The Godfather’s Daughter

But just as the old order of the Philadelphia mob broke down with the passing of Angelo Bruno, so did the order of inheritance. The pain this causes Jean is apparent when she sits down gingerly at a conference table across from her small, balding, mild-mannered attorney, Frank Baldwin. According to Baldwin, since Sue Bruno made no specific documented provisions to award the jewelry to Jean, the jewels — or the proceeds from their sale — will be divided between Jean and her brother’s heirs, unless she fights for them.

“Of course she wanted me to have the jewelry, Fraaaank,” says Jean, dragging his name out like a six-year-old child in full whine. “I’m her daughter. It’s the Italian way!”

But evidently it was not her mother’s way. In this context, the colorful jacket is both a flag of mourning and a sagging metaphor: What Jean Bruno wants is not more money or even Marilyn Monroe’s jewelry, but what those things represent. What she wants, even now, is her father.

When Jean got word her father had been shot, she and Ralph jumped in the car in Radnor and drove back to Snyder Avenue. Throngs of people already lined the street. Angelo Bruno still sat upright, his mouth gaping open and impossibly wide, as if the two people inside him — the loving father and the calculating gangster — had forced their way out at the moment of death. A chant slowly built from the crowd: “Take him away! Take him away!”

Jean ran inside the house, grabbed a sheet, and went back outside. She handed it to a policeman to drape over her father. But they didn’t cover him — at least not right away — so she went back inside, and stared out the living room window. “I kept looking at him,” she says, her voice cracking as she cries. “Because as awful as it was, I figured I wouldn’t be seeing him much longer.”

She later wrote about that night, a passage she reads aloud to me in the moments before we descend into the basement to inspect her father’s trunk. “The implications of the scene before me, even I, who had been cushioned by a world of lies, could not deny. Daddy was dead, murdered. You usually don’t get shot by keeping your hands folded in Sunday school. Everyone acted surprised … so stunned because they had thrived in their fantasy of his invincibility. Along with the press and the government, they had frightfully made him larger than life.”

It is the first glimpse I’ve had of the anger Jean may hold toward her own family, perhaps even toward Angelo Bruno, for making her complicit in the lies that sustained his life. It is also the first time I’ve sensed in her a division between the intelligent, educated woman confronting the myth of her father and her childlike desire to propagate it.