In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  “This is going to be the end of the family now, Tonio,” he said one night as we stood looking over the vacant lot at the streetlights on Park Avenue.

  “No it isn’t. You’re not here during the day. You don’t know how many people come by—Aunt Marie, Aunt Eveline, Uncle Francis, Uncle Aldo, all the cousins. Everybody comes.”

  “Sure. I’m not sayin that. I’m sayin it will never be the way it was. People will come to see Grandma, and you, and me, but the whole family’s gonna change when Grandpa passes, you’ll see. People will go their separate ways. That beautiful thing we used to have, that’s gonna break apart.” He shot his cigar out into the night, and I watched the red ash arc and sputter at the edge of the garden. “Your father was the only one who could have held everybody togetha.”

  “What about you?” I said. “You could hold us together.”

  “Me? With my track record? I couldn’t hold togetha the two sides of my pants if the zippa broke.”

  I had a vision then of my grandfather as a skinny fifteen-year-old, booking passage back to Italy in order to fetch his parents and sisters, to piece his family together again in the New World. I imagined him sitting in the hold of a shuddering ship with strangers coughing and retching and pissing in pots around him. It did not seem possible that we could face any obstacle greater than what he had faced, that any of the forces of modern life could tear a fabric as tightly woven as ours. Which shows, I suppose, who was the wiser of the two people standing there on that night.

  On Saturday, the night before I left to go back to school, Grandpa Dom and I stayed up late to watch the boxing matches on the TV in the den, something we had not done more than four or five times since my parents were alive. He would drop off to sleep and wake up, drop off and wake up, and I spent as much time looking at him as at the action on the screen. My grandmother was praying in the back bedroom, as she always did before sleep; Uncle Peter was upstairs in bed, Rosalie out on the town. Grandpa Dom sat on the sofa in a bathrobe that looked two sizes too big for him, his hands pressing down on the pillows as if he were pushing with all his remaining strength against the gravitational tug of the grave.

  When the last event ended, I turned the set off, and the small noise woke him. He patted the cushion of the divan, and I sat there, close enough to smell old age on him—old clothes, old skin, old breath. I looked through the lenses of his glasses at the watery whites of his eyes.

  “What are you going to do now, Tonio, with your life?” he asked me in Italian, each word like a heavy stone he’d had to carry up through his chest and push out into the air. Che farai adesso, Antonio, con la tua vita?

  “College, Grandpa.”

  He nodded. I could see the thin blue blood vessels on the sides of his high forehead, crooked little threads through which the last of his life was running. “After the college, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. Something with Russian, maybe.”

  He closed his eyes and opened them. “Not a priest,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “A doctor?”

  “No.”

  “A professor then maybe, in the university.”

  “Il professore,” I said, puffing myself up and dragging out the word. It was an old joke of ours, a term we used, sarcastically, when we saw someone on TV who acted like he knew everything—a reporter, the governor, a political pundit. On certain summer afternoons, our neighbor Jim Shelston used to come by and watch us work in the garden, and offer a small encyclopedia of advice: “You should mulch those peppers more, Dom.” “You should pick those eggplants now, when they’re small, they have more taste that way.” “You shouldn’t let your grandkids play ball here—look, some of your lettuce is broken.” Grandpa would nod, thank him, and go on about his work. And when Mr. Shelston finally wandered back to his own home and his own garden, my grandfather would look at me, raise his eyebrows once, and say, “Il professore.”

  He lifted his eyebrows again now when I said it, pulled his lips back in a version of the old smile, then sank slowly into a tired silence, looking down through his glasses at his loosely folded hands. I would have taken him by the arm and led him to the bedroom, but I had the sense then that he was trying to gather the energy to say something. I looked out into the kitchen, where my grandmother had left the night-light on; the clock above the table was ticking loudly enough for us to hear.

  “Ask me now,” he said at last. Fammi una domanda adesso. “Ask me now, Tonio, if there’s anything you want to know.”

  I looked at him, and then out into the kitchen. Through the window I heard angry voices, then a car door slam, then Rosalie’s footsteps on the porch and on the stairs leading up to the apartment above us. I was suddenly assaulted by questions, overrun by a battalion of questions. What is important, your own work and success or trying to take care of the pain of the people around you? Can you manage both? Where should I live, in Revere or not in Revere? What did you do wrong that you don’t want me to do wrong? Why did what happened to my parents happen? How could something like that happen to us? Why?

  He watched me with some patience, though he must have been exhausted by then. Why did God set it up like this? I wanted to ask him. What is the point of it, of living, of suffering, of people you love leaving you, one after the next, of having to sit and watch all your dreams get picked up and twisted around and set down in a different shape?

  He watched me, and I would have given anything then to have been able to find the question for me, and to have him offer an answer. I would give a great deal now to have been able to summon my Exeter eloquence on that night, some manly expression of gratitude. You saved me, I wished I had said, at least. All the time you spent reading through the catalogues of those schools, all the hours on the ice at the Public Gardens, your stories, your example about going where you were afraid to go, being a quiet, dignified, gentle man instead of something meaner. You saved me from the person I might have been. I know that now, I can feel it, I can see it. How can I thank you? How can I live so as to thank you?

  But nothing came. Nothing, not one word, not a sound. My throat tightened up like a knot being closed in a rope. I knew he was telling me I would never see him alive again; and even with all the practice I’d had, all the warning, I could not bear the thought of that. After a few moments, I felt a tickling in my throat, and the sides of my eyes blurring. I looked away and then back, straight at him. He lifted his frail hand and rested it against the side of my face as he had not done in many years, and he rocked it up and down there once so that the skin and muscle moved back and forth over the bone, and a tear was shaken loose from my left eye, and ran down his finger and wrist and up under the cuff of his sleeve.

  “Help me up now,” he said at last. I stood and pulled him carefully to his feet. He seemed to weigh nothing. We squeezed side by side through the arched kitchen doorway and went as far as the threshold of his bedroom. He held me lightly at the back of the elbow. “Your cousin has her own life,” he said, speaking quietly and hoarsely, almost whispering. La sua propria vita. “A separate life from you.” He squeezed my arm once, and then stepped into his room, and I went down the short hallway and across the corner of the parlor, into mine.

  Twenty

  THERE IS NO FEELING on earth like the feeling of waiting for the death of someone you love. You cannot reach out your hands to help: he is too far away to touch. And, though you desperately want to, you cannot slow down, but must continue to lift your healthy thighs, and pump your healthy arms, and hurry on toward a future you can’t see, and don’t want to see, and want to.

  Guilt, fear, helplessness, rage, impossible hope—every new day carries a new emotion, another bit of weight, as if you are trying to slow yourself down, trying to swing back into step with him. But he staggers on, falling farther and farther behind. Long past the moment when it seems he must surely collapse, he still moves forward on his feet, another breath, another minute, another day. The distance between you increases. You must
look in front of you finally because you can’t keep your head turned back at such an angle. You must look away, though you know what will happen when you look away. You know what you will not see, and want to, and don’t want to.

  I had to leave Revere and return to Exeter. I had to hold my grandfather’s frail body against me on the front porch, and then finally let it go. I could not look into his face in that last minute, when he was standing so close to me. I turned away quickly and, through a gray, watery storm of tears, went down the steps and climbed into the backseat of Uncle Aldo’s Oldsmobile. Uncle Aldo and Aunt Laura were in the front seat, ready to go; my young twin cousins Eliza and Alissa sat beside me, staring at me, perplexed, almost afraid, because of the scope of my grief. My window was down. As the car moved away from the curb, I turned to look. He had come out of the porch and was standing on the top step, one hand resting on the railing. My grandmother was behind him, in the open doorway, and Uncle Peter was standing to his left, supporting him under the elbow. I knew he was trying to wave. I could see that he was trying to lift his hand from the railing and wave good-bye to me, I could see just the fingers move. He turned his head as we started off, following us, and I pushed my face out the window and managed some kind of grotesque smile, stretched, trembling, tears streaming down across it. I saw him open his mouth and lean forward an inch, as if saying one last word, in Italian, that I could not hear.

  DURING THE FIRST LONG DAY back at school, I expected, every minute, to receive the news that he had died. I made the walk from Amen Hall to my classes, watching for the assistant dean to step out of one of the buildings and signal to me, the way I had seen him signal to Johnny Grater when Grater’s brother was killed in Vietnam. In calculus class, in Russian class, in the dining hall, half of me paid attention to what was being said and the other half held a constant vigil. I did not want to be surprised by the news. I did not want it to catch me unawares, the way a boxer is sometimes caught, the opponent’s left hand coming out of darkness while you are watching the right, thundering against the bone to the side of your eye, and smashing you down on your back, on the gritty, sweaty canvas. That had happened to me, twice, and I thought I could avoid part of the pain of it if I saw it coming at me a third time.

  I called home after dinner that night. “He’s the same,” Uncle Peter said over the line, “maybe a half a little bit bettah.”

  “Can he come to the phone?”

  “He had a hard day, Tonio. He’s beat.”

  “I thought you said he was a little bit better.”

  “Half a little bit, I said. He sat at the kitchen table, and Grandma fed him three spoonfuls of soup and a bite of bread. Vito came with the paper, like always, and Grandpa put the paper on his knees and he turned one page. That’s how much bettah we’re talkin about.”

  “You’ll tell me if he gets worse?”

  “Sure I’ll tell you. Whaddaya think, I wouldn’t tell you?”

  “I’ll call tomorrow night.”

  “Call every night this same time. He hears the phone ring, and he knows it’s you, and it makes him happy. If he’s feelin good enough, he’ll get up and talk, okay?”

  My grandfather lived through the next day, and the day after that, and the following week. For a short time it even seemed he might be growing stronger. Once or twice he was awake when I called, and feeling well enough to speak a few sentences into the phone. Those conversations were brief and affectionate scenes in a play. The script called for us to act like old friends chatting over a last peacetime lunch in the park, knowing all the while that an invading army was rolling in to the far side of the city, burning, looting, smashing through the streets and cafés and museums we loved. We talked about my classes, the weather, plans for the garden, expressed our love for each other in a word or two, and said good-bye.

  On other nights my grandmother would come to the phone and say, “He’s about the same, darlin. He sends his love, he’s sleepin now, he loves you.”

  Lydia did not write again. I checked the mailbox three or four times every day—letters from the hockey coach at Brown, from an aunt or uncle or cousin, a card from Uncle Peter with a twenty-dollar bill inside, a note from my friend Leo Markin, saying he was thinking of enlisting in the marines after graduation, and was I interested. But nothing from Lydia. I called her, five different nights. The phone rang and rang in an empty house.

  During the last days of April and the first days of May, I had more time to myself than I’d ever had at Exeter. I spent a lot of it walking. The fields and woods had burst into color after the long dreary winter, and in the afternoons I’d go along the path on the far side of the river, praying for my grandfather, fingering a whole rosary of strung-together memories; beginning—tentatively, guiltily—to imagine a life for myself without him. In those days I had the sense that the nonphysical part of me had grown into a larger size, and was waiting for a suit of clothes that was still being cut and sewn for it, that was not quite ready. I was in the last stretch of my last year, one of the oldest boys at Exeter now, gaining weight and muscle, the hockey season behind me, most of my academic challenges behind me. It seemed to me that one or two more stitches had to be sewn in and tied off, a sleeve finished, a cuff hemmed; another month or two, a few more lessons, and I would shake off completely the tight skin of childhood. There was a lining of impatience to every hour.

  I avoided Lydia’s flat stone, but not for any reason other than the fact that it stood close to the path, and I didn’t want my friends to see me there, sitting with my eyes closed and hands folded.

  In spite of that, though, I began to try to meditate as she’d instructed me, sitting quietly, a neutral observer over a parade of hopes. It was difficult. I found a log by the river, protected from view by a thick growth of underbrush, and I’d sit there for ten or twenty minutes at a stretch, trying to recapture the feeling I’d had during crew practice that one afternoon. It helped me believe I was maintaining some connection with her. It helped me forget, for a few seconds or a few minutes at a time, what was happening on Jupiter Street. On Wednesdays and Saturdays I would go out for a run and always take a route that led past her house. I’d slow down there, look up at the windows, peek into the yard as I passed, checking the door and the driveway and the lawn for signs that she’d returned.

  After one of those runs I came back to Amen Hall via a roundabout route that brought me past the new library and through the door next to the smoking room. I climbed the iron-tipped concrete stairs, pushed through the brown fire doors into the third-floor hall, and saw my friend Chris Jensen there. He was waiting for Higgenbotham outside his room, twirling a squash racquet on its rounded end as if it were a top.

  “Eliasis wants to see you, man,” he said. “Right away.”

  So, in shorts and sweatshirt, I went back through the fire doors, up another flight, and knocked on the door of the faculty apartment. Mr. Eliasis ushered me into his rooms—a real living space, carpeted and full of color. “Please sit down, Anthony,” he said in an oddly formal voice, but by then I had made myself ready. I sat on his sofa. He sat on the edge of a soft chair, hands folded in front of him, forearms balanced across the tops of his thighs. For a second or two he squirmed and fidgeted, almost making eye contact, then he looked at me and said, “Your uncle called half an hour ago with some very sad news.”

  Twenty-one

  I DON’T REMEMBER WHAT Uncle Peter and I said to each other on the ride home from New Hampshire that day, if we said anything at all. What I remember is that instead of going straight to Jupiter Street, he took a different exit off Route 1 and drove to Revere Beach. There would be people waiting for us at the house, we knew that, cousins, friends, neighbors, my grandmother, Uncle Peter’s brothers and sisters. But it seemed the right thing to do to go and spend an hour near the beach before we saw them.

  “Food up theah still lousy?” he asked when we were driving along the Boulevard.

  I nodded, and he pulled into a parking space opposite Bianc
hi’s Pizza. He bought four slices and two sodas, and we carried the food across the street to the hurricane wall and sat there eating and looking out over the sand. Revere Beach was not at its best that day: the tide low, the shoreline strewn with seaweed, litter, broken shells, and smelling of decay and salt.

  “Why do people do that?” my uncle asked, sticking out his jaw to indicate a drift of plastic cups and pizza boxes against the foot of the wall. There was a trash barrel not ten feet behind us. I said I didn’t know.

  It was one of those days when the landing patterns of the big jets took them right over our sparkling little bay. From where we sat, if you looked to your left and out over the water, you could just see them beyond the Nahant Peninsula. A wavering gray smudge against pale blue sky, at first. Then, as they came in over the houses on Nahant, they grew larger—you could see wings, then the landing gear—but they still seemed not to be moving, or to be moving only at the speed a child might walk. And then they were suddenly enormous, right there, roaring so low across the water with the fuselage and windows glinting in the sun, and the wings dipping and lifting, and the tires looking as fragile and soft as the sugar-wheel pastries my grandfather used to buy me at Sully’s store. It seemed absolutely impossible that something so huge and made of metal could hold itself up in the air like that, drop so quickly beyond the homes on Beachmont Hill, touch lightly down on the runway at Logan Airport, and bring its cargo of souls safely to the terminal. But all afternoon you could sit there and see jets strung out over the ocean in a long line, coming back to earth one after another, miracle upon miracle.