“You see so much pain over the years that you become a realist when it comes to these things,” says Anthony Mancuso.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

I’d heard from mutual acquaintances that Tony Mancuso wasn’t doing well. And I knew I should give him a call.

But week after week, though I’d leave myself notes reminding me to phone him, I’d find something — anything — else to write about.

Mancuso, the former Providence police chief, had told me last summer he was fighting lung cancer. And I didn’t really want to face the way that story seemed to be turning out.

But last week, I ran out of excuses. I gathered my courage, picked up the phone and called him. Then I paid him a visit at his Narragansett home.

The news about his health was bad, all right. He’s stopped the chemotherapy and made his final arrangements.

But — sitting in the warm summer air, surrounded by family and buoyed by friends — his mood was anything but grim.

MANCUSO’S BEAGLE, Rocky, greeted me at the door to the salt box where the chief and his wife, Elaine, have lived for 26 years. Then I saw Mancuso, looking thinner than the last time I’d seen him, and casually dressed in pale green golf shirt, tan shorts and moccasins, no socks.

He walked me through a rec room whose walls were crowded with photos — “my memory room” — and out to the patio. It was a sunny day, but an umbrella table kept us cool and provided a place for the soft drink Elaine Mancuso pressed on me.

A moment later, she brought out a serving plate full of sliced calzone, and a second of jumbo cocktail shrimp, beautifully arranged on chopped lettuce as though we were in a fine restaurant. She couldn’t believe I’d already eaten, though it was a few minutes after 1 p.m.

“You should have known you were coming to an Italian house,” she chided playfully.

The food was only partly due to her sense of hospitality, though. She’s also trying to get weight back onto her 68-year-old husband, whom she’s been plying with banana-and-ice-cream-laden milkshakes and all the carbs he will eat.

“I can’t even hide them,” he said good-naturedly a few minutes later, taking a piece of calzone. “She knows all the hiding places. So it’s easier to eat them.”

MANCUSO IS OFF the chemo, he said; his doctors are treating symptoms as they occur. That’s not a recipe for a cure, but for pain management, though he feels okay at the moment.

“If you want to say that my final plans have been arranged,” he said, “there’s certainly no secret.”

His voice hoarse and pitched just above a whisper, he talked of the friends and family who have come to see him — “it must have been 200 people here over the last few months. Everybody’s been here” — former football players from his years as a coach in Cranston and South County; guys from the state police and Providence police, and “one politician or another.”

“Buddy hasn’t been by yet,” he said with a chuckle, referring to the doubly felonious former Providence mayor, Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci Jr. Cianci had made Mancuso chief in 1981 — I first met Mancuso back then, while covering Providence police — and three years later, the mayor’s public safety commissioner tried to fire the chief during the chaos surrounding Cianci’s leaving office because of his first conviction.

I mentioned that Cianci was busy preparing to march in Friday’s Bristol Fourth of July parade, and Mancuso recalled marching by Cianci’s side in 1983, after the incident that led to the mayor’s first exit from office — Cianci’s assault on Bristol contractor Ray DeLeo, whom he suspected of having had an affair with his wife. During the parade, in which Cianci marched uninvited in a veterans’ division, the route took him past DeLeo’s house under a scorching sun that pushed temperatures into the 90s. He was both cheered and jeered.

“That’s what you call, I guess, being loyal to the man you work for at the time,” Mancuso said now. “I wanted to be with him like I wanted to have cancer.”

He caught himself, corrected himself. “Like I wanted to have a heart attack.

“But it was always interesting.”

AS HE DID when we first spoke of his cancer last year, Mancuso talked glowingly of both Elaine and his first wife, Marie, who died in 1980 of a brain aneurysm.

“I’m a lucky man,” he said. “I’m lucky twice over.”

I asked how he maintained such a positive attitude.

“I think it’s part of your law enforcement years,” he said. “You become a realist. You see so much pain over the years that you become a realist when it comes to these things.

“And I have strong faith in my religion,” he added. Adherents to all faiths share this, he said, not just Catholics such as him. “I feel very strongly that I’m going to a better place going forward. …

“My wife says that with hurricanes, floods and everything that’s happening, God is not a happy camper. So it may be a good time to go to the next world.”

He thought for a moment.

“Having said that, I have a strong family. My brothers, my sisters are very strong. And I guess it kind of runs in the family. …

“My father and mother were tough people, hard-nosed. My father came here from Sicily and made a life, my mother from Italy … As my wife says, ‘Apple trees don’t make bananas.’ So I give all the credit to my parents.”

MANCUSO’S DAUGHTER, Brianne, his youngest child at age 18, is a University of Rhode Island student and a summer bartender at the Narragansett restaurant Pancho O’Malleys. She stopped by to steal a swig of her father’s Pepsi and ask if we needed anything.

“Now she’s a grown-up kid,” he said with pride when she’d left. And he talked with equal pride of his other children.

I asked if there was anything he regretted.

“I can’t think of anything I regret,” he replied. “I had such a good youth.”

He lost his parents young, when he was still in his teens, and that does bother him — “I was unable to establish a true adult relationship with my mom and dad.”

He’d been stoic as he spoke of his own problems, and laughed easily as he told stories about his family. But now the tears came.

“My father had a nickname for everybody,” he said. “He used to call me, as a kid, Shamus, which means ‘detective.’ I guess when I was 7 or 8, he saw something in me I didn’t see in myself.

“My family kids me over that to this day: ‘He had you pegged.’ ”

ROCKY, THE BEAGLE, sat looking patiently at Mancuso, waiting for the chief to slip him some of the plentiful slices of calzone still sitting on the serving plate.

“You know I can’t,” Mancuso said. “Mom will get mad.”

The dog, unmoved, continued to stare at the man.

“Look at those eyes,” Mancuso said. “How can you resist it?”

But, mindful of his wife’s rules, he did resist.

We talked awhile longer, about our families and about the past, about current politics and police matters. He praised the “honesty and integrity” of Colonels Dean Esserman and Brendan Doherty, current heads of the Providence and state police forces, and of Col. Steven Pare, Doherty’s predecessor.

“They run a tight ship,” Mancuso said.

Then it was time for me to leave, and Mancuso walked me back through the house. We paused for a moment in the rec room, and he took down a photo collage that showed him as a teenager, part of the doo-wop group The Imperials. He pointed at another photo, much more recent, of the men singing at Foxwoods as part of a show featuring Regis Philbin, who’s a friend of one of the members.

Good times.

We reached the door, and Mancuso sent greetings to my wife. Then, taking my hand, he wished me well.

I wished him the same.

arosenbe@projo.com