The voice on the recording belonged to Denise, my daughter in law. Dean Harrington played it twice on her desktop speaker in the quiet of her office on Sansom Street, a woman voice, calm and sweet, saying she was Frank Mancuso, that he wished to withdraw his payments of thirty eight thousand dollars toward the tuition of his granddaughter, and that the refund should go to a business account in Cherry Hill. She gave my Social Security number without a pause. Then, near the end, she laughed softly and said, “I am an old man, honey, and I am so confused.” I knew the laugh. I had heard it at every Christmas dinner for twenty years.
Dean Harrington explained that the bursar had grown suspicious because the account for the refund was a business account and the caller could not remember my middle name. The bursar placed a hold on the refund and sent the recording up the chain, and the dean, who had met me at the reception, recognized the name. She had called me in from the overflow gym for just that reason. Then she told me whose account it was. The account in Cherry Hill belonged to Mancuso Restaurant Supply, the company of my son Paul and his partner Rick, which was three months behind on its loan.
I sat in the leather chair and looked at the portrait of Benjamin Franklin on the wall. I thought of Angela, who used to sew the buttons on my SEPTA jacket on Sunday nights, and who had told me when Paul was twelve that he would be a good man if somebody loved him enough. I had loved him. I was not sure that was the problem. Then the door opened, and Gina came in, in her black gown and her Penn Law hood, with her mortarboard under her arm, and her eyes went straight to my face. “Pop Pop,” she said, “I know. I found out an hour ago.”
A recorded call to a university bursar gave one retired bus driver the length of a single afternoon to bring his son back to the truth in Philadelphia.
I gave my terms to Paul, Denise and Rick in the dean conference room, with Gina beside me in her gown and the dean at the head of the table. The refund request would be withdrawn that day in writing. Denise would write a letter to the bursar admitting the call. Rick and Paul would work out their debts with a bank, and not with my money or my name. And Paul would stand up at the dinner that night and tell the whole family that his daughter was the best thing he had ever done. I said it in the voice I used on the number 17 bus, when somebody tried to get on without paying.
Denise confessed without lifting her eyes. The loan was desperate, she said, the interest was crushing, and Paul had talked about my money at every dinner since Angela passed. She had practiced my voice in the car for a week. Paul put his head in his hands. Rick studied the carpet. And then Paul said a thing I had been waiting thirty years to hear. “Pop, I am ashamed of myself.” He said it quietly, the way a boy does when the lie has finally grown too heavy to carry. I reached over and held his wrist.
Rick snatched the recording drive and the papers off the table, meaning to run for the stairs and throw them in the Schuylkill, and he bolted from the conference room in his tight dress shoes, down the marble hall and out through the double doors of the law school, with the dean calling after him in a voice that carried across Sansom Street. Gina started to follow. I held her sleeve. In forty years on the bus, I had learned that you never chase a man in the middle of a parade.
He ran straight into a string band. A South Philly Mummers club was marching down Sansom Street in sequins and feathers, with banjos and glockenspiels and a man in a gold suit twirling an umbrella, performing for the graduates on the lawn. Rick stood in the middle of the street, unable to run in any direction. A banjo player pushed an enormous feathered hat onto his head. The drummer fell in behind him. The whole band began to strut, and Rick, unwilling and furious, found himself in the front row, strutting too.
Rick was the one who returned with the drive, red faced, a feather still stuck in his collar. The bursar canceled the hold, and the money stayed where it belonged. Denise wrote her letter and sold her good jewelry to cover the legal fees. Paul sold his half of the business to Rick for a dollar and took a job driving for SEPTA, the same route I drove, the number 17. He said it was the only honest work he could think of. On his first day, he called me from the bus, laughing, to ask how to open the back door.
In the name of Angela, who passed in 2020, I started the Angela Mancuso Cap and Gown Fund. It pays for tuition gaps, textbooks and graduation costs for first generation students from South Philadelphia, Delaware and Montgomery counties. In the first year we sent nineteen students across a stage. One boy from Passyunk Avenue, whose father drove a delivery truck, had never owned a suit. I took him to a tailor on Ninth Street and watched the old man pin the cuffs. When he looked in the mirror, he saluted himself.
On Monday morning, in the great hall of Penn Law, Gina asked me to hood her. A professor showed me how, standing behind her, to drape the velvet over her gown and settle it on her shoulders. My hands shook. I thought of Angela. I thought of the little girl who used to ride in the front seat of my bus. Paul stood in the second row, in a borrowed tie, and when Gina turned to face the crowd, she looked at him first, and I saw his shoulders loosen.