Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History

1Majestic MemoryThe night my grandfather tried to kill us, I was five years old, the age Istopped believing in Santa Claus, started kindergarten, and made realrather than imaginary friends.Because Grandpa was one of two grandfathers in their family, my cousinscalled him Grandpa Jerry. For me, he was simply Grandpa. I had only one.The other–my father's father, the Polish grandpa we called Dziadzia(pronounced Jaja)–was hit over the head during a burglary in his fronthallway seven years before I was born and died after slipping into a coma.Everyone in Jersey City knew Grandpa "Italian Grandpa" as Beansie, becausewhen he was young, he stole a crate of beans from the back of a truck.Details about his life started to bubble into my consciousness during thesummer of 1970, the year my memory kicked in full force. There were storiesabout Grandpa "going away" to Trenton for murder. Being arrested for armedrobbery. Beating my mother, her sister, and her three brothers.Grandpa was a well-known neighborhood bully and crook, though the onlystolen objects I knew of firsthand were the ones he swiped while working asa security guard at the Jersey City Public Library and Museum in the late1960s. The fact that Grandpa was able to get a city job as a securityguard (through an uncle, who knew a local judge, who was connected to themayor) says a lot about Jersey City's patronage system and generalreputation. Everybody stole. It was no big deal.My brother inherited most of the objects Grandpa took from the library andmuseum–the shiny, shellacked coins with Indian feathered heads; aphotograph of Abraham Lincoln; small, black Indian arrowheads; a set ofencyclopedias. I always wondered if Grandpa stole them book by book or hadone of his friends with a car pull up to the library and help him load themin.The only stolen object of Grandpa's that I possess is a dictionary, aWebster's Seventh New Collegiate edition, which he inscribed to my sisterthe year I was born: "From Grandpa. Hi Ya Paula. Year-1965." The callnumbers on the spine and the blue stamp on a back page, which reads freepublic library jersey city, n.j., have been crossed out in blue indeliblemarker, his attempt to legitimize the gift. Grandpa obviously had his owninterpretation of the phrase free public library.Before I started school, my grandma Pauline baby-sat for me while my motherworked as a clerk at the Jersey City Division of Motor Vehicles office,three blocks away. When Grandma died in February of 1970, my mother had noone to baby-sit, so she quit her job. Though I'm sure I missed my grandma–asaintly woman with a halo of white hair and small, pretty hands–my worldchanged for the better. I was suddenly the center of my mother's attention.With Grandma gone, Grandpa was at the center of no one's.Because my grandmother had stayed married to Grandpa for four decades, shedied fairly young. She was only sixty. She died on Ash Wednesday, the firstday of Lent. By then Grandma hated Grandpa so much that on her deathbed,with the smudge of ashes on her forehead, she made my mother promise thatGrandpa wouldn't be buried on top of her when he died. She couldn't standthe thought of his remains mingling with hers.