My Don Left Me in Labor for Her Comeback Chapter 10

My Don Left Me in Labor for Her Comeback Chapter 10

Two months later, I returned to Mount Sinai.

But I didn’t go back to my old office.

I didn’t hang a new nameplate outside the OB-GYN department.

I applied for a transfer to the newly formed Maternal Emergency Response Training Program joint initiative between the New York State Department of Health and every major hospital in the

tristate area.

The program’s mission: ensure that what happened to me in that Carnegie Hall storage closet never

happens to another woman. Public venue emergency birth protocols. EMS priority routing for

obstetric emergencies.

Mandatory staff training at every concert hall, sports arena, and theater in New York City.

–

The program was funded by the Marino DeLuca Foundation – an organization I had quietly incorporated the week after my son’s funeral, using my divorce settlement to endow it with seven

million dollars.

Massimo tried to find me at the hospital.

He brought soup from Eataly. Stood outside the physician’s entrance for eight hours.

Maya went down to tell him: “Dr. DeLuca has transferred to a training position in Baltimore.

She’ll be at Johns Hopkins for the next six months. Stop coming here, Don Massimo.”

He stood there, holding his cooling minestrone in a paper bag, and said nothing.

I heard later that Massimo sold the Maserati.

Sold the Hamptons house. Sold everything that remained of the DeLuca fortune and donated the proceeds – anonymously

anonymously – to the Marino DeLuca Foundation.

$8.2 million, transferred through three shell companies because he was too ashamed to attach his

name.

The foundation’s director called me: “Dr. DeLuca, should we accept?”

“Take the money. Publish the quarterly reports. Then send him one.”

No note. Just the data. Seven women saved so far this year. All mother and child: safe.

As for Violetta St. Claire the lawsuits bankrupted her. The tour cancellation triggered an avalanche of breach-of-contract penalties.

Her record label sued to recoup the advance.

Carnegie Hall’s insurance company sued her for contribution to the settlement. She was blacklisted from every reputable venue in North America and Europe.

Six months after the trial, someone sent me a news clipping: Violetta St. Claire, former Carnegie Hall soloist, now teaching beginner violin at a strip-mall music school in Paramus, New Jersey.

$35 per half-hour lesson.

Parents complained she was “distracted” and “cried during lessons.”

She went to Massimo one last time.

Begged him on her knees – at the same hotel where he’d been living like a ghost – to help her.

A loan connection. A word in the right ear.

the door.

er was a great man,” he said through the wood. “You are not your father.”

nt the next year in Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins. The distance helped. The work helped more.

One night, I was paged for an emergency: a woman in preterm labor, airlifted from a highway rest stop, hemorrhaging, both her life and her baby’s on the line.

Four hours in the OR.

When I walked out to tell the husband that his wife and daughter were both alive and stable, the man – a truck driver from Delaware, tattooed knuckles, steel-toe boots – dropped to his knees on the hospital linoleum and wept.

I didn’t cry with him. The old Serafina would have.

Instead, I gave him the post-op instructions, calm and professional, shook his hand, and walked to

the scrub sink.

In the mirror, I saw a woman who could no longer carry a child, but who had just saved two lives in

four hours because she had walked through the worst thing that could happen to an obstetrician

and come out the other side.

I smiled. Just slightly.

I was no longer in that storage closet.

The following spring, I returned to New York for the State Department of Health’s annual Emergency Medicine Summit.

I was the keynote speaker.

The title of my presentation: “The Carnegie Hall Protocol: Public Venue Obstetric Emergency Response – One Year Later.”

I stood at the podium, in a packed auditorium at NYU Langone, and clicked through slides showing

the statistics.

The new training protocols. The venues that had installed emergency birth kits. The EMS dispatch

reforms.

The seventeen women and twelve infants whose lives had been saved, in twelve months, because of

the system we built from the ashes of my son’s death.

Massimo was in the audience. Last row. Far corner.

I hadn’t seen him in a year. He had lost weight – not the healthy kind.

His suit hung off him. His hair was grayer. He clutched a copy of the Marino DeLuca Foundation’s annual report, the pages dog-eared from rereading.

On the final page of that report was a single line: “This year, the Marino DeLuca Emergency Birth Fund directly supported the safe delivery of seven high-risk patients. All mothers survived. All infants survived.”

He stared at that line like it was a prayer he didn’t deserve to utter.

After the presentation, the media crowded the stage.

I exited through the faculty door on the opposite side of the hall.

Massimo was in the southeast corner.

I walked northwest. We did not cross paths.

That evening, at dusk, a light rain began to fall over Midtown.

Massimo walked alone to West 56th Street, to the service lane beside Carnegie Hall.

The building was still closed – the investigation had dragged on, the insurance claims unresolved, the grand landmark caught in legal purgatory.

The spot where he’d parked the Maserati was now painted with bright red cross-hatching and a sign:

LIFE CHANNEL

NO STOPPING NO STANDING

EMERGENCY ACCESS ONLY

Sponsored by: Mount Sinai Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology

Program Director: Dr. Serafina Conti

He reached out and touched the sign. His fingers traced those three words

then the name beneath them.

Then, slowly, he lowered himself to his knees on the wet asphalt.

– LIFE CHANNEL – and

The last thing I heard: he volunteers there now. Every Saturday. At a free clinic in the South Bronx, run by one of the foundation’s grant recipients. He doesn’t tell anyone who he is. He mops floors. Stocks supplies. Files paperwork.

Once, a young resident asked him why he volunteered. Massimo DeLuca, former Don of the DeLuca Family, looked at her and said:

“I killed my son. The least I can do is help save someone else’s.”

The resident thought he was speaking metaphorically.

He wasn’t.

The clinic is called Casa Marino. Marino’s House.

He named it himself. He funds it, in full, every year, from whatever money he has left.

When the board asked if he wanted his name on the plaque, he said: “No. Just his.”

So the plaque reads:

CASA MARINO

Because every little boat deserves to sail.