In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  Thirteen

  IN THE MONTHS OF SEPTEMBER and October, a rare kind of healing light falls across southern New Hampshire in the late afternoon. The uniqueness of that light has something to do with the proximity of the ocean and the mountains, and later, as the season deepens, with the colors of the dying leaves. People come from all over the world to see the autumn colors, but I think it is really the light that draws them to that particular part of New England: they come in hope of a cure.

  Across the street from Amen Hall were tennis courts and the new athletic complex, and then, stretching as far as the river and a little ways beyond, an expanse of open playing fields: for baseball, soccer, football, and lacrosse. I did not have a late-afternoon class that term, and sometimes, between the end of sports and the start of the dinner hour, I would wander out on those fields, cross the concrete bridge over the river, and walk in the woods alone. There was a profound joy for me in those walks, and it soothed some of the trouble I’d brought back from Revere. The fields seemed like living creatures shifting and settling in the mysterious light, almost able to speak.

  Because we had both wanted to do something different in the way of a sport that fall, Joey and I were rowing intramural crew. Practices lasted from two to four, and were held on a wide section of the river that was far from Amen Hall. After those workouts, my legs and arms would be weary and there would be only an hour or so between the time I got back from the boathouse and the time I had to head off to the dining hall, and there was always a paper, exam, or oral presentation to think about. But my solitary walk in the woods had begun to seem like the most important part of the day, and I usually found the energy for it.

  On some of those afternoons, walking out of the woods and toward the campus in that light, with the smell of the river around me and the plock … plock of tennis balls on the clay courts in the distance, I would be filled with a feeling that seemed to me to have nothing to do with Revere or the Benedetto family or my friends at the Academy. I am tempted to say it was only that first sense of existential solitariness that sets the adult apart from the child. But it was deeper than that. I came across a poem not long ago, a very bad poem with a title I liked—“The Ordinary Self Greets the Soul”—and that might be a way of describing those moments: as if I were being introduced to a piece of my truest identity, something steady and gleaming, almost eternal, that stood beside or beneath the ordinary run of thoughts and feelings I was used to calling “Anthony Benedetto.”

  One afternoon, walking a few minutes later than usual along a path in the woods, I turned a corner and was startled to see a woman sitting there on a flat, waist-high boulder in the middle of a clearing. She was so still, I didn’t see her until I was nearly right next to her. I let out a small grunt of surprise; she didn’t move. Her eyes were closed. I thought at first she was sleeping, but who slept sitting up? When I recovered, I went over to her and asked if she was alright.

  She opened her eyes. “Yes, fine,” she answered, in a voice you would use with someone you knew well, a voice stripped of the tacked-on decorations that keep people at a distance—that signal approval, or disapproval, or a desire to be liked, or a desire to be left alone.

  “I’m sorry I disturbed you.”

  “You didn’t.”

  I nodded, apologized again, and went on along the path. It was one of those encounters that seems to happen too quickly; afterward, you run through all the things you might have said, might have done differently. I did not like the fact that I had been startled, that I had tried to cover over my embarrassment by asking a question that did not need to be asked. It made me feel young again, just when I was beginning to feel so mature. Crossing the river, I realized I had recognized the woman, and I remembered her name. Mrs. Coughlin. Her teenage son and her husband—who had worked in the admissions office and whom I’d spoken with briefly on my first visit—had been killed in a car accident on Route 101 near the end of the previous school year. The principal made the announcement in chapel, taking off his glasses and holding a handkerchief up to his nose and mouth. It was recommended, but not required, that students attend the wake, and Joey and I and Higgenbotham and Madhur Jarasapwanatha had walked down to the funeral home in our sport coats and ties to shake hands with her and the other family members and to tell them how sorry we were.

  It was my night to wait on faculty tables, and I was late. I trotted back across the fields, wondering what quality it was in the way she had spoken to me, what had seemed so different there.

  Fourteen

  THOSE WALKS, that quick encounter with Mrs. Coughlin, marked the start of another life for me. It is a difficult thing to write about. Difficult to write about because the life that began there—fragile, unsure, wavering like a candle flame beside an open window—was an interior life, hidden from the camera lens of the commercial world. In America, though all of us experience it, that dimension of things has usually been suspect, the province of bohemians, loners, and ten-dollar palm readers at sidewalk booths. We are a country of scientists and entrepreneurs, of factual certainty and cold, hard cash. We put our energy into things that can be measured—as if accomplishments can change the raw fact of dying, or as if, like the pharaohs, we can pack our treasures into the coffin with us and carry them past the customs checkpoint of death.

  I am that way, too, as American as anyone, and that fall I was caught in the same web of hope and anxiety as all my friends, the same kinds of thoughts: girls, schoolwork, college. But beneath all that, in a deep, hidden part of me, something else was beginning to stir. I do not know why, or what to call it.

  I had been elected Student Council representative from Amen Hall, my grades were solid if unspectacular, I had grown to above-average height and started shaving every day. I was feeling more and more at ease in my classes, in the basement smoking room with my friends—some of them hockey players, most of them not. I felt healthy and strong.

  Coach Rislin stopped me outside the post office one morning between classes and said, “Benedetto, you turned into a poplar tree over the summer. Poplar trees don’t make good hockey players, understand? Between now and when the season starts, I want you to eat like a tiger, okay? Like a rhinoceros.”

  “Like an elephant,” I suggested.

  “Right. Like an elephant. I want some meat on those bones.”

  I did not need the encouragement. Most days, between breakfast and lunch, I went down to the the Grill—the campus snack bar—and had a hamburger, or a milk shake, or a couple of frosted cinnamon rolls and exchanged a few words with the cook there, a stocky, fake-gruff man named Bucky, who was one of my favorite people at the Academy. And most nights after dinner, a few of us from Amen Hall would make the pilgrimage to Ferlita’s for sub sandwiches, or have pizzas delivered. When Uncle Peter visited, he took to bringing up loaves of soft white bread from Brandano’s bakery on Broadway, and Joey and I would make peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and share a quart of milk before going to sleep.

  Everything about my external situation at Exeter was fine and pleasant. I was rushing toward adulthood with a kind of half-childish abandon that felt like the end of mourning to me. Eating, rowing, learning, dreaming about girls, waiting to hear from colleges.… But, underneath all that, something else was breaking open.

  One day during a particularly tough crew workout, that invisible something made itself known to me in an unexpected way. It was near the end of the practice. We were three-quarters of the way through a twenty-minute piece, full power. Our legs were burning, and the breath was moving in and out of us in great heaves. My whole torso seemed to have been dipped into a boiling pot of pain, and my mind was trying every imaginable strategy to get me to ease off a bit, to move away from the pain instead of into it, to do something sane with my afternoons instead of driving an eight-oared boat along the cold surface of the Exeter River with blistered hands and screaming muscles. For some reason, though, instead of easing off, I pushed on into the pain and the fear, and after twent
y or thirty more strokes and another hundred breaths, my mind just seemed to give up, to stop, to go quiet. I rowed on, unwavering, the pain held at arm’s length, until the coxswain rattled the wooden knockers and called out, “Paddle! Paddle now! Easy now. Long and slow, zero power. Breathe easy.”

  Afterward, everything was almost the way it had always been. I rowed along lightly, caught my breath. We turned toward the boathouse with the afternoon shadows on the river’s steely surface, the oarlocks squeaking, the motor on Mr. Swift’s launch puttering behind us. We climbed out, lifted the boat over our heads, and carried it into the boathouse on our shoulders. The gunwales dripped, the dock creaked and rocked under our bare feet, the smell of the river clung to our shirtfronts and faces.

  Joey and I sat on the dock, laced up our running shoes, and, as we always did, jogged back to Amen Hall along Main Street, through a thin parade of women doing errands and town kids killing time after school. We showered and changed. He headed off to Advanced Calculus, and I went out for my walk in the woods. Everything was the same, except that my mind felt like a cottage on the shore that had just had its windows thrown open after a long, musty winter. I sailed along past the tennis courts and onto the fields, filled with a quiet jubilation that was nothing like any happiness I had felt before. It lasted for the better part of an hour.

  A week passed. On Wednesday, a night when I wasn’t required to wait on tables, I stayed out in the woods until the sun set and the first wooly shadows were gathering in the tops of the trees, and then I walked past the clearing again and saw Mrs. Coughlin there on her stone. I squatted on the path and watched her. It was a strange thing to see an adult that way, not moving at all; and stranger still to be spying on her. I watched until she opened her eyes, stretched her arms and legs, and then I made a little scuffing noise in the pine needles of the path so as not to startle her.

  She was wearing hiking boots, blue jeans, and a red down vest, and from the pocket of the vest she took a pair of eyeglasses, hooked them over her ears, and calmly looked at me. “Hello again,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  She stood up and came toward me. She was a small, trim woman, with a round face that was attractive without being pretty, and light brown hair pulled up tightly in the back. She held out her hand. “I’m Lydia Coughlin.”

  “I know. I met you before … at the wake.”

  She asked if I was walking back toward campus, and I said that I was, and we went together along the path by the river. She asked what grade I was in at school, what I was studying, which sports I played, where I was from—all the usual questions. I wasn’t the type of student who felt at ease in the company of my teachers, and so I associated her, at first, with the other middle-aged adults at the school, people from whom I was separated by twenty or thirty or forty years and a waist-high fence of formality and deference.

  But when we crossed the bridge and started along the fields, I began to relax. Those fields were, after all, my territory, the place I felt most myself; and I began to see that she was speaking to me in a way fundamentally different from the way my teachers spoke. There was no armor of politeness, no subtle false suit of smugness about being older. “So, are you happy here?” she asked when we were climbing the small rise to the dirt road that ran past the gym.

  “Three out of every four days,” I said. It was a line I’d borrowed from my grandmother, who believed that the secret to happiness was to expect some disappointment, sorrow, and pain, not to resist it too strenuously, to think of it as the Fourth Day.

  “Is today a good one or a bad?”

  “Bad,” I said. “Salisbury steak for supper. ‘Cooked puck,’ we call it.”

  She laughed—a quiet, lilting laugh. We walked past the tennis courts and stopped at the road, waiting to cross. In front of Amen Hall she stuck out her hand again, her arm straight and held up high from the shoulder. It was dark, there was no one else there. I don’t know what came over me, but instead of just saying good-bye, I said, “I was really sorry at the wake. I said I was sorry, but really I was. My mother and father died when I was young … suddenly, like that … and I …”

  “Thank you,” she said, but it sounded to me as if she wished I hadn’t brought the subject up, which made me feel young again, and foolish. “I’ll see you,” she said. “I’ll have you over for dinner some night when they’re serving cooked puck.”

  I laughed too loudly. I walked off toward my awful meal, feeling angry at myself for not having behaved properly. She had been so plain and at ease, and I had flipped from one persona to the next—the respectful schoolboy, the hockey player, the Revere guy, the respectful schoolboy there again at the end. All through the meal I fidgeted and worried about it. We filled ourselves up with milk and pudding, sliced off disk-shaped pieces of the inedible meat and slapped them back and forth on the table-top with our knives. When we tired of that and brought our trays up to the conveyor belt, Higgenbotham turned to Joey and me and said, with his slight lisp and in the aristocratic tone we had come to love, “The sub shop, gentlemen?”

  We walked across campus again in the sweet fall darkness, cut through one end of town, and consumed a second dinner under Ferlita’s fluorescent lights with the jukebox playing Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” at top volume. Clapton and his friends were scooting happily down the drug-addled alleys of the early seventies when they recorded that tune. Even now, you can hear the crazed joy of those times in it, the manic, chemical jubilation. The Vietnam War hovered always in the background then, and death was on the news every night, real as the weather. War, riots, assassinations—it wasn’t the happiest of times in America. But if you really listen to that song, you can hear in it a sort of rock-and-roll insistence that death always takes second seat to one god greater.

  Fifteen

  TWO WEEKS PASSED. I saw Mrs. Coughlin again in the woods, and we talked a little more. She did not have to work, she told me in that second conversation; she had “family money”—a term I’d never heard before coming to Exeter—and her husband’s insurance benefits, but she put in five or six hours a day making stone sculptures, and she volunteered four mornings a week at a school for the blind in the next town east. Her grandparents had been émigrés from south of Moscow—her maiden name had been Svetlovskaya—and when she heard I was studying Russian, she spoke the expressions she remembered from her childhood: “shto khochesh”; “tebya liubliu,” and so on.

  We bumped into each other again a few days after that, on the last Tuesday before hockey season began, my last free afternoon until the April vacation. The dining hall was serving Salisbury steak again, and I mentioned it to her as we came back across the river toward campus.

  “Do you like Indian food?” she said.

  “Never tried it.”

  “I made a rice-and-lentil dish yesterday. All I’d have to do is heat it up.”

  It took me a few seconds to realize that she was inviting me to her house for dinner. I almost said no, almost made some excuse about schoolwork or friends, and headed back to the safety of the dormitory and the dining hall, my ordered little world. Newfound maturity notwithstanding, I was still a seventeen-year-old boy, bashful and self-involved; it could not possibly have occurred to me that a grown-up woman might just want some company on a weekday night.

  Her house was seven blocks from campus, on a quiet street of well-spaced Victorians with front porches painted in pastels. We turned off the sidewalk and walked down a gravel path. The light was on over her back steps, and I could see a built-in swimming pool covered with blue plastic and spotted with fallen leaves. Her back steps led up to a glassed-in porch, and then through a glass door into her kitchen. The kitchen did not feel like it belonged in such a sedate neighborhood: new white and green tiles on the counter and partway up the walls, new white cabinets without handles, a table made of pale wood that shone as if it had been polished for hours, and a single thick candle for a centerpiece. No saints on the walls; nothing on the walls, in fact. It was
as spare and tidy as a hospital waiting room, but warmer and more elegant, a place so free of clutter and plastic surfaces that the table and stove and the glasses in the strainer seemed to pulse with their own quiet life.

  After so many weeks of dormitory living, of looking at furniture that was identical to the furniture in every other room and belonged to no one, it was always a shock to walk into a real home again. You felt as though you shouldn’t touch anything. Beyond that, there was still a way in which any house other than the ones I’d grown up around seemed alien. There were no garlic and tomato smells in Mrs. Coughlin’s kitchen, none of the trappings of the Italian-American aesthetic—plastic tablecloths and garish mirror frames, crucifixes wherever you looked. And it was an odd thing to do, skipping dinner with friends to spend time with a woman so much older. It was something I never would have done a few months earlier, and in those first minutes, especially, I was self-conscious and anxious.

  I had called her Mrs. Coughlin once or twice during the walk. When we were inside the house, she asked me to call her by her first name, Lydia, a name she admitted she had never really liked. She poured me a glass of grape juice and told me to wander around while she heated up the food. The other rooms on the first floor—a dining room, a parlor, a guest bedroom with the door open, a very small room with a foot-high stone Buddha on a platform and cushions on the floor instead of chairs—had the same unpretentious, orderly feel as the kitchen. I remember stopping in front of an end table next to the living-room sofa and looking into the faces in the picture frames there. A man I recognized as Mr. Coughlin was standing on a sailboat, one of his hands holding a rope that angled across the picture, and the other curling around the shoulders of a boy who resembled Mrs. Coughlin—Lydia—so perfectly that he looked to be a younger, male version of her.