12

THE PROMISED LETTER DID ARRIVE THE NEXT DAY, BUT NO LONGER EXISTS. As soon as I read it, I destroyed it.

I do not regret that altogether. It brought me to recognize how intensely I had been mourning the loss of Modene. I could even feel the loss in my fingers as they fed the last page to the paper-shredder. I was in a fury at Kittredge for sparing no details.

All the same, it is a loss. One of Kittredge’s best letters is gone, and my literary task might be simpler now if I had it before me. Much later, sixteen years later, I did, however, obtain, in 1978 (by way of a senator’s aide), a copy of the transcript upon which Kittredge based her letter, and it will have to suffice. Let me not make too much of it. A good many years have gone by.

In January of 1962, Modene’s parents were in an auto accident. Her father took a turn at high speed, hit a patch of ice, and ended upside down in a ditch. Her mother escaped unscathed, but the father was left in a coma; the only question was whether it would take a few days or several years for him to die.

Modene grieved to a surprising degree. As she confessed to Willie, she had hated her father for years. When drunk, he had treated her mother badly. Nonetheless, she felt herself to be very much like him. At the end of a week-long visit home, she wept in her mother’s arms because now she could never come close to her father, and she had always assumed that would sooner or later transpire.

After Modene returned to work, however, she felt recovered, and was surprised at how little her father’s condition now seemed to affect her. Then, a week later, on a three-day visit to Chicago, she discovered that she was at the border of a nervous collapse. She could not sleep for fear that her father seemed to have died; he seemed to be visiting her in the dark. Yet, in the morning when she called Grand Rapids, he was still alive—in coma, but alive. (It may be worth noting that Kittredge, in a monograph called Half-States of Mourning in the Dual Persona, was subsequently to suggest that mourning, like love, was rarely experienced in anything like equal proportion by Alpha and Omega. Indeed, in troubled cases, when a territorial war over mourning rights waged within the psyche, the appearance of ghosts became a not uncommon manifestation.)

After the second night of such visitations, Modene felt ravaged. Giancana, in deference to her practice of never spending an entire night with him, came to her hotel room to pick her up for breakfast. Quick to sense the depth of her disturbance, he told her that he would make a few calls and then devote the day to her.

On this occasion, then, he did not take her from bar to clubhouse for his meetings, but had a picnic hamper put together with several bottles of wine, a quart of bourbon, the accompanying ice, and told her in a calm voice that they would have a private and personal wake, and he would help her to bury the ghost of that father who was not yet dead. He had a handle on such things, Giancana stated.

Driving his old sedan, he confided to her that he could get close to her father because he, Sam, could have been a motorcycle racer himself, and to prove the remark, gave her a demonstration as they drove out through the shabby, working-class back streets of West Chicago, whipping corners at high speed to demonstrate how a skid-turn could be taken at the last moment under “conditions impossible for other drivers. I could have been a stunt man,” said Giancana. “So could your father.” He drove that day out on South Ashland Avenue to a squat, dark church called the Shrine of St. Jude Thaddeus. “This place,” Sam said, “is not named for Judas, but Saint Jude. He is the saint for special cases, the hopeless cases, doomed people.”

“I am not doomed,” she told him.

“Put it this way. He takes care of the stuff that’s out of line. My daughter Francine had eyesight so bad she was almost blind, but I brought her here. I’m no churchgoer. All the same, I made a full novena, nine visits, and Francine’s eyes got to the point where she can see with contact lenses. They say St. Jude gives intercession for those who are without hope.”

“I do not see myself as without hope.”

“Of course not. But this is a special case concerning your father.”

“How do you expect me to come here nine times?”

“You don’t have to. I’ve done the nine. I carry the intercession.”

She knelt and prayed at one of the smaller chapels of St. Jude and was painfully aware of other people who prayed with her. “Crippled people,” as she would describe it later to Willie. “Some of them looked insane. There was the oddest mood in the place. I felt my father was very near to me and he was angry. ‘You are praying for me to die,’ I heard him say in my ear, but I was in a far-off mood, as if I was learning how to live in a cave. St. Jude’s is like that. Very much so. I felt as if I was in one of the old Christian caves. Maybe that was because there was not much ornamentation on the walls. It’s a poor church.”

After they left St. Jude’s, he drove out to a cemetery whose name she never noticed, but his wife, Angelina, he told her, rested there. Within the dim but expensively illumined interior of a mausoleum, kept always at seventy degrees, he set out the picnic hamper on the stone floor in front of the stone bench on which they sat. While they ate and drank, he repeated the account he had given her once of life with Angelina. She had been short in height and thin, and ill from birth with a spinal defect. Yet he loved her. Angelina, however, had not really loved him, not for years. “She still lived with the memory of her original fiancé who died young. She was faithful to his memory. I had to win her over,” said Sam, “and I succeeded. After she died, she used to come to visit me at night. Believe me. On her invitation, I would visit this mausoleum.” As he spoke, they ate and they drank and began to kiss.

At this point, I will use the copy of the transcript.

WILLIE: You began to kiss him in that mausoleum?

MODENE: There was nothing wrong with it. Do you have any conception of how hungry you can be for a live person’s mouth when there has been a tragedy in the family?

WILLIE: I can follow you, I guess.

MODENE: Well, you are always asking me what really happened.

WILLIE: I would rather be shocked than frustrated.

MODENE: You will be shocked. Sam is no ordinary man. He understands all the things that I start drinking to stop thinking about. He told me again how the Sicilians understand dead people, and ghosts, and curses, and can find a way through situations where other people would be lost. He told me that Angelina would have to help us if I cooperated with him. He had taken me to this place, to her mausoleum, because we had to show Angelina that we were not afraid of her. For that, we would have to do something we had not done before.

WILLIE: What?

MODENE: We had to fuck.

WILLIE: Did he use the word?

MODENE: Yes. He stopped using it in front of me months ago, but now he said we had to fuck right there in front of her. He said that he had never forced it on me because he was a little afraid of Angelina himself, but now he wanted to do it. He loved me. He was prepared to take a chance on things going wrong for him also.

WILLIE: This sounds awfully sick and crazy to me.

MODENE: Wait until you are invaded by a ghost. Maybe your idea of what is acceptable behavior will go through a change.

WILLIE: You actually agreed to do it with him right there?

MODENE: He took a blanket out of the picnic hamper and spread it on the floor. I lay down and let him put it in me for the first time. Then I stiffened. I would not allow him to finish.

WILLIE: Oh, my God, after all that?

MODENE: I felt her presence. It was as if an old gypsy woman was whispering in my ear. She was saying, “Enough is enough.” I thought she was right. It froze me. Sam and I started to argue right on the floor. I was as tight as a clenched fist. “It’s all right,” I told him, “but we have to finish somewhere else or none of it will work.” Do you know, he understood. He got up, he got dressed, he was very flushed, and I have to tell you that he looked sexier than I have ever seen him. He picked up everything, put it in the hamper, and drove me over to his house. I have never been more sexually excited in my life.

WILLIE: You have said as much before.

MODENE: Never like this. I couldn’t wait to get to his house. It was spooky in the tomb, but now I felt wild. I hate to say this, but do you know, Sam has an odor to his private parts that reminds me just a little bit of oil and gasoline, and that reinforced my impression that he could do something about my father.

WILLIE: I don’t know if I want to follow any more of this.

MODENE: You asked for it, and you can listen to it. When we reached Sam’s house, we rushed down to the private office in the basement where he has his serious meetings with the mob, and after he locked the door, we tore off our clothes and made love on the carpet of the floor. I kept thinking of all the men who walked through there and I am sure that Sam has made some decisions around that table to kill people—and, I have to say that had me so excited that I was ready as soon as he was. Afterward, we just lay there loving each other. Do you know, when I got back to my hotel that night, there was a message to call my mother. She told me that my father had died just that afternoon, and I said, “Mother, I am so happy for all of us.”

One comment in Kittredge’s letter I do not forget:

Do you know, Harry, much as I would like to believe that this is a pure manifestation of Giancana’s Omegic powers, I must also—thanks to living with Hugh—contemplate the possibility that Sam sent out orders that morning to locate some compliant orderly in her father’s hospital who, for the appropriate pourboire, would pull the plug. Having some idea of how difficult such matters can be to arrange, I lean, I confess, to the occult explanation, but do feel obliged to recall us to Hugh’s epistemological dilemma: “Do we enter the Theater of Paranoia or the Cinema of Cynicism?”