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BIO

Prologue

I was fourteen, walking on a beach in Ischia, a Mediterranean island forty miles off the coast of Naples, when I found out about my father. A white cotton towel hung around my neck, the morning sun warmed my back and soft waves rolled against a pea-green fishing boat. A cluster of children were building sand castles by the shore while three German tourists nodded in approval. It was mid-July 1969, my first summer away from home and the most peaceful time in my life.
     My mother, slumped and weary, stood at my side, staring out to sea. She hardly noticed the Moroccan merchant who was offering good buys on cheap goods or the beach bum selling cool slices of fresh coconut. She reached for my hand, her brown eyes softened by the passing years.
     "It's time you knew the truth," she said. "About your father."
     "What about him?"
     "His first wife," she said. "She didn't die of cancer."
     "How did she die?"
     "He murdered her."

My mother's words struck with the force of an ax. I stared at her, making sure that what she said was real, that the sudden anger and confusion inside me was justified. With tears streaming down her tanned face, she kissed me on the cheek and walked away. I sat at the water's edge, shivering in the sun, the towel wrapped tight around my shoulders. I stayed there well into the evening, looking out at quiet waters, thinking about my father.
     I imagined his face before me and tried to picture him during his moment of violence. Through the years, I had learned to live with my father's vicious rage, choosing the easier route of acceptance, never once believing he would ever take his ugly side further than a certain number of hard slaps and painful punches. Ever take it past the limit of murder. Not with me. Not with my mother. Not with someone he loved.
     I loved my father. We were inseparable, united by both friendship and blood. Now, in the small space of a few hours, those feelings had been forever altered, all because my father murdered a woman I had never met. For the first time in my memory, the thought of my father frightened me.
     The sea was calm most of that day, low waves beating against soft edges of the beach. I dug my feet into the wet sand and turned my face toward the water's spray, my mind armed with dozens of unanswered questions. Why did my father kill his wife? What could she have said or done that would have sped his rage to its blindest point? How did he do it? When? Where? What happened after he killed her? If he did it, why wasn't he still in jail? Why was he free, with a wife, a son and a job, passing time as if nothing sinister had ever happened?
     I knew I would have to learn all I could about the murder and its aftermath, though I didn't know then how difficult that would be. I didn't know about all the relatives and neighbors I would have to confront, or all the lies and deceptions I would have to overcome.
     I didn't know when the eventual showdown with my father would take place, or even if I would survive it.
     During that long day on that bright beach more than four thousand miles from home, I had no idea that my father's crime was destined to reach into every part of my life. How could I have known that one day I would have to tell the woman I wanted to marry that there was a terrible stain on my family -- then look into her eyes for signs of fear? I had no way of knowing then how the murder would affect me as a father, or how it would touch the lives of my own children.
     I didn't know back then how very much like my father I was and what a burden that knowledge, and the fear behind it, would carry. Most of all, I didn't know if I could ever answer the question I feared everyone would always be asking: Was I as capable as my father was of murdering someone close to me?
     All I knew was that my father was a murderer and that I needed somehow to find the truth behind the man and the murderer.

* * *

It would take nineteen years. What began on a warm day on a beach in Ischia would end on the cold, cloudy morning of November 8, 1988, with my father's death. He was seventy-one years old, and the last five months of his life had been painful to watch. The spreading bone cancer had taken away the use of his legs. A mild form of dementia had set in, making lucid conversation difficult and brief. The muscles around his face sagged, his eyes were sunken, and his voice had wilted to a harsh whisper. His weight had dropped, his arms were brittle to the touch, and his entire body was smeared with droplets of cold sweat. His was now the body of a tired and dying old man who bore no resemblance to the father I had feared for so long.
     My father had left me with a number of final requests.
     "I don't want to be buried," he said. "No rats are gonna eat off of me. Burn me. Understand? Burn me. It's fast and easy. Don't put me in any vault either. I hate feelin' closed in."
     He wanted my mother to be told how sorry he was for the troubled decades he had given her.
     "You're better with the words than I am," he said. "She listens to you. She doesn't believe me anymore. I try telling her myself, but I cry when I see her."
     Some days I would visit his hospital room and stare at him for hours, sadly watching his once-powerful body give up the fight. The lower half of his face would droop against his right shoulder, spittle forming at the corners of his lips. He would look at me and smile.
     "This is what you wanted, isn't it, fucko?" he would say. "This is what you stayed up nights prayin' over. At least your prayers were answered."
     Other days, I could stand to stay near him for only a few minutes, dropping off the tabloids that would remain unread on his night table and the fruit that would remain uneaten near his dinner tray, then walking away.
     "Can't stomach it, can you, fucko?" he would shout then. "Can't watch me die, can you?"
     I would rush for the elevator banks, head down, hoping to avoid the concerned gaze of the nurses who cared for my father.
     He was right. I couldn't stand to watch him die. I had prayed for his death on so many nights over so many years, and yet, when it came close, I wanted death to leave him alone. There was no victory in his suffering, no satisfaction in his end. My anger at him remained, perhaps stronger than it had ever been, but so, too, did a sadness, for with the death of this old man, I would not only lose my most bitter enemy, but a trusted friend. It was what the bookies in the old neighborhood called a push.
     One morning, close to the end, my father, chewing on half a grapefruit, signaled me to come closer.
     "You always wanted to know about my life," he said. "Why?"
     "It's important to me."
     "Why?"
     "I can't really explain it. It's important, that's all."
     "Gonna write about it?"
     "Maybe. I never thought about it."
     "Will they pay you if you write about me?"
     "Someone might."
     He looked away, out the window of his tenth-floor room, thinking back to hundreds of scams, dozens of cons, all planned against the fear of work. His biggest regret, which had gone unspoken between us, was that he would die and not have any money to leave me or, more important, my two children. In fact, there was still more than four thousand dollars in debts that needed to be paid.
     "How much? he asked. "How much would someone give you to write about me?"
     "Dad, please."
     "How much?"
     "I don't know."
     "A million?"
     "What?"
     "Would someone pay a million for my story?"
     I looked in his eyes, saw them alert and alive for the first time in months, saw his breathing come easier, his hands tense with excitement and realized that, to my father, having someone get paid to tell his story could only be the ultimate scam. Especially if that someone was his son.
     "Would someone pay a million for my story?"
     "It's possible."
     He reached out his hand for me to shake. I took it.
     "I'll never lie to you again," he said.
     "About anything?"
     "I swear on your mother."
     "Even about the murder."
     He took a deep breath. I could hear the rasping in his chest, the cancer having weaved its way to his lungs.
     "Yeah," he said. "Even about the murder."
     He held my hand tighter, the grip a stranger to what it once was. We were inches apart, dead man's breath leaving his open mouth.
     "Take your best shot, fucko," he said. "Give it all you got. Just do what I didn't do."
     "What's that?"
     "Tell the truth. I don't care who gets hurt. You hear me, fucko? Tell the truth."

On my next visit I brought my father two slices of watermelon, a Hershey bar with almonds and the Daily Racing Form. I walked quietly down the hospital corridor toward his room. I stopped at the door, waiting as a nurse finished changing his sheets, fluffing his pillows and adjusting his bed. She was short, pudgy, a middle-aged Jamaican woman with a sing-song voice and a cheerful manner. She saw me standing by the half-open door, reading my father's medical chart.
     "Come in, young fellow," she said. "I'm about finished."
     She reached for my father's hand and stroked it.
     "I'm going to leave you, Mario," she said. "You don't need me anymore. Your son is here."
     "What time's dinner?" my father asked.
     "Soon," she said.
     She looked at me.
     "He barely finishes one meal before he asks about the next," she said. "I tell you."
     "He's too old to change," I said.
     The nurse turned toward my father and winked.
     "See you later, handsome," she said.
She walked toward me and reached for my arm, a wide smile across her face.
     "I'm so happy for you," she said in a whisper.
     "Why?"
     "Your father told me," she said. "About leaving you the million dollars. I think it's wonderful. You are so lucky to have a father like him."
     I looked over her shoulder at my father, sitting in bed and smiling at both of us.
     "Such a good man," she said, walking out of the room. "Such a good man."

* * *

My father's body was cremated on November 11, and a memorial Mass was held two days later. Following the service and the customary cookies, coffee and small talk with friends and family, I bundled up my children and took them for a walk in the park. We headed for a playground, the same one my parents had taken me to when I was a child. I put my son, Nick, then two, in a swing and watched as his sister, Kate, then six, gave him a few strong pushes. I leaned against a pole and watched them both.
     Kate looked at me, stopped pushing her brother and came by my side.
     "I need a tissue, Dad," she said.
     I pulled one out of my coat pocket and bent down to rub her nose. She reached out and hugged me.
     "Sorry about Grandpa," she said.
     The remark caught me off guard.
     "I'm sorry, too," I said.
     "What did he die of?"
     "Cancer."
She went back to pushing her brother.
     "Is that bad?" she asked.
     "Yes, very bad."
     "Did you send him flowers?"
     "No. No I didn't."
     "Why not?"
     "He didn't like flowers."
     "Oh."
     She pushed her brother as high as the swing would take him, his legs stretched out against the cold wind, a smile locked across his face. I watched them, grateful for the inner warmth they provided.

Nick tired of the swing about the same time Kate tired of pushing him. I reached for my son's outstretched arms, and together the three of us continued our walk.
We made our way past the near-empty carousel, the music from its shell resonating through the park.
     "Grandpa used to bring me here every weekend," I said to my daughter. "Once gave me a five-dollar bill and told me to ride until the money ran out."
     "How long it take?" Kate asked.
     "Long time," I said. "Most of the afternoon."
     "Did you like it?"
     "Almost threw up, I was so dizzy," I said. "But I liked it. Liked being with him even more."
     "Mom says you and Grandpa look alike," Kate said.
     "A lot of people say that."
     A soccer game was in full swing on a hard dirt field to our left, played in front of a scattering of homeless men and women sitting on park benches, their eyes staring blanks, their lower lips mumbling words. Nick was asleep inside his stroller, his head leaning to one side, a half-empty bottle of apple juice still clutched in one hand.
     "Did I ever meet Grandpa?" Kate asked.
     "A long time ago," I said. "When you were Nick's age."
     "Did he like me?"
     "Very much," I said. "He used to call you Doll-face. He loved to hear you laugh. Always talked about it."
     "What was he like?" she asked.
     I bent down and scooped Kate into one arm, pushing Nick and the stroller with my free hand.
     "You ask a lot of questions," I said, kissing her on one cheek.
     "Please tell me," she said. "What was Grandpa like?"
     "He was just a dad," I said. "Better than most, maybe, but just a dad."
     "Like you," Kate said.
     "What?"
     "A dad just like you," she said.
     "That's right," I said. "Grandpa was a dad. Just like me."
     I walked out of the park and onto Central Park West, heading for home, my daughter still clutched to my side.

Excerpted from A Safe Place by Lorenzo Carcaterra. 
Copyright (c) 1992 by Lorenzo Carcaterra. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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