We had, between us, a complicated language of silence. We had rituals—picking Japanese beetles from the grapevine leaves and drowning them in jars of kerosene, watching the Saturday night fights on his television, sneaking sips of wine in the cellar room where he kept his red-stained barrels, studying the fine points of Italian grammar (though, by that time, the language came almost as naturally to me as English), discussing the small tasks he would assign me around the yard and pay me extravagantly for completing. We had our card games, little arguments, inside jokes, and, on days when I was feeling low, we had our clandestine trips to Sully’s store for a sickly sweet chocolate pastry called sugar wheels.
He saw me and nodded. I walked over and stood beside the chair so he could put his arm around my shoulders. When I slipped the report card from its manila envelope again, he balanced his cigar on the edge of the concrete bench that ran the length of the shaded area, and took it from me. For more than a minute he stared down at it without speaking, his eyes moving slowly over last term’s grades, the explanations of each subject, the teacher’s comments, and my mother’s signatures on the back, as if he had never seen an American report card before. The smoke from his cigar curled around us, and I could smell that, and smell his aftershave. The intermittent screeching of the clothesline pulley stopped.
“Is there anything better than A?”
“A-Triple-Plus,” I said. “But nobody ever gets one.”
He looked at me, tapped me once on the nose with a finger. He leaned sideways against me and drew a brown leather wallet from his pants pocket. It flapped open, showing a picture of his wife, my grandmother—sepia tones and old-world somberness—when she had been a girl of twenty or so.
“How many As there, count them, Mr. Joke-a-make. In Italian.”
“Uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto.”
“Bène. Otto.” He drew a five and three ones from the wallet, crisp as if they had just come from the mint (it was said that he liked only new money, and would go to the bank on Broadway every week and trade his wrinkled, soiled bills for ones like these), and handed them to me.
He nodded when I thanked him, a nod with great dignity and fellow feeling in it, as if we had once been the same body and were now, by some unfortunate accident, separated, and whatever he did for me was merely what one would be expected to do for a detached part of oneself. He picked up his cigar, all the while staring out over the ceramic statue of the Virgin and the flower garden my grandmother kept there, out past the rosebushes and the smaller vines that produced what we called “water grapes,” toward the privet hedge that marked the boundary of his property. For a little while we stared out there together, as if making a scientific study of the molecules in the warm waves of air over Jupiter Street, or as if waiting a suitably long moment for the subject of my great academic success to have its play. Then he said, “Ci mangiano vivi.” They’re eating us alive.
“New ones?”
Another nod. “I waited for you to come before I went after them.”
“Let me go after them.”
He lifted his arm and released me, and I walked out from beneath the shadow of the arbor and into the sunlit garden. There were tomato plants of course, rows of them with their sharp smell; and peppers, squash, beans, basil, arugula and escarole, eggplant, carrots, beets, radishes, onions, garlic.
I made my way carefully between two rows. The tops of the tomato plants were at a level with the top of my head and had been tied to wooden stakes with white scraps of old shirtsleeves. On two plants near the end of the row, some of the leaves and limbs had been eaten down to their lime-colored skeletons. I traced the damage up from the ground, studying the square black turds, the ravaged leaves, two green tomatoes from which rough circles had been chewed. At last, I pinched the tip of a leaf and, turning it over, discovered one of the culprits there. It was fat from feasting on our crops, with tiny ivory feet, and it had a red horn, like the thorn on a rosebush, curling out from its forehead. Each of its green sections was dotted with a small black mark, windows on a jet fuselage. I cut off the leaf with my thumbnail and carried it over to my grandfather. He tore a page from that afternoon’s Record American, set the leaf and caterpillar gently upon it, touched the corner of the page with his lighter, and we watched as the flames rose and the monster writhed, flipped onto its back, and soon melted. Grandpa Dom put out the fire with his foot, stamping and stamping and making something of a show, then wiping the sole of his shoe on the edge of the concrete. I went upstairs, satisfied, eight dollars and twenty-five cents richer for the afternoon—nine twenty-five richer for the day—and had a glass of milk with my mother, who was pleased by the As.
“Uncle Peter never came back for me,” I said, to distract her from the subject of my school pants. She was baking something. I remember her turning away from the counter to look at me, her forearms dusted with flour. I remember being surprised at the wrinkle of disapproval in her voice when she spoke. She was not a bitter person, not by any means, but I remember the bitterness in her voice that day, hot and short-lived as the flash of a struck match. She said, “If your uncle’s promises were dollar bills, we could buy two new houses with them.”
“One for me and Rosie and our kids and the other one for you and Papa.”
“You can’t marry your own cousin, Tonio, you know that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not legal, it’s not right.”
“We could have a separate house, and then you and Papa could live in peace.”
“We already live in peace. What’s that on the knees of your school pants?”
“No six kinds of ice cream, Ma. He never came back.”
“He’ll make up for it, you’ll see. That’s the way he is. He finds a way to make up for everything.”
“When?”
“Tonio, let me see those pants.”
“When, Ma?”
“Some other time, you’ll see. You’re like a son to him. What happened to your best school pants? Tonio!”
“Ci mangiano vivi, Mama.”
Five
WITH HIS PENCHANT FOR impossible schemes and spectacular failures, with all the afternoons and evenings he’d walked out alone into the ten-acre parking lots of Rockingham, Hialeah, or Suffolk Downs, wringing a racing program in his hands and littering the tar with losing tickets; with all the twenties, fifties, and hundreds he’d tossed into the pot for someone else to win, maybe it was just the law of averages that caused the numbers to fall as Uncle Peter dreamed they would on that day: one, two, six.
Years later another possibility occurred to me: that my uncle had somehow found out in advance what the number would be. It goes against everything I know about how the number was determined on any given day—by the winning horses in three races at a certain track. But it is easier for me, given all the trouble that one flash of good fortune brought us, to picture Zingy or Johnny Blink whispering in Uncle Peter’s ear in a loud bar near the beach, than to believe that God presented the information to him in a dream.
My father had bet ten dollars, Uncle Peter had bet twenty; another uncle, Leo, had been convinced to put down five. It was 1964; the payoffs in those days were on the order of 750 to 1, so, among them, on that afternoon, the three brothers took in the equivalent of several years’ pay. When the news traveled around the family, a spontaneous festival formed itself at the house on Jupiter Street. Of that day I remember most of all the image of my cousins in the yard—thirty of them—a band of Benedettos aged four to twenty-two, the younger ones gathering into packs and roaming the two-tiered backyard, and the side yard, and the grassy alleyway next to the Sawyers’ house. It was pleasure we were hunting, the fierce uninhibited joy of the child who has grown up in an environment where the flame of childhood has not been trampled out by addiction or poverty or the parents’ demons.
We meandered and chattered, we shrieked and sang, sprinting, sweating, falling, arguing, crying out for each other. There was a kind of ben
ign wildness in the air around us, as if the illegal windfall had pulled the last restraints off the chariot of our collective youth. At one point, on the upper tier of the back lawn, a square enclosed by the rear wall of the house, the grapevine, and two neighbors’ fences, Rosalie went through one of the routines of the Revere High School cheerleading squad, which she’d memorized on two afternoons of peering through the fence at Paul Revere Stadium. She was twelve years old, too young to be a cheerleader. She would, in fact, in later years, harbor nothing but a bruised, smirking disdain for what she called “those nuns in foo-foo skirts.” But on that afternoon, as the cousins ran and wrestled, she broke spontaneously into her routine, bouncing and kicking and barking out chants. “Gimme an ‘R’! … Gimme an ‘E’! …” The rest of us stopped and watched, panting, pulling strands of grass out of our hair, wiping our foreheads and faces with the sleeves of our shirts.
She was wearing a yellow dress with maroon and white stripes crossing at right angles to each other. “My tablecloth dress,” she called it, affectionately. It flounced up around her hips when she pumped her knees, so that you could see her underpants and the tops of her pale thighs.
At the end of the routine, she flopped down on her back in the grass, the exhausted starlet, and then, while we were still applauding, she jumped up again, screaming. I thought a ground hornet had bitten her, or that she’d seen a snake. But it turned out she’d gotten the back of the dress in something one of the neighborhood dogs had left there. “A gift,” we’d been taught to call it. As in “Rin Tin Tin from up the street left a gift in the backyard again, Ma.”
But Rosie was going on thirteen, as we used to say, and too grown up for euphemisms. “I got shit on my dress, Tonio!” she cried out over the southern half of Jupiter Street at top volume. “My tablecloth dress! Dog shit, Tonio! Do something!”
In the foundation at the back of the house, there was a three-quarter-size door that led to my grandfather’s wine cellar. Surrounded by a protective circle of girl cousins, Rosalie stood in the doorway, just out of view, and took off her dress. The young girl cousins carefully handed it out to the young boy cousins, who handed it over to me. Only a few square inches of the material were soiled, but the smell seemed to fill the backyard. Augustine, an older cousin who’d been named after my father, came by and held the dress while I sprayed it and sprayed it from the nozzle of the hose, and Rosalie called out instructions from her place by the wine barrels. “Be sure you get all of it, Tonio! Every last little bit! My mother will kill me if it smells up the car.”
When Augustine and I had cleaned off as much of the gift as we could, we rubbed fistfuls of grass over the wet spot—so that the brown stain was replaced by a green one—then sprayed it thoroughly one more time. And in a little while we were all running again, making up games that blossomed and died, blossomed and evolved and died. With the wet dress sticking to her legs, Rosie ran beside me everywhere I went, pinching me, poking me, whispering secrets. The afternoon light softened, and soon evening fell over us, a sweet purple gauze. The voices of my cousins echoed against the houses like a happy symphony, and there seemed to be an endless supply of energy, of time, of good fortune. Anything was possible then: marrying a cousin, becoming rich, any good thing was possible.
From time to time, alone or in groups of two or three, we would pause for a breath and climb the wooden back stairs into the kitchen, take a sandwich or a piece of pastry from the table, run the gauntlet of aunts and uncles. One or two of them would stop us, put a hand against our neck or on our head or shoulder and ask about school, or friends, or our little lives, as if passing along an inheritance of warmth and goodwill, one heartbeat at a time. Crucifixes flashing against bare throats, glasses of wine in one hand, the smell of brewing coffee, the fan wagging back and forth on top of the refrigerator sending out streamers of torn sheet in front of it, the television murmuring in the narrow room that had been fashioned from a hallway when the house had been renovated to make the apartment upstairs; jars of vinegar peppers, thin oily slices of salami on a plate, the soft white bread with sesame seeds baked into the crust, the bowl of fruit, the noisy tide of conversation, one or two of the aunts smoking, one of the uncles sitting with his knees spread, peeling the skin from a tangerine and offering sections all around.
My father and mother were there, sitting beside each other, the beam of sudden wealth—or, at least, sudden freedom from debt—shining in their eyes and mouths. My mother had taken hold of my father’s hand, fingers intertwined, and was resting it in her lap, a sign that all was well in the world.
Around this nucleus of unwavering affection my cousins and I sprinted and whirled, until the neighborhood went completely dark and the radio music had been turned down inside, and men were standing on the back porch sucking light into cigar ashes, and I was being summoned, with increasing seriousness, up into the heat of the apartment for bed.
“Let me take him around the block once, Anna,” my father said. He was holding one hand on the sweaty back of my neck, maintaining a pressure there just firm enough to keep me from running away again. We were standing on the side lawn, looking up at the window. My mother was leaning out of it on her elbows, as if she’d just finished taking in another line of socks and shirts. The hallway light was casting her head in relief, the shadows of the night covered her wrists and hands.
“Gus, it’s almost ten. He has to be up at six-thirty for school.”
“Just one loop around,” my father said. “We need to have a special talk.”
My father moved his hand to my shoulder, and we made one trip around the block that way. Smoke from his cigar floated across my face, a smell so pleasant to me that I would sometimes shut my eyes for a step or two and breathe it in deeply through my nose. It was a very warm night. Streetlights were reflected in the windshields of parked cars, and you could hear a laugh or a shout or television voices drifting out through the screens.
We climbed the hill of Jupiter Street, went across the short stretch of Mountain Avenue opposite Barrows School, then turned left and came down Saturn Street to the corner, made another left on Park Avenue, where there was more traffic, then walked up the sidewalk to the front of our house. There was the quiet tinkling laughter of domestic revelry floating out through the windows, a line of family cars still parked at the curb. “Let’s sit here a minute,” my father said, gesturing at the rough concrete stairs, “me and you.” And we sat there, side by side and not looking at each other, like two men.
“I have to tell you something important, Tonio, alright?”
“Okay, Pa. That we’re rich now?”
“We’re not rich, but your mother’s pregnant. Do you know what that means?”
“Having a baby.”
“That’s right.”
“When?”
“Seven more months.”
“How do you know, Pa?”
“We just know.”
“Where’s the baby now?”
“God has it.”
“Where does He keep it?”
“In heaven.”
“How does He let you know it’s coming? A dream?”
“The doctor tells us. God tells the doctor and the doctor tells us and we go pick it up at the hospital on the right day, just like we did with you.”
“Why does the woman’s belly get big, then?”
He paused, glanced at me, then away. I turned and looked at his handsome square face in the streetlight, black-framed glasses balanced on the bridge of his nose, a dimpled chin, a high broad forehead, and a forest of dark hair his brother Peter would have killed for. He was smaller than Uncle Peter but almost as strong. And almost as bad with money. But more so than my grandfather or Uncle Aldo, the bank manager, my father went through his days wearing a mask of seriousness and purposefulness. Part of it came from the responsibilities of his job—he was a foreman in a plant that built jet engines. Part of it, no doubt, from what he had seen in Europe in 1943 and ’44. Most of it, though, it see
ms to me now, was due to his inability to find a way to perfectly fit together his natural softheartedness and the code for manhood in that place and time. Sometimes the mask would crack. You’d get a glint of his dry humor, or follow the trail of his quiet sobs and find him burying the family dog in the upper part of the backyard on a cool October night. More often he’d simply pretend to be stricter or rougher than he was, though the act fooled no one, least of all my mother and me. “Tonio,” he’d say, when I was being particularly disobedient. “Look at this, see this?” He’d turn his hand palm-up and point to the ridge of muscle between his wrist and thumb. “This is made to go against your bum, and it’s gonna go there in another two seconds if you don’t cut it out.” Or he’d pull out the flap of his belt as if preparing to take it off. But there were no whippings in that house, no spankings. He was not an athlete like some of his brothers, not adept in business like some, not as socially at ease as Uncle Peter. At age nineteen he had been witness to the extreme end of the spectrum of human cruelty, and I think he struggled every day after that not to let it sour him, not to spoil my innocence with the legacy of war. That innocence would, in any case, be spoiled soon enough, though my father would not live to see it.
Laughter and voices floated out of the windows behind us.
He said, “It’s in her belly now. It grows there a little every day. We can’t see it yet.”
“Why is it in her belly?”
“Because the seed for the baby gets planted there.”
“Who plants it there, God?”
“Right. God and me.”
“How, Papa?”
“What, how? We put it inside there.”
“How do you put it in?”
“It’s small in the beginning.”
“In her mouth? Like food?”
“No, another way.”
“How?”
“A trick.”
“How, Pa? What kind of trick?”
He held the stub of the cigar between his middle finger and his thumb and launched it toward the street. It fell short, and I could see it blinking and smoking on the edge of the sidewalk.
In Revere, In Those Days Page 3
