Blind Faith

  “Listen, in this town—in Brookside anyway, or at the country club—the slightest whiff that maybe there’s less in the till than there was last year and it’s like you got a social disease. In Rob’s case, we’re not talking social disease, we’re talking the equivalent of AIDS. It’s fatal.

  “Nobody will ever know how bad the trouble was, and who he might have gone to for help—although I can tell you one thing: he was right there on his knees with the rest of them at Gigliotti’s funeral, and if you go check a calendar you’ll see that Gigliotti’s funeral happened to be the day before Rob had his first meet with L’Heureux.

  “And something else that never came out: Felice told the prosecutor’s office—this was back when she was telling them everything, so they could let her off the hook and keep the right people happy—that Marshall was spending time at the Key West Lounge with Riccio and Gigliotti. It’s all down on paper. Not in the official reports, you understand, but it’s there.

  “What do you think he was doing over there, break-dancing with the teenyboppers? The Key West Lounge was Cocaine City, and there’s poor, square Rob Marshall right in the middle of it, with no idea how deep the shit was he was into. And meanwhile, back home, doing the laundry nice and fresh and melting the butter for the pancakes, there’s good old reliable gung-ho Maria: without the slightest clue about what’s happening.

  “When she starts to pick up a couple of clues, she can’t believe it. This can’t be happening to her. This wasn’t the way she was brought up. Hey, she’s the swim team Mother of the Year. The happy lady waving that big blue finger that says ‘We’re Number One’ and leaving notes in her kids’ underwear drawers saying ‘Smile, you’re a champ.’

  “But, hey, that’s over now. Things got a little out of whack for a while but everything’s back to normal now. No harm done, except, I guess, to Maria.

  “And to Rob. You could say, I suppose, that there was harm done to Rob. On the other hand, you could also say he was the one who done it.

  “I’ll tell you who really got screwed in all this, and everybody says it but that doesn’t make it any less true, is the boys. Those poor boys. Those poor boys. I wonder if they’ll ever recover.”

  On April 1, 1987, more than a year after the conviction, Chris Marshall, then a junior at Lehigh University, wrote his father a letter of the kind most sons never have to write.

  Dad,

  The following is a response to your most recent letter and a collection of recent thoughts. There is no particular order to these but I feel the point is clear.

  (1) I think you’re guilty.

  (2) I hate you for what you did to Mom.

  (3) I hate you for what you did to Grandpop.

  (4) I hate you for what you did to Grandmom.

  (5) I hate you for what you did to our family.

  (6) I hate you for what you did to John.

  (7) I hate you for what you did to Roby.

  (8) I hate you for what you did to me.

  I hate having to talk to you on the phone. In the future, if you want to call, make it person-to-person for John. Otherwise, I will not accept.

  I hate getting letters from you. DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS ONE, I WILL NOT READ IT. Any letter I receive from you from now on I’m not even going to open. If you must contact me, do so through my lawyer: Eugene Leahy.

  You were right about one thing, I will do what I want; just like you always did. The difference is I’m not going to kill anybody doing it.

  Your son,

  Chris

  Six weeks later, on Mother’s Day 1987, which was a hot and sunny Sunday in Toms River, Roby Marshall sat on a lawn chair in front of a modest home on a well-traveled road in a section of Toms River where the houses were a lot cheaper than in Brookside.

  The home belonged to the father of Roby’s girlfriend, who was soon to become his fiancée. The small, dirt-covered front yard was filled with tables on top of which were arrayed all that remained of what once had been the possessions of Rob and Maria Marshall.

  The house at 884 Crest Ridge Drive had been sold. Now, Roby and his girlfriend, whose name was Michelle DiGiacinto, were holding a tag sale to dispose of its contents. Even Rob’s old roulette wheel and blackjack table were up for sale.

  “You know,” Roby said, “if we’d put up a sign that said ‘Last Chance to Grab a Piece of Rob Marshall,’ instead of just ‘Tag Sale,’ I bet we’d do a whole lot better.” Then he grinned.

  There was about him an air of relaxation and even contentment that came as a surprise to a visitor who had not seen him since the days of turmoil that had enveloped his father’s conviction. He seemed at peace with himself and his circumstances.

  “It’s true,” he said. “Going into the trial, I remember saying that once I had everything and now I had nothing. But the wheel didn’t stop there. It kept on turning, and now I feel—I know this will sound strange, but it’s from the heart—I feel I have everything again.

  “The thing is, I’ve learned what’s important and what’s not. Michelle has done that for me. She’s taught me so much. She and her father. The way I used to be—the values I used to have—I wouldn’t even have known people like this. I wouldn’t have bothered with them, I would have looked down on them, just because they didn’t have money.

  “Michelle’s father used to drive an ice cream truck. Now he’s a handyman. He’s the kind of guy we would have hired in the old days, not someone I ever would have thought could have had anything important to say.

  “But, I swear to God, he’s saved me. He and Michelle. I had a hard time, I had a real hard time, after the trial. I just couldn’t accept that my father had done it. I knew it was true, but I couldn’t accept it in my heart.

  “It took months. Last summer, I’d go over to the beach at night all by myself and just sit there under the boardwalk and watch the ocean and think. I’d sit there for hours, sometimes all night, and I remember one night I did that, and there was this tremendous thunder-and-lightning storm out over the ocean and I just sat there through it all, watching the sky light up and hearing the thunder, and when it was all over—I don’t want this to sound too mystical or anything, it’s just the way it happened—when it was over, I suddenly felt like my own head had cleared, like the sky.

  “And I realized—I realized—I just didn’t believe him anymore and I’d never believe him again. And that was it. It was like this tremendous burden being lifted. Because ever since he’d called me at school and asked me to lie for him I knew, I knew he had to be guilty. I knew it but I couldn’t accept it.

  “Suddenly, as that dawn came, after the storm, I could accept it. I know this may sound like bullshit but it was like all at once there was nothing to fight about anymore. Hey—facts are facts. Lies are lies. It was over. I drove to my friend’s house, Keith Wolff’s, and I remember waking him up and just telling him, ‘Keith, Keith, it’s over. I just don’t believe him anymore.’ And then I cried. And Keith said, ‘Thank God, man, now you can rejoin the real world.’

  “See, that’s what it had been like for so long. This big pretense that Tessie McBride was maintaining and my father was maintaining and we were expected to maintain. I tried to do it—I tried to do it for months, even after the conviction, out of that misguided sense of loyalty.

  “Once I stopped fighting it, once I accepted the truth, it was like I was at this point of exact zero, or something. Like this point of nothingness. And what I realize now is that that’s what made room in my heart for Michelle.

  “She helped me to understand that I was a victim, too. She let me feel the way I wanted to feel about all this—not the way people told me I was supposed to feel. I was right to feel angry! That was okay. She and her dad let me know it wasn’t my fault. See, I think subconsciously that was part of the problem. Somehow, I was blaming myself for Mom’s death.

  “Michelle and her dad, they both told me: ‘Nothing you could have done could have prevented this. And there’s nothing you can ever do to chang
e it. Believe what’s in your heart, not what your father tells you to believe.’

  “It sounds obvious sitting and talking about it now, but it’s what has totally transformed my life. It’s made me feel like I have a life again.

  “And it’s a life with a completely different set of values. I don’t look at a lack of money as being a flaw anymore. Now, I look at it as being an asset, because it can make you a down-to-earth person. Michelle and I, we do things like—go for walks. Things that don’t cost any money. I mean, I guess it shouldn’t have taken me twenty years and the death of my mother to understand this, but you don’t have to spend money to have fun. And you don’t have to have money to be worth loving. And I love Michelle. And that’s what I mean—I feel like I have everything again.” He laughed. “Hey, Michelle has even taught me to like dogs.”

  The sun was growing hotter. Occasionally, a car would stop and Roby would get up to make a sale. He wasn’t in the mood to drive hard bargains. “How much?” he’d say. “I don’t know, what’s the tag say, ten bucks? You can have it for five. Three, three, make it three, that’s fine.”

  He walked among the tables, pointing at random. “I’d give this stuff away,” he said, “except if you put up a sign that said ‘Free Stuff,’ nobody would stop because they’d all assume it was junk. Hey, a lot of it probably is. But it’s memories. Twenty years of marriage, twenty years of memories. “For sale,” he called out. “Right here! While they last! Get ’em cheap!”

  Then he sat down in the lawn chair again. “Another thing I’ve come to accept,” he said, “and this one’s been harder, is that the loss will never go away. It’s like, I used to feel, ‘Hey, I should be over this by now.’

  “I’m not ever going to be over it. I see a station wagon drive by that’s like Mom’s and all of a sudden I’ll feel sad. I’ll see some woman in a supermarket who just for a minute looks like her, and I get this like jolt of sadness and it’ll even bring tears to my eyes. Anything can trigger a memory.

  “For like a year and a half it was all ‘Dad, Dad, Dad, how terrible what’s happening to Dad.’ That’s all I was surrounded by. But it’s like Michelle said: ‘You’ve got to stop thinking about your father and start thinking about what happened to your mother. You’ve got to mourn. Otherwise, you’ll never move beyond it.’

  “So, I’m mourning. I’m letting myself feel how much I miss Mom, I’m not fighting it. And most of the time it’s okay, I can deal. But, Jesus, this past week has been a bitch. All those Mother’s Day commercials on TV.”

  By midafternoon the sun was too hot and no cars were stopping anymore. Roby dragged what hadn’t been sold into Michelle’s father’s garage. Then he drove to the condominium into which he and his brothers had recently moved.

  He said some people found it strange that they’d want to remain in Toms River, but, he said, it was the only hometown they’d ever known, and, having lost so much else, they felt they needed something familiar to hang on to.

  “Besides,” he said, “it’s close to the beach. And that’s one value that’s never gonna change. I love the beach.”

  Chris Marshall was at the condominium, where the powerful central air-conditioning unit provided a bracing antidote to the heat.

  Likewise, Chris’s mood seemed in sharp contrast to Roby’s. The act of writing such a forceful letter to his father, after two and half years of fighting back his feelings in order to offer support, seemed to have energized him.

  Where Roby was newly tranquil, Chris seemed still flush with rebellion.

  “Yeah,” he said, “my father’s written back since I sent him that letter. He’s written back about twenty times. But I have no idea what he’s saying because I don’t even open the envelopes. I just throw them right in the garbage, like he threw Mom.

  “I’ll never forgive him. There’s no way I could forgive him for what he’s done.

  “Not that he’s exactly begging for forgiveness. He’s still keeping up the charade. All the bullshit. I reached a point last summer where I just couldn’t take it anymore. Tessie McBride called up and said she was setting up a visiting schedule for prison, and I said, ‘I’m sick of this shit! I think he’s guilty and I’m never going to see him again.’

  “I figured it was time for a total break. Time to lay it all out and let my father know just how I felt. And that’s it. That’s the last communication I’ll ever have with him. Philosophically, I haven’t really figured out how I feel about the death penalty, but as far as my father goes, if they execute him it’s no big deal—to me he’s already been dead for a long time.

  “And just for what he did to John he should be. By the time this happened, Mom’s murder, my personality was already formed. I had already gone to college. But John was only thirteen years old. He still had four or five years of mothering coming to him and my father took those away from him. I’m his legal guardian now, big deal. Who’s going to make him pancakes in the morning?

  “But this is Mother’s Day. I don’t want to talk about my father. I’m sick of talking about him, hearing about him and thinking about him and nothing but him since the night my mother was killed.

  “I’ll tell you a story about my mother, although this involves my father, too—maybe there is no escaping it. But this is something I think about a lot. It was three years ago, just about this time of year, maybe a little later in May because Roby had just come home from his freshman year at Villanova.

  “To celebrate, we went out to the club for an early supper. We were at this big table in the corner where they usually seated us, and they’d just brought our appetizers to the table. I remember that, because mine was shrimp cocktail and it was nearly inedible.

  “Then Tom Kenyon and his wife walked in and were seated very near us. Maybe not right next to us, but pretty close. And I could see that for some reason my mom was getting upset. Then, just as the main courses arrived, she started to cry. She got right up from the table and put her sunglasses on so nobody could see she was crying and left the room.

  “She must have been gone for twenty minutes. The waitress asked my father if they should take the food back to the kitchen to keep it warm but he said no, she’d be right back. Finally, he and Roby got up and went outside to look for her. And I remember just sitting there with John, looking down at all this food that suddenly I knew none of us were going to eat, and wondering, What the hell is going on?

  “We never did eat the meal. She came back in, with her sunglasses still on, but after about five minutes of nobody saying anything we all just got up and left. When I asked her that night what the trouble was, all she said was, ‘I’ve been upset lately, it’s been the buildup of a lot of things.’

  “It wasn’t until all that stuff came out at the trial about my mom going to see Mr. Kenyon and then him telling Felice everything she’d said that I realized that must have been it: here we were, this supposedly perfectly happy family, this advertisement for the good life in Toms River, and just as the main course arrives in walks the one man in town who my mom knows is aware that the whole thing is a sham.

  “I think she just couldn’t take it. She just couldn’t take pretending when she knew that ten feet away there was somebody who knew the truth. And I think that might have made her realize that pretty soon all the pretending was going to have to stop.

  “Well, it did,” Chris said. “Just not quite soon enough.”

  Roby came into the living room. He was carrying a folded letter on pink stationery.

  “Do you remember,” he asked, “that my mom and my uncle Gene were supposed to meet Dad that Monday morning, and lay everything out in front of him? Well, here’s the letter she was going to give him at the meeting.”

  It wasn’t long. It took up only one side of the paper. It said:

  “The first 20 years.”

  I hope that you can be whatever you need to be with me.

  I hope that you sense enough love from me to feel easy about smiling when you need to smile and crying w
hen you need to cry.

  I really hope that you feel secure enough with me to be silent or to show your needs or just ask for a hug.

  Feeling that secure is important—I know, because I need that feeling of security from you, too.

  All my love, Maria

  “Security,” Roby said, his eyes suddenly filled with tears. “That’s all she wanted from him—security.”

  “Instead,” Chris said, “he gave her a couple of forty-five slugs in the back.”

  They stared at the note for a few moments without saying anything. Then Chris looked at his watch. It was 4:30 P.M.

  “Where’s John, upstairs?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Roby said.

  “Let’s go get him. It’s time to go to the cemetery.”

  They brought roses, red roses, just three.

  Within days of their father’s conviction, the boys had gone to the funeral home in Toms River and had been given their mother’s ashes, which had been kept in the cardboard box in the drawer.

  They’d buried the ashes in a plot at St. Joseph’s Cemetery and had marked the plot with a headstone inscribed with the words Maria had written on the back of Roby’s appointment card from Stockton State College a week before she died: “Our Greatest Glory Consists Not in Never Falling but in Rising Every Time We Fall.”

  The afternoon had turned very warm, as much like July as May. The bright sun gave off a glare. A hot wind blew across the wide expanse of grass, rustling tall trees that were already in full leaf, and setting up a bobbing motion among dozens, maybe hundreds of Mylar balloons that had been affixed to grave sites throughout the cemetery.

  This was, apparently, some sort of new tradition in Toms River. Marking special occasions by putting a Mylar balloon on a tombstone instead of flowers.

  Roby, Chris and John had only their flowers, one each. They parked on the edge of an asphalt roadway and walked slowly toward their mother’s grave.

  When they reached it, they knelt together for many long minutes in silent, tearful prayer.