In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  She was a peasant woman from a dirt-road village in the Italian countryside, intelligent but uneducated, not in possession of fancy phrases like that. So she cooked me eggs and bacon, and poured me a glass of cold milk to take the thirst and sourness out of that night. That was how she passed down her profound understanding of things: not just in plates of grilled veal cutlets, bowls of escarole soup, and glistening strips of vinegar peppers on slices of soft white bread, but in touches of her hand, in the steadiness of her eyes; in the sense you had that she would never judge you—even secretly—never criticize you too harshly within her own mind. She was a sort of gentle Zen master in disguise, a woman who spoke a language no one else around her could understand.

  In the days and weeks after my parents died, I could feel her watching me, as if for signs of illness. Several times, through the soft quilt of sleep, I heard her come into the little room and stand beside the bed, checking in, like Uncle Peter. And in the warm seaside evenings just before darkness fell, in that sweet hour after supper, she would sometimes call me to stand with her in the flower garden she’d planted around her statue of the Virgin. “Antonio,” she would say, though it sounded more like “Ahndonyo,” and she would always be touching me when she said it. “Ahndonyo, you mama and papa, they’re standin now just on the other side of a curtain, with the mother of God. The curtain, she seems to us thick, but she isn’t, darlin. They’re waitin for us there. They’re watchin us.” For a minute or two it would comfort me, this language of hers, this vivid faith in a world I could not see. And then I’d go back into the house and feel the weight of the four empty rooms upstairs, the enormous echoing vacuum where my parents’ affection had once been.

  My grandfather had a different method of dealing with what had happened to us. For days and days, for weeks after the funeral, he went around submerged in a stoic sorrow, sneaking sad glances at my father’s picture on the parlor coffee table when he thought no one was looking. All during that time, he said nothing to me about death, my parents, God, or the nature of life. It seemed, at first, that he would never talk to me about what had happened, never again use the words mother or father, that he expected me simply to stop thinking about them.

  Then, one afternoon, almost a month after the funeral, he came out into the yard, dressed maybe one-half of one notch less formally than he usually dressed, and he said, in English, “Tonio, now you and me, we’re going down the beach.”

  I could only stand still and look at him, and, after a moment, say, “What, Grandpa?”

  “We’re going down the beach now.”

  “What beach?”

  “The beach in Revere.”

  “Who?”

  “Me and you.”

  “Swimming?”

  “Not swimming, we’re just going down there. To see the water. To walk around.”

  I stared up at him a moment more. He had his hat on, he seemed to mean it, but I had never known my grandfather to go to the beach. His affection for nature was confined to his vegetable garden and fruit trees. And even those he enjoyed at some distance, hiring Vito to come and prune the grapevine, and another friend, Nico Pentasco, to turn over the earth in spring, and spread the manure. He set out the plants himself, watered them, then washed his hands and put on his tailored trousers and white shirt and sat in the shade of the grapevine, reading Il Mattino. He listened to opera on Friday nights, while the other men on Jupiter Street were packing up the family station wagon with camping gear. He did not own a pair of blue jeans or short pants or a bathing suit. As far as his relationship to the ocean was concerned, we might as well have lived in Ohio.

  I followed him out of the yard.

  We walked down the street, crossed Park Avenue, and waited for the round-shouldered MTA bus to appear on top of the hill. When it arrived, we took our seats and rode to Revere Beach, a three-mile stretch of cold water, rounded stones, powdery gray sand, and amusement rides.

  Once there, once we had stepped down out of the bus and into the shimmering air, Grandpa Dom seemed to stiffen. I could feel it in him the way I could feel all his changes in mood. It was as if the grit on the sidewalks, the kids in diapers splashing in the shallows, the tattooed carny taking tickets in front of the Dodgems, the seaweed and salty hot wind and the parade of high-school girls in bathing suits represented, for him, a circus of American disorder, unruly and rough as tackle football. Stiff and ill at ease, he led me down the long row of amusement rides, encouraging me to indulge wherever I wanted—the rickety roller coaster on its white-painted stilts, the echoing, rumbling Virginia Reel; the cheap games of chance—darts and blue balloons; BB guns and stuffed giraffes—the entirely artificial and wonderful little death-denying world that stood in a crescent of peeling wood and barking carnies just opposite the fine curl of shore. He never came on the rides with me, never threw a single dart. There was no mention of going in the water.

  After an hour or so of this he bought a pizza, and two Coca-Colas in thick green bottles, and we carried them across Revere Beach Boulevard to the shade of the pavilion. We sat on a bench there and ate and drank, with legions of pigeons eyeing us from the hurricane wall, and seagulls flying in to stand and gawk, too proud to beg.

  When we were finished, my grandfather wiped his lips very carefully with the paper napkin, back and forth and back and forth, folded the napkin, tucked it into the pizza box, closed the box against the breeze and the inquisitive gulls, set the empty bottles on the concrete near his shoe, and stared out to sea. After a time, and without any preliminaries, he began to speak to me, in Italian.

  “I was born in a village they call Squillani,” he said quietly, not looking at me, but out over the hurricane wall, toward the Nahant peninsula, and beyond. Sono nato nèlla piccola paese quale si chiama Squillani. “Between the cities Avellino and Benevento. In that place, there are hills wherever you look, green in spring like spinach—dark and green like that—and the rest of the year, brown like a potato after you dig it up and the dirt is dry and still holding to it.

  “In Squillani we had one road covered with stones that went in circles up our hill from the big road that led to Benevento. People lived on that road in stone houses with red tile roofs. People walked where they wanted to go, or they rode horses or in carts. There was one church, San Rocco. We went there every Sunday and feast day, and every morning during Lent. An old man rang the bells in the morning and again at night. On the feast days my mother would make bread and almond cakes, and you could smell them from five or six houses away, and it would make you want to go toward that smell.

  “Sometimes, on Saturdays when the weather was not too cold, my father would take my brother, Salvatore, and they would go hunt rabbits in the mountains past Benevento. The only bears left in Europe lived in those mountains. Even now it is that way. He would borrow a rifle from his friend Enzo Moccia. They would leave before it was light on Saturday morning, and return very late. Do you understand me?” he asked. Mi capisci?

  “Sì.”

  “Tutti le parole?”

  “Sì, tutti.”

  “Bène. When I grew old enough, a little older than you are now, I used to ask my father to let me go with them. After a year of asking, he agreed. It made me happy to think that I was old enough to go with him and Salvatore and not delay them. Salvatore and I slept in one bed, close together. Bapo would wake us by hitting us once in the middle of the forehead with his second finger. Hard. It was dark in the rooms of our house, dark and cold outside the windows. Salvatore would take out the cheese in the dark and take my mother’s big knife and cut three pieces of cheese and four pieces of bread—two for our father—and tie them up in a clean cloth. My job would be to carry three empty wine bottles to the well and fill them with water and push the purple corks into them and wait there. The birds would be singing in all the trees while I waited. The sky beyond Tufara, which was the next village to the east, would start to show a light the color of a drop of wine in water. Not long after I saw that color, I wo
uld see my father and brother coming down the path carrying the rifle and the food. They would take one bottle from me each, and we would go down toward the big road without talking. The birds would be whistling then, calling one to the other, and the dogs near the bottom of the hill, the ones who didn’t know us, they would be barking.

  “We would go to the bottom of the hill and wait there on the road to Benevento. The sun would just be showing his face now, throwing down light on the tile roofs of the houses and the tops of the hills. But everything—all the stones and leaves and the tops of our shoes—would still be wet with the rugiada. Do you know this word … in the morning, when the grass is wet—”

  “Sì.”

  “How do you know it?”

  “I heard Grandma say it.”

  “How many times?”

  “Once.”

  “What is she, in the English?”

  “Dew.”

  “How does she spell herself? Com’e si scrive?”

  “D-E-W.”

  He grunted, nodded, peered down at my forehead for a moment, plucked at the crease of his pants. “After a while, my father would make one of his cigarettes and smoke it, and after another little while we would hear the cart coming from the direction of Roccabascerana. We would hear the wheels, the hard feet of the old horses. The cart would stop and we would climb up in the back with the man’s metal pots and rope, and the boxes of soap that he and his wife made with their own hands. My father would sit in front with the cheese and bread so we wouldn’t eat it. My brother and I would sit in the back with our legs hanging over and our stomachs crying for something more to put in them. Sometimes Salvatore would have hidden two or three cooked chestnuts in his vest pocket. He would take them out and peel off the shell with his teeth, and break them one by one in half, and we would chew on them in the bouncing cart. Slow, we would chew them, to make them stay longer in our mouths, and when they were all finished there was a feeling in your stomach worse than when you started.

  “It did not take long for the day to get hot. Soon we would begin to sweat, and we would watch the dust lifting up behind us. Sometimes, when it was very hot and we knew we still had a long way to go, we would all sing ‘O Signore’ or ‘Lenta Va La Luna’ and drink a little of the water to make the time pass.

  “At the market in Benevento, the man—I don’t remember his name anymore—he would let us off, and we would walk from there up into the mountains to the places where you could hunt. Sometimes there were berries on the bushes there. Sometimes my father bought some sour cherries or two pears at the market and let us eat them.

  “When we got high up to the places where you could hunt, Salvatore would go into the woods on one side of the path and I would go in on the other. We would throw stones there and make noise and stay far out to the sides. The rabbits would be afraid of us and would run out into the path, and Salvatore and I would hear my father shooting the gun. After a time the shooting would stop, and he would whistle, twice, very loud, the signal that we could come back out, and then we would go onto the path and take the rabbits and carry them back to him by their ears, with their blood dripping near our shoes.

  “Once, I heard a loud noise in there, and saw a bear, just the front leg and part of the shoulder. The bear was brown, Tonio, and he looked as big as two kitchen tables one on top of the other. I ran back to my father. Salvatore ran back. We waited with the gun, shaking, but we did not see him again. Once, Salvatore chased out a fox. My father shot it below its ear and sold the fur for a lot of money, and with some of that money he bought us a hunter’s knife to share, with a white ivory handle.”

  “What’s that, Grandpa, avòrio?”

  “What the elephants have on their horns. White, hard. Avòrio … capisci?”

  “Sì.”

  “Salvatore had that knife in his belt when he died in the First War.… Sometimes, in the autumn, we would go farther up, to where there was a field of tall grass. We would chase out birds there for my father to shoot. Afterward we would eat the bread and cheese and drink the water, looking out over the tops of the hills toward Napoli. My father would clean whatever he had shot and put it in a cloth sack that he kept folded over his belt and that was stained with blood and marked with black letters you couldn’t read anymore. He would take a handful of the thick grass and wipe his fingers clean, and the blade of the knife clean, and tell us stories about the city of Napoli, the statues and churches and palaces there, the thieves, the market, the boats that left there every day, carrying people to other countries, to America. We would sleep a few minutes sometimes, the three of us against each other to stay warm. And then Salvatore and I would carry the sack down the hill, taking turns. We would wait near the edge of the market—sometimes a long time—until the man with the cart was finished with his business, and if we had money and if it was the right time of year, Salvatore and I would buy four or five peaches and eat half of one, each of us, and bring the rest home for our mother and sisters. Sometimes I would fall asleep sitting on the cart with my legs hanging over. Just like that.

  “When we came back to Squillani, it would be dark. Our father would give the man one or two birds or one rabbit for letting us sit in his cart. We would walk back up the road to our house, and I would almost be too tired to put one of my feet in front of the other. My father would carry the cloth sack, and Salvatore would carry the empty water bottles, and I would carry nothing and fall farther and farther behind them, looking down at my feet. At home I would wash my hands and face and my feet at the well, then go right to sleep without even eating anything and wake up so hungry, it was like the nest of bees in your belly.

  “But every time my father asked me to go I went, and in a few months I was strong enough to walk and not fall behind.

  “Then, one time, after I had been going with them for two years, we were coming back in the cart from Benevento, and the birds started to sing and whistle and fly inside the trees like they were crazy birds, and the air near us felt like there was a sound in it but nobody could hear that sound. And then the man’s horses started to kick and jump and try to break loose from the cart—the same two old horses that always walked along, one foot and then the next foot, like they were falling asleep. The man could barely keep them from running off the road. The chickens near people’s houses there, and the dogs and the goats and the birds—all of them were making a terrible noise like the end of the world—tutti facevano un rumore terribile, come se fosse la fine del mondo. I looked at Salvatore and saw him bounce up in the air, off the cart. I looked over my shoulder at my father, and he was looking back at me and his face was a terrible face, all with the fear of death on it. It is a terrible thing to see a father’s face that way.”

  He interrupted his story for a moment then, as if realizing what he had just said, and what visions it might raise in my mind’s eye. I became aware again of people on the sand, and cars going past behind us in the sun, and the shimmering quiet bay. And I did in fact think of my father in the last seconds of his life, with the flames around him, my mother with the child in her belly, burning up, and people screaming and dying around them, and the jet going along the runway at an impossible speed, backward, upside down, the sound of tearing metal above everything else, the horror of it, something very close to my image of what hell must be. I had read about the crash, sneaking the newspaper into a corner of the front porch at night and kneeling on the floor there in the light from the street, and in the previous weeks I had imagined those moments in great detail, hundreds of times. Night and day they would press themselves into my mind: the fire, the pain and blood, the sound of screaming. I saw my mother with her bandaged face and missing leg. I remembered the smell of the hospital room, the beeping machines, the wails and cries that had come from the room when the aunts and uncles went in there, with the doctors and nurses working to pull my mother back from the other life into this one. Those thoughts hung always just outside the goings-on of the moment, like clouds of ash and smoke swirling
against the lid of a closed eye. The smallest movement, a word, a photograph—any one of a thousand things could lift the eyelid.

  But when Dom fell back into the hypnotic, quiet rhythm of the story, those images floated back again and hung at a little distance. He was talking steadily and quietly, staring out over the ocean, one arm behind me on the back of the bench but not touching me. His legs were crossed at the knee and his hat was sitting on a piece of newspaper on the green wooden slats on the far side of him. His voice changed slightly, as if the place it was coming from were a barrel slowly filling with water. And slowly I began to feel the enormous sadness that was in him, and to understand that it was always there, buried below the quiet, ordered exterior. That he needed to have perfect new bills in his wallet, that he needed to have a crease in his pants, a laundered and pressed handkerchief—these things moved and shifted and formed a new picture of him. I began to feel a different kind of connection to him, and to sense that there might be some hope for me at the end of his story, some explanation for his own grief and mine, something he had been turning over in his thoughts all those quiet afternoons, some particle of proof, as impossible as it seemed to me then, that God had ordered the world a certain way, and might have been present to help my parents in their last agony, and might be able to help me now.