FOR THE SINS OF MY FATHER(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Offers a remarkable perspective on how a brutal mobster could
lead a sweet home life as a suburban dad.” —New York Times

　　“One of the most searing volumes ever written about the mob .
. . An] unforgettable memoir.” —Publishers Weekly

　　“Admirers of Mafia fiction . . . should enjoy DeMeo’s attempt
to strip off the gaudy veneer of what is, what was, and [what]
always will be very dirty business.” —Detroit Free Press

　　Born in Brooklyn and Long Island, ALBERT DEMEO lives in
suburban New York.
　　From the Hardcover edition.

　　Offers a remarkable perspective on how a brutal mobster could
lead a sweet home life as a suburban dad.” —New York
Times
　　“One of the most searing volumes ever written
about the mob . . . An] unforgettable memoir.” —Publishers
Weekly
　　“Admirers of Mafia fiction . . . should enjoy DeMeo’s attempt to
strip off the gaudy veneer of what is, what was, and [what] always
will be very dirty business.” —Detroit Free Press

　　one
　　FAMILY
　　Let us go then, you and I,
　　When the evening is spread out against the sky
　　Like a patient etherized upon a table;
　　Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
　　The muttering retreats
　　Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
　　And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
　　Streets that follow like a tedious argument
　　Of insidious intent
　　To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
　　Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
　　Let us go and make our visit.
　　–t. s. eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
　　My earliest memory is of blindness. I was four years old when I
woke up in a hospital crib with patches over my eyes, darkness all
around, utterly alone. Confused and disoriented, for a moment I
could not understand where I was or why my parents had left me
there alone. Then I remembered: I’d had an operation to fix my
crossed eye. Fear and loneliness whispered in the invisible room
where I lay, and I cried out for my mother and father. When the
bandages came off a few days later, the first image to emerge from
the blur was my father’s worried face. Looking back, it seems
fitting. I have spent more than thirty years since then struggling
to bring him into focus.
　　I was born in a quiet residential Brooklyn neighborhood in 1966,
the second child of parents barely out of their teens. I had an
older sister named Debra and a teenage stepbrother in my Uncle Joe.
My grandfather DeMeo had died when Joe was a baby, and when Grandma
DeMeo returned to her native Italy without Joe, my parents took him
in as their own. The five of us formed a happy, traditional
Italian-American family. A year later we moved to suburban
Massapequa, where my younger sister Lisa was born. Grandma returned
to Brooklyn shortly before Lisa was born and moved in with her
closest friend, Mrs. Profaci–“Mrs. P,” as I called her. Once
again, the family was complete.
　　Mrs. P lived just down the street from the two-story brick duplex
where my father had grown up. It was a green neighborhood in the
springtime, with tall, well-established foliage and small shrines
to the Virgin Mary in nearly every front yard. The Profacis’
towering brick mansion dominated the quiet street. Twice a year
until I was five or six, my father took me there to spend the night
with my grandmother, down Flatbush Avenue, through a maze of side
streets, and up to the corner lot where Mrs. Profaci’s house stood.
The Profaci home was like another world, a realm of elegant
timelessness. The living room was filled with delicately curved
gilt French furniture, always perfectly maintained. Pale satin
drapes and lace panels covered the windows. Mrs. P was equally
elegant in her high heels and pearls. The scent of Chanel No. 5
would wisp into my nostrils whenever she bent to kiss me. With her
silver blond hair swept into a French twist, she seemed a human
embodiment of the golden furniture that filled her home.
　　Mrs. P didn’t own a television, so our evenings there were spent
in quiet conversation in the kitchen after dinner. Grandma and Mrs.
P spoke Italian to each other, but they spoke English to me.
Grandma loved to talk about Mrs. P’s brother-in-law, Joseph
Profaci.Grandma admired everything about him–his custom-made
clothing; his luxurious car; the lavish gifts he made to his
family; and most of all, the way everyone looked up to him. “Your
grandfather was just an ordinary working man, Albert,” she would
tell me. “But Joseph Profaci–he was something special. I pray God
your father is half the man someday.” One time I asked Mrs. P how
her brother-in-law got so rich, but she changed the subject. Mrs. P
didn’t seem to like talking about him.
　　I lived in Massapequa, Long Island, for ten of my first eleven
years. It was a wonderful place to grow up. The streets of our
neighborhood were wide and clean, the sidewalks lined with
children’s bikes. It was the kind of place where you could sleep
outside on a summer night and feel perfectly safe. My early years
there were filled with joy and contentment. At the core of my sense
of security was my father.
　　No one could have asked for a better father than mine. He was a
husky man with dark hair and kind brown eyes, and though he was
only five feet, nine inches tall, he was a giant to me. He could
pick me up and toss me around as effortlessly as a cotton ball, and
he often did. I loved to ride on his shoulders. He spent more time
with me than any of the other fathers in the neighborhood spent
with their kids. Most of the other fathers were firemen, policemen,
teachers, or small business owners who worked on the island and had
to be at work by nine o’clock every morning. My dad was different;
he was home in the mornings, so he walked me to school while my
mother cleaned the house and started lunch. When the other kids
were kissing their moms good-bye, I was hugging my dad. Sometimes
he brought me a doughnut when he came to pick me up a couple of
hours later. I wasn’t exactly sure what my father did for a living,
and I didn’t care. I just liked being with him.
　　On sunny weekends my father took my sisters and me for hikes in
the nearby nature conservancy. Dad loved being outdoors with us.
Dad; our German shepherd, Major; my sisters; and I would all head
out after breakfast carrying bags of stale bread my mother packed
for us. The path behind our neighbors’ house led to a trail through
the trees and about half a mile down to a preserve with woods and a
small lake. The lake was filled with ducks and swans, and my
sisters and I would crouch down near the water’s edge and coax the
birds with pieces of stale bread. Afterward we would hike through
the woods until we got tired. When we were ready to rest, we headed
for the big log near our favorite tree to sit down. My father
always carried a switchblade. One afternoon my father took the
knife from his pocket and carved all of our names on the tree,
along with the date. After that we thought of it as our tree, and
we visited it whenever we could. It was a DeMeo family secret, our
special place in the woods.
　　Sometimes my dad took me for rides in the car with him on the
weekends. One Saturday he told me he was taking me to the airport
to meet someone named Uncle Vinny. “Uncle Vinny isn’t a blood
relation, Allie, just a friend of mine,” he told me when we pulled
into the terminal. I was too interested in watching the planes take
off and land to pay much attention when my father introduced me to
Vinny.
　　”How ya doin’, Albert?” Vinny asked as he bent to shake my hand.
He had on a blue uniform with his name embroidered on his shirt. We
went back into the cargo section with Vinny so my father could talk
to him, but I couldn’t hear a word they said over the roar of the
planes. I explored the dusty cargo area while Dad and Uncle Vinny
talked. Vinny looked very earnest and waved his hands around a lot
while my father shook his head the way he did when I was naughty.
Finally Uncle Vinny gave my father an envelope, and we left.
　　It wasn’t long until I saw Uncle Vinny again. Early the next
Saturday morning Vinny drove up in a station wagon filled with
crates of fresh fruit. My sisters and I lined up on the curb to
watch as he carried the wooden crates into our house. We had never
seen so much fruit. Along with the ordinary bananas and oranges,
there were exotic fruits like guava that not even my mother had
ever seen. My mother shook her head as she sorted through the
crates, murmuring that there was enough here for half the
neighborhood. Uncle Vinny smiled sweetly and murmured, “A little
gift for you and the children, Mrs. DeMeo.” The following Sunday he
brought us boxes of imported chocolate. The weekend after that he
brought beautiful London Fog raincoats for us kids. Trailing behind
him back out to the car that afternoon, I asked him where he got
all this stuff.
　　”They’re F-O-T, Albert,” he told me. When I looked blank, he
winked at me and said, “You know, F-O-T. Fallen off trucks.” I was
amazed. How could the truck drivers be so stupid? This was a lot of
stuff. It must be worth an awful lot of money. Uncle Vinny had
brought more coats than we needed, so my mom gave the extras to
Barbara and Jim, my parents’ best friends on the block, for their
kids. Jim was a policeman who didn’t make much money, so Barbara
was really excited to get the coats. Vinny continued dropping
things off for us at least once a week, and after a while I started
wondering why the truck drivers didn’t just pick this stuff up if
it wasn’t damaged.
　　Finally I asked my father about it. He eyed me for a moment, then
smiled and said, “Son, can you keep a secret? Man to man?”
　　Of course, I could. I was proud that my father trusted me.
　　”Your uncle Vinny steals things. He’s a nice guy, but he steals
just about anything he can lay his hands on. And he bets on horses
a lot, so I loaned him some money, and he can’t pay it back because
he keeps betting. This is his way of repaying me. I don’t ask him
where the stuff comes from. I don’t want to know.”
　　Uncle Vinny was a thief? But he seemed so nice, and I could tell
my father liked him. If my father liked him, he must be all
right.
　　Saturdays were good, but Sunday was the best day of the week. My
father got up early on Sundays to cook us breakfast. My Sunday
alarm was the sound of the juice machine as my father squeezed
fresh orange juice to go with the meal. I piled into the kitchen
with my sisters one late spring morning to find the table loaded
down with stacks of pancakes, butter and warm syrup, homemade hash
browns, eggs to order, and bacon and sausage. We ate until our
stomachs hurt as my father sat and watched, smiling to see our
enjoyment. Afterward my mother chased us upstairs to get ready for
church.
　　In half an hour, we were all back downstairs in our Sunday best.
My sisters had lovely dresses and patent leather shoes, and I wore
a nice suit and tie, with my shoes polished and my nails manicured.
While Dad cleaned up from the mo…