In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  “Have you kissed one yet?” he asked me simply, straightforwardly. Ne hai gia baciata una?

  “Non ancora.”

  “Perché?”

  “I don’t know why. I’m shy with them still.”

  “Alright. You won’t always be. You need that other half of you to make the life right. Every man needs the woman half in his life. Almost every man needs it.” He nodded at his own words, swirled the last two drops of wine in his glass, then drank, set the glass down directly in front of him, moved his hands out to either side a few inches and then brought them in again, slowly, tenderly, fingers outstretched against the sides. “Like this you want to hold them when the time comes,” he said. “Cosí.”

  I CHANGED INTO MY PAJAMAS, brushed my teeth, walked back to my small monk’s room with its bookshelves, statues of saints, and pictures of my parents, and I pulled the covers up over my chest. The wind whistled in the leaves of the Sawyers’ maple trees and against the eaves of the house. The wine ran warmly in my hands. I brought them up together above my body, holding them a few inches apart as if there were a glass there, and then wider.

  Six

  AFTER THE TRADITIONAL FOOTBALL GAME against Winthrop (Caesar with his seven unassisted tackles and two penalties for unnecessary roughness; the cheerleaders cartwheeling in the cold so that their underpants showed, then bouncing up and shouting, “We’re from Revere, and no one could be prouder, and if you don’t believe us, we’ll say it even louder! WE’RE FROM REVERE, AND NO ONE COULD BE PROUDER!), after the turkey and lasagna and the rounds of dessert, coffee, and talk, Rosalie and I put on our coats and hats and walked the grid of streets, block by block, the way we liked to do on that holiday.

  There were flakes of snow in the air, kicking sideways in a fickle wind, and the city was quiet and still, so that I felt my old love for it swirling and rising around me. The houses and the yards were miniature worlds—fenced in, closed in, private, mysterious, and yet, at the same time, connected to the life of the street, sharing a common, humble fate. Green shingles, gray clapboards, white window trim, TV antennas, statues of the Virgin, the pocked green cinder-block wall of the football stadium—all of it seemed to be singing to me: “We’re from Revere, and no one could be prouder!”

  I wondered if Rosalie could hear it. I wondered if she ever thought about the other part of the cheer: “And if you don’t believe us, we’ll say it even louder! WE’RE FROM REVERE!” Why assume that a listener wouldn’t believe it? Or that saying it louder would convince him? Why were the Exeter cheers all “Rah … rah … hail to the grand old school” types of things, straight off the playing fields of Eton, dry and empty as a verse from an out-of-date hymnal in a dim colonial chapel? One shore was jumbled, raucous, and lit up with glaring insecurities and a desperate, infectious pride. The other was orderly as arithmetic, closed, staid, too certain of itself. I wondered then if Rosalie, if anyone in Revere, if anyone in the world other than Joey Barnard, had any good advice about how to keep a ship afloat in the rough waters between.

  “What was that look you gave me?” I asked her at the top of Mercury Street.

  “What look?”

  “Last night, on the beach. You looked at me like you hated me.”

  “You were acting phony.”

  “How?”

  “You were pretending you liked Caesar.”

  “He seems like a pretty good guy.”

  “Stop it, Tonio. I know you can’t stand him. You’re phony now since you went away to that school. You even talk different. You have niggers for friends.”

  The word burst against my ears, like cunt, like guinea, all the vicious syllables we reserve for the Other. I had heard it often enough in Revere, but never on Rosie’s lips, and I went along a few steps with my eyes straight ahead and my hands clenched in my pockets. “Saying nigger to them is just like someone saying guinea or greaseball to us,” I managed, when I had calmed down a bit.

  “So what?”

  “So, treat other people the way you want them to treat you.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “His name’s Joey. He’s my best friend there. I’m going to bring him home some weekend. You say that word around him, and I’ll take Caesar outside and kick his ass in front of everybody.”

  “Right. You look like a stringbean next to him. He’d beat you to a pulp with one finger.”

  “And that’s the most important thing, right?”

  “See what a phony you are now? You want it both ways. You want to beat up Caesar, and you want it not to be important that you can beat up Caesar, which you never could in a million years anyway. Who are you, Tonio? What are you, a boy in a magic-show act, a little different costume every day depending on who you’re with?” She leaned her head back and laughed, in a way that seemed borrowed and almost cruel. Two snowflakes fell on her face and immediately melted. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open, and her black shining hair was caught in the collar of her coat and bent upward in a curl. For that instant, she looked like a grown woman in terrible pain. “Next thing you know you’ll be hanging around with queers,” she said.

  “Why all the meanness all of a sudden?” I said. “What did I do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You never used to talk like this before.”

  “I’m just joking, it’s a joke. Don’t be a girl about it.”

  On Mars Street, a man in a T-shirt stood in his front yard, teasing a German shepherd with scraps of turkey meat. Snowflakes landed on his bare arms, but the pain of the cold did not seem to reach him; or possibly it reached him and was indistinguishable from the pain of the rest of his life, unremarkable. He was holding his right arm out, jerking the hand upward a few inches whenever the dog leapt for his treat. “Work for it,” he said. “Come on, Sinatra. Want it.” His wife stood behind the storm door in her housedress, a glint of wry admiration on her face. The man ignored her, ignored us as we passed.

  “You could go out with any boy in the whole high school,” I said, pressing all my weight down against the urge that was rising up in me, an urge to hurt her back.

  “That’s right, I could. And I picked him.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because he has a nice car, I like his face, I like the way he kisses. And he doesn’t pretend I’m pretty.”

  “You are pretty. You’re beautiful, Rosie, like your mother was.”

  “Right, thanks.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Thanks for the comparison.”

  She pulled a quarter step ahead of me.

  “Where is she, do you know?” I asked.

  “Do I care?”

  “Does she even write or anything?”

  “Do I want to talk about her, Tonio?”

  There was a small brick hospital just opposite the top of Mars Street, on the other side of Mountain Avenue. The smell of cooked turkey was floating out through the kitchen vents, but there was something oily and sour about it, something deathlike. “I came up to your house once,” I said. I had been squeezing the words away from my lips for half a block. “Your mother was in your room, she—”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Tonio. I don’t want to think about her. I don’t want to talk about her ever again, that’s all. She should have died. I would have been happier if I came home that day and it was her dead body there on the kitchen table instead of the note.”

  “She left you a note?”

  “I don’t … want … to … talk … about it, Tonio.”

  “What did it say? You never told me.”

  “Tonio, stop!”

  I stopped. We reached the top of Jupiter Street and headed down the short hill, wrapped in a silence that was as different from our old silences as the skin on an old woman’s face is different from her granddaughter’s. We passed DeRosa’s yard, Achenbach’s, Zwicker’s, Sawyer’s, Famigletti’s. When we reached our grandparents’ house, her house now, Rosalie touched me on the shoulder, not unkindly, and said, “Go the rest of the way
alone, okay?”

  “Rosie, come on.”

  “I didn’t mean that about your friend. I don’t ever use that word.”

  “Why did you say it then?”

  “I don’t know, I’m confused now. My head is confused.”

  “Rosie, talk to me. Come with me. We always go as far as Pluto Street on Thanksgiving. We’ve been doing that since you were eight and I was six and a half. I have to have somebody to talk to here, about things, I—”

  She kissed me on the lips, sprinted up the steps, and disappeared through what had once been the front door of my parents’ house.

  THERE WERE CARS PARKED along the curbstones on both sides, as always, and the houses were quiet on that holiday, though you could sense people inside, families around a table, men propped up in front of a television, watching football. I walked as far as Pluto Street and then kept going, angling down Dale Street past the Jehovah’s Witness Temple, past the wrapping-paper factory with the sagging roof, along Fenno Street to Page to Olive. My mother’s friend Lois Londoner lived there. She and my mother had both been trained as physical therapists, and had met in the years before I was born, when they worked at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, and then at the Soldiers’ Home on the hill in Chelsea. I knew Lois had had a stroke a few years before, and as I walked, the idea came into my mind that she might be alone on the holiday and want some company. I did not feel like going back to my grandparents’ house, in any case. For once, I did not want to be around the other Benedettos. I do not know why.

  Lois answered the door in her housecoat, pressed her trembling cheek against mine. She invited me in and immediately began setting out plates of various desserts on the table. She said she’d cooked a Thanksgiving meal for old friends, but there was no evidence of it in the room, no smells of turkey and stuffing, no dirty plates in the sink. There were six or eight birdcages in the kitchen, and a few more in the corridor that led to her dining room. Parakeets, a toucan, two parrots. From time to time, as she shuffled around opening bags of cookies and splashing them onto plates, cutting ragged slices of boxed cake, I would hear a squawk or the batting of feathers against thin metal bars. The parrot was the only real noisemaker. “Who’s there? Who is it?” he would screech, a deaf old man shouting into a telephone receiver.

  “It’s Anthony,” Lois said, exactly as if she were talking to a friend, and it occurred to me that the only Thanksgiving dinner she had prepared was the one she’d fed to her birds. “Anna’s son.”

  “Who’s there? Who is it?”

  “Anthony Benedetto.”

  “Who’s there? Who is it? Who?”

  Between his cackling questions, I could hear the clock ticking steadily in the parlor. Lois poured me milk from a glass quart bottle, and her hands shook so much that a little bit of it spilled on the tablecloth. In a moment she was next to me again with a yellow sponge, the impulses going from brain to hand in broken bursts, so that she jerked the sponge awkwardly over the spill and nearly bumped the full glass off the table.

  We sat and made small talk for a while. I told her about Exeter, about that day’s football game, about the aunts, uncles, and cousins she knew. She listened eagerly, pushing the various dishes a quarter of an inch left or right or closer to me, as if I might not have seen them. After a short while, the conversation ran out of gas and coasted to a stop against one wall.

  “Who’s there? Who is it?”

  I was concentrating hard on the cookies and milk, scraping my brain for new things to say. I could feel her watching me.

  “Your uncle comes to visit,” she said at last, and I looked up.

  “Which one?”

  “Peter. He never stays very long. He’ll show up at the front door, ringing the bell, and by the time I get there he’ll be looking this way and that way, peeking in through the curtains, shuffling his feet. He always brings a fresh loaf of bread or some macaroons from the bakery on Broadway, but you have to practically pay him to come in and sit down. I don’t think he’s ever yet finished a cup of coffee I made him, then he’s up and kissing me, saying he has to go, has to meet somebody, has to get his car fixed, has to get some little something done at the dentist.”

  “He’s like that,” I said, and I heard the words echoing across time. I saw my mother at the kitchen counter with her hands dusted in flour, saw her turn and look at me over her shoulder. He’s like that, Anthony. In her voice there had been the same species of frustration I now felt with Rosalie. She’s like that. She moves, dances, keeps herself always just beyond the reach of your arms, of your affection, as if she believes that, at its deepest levels, love is nothing but a sticky trap, a death sentence.

  Because I couldn’t stand the silence pressing in against us, I blurted out, “I had the feeling sometimes my mother didn’t like him.”

  “Who’s that? Who’s there?”

  “No, she liked him. Who couldn’t like him?”

  “Nobody,” I said quickly.

  “But she was worried about the influence he had on your father. She brought your father back to life, you know, right back from the dead. When she met him in the hospital, he was a broken man. He never talked to you about what he saw in the war, did he?”

  “No.”

  “He was wounded very badly. Did he tell you that?”

  “My mother did, once. Wounded in the knees, she said.”

  “Feet, knees, and his back. And he’d already spent four months at the Walter Reed and hadn’t really gotten much better. He didn’t want to get out of bed to do his therapy, didn’t want to see any visitors. He used to wake up in the middle of the night on the ward and scream and scream and then sit there, bolt upright, shaking worse than I’m shaking now. She’d come in and calm him down. But in the daytime she’d talk tough to him, wouldn’t take any funny business. ‘Time for your exercises now, Augustine. This isn’t summer camp,’ she’d say. ‘Your life’s ahead of you, not behind you. Show me what you’re made of now. Just get up and walk through the feelings and do what the doctor told you to do.’

  “He was angry at first, and stubborn. And then, little by little, you could see him falling in love with her. Before they could be released, the patients used to have to go out into town to prove they could get by in the world—prove that they could walk, reach around and take the wallet out of their back pockets, get on and off a trolley car, that they were stable enough, mentally, you know. At first, she used to go out on these pretend dates with him and act like it was a duty, but you could see she was falling in love. Your father was such a handsome specimen of a man, for one thing. And once all that shadow came away from his face, once he started to walk again and get out in the sunlight again, he was like a regular movie star. We were all a little bit in love with him.

  “When they got married, your mother made him promise to move out of Revere within three years, but he never could do that. He never could have left his brother, for one thing.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because he felt sorry for Peter, I guess, because he worried that he wouldn’t survive if they left him—”

  “No, why did she want him to move out?”

  “Because she thought there were better places for children to grow up. And she worried what might happen to your father if he stayed in the city, working at that factory. The noise, the commotion. She worried that if he kept spending so much time with Peter, you’d never have enough money to move out. She and your father used to take drives up to Newburyport on Sundays when you were a baby, and she always said that was where she wanted to live, out in the country. It was her idea, you know, for you to go away to a school like where you’re going.”

  “No, it was my grandfather’s.”

  “Your grandfather got it from your mother, believe me.”

  “No, he heard it from someone he was in the hospital with, a hockey player.”

  She looked at me for a long time, folded the fingers of her shaking hands together. “Your grandfather’s a very smart man,
Anthony, the way your uncle is. Smarter than he pretends to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t mean anything, but it was your mother who used to talk about you going away to school, about you being something nobody else around here has ever been.”

  “There are doctors here,” I said. “Lawyers. There are some rich people in Revere.”

  “Rich wasn’t what she had in mind. Doctor wasn’t, either. She’d seen enough of doctors, believe me, not to want one in the family.”

  “What then?”

  “Just different, inside yourself. A different kind of man. She used to come down here and have lunch with me sometimes when you were in school and I didn’t have to go to work until three o’clock. Different was what she wanted for you. Some other place, some other way. She never said specifically.”

  IT WAS DARK BY THE TIME I left her house, Lois’s kindness and loneliness and the courage with which she bore her fate all tugging at me for the first few blocks.

  Instead of retracing my steps, I took the longer, flatter way home—Fenno Street to Broadway to Park Avenue—adjusting my past as I went. Who’s there? Who is it? … A different kind of man. Later that night, in as casual a tone as I could manage, I asked my grandfather what was the name of the professional hockey player he’d been in the hospital with, but all he said was, “That’s too long ago now, Tonio, for me to remember.”

  Seven