SHARED SORROWS
VINCENT PANETTIERE
SHARED SORROWS
Copyright © 2021 by Vincent Panettiere
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is coincidental. Names, characters, events and incidents are products of the author’s imagination.
www.vincentpanettiere.com
To JSP
CHAPTER ONE
B
illows of steam from his shower enveloped the early morning thoughts of Frank DioGuardia.
The whispers began on time. Dreaded October.
One more Christopher Columbus Day parade to attend with the Ridgecrest, New Jersey, chapter of the Knights of Columbus.
Five more days before the anniversary of his father’s death.
Six more months to live until he had breathed more air than his father, who, Frank all too easily recalled, died of a massive heart attack while bowling with fellow office workers at age sixty-one and six months.
That same evening, he remembered with additional sorrow, twelve firemen perished in a building on 23rd Street near Madison Square Park. It would be the worst loss of life in the history of the New York City Fire Department until September 11, 2001.
He heard the news broadcast, background noise from the car radio, as he drove his mother to the hospital. A terrible blaze somewhere in Manhattan. They listened in silence. Both had thoughts of finding his father recovering from the unknown malady that prompted an office mate and fellow bowler to call the house in the chill of the early fall evening.
Deep down, they both silently speculated. But the empathy they felt for the families of those firemen, consumed by an inferno when a floor collapsed, was—horrible as it seemed on reflection—a welcome distraction. Neither voiced what they feared.
Each conceded that Paul DioGuardia, father and husband, might have had a third heart attack. The previous two exploded at home before their eyes. Revived, thank God, by a jelly glass of red Zinfandel, followed by a decade of nitroglycerine pills. His father remained alive. This time would be no different, mother and son silently prayed.
Decades from that fateful October night and the experience Frank DioGuardia considered to be the most influential of his young-adult years, he now clearly and finally understood the true goal of his life.
To outlive his father.
More than a career. Beyond marriage and the well-being of his children, his unconscious task was to eclipse his father’s life on earth. That was the competition he’d entered the morning after viewing his father’s cold, blue face in the morgue.
“He’s so cold,” his mother whispered, anguish echoing in her voice. Her husband’s unyielding skin was incomprehensible. She knew her role was to provide warmth and comfort through every circumstance. She had witnessed her husband’s first two heart attacks. She may have considered, but not revealed to her children, the prospect of his eventual passing. She chose instead not to upset them. She was lost, waiting for a spinning compass to provide her with direction. In the morgue, looking at the closed eyes of her husband as he lay in a gray metal drawer, she dreaded failing her family.
Soon she was aware of the solicitous young resident hovering by her side. A few years older than Frank, the doctor approached them with a mixture of professional concern and perhaps personal relief. Did they want an autopsy?
No. Frank answered for his mother. The cause of death would not be a surprise, and mutilating his body to confirm the obvious would not restore his father to life.
Frank resented the doctor, who he didn’t know and had never met. His kin were living and breathing in some more vibrant place than inside a hospital morgue. Spying the name tag “G. Agannis, MD,” Frank was distracted from the present inequality between them—one fatherless, the other not—and remembered another Agannis, an ill-fated professional baseball player from one of his old bubble gum cards. Similar name, but only one was still alive. Then he pitied Agannis the athlete dying in his twenties, but more likely pitied himself, a young man with a dead father.
The following morning, the gray early light of day shrouded the semidetached house in the middle-class enclave of Maspeth, Queens. Even in bright sunlight it was an ordinary house, one of many built during the postwar boom of the early fifties. For the new buyers, including Frank’s parents, the move from housing projects or cramped apartments represented a step up into the “ownership society,” a term no one actually used half a century ago.
Frank was the first in the family to awaken. He stood at the living room window feeling the chill seep through the glass pane and watching the wind-whipped rain teem down with such speed and volume that it washed over the curb in front of their house and coursed down the sidewalk. Instantly, a cement streambed came alive as if nature so designed.
Deep within, Frank encouraged himself to feel the maudlin notion that the sky was crying for his father. The growing conviction he allowed, that nature paid tribute to his father, made his eyes well with moisture. It would be his only expression of mourning. He sensed, and then had to admit, his tears were more an emotional hiccup than a full-throated operatic wail. Frank knew he didn’t want to cry. More upsetting was the knowledge that he didn’t know how to release his emotions. Doubted there were any. He had more important responsibilities. He needed to hide his emotions behind a solid reserve to be a steady rock of support for his family.
The warm moisture dribbled from his eyes. His chest heaved convulsively. No sound was emitted. He felt better. Emotionally immature, words like catharsis and visceral were foreign concepts to him then. He hurt or he didn’t hurt were his only reference points. Pain and anger were simply to be eliminated through reverse osmosis. Effectively regurgitated like spoiled meat. They would be given as much value and regard. Gone. Over and out.
Pain and emptiness were the bookends of that first morning of the rest of his life. He knew they would not be easily expelled. A pair of constant companions who made a good-looking couple. Even if he’d squeezed some warm liquid from his eyes, pain and emptiness were not going anyplace soon. Worst of all, he couldn’t imagine his life without them, inseparable buddies.
He reminded himself to tell the rest of the family as they woke that “the sky cried for Dad.” He was sure that would make them feel better too. Knowing that he found a way to ease the pain for his mother and three sisters was his contribution to their well-being.
How easily he slipped into the role of protector, caretaker, caregiver for his family, as if groomed for the job from birth. He had not one thought for himself. Not even the stray tears were his exclusively. They were for family comfort.
This was not a time for him to consider his future as a young man without the presence of his father in his life—no matter they were in competition, like two bull elks, for his mother and for some unspoken leader-of-the-pack Oedipal prize. Not until years later would he realize that his position in the family was that of a human replacement part or, more sinister, as a baby calf raised to become veal and then consumed.
What he did not know, could not see or understand that morning, was that the ultimate race of his life had begun. At twenty-three, less than eight weeks before turning twenty-four, the finish line was approximately thirty-seven and a half years into the future.
If he were asked to make a contribution to some sociological dissertation by a friend’s child, whose PhD treatise was entitled “Memorable Admonitions of Paterfamilias,” for example, these would represent his father: “The race is not to the swift,” or “slow and steady wins the race.” And, most damning, “If at first you don’t succeed, suck lemons.” Then, in acknowledgment of his cultural roots, he’d add “piano, piano,” which translated from Italian means “slow, slow.” And that was his father. Slow in action. Slow in speech. Slow in thought. Slow to express love. All this clichéd advice would have been recalled the morning after his father’s death, had he known. He was too young to listen. He could not recall.
If outliving his father was truly the unconscious goal he’d been following for more than thirty years, he figured his life had been a sham. A waste. An empty exercise. A reason not to have been born.
Frank finished toweling his body dry as cold dread returned to the pit of his stomach. With him as he entered the master bedroom were fear, loss, and panic combined in the same dosage as when the morgue attendant opened the steel drawer to reveal his father’s lifeless corpse. So long ago, yet so vividly present.
Even now, he tried to remember the clothes his father wore that last day of his life. He assumed they were the same clothes as when he left their house that morning. In truth, Frank didn’t remember his father leaving. Did not see what he wore or hearing a cursory “goodbye, see you tonight.” Frank had to face the fact that he had not seen his father alive on the last day of his life.
He couldn’t remember the last time he spoke to his father or the last time he heard that voice spoken to him. Not the time, place, circumstances of their last meeting. Most likely the day before at dinner. Yet . . .
Frank’s face, visible in the mirror that hung over Francine’s vanity in their bedroom, reflected the ache of long ago. To get a better look, he leaned forward from the upholstered piano stool she sat on when applying her makeup. He saw himself as a human husk, as transparent as the skin from a clove of garlic.
To anyone else he looked like a gentleman preparing for a formal affair or a job as maître d’ of a posh restaurant. Black suspenders creased the shoulders of his formal white shirt as he affixed his black clip-on bow tie to the points of his collar. What couldn’t be seen by any observer were beads of moisture forming on his forehead. They couldn’t feel his skin flush as if trying to throw off a fever.
Before he could take any further measure of his well-being, he heard a knock on the bedroom door, followed by Francine’s voice.
“Frank, are you decent?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. He didn’t intend to give one. Married since bell-bottoms were in vogue the first time, communication had settled into a familiar rhythm long ago. Some questions were answered, and some contested. Others went without answers. For a few, no answer was expected. Her question of decency fell into the last category.
He knew she was waiting to drive him into the city. There was only one “city”—meaning New York City. Specifically, Manhattan, historically and socially the only one of the five boroughs officially comprising the “Big Apple” that really mattered. One city and four afterthoughts. Yet, if the residents of Manhattan got down from their self-reverential pedestals, they’d soon realize that Manhattan was the most provincial of towns, albeit wealthier. A more than superficial look would reveal a mini Fort Wayne every three blocks. Duplicates of supermarket, pharmacy, candy store, florist, so that the vertical dwellers need journey no more than three blocks in either direction from their front door. Crossing to a fourth block would only bring repetition of services, with no advantage and a longer walk home.
The replicating Fort Wayne concept was one that no elitist Manhattanite would stoop to contemplate, even if they could locate Fort Wayne on a map—if any of them owned one. Since the vast majority rarely ventured off the island physically and were never far away mentally, as in Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” a map was as useful as a chair with a sawed-off leg.
He knew Francine would drive him in her five-year-old Volvo, down Route 17 to the GW Bridge, keeping right until the roadway curved south along the Hudson River on the once-elevated West Side Highway. Frank was pleased that this monument to Robert Moses’s ego had been dismantled and lowered to street level, increasing the view of the river. How edifices of the mighty get reduced to rubble upon, or even before, their demise. Like the photo-op toppling of Saddam’s statue.
She’d make a left on 33rd Street and deposit him west of Fifth Avenue but within walking distance of the Empire State Building, where he would make his way through the crowd of parade marchers until he reached the K of C assembly area. From there he’d join his fellow Knights from Ridgecrest. They’d form a phalanx of sorts and march up the Avenue while she reversed direction and returned home. He’d get a ride back from Jimmy Fusco. Originally, Fusco was going to drive Frank into Manhattan, but he canceled unexpectedly the night before for some vague reason.
These days everything about Jimmy was vague. Fusco never married. No one asked gay or straight in their generation. No one thought that way. Ten years ago Fusco bought a house two blocks away and moved his widowed mother out of Queens and into the bucolic-by-comparison bedroom community of Ridgecrest.
He was a “good son,” as self-sacrificing, self-suppressing, unmarried, stay-home-with-mom sons were called in their demographic. Few thought to depart from that norm, and shame upon those who did.
There but for the grace of . . . Frank stopped. It wasn’t the grace of God that enabled him to marry Francine, but the death of his mother. Otherwise, he’d have been a “good son” too. Nothing else was expected, demanded.
Having Fusco, his pal from the first day of high school, two blocks away gave Frank an outlet from domestic confines. Frank interrupted that thought, not meaning to suggest his wife and children were not his life, his be-all and end-all. Every once in a while, change . . . . .
Francine cracked open the bedroom door and eased the top half of her body into the room at an angle. Frank dismissed thoughts he felt were disloyal to his family, then forced a smile as he turned to Francine. She had a seventh sense that easily read the emotions projected on his face. Unnerved whenever she’d say, “I hear your brain ticking,” rarely, if ever, did he want to share those inner ramblings. An unacceptable intrusion even after all the years they’d been together. Whether his inability to cry when his father died or reluctance to share innermost thoughts on command were all parts of the same defense strategy, Frank didn’t know. This was not the time to speculate.
Francine had on her sage-colored, loden car coat. The car keys jangled in her hand, urging him to hurry up. A blue cloth covered the top of her head. He knew it wasn’t a scarf, just something she wore when cleaning. This also was standard attire whenever her hair was dirty or uncombed, colors of her schmata changing with the seasons. For an instant she looked like the girl he fell in love with during sophomore year of college.
Francine was a slight woman, no more than five feet, four inches without shoes. Her energetic spirit added height and substance. Not that she was larger than life. She demanded attention be paid, which, in those I-hear-your-brain-ticking moments, was a drain.
Diminutive women, he thought, either come in the form of meek and mild or pert and plucky, the latter manipulating their diminutive size to gain advantage. Unfair? No such concept as fairness in life. He knew that myth existed only within a playing field and its specific demarcation indicating fair or foul. What’s fair about the ruins of the World Trade Center? Or an African village where malnourished children die daily as a result of inadequate formula forced on them by corporate economic hit men and women? He was now falling far inside himself. A place for another time.
Frank made himself remember the first time he saw Francine dancing at a pep rally in college. Every coordinated movement she made blasted bolts of electricity, rays of light. He couldn’t describe it precisely now, just the memory of how he felt. She was the kind of woman usually called a “little dynamo.” Maybe it was the female version of the Napoleon complex? A Josephine complex? He didn’t know. She was more like a young collegiate gymnast, only older and without such muscular thighs.
“Let’s go, toots,” she said.
Frank nodded and stood to put on his tuxedo jacket. Francine, now completely in the room, lifted the jacket so that Frank’s arm could easily slip into the left sleeve.
“Thanks,” he said and kissed the top of her head.
As he leaned over, she drew back sharply. “I’m dirty. My head’s full of dust.”
Frank looked at her with empty eyes.
“We’ve got a dinner here Saturday. The engagement party? Remember? That’s four days away. And someone,” she said, pointing broadly to herself, “moi, has to clean. Hmmm?” Then she added as proof, “I’m halfway finished dusting and vacuuming the living room. Just in case you wondered.”
He said okay but knew his answer was distant. He turned to adjust his tuxedo coat, pulling it down so that no bulge of material encircled the back of his neck.
She watched patiently. “Ready?” He nodded again, and she lifted a white ceremonial sash from the bed and placed it over his head so that it rested on his right shoulder and ended above his left thigh. She straightened the sash, and he confirmed its position by watching in the mirror.
Next, Frank started his personal countdown, a ritual he performed every time he left the house. It was a ritual not unlike what his father had enacted. Another genetic marker come to life. In his preflight checklist, instead of “wheels, flaps, speed,” he patted his body. “Wallet,” back-left pocket patted. “Handkerchief,” back-right pocket. “Money,” right-front pocket. “Keys,” left-front pocket.
“All set,” he told his wife and then lifted the black satin cape from the bed and carefully draped it over one arm. With his free hand, he collected a cocked hat adorned with white feathers, and a pair of white suede gloves. Now they could leave.
Frank paused in the front hall, faced an oak-framed mirror, and inspected his appearance. This was a morning tradition. One last chance to improve or alter. This morning he didn’t see himself. He saw through the familiar face and was disappointed.
Frank carefully placed the cape on the back seat of the Volvo, his hat and gloves on top of it. He opened the passenger-side door.
“Damn. I forgot the sword,” he said and trotted back to the front door in small, quick steps. “I hate carrying that damn thing.” He directed his words over his shoulder at Francine, who shrugged before getting into the car and starting the engine.
Entering his house, Frank chastised himself for being forgetful. He considered such lapses a self-inflicted affront to his intelligence. Which in turn led to a period of seething self-loathing.
Frank returned with the sword, its brass fixtures tinkling before he placed it on top of the cape. He buckled up, and Francine carefully backed out the car. Frank observed to himself that the driveway, resurfaced with new blacktop over the summer, would get its first winter test. He hoped it would hold up, not crack, and last longer than the old surface.
As Francine turned the corner and headed for Route 17, the sword shifted and hit the back of Frank’s seat, its metal loops jangling. He strained within the confines of his seat belt and straightened the sword back over the cape. This gave him a chance to glance at what he would carry up Fifth Avenue. Frank knew the correct term was sword rapier and that it was a reproduction of the kind of weapon used by armies in seventeenth-century Europe.
Made of high carbon steel, the blade was as long as a yardstick and gained another six or seven inches in its scabbard. The cup hilt indicated its Spanish roots. Less than three pounds in all, he had to admit it was easy to carry, fitting close to his body. Then why the aversion, the dread?
Was it some pacifist leanings? Or the distaste for a weapon that might end a life? A lethal instrument in his possession? So was the car he rode in and the one he drove. Both became lethal weapons when handled carelessly. There was no answer, and he let the question drift out onto the gray, placid surface of the Hudson River as they crossed the George Washington Bridge.
Now, years after 9/11, he tried not to look due south along the edges of Manhattan Island. Two towers and thousands of lives erased from memory. Though the muscles in his mind tried to return those signature edifices where they belonged, no will or imagination could bring them back. His gaze stayed fixed off into the Hudson.
Francine knew it was best not to intrude when Frank was silent. Not that she was afraid to interrupt his recomputation of some Einsteinian formula. As if! After more than thirty years of marriage, she’d learned not to engage in futility. When Frank was off somewhere in his mind, it was best to have him return on his own. True, the caterers would handle dinner. Yet there was much she had to make ready so that all would be perfect for their son, his fiancée, assorted relatives and friends. Nothing happens by magic.
Not that he was any help in the kitchen, and his culinary creativity was primitive, but he needed to know what she planned so that, in the very least, he wouldn’t get in the way. Yeah, sure.
Frank hadn’t spoken since they’d left the house. He wasn’t being silent on purpose, nor was he peeved at Francine for any reason imaginable. He remained under the spell of his realization, the rock-solid lump in the depths of his soul, that he’d been living for the wrong reason.
Every breath, every meal, every act of love, every ejaculation, every new suit, every thought and prayer contributed to the continuation of his life for the most superficial of goals. The weight made him quiet, sad and speechless. He felt Francine’s hand caress the inside of his thigh, moving from outside to inside, not in a sexual manner but in the way one gentled a person in shock.
“There, there. Come on, now,” the moving hand seemed to say.
He turned to her and she smiled. “Hi,” she said. “Listen, sweetie. About the dinner for Frank Junior?”
“Yes, Francine. I know. It’s Saturday. I’ll be there.”
Francine reached out and patted his cheek. “I know you will. Who would open the wine if you weren’t there?” They both knew her teasing was familiar and without barb.
To make amends, Frank took her hand and kissed it. “I am so honored to be . . . needed,” he said with a hint of a laugh.
“We’ll be twenty, maybe twenty-five, for dinner. You’ll need to bring up the extra chairs from the basement. Whoever doesn’t fit around the table can eat in the living room. You’ll need to also bring up the TV tables. And don’t forget to pick up the cake on your way home.”
“Ah,” he began, only mildly sarcastic, “reduced to the role of a schlepper again.”
She gave his cheek another pat before turning left on 33rd Street. “Yes, but you’re my schlepper, and I love you.” Pat. Pat. Pat.
“Thanks for driving,” he said.
“’S okay.”
“I know you’ve got lots to do.”
“I do,” she said with a groan that came close to a whine. “Fusco is such a fink, canceling at the last minute. Since his mother died, I don’t know . . . .”
“He’s free,” Frank said without thinking.
“What?”
“He’s free to come and go. That’s all. Doesn’t have to be home at a certain hour.” Sensing her reaction, he quickly added, “Nothing wrong with that.” Did he envy Fusco? Another grain of sand irritating his mind.
Francine looked at him, and he saw a slight wrinkle in her brow. Was it doubt? Surprise? Worry?
When the car stopped, Frank leaned over to kiss Francine on the lips. She turned her head so his mouth met her cheek. “What was that all about?” shot through his head as quickly as a nervous tic and was gone. He collected the cape, sword, and hat from the back seat and stepped onto the curb. Francine pulled away before she could hear him say goodbye.
On the day he judges his life a failure and a fraud, his wife gives him the deep freeze. For what? She was dusty, unshowered, uncoiffed? Thirty years later and not an inch closer in understanding.
He walked two blocks east before spotting the mass of parade marchers in costumes similar to his. The advantage of his height, about six feet two, enabled him to not only see above their heads but be seen as well. His slim build allowed him to slip through the crowd with ease.
“Hey, DeeGee!” a voice belonging to Fusco called out. High school names persisted far beyond graduation. First the voice, then the body appeared from the massed contingent of Ridgecrest Knights. As in high school, Fusco retained rodent-like features. From angular face to protruding teeth, always an unfortunate combo. Why would nature replicate such unattractive DNA? He quickly erased it from his mind as unchristian. But true.
“What happened to you?” Frank asked through clenched lips, suppressing a smile. “At the last minute you cancel?”
“Kimberly happened to me.”
“What’s that, a kind of rapture thing? Hosanna in the highest. Maybe it’s a rash.”
“Bite your tongue. Rash! Kimberly is the woman I’ve been chatting with online.”
“When are you going to act your age?” Frank, far from being jealous, couldn’t understand the sense of banging away on a keyboard hoping to impress enough women to end up banging away in their beds.
“Age is a number, Frank. It’s what’s inside that counts.” He pointed to his heart and grabbed his crotch. “Couldn’t pick you up because”—Fusco’s voice took on an unusual sophisticated quality—“Kimberly and I had dinner last night at Pont Neuf. As we strolled back to her apartment, she nibbled on my ear. You know what that does to me.”
“Of course I don’t. You nuts?”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t take offense. What’s with you today? You didn’t get any—”
All Frank had to do was give Fusco a scowl, and he changed the end of his sentence from pussy to bran flakes. “Maybe you’re irregular. Whatever. End of the story. I boffed Kimberly after dinner, and when I knew I’d be staying over I canceled picking you up.”
Frank tuned out Fusco and returned to the territory inside where no one else could venture, while physically straightening his hat, affixing the sword to his belt, and laying the cape around his shoulders. He was ready for what might be his last march up Fifth Avenue in the Columbus Day parade. Whether he lived beyond his father’s age or died short of reaching it, nothing would be the same.
Over the years since high school, Fusco had seen the change from light to dark cross Frank’s face on several occasions. Those were don’t-feed-the-animals times. Today was no exception. Luckily they were assigned to carry the banner, proclaiming KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS, RIDGECREST, NEW JERSEY, in gold letters, at the head of their column. They’d be too far apart to talk, so by parade’s end, whatever hair Frank had up his ass would disappear.
The marching band from a high school in the Bronx preceded the New Jersey Knights. A swath of shimmering blue satin obscured Frank’s vision and enabled him to retreat from the present while his legs functioned in an automatic cadence, separate entities entirely.
He owed Fusco . . . what? An apology? Not exactly. He’d snapped and caused tension between them. They had a long march up Fifth Avenue ahead. Better now before other events intervened.
“The food . . . ?”
“What? You’re talking . . . ?” Fusco’s voice had an edge.
“Last night. What kind . . . how’s the food?”
Fusco took the opening and decided to let the past pass. “Oh, yeah. Good. Real good food. We both had sole meunière. Like soul mates.” Fusco laughed, displaying his buckteeth. “Get it?”
“If I taught a class in punditry, you’d fail.” Frank smiled and laughed to show Fusco all was well. “Get it?” Before looking over at Fusco for the answer, he explained. “You made a pun of sole the fish and soul the spirit, but soul mates was a prediction. In that case you were a pundit, and I said punditry meaning—”
“I get it. I get it. My knees are buckling I got so much of it,” he said, laughing. All was now even. “But like I said . . . good food. Nice, chilled Chablis. She liked it. That’s all that matters. Nice firm, round ass—”
Fusco’s description of Kimberly’s charms was drowned out as the band preceding them started playing “God Bless America.”
