Denise Falcone

Theirs Was an Enduring Music

It’s a little late for name-dropping but still, I’d like to tell the story about my mother, who grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, in a house across the street from Frank Sinatra. Frank and my mother were both doted on only children. Frank’s mother, Dolly, and my grandfather, Louie, were good pals. When Frank wanted nothing else in life but to sing and his father kicked him out of the house one night in a fight about staying in school—he had high hopes for his son to become a doctor—my grandfather intervened and found him a job at a place upstate called The Rustic Cabin. As often as she could hitch a ride, my mother would go to see him perform and hang around until the end so Frank could drive her home. My grandmother would be up, waiting in the shadows worried and furious and sometimes would even hit my mother on the head with her pocketbook for sneaking into the house in the wee small hours of the morning.

After Frank made it big out in California, some of the gang, as my mother called them, decided to follow him out there to try and make it as well. And a few of them did. Stanley, my mother’s first real love, became a successful film producer. She would have married him but when he brought her to meet his mother, the woman was cold and forbade Stanley to have anything to do with her. Stanley said it was because he was Jewish and she was Italian. Maybe my grandfather’s reputation had something to do with it, but it broke my mother’s heart and touched off a pattern of insecurities that would torment her for the rest of her life.

Frank was supposed to sing at my parents’ wedding but he had to stay in Hollywood to make a movie. Dolly sang instead. My father was a handsome young army lieutenant and he had fun dancing with Lana Turner once at one of Dolly’s famous New Year’s Eve parties, but most of the time he was jealous of my mother’s people, particularly of Frank and his cocky, swanky success.

When she lived with my grandparents, my mother had a new convertible, a glamorous job in Manhattan, and great clothes, but after she married my father and moved to the suburbs, she had to scrimp on herself so he could have a turn at having nice things. Her custom designed wedding gown ended up stuffed into a moldy old chest down in our basement. Once as a child I lifted the lid to see if I could make something out of the huge mass of stiffened ivory satin, but just like I would cringe and escape to my room and close the door when the yelling started rather than witness the spoils of her marriage, I hastily slammed the chest shut without ever taking the dress out far enough to see the vestiges of lovely hand-sewn seed pearls on the edge of each tapered sleeve that she pointed out to me once in the photograph taken on her special day.

After years of door-slamming disappointments and struggling through her unhappiness, my mother would have done anything to get away and she did, but not without consequence. Since my grandfather was getting old and didn’t have enough money to help her, she was unable to just pick up and leave with three kids, so she met someone else. My father was the big shot with connections now. He fixed it so the pastor of our church would testify in front of a judge that because of her heinous infidelity she was an unfit mother and he took my little brother away. And I remember nothing like I remember that time in the supermarket when I had to watch her smile painfully as she reached over to touch the head of a little boy who resembled her son while he waited with his mother in front of us on the checkout line.

Whenever we would hear one of Frank’s songs on the radio or see him on TV, she would seem pleased for him. And of his antics and escapades, she would nod her head and say, “That’s him,” or she would laugh and say, “He’s crazy!”

My mother married again and this man, whose parents fled from Nazi Germany just in the nick of time, loved her. He loved her too and was far from being stingy and self-centered, so they lived the good life and traveled often. Once while strolling along Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, my mother noticed Frank’s yacht docked in front of the Fontainebleau Hotel. She felt that by all means she should stop in to say hello. Without thinking anything of it she began to walk towards the private dining room where he was holding court at a large round table. Suddenly someone pretty large emerged from behind a curtain and politely escorted her out. “Sure lady, everyone’s a friend of Frank’s, but he’s busy now so why don’t you just take it outside like a good little girl.”

She did manage to see him at the funeral home for his father’s wake a couple of years later. My grandfather rushed in on the bus from his bungalow down in Delaware, where he lived with his second wife Ann, who made fresh spaghetti and dried it on the bed. My mother came home that night, but my grandfather stayed with Frank and his friends for three days afterwards.

The weather was always nice in Florida, so my mother and husband number two decided to move down there only to find flocks of eager young cocktail waitresses who really liked men. Even married ones in brown polyester suits. I bought her a stack of Frank’s tapes to play in the car, to remind her of who she was and where she came from while she went through the divorce proceedings and struggled to keep a nervous breakdown at bay. She managed to snap out of it when her lawyer got her the house.

For the rest of her life, well into her eighties, she dressed up everyday and went to work. She bought herself a new car and tooled around Pompano Beach with the top down like she was back in the days of Hoboken again.

When Frank died, rather than talk about it, she chose silence. It was as if a part of her spirit had been amputated and was gone forever.

One day I received a call from her on my cell phone. You can take the girl out of Hoboken but you can’t take the Hoboken out of the girl. “Jesus Christ Almighty! I have to be admitted to the hospital for tests because my heart is beating too fast. God damn it!” It was six months in and out of the hospital before I could bring her up to New York to be close to us. After a day spent together, I drove her back to her assisted living residence. As I helped her out of the car, my mother, frail and smelling like shit, glanced up at the entrance of the place and looked at me with her beautiful, exhausted eyes that were the color of beer. She said, “This is not for me.”

That night Frank came to me in a dream. Impeccably dressed as always, this time in a dark ink blue suit, he was sitting at my desk going through some papers. I asked him, “What’s going on? What are you doing here?” He told me that he had come to take care of a few things.

In the morning I was woken up by a phone call from a nurse telling me that my mother was dead. She died in her sleep. I like to think that Frank came to get her. He probably said as they entered the casino, “Take care of her. She’s one of mine.”

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