In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  Uncle Peter told me to go out into the yard and play, to wait for him there, but for some reason I didn’t do that. I remember standing in the kitchen with a glass of cream soda in my right hand. Rosalie was in the bathroom, cleaning herself, according to her father’s instructions, with a warm washcloth. Uncle Peter was standing sideways in the parlor doorway with the telephone receiver trapped between his bare shoulder and his jaw, and he was taking the cap off a bottle of cold beer with a metal opener. He could not see me. He fumbled with the opener a little—he was distracted by Rosie, the phone—the muscles near his shoulders jumped as his arms moved, as if small animals were trapped there, below the skin.

  “Ulla,” he said into the phone. The bottle cap came off at last and skittered across the linoleum. “Home … our house. Rosie’s got her, you know. She’s bleedin … between the legs.… I know it, unbleevable, right? … I’ll come get you, two minutes.… Whaddayou mean? This is somethin for you to do, Ul.… Look, I’m comin down there and I’m bringin you back here.… That’s right.… I know that.… My brother just died, and my sister-in-law is probably gonna die, too.… I was out … out, nowhere. Driving around cryin.… Who abandoned you? What abandoned? What are you talkin about? Those are my brothers and sisters.…”

  When he hung up the phone, Uncle Peter went out the door that led off the hallway between the kitchen and parlor. The door opened onto a tiny porch, just a landing, really, for the steps that led down into the backyard. I could see him through the kitchen window above the sink. He was standing near the railing, the tips of the fingers of his left hand resting on top of it, his right hand holding the bottle of beer at his hip. He took one drink from it and stood very still for twenty or thirty seconds, then he lifted the bottle up to his shoulder and threw it with a casual motion, one quick flex of the muscles of his shoulder and arm. The bottle flew end over end, circular trails of beer leaking out. It splashed into the round, blue, above-ground pool, bubbled there a minute, and slowly sank.

  I SLEPT A DEEP, deep sleep that night, alone on the sofa bed in my grandparents’ parlor. Rosie slept in her own house, in her own bed.

  In the morning I sat at the kitchen table with my grandmother, eating toast and drinking coffee with extra milk in it, replaying everything I had seen and heard the day before. I was being cheated, I knew that—by God, by the aunts and uncles. Cheated or punished. My father was dead and my mother was going to die. Rosalie was bleeding from inside. Uncle Peter and Aunt Ulla were arguing. My grandfather had become a nervous man, overnight.

  Instead of sitting with my grandmother and me as he normally would have done, still and calm, a sort of living statue before which we could lay the wreaths of our worries and plans, Grandpa Dom paced like a sterner, smaller Uncle Peter, lips pressed into a line, hands clasped and working behind his back. He stepped into the den and then out again into the kitchen. He went the length of the kitchen and disappeared into the small foyer near the back door. I could hear him speaking under his breath there, something I had never known him to do. Another few seconds and he reappeared, still muttering, checking the clock, checking his watch, disappearing again.

  “Domenico,” my grandmother said, as if she were warning him. “Rose Marie verrà tra quindici minuti.”

  He emerged, a nervous ghost in the doorway, nodded at her curtly, nervously, and went on with his peculiar routine—the back door, the den, the back door again. On his loops through the den, he began now to address the telephone, in quiet but urgent Italian, commanding it to ring. When it at last obeyed, he was in the middle of the kitchen, heading the other way, and he turned and hurried back. I stopped eating and listened to him in there, speaking in his soft, aqueous voice. He hung up and hurried into the bedroom, then joined us again wearing a suit jacket over his white shirt and carrying his straw fedora. He touched my grandmother once on the elbow as if for luck, a touch with fifty years of companionship and the grief of one dead son in it, and signaled for me to follow.

  I trailed him into the white heat of the morning and caught up with him just as he was leaving the yard. We turned left at the bottom of the street, sunlight sparkling on the car windows and on Park Avenue’s drooping electric wires. We passed the awning shop, then Zingy’s, then Sully’s, a one-room corner store where my mother had sent me a hundred times for bread and milk. At Venus Street, a quarter mile short of Broadway, Grandpa Dom turned abruptly left, as if seeking shade. We went a hundred feet up the sidewalk and found a green Pontiac parked there with its motor running. My grandfather opened the passenger door, flipped the front seat forward, and motioned me in. Behind the wheel sat Vittorio Imbesalacqua, hair clipped short beneath a carpenter’s cap, and beads of sweat on the back of his tanned, strong neck. Vittorio was almost thirty years younger than my grandfather. They treated each other more like brothers than friends, held together by a bond that seemed mysterious to me until I found out—years later, from Vito’s daughter, Joanie—that my grandfather had sponsored her father’s arrival in America, promised the authorities that the man would work hard, would do no harm here.

  Every spring, Vittorio—“Victor Bones,” as Grandpa called him—spent a whole workday pruning the vines on our grape arbor, in payment for which he would accept nothing more than a single shot glass of brandy in the late afternoon. He would bring his wife, Lucy, and his children, Joanie and Peter, to our Sunday gatherings, and sit with my grandfather on the concrete bench beneath the grapevine, sometimes holding a cigar between the fingers of one rough hand and taking the occasional puff. Famous for his physical strength and sublime abilities at bocce, he was the gentlest of men, quiet as a monk. He acted as if he were bearing some secret pain through the world and would never speak of it. And he had always seemed to hold some particular affection for me, always talked about my working for him when I was old enough, building houses. His son was just my age, a wild, funny, charismatic boy, who made fun of his own father’s accent because some of his schoolmates taunted him about it.

  My grandfather slipped into the front seat of the Pontiac and spoke to Vito conspiratorially, in Italian, mostly too soft and fast for me to understand. But I caught one word. Dom reached over the back of the seat and took hold of my hand, and we slipped off through the streets of Revere like fugitives in flight from a repressive regime. The word I thought I had heard was “ospedale.”

  We went along Mountain Avenue to Washington Avenue, and dodged through the back streets of Chelsea toward the ramp that led onto the Mystic River Bridge. My grandfather pushed open the small triangular side window so that the breeze blew into his face and tossed his fedora into my lap. I held the fedora there, watched him across the back of the seat, but I did not look at him or say a word, as if eye contact or speech or anything as noticeable as a drawn breath would cause him to order us back to Jupiter Street.

  We climbed the long rise of the bridge, and saw Boston spread out there in the heat—the harbor, the Customs Tower, the hills of Charlestown scarved in smog, steaming, sweating. Grandpa handed Vittorio a dime for the toll, and Vittorio made a big show of refusing him, taking one hand off the wheel to bat at my grandfather’s arm and bubbling in Italian that Dom was going to make him drive over the edge of the bridge and down into the water if he didn’t stop; that it was bad enough, the driving, the sadness, what had happened to this boy, to his father, his mother, the other cars trying to push him over the edge, without the embarrassment, the humiliation, of someone else paying the toll for him when he was driving in his own car. He’d put the dime in his pocket, he said, he’d had it there all along, but then he’d set it out on the dashboard while he was waiting and it had somehow slipped off.…

  At last, a coin—someone’s—was handed over to the attendant, and we drove on, descending now, gliding this way and that along busy ramps and through short tunnels, through the close, clamorous city air.

  By the time we turned onto Storrow Drive, Grandpa Dom had his hat on his head again; people were blowing their horns at the Pontiac
and crowding up close on three sides. And Vittorio was leaning forward over the wheel, rolling along the speedway at thirty miles an hour while Boston drivers swarmed and cursed him, and his friend Domenic Benedetto snapped directions at him in a version of Italian laced with expressions known only to a few thousand souls born in the dry hill country east of Naples.

  Finally we pulled up to the door of the hospital. Vittorio let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since Venus Street. He sank back into the seat, took out the swatch of old cloth he used as a handkerchief on his job, and toweled off his forehead, ears, and neck.

  My grandfather squeezed his shoulder. “Don’t wait for us, Victor Bones,” he said in English. “You have the job going.”

  “But how can’t I wait, Domenico?”

  “Don’t wait. You’re in the middle of making someone’s house.”

  “But how couldn’t I?”

  “Don’t.”

  “But what now, you gonna walk home?”

  “Se ashpett, ci sara’ un ingorgo. La traffic jam!”

  “Ma perché? Sono soltanto le dieci!”

  “Non ashpett!”

  They argued like this for a few minutes, as they had argued about the toll. It was a fixed aspect of their friendship, these little bursts of disagreement that were about nothing, and went nowhere, and almost always ended up with my grandfather, in deference to his age, perhaps, getting his way. With one hand on Victor Bones’s shoulder, Grandpa made a signal to me, a finger hooking the air. I leaned forward and kissed Vittorio on his sticky cheekbone and thanked him, in Italian, three times.

  And he said, “For what, grazie? You mother, she’s like my own blood.”

  Once we were out on the sidewalk, Dom reached back in and dropped a dime on the seat for the return toll, then slammed the door on Victor Bones’s objections and waved him back into traffic.

  THE HOSPITAL WAS ALMOST cool inside and fearfully white—nurses’ shoes, corridor walls, mattresses on wheeled metal carts. A miserable chemical smell pressed against my face, and after the heat of the highway, the sweat on my bare arms stiffened quickly into a gritty film.

  My grandfather took me by one hand, and we went along the polished hallway. Doors stood open on scenes of beds and curtains, patients with sheets thrown off bare legs, casts, bandages, bottles, electric fans pushing air across faces that seemed sad and resigned to me. I saw no other children. In every room we passed I looked for my mother, but Grandpa Dom led me straight on, walking quickly, as if trying to outrun a posse of aunts and policemen.

  We waited for the elevator in the company of a nurse who was pushing a woman in a wheelchair. The woman had damp white hair plastered down around her ears, and a slack mouth, and her shoulders—knobs of bone pressing up through the hospital gown—were curled in toward each other. As we waited, she let out a loud fart. I looked straight forward at our blurred reflections in the elevator doors, then rode up behind her, running the tip of my finger over the rubber wheel while she muttered and belched.

  The fifth floor was another maze of corridors, waiting areas, bedrooms with the doors propped wide. At the third or fourth doorway, Dom steered me into a room with drooping plastic tubes and machines surrounding four beds. He led me to the farthest bed on the left side, and we stood there looking down at an old person with only one foot showing at the bottom of the sheet. Tubes were running into the person’s nose and mouth, and under the sheets. A steady series of faint beeps emanated from a machine at his head. The head was shaved and partially bandaged, and there was a plastic mask over the mouth and nose and a stripe of swollen stitches along one cheekbone. The skin surrounding both eyes was a palette of purple, black, and dull yellow, and the arm we could see was wrapped completely in a cast. The patient was unnaturally still. I stared, wondering if it was a friend of Dom’s who happened to be in the same hospital as my mother, or if he had brought me here first while the nurses were washing my mother and brushing her hair.

  Grandpa Dom squeezed the top of my arm and said, “It’s you mama, Tonio. She’sa sleepin now.”

  I was sure he was mistaken. I suspected a trick. My mother had eyebrows, a full pretty face, dark hair, life in her arms and fingers, two legs. She would never lie there silently like that with me in the room, no matter how sick she was.

  I thought I heard my grandfather say, “She has a coma,” as if he were mingling Italian and English again as he sometimes did. And at that moment I noticed the patient’s chest pushing softly up beneath the sheet and realized it was a woman lying there.

  As if from an enormous distance, I heard footsteps slapping the floor, a nurse calling angrily, her voice swallowed by an announcement on the corridor loudspeaker. My legs were shaking. My grandfather reached out and rested his fingers on the woman’s forehead, on a clear patch of skin between two raw scratches. I noticed a familiar splash of freckles between her cheekbone and ear. I studied the closed, bruised eyes, what I could see of the nose and mouth beneath the plastic mask. Dom put a hand on the back of my neck and said, “Touch you mama, Tonio.”

  I tried to move my arm but could not. I closed my eyes and opened them. I stood there trembling. He took hold of my wrist and placed my hand above the sheet, near her shoulder. And for two or three seconds there was a slight change in the rhythm of the beeping machine, a quickening beneath the absolutely motionless surface. I looked up at my grandfather to see if he heard it. He nodded, yes. “Say in her ear you love her,” he told me.

  He stepped back and I slid along the rail in front of him so that my face was even with hers. He put his hands on my shoulders. I heard footsteps, close by now, and then the nurse was there at the end of the bed.

  “We cannot have this, sir,” she said.

  “This woman in the coma,” Dom said to her. “She’s mama to this boy.”

  “Come away immediately. We cannot allow this.”

  I leaned down toward my mother’s ear.

  “Come away, please.”

  “Mama, it’s me,” I said. “It’s Tonio. Mama. It’s me.”

  The nurse pushed her arm in between Grandpa Dom and the railing of the bed and took hold of my shoulder. “Come now,” she said. “She can’t hear you.”

  “Yes, she can.”

  “No, believe me. She cannot.”

  I let her tug me away from the bed, listening all the while to the rhythm of the beeping machine. I looked back once, hoping to see my mother’s eyes, or one of her hands reaching up.

  Then I sat on a gray upholstered couch in the waiting room, with beams of harsh sunlight falling in through the window, and watched the nurse chastising my grandfather in the corridor, her hand wagging in front of his face as if he were the eleven-year-old. A stretcher was rolled past, there were more echoing announcements on the address system, two doctors came hurrying along with stethoscopes in their pockets. I tried to hold my eyes on Grandpa Dom, but they kept filling with tears. He stood facing her, straight-backed, the straw fedora in one hand at his side. He said nothing, offered no resistance, no defense. At last, she released him and he walked back and sat close beside me without speaking. He gave me his handkerchief, and we sat there like that, for ten or twenty or thirty minutes, until visiting hours began, at noon, and I heard the shoes of my uncles and aunts tapping in the hallway and then heard their voices. But by the time they saw me and started in on Dom’s second round of chastisement, my mother had already passed on.

  Book Two

  One

  MY PARENTS WERE WAKED at Alessio’s funeral home, and buried after a service at Saint Anthony’s Church, and life very gradually regained some semblance of balance for me. By this I mean that I stopped bursting into tears three or four times during the course of the day, stopped wanting to throw stones through school windows, and moved from my grandparents’ sofa bed to the small spare room off the parlor, a room that had been used for storage but was now converted—the walls painted a pale blue, my bed and bureau brought down from upstairs and squeezed through the door
, pictures of my mother and father set up on the night table in new dark frames. By some semblance of balance I mean that, gradually, over a period of weeks, the house emptied of visitors and fruit baskets, and “I’m sorry, Anthony, I’m so sorry” was no longer the first thing people said when I bumped into them on Park Avenue.

  It has occurred to me from time to time since those days, as it has occurred to many people, I’m sure, that we live a kind of elaborate charade. In order to function in the waking world, we have to pretend to ourselves that death is some kind of rare affliction reserved for ninety-year-olds in hospital beds, or impoverished people in impoverished countries, or men, women, and children on other airplanes, in other cars, walking into other doctors’ offices. The absolute certainty and complete unpredictability of it is too humbling and terrifying, too depressing to keep always before us. There is a Hindu saying: “Don’t take the next breath for granted,” which seems like good and wise advice to me now, but who, what earthbound saint, what goddess can follow it?

  So we make plans, pursue an education, save money for some probable future. We have to delude ourselves like this—who would ever have children otherwise, who would step out of the house?—it is right and good to do it. It is also partly false. And what happens to anyone who sees death at an early age is that he has that pleasant disguise ripped away from the face of creation. This is the awful predicament of eighteen-year-olds who have been sent to war: afterward—for a year, for a lifetime—everything but death seems like a lie to them. Every spark of beauty or kindness is shadowed.

  Some people manage it, though, this perfect balancing of the constant awareness of death and the obligatory optimism of living. A few rare souls manage it. I believe now that what I saw in my grandmother, the night she cooked me eggs at two o’clock in the morning, was something like that: her understanding of the second-by-second fragility of our elaborately decorated worlds. I believe she knew that truth in her cells and bones, in a way most of us do not know it, or know only superficially, intellectually; and that my parents’ deaths, while they were like a hammer blow to her heart, did not really shock her the way they shocked the rest of us. She had somehow learned to live by that Hindu saying, but there was no proper way of passing her wisdom on to anyone else. What could she possibly say on the subject to an eleven-year-old boy who had just lost both his parents? We mustn’t take life for granted, Tonio? This is God’s will, Tonio? This is the truth of our situation in the world: that we rope the wild beast of life with our thoughts, and corral it inside a fence of our fantasies and expectations, our sense of what is fair and not fair, but the corral, the fence, the hope of security and fairness and of keeping the stallion still—these are nothing but comforting illusions, apparently true for seconds or minutes or years at a time, but, in the end, not really true at all?