“The way the world is set up,” he said at last, “the way God sets it up, see, you learn a little bit at a time. Like you in school. Every grade you learn something a little bit different. It goes into your brain in a different place, a different little room, okay? First you learn to color, then you read, then you add, now you do long division, right? In my job you don’t start building the whole engine for the airplane on the first day. You learn to read the plans first, you learn the different tools, calipers, trimmers, how you use them, okay?”
“Okay, Pa, but—”
“You’re not at the age yet to learn everything about babies, or how to shave, or how to drive a car. Pretty soon you will. Hair is gonna grow on your face like on my face, see, on your body. You’ll get big. Then we’ll have a talk, okay?”
“Okay.”
“We’re going on a little trip, your mother and me, to celebrate our anniversary, get a little rest before your baby sister or brother comes, alright? We don’t want you to feel bad that you’re not coming with us. Your mother needs to get away now before this happens, understand?, because having a baby is hard work. She has to carry it around, she has to bring it to the hospital and deliver it. It doesn’t mean anything against you that we’re going.”
“Where will I stay?”
“With Grandma and Grandpa. Rosie’s coming over. The two of you are staying here, and Uncle Peter and Auntie Ulla and me and your mother are flying to New York. Three days we’ll be gone; can you handle that okay?”
“Sure, Pa.”
“Alright then, go to bed.”
“Pa?”
We got up and went in through the narrow screened porch and toward the door where Uncle Peter had stood and pressed the buzzer that same morning. My father knocked twice on the wood, hard, and only then turned to me. “What?”
“When you get as old as Grandma and Grandpa, what things don’t you know yet?”
An exasperated smile started to scratch at the muscles of his mouth, but immediately died there. He pressed his lips together. He raised one finger in the air and lowered it. “There’s such a thing as being too smart,” he said. “For a kid especially, there’s—”
“I know, but what things?”
He knocked on the door again. “Probably you don’t know the last little secrets,” he said, “the things God keeps for Himself.” He was looking straight at me now, the mask gone, the veneer of toughness stripped away. If I had known to look for them, I would have seen the bloody footprints of war there on his face, the dark questions at the center of my father’s life.
“Like what?” I said.
“Like what? Like why He makes people get sick. Why He makes them die. Things like that.” The buzzer sounded and the lock popped. “Now go on up now. Give me a kiss and go up and right to bed.”
But even in bed, listening to the voices in my grandparents’ apartment, the sound of spoons in coffee cups, a bubble of laughter in the yard—even there I could not let go of the conversation. I pictured an enormous book, thick as the library dictionary, the finger of God turning a page every year or so, letting you in on another small piece of the mystery. Hair on your face, cigar smoke and bundles of money, the secrets of pregnancy and death—I wanted to steal the book and hide in my room at night with a flashlight, poring over it. I wanted to know everything everyone else knew, without waiting.
“YOU CAN’T FEEL IT YET,” my mother was telling me. She was sitting on the edge of the mattress. I could see her forehead and eyes in the faint light from Park Avenue, and the small space between her two front teeth. She had pulled the sheet up over my chest, then changed her mind and pulled it down again. “Later, you can put your hand here and feel her moving.”
“It’s a girl?”
“I think so,” she said. “Won’t it be nice to have a little sister in the house?”
I heard people on the wooden back stairs, and then on the walk beneath my window. “Wait till I get you home,” Aunt Ulla was saying, in a voice that felt like a piece of sandpaper running along your skin. “Just wait.”
“Sure,” I told my mother. “Sure it will.”
Six
THE BIG TRIP WAS PLANNED for that weekend, the last weekend in June. Uncle Peter had bought the tickets from a friend of his, a woman who knew somebody at the airlines—special price. He told me he’d made reservations at the finest, classiest, most expensive hotel in New York. He’d gone out and picked up a new suit, a new sport coat, a new pair of shoes because, as he said, “You can’t go to New York City looking like a nobody.”
But at the last minute Aunt Ulla must have fallen ill with one of her headaches because, as things turned out, my mother and father ended up flying off by themselves. Uncle Peter, Rosalie, and I drove them to Logan Airport on a hot, sunny Friday. We stood in the terminal building and watched through the glass as my parents appeared on the tarmac in a loose file of other travelers, as my mother turned to look for us and waved, as they climbed the portable stairway, turned again, both of them, swung their hands twice in our direction, as if they were just going to New York, to a hotel, as if they’d be home again in two days and then the world would be the way it had always been.
“Those are the kinds of engines your pa makes, see?” I remember Uncle Peter telling me. “At the GE, see? Look at them.”
We climbed up to the open-air observation deck on the roof of the terminal—people did not bomb airplanes in those days, or fly them into buildings—and watched the jet back slowly out of its berth and roll off to the edge of the runway, only a few inches, it seemed, from the sea. We stood and stared as it gathered speed there, lifted up in a neat silver line, climbed, banked, folded its wheels in, and blinked off toward the exotic territory called New York.
Seven
OVER THE PAST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, I have tried probably fifty times to paint my father’s mother. There are old wrinkled snapshots of her all over my studio—as a young bride with shining black hair twisted into a bun on top of her head; as a mother surrounded by her brood; alone in her garden of gladioli and roses; with her husband in the mottled grapevine shade; with the statue of Mary in the background; with a child in her arms; indoors, outdoors, late in life, as I knew her: gray-haired, a silver-capped front tooth that blinked in the sunlight, the nose and ears gone too large, the flesh beneath her chin drooping, her eyes turned up slightly at the corners.
In her young, pretty days, in her old and not-so-pretty days, some persistent, unvarnished force shone through her, a steadiness, a deep, deep patience with the pain and frustrations of living. Looking at the photographs, you can see it there. But it does not translate into oils. Or, at least, I have never been able to accomplish the translation.
My grandmother was the sun around which the Benedetto family orbited. This, I know, runs against the cliché. In Italian families it is supposed to be the father who is imbued with some larger-than-human dimension. And in Revere, in fact, it was usually the father’s word that held most of the weight in an argument, in a household code of laws—something carried over from the besieged mountain villages in the southern Italian countryside. In those places, invasion was a seasonal event, and it was the men, the warriors, who kept or failed to keep the family alive. Centuries later and thousands of miles to the west, it was the father whose arrival home at the end of the working day was a cause for celebration—as if he had been away in battle and there had been some doubt about his safe return. It was the father who pronounced grace over steaming plates of food, who stepped out onto the porch and smoked on summer evenings while the women tended to their offspring and rinsed plates. If the Benedetto family had been a fifteenth-century Neapolitan royal clan—nine children and their nine spouses and their thirty-one sons and daughters—then my grandfather would have been installed on the throne, not beside his wife but a step above her, two steps above their Augustines and Peters and Marias and Aldos and the people they had married. My grandfather bore this exalted status well and quietly, neither making a g
reat show of it nor shirking the harsher duties. But, king or no king, ask any of the surviving children where the spiritual power in the family resided.
My grandmother came to America when she was thirteen, was married by the time she was seventeen, gave birth to her first child at eighteen. Her adulthood was an unbroken dream of hard labor: carrying and bearing children; drawing forth meals, day after day, year upon year, from the cupboards, skillets, and gardens the way a conductor draws forth music from an assembly of musicians; scrubbing, dusting, pushing the carpet cleaner along the hallways while her younger children napped.
When I knew her best she was in her sixties and seventies, and until she became ill with Alzheimer’s a few years before the end of her life, she would still put three meals together, weed her flower gardens, bake pies, and keep the house clean without benefit of paid help.
Her main pleasure consisted of surreptitious shopping trips to Boston—on the bus and in subway cars—where she would comb the department stores along Washington Street in all months of the year, buying Christmas gifts. After her children had all left the house and there was more time, she fell into the habit of watching the soap opera As the World Turns every afternoon, weeping over it sometimes as her mind failed. Every other spare moment seemed to be filled with prayer. I would come through the back door after school and find her at the table with her beads, eyes fastened on the wall as if a vision of an easier existence were painted there, and it was just a question of having the patience to wait until the colors came to life.
Even here I know I am not capturing her as she really was. Words stick on the surface. She worked a subtler dimension, the realm of the absence of ego. Even today, old neighbors I meet on visits back to Revere say, “She was a saint, your grandmother.” And I want to say to them, Yes, right, but what is a saint? A stiff relic in the window of the church? How do you make a portrait of a saint; how do you talk about her without sounding false? What does it actually mean to be a saint in this world of lies and religious fanaticism? Who even believes in the possibility anymore?
I ask those questions of myself, in the studio, piling failures one upon the next. And always I go back to what seems to me a safe starting point: a saint is someone who, doing nothing dramatic, saying nothing profound, knows instinctively how to begin to rescue a child when, on route back to Boston from New York, descending through a soupy, surly fog, the jet that the child’s parents are riding in catches its landing gear on the top of the concrete wall that marks the airport’s eastern boundary, wobbles for one instant between an ordinary, taken-for-granted morning and the threshold of terror and mystery, then jerks sharply downward so that the nose strikes the tarmac, the enormous momentum lifts the tail up and over, and the jet, missing one wing, skids upside down and backward along the runway and explodes.
Eight
I REMEMBER SITTING BETWEEN my uncle and cousin in the terminal and watching the fog brush against the plate glass like the shoulder of a sleeping animal. It was an early-morning fog, a common occurrence in summer along the New England coastline, something that would soon burn away, leaving a clear, hot day. If the flight had arrived an hour later, there would have been no problem, no crash. We would have ridden home to Revere in my uncle’s car and lived out very different fates. If the flight had arrived an hour later, if the pilot had not tried to land, if the angle of descent had been one degree different from what it was …
I remember I was dressed in school clothes for the event of my parents’ homecoming, and that, at my grandmother’s suggestion, I had picked a few flowers from the yard for my mother, and that Rosalie was sitting to my right, swinging her legs back and forth beneath the chair in a way that irritated her father. Years later, Rosie would tell me she’d had a premonition on that day, that she turned to me a few minutes before we heard the news—before there was any news to hear—and said, “What’s wrong, Tonio? Something’s wrong.” But I do not remember her doing that.
I remember an announcement coming over the address system, and Uncle Peter lifting his head out of some reverie of greyhounds and colts, walking over to the ticket desk and then suddenly, absurdly, sprinting toward the emergency door and throwing his shoulder against it. At first, Rosalie and I thought he was only making one of his manic, comedic displays for the amusement of the other people waiting to be summoned to the gate. And then two policemen ran up and wrestled him to the ground. Uncle Peter threw a punch into the air—one inch to the side of one of the faces—a punch that would have killed a man, and the policemen redoubled their efforts, leaning all their combined weight on his arms and torso, and shouting for assistance. I threw the flowers onto a chair. Rosie and I went running to save him.
I remember stumbling around the yard at 20 Jupiter Street in the broiling heat of that afternoon, walking dazed down the narrow grass alley that separated my grandparents’ house from the blue picket fence of the next yard over. I remember the smell of my aunts’ perfume and lipstick as they took hold of me, under the grapevine, on the back steps, at the edges of the kitchen, pressed me against their chests and wrapped me in Roman Catholic platitudes about God’s goodness and mercy. And I remember, when the afternoon had worn itself down to a blunt nib of spoiled, burnt hope, standing on the sidewalk in a loose collection of cousins and watching Uncle Leo’s blue Studebaker make the corner from Park Avenue, come up the street, and stop at the curb. I looked at Uncle Peter. He was in the passenger seat, leaning forward, looking at me, his face a quivering chiaroscuro on which was painted misery enough for a hundred lifetimes.
I was swept into the small den, the TV was turned off, the other cousins banished to the yard. The aunts and my grandmother crowded around the door. My grandfather and uncles sat on the sofa and soft chairs, the room so small their knees were touching in an uneven circle. Uncle Peter’s eyes were sending streams of tears down his face, and he stared at me as if I, too, might vanish in the next second, as if God were intent on taking the people he loved out of the world, one by one, like a merciless opponent plucking chessmen from a board. Uncle Leo was looking at the window, though the Venetian blinds were drawn. I remember all this as if it were painted on the insides of my eyes. Uncle Aldo and Uncle Francis maneuvered me so that I was standing between their knees, my back to the sofa, and facing my grandfather, who was sitting straight-spined in the soft chair closest to the door. I could hear Aunt Marie—who’d named her oldest son after my father—wailing in the kitchen, calling my father’s name again and again.
“Antonio,” Dom said when we were all still. He reached out, took my hands in his hands, and drew me across the carpet toward him so that I was standing close to him and my eyes were even with his eyes. “The plane, she crashed, you know it.”
I couldn’t swallow or speak. I could not move. I stared through the upper lenses of his bifocals.
“Eighty-nine people, they died.”
I thought for a moment he was going to ask me to give him the words for “eighty-nine” in Italian. Ottanta nove, I was ready to say. I would have pronounced any number for him, any phrase. I would have taken out and handed over any of the empty little treasures of my school year—the test scores, the columns of As, the compliments of my teachers—in exchange for some relief from the weight of that moment.
“Three people, they lived so far; what they can find.”
“Your mother lived,” Uncle Leo blurted out, because he could not endure the pace at which his father was dripping information into the room.
“You mama, she’s alive still, in the hospital now.”
“Papa?” I spoke this as a question into a silence that was broken only by the wails and sobs in the kitchen. “Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus God,” Aunt Marie was crying out.
“You Papa …,” Dom said, and now he squeezed my hands harder and pulled me an inch closer.
“Your father pushed your mother and the other two people out the window,” Uncle Leo piped up again from the corner of the couch. But his words, arcing over toward me li
ke the thinnest lifeline of hope, carried no comfort. I could not turn away from my grandfather’s face. “The plane was on fire,” Uncle Leo went on. “People were burning up, screaming. Your father was a hero, like in the war. He saved them.”
The sentences floated through the air like scraps of old thread. My grandfather’s face was what mattered to me, his words, his assessment of the situation. He did not move, his grip did not relax; someone was murmuring to my aunt in the kitchen, comforting her.
“God called you father today,” Dom said at last, and I watched a burst of feeling—electric and terrible—race along the lines of his face. “God called him up.”
I looked to my left at the heavy black telephone on its skinny dark table. I smiled a wretched smile, a spasm of horror in the muscles of my mouth. More people were crying in the kitchen now, in the doorway, on the sofa behind and to either side of me. If there had been any chance of breaking away, I would have sprinted out through the kitchen and down the back steps, but I was trapped in that little circle of misery. I looked at Uncle Peter, who had leaned his face down onto his hands and lowered the backs of his hands to his knees and was weeping in high-pitched hiccups. I felt the skin of my face go loose, and a flood of tears, and mucous in my mouth, and my grandfather’s arms taking hold of me.
Nine
THAT NIGHT I SLEPT on the sofa bed in my grandparents’ parlor, a rarely used room of drawn curtains and plastic-covered armchairs. Rosalie slept with me. After a few restless hours, I awoke, in darkness, to the warm cotton smell of her pajamas, and the tangle of black hair down her back. I thought I had heard her crying. I thought the sound of it was what had made me wake up. But when I quietly said her name—“Rosie?”—she did not stir. I put the flat of my hand against her pajamas, against her back, and tried not to breathe so I could be sure she was breathing. “Rosie,” I whispered. She slept on.
In Revere, In Those Days Page 4
