In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes and rubbed my face and saw that a frail light bloomed in the arched kitchen doorway. I shuffled across the carpet toward it. In the kitchen, my grandmother sat alone at the table, the night-light from her bedroom plugged into the outlet. Moths were driving themselves against the screens of the windows, buzzing and bumping and scratching at the metal threads. In her hands she held a small prayer book with a worn-out black leather cover, the pages edged red. Her eyeglasses rested halfway down her nose—a more modest version of Uncle Peter’s nose—and she mouthed the words as she read.

  When she realized I was there, she put her hand on the sleeve of my pajamas. A thin breeze, almost cool, floated in through the screens and across the skin of my neck. I shivered, stared at her, sleepily, miserably, half-listening to the moths. She pushed me gently down into a chair and went to the refrigerator, and in a moment the short sharp stink of stove gas reached me, then the sweet smell of bacon being cooked in its own fat. Soon she put a plate of eggs on the table, a glass of milk. She worked at the counter another minute, returned with another plate: two slices of toast, giving off small steamy breaths. She sat again, her hands and fleshy forearms on the plastic tablecloth, and for a few seconds we were as still as statues in the huge, half-lit silence, darkness breathing in through the screen, the emptiness of the dark rooms above us like an open mouth about to speak. She touched the toast slices with one finger and put a hand on my arm, not crying while everyone else cried, not trying to say anything to comfort me. Grandpa Dom slept, Rosalie slept. The aunts, uncles, and cousins had returned to their houses to sleep. She took up the prayer book and held it in her hand without opening it, without taking her eyes from my face. She looked at me out of a perfect stillness, as if willing me to understand something that could not be spoken. And for a few flickering seconds I thought I did understand it. Even to the deepest grief and pain there is a thin lining of disbelief, as if death and suffering are mostly, but not completely, real. It seemed to me on that night that she had taken my thoughts as if they were fingers, and was running them along the fabric of that lining, letting me feel the weave of it. But this lasted only a breath or two, before the tears came. I put my face in my hands, the way I had seen my uncles do, and wept without any self-consciousness, the top of my head so close to the plate that the next morning there was dried egg yolk in my hair, and she saw it and took me to the sink to wash it out.

  Ten

  THE NEXT DAY WAS very hot again, the sky unbearably bright, as if it were reflecting another world on fire. The fan hummed on top of my grandparents’ refrigerator, and the house and yard were overlaid with a sad, superheated lethargy. My grandmother stood at the stove, sweating over her bubbling pots, resting a hand on my shoulder when I came within reach of her, pulling me close against her leg, pressing her fingers into the side of my face. Cousins sat in the shade of the grapevine or wandered the yard in pairs, staring out over the fences, picking up stones from the dirt of the vacant lot next door and tossing them back down again, glancing up and then guiltily away when planes crossed overhead on their approach to Logan. Neighbors brought over plates of lasagna and fruit baskets in plastic wrap. They sat in the kitchen for an hour or two hours, and with each new arrival I was summoned from my places of mourning—the sofa bed, the grassy alleyway—and presented to the guests so that I could accept their embraces, their kisses, their “Tonio, my God, Tonio. I’m so sorry for you, honey.”

  But I did not want sympathy and pizza dolce; what I wanted was to see my mother.

  Rosalie acted as if I were a starving blind boy she had volunteered to chaperon. She brought me sandwiches, tall glasses of iced coffee with two inches of sugar in the bottom, cakes, cookies, bowls of pudding, pieces of fruit. But I would not eat. When, after lunch, the stream of visitors increased, and I realized none of them had come to take me into Boston to the hospital, that none of my begging and pleading was having any effect whatsoever on the aunts and uncles, I crawled beneath the large evergreen bush to the right of the front steps and sat there, nephew on strike, scratching nonsensical patterns in the cool dirt, refusing to appear when summoned, refusing to speak. After a while, Rosalie came and sat with me. We stayed there for a long time, not looking at each other, not talking. From our hiding place we could hear cars pulling up and doors slamming, and, once, the voice of a woman: “Such a handsome man.”

  One of us must have broken the silence. I don’t remember who, or what we talked about at first—the memory of that day is broken up into pieces, hot, vivid, incomplete. At some point Rosalie took out her “Mary card” and held it in both hands in front of her against her bare raised knees. The Mary card was a piece of thick paper, not quite cardboard, probably an inch and a half by three inches, with a painting of a very young Virgin holding her infant son and looking up to heaven. Most of us had a talisman like that: a square of rough cloth called a scapular, which we wore around our necks; rosary beads; slivers of the True Cross; Saint Joseph medals on our desks, Saint Rocco statues on our end tables, Saint Christopher pendants dangling from the rearview mirrors of our cars. We prayed to Saint Anthony when we lost something, Saint Jude to help us with impossible cases, Saint Lucy when a cousin was hit in the eye playing stickball. We had our throats blessed by Saint Blaise in winter, we said novenas, went without meat on Fridays, nodded our heads when we spoke Jesus’ name aloud or when we drove or walked past a Catholic church. The ordinary days were speckled with reminders that this life was a temporary life, not what it seemed; that there was a whole team of spirits above us, invisible in the ether, eager to help. You prayed to Jesus on the Little League field; you wrote down your sins every evening so you could make an accurate confession on Saturday afternoon. You said “God bless you” when someone sneezed, and “God rest her [or his] soul” whenever the name of a dead woman (or man) was spoken aloud. The Catholic child’s mind was flooded with images: a tortured savior; a perfect mother; the agonizing cries of sinners burning in hell, without advocates, without hope.

  So it seemed perfectly natural to me that Rosalie always carried the Mary card around with her in her pocket. And absolutely unsurprising that she would take it out then. On that stifling day we were all calling on God—to heal my mother, to lift my father’s soul, to give us some explanation for what had happened.

  Rosalie stared at the card for a few minutes—I assumed she was praying—then tore it in half. She held one piece in each hand. I let out a choked-off shout, a protest, and reached out roughly to try to put the two pieces back together. Rosalie squeezed her hands around them, turned her back, and tore up each piece again, then tossed them in the dust and spruce needles.

  “Rosie! It’s a sin!”

  “What God did to Uncle Gus, that’s a sin.”

  “You can’t say that!”

  “He’s not there. He couldn’t be there and do something like this. Even the devil wouldn’t do something like this to Uncle Gus. What if your mother dies, too? What if my father dies next?” She slapped at the dust so that the pieces of paper scattered. I reached across and grabbed at them, held one little scrap in my fingers. She pulled my arm back, put her body in the way. We wrestled and grabbed at each other’s hands, angrier and angrier, grunting, saying, “Stop!” “Cut it out!” until she started crying, and then I started crying, and we sat with our backs against the foundation of the house like a set of sweaty, dirty-cheeked twins.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON, a car carrying three pairs of uncles and aunts left for Boston. I remember breaking away from Rosalie—who was staying close to me still, as if I were a balloon or a kite and the smallest breeze would carry me out over the ocean—and running down the sidewalk after it, calling out, “Take me! Take me!” until the car made the corner onto Park Avenue and pulled away.

  Though I had spent almost no time in the house, where most of the rest of the family huddled and mourned, I knew Uncle Peter wasn’t there. I knew it because when he was in the house or in the yard or out front leani
ng against the fender of a car with his arms crossed, he would almost always make a point of “checking in,” as he called it. This meant that if I was outside playing with the cousins, he’d break away, every half hour or so, from whatever conversation he was engaged in, and stand at the screen door or step out onto the back porch until he saw me. He’d always done this, years before my father died, and, in a different way, he does it still. If he stopped by the house on one of his unannounced visits and I was asleep, he would slip into the bedroom and stand over me for a minute, usually reaching down and resting his fingers on my chest to make sure I was still breathing. This had been going on for so many years that I was no longer surprised to wake up and see him there, outlined in the diluted hall light with his huge arm held toward me and two of his fingers resting lightly on my chest. During the school year, especially, it upset my mother—the waking up, not the checking in. On more than one occasion, after Uncle Peter left, there was a small argument about it.

  But he was my godfather, and in southern Italian culture that relationship carries with it a particularly heavy responsibility, as if you have been charged with taking care of a precious possession that belongs to someone else, a neighbor’s diamond ring placed in your pocket, for life. You watch over it even more closely than you would if it were your own.

  But it was more than that. It went deeper, even, than the fact that Uncle Peter was unhappily married, and poured out, on Rosalie and me and on one or two of the other cousins, the affection Aunt Ulla would not accept from him. It went deeper than the love he felt for my father—his favorite among the siblings. It had something to do with heroism; I am just now coming to see that. Always remember who you are, Einstein, who your family is. It had something to do with this idea he’d had, as a boxer, that by becoming heavyweight champion of the world, he would somehow lift all of us up and out of the reach of humiliation. No one could look down on him then, or on us. For being Italians. For being from Revere. The world would see us as we saw each other—as dazzling souls. It explains the Cadillac, and the expensive clothes, and the dream—impossible to fulfill—of winning enough money at gambling to buy us all the life we deserved.

  Though there was no real reason to, he had this idea that I would conquer the wider world he had seen—and failed in, and fled. He loved his daughter more than he loved his own life, but he did not expect her to do this for the Benedetto family. He expected me to do it.

  So he bought me baseball gloves and took me with him to Fenway Park. He drove me to school, taught me to fight, instructed me in the laws of style, of pride, of narcissism, perhaps. He treated me as if I would be a king someday and would lead my people. I liked it—what young boy wouldn’t like it? I looked into his face hoping to see reflected there the proof that I was not ordinary … which may explain why I have spent the last twenty-five years trying to be as ordinary as I can possibly be.

  And on the day after I learned my father had been killed and my mother badly hurt—how could God do such a thing to a special boy?—I looked for that image of myself reflected in Uncle Peter’s face. I waited for him to come and lift me up.

  But he had dropped off Rosalie and Aunt Ulla early in the morning and stayed only long enough to have a cup of coffee with his parents. He’d barely acknowledged me and left without saying good-bye, and for the rest of the day I looked for his car and listened for his voice. The previous twenty-four hours had been a series of mortar rounds with reverberating silences between: the commotion at the airport; the gathering of men in the TV room; the endless night in which I’d dozed and awakened every half hour and felt the truth of what had happened, the fact of it, appear out of the dark forgetfulness of sleep and slam against me, again and again. Shell-shocked as any soldier in any muddy trench, I expected what was left of the world to be blown apart, too. All guarantees had been revoked. What was to stop my mother from dying? Grandpa? Grandma? Rosie? Why shouldn’t Uncle Peter fail to check in, even though he had been checking in every day I could remember for years and years?

  Finally, late in the afternoon, half an hour after the carful of aunts and uncles drove away, I heard a car door close, and saw his face and shoulders above the trimmed hedge. I heard him say to Rosalie, “Where is he?” and watched his eyes flit over the lawn. When he saw me, he tilted his head toward the street once, quickly. I ran out of the yard and stopped next to him. “Get in,” he said, “get in front, next to me.”

  I sat between him and Rosie. He was wearing a short-sleeved white dress shirt. I remember the light coating of hair over the sinews on his huge forearms, his thick wrists, the sight of both his hands on the wheel for once, the knuckles, the wedding band, the watch—everything reminding me of my father. The car squealed away from the house as if it were being driven by a teenager. Rosie took hold of my hand. We went up Jupiter Street and turned right onto Mountain Avenue and right again at the corner of Broadway, and near the end of Broadway we pulled to the curb in front of Russo’s bakery. Uncle Peter reached two fingers into the pocket of his shirt and drew out a folded hundred-dollar bill. I had never seen one before. He pushed it into my hand and said, “We’re goin in, and we’re gonna buy every macaroon cookie and every éclair and every biscòtti they have, alright? Quick, they’re closin up.”

  “And take them to my mother?”

  He did not look at me. We got out of the car, closed the doors, and stood in the cool sidewalk shadows.

  “And take them to my mother, Uncle?” I said again. My voice twisted upward and broke over the last two syllables. I had the bill in my right hand; Rosalie was holding my left arm near the elbow. I did not know that Uncle Peter was lost, adrift, that he was only falling back on old tricks—the money, the show—because he had no sense at all now of where the channel was, and where were the shoals. He had stayed away from the house all day because he could not face what had happened, could not face me. When he heard the word mother a second time, he looked at me blankly, then turned away. Someone who must not yet have heard about my father drove by and yelled out, “Hey, Peter B!” but he did not move even his eyes.

  “Uncle?”

  “We can’t see her,” he said flatly.

  “Why not?”

  “Why not, Papa?”

  He looked at Rosalie and pursed his lips. He looked away.

  “They let Uncle Aldo and Aunt Maria, they let—”

  “You’re too young. The doctors don’t let you in that young.”

  “I want to see her!” I shouted over Broadway. “I want to see her!”

  “We can’t now, pal.…”

  I crushed the bill in my hand, threw it against the front of his shirt, and sprinted down the sidewalk in what I guessed was the direction of Boston. I made it across Fenno and almost as far as the corner of Page Street—two blocks—before he caught me. He squatted down next to me and held me against his chest until I stopped fighting. “I can’t, Tonio,” he said into my ear. “I can’t, pal, I can’t. The other uncles and aunts, they had a meetin last night.… They don’t want you to see her now. She’s burned, your mother, okay? Now I told you. Burned up bad. She’s in the hospital bed and can’t get up. She can’t see you, can’t talk to you. I wanted to take you but now I can’t, see? They’d crucify me. Let’s wait two days, alright? Two days, then I’ll take you, I give you my word, no matter who says anythin about it, okay?”

  I leaned my head to one side, half-trying to escape, and saw Rosalie standing on the sidewalk fifty yards behind us, bending over with her hands on her knees, as if she’d been running all the way from Jupiter Street. “Papa?” she called.

  Still holding me with one arm, her father turned and looked at her over his shoulder. “Papa?” she said again, weakly. She wobbled, she reached up and pressed one hand against her belly. We hurried toward her, and when we were still a few feet away, I saw that there were two thin trickles of dark blood on her right leg. I thought she had fallen and cut herself. “My insides hurt, Papa,” she said, still bending over, and I could se
e then that the blood was coming down her thigh, past her knee, staining the top edge of one white sock.

  “Jesus, Madonna,” I heard Uncle Peter say. “Madonna, when things happen, they happen.” He was fighting with the buttons of his shirt, taking it off. The word tourniquet came into my mind. I may have said it aloud, standing there, two feet from Rosalie. I may have burped it out in a spasm of panic.

  My uncle had his shirt off and was bare-chested on the sidewalk, with the late-afternoon traffic rolling past and two women in black dresses watching from the door of an apartment house. He had balled up his dress shirt and was cleaning the blood from his daughter’s leg. She had one hand on his bare shoulder. I could see the dark rich red soaking into the white fabric of the shirt. “Papa, Papa,” she was whimpering. Uncle Peter folded the shirt over itself, enclosing the stains in white, then gently reached it up under her dress, between her legs, and said, “Put your hand there and hold it like that, honey; it’s okay, nobody’s watchin us. You’re okay.” He put one arm behind her knees and one behind her back and lifted her, and Rosie’s eyes swung up and caught my eyes.

  “Nobody’s watchin, honey, nobody’s watchin,” Uncle Peter said as he carried her. She stared at me as we went the first few steps, then buried her face in her father’s chest. “Nobody’s lookin, honey. You’re growin up now, that’s all. Mama told you about it, didn’t she? You’re alright. We’ll take you home now for a little while. Tonio’s here, we’re all okay. We’re okay.”

  I opened the car door. Uncle Peter put one knee on the edge of the seat and, reaching in, set Rosie down in the middle. “It’s leather, it washes, don’t worry, honey.” There was a little blood on his hands and arms. “Reach in my back pocket and grab me the handkerchief, Tonio,” he said. He cleaned off the blood, tossed the handkerchief onto the floor of the backseat, and we sat on either side of Rosie and rode up the hill to the house on Venice Avenue.