WE HAD A STRONG TEAM that season—my Upper Middle year, as they call the junior year at Exeter. Higgenbotham played second defense; I was the left wing on the third line; and we had a Lower Middler goalie named Giorgio Cabanhas, who would one day be named All-America at Cornell. Because four of his stars had graduated the previous June, Coach Rislin liked to refer to that season as a rebuilding year, but we won four of our first six games, and went into the Andover game at the end of the season with a record of ten wins and four losses.
The Phillips Academy at Andover and the Phillips Exeter Academy are sometimes confused with each other, though they are not connected in any real way. They were founded by cousins—Henry and John Phillips—in 1778 and 1781. They attract the same kinds of students, their campuses resemble each other to a certain extent, and they’re less than an hour apart, one in northeastern Massachusetts and the other in southeastern New Hampshire. There is a two-hundred-year-old rivalry between them: at Exeter, in the area of sports, a win over Andover carries as much weight as the rest of the season’s games combined.
Uncle Peter had been to most of our home games that year, sometimes bringing Uncle Leo and Aunt Eveline and one or two of the younger cousins along. He would sit at center ice, in the top row of the concrete benches, and feel no compunction at all about standing up at quiet moments and shouting, “Antonio Benedetto!” at top volume. It embarrassed me the first few times. I don’t think Rosalie was right in saying I had turned into a different person since going to Exeter, a phony person. But I had been made aware that there was a more restrained way of doing things, and shouting out your nephew’s name in public did not exactly fit in with that. When I scored my first goal—it was against Choate in the second period of a runaway victory—I skated back to the bench out of breath and happy, and, after a few seconds, felt someone thumping me from behind. It was my uncle. He’d run down through the crowd and was leaning far out over the wooden partition that separated players from fans, and he was hitting me on my shoulder pads, hard, with both hands. Coach Rislin half-turned toward him and twisted up one side of his mouth, but that subtle hint was like a child’s whispering in the noisy circus of Uncle Peter’s affection. When I turned around I was looking directly at the top of his bald head. His face was tilted up toward me, the eyes lifted against the edges of the lids, the big nose sticking forward and down. The strain of the awkward position had caused the blood to run into his face, and his old boxing scars stood out against his pink skin like tiny porcelain chips. It was an astounding face, really, the face of an old warrior, at once humble and magnificent, ugly and resplendent. At that moment, held out like that into the territory of the players and coaches, it was a glowing coal of triumph, as if my little victory had reignited all of Uncle Peter’s youthful glory in the ring and we were linked now, standing together victorious above the hurt that, for the last 150 years, had been flung at every immigrant who ever set a tattered valise down on American soil.
All that winter I waited for him to bring my grandfather to one of the games. Grandpa Dom had seen me play at Revere High, but I wanted him to see me at Exeter, in the elegant uniform—maroon with white numerals—a better player now, and at home in the big new world into which he’d propelled me.
But that winter my grandfather’s trim vitality began to abandon him. He’d been in and out of Massachusetts General Hospital four times with chest pains, and I lived with the constant fear that I would never see him again. Two nights before the Andover game, I called home. Uncle Peter answered, said Grandpa was resting, that he wanted to come to the game but the doctors wouldn’t allow it.
“Is he okay?”
“Sure. He’s just resting, Tonio.”
“Really?”
“Natchrally really. What do you think, I’m makin it up?”
“He’s not dead?”
“What, dead? What’s the mattah with you? The pressure goin to your brain up theah? Lissen, let the nervousness make you stronger, alright? Let it be like gas in a car. There’s gonna be scouts in the stands. It might make the difference between gettin into Hahvahd, you know, and havin to settle for somethin less.”
The locker room on that Saturday was quiet as a wake. We dressed in silence, Coach Rislin pacing back and forth with his clipboard and maroon wool jacket with EXETER sewn on the back in large letters, the smell of concrete and liniment in the air, the sound of sticks clattering, locker doors slamming.
When you first step out onto new ice it is very slick and fast. There are no blade marks to slow down the puck, and passes come at you like black artillery rounds. We went through our regular pregame drills, passing, shooting, making plays, skating together in a large circle, then crowding around our goalkeeper and slapping him on the helmet, or knocking our sticks against his shin pads, for luck. When the horn sounded, the starting six stayed out on the ice, and the rest of us banged through the gate and took our places on the bench, clouds of breath in front of our faces, sticks upright between our knees, little twists of nervous energy skipping about in the belly. In a slow moment during one of the drills, I’d glanced up at the back of the grandstand, hoping to see my uncle there. Joey Barnard raised an arm in salute; I answered by raising my stick. But there was no family. So in the quiet, tense seconds before the puck was dropped, it was a surprise to hear the sound of my uncle’s voice yelling out, “BEH-NEH-DEH-TOE!” One or two of my teammates looked at me and grinned over their mouth guards. The “oh-oh-oh” echoed around the concrete arena. The game began.
Andover had lost only twice that year. They were solid through all three lines, but had two exceptional players—a first-line center from Quebec named Andrew Boldeaux, and a defenseman named Jacob Mellmann. Mellmann also played middle linebacker on the football team, and his style in both sports was similar: hit, hit, hit. He was, I suppose, a sort of more-polished, better-educated version of Caesar Baskine. That week in practice, Coach Rislin had made Higgenbotham take on the role of Mellmann. Higgenbotham had worn a blue practice jersey, and had made a sincere effort to intimidate us, throwing his thin shoulders into people, tripping, hooking, even tackling me once when he knew I had him beaten.
Higgenbotham was no Mellmann, we all knew it. For a defenseman especially, he was a bit on the timid side. But the exercise accomplished two things at once: it gave Higgenbotham more confidence that he could knock people over occasionally without costing us goals, and it broke down the exaggerated picture of Mellmann we’d built up in our minds.
Still, deflated reputation or no, he was an impressive sight: legs like tree trunks, a thick waist, and a pair of shoulders you don’t often see on high-school hockey players. He was a deceptively quick skater, too. Whenever I wasn’t on the ice, I studied him, but I couldn’t find any weakness in his game. He never rushed the puck, preferring to hang back and latch on to our forwards as they came into his zone. He’d fall back, fall back, draw the forward in, then, abruptly, the distance between them would close and Mellmann would be stepping up with a shoulder and perfect balance, knocking Eddie Westin or Michael Courtman to the ice and sweeping the puck away with an air of cleaning up a small mess after having chased the riffraff out of his mother’s backyard.
Boldeaux was a player of a different sort, an artist, a magician, light as a leaf on his feet. He spun, he twisted, he feinted and deked, the puck glued to the blade of his stick as he sprinted his glorious zigzags up through the middle of the ice. The scouting report on Boldeaux was that he relied more on his moves than his shot, which was mediocre, so the strategy was to keep him outside a certain radius and make him shoot from there at our acrobatic Cabanhas. We managed to do that for the first period, and it ended in a scoreless tie. The locker room was silent, as before, the syllables of Coach Rislin’s terse sermon falling on us like beads of sleet.
In the early part of the second period, the center on my line, Andy de Vetterling, knocked the face-off between the legs of the Andover center. I had cut diagonally across behind him—a play we’d worked on i
n practice—and I caught the puck on my blade and went over the blue line with only Mellmann between me and the goal. I skated straight at him, faked left, slipped the puck neatly between his feet, and was most of the way around his right side when he took an extra skip-step, an improbable ballet move for someone that size, and drove his shoulder pad into my helmet. I went down face-first and slid into the boards, hard, getting a glove up in front of me at the last second. Stars, a whistle, the hot, sweet taste of blood. I lay there letting the world spin and the pain rise and rise and then begin to fall away. In a moment I could see the ceiling lights, then a circle of swirling faces. Bill Liston, the trainer, was kneeling next to me, wiping blood away from the top of my lip and pinching my nose gently between his thumb and second finger to see if it was broken. I sat up, was helped to my feet. “BEH-NEH-DEH-TOE!” I heard from the top of the arena, but it was like someone else’s name being called through thick seaside air. Held by both arms, I wobbled back to the bench through a fog of dizziness and pain, and sat out the rest of the period, leaning my head forward into a bag of ice and spitting blood onto the rubber mat between my feet. I can’t say much about that period, except that it ended, again, in a 0–0 tie. During the intermission, Mr. Liston worked on me some more, checking for a concussion, plying me with aspirin and water, applying bags of ice, massaging the back of my neck. By the time the horn sounded, I was clear-eyed again, and steady on my feet.
Boldeaux hit the post twice that day. Six minutes into the third period, he took the puck from his own blue line, shifted and spun through half our team, made a fool of Higgenbotham with a left-left move no one had ever seen before, went in alone on Cabanhas, faked right, flipped the puck to his forehand, and fired a wrist shot that banged loudly off the pipe and caromed straight out front. Cabanhas covered up until the whistle blew, then lay there an extra few seconds, composing himself. The contingent of Andover fans cheered and howled at the brilliance of it, the bad fortune, and for a little while after that we stumbled and slipped around the ice like beaten boys.
With three minutes left to play, my line skated on to take a face-off in our own zone. My head had cleared completely, leaving only some swelling and a small throbbing in the middle of my face. Someone had tossed an orange peel onto the ice, and as the referee cleared it up and checked to see that there were no scraps left anywhere, I heard my uncle shout, “Tonio, Tonio, Tonio! Grandpa’s here!” I barely kept myself from looking up. The puck was dropped, we cleared it, and for another minute and a half chased it back and forth in center ice. We were near the end of our last shift and very tired, all of us; everyone on the ice was tired. Chaz Metier fought with an Andover player on the right wing, kicked the puck loose, chased after it in a burst of energy, captured it, looked up, fed it across ice to me. I was already moving toward the goal—one of the best things I’d been taught in the Revere hockey program was to always be in motion so that if the puck did come my way I’d have some momentum and might catch the defense flat-footed. Which is more or less what happened. I was moving when the puck reached me, tapping into some last reserve of energy. One stride and I was across the blue line, Mellmann right there. He’d been on the ice for probably 60 percent of the game and was exhausted, half a step slower than he might otherwise have been. I crossed my right skate over my left and took the puck diagonally away from him, toward the left corner. Just as he shifted his weight, I reached the puck forward and slid it behind the heel of his stick and across in front of the toe of his left skate. Metier was streaking for the net there. He took the pass, skated two strides, and lifted a perfect wrist shot over the goalie’s stick-side arm and into the left upper corner of the net. The red light flashed, the arena exploded in cheers, horns, and stamping feet, and we wrestled Chazzy to the ice and pounded him black and blue.
With something like ten seconds to go, Boldeaux made another of his astonishing runs, swerving, shifting the puck all the way across from far left to far right without even glancing down. When Courtman tried to pin him against the boards, he spun completely around in midair, somehow keeping his feet, recovered the puck, and moved straight in. He beat the other defenseman, had an open shot from fifteen feet out, half-beat Cabanhas, too. But Giorgio managed to get a piece of his glove on the shot, lifting its trajectory enough so that it clinked off the crossbar and banged into the glass behind. Boldeaux chased it, madly, furiously, and the horn sounded, ending the game. As we poured off the bench and onto the ice, I held back for one small moment, looked up at the scoreboard to fix it in my memory, then turned and searched for my grandfather in the cheering crowd. I found him this time, two rows down from Uncle Peter’s usual place, between my uncle and Joey Barnard. Uncle Peter was hugging and kissing them, bouncing up and down like a boy, but my grandfather was facing straight forward, staring at me, one of his gloved hands held out in a loose fist in front of him. For a second or two, I could see my father there, in my grandfather’s posture and in his face.
IT’S NOT A VERY IMPORTANT THING, I know, a tiny triumph like that. Much as some athletes and fans like to think so, sports is not the same as life. There are lessons you can learn, sure, but the stakes are never as high. Still, it can sometimes happen that there is a crucial interior puzzle a person is working through, and it gets solved in an exterior event—one spark of grace in a high-school hockey game, a painting that turns out just right, a lucky conversation with a friend. Occasionally now, in certain moods, struggling in my studio, cleaning up after an unproductive day when all the nasty demons have been singing in my ears—that making faces on canvas is a waste of time in a world where people are hungry and poor, that I have no special contribution to make in any case, no special talent, that the pool from which I draw is only a muddy puddle at the far edge of the truly important things—at such moments, sometimes without trying to, I remember my grandfather’s face and gesture on that afternoon at the Exeter rink, and it lifts me up a little bit.
Eight
I WONDER SOMETIMES WHAT would have become of my cousin Rosalie if she’d had a couple of triumphs like that in her high-school years. Not sports or academic success necessarily, but any little bright moment she might have held on to and looked back at from time to time. I wonder if those kinds of exterior successes aren’t, at least partly, a substitute for something else; if we seek glory in politics or sports or business or the arts only in order to fill what is really an interior void. The empty place where a mother’s love should have been, for instance. Once, only once, in her cocky, bulletproof, pretend-nothing-hurts voice, Rosie said to me, “I think Caesar’s a substitute for something, Tonio. I think drugs are a substitute, and sex, and everything.” But though I prodded and pushed her and made a nuisance of myself, that was as far as she’d go.
The rest of that year went smoothly for me. I took a driver’s education class with a man named Roberto Whistlestop, who was almost deaf and ridiculously nervous, and yelled out, “Stop sign! Stop sign now!” when we were still in the middle of the block. I played club baseball four days a week, watched Joey run track when there were home meets on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I adjusted myself to the pace and stress of academic life at Exeter, studying three hours and more every night. On Sunday mornings I walked down to St. Michael’s for Mass, and soon developed a wild infatuation for a girl there. I used to stare at her thin legs when she walked up to Communion, braids bouncing on her shoulders. I used to think of her at night as I lay in bed, the freckles across her nose, the turned-up top lip, the hem of the skirt knocking against the back of her legs when she walked. Once, late on a Sunday afternoon, she and a friend came to the tennis courts for a game, and Jarasapwanatha rushed into my room, saying, “Ahnthony, Ahnthony, the geerl from the choorch is pilaying.” We borrowed two of Higgenbotham’s racquets and raced down there, hit the ball into her court a few times, asked her name—Penny Toddeman—but it never came to anything beyond that. I was too shy to try to talk to her after church, miserably, agonizingly, shamefully shy. And, though I found two
Toddemans in the Exeter white pages, and even carried the numbers down to the pay phone in the basement once with a pocketful of dimes, I never called.
Joey Barnard came home with me for Easter dinner, and it took the family about half an hour to forget he was black and stop being extranice to him. Because of his brother in Vietnam, he had conflicting feelings about all the antiwar protests—which endeared him to us, because my cousins Jamie and Augustine were in Vietnam, too, and we felt the same way: wanting their sacrifice and courage to count for something, on the one hand; and on the other hand just wanting them home. Joey said he had never tasted cooking as good as my grandmother’s—which was the right thing to say—and ate so much of her lasagna that the family talked about it for years and years. After the meal we walked to the beach together in the April sunshine. Black faces were not seen on the streets of Revere in those days, and there were a few nasty looks, people staring out car windows, turning their heads at us as we passed. I could tell Joey noticed, but I didn’t think it was something we could talk about. Though Rosalie kept her distance from us, she did come up to him as he was leaving and shake his hand in a friendly way. And she did let it be known later—to others, not directly to me—that he was “a nice kid.” High praise from her, in those days.
She still refused to write to me at Exeter, or speak to me on the phone. When the school year ended and I came back to 20 Jupiter Street, I saw almost nothing of her. Uncle Peter had gotten me a summer job, mixing and carrying mortar for a bricklayer in North Revere, and Rosie spent all her nights and weekends out with friends, with Caesar. When I did see her—in my grandparents’ kitchen, in front of the house, at the beach with her gang of girlfriends—she was always in a hurry and glassy-eyed, and she treated me as if I were an old pal with an infectious disease, probably a fatal disease, the symptoms of which were that you would be forced to stop rushing and rushing, and made to sit still and tell everything about yourself, honestly, to someone you loved. After a while, it hurt me so much that I stopped trying to talk to her, to get her to stand still. I breathed cement dust and read Kerouac and went to the beach on weekends with Leo Markin, Alfonse Romano, and Petey Imbesalacqua. I sat with my grandmother and grandfather in the yard, worked in the garden, went to church, played golf with Uncle Peter a few times on Sunday afternoons, or went with him to the horse track for an hour or two of talk and losing.
In Revere, In Those Days Page 20
