard-working and industrious in his studies, never so popular with the girls as Bill had been but always with an eye to the future. Through their fathers’ acquaintanceship that went back to Sicily, Bill and Greg had become quick friends years before Catherine had taken an interest in Greg; in fact, she had deliberately avoided him during the period when they attended classes concurrently on the Arizona campus, not because she found the thin, dark-haired man unattractive but because she regarded him merely as a friend of Bill’s. Later Catherine had nearly become engaged to another man whose Italian family was known to Joseph Bonanno, and Bill thought that the wedding plans had met with everyone’s approval, underestimating the private power of his mother, Fay. Fay Bonanno waited until her husband had gone out of town on a trip, which was one month before Catherine was to announce her engagement formally, when she boldly told Catherine that she did not want to see the young man in the Bonanno home again. She offered no explanation but hinted that she knew something about him that was too distasteful to mention. Catherine, confused and hysterical, demanded to know why her mother had not spoken up sooner, why her father had not been informed before his trip; but Mrs. Bonanno remained adamant, almost tyrannical in her sudden control over her daughter. Catherine became silent, and angrily determined that she would wait for her father’s return.

Catherine’s relationship with her mother had always been remote when compared with the demonstrative affection she exchanged with her father, and Bill wondered if there might not have been a subconscious mother-daughter rivalry. While his mother had always put her husband ahead of the children, she had permitted Bill and his younger brother almost total freedom during their adolescence, while Catherine as the only daughter had been bound by a strict code of behavior, not allowed to date boys unchaperoned until after she had entered college. Bill remembered that Catherine was a tomboy during her girlhood, playing with the neighborhood boys in Hempstead and resenting her exclusion from her father’s male companions who had come to the house and had invariably included Bill in their circle of conversation. These men used to wrestle and play with Bill in those days as Bill’s men played with Tory now; and Bill remembered one Christmas Eve in 1940 when his father’s men arrived carrying an enormous train set, and as he sat waiting with wild anticipation the heavy-set men crawled uncomfortably along the floor for hours, hooking pieces of track together, linking various pieces that formed the station platform and the cantilever bridge.