...And Never Let HerGo

saying that he was going to hire him.
    “Mr. Capano built us this big white house, but there was something my father wanted him to fix—the curve of our stairway wasn’t quite right. He came back a couple of times—himself—to be sure it was exactly what my father wanted. I remember Mr. Capano standing in our yard, and he wore a trench coat. And he did have something—this
presence
about him. That house is still in good shape.”
    Lou continued to strengthen his reputation as a builder to be trusted. The “DuPonters” poured into Wilmington, and they needed more and more houses. Lou’s banker summed up why he was so respected: “He was the kind of a builder who didn’t play games—he told bankers the truth. If he was having troubles he would tell you. That was a nice thing for a banker, since so many builders tried to hide things and hoped they’d go away. But Lou Capano built the houses too good—and the building business is too cyclical.”
    Lou made deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on a handshake—and he was never known to go back on his word. Any house with his name on it as the builder automatically jumped a few thousand dollars in value. He drove himself, chain-smoking all the time. He expected his boys to work just as hard, and he was a strong patriarch in a typical Italian family. All three sons did their turn with a shovel and pickax working summers for their father. They dug ditches, moved bricks, and drove trucks. Their father wanted them to understand the construction business from the bottom up. Even so, they never knew the hard times that he had. The Capano children grew up in the magnificent gray-stone Colonial mansion Lou built for them on Weldin Road in Brandywine Hundred. It had gabled windows and bay windows, sunrooms, breezeways, and a huge garage. A circular driveway cut a swath through holly, fir, and maple trees, and it was landscaped with shrubs and flowers.
    Marguerite moved with seeming ease from the little house to the mansion, although the change was akin to going from a furnished room to a penthouse. She never worked outside the home, and she knew nothing at all about business affairs or keeping books. She was a wife and a mother. But she was a strong woman who felt her husband and children could do no wrong. “She was one tough cookie,” a woman who knew her then remarked.
    When the boys were elementary school age, Joey Capano once made an anti-Semitic remark to a Jewish boy, and his mother called Marguerite to complain, asking her to intervene and reprimand Joey. Marguerite refused, saying, “Well, my kids get called wops and guineas. He should toughen up.”
    Lou and Marguerite’s boys didn’t resemble one another in looks or personality, but Tommy, Louie, and Joey all had dark hair and their father’s charisma. Tommy was clearly the most scholastically adept. His sister, Marian, remembered fondly, “I can still picture him reading books at his little desk in his little room.” Tommy was also the son who did the dishes and washed the pots and pans without complaint. Louie was charming and funny, and Joey was arguably the best looking and the rowdiest.
    The Capanos loved kids, including the neighborhood kids. Whether in the old neighborhood or on Weldin Road, their home was open to children. When the sultry summer months suffused Wilmington with a blanket of heat and even the tomatoes and peppers growing in front yards drooped, anyone who could afford to headed for the ocean beaches on the Delaware coast, or to the little offshore islands of southern New Jersey, which rested in the Atlantic Ocean as if some giant chef had spattered bits of pancake batter on a hot griddle. In Delaware, vacationers called it “going to the beach”; in Jersey, it was “going down the shore.”
    Marguerite and Lou chose the Jersey shore. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Wilmington across the Delaware River and then through a series of little towns in New Jersey. Lou bought a duplex in Wildwood. They rented out the lower floor and kept the upstairs for family vacations. They took their children, their relatives, and any neighbor child who wanted to go.
    “It was a madhouse,” a onetime tagalong remembered. “Kids and dogs, sleeping on mattresses, running in and out. It was like the old days on Seventh Street. Marguerite was cooking lots of Italian food, and she waited on everyone. Lou was just sitting there reading the paper as if everybody wasn’t running