WHEN I arrived in Mexico, I was met at the airport by a friend of my husbands who told me he would take me to Bill. The first thing I saw when I entered the restaurant was Felice Cumpleaos, Rosalia written on a banner. There were daisies, my favorite flower, in wine bottles placed in the middle of every table. Mexicans playing guitars began a love ballad, and when my husband walked out of the kitchen, took my hand, and led me to one of the tables, he looked different, almost like a stranger. Hed lost maybe thirty pounds, which made him seem even taller than his six feet two inches. He had grown a beard and his eyes were deeper, and darker, more intense. He seemed fragile somehow, beautiful even. I pushed at the glass of wine someone had placed in front of me, moving it a couple of inches away. I reminded myself not to be a fool and get drawn into loving Bill Bonanno again.
The last time I saw him, four months earlier and about half a year after he was released from prison the last time, Bill had called to tell me he wanted to come over for dinner and talk to me and the kids. We were living separately.
Since it was three days before Christmas, I prepareda festive dinner. Afterward he said he had something important to tell us. We left the dinner table and went into the living room. I noticed that he did not look at or mention the desk Id moved into the living room or the filing cabinet or the appointment slips tacked to a bulletin board, all signs that my career was thriving, something Bill would ordinarily find hard to swallow. He waited until we all settled into chairs, then sipped ice water from a tumbler and said in his lawyerly way (a manner of speaking hed picked up serving as a paralegal in his and his fathers many legal battles), As you know, my life has been controlled by prisons and courts for the last ten years. Grandma is dead. Grandpa is going to prison. I dont know what to do next. I have emotional and personal problems. Due to some or all of these events in my life, its necessary for me to go away for a while to get my head together.
It was true. Bill didnt look in the best of health, and he was impossible to talk to or reason with. I wondered if anyone else was after him now: the FBI, some grand jury, or other men from his world.
I cant tell you where Im going, or how long Ill be gone because I dont know myself. I wont be in touch with anybody until I get back. Im not excluding you from anything. This is just the way it is.
I watched the look on my childrens faces, knowing that I didnt care and wondering if they did. Chuck and Joe and Tore, all young men now, looked understanding if a little blank. What couldthey ever say to their father anyway? Their only choice was to show respect and remain silent. My daughter, Gigi, my husbands favorite, the youngest of my children at sixteen, looked worried, but not surprised. Nobody said, Hey, Dad, cant you at least wait till after Christmas?
After that night he was gone: no phone calls, no word, no news. This was nothing unusual, really. My husband had been missing before. Bill was not your normal, everyday nine-to-five kind of husband, who goes off to a job, returns, eats dinner, watches television, goes to bed. My husband is the son of Joseph Bonanno, who the newspapers and the government say was the head of a Mafia family and that he was his fathers consigliere. This, however, is not what my husband says. My husband says Mafia is a figment of the medias imagination. He says mafia is an adjective, not a noun. To be mafioso is to be brave and honorable. He says it means being a man, audacious but never arrogant. My husband says that he and his father are men of honor who do things according to the ethos of a 750-year-old tradition transported to the United States from Sicily. The Sicilian tradition has a system of respect, of kinship, a code of behavior that tells you what is right and what is wrong. According to this code people fight their own battles and have no need to go to outside authorities such as the police. My husband tells the story of a woman whose husband has just been killed. The police say, But who did this? And the woman replies, It does not matter, as long as he knows, nodding tothe baby boy she holds in her arms. That tradition is dying, thanks to the changing times. I have not raised the children to follow in their fathers footstepsto live staunchly within this traditionas my husband was raised to follow in his fathers.
Although my husband tells me my father, Salvatore Profaci, moved in the same world and was as much an adherent of the tradition as my husbandand that surely having been raised by Salvatore I must possess an inherent understanding of that worldthe truth is I have a hard time with it. To me it means I can never ask questions, such as: Where are you going? How did you get the money? or How are we going to pay the rent, or the doctor bill, or the water tax? The life-style my husband leads, which I suppose is essential to his position within the Sicilian tradition, as it has been translated into the culture of the United States, means, as far as I can tell, that he does not go to a job, has lots of cash sometimes, and no money others. It means there were times he never left the house unless he was wearing a gun, and there were times when he had at least one guy in front of him and two guys in back wherever he went. Bodyguards is one word, I believe; decoys is another. My husband is constantly engaged physically, mentally, emotionally, and monetarily in court battles (its said that old gangsters never die, they just become lawyers) and at one time fought in what the media called a gang war. What I knew about this gang war was nothing except that there were FBI men stationed outside my front door, questioning mykids when they left for school; there were floodlights pointed at my house; and there were nights when my husband didnt come home and then one evening would break into his own houseunobserved by the FBI, the police, or whomever else he didnt want to seeblindfold me, and take me off to a motel or an empty house or the backseat of a car to make love. The blindfold was for my own good. Its for your protection. The less you know, the better off youll be, are words I have heard often.
Bills complex personality made him different even within his world. I never knew anyone like him. What the media doesnt know about or finds too boring to tell, are the normal times. The days when were not dodging subpoenas. When my husband was home, he was home. But, really, even then it wasnt normal; it was more like a situation comedy, where every day is Saturday because Dads always there. I wanted Bill to get a job, use his many talents. I wanted Bill to be different, to answer the phone or the door, take out the garbage, mow the lawn, or paint the bedroom. We had no checkbook, no savings account, no life, health, or car insurance. In fact, there were no plans. The way people plan for a vacation, put money aside, and make reservationsnone of that. But one day my husband might show up after being gone for a couple of weekswhile I was pinching pennies to make whatever money hed left me lastand say, Pack a bag. Were going to Haiti, and then guide me through casinos, his hand on the small of myback, people paying us homage like royalty.
I will say one thing: Life with my husband has been anything but boring. Our marriage has been written about. It is part of Mafia lore. I am Rosalie Profaci, eldest daughter of Salvatore Profaci, said to be the righthand man, the brains behind the brawn, of his brother Joe Profaci, the head of the Profaci family. When I married Bill it was said to be a marriage of a prince and a princess, the uniting of two powerful families. The problem was that I had no idea what I was getting myself into and Bill had no idea I had no idea. In other words, if I was a princess I didnt know it; and furthermore, even if I was a princess, Ive been striving all my life to be a commoner while my husband has been striving to be a prince.
