In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  I watched him put the glasses back in place. “What do you think, Tonio? What do you think about it?” I watched him fold his handkerchief and fold it again and smooth it with his thin fingers before putting it back into his pocket. I watched him brush some crumbs from the table into his palm, and drop them in the saucer. Something was different. His eyes wavered when he looked at me, he seemed ill at ease, not quite sure of my affection for him. “It wouldn’t be now, but later. For the high school. You would have to live away.”

  “Away where?”

  “At the school. New Hampshire. Maine. You would have to go away like I went away when I was a little older than you, even though it makes you afraid. Sometimes you have to do that to find the life for you.” I watched him. “What do you think? They have hockey teams there. They have people who go to the fancy colleges afterward, who turn into doctors.”

  The life for me. I had just discovered the idea for me, and now he was talking life. I finished my macaroon cookie and looked out the window at the street.

  “You can stay with me and Grandma, Tonio,” he said. “Until we die. That’s not why I’m saying it.”

  Seven

  I THINK OF THAT MOMENT in the West End Bakery as the point where my spirit and my cousin Rosalie’s spirit began to run along different roads. That conversation planted something in me, gave me permission to do what I did not yet even know I wanted to do: go out into the wider world the way my uncle Peter had, and see how long I could stay on my feet there. Frightened and confused, I nevertheless began, on that day, to look for my true place in the world.

  The beginning of our separation had little to do with the fact that, being a boy in the 1960s, I could play ice hockey, and, being a girl in the 1960s, Rosalie could not. What began to draw us apart was connected more with what my grandfather had said about conquering fear. It was a subject he knew something about. In 1908, age fourteen, he’d left Italy alone and sailed, in the hold of a ship filled with strangers, across an ocean, then hand-built a new life for himself in a country that was filled with opportunities … for which millions of immigrant men and women had to claw and battle. He knew the price you paid for having the courage to leave—that feeling of being cut off, forever, from the warm soil in which the people closest to you had their roots; the feeling of speaking an alien tongue in an alien land; the feeling that your success in the new world, however impressive, would always be edged with a memory of the life still endured by the people you’d left behind, your every hard-bought comfort lined with guilt.

  It was that way with Rosalie and me. I know enough now not to make judgments about it. It was not better to leave Revere or Squillani; it was not better to stay. What’s better is, somehow, in the middle of the roar and whimper of a thousand local voices, to hear clearly the music that plays inside you, and to dance to that and nothing else.

  If it were possible to ask Rosie’s opinion on the subject now, I suppose the response would be a shrug, one of her classic tough-girl smiles, a comment like: “Oh, Tonio, don’t you know? Every life is the same, just like every dinner is the same, don’t you understand that yet? A little different flavor maybe. A little fancier or more expensive, quicker or more drawn-out. Same basic shitty result in the end.”

  It’s not true, though. Even the same basic shitty result—even death—varies, depending on what kind of life it closes the door on: authentic or stunted; plain, sensible, and enriched with love, or elaborately decorated and empty. No one who knew her would say that Rosalie’s life was a fulfilling and healthy one, or that her death at age forty-one was anything but the last in a series of small and not so small tragedies. Though her father had never lived his dream, he had at least tried to live it, and had made his uneasy peace with the demon of failure. Rosie could not do that. She was penned in by some primal hopelessness so terrifying that the door could not be opened on it. She was a master at hiding all this—the fear, the vulnerability. Until the night she died, she was chained to her place by the fear of some ultimate humiliation at the hands of the outside world; as if, within the limits of the city of Revere, anything could be borne, but beyond them, nothing.

  Eight

  SHE WAS A BEAUTIFUL GIRL, exotically beautiful. Later in life, people would often ask if she had Gypsy or American-Indian blood. She had the thick black hair Uncle Peter must have had in his youth, and her mother’s pale eyes, a color not so very far from the color of the gas flame on our grandmother’s stove. She was fourteen months older than I and, until my second year of high school, slightly taller. She had a great natural talent for drawing and painting, an aversion to dogs and a special affection for birds, a habit of interlacing her fingers and putting her hands on top of her head, so that her forearms pointed out from her skull like the brim of an oversized hat.

  She was always a bit uncomfortable with her own girlishness and prettiness, always saucy and cool, as if she had been thirteen since the day she turned three. She would hide behind that coolness, with her friends and schoolmates especially, and then, just when you saw it for the disguise it was, she’d rip it away and speak some bare truth at you, shock you, try to embarrass you even—especially if she herself was embarrassed.

  I remember once, walking with her around the block of Jupiter and Saturn streets on a Sunday afternoon eight months or so before my parents died. I know it was October, because she would stop from time to time and pull a few bright red or orange leaves from the edge of someone’s lawn and put them into her fist like a florist making up a bouquet, and I remember her saying, in the middle of a conversation about school, “I kissed Caesar Baskine last night. I let him put his tongue in my mouth. Have you ever done that with a girl?”

  She was eleven at the time. Caesar Baskine was a seventh-grade boy from the housing projects, notorious even then for his playground sadisms and collection of pornographic playing cards. Of all the boys in Revere, all the boys in eastern Massachusetts, all the boys along the Atlantic shoreline from Prince Edward Island to Patagonia, Caesar Baskine was the last boy her father would have wanted to be allowed to place his tongue in Rosalie’s mouth.

  As the years passed it was always that way. “I had a whole cupful of whiskey last night, Tonio, and I went to bed so drunk the room spun like a Ferris wheel. Have you ever done that?” “I smoked pot with some of my friends down the beach last week. Have you tried it yet?” “I snorted cocaine.” “I had sex.” “I went a hundred and ten miles an hour in Joey Mitchell’s car on the Lynnway.” Later: “I lost twenty-seven hundred dollars at Atlantic City in two hours. Seize the day, right?” And still later: “I moved back in with Caesar. He said it won’t happen anymore, he promised.”

  It seems to me now that, more than any of the other cousins, Rosalie and I inherited our grandparents’ courage. That was a key element that linked us. The difference was that my courage was emotional, or psychological, and Rosalie’s was physical. In time, my adventures would take me to the distant bright bays of the wealthy, to their schools, their homes, to harbors lit with their careless optimism and noblesse oblige. And hers carried her always closer and closer to the forbidden, uncharted channel of some night world inhabited by demons.

  My wife—a woman who knows something about the subtleties of self-hatred, whose brother returned from Vietnam a walking manifestation of it—was friends with Rosalie for the last twenty years of her life, cared about her almost as much as I did, tried almost as hard to help. Her comment on the day of Rosalie’s funeral still rings in my ears. “The idea that she was supposed to hate herself was planted in that woman very deep, Anthony, very early on. You tried to get to the roots and dig them out. I tried. But whenever she got close to digging them out herself, some devil whispered in her ear that she’d be adrift then, that she’d float out into deep water and end up lonely and abandoned and broken.”

  Nine

  BUT THE CABLES OF AFFECTION that bound Rosalie Benedetto and me were spun from fibers of blood and history and a million small Revere moments. We knel
t next to each other at the altar rail at the children’s Mass at Saint Anthony’s, tickling, pinching, and whispering while the priest worked his way toward us with the chalice. We stood on the pedals and pumped our bicycles up the long slope of Mountain Avenue, then coasted back down, no hands. We sat cross-legged in our grandparents’ parlor with bowls of ice cream in our laps while she rattled off a string of numbers: “Sixteen, four, thirty-one, eleven, five, five, twenty,” and I said, “Ninety-two,” the moment she was finished, and she called me Einstein the way her father sometimes did, and told me to be careful or one night I’d wake up with smoke coming out of my ears. We’d sit in her room and I’d watch patiently while she made copies of dollar bills, with a fountain pen on good paper, very carefully transcribing the elaborate edging, the numerals, the shaded leaves on the right and left sides, working hour upon hour to get it exactly right. A teenage counterfeiter. An artist of the doomed and confused.

  Every Sunday, Dom and Lia would invite one family to 20 Jupiter Street for lunch—Aldo and Marie and their children one week, Francis and Julia and their children the next, and so on—and then, after lunch, the table would be cleared, reset with cold cuts and bread, desserts, fruit, coffee, and the other aunts, uncles, and cousins would arrive. In the space of thirty minutes, our ordinary backyard would convert itself into a kind of Circus Maximus. There were thirty-one grandchildren. A few were too young to venture away from their parents. A few were too old to want to spend Sunday afternoon at the circus. The rest of us occupied the bottom of Jupiter Street—and, in colder weather, the rooms of the first floor of our grandparents’ house—like a band of undersized heathens.

  It seems to me now that we spent most of those afternoons running. We would chase each other down the grassy alley next to the Sawyers’ house, or through the stony, weed-covered vacant lot next door, or around the grape arbor and up onto the elevated patch of lawn, along the borders of which my grandmother grew flowers, and in the center of which a gnarly crab-apple tree tossed its worm-eaten fruit. We’d sprint, sing, taunt, and wrestle, squeeze behind the neighbors’ garages and sheds, hide in their shrubbery, throw baseballs, kick footballs, fly kites, jump rope. We’d stand still for a minute or two and eat a handful of my grandparents’ grapes, squeezing the pulp and seed into our mouths and tossing the bitter skins over the fence into the yard next door. Or send a few bocce balls down the dusty court in desultory imitation of our parents. Or, as the afternoon cooled and we grew more sedate, we’d sit on the lawn or the front steps and listen to the older cousins—Michael, Patti, Julia, Nunzio—tell stories from the battlefields and tender parlors of high school.

  When we were young, especially—seven, eight, nine—Rosalie and I loved those afternoons, loved the stature and grace of our older cousins—sports heroes, war heroes, famously popular girls at Revere High. But almost every Sunday we’d end up slipping away from the communal fever for half an hour, tugged free by some need to share a quiet intimacy we believed we had invented. We’d spend this time in simple ways—walking down to the corner of Park Avenue to watch the buses and cars go past; walking up to the school, sitting in the shade of its balcony, and looking out over the planetary streets sunken in their Sabbath rest. Or we’d sneak down the cellar stairs and forage around in the dusty room where Grandpa Dom kept his barrels of homemade wine, and where we hid the treasures of the season—pieces of quartz, polished chestnuts, scraps of wood and ceramic tile and metal with which, in the vinegary shadows, we engineered elaborate imaginary worlds.

  We showed each other our private parts once, as we crouched in the small space between the Cappuccios’ garage and their back fence.

  Once, we kissed like grown-up lovers—on the bed in my room, no tongues involved, just a passionate embrace and a drawn-out pressing of lips to lips.

  Even before my parents died, we shared a fascination for the inexplicable: why God made some boys and girls retarded, or crippled; why Mrs. Castellano was mean and Mrs. Abbruzzo kind; why there existed such creatures as mosquitoes, caterpillars, and sharks, things no one wanted. Why her mother loved her some days, and seemed not to love her at all on others.

  Aunt Ulla was a sort of shadow-mother to Rosalie, a woman of irreconcilable contradiction, a figure who haunted the margins of the family life from the moment she said, “I do.” She taught her daughter to put makeup on her face, and mocked the color of her hair. She threw together careless meals, and spent hours cleaning the kitchen and Rosalie’s room. In certain moods, she would wrap her arms around her daughter and squeeze her against her chest, fondle her cheeks, put an arm around her on the divan. And then, on the same day, sometimes in the same hour, she’d slap her in a fit of anger or poke her in the ribs to make her move, or push her roughly against the refrigerator when Uncle Peter wasn’t home and she thought I wasn’t watching. She hissed threats that would wrinkle the skin of your arms, and she laughed a laugh that could make you feel happy to be connected to her. She pushed Rosie mercilessly to do well in school but seemed incapable herself of understanding even grade-school homework. For years, Rosalie circled her, a hungry dog circling a piece of meat roasting in the flames. From time to time the flames would seem to lessen, and she would dart in for a lick or a nibble, a bit of nourishment … and be burned again, and retreat to a wider circle, and gradually, after an hour or a week, move close again, make another hopeful, pitiful assault on her mother’s heart.

  And then, not long after my parents died, she seemed to just give up. She stopped circling, kept her mother at arm’s length, paid her back with interest for the hungry years, never returning a kiss or a kind word, barely making eye contact; turning her smile, and her beauty, and the saucy, smirking joy of her presence in her father’s direction, and in mine.

  As we grew older, as Aunt Ulla retreated more into her moods, headaches, and bottles of pills, Uncle Peter became a kind of friend for us, a 220-pound equal. On certain summer afternoons, he would be “taking a beach day,” as he called it, and would appear in front of the house in his Cadillac—without ever calling first—send Rosalie to find me while he talked and drank coffee with his parents, and then ferry us off to one exotic destination or another: the docks in East Boston (where he had a childhood friend in the scrap-metal business … “crap metal,” he called it when the friend wasn’t around), the pond at Breakheart Reservation (he loved to swim and would go out into the deep water and dive and resurface a dozen times like a seal), Revere Beach, Nahant Beach, ramshackle and elegant houses in different North Shore neighborhoods, where he would vanish into the back room for mysterious consultations with Johnny Blink or Freddie Frisco. Rosie and I would be left to make odd conversational gambits with Mrs. Blink, if there happened to be one, or Freddie Frisco’s elderly uncle, leaning over sideways in his wheelchair with the television on too loud. Or, once, with our host’s girlfriend, who lay in queenly fashion on the sofa with her skirt hiked up to the middle of her thighs, her slender legs flexing and gleaming in a pair of silk stockings, and a small pet monkey pulling at the buttons of her blouse with hairy fingers, like some miniature version of the fellow with whom my uncle was taking counsel in the back room.

  I read somewhere that boredom is the beginning of the spiritual path. Perhaps that is true. Maybe we need to get tired of this world’s enticements in order to be drawn toward those of the next. But, for Rosalie’s father, boredom was an enemy to be hunted down and killed. Boredom, for Uncle Peter, consisted of two unpeopled minutes strung together. He did not like to be alone, and believed no one else liked it, either. Conversation and companionship were breath and pulse for him, and he was happiest holding court at the kitchen table on Sunday afternoons, or wandering out into the yard, catching hold of a passing niece or nephew by the shirtsleeve and saying, “What’s goin on? What are you doin? Who was that boyfriend I seen kissin you down Hill Park?” He’d pay unannounced visits to the homes of his brothers and sisters—before work, in the middle of the afternoon, sometimes at ten or eleven o’clock at ni
ght—just to sit over coffee or a glass of wine and talk for a little while. An almost fearless man in the physical sense, he seemed to live in constant fear (a fear my parents’ deaths reinforced) that this breath and pulse of companionship might suddenly expire, that the family might evaporate before his eyes. It was as if he were an acrobat with plates balanced and rings spinning and bowling pins somersaulting in the air all over the city, and his first duty in life was to drive around making sure nothing ever touched the ground.

  I understand now that this manic gregariousness would be an exhausting quality in a mate. But it was a wonderful quality in an uncle. When my parents were alive, and, especially in the long barren stretch after they died, nothing was sweeter than to see Uncle Peter’s Cadillac draw up in front of the house, to hear him say, “Let’s go,” to climb into the front seat beside Rosalie and head off with the radio playing and a roll of bills flashing and to end up following his naked, muscular back into the water of Breakheart’s Upper Lake, or the swinging tails of his sport coat up the driveway of a house in Somerville or Medford or Nahant, behind the door of which any sort of creature might be waiting. For Rosalie, especially when she felt motherless, and for me, especially after I became an orphan, nothing was sweeter than that.

  Ten

  ON THE DAY ROSALIE TURNED FOURTEEN—a little more than two years after my parents died—Uncle Peter took some time off from his latest temporary position—as a bricklayer for a friend named Isaac “King” Bundt, who was building a strip club on Squire Road—and drove us to Suffolk Downs. He parked, not in the enormous lot where the ordinary clients left their ordinary cars, but around back, a few yards from the security entrance. Two wheels up on the sidewalk, a foot or two south of a fire hydrant, illegal in six different ways. He stood up out of the car, shrugged the sport coat onto his big shoulders, smoothed the lapels, shifted his belt buckle left and right with one hand, slammed his door. I happened to glance at Rosalie while this was going on. She was watching him, trying to get it exactly right—the shrug, the lapels, the imaginary belt buckle. She even slammed the door with the same exaggerated carelessness as her father. He didn’t notice.