Honor Thy Father by Gay Talese Page A

an operation for diabetes, and he became bitter and depressed, drinking great quantities of wine and cursing his fate. He banged his crutches angrily against the walls of his room when he wanted one of his daughters to attend to his needs, and his only unintimidated companion during this period was a pet chicken who followed him everywhere and slept on his bed at night, often on his chest. Whenever the Bonannos came to visit and left young Bill for a few days, the old man was pleased.
    Bill remembered his grandfather as a heavy white-haired man sitting in the sun in front of the house reciting Sicilian proverbs—ancient truths from a stoical society—and occasionally the old man would send him to a nearby tavern for a container of beer or into a drugstore for a single cigarette, which could be bought for a penny. When his grandfather wished to go up to his room, Bill would tuck his shoulder under the stump of his grandfather’s leg, and they would slowly climb each step; although the weight was borne by the crutches, Bill was providing moral support, and he liked the appearance of being needed and being close.
    Sometimes when the old man was asleep, the youngest son, Frank, would take Bill for walks, looking after him as he would later in life. Frank Labruzzo was then in his twenties, working at odd jobs during the Depression years, including part-time work as an undertaker in a funeral parlor partly owned by Joseph Bonanno. Bill remembered how horrified his grandmother was when she heard that Frank had become a mortician and how she screamed whenever he entered the house, warning him not to touch anything. Frank would merely shrug in his casual way, not offended by her attitude or embarrassed by his work, which he preferred to working in a butcher shop.
    Frank Labruzzo never did work for his father; he was attracted instead to the activities of his brother-in-law, Joseph Bonanno. Bonannos’ existence seemed glamorous and exciting. He wore fine clothes, drove a new car. He was in touch with the outside world.
     

    On Thursday evening, December 17, Bill Bonanno and Frank Labruzzo paid their weekly visit to the phone booth on Long Island. It was the sixth consecutive Thursday they had gone there. In a week it would be Christmas Eve, and on the way to the booth the two men wondered aloud if the holiday truce would be observed by the various gangs this year as it had been in the past. Under normal circumstances it would be—all organization members would temporarily forget their differences until after January 1—but since the Bonanno loyalists were technically suspended from the national union, neither Bill nor Frank knew for sure whether the holiday policy would now be followed with regard to their people. They would have to anticipate the worst, they decided, and both men assumed that they would not be spending Christmas with their wives and children.
    At 7:55 P.M. they pulled into the parking lot near the diner and parked a few feet away from the booth. It was a cold night, and Bill, turning off the radio, sat waiting in the car with the window partly open. The sky was dark and cloudy, the only reflection came from the big neon sign above the diner. There were three cars parked in front of the diner, and except for a few customers seated at the counter and an elderly couple at a table, it was empty. The food must be terrible, Bill thought, for the diner had never seemed busy during any of his visits, although he conceded the possibility that it had a late trade, maybe truck drivers, which might explain the large parking lot. Many people thought that places patronized by truckers must be serving good food, but Bill believed that the opposite was probably true. He had eaten at hundreds of roadside places during his many motor trips across the country, and most of the time he had observed the truckmen eating chicken soup and salted crackers, and he was willing to bet that most of them suffered from nervous stomachs and