...And Never Let HerGo

around him. He was very calm, and very kind to all of us.”
    Marguerite and Lou were almost forty in the summer of 1962, Marian was in college, Tommy was in the eighth grade, Louie in the sixth, and their youngest son, Joey, was ten, when Marguerite found she was pregnant. This baby was a surprise, and somewhat worrisome because she had never had easy pregnancies and she was a decade past her last baby. She was confined to bed throughout thispregnancy, and her boys, especially Tommy, waited on her and did the chores she could not.
    But Gerard was born healthy on May 25, 1963, and Marguerite recovered to full health. Still, it was to be a bad year for the family. Lou, only forty, had a serious heart attack and had to stay in bed for weeks. Gerard—Gerry—was taken care of as much by his older brothers, and his sister when she was home, as he was by his parents. Not surprisingly, he was soon spoiled rotten.
    “Gerry had these long golden curls,” a neighbor remembered, “and no one in his family could bring themselves to cut his hair for years. He really was a beautiful baby and he was hard to resist. Down at the shore the summer he was three, he went around saying to everyone, ‘You’re a pain in the ass!’ and the family all just laughed at him. Nobody scolded him.”
    Before he went to school, they cut Gerard’s long yellow curls, but he would always have a soft, baby face—even as a grown man.
    L OU C APANO recovered from his heart attack and went back to chain-smoking and working long hours as a builder. He and Emilio Capaldi dissolved their partnership, but they remained friends for life. High on Lou’s agenda was the education of his sons. His own education had been rudimentary at best, and even when he became a financial success, he was intimidated by men with college degrees. He vowed that his children would go to the best schools, although it was sometimes a financial crunch for him as the real estate market rose and fell.
    They all attended Catholic schools, just as the family attended St. Anthony’s Church. It was the same church and the same priest, Father Robert Balducelli—Father Roberto—as it had been when Marguerite and Lou were first married; but the Capano sons went to St. Edmond’s Academy for Boys during their elementary school years, and from the ninth grade on, Tommy and Louie attended Archmere Academy, a Catholic prep school in Claymont, Delaware, a dozen miles north of Wilmington.
    The forty-eight-acre estate that would become Archmere was once home to John J. Raskob, at various times chairman of the board of General Motors, secretary to Pierre S. du Pont, and vice president in charge of finances for the DuPont company. He also built the Empire State Building. He lived at Archmere with his wife, Helen Springer Green, and their twelve children from 1910 until 1931. Not much removed by distance from Seventh Street and Rodney,where the Capanos, Rizzos, Moglionis, and their friends lived, it was like another planet in ambiance. Archmere was plush and private and absolutely perfect.
    The twenties were an untroubled decade along the Delaware River; it was
the
place to reside—Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived just down the river from the Raskobs, and between one estate or the other, there was a constant flood of famous visitors. But as John Raskob became more well known and word of his wealth spread, he worried. The rest of the nation was caught in the Great Depression and feelings ran high. In 1931, Raskob was gravely concerned when a kidnapping threat to one of his children was conveyed to him. His children meant more to him than his great wealth, and he moved away from Archmere, leaving behind its Italianate Renaissance mansion—the Patio—and Manor Hall, where the servants lived. The Raskobs had their memories of parties, meetings with the Democratic National Committee, and visits from presidential nominee Governor Al Smith, for whom Raskob was campaign manager. When the Lindberghs’ baby
was
kidnapped the next March, the Raskobs knew they had done the right thing in moving to a less accessible home.
    A year later, the abbot of the Norbertine order of Catholic priests purchased Archmere for $300,000 and opened a boys’ prep school with an enrollment of twenty-two students. Archmere expanded its student body and built more and more buildings, always adhering to its motto,
Pietate et Scientia
(By Holiness and Knowledge).
    And so in the sixties the sons of a once-poor carpenter