from on high to return to a place I didn't even know existed. I know that

sounds nutty and worse, grandiose, but there is little doubt that my mother, my

daughter and I were led home by a series of events so bizarre, they fall into

the "You're kidding me, right?" category.

It began the day after my daughter Jess graduated from

college. On a Sunday, she was in cap and gown drinking punch on the lawn at

Wellesley College and the next day she was in jeans running for coffee and

bagels in Brooklyn for the director of a movie, A Brooklyn State of Mind . That Jess had graduated cum laude is not what put her ahead of

the pack of kids begging for the slave gig. What nailed the job for her were

her two real qualifications: She had a car and she spoke fluent Italian. (The

star of the movie, Maria Grazia Cucinotta, needed an interpreter, and the

small-budget movie needed an extra driver, an extra car, an assistant for the

director and a gofer-all of which they got in one kid.)

Assignment 1: The film was being shot in Carroll Gardens in

Brooklyn and Jess was sent to find the best eats in the neighborhood. After

working her way through several pastry shops, a bunch of Italian delis and a

few Zagat-rated "I" for cheap restaurants, she hit upon a tiny place called Ferdinando's

Focacceria, on Union Street. The little neighborhood joint (sorry, bistro)

hadn't changed its décor (except for adding some almost-wood paneling) since it

opened its doors in 1904.

Because she was working about 20 hours a day, and earning

about 75 cents a month, she couldn't actually go to Ferdinando's herself, but

she told Maria about it, and she went. So did the crew. Real serious Sicilian

food, an owner, Frankie, who spends most of his time complaining, a waitress

who takes no crap from nobody. Perfect. It became the crew hangout. And, for

whatever reason, Jess took to driving past the place after shooting wrapped

each night, sometimes as late as 2 in the morning. Hardly the compulsive type,

she nonetheless turned the "good night drive-by" into her nightly ritual.

It was a good summer-she had her first movie job, she got to

call Danny Aiello (who also starred in the movie) at home, she went to

Bulgari's with Maria. The world was O.K. Except that my mother, Jess'

grandmother, Florence Barbera Stasi, had gotten very ill. The diagnosis was

dire, and Jess was heartbroken. They are bonded. Against my wishes the year

before, Jess had used up her savings to fly home from school in Rome to visit

her. I'd sometimes walk into the hospital room and find them curled up together

in the bed, fast asleep, "watching" the soaps.

The doctors warned the family to prepare for the worst, but

Jess refused to buy it. My mother, however, started to get ready. I realized

that when she declared, "I'm redecorating my whole apartment." Not wanting to

hang the crepe, I did have to say, "Er, Mom, don't you think that it's probably

not the right, er, time?" She looked at me like I'd gone nuts. "Why?" she

screeched. "I'll be dead before the bills arrive!" This is what I was dealing

with.

Jess, on the other hand, just kept saying, "When Gram gets

well, we'll take her to Ferdinando's." Right.

When the movie wrapped, Jess started hanging out at the

restaurant and became fast friends with the owner, Frankie. She begged him and

he promised that as soon as she could afford it, he'd rent her one of the two

upstairs apartments. "No matter who else lives there," he exclaimed in broken

English.

At Jess' urging, my boyfriend and I finally went ourselves.

It's hard not to love the place. Frankie pulled up a chair and sat down with us

for dinner. The kid was right-my mother, a great Italian cook herself, would

have loved it.

Here's where the weird part begins: One day-and don't ask me

how-the impossible happened. Mom's doctor at N.Y.U. called me in and told me

that, well, yes, it seemed that my mother's cancer had spontaneously

disappeared. Somehow. It didn't surprise my mother in the least. All she said

was, "Lucky I didn't charge up a storm at Jennifer Convertibles. I'd be mad as

hell at myself." Oh.

It was a while before Mom was strong enough. But finally

Jess got her wish and we headed out to Ferdinando's to celebrate. On the way,

Mom kept saying, "Who ever heard of Carroll Gardens? What kinda name is that

for Brooklyn? Is this Queens?"

Frankie, who'd become a family friend by this time, began

our celebration by complaining. Then he brought out the specialty of the house,

panelle-little chickpea pancakes. My mother was thrilled. "I haven't had these

since I was a little girl," she said. "We lived upstairs from a restaurant and

this man, Don Paulino, used to give us kids raw chickpeas, too."

Frankie smacked his head. " Gesù Cristo Maria! Don Paulino! He taught my father-in-law to make

panelle!"

My mother gave him one of those scary single-raised-eyebrow

looks that all Italian women develop immediately after giving birth. In case

you have never encountered it, a raised eyebrow means, "Don't screw around with

me if you know what's good for you."

Frankie was in the hot seat and he knew it. "Really?" she

said very skeptically. "His place was on

Union Street, where I grew up."

Frankie looked scared. I thought the poor son of a bitch was

caught in a lie and was about to discover the Wrath of Flo. Instead, he said,

"This is Union Street."

Now my mother looked

scared. "Really? We lived at 151 Union Street. We had the upstairs apartment."

Frankie got teary. " Signora ,

this is 151 Union Street."

We sat in stunned

silence. Even my Jennifer Convertible-less mother was speechless. The whole

Barbera clan had lived in the very apartment my daughter was trying to rent!

Frankie got up and took

an old photo down from the wall and handed it to us. It was taken of the

building in 1935-when my mother lived there. Her apartment windows were front

and center. The shades were pulled tight. "Look," my mother said, pointing at

the windows. "My mother made us pull the shades every afternoon after school."

"Worried about fading the furniture?" I asked.

I got the one-eyebrow look. "No!" she said, like she was

talking to morons. "A man-a gangster-was once shot dead in the hallway. She

didn't want us to see when the gangsters would walk around outside." She took

the picture from Frankie and he started to cry. Then she broke down, and then I

did, and then everyone-from the Con Edison guys at the front table to the

Caribbean family in the corner-were bawling like babies. Frankie even pulled

out the private grappa stash and we drank until we couldn't walk.

Why didn't my mother know that she'd grown up in Carroll

Gardens?  Because back then it was known

simply as Red Hook. Before tenements became co-ops, row houses became town

houses, and joints became bistros.

Gentrification, like a cultural mugger, almost stole my

heritage.

Then three years ago I opened the paper to see the face of Robert Shulman, now 45, a disgruntled postal worker if there ever was one, staring back at me. Mr. Shulman was sentenced to death last month for beating to death three young women from Queens in 1994 and 1995. After murdering them, he dismembered their bodies and stashed them in his filthy rented bedroom in Hicksville. Robert Shulman is the younger brother of the first man I almost dated after my divorce in the early 80's.

While Robert awaits trial for the murder of two more women in Westchester-he is the first man on Long Island to be sentenced to death since reinstatement of the law and only the third man on Death Row in New York-another of his brothers, Barry (now 40), stands accused of dumping bodies after he smelled them rotting in Robert's bedroom. Middle brother Steven, wracked by drugs and depression, was already long dead by his own hand. Only the oldest brother, Shelly, briefly the object of my affections, escaped the ravages of rage and depression that consumed the rest of the family.

Although my "thing" with Shelly never went anywhere, we remained friends for years. When I first laid eyes on him, he was a Robert Redford-looking superjock who'd gotten a full ride at Southern Methodist University for football and went on to become a therapist. He was the handsomest guy I'd ever laid eyes on. I was still wounded when we first met, and I thought maybe he was too good a guy to take advantage of me. I didn't want to think I just wasn't his type, which is probably closer to the truth.

Over the years, however, we ran into each other at bar mitzvahs, birthdays, whatever. We talked on and off. I helped him out with a seminar he gave on relationships at Hofstra University.

What I knew was that he and his three brothers grew up in the 60's in the upper-middle-class development Birchwood at Westbury-the only white pocket in heavily black Westbury. Birchwood just happened to be within the white East Meadow school district, and consequently was mostly Jewish and Italian. (Strangely, Mr. Rifkin also came from East Meadow, and Mr. Berkowitz had also been a postal worker.) I knew the Shulmans had grown up in the land of Dr. Diamond noses, lavish bar mitzvahs, posh sweet sixteens, beach clubs, mothers who didn't work. From the outside they were as Father Knows Best as every other family on Roxbury Drive. Four little boys. One golden. It's hard to imagine that years later Robert would slaughter and butcher young hookers not a mile away from that house.

What happened? Never one to jump on the "it's all the mother's fault" train (although I am more than happy to take 100 percent credit for how my own kid turned out), sometimes the mother really is a crazy who is to blame for raising psychos. Mildred Shulman, in the words of her own daughter-in-law, was "a nut job" who did, in fact, raise some serious psychos.

While all the other late-60's Birchwood wives were doing Bess Meyerson, she was doing Kim Novak-seductive in her Capri pants, all red lips and blond hair gleaming. She'd sleep until late in the day and then emerge done to the nines. The kids were neglected, but no one in the neighborhood knew it. In fact, Blanche Kurzweil, a neighbor, told me after the story broke that "Mildred was a lovely woman-a little kooky in her dress-but nice. The husband was a doll."

Mr. Shulman's attorneys, Paul Gianelli and William Keahon, told me a different tale. Mr. Gianelli told me Mildred was "an incredibly self-centered woman. She was a good-time Charlie … more interested in partying and going dancing than taking care of her kids." Bad-but not enough to produce a serial killer, an alleged body dumper and a suicide. Or was it?

Had these boys been sexually or physically abused behind the doors of their lovely house? The lawyers told me something that would never come out on the stand: Mildred desperately wanted a daughter, so she dressed Barry up in girls' clothes and told everyone he was her daughter. Despite that, Mr. Keahon believes, "It was more massive neglect than active abuse. If there was abuse, it's buried very deep." And therein may have lain one of the big problems with defending Mr. Shulman. How could a panel of working stiffs in Riverhead look with sympathy upon a man who'd seemingly grown up with all the advantages-except his mother's attention? Right.

The father, Jules, died in the late 60's of Hodgkin's disease. Shortly thereafter, Mildred met a man at Parents Without Partners and married him five days later. She herself died several years after that. As James Catterson, the District Attorney of Suffolk County, said in an interview, "What are the mitigating circumstances here? My mother died? Puhleeze."

No family members showed up during the trial or for the reading of the verdict, which came back in four hours-after five long months of trial. The only family members present were in a photograph that Robert clutched in his hand. It was a picture of the four little Shulman brothers happily smiling and laughing together way back when.

Much to the jury's surprise Shelly came forward to testify during the next phase of the trial, where it would be decided-like an event at the Roman coliseum-whether Robert would live or die. "I made a decision to love my brother before he was incarcerated. It's still true," he said in the emotional plea.

The next day, Shelly's ex-wife, Sheri, took the stand and told of how the little boys had lived in "disgusting" conditions with cobwebs, filthy silverware and uncooked meals. Interestingly, Robert's rented room was a mirror image of that disarray and filth with dirty dishes, silverware and clothes everywhere. When detectives entered five years after the first known murder, there were still more than 2,000 unwashed blood splatters from five separate victims in Robert's room on mugs, bowls, silverware and walls.

Who even knows, in the end, how many women were killed and butchered by Mr. Shulman during his rampages? Either he is the unluckiest serial murderer in history or the clumsiest. One victim was found because she had been placed in a recycling bag and ended up on a conveyor belt in Brooklyn instead of in the dump. Another was thrown into a dumpster and a man who'd lost his Lotto ticket just happened to crawl into that bin to find it. The third victim was placed in a new garbage can and left along the road, where highway workers picked it up, figuring they could use it to hold tools.

It's all about the luck of the draw. For the dead women. For the guys who found the bodies. For Shelly. And for me, too.