“Alright.”
“You have to promise me.”
“I promise.”
“You have to remember that Uncle Peetha will die if you tell anyone, if you ever tell anyone—Rosie or Grandpa and Grandma, your friends, anybody, okay?”
“Alright.”
She looked at me for a long time, then stood and stared out the window with her back to me until the cigarette was smoked all the way down and the rain had eased somewhat. I could hear the grandfather clock ticking above the sound of it.
“Thanks for the ice cream,” I said. “I’m not that hungry now.”
“You can’t even tell Rosie that you came up to see her today,” she said over her shoulder. “Can you remember not to do that? Otherwise, she’ll know about the doctor.”
“I’ll remember.”
“I have to go someplace now, to the drugstore to get my medicine. If I had the car I’d drive you home, but it’s not raining that hard now. When you get back, tell Nana and Grandpa you just went out for a walk someplace, to the park, and you got wet, alright? I’d let you have my umbrella, but then they’d know you were here, and they’d find out about me, and they’d get sick, too.”
“Alright.”
For some reason I had held on to the orange during all of this. As I was going down the hall and toward the front door, Aunt Ulla stopped me and took it away.
I was already developing the habit, in those days, of pretending to know less than I knew, pretending not to understand something an adult had said when I sensed they did not want me to have heard it. Twice, I had even raised my hand in class and answered a question wrong—though I knew the correct answer—because it was beginning to seem to me that there was something slightly shameful about my harvests of As, that the teachers might embarrass you if you seemed too eager to learn, that people wouldn’t like you as much. So, as I was going toward the door I tried, without saying anything, to make my face and somehow my arms and shoulders into a mask and a posture of stupidity. It made me feel very young. I nodded at Aunt Ulla in what I hoped was an innocent, stupid way, and then I turned around and ran down the steps into the rain with my arms up, making a little false yell as if I were seven or eight and Rosalie were there and we were playing one of our games. I kept this up until I was through the gate and down the sidewalk far enough so that she could no longer see me, and then I dropped my arms and walked home in the last breezy splashes of the storm.
Twelve
I HAVE STOPPED TRYING to explain to my friends—artists, professors, intellectuals, people who, for the most part, don’t have warm feelings about organized religion—what a central place Saint Anthony’s Church occupied in my childhood years, and occupies still, in my memory.
My parents’ bodies were blessed in that church before being brought to the cemetery for burial; my uncles, aunts, and cousins were married there. Along with the names of a few hundred other early benefactors, my grandparents’ names are cut into blocks of pale marble near one end of the altar rail—you can still see them if you go there. My father used to tap me on the chest with the offering basket when he ushered at the nine o’clock Mass; my mother used to press her eyes closed at the elevation of the host and bring the tips of her fingers to the spot between her eyebrows. In that church I saw my uncle Louis, a tough guy in his youth and an ironworker into his sixties, bubbling over with tears at the sight of his brother’s coffin being wheeled down the aisle. That brown stone building, for me, is a museum that holds the solids, vapors, and liquids that make up human existence: the joy of birth and the sudden mysterious disappearance that is death, the wailing of babies, the shrieks and laughter of young children, the love of God and the terrors of hell as described to us by pale nuns in spectacles, the confusion of a Catholic boy’s sexual awakening. The smell of incense, the glass-clean soprano notes falling over us from the choir loft; old Vincenzo Festa, with his half-inch-thick eyeglasses and terrible speech impediment, grabbing hold of my arm as I walked down the aisle after Mass, and trying to make it clear to me, for the hundredth time, how close he and my father had been all their lives, like brothers, like twin souls knit together. Given the trembling flute-note of love in his voice, given a bundle of memories like that, how could I possibly walk into Saint Anthony’s and be thinking about Vatican politics?
For a certain part of my boyhood, roughly the years between ten and fourteen, I would go to Saint Anthony’s every other Saturday afternoon with my grandmother, for confession. Sometimes Aunt Marie or Cousin Laura would join us, but most often we went alone. It was a ritual for us, what we had instead of hockey practice. Uncle Peter would leave us off in the parking lot, and we’d walk side by side up the shallow stone steps between the statues of Christopher Columbus and Anthony of Padua. There were heavy dark doors, as if we were stepping into the Middle Ages, and beyond them the dim, smoky quiet of the vestibule. You dipped your fingers into a white marble basin of holy water and touched them to your forehead and chest; you heard the heel of someone’s boot knock loudly against a pew and the sound echoing up to the sixty-foot-high ceiling; you saw a priest without his vestments striding briskly across the altar on some errand, trailed by an altar boy in floppy black cuffs; you stood for a moment letting your eyes adjust, watching the dust motes drift across beams of sunlight that angled down through the stained-glass windows.
My grandmother and I would walk up the side aisle, past the confessionals and the stations of the cross, and light two candles at the altar rail, then go back, kneel in a pew, and wait our turn.
The priests—Fathers Castaletta, Bucci, and Bellini—had rotating duty in the confession box. Father Bucci was a friend of Uncle Peter’s and generally considered the most lenient of the three. Father Castaletta was hard-line, strict; on certain days, positively mean. I used to hope we would draw Father Bellini, who was almost deaf. There was something strangely soothing about kneeling in a pew, contemplating your sins and God’s wrath with such somberness and regret, nervously waiting your turn, then hearing Father Bellini’s voice booming out into the nave: “YOU WHAT? HOW MANY TIMES? BUT HOW COULD YOU DO THAT, KNOWING OUR LORD LET HIS SON BE CRUCIFIED FOR YOUR SINS?
The tactic never varied. Father Bellini would berate the poor sinner, go on and on about how awful his or her transgression was, how incredible, how absolutely unbelievable … and then, once he or she was suitably humbled, “Father B.,” as we called him, would change from the Old Testament God into the New, and in a slightly kinder but not much quieter voice say: “ALRIGHT, THEN. NEVER MIND. IT’S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD. YOU THINK IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD FOR SOMEBODY LIKE JESUS? YOU THINK HE HASN’T HEARD WORSE THAN THAT, A THOUSAND TIMES WORSE? OF COURSE HE HAS. SURE HE HAS, HERE’S WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO, THEN: FOR YOUR PENANCE SAY ONE OUR FATHER AND BE SORRY YOU DID IT, OKAY?”
On one of those Saturdays, I saw a woman—she must have been visiting from another parish—come out with tears streaming down her face. More often, though, people would step from behind the heavy curtain, glance up for a moment at a friend or relative waiting in the pews, and shrug their shoulders as if to say, “Well, what can you do? I drew Father B. this week; he let me have it.”
On the Saturday after I’d stumbled upon Aunt Ulla and her friend Smithy, Fathers Bellini and Castaletta must have been visiting the sick or playing golf. After my grandmother had taken her turn, she held the curtain back for me, and I went in and knelt and waited. The panel slid open before me, revealing Father Bucci’s profile, and I started in, by rote: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. These are my sins. It has been—”
“Tonio,” he interrupted, “how’s Little League?”
“Good, Father.”
“How’s your team?”
“We’re seven and three, Father, so far.”
“Seven and three. Alright, not bad. What position you playing?”
“The bench, Father. The bench and shortstop.”
“What bench? Your uncle says you’re a star, as good as your cousin Nunz
io. What’s he up to, anyway?”
“Nunzio? He has a summer job with the MDC, cleaning up—”
“No, your uncle.”
“Uncle Peter?”
“The one who never comes to church. Where the hell has he been lately, out golfing every day instead of coming to visit his friends?”
“Last week he took Rosalie up to Topsfield to see horses.”
“And he didn’t bring you along?”
“He just missed me, Father.”
“Missed you. How could he miss you—”
“I went out for a walk.”
“I’ll give him miss you. I’ll take him out in the back parking lot, and I’ll knock him out with one punch. You tell him I said so.”
“You sure, Father?”
“No. Tell him Father Bellini said so. Tell him he yelled it out all over the church.”
“That would be a lie, wouldn’t it, Father? I wanted to ask you—”
“There are lies and there are lies. That would be what you call a little lie that doesn’t hurt anybody. Half a venial. Then there’s the three-quarters of a venial, that maybe hurt somebody a little bit. Then there’s the big lies, full venials. The big ones you confess, the other ones you say an Act of Contrition and ask Mary to ask Jesus can he look the other way. Capito?”
“Capito, Father. But how do you tell the difference?”
“Easy. The difference comes down to one thing: did you do it out of love or did you do it to get something for yourself?”
“What if somebody else asks you to lie?”
“About what?”
“About something you saw.”
“Then it’s the same way. That something you saw, will it hurt somebody if you tell them? Will the lie make you get something just for yourself?”
“Yes to the first part, Father, and no to the second.”
“Then it’s not a sin. What else? Any other gigantic sins this week? You kill anybody? Steal any cars, anything like that?”
“No, Father.”
“How old are you now, twenty-one?”
“Going on thirteen.”
“Any girlfriends yet?”
“Three of them, Father. I like to go out with three at the same time if I can, so it doesn’t get boring.”
There was a pause. I saw his face move closer to the screen. I could smell his aftershave. “You’re a joker,” he said at last. “Your father was like that, too, you know. You could never tell with him when he was joking, his face wouldn’t change. And your mother was a very special woman. She saved your father’s life after he came back from the war, did you know that?”
“No, Father.”
“He would never have put the pieces back together again without her, do you understand?”
“What pieces, Father?”
“The pieces of who he was. His soul’s pieces. Your mother and Vito Imbesalacqua saved him. Ask your grandpa someday what Vito did for your papa when he came home.”
“I will, Father,” I promised.
“I pray for them every single day. You’ll see them in heaven, okay? That’s the way God does it. He takes them away from you for a little while. Seems like forever, but it isn’t. You believe me?”
“Yes, Father.”
“What about your cousin Rosie? Any boyfriends?”
“Caesar Baskine.”
“Now you’re joking again.”
“I’m serious, Father.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Last week he took off his bathing suit down the beach in front of everybody to prove he already has hair near his penis.”
“He did that?”
“Yes, Father. Next to the bathhouse. Rosie told me, and it’s not something she would make up. Two old women saw his naked bum and started to yell for the police, and then Caesar and his friends ran away.”
“And Rosie is going around with him?”
“I think so.”
“Does your uncle know?”
“Not yet, Father.”
“Alright. I’ll go up the house then and have a talk.”
I glanced at the crucifix on the wall to my left, at the dark curtain, at Father Bucci’s silhouette. “Call first,” I told him.
AFTERWARD, I SAID MY TWO Hail Marys at the altar in penance for the multitude of my sins, and my grandmother and I stepped out into the day, feeling as though we’d been washed clean, inside and out. For a child, perhaps for adults as well, there was no feeling quite as deeply calming as the feeling of believing yourself to be forgiven and loved by God. I sometimes wonder now if the whole spiritual search doesn’t consist of that and nothing else: a movement toward that feeling, toward an unshakable belief in your own goodness, in some pure and persistent essence that hasn’t been ruined, no matter how ragged and selfish a life you’ve led.
I remember the way the sunlight struck my face when I stepped out of the church on those afternoons, the way the tight line of houses on the other side of Revere Street seemed to have been polished and set clean against the salty air. The flagstones on Saint Anthony’s patio, the wrought-iron railings there, even the chrome and glass of the automobiles in the lot—every object in the world vibrated with a quiet, gentle approval, as if the atoms of creation were comrades-in-arms welcoming you back from war. The feeling lasted sometimes as long as several hours, and for that time you saw the world as mystics and saints must see it: the eye with which you viewed creation was a purified eye, free of self-doubt and self-loathing.
As we usually did, that day my grandmother and I walked three blocks to the corner of Revere Street and American Legion Highway, where there was a coffee shop owned by Uncle Aldo’s godfather, a man who went by the name of Jerry the Zazz. Among a number of other delicacies, Jerry the Zazz served English muffins that were pressed flat to the grill in snapping puddles of butter, and milkshakes in tin shakers with dew on them. There was an odd collection of new and slightly used items for sale on the shelf that ran along the wall below his plate-glass windows: small television sets, cameras, a vacuum cleaner; once, a puppy in a cage. When I asked my uncle about these things, he told me they had “fallen off a truck,” which did not quite make sense. It was true that Jerry the Zazz’s place sat on the corner of a busy highway, and that trucks passed it day and night. But, looking at the unmarked TV sets, the puppy, the leather gloves in boxes, the golf clubs in bags, it seemed impossible to me that they could have fallen from one of the passing trucks and not been damaged. And it was difficult to picture Jerry the Zazz out in the street, between orders, rescuing lost objects from the edge of the curb.
My grandmother and I took our regular table and sat looking out on the highway.
I have a peculiarly good memory for visual details, for certain moments. It’s not exactly a photographic memory. I can’t read a page of text and repeat it verbatim without looking. But I can summon pieces of my past and “see” them as clearly as if they have been thrown onto a screen in some interior theater. There are times when this is more curse than gift—I sometimes wish, for example, that the humiliations and botched love affairs of my early adulthood would blur a bit in my inner eye—but it helps with the kind of painting I do, and it’s not the kind of thing a person can change in any case.
I remember that my grandmother was wearing a dark brown dress on that day, with a maroon thread sewn in curlicues on the collar, and that her church hat was made of velvet or velour, black as a burnt match, with tiny mother-of-pearl beads and a fishnet veil. She took the hat off and set it to the right of her coffee cup, and Jerry the Zazz himself brought us our food.
He was a very small man (some scholars say that Pygmy blood mixed in with the southern Italian gene pool at some point in history) with a nose that seemed to have been formed from a slightly different shade of clay and pressed too hard into the middle of his face. His beard must have been especially heavy, because every time I saw him—mornings and afternoons, weekdays and weekends—his cheeks and chin were covered with a thin carpet of stubble t
hat made me think of the wicks of candles. His eyebrows were black, too, though his hair was perfectly white and thick, and parted on one side in a neat pink line.
He was polite enough to me, usually asking how old I was, or what was the name of my teacher—as if this information had a life span of two weeks and he needed to renew it every other Saturday. But the way he spoke to my grandmother went beyond politeness. He set her coffee and slices of toast on the table, then invariably reset them, moving the handle of the cup half an inch so that it would be easier for her to take hold of, or rotating the plate two degrees so that the toast faced her at a certain angle. He would then take a step backward, into the aisle between our table and the counter at which his other customers sat on red bar stools. And he would take up the end of his apron in both hands and wipe his fingers clean, leaning slightly toward her as he did this. He let go of the apron eventually, but kept the small forward tilt of his upper body, sometimes pressing his hands against the outsides of his trouser legs like a man frozen in the first instant of a deep bow.
“Lianna,” he would address my grandmother, in what I recognized even then to be extremely formal and elaborate Italian. “Come il mondo ti tratterebbe sul questo pomeriggio meravigliosissimo?” How would the world be treating you on this most marvelous of afternoons?
“Abbastanza bène,” my grandmother would answer, leaving her hands in her lap so that he would not feel that his conversation was keeping her from her food. Quite well.
“And what,” Jerry the Zazz would go on, “would be the condition of the health of your wonderful husband, Domenico?”
“Quite well,” my grandmother would say.
“And this life of ours in America, this rich life of ours, is it generous with all your children and their husbands and wives, with all your grandchildren? Are they well?”
“Very well.”
Hearing this, Jerry the Zazz would nod and bring his dark eyebrows together like caterpillars consulting each other as to the advisability of risking one small further advancement in the line of questioning. He would glance at me, seem to remember my presence. And then, having made his decision, he would straighten up an inch, step back another quarter of a step, and sweep his short arm through the air as if he were smoothing the shoulders of the oxygen molecules there with the veined back of his hand. “Excuse me, I’m interrupting you,” he would say. Scusa, ti disturbo. “I’m delaying your afternoon. Please eat. Please call if I may help you.”
In Revere, In Those Days Page 13
