Three Napoleons

It would have been a day like any other on Staten Island in the winter of 1966, were it not for it being ten years since Fred Napoleon lost his wife, Maureen to pneumonia. Maureen and Fred got married in 1946 after World War II and lived in a modest one bedroom apartment on Daniel Low Terrace in St. George. Her pneumonia came on suddenly; with barely time to say their goodbyes. One minute she was home in her wheelchair -having been crippled from polio since she was 12 - the next minute she was at St. Vincent’s Hospital… and then she was gone, buried in the family plot at Saint Peter’s on Clove Road.

Fred and Maureen couldn’t have been more physically different, Maureen was petit, wore elegant tortoise shell combs in her long auburn hair and had a lilt in her voice like music when she spoke. Her eyes were clear hazel and her mind was sharp and mercurial, especially when she was doing her bookkeeping which was how she earned a living.

Fred, on the other hand was big and puffy, had a soft, sweet face and porcelain-blue eyes. His voice was deep but gentle and for one thing or another, he was always apologizing.

“Sorry, if I was too loud when I came in, Mo.” “I’m sorry if I disturbed you, Doll.” “Sorry if the coffee isn’t hot, Sweetie.”

Every year for the past ten years, Fred would make his anniversary pilgrimage to Vincent’s Bakery in the Saint George Ferry Terminal, just to the right of the ramp for the 107 bus. Even on the most inclement days, Fred would awake at 5AM, throw on his long wool coat and trek down the hill to celebrate the love of his life with her favorite pastry, a Napoleon.

This morning, however, Fred felt like walking a bit more before going to the bakery. He turned left on Bay Street feeling a snap of winter wind whipping the air; he pulled the collar on his coat and headed along Richmond Terrace overlooking the Kill Van Kull. Each step of the way, Fred thought of the many times he had taken Maureen in her wheelchair along the broken slate sidewalks, anticipating the bumps so she wouldn’t get jostled. Their destination was always Sailor Snug Harbor, the old home for sea captains, deckhands, and stevedores adrift in their lives, each awaiting the towering wave of his final port of call. The sprawling grounds of Snug Harbor, on the banks of the Kill Van Kull had several long houses filled with withered men, each a shell of his former self. Often at dusk, Fred and Maureen would see them moving ghost-like along the shadowy paths in their threadbare pea coats, as if being pulled along by some invisible mooring rope to the austere marble chapels and alabaster meeting halls that brought them a last measure of comfort. Sailors Snug Harbor, a place cordoned off from the rest of the world by ominous wrought-iron gates, held the stories of these aged sailors, the often rugged lives they had lived, the loves they had left behind, and their perfume-scented letters, baubles and bone buttons, that would otherwise have been lost at sea.