City of Girls

And, of course, he was faithfully married—with a beautiful daughter whom he’d named after God’s angels.

In a sane or reasonable world, how would a serious man like Frank Grecco ever have crossed paths with a lightweight individual like me? What had brought us together? Aside from our shared connection to my brother, Walter—a person who had made both of us feel intimidated and minimized—we had no other commonalities. And our only shared history was a sad one. We had spent one dreadful day together, back in 1941—a day that had left the both of us shamed and scarred.

Why would that day have led us to falling in love, twenty years later?

I don’t know.

I only know that we don’t live in a sane or reasonable world, Angela.

—

So here is what happened.

Patrolman Frank Grecco called me a few days after our first meeting and asked if we could go for another walk.

The call came in to L’Atelier rather late at night—well after nine o’clock. It had startled me to hear the boutique’s phone ringing. I happened to be there, because I had just finished up some alterations. I was feeling stagnant and bleary-eyed. My plan had been to go upstairs and watch television with Marjorie and Nathan, and then call it a night. I had almost ignored the ringing phone. But then I picked it up, and there was Frank on the line, asking me if I would go walking with him.

“Right now?” I asked. “You want to go for a walk now?”

“If you would. I’m feeling restless tonight. I’ll be out walking, anyway, and I hoped maybe you would join me.”

Something about this intrigued me, and touched me, too. I’d gotten plenty of calls from men at this hour of the night—but not because they wanted to go for a walk.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I’ll take the streets, not the expressway.”

We ended up walking all the way over to the East River that night—through some neighborhoods that were not so safe back then, by the way—and then we kept on walking along the deteriorating waterfront until we got to the Brooklyn Bridge. Once we got to the bridge, we walked right over it. It was cold out, but there was no breeze, and our exercise kept us warm. There was a new moon, and you could almost see some stars.

That was the night when we told each other everything about ourselves.

—

That was the night I found out that Frank had become a patrolman expressly because of his inability to sit still. Walking a beat for eight hours a day was exactly what he needed, he said, in order not to crawl out of his own skin. This is also why he took so many extra shifts—always volunteering to fill in for the other cops who needed a day off. If he was lucky enough to get a double shift, he might be able to walk a beat for sixteen straight hours. Only then might he be sufficiently tired to sleep through the night. Every time he was offered a promotion on the force, he turned it down. A promotion would have meant a desk job, and he couldn’t manage that.

He told me, “Being a patrolman is the only job beyond street sweeper that I’m qualified to do.”

But it was a job that was far below his mental capacities. Your father was a brilliant man, Angela. I don’t know if you are aware of this, because he was so modest. But he was something close to a genius. He’d been born to illiterate parents, sure, and he’d been neglected in a tumble of siblings, but he was a mathematical prodigy. As a child, he may have looked like a thousand other kids in Sacred Heart parish—all children of dockworkers and bricklayers, born to be dockworkers and bricklayers, themselves—but Frank was different. Frank was exceptionally smart.

From an early age, he’d been singled out by the nuns as something special. His own mother and father believed that school was a waste of time—why study, when you could work?—and when they did send him to school, they were superstitious enough to tie a knot of garlic around his neck, to keep away the evil spirits. But Frank bloomed in school. And the Irish nuns who taught him—distracted and tough though they were, and often viciously discriminatory against Italian children—could not help but notice the brains on this kid. They skipped him a few grades ahead, gave him extra assignments, and marveled at his skill with numbers. He excelled at every level.

He got placed in Brooklyn Technical High School, easily. He finished at the top of his class. Then he put in two years at Cooper Union studying aeronautical engineering before he enrolled in Officer Candidate School and joined the Navy. Why did he even join the Navy? He was fascinated by airplanes and was studying them; you would’ve thought he’d have wanted to be a flier. But he went into the Navy, because he wanted to see the ocean.