Once Broken (2 page)

At 5′9″, Ed Martin, despite his corpulence, was an appealing man of Canadian descent. With mahogany hair and soft caramel-brown eyes, in his youth Ed earned the reputation of being a “lady killer.” He was engaged twice before marrying Lucille Paglia, his “Queen of Hearts.”

When Ed and Lucille went out on the town, Ed asked his friends, “Don’t you think my wife is beautiful?” Lucille lectured him when they were alone. “Honey, don’t do that. You know everyone doesn’t think I’m beautiful.”

But Lucille was mistaken. Of Italian descent, she had enchanting gray-blue eyes, chestnut-brown hair, and a stunning smile. She was a beautiful woman and her husband knew it.

Lucille loved her husband and was stimulated by her role as a ’50s housewife. It was her niche. She loved keeping up with Betty Crocker and Heloise and, eventually, Julia Child. She delighted in all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and general homemaking required by her family of five. In particular, she basked in her husband’s compliments and attention.

Jackie took great pleasure in her dad’s compliments and attention as well. In good weather, she’d wait on the front steps for him to return from work. In cold weather, she’d wait on the porch. Every day he’d get out of the car wearing his dusty gray work clothes and carrying his stainless steel lunch box. “There’s my pumpkin,” he’d exclaim when he saw her. He’d lift her up, give her a quick bear hug, then take her hand and walk into the house.

She loved playing games with her dad—board games, cards, or checkers, it didn’t matter to her. Ed maintained his childlike playfulness so every kid loved him, neighborhood kids and cousins alike. More than a few times, Jackie’s friends knocked on the door asking to play checkers with Ed. Jackie would whine, saying “That’s not fair.” Ed told her, “They asked first. Come, you can watch.” But neighborhood kids never got to share in the best moments of all, when she sat on her dad’s lap, syncing her breathing to his. There was no safer place in the world.

When Jackie was six, Ed suffered a major heart attack. Jackie overheard the adults talking among themselves. “He’s lucky to be alive,” they said. It shook her to the core. Lucille made changes to the family meals and yelled at him to stop smoking. She promised to stop too, if he would. Eventually, Ed went back to work and things returned to normal. Jackie took solace knowing that God would never let anything happen to her dad.

At two a.m. on June 2, 1965, a week before her tenth birthday, Jackie was yanked from sleep by animal-like sounds— moaning, groaning, gurgling—and her mother’s hysterical voice. “Oh Honey! Do you want me to call the doctor? Should I call an ambulance? Oh my God!”

Jackie leaped out of bed and stood clamped to the bannister at the top of the staircase. Over the wild beating of her heart, she heard her mother’s cries. The response to each frantic question was more moaning, groaning, gurgling, then a growl. She heard her mom calling for an ambulance. A short time later, Jackie watched, petrified, as the paramedics took her father away on a stretcher. She knew he wasn’t coming back.

Jackie ran into her brother’s room. “Vic, Vic, wake up! Daddy went to the hospital! Mom called Mrs. Sullivan. She’s downstairs.”

Sixteen-year-old Vic rubbed sleep from his eyes, trying to make sense of Jackie’s words. “What?”

“Daddy’s … gone, I think.” Jackie told him, too afraid to cry. “Mrs. Sullivan is downstairs making coffee, waiting for mom to get back from the hospital. I’m going down.”

Rolling the blankets aside, Vic got out of bed, joining his sister and Mrs. Sullivan in the kitchen. Sitting in the chair between the refrigerator and the stove, Jackie asked, “He died didn’t he? He’s not coming back, is he?”

“Honey,” Mrs. Sullivan said in a gentle voice, “let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s wait for your mom to get home.”

“Yeah, Jackie. It’ll be okay,” Vic assured her. He leaned against the refrigerator, his lower lip twitching.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Remember when daddy had that heart attack before and everyone said he was lucky he didn’t die? Maybe this time he won’t be lucky,” she whispered.

A short time later, Jackie looked down the hall as Lucille came in the front door. A priest followed her. Jackie turned to stone. Vic went to Lucille and Jackie heard the priest mumble something. Vic let out a wail that sent chills down Jackie’s spine. Then and there she knew the unthinkable had happened. Mrs. Sullivan urged her to go to them but Jackie didn’t budge. Maybe if she stayed there, she’d never have to hear that her daddy wasn’t coming home.

By dawn the Martin household was filled with aunts and uncles. Everyone was talking and helping Lucille make arrangements. Jackie had moved from the chair beside the stove to her father’s rocking chair where she wanted to spend the rest of her life.

One of her aunts told her what would happen next. She couldn’t go to school for the week. Neither could she participate in the services, the wake, or the funeral. She had to stay at her best friend Janice Wheaton’s house. Her brother Paul, five years old, would spend the week with Mrs. Sullivan’s family. Jackie loved Janice and her family but she wanted to stay home. She wanted more than anything to sit on her father’s lap, melt into his breathing pattern, and feel the world was safe again.

In the early days after Ed’s death, there was a lot of crying and panic in the Martin family. But Jackie didn’t cry like everyone else. She was angry. Lucille was advised to sell Ed’s welding business. Jackie was relieved when she overheard that the family didn’t have to move because there was mortgage insurance. All Jackie wanted was for life to return to normal. But everything was different. People looked at her in a strange way. Friends and other kids at school felt sorry for her. And the ache in her heart was agonizing.

The Martin family didn’t discuss the tragedy. No one knew the words to use. The only certainty was that the family was shattered. Dinnertime was silent. Jackie stared out the window, desperately hoping that her father’s red Rambler would pull into the driveway, ending this nightmare. Instead, in the driveway sat her mother’s navy-blue ’64 Ford Falcon.

Lucille was devastated, emotionally and financially ill-equipped to handle a tragedy of this magnitude. As a young girl she was promised, in all the unspoken ways we all learn the rules, that good girls marry the men of their dreams and live happily ever after. Yet in the blink of an eye, she became a tortured thirty-nine-year-old widow with three dependent children. She lacked marketable skills, sufficient resources, and emotional buffers that were required to carry such a heavy burden. A family friend owned a local diner and asked Lucille if she wanted to waitress there. She accepted.

As her mother made adjustments, Jackie grew angrier because she had never been given the opportunity to say good-bye. Not understanding death, she internalized that her father left her. They told him after his first heart attack that he needed to lose weight and stop smoking.
If he loved us, he would have done those things.
So, she concluded, he chose to leave her.

Jackie was brokenhearted and needed someone to help her come to terms with her crushing loss. At her parochial school, she and her classmates attended first Friday mass each month. Classmates told her about her father’s funeral mass because they had attended as a class. Jackie sat in church reconstructing the stories she’d been told. Finally, for the first time, she cried.

She was startled when a nun tapped her shoulder telling her to see Mother Superior. While she walked the block from the church to the school, she hoped Sister Anna might help her. She knocked on Mother Superior’s door and was told to enter. Sister Anna asked her what the problem was. Astonished that she had to explain, she responded, “I’m sad because my dad died.” Sister Anna scolded Jackie, telling her that she had no right to cry because God needed her father more than she did. Jackie’s anger exploded exponentially. In her ten-year-old mind, she reconciled that she was abandoned and no one cared, not even God.

Lucille couldn’t bear to sleep in her half-empty double bed, so begged Vic to switch beds with her. But that didn’t alleviate her pain or loneliness. She started with a few shots of whiskey before bed. It helped her sleep, at least for a few hours. But soon, a highball after work was soothing. And then another, while making dinner. The Martin household ran wild in an effort to escape the gaping wound left after Ed’s death.

Vic got a job washing dishes at a local bakery where met his first serious girlfriend, Karen Zeolla. If Vic wasn’t working, he was with Karen. Jackie started babysitting and found a second family for refuge. If she wasn’t babysitting she distracted herself with music, food, and fantasy. Paul, desperate for attention, learned that if he was bold and obnoxious enough, he couldn’t be ignored. The dynamics of the family changed and dysfunction became the norm.

At fourteen, Jackie was told by everyone that she looked like her dad. She had his shiny dark-brown hair that she wore shoulder length. Her almond-shaped caramel eyes were set off by her creamy complexion. She possessed a natural beauty anyone would envy. Yet she harbored so much anger. Not only did she lose her father, but her mother, after a few afternoon drinks, threw hostile fits if she wasn’t passed out on the couch. The anger she spewed at Jackie, and the retaliatory anger Jackie hurled back, spiraled Jackie’s self-esteem much lower than her unresolved grief alone.

In high school, Jackie had friends but felt most comfortable on the sidelines, uninvolved and indifferent. She was haunted by a serious side of life that other kids her age didn’t grasp. Distrust and abandonment were her focus. High school, with its adolescent competition and social pressure, was not a place where Jackie thrived.

1971

When Jackie turned sixteen, Tara Manchester got her a job at Patty’s Donut Shop. She needed to help support herself and buried her worries in the fast-paced restaurant business. In addition to donuts and muffins, Patty’s served breakfast and lunch. It was a perfect weekend job.

Since money was tight following Ed’s death, Jackie left parochial school in the eighth grade and entered public school. Tara and Jackie had become instant friends at Watertown Junior High. Tara was a fun-loving young woman, both confident and attractive. She was Jackie’s opposite in that she fully trusted life and in the goodness of most people. Jackie needed to learn that. Compassion ignited their friendship. Mutual fondness fostered it.

Tara was petite with an adorable face framed by luxuriant brown shoulder-length hair with a few bouncy curls. If her appearance didn’t attract attention, her zest for life did. When Jackie spent time with Tara, she remembered that she was still a kid and not an emotionally overburdened adult at the age of fifteen.

One day at the shop, Jackie noticed a tall, dark-haired young man with blue eyes in the swarm of patrons nudging their way to the donut counter.

“Excuse me, can I get a dozen donuts please?” asked the next person in line. Her attention refocused, Jackie took the order. Finally, she took
his
order. She read the name embroidered on his dark-blue work shirt.
Tony
. As he left with his muffins and coffee, she was thankful that her racing pulse wasn’t visible.

Tony started coming in earlier and sat at the counter ordering a full breakfast. Jackie bolted to wait on him. Soon they were exchanging banter and small talk, but it never went further.

“I don’t get it,” Jackie told Tara. “We talk every time he comes in. He’s so easy to talk to and so funny. But he doesn’t ask me out. He never mentions a girlfriend. I don’t get it.”

Well, he may be in a relationship—have a girlfriend or even be married, though he doesn’t wear a ring. Or he’s just being nice and not really interested. I think he’s interested, though. So I don’t know. As my mom says, there’s more fish in the sea.”

But Jackie didn’t want any fish, she wanted this fish.

Jackie started college, but continued to see Tony at her weekend shifts at Patty’s. Each time they met, she grew more enamored. Their conversations were effortless. The challenge was getting Prince Charming to ask her out.

Within a few months, without warning, the owners of Patty’s decided to close the business.

Tony

B
etrothed to a home-grown Italian woman, Louie Salvucci wasn’t interested in any other woman until he met Anna McCabe, a new co-worker. Louie resisted his attraction to her, respecting his engagement, but Anna won him over. Anna was not a naturally beautiful woman, but if Louie had been asked, he would have described her as seductive. Old-country values lost their significance to a riptide of desire. Louie broke off his engagement. After a brief courtship, despite Louie’s parents’ objection and embarrassment, Louie and Anna eloped.

The newlyweds were in a rush to start the large family they had talked about, but Anna’s first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. The second attempt resulted in the stillbirth of a baby girl they named Dominica, after Louie’s grandmother. Louie refused to try again as his love for his wife and fear of losing her far outweighed his desire for a child. Anna still wanted a child and pleaded with her husband.

“Louie, I can’t live a protected life. I need to have a baby as I need to breathe. Please, let’s try again.”

“We’ll adopt.”

“I want our own baby, Louie. I want to look in the eyes of our child and see your eyes. Please. I know everything will be fine.”

“Oh, you know? Dr. Erico warned of the possible complications due to your age. I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you or we lost another baby.”

“Yes, my dearest, I do know,” Anna assured him. He looked into his wife’s eyes and was once again persuaded by her allure.

Louie and Anna were married five years when the third conception occurred. The pregnancy was a miracle by all accounts, problem-free from conception through delivery. But, upon medical advice, a hysterectomy was performed following the birth of their son, Anthony James Salvucci.

Anna and Louie anticipated their son’s every need, which produced an overprotected and pampered baby. Anna loved her son completely, but Louie’s utter devotion to his child became a point of marital contention.