name that went the way of the rotary phones and rabbit ears in their apartments. She raised my mother alone in a small ground-floor apartment. Her older sister Johanna lived across the street. We called her Tante, the Austrian word for aunt . They were linked by blood, by relatives in Austria, and Tante was loyal but not warm. She was not a woman who forgot mistakes. She thought it a duty to preserve them. She was small and firm like my grandmother, and she came to America first and respectably, with a husband. Grandma Binder left behind a son in Austria and a cloud of secrecy surrounding my mother’s father. His identity was never discussed. For this, Tante kept my grandmother in a perpetual prison of atonement that she neither resented nor shunned. There was a distinct pecking order: Tante, then Grandma Binder, then my mother. This was simply how it was. Grandma Binder and Tante were quiet and serious—staid women from a generation that expected difficulties and hard work. There was pride about owning things, admonitions to be careful. They parceled out information in tiny bites on a need-to-know basis, and there was little, in their view, that anyone needed to know.
The DiFalcos were cheap wine, cigarettes, loud laughter. Their faces were colorful, their movements exaggerated. They told big stories and filled up space. They were unable to leave a room without marking it somehow. My mother’s family, on the other hand, was quiet and resolute. They drank coffee in cups with saucers; they sat up straight in their chairs. They were in constant struggle, these temperaments, from where we kids stood: the DiFalcos’ clamorous simplicity, the Binders’ stern wall, and my mother parked uneasily between them.
My father grew up on Fifty-Eighth and Second Avenue with his brothers—Sal, Benny, and Joey—and Maryann. It was the kind of city block that was typical then: self-contained like a small town. A tight neighborhood at a time when you counted on the kindness of strangers—on other adults, the neighborhood policeman—to watch out for the kids. He was handsome—muscular and square-jawed, always with a cigarette dangling from his lips. He was one of the gang on Fifty-Eighth Street and had a quiet, James Dean kind of cool.
He was twenty-two when he spotted my mother on Sixty-Ninth and First Avenue, sitting on the corner next to Julia Richman High, from which she had just graduated with honors that spring. She was brainy and pretty, drawn to the guy in the leather jacket. I like his stories because he doesn’t tell them much, and when he does they’re casual but vivid. Nothing is left out. We know about the years busing tables at the Copa, with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra hanging out in the kitchen. We know about motorcycles and street fights and hotwiring cars from Potemkin Cadillac on Sixty-Ninth Street with his buddy Vezzie. We know about Eddie Nine-fingers and the fight with Duke for my mother. We know he and Sal and Benny enlisted in the army in 1962 and that he was promoted from private to sergeant, which made him practically a war hero in my family.
My father was a high school dropout with a motorcycle and a leather jacket, a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the sleeve of his T-shirt. And he was the first person to give my mother information she could do something with. “You’re smart, Helen,” he told her. “You should go to college.” Then they walked hand in hand through Central Park singing, “two lost souls on the highway of life…” and she married him.
I think my mother had a different sort of life in mind, a more complicated one that she had expected but thought had missed her. Girls on Seventy-First Street were to get married and have children and it was assumed that was enough, a vague sense of respectability that always involved a man, and children, and very little of the woman herself. My mother made her choices early, before she was ready to, perhaps. At a time when there was a slight