In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  “He was lyin in bed,” Uncle Peter said after the roar from one of the larger planes had subsided. “Hurtin pretty bad. We told him the ambulance was comin, and he said he had to get his pants on. I said, ‘No, Pa, don’t worry about it. You can go in your pajamas.’ But he had to get his good pants on first; it meant everything to him to go to the hospital in his good pants. It was strange, Tonio. He sat up like he was as strong as he used to be, and he said, ‘San Rocco,’ just like that, and then he went. I stahted slappin the bottoms of his feet, hahd; I thought I could bring him back. Aunt Laura had to grab my ahms, imagine?” Uncle Peter threw the last crust of pizza into the box and closed the cover. “She said Saint Rocco’s was the name of the church in the place in Italy where he grew up.”

  “It’s where his sister was buried from,” I said.

  “What sista?” Another jet came roaring past. Uncle Peter didn’t look at it, didn’t seem to expect an answer from me.

  “You know what I keep thinkin about?” he said. “I can’t stop it, all the way up to get you I was thinkin about this, that one time he lent me money when I was really down and out and I never paid him back. I used to try to. I swear to God I tried as hahd as I could. The car, the house, money for Rosie—when theah was anythin left ovah I used to try to give it to him, ten bucks, twenty bucks. He’d take it and look at me … he used to look at me like, When are you gonna learn? I’d go out of my house on a Friday night at the end of a week of work, three hundred bills in my pocket, and I’d be plannin in my mind to go see him. But then I’d have to go to Broadway for gas for the car, then I’d remember he wanted some cold cuts from Rigione’s, so I’d go to Rigione’s. Then I was only five minutes from the dog track, so I’d go to the dog track. Three hundred, I used to think, what the hell good is three hundred when I owe him three thousand? I’ll win the three thousand down Wonderland and I’ll wrap the bills in a little piece of paper and stick them in there with the cold cuts, and then I’ll sit down and say, ‘Ma, what about a sangwich for Pa and me,’ and she’d find it, and say, ‘Pietro, what’s this? My God, Pietro!’ I’d imagine it just like that, you know, real as could be. And by the time I finally got to Jupiter Street that night, I’d have a dollar and forty-five cents in my pocket.”

  “He loved you,” I said.

  “Shuah, natchrally, he loved me. But I was the screwup who couldn’t pay him back. When are you gonna learn? his eyes used to say to me. When?”

  “He loved you more than anybody.”

  “What, more? What are you talkin about?”

  “You were his favorite.”

  “How? What? What, favorite? Favorite screwup is what I was. Favorite moron. Big shot with the Cadillac and the new shoes.”

  Twenty-two

  MY GRANDFATHER WAS WAKED at Alessio’s, in the same room where my parents’ caskets had once stood. Thick red carpet on the floor, ushers with somber faces and dark suits, rows of folding chairs, the smell of dozens of floral arrangements that were propped up near the long shining box in which he would be buried. My grandfather had led a quiet life—with the exception of his transatlantic voyages—but over the course of those two days, something like a thousand people came to pay their respects. Priests, tailors, retired presidents from the garment union, neighbors of my aunts and uncles, tough guys and gamblers and the friends who worked construction with Uncle Peter, old-guard Italian Americans—the men with big ears, coarse hands, and white shirts open at the neck, and the women with their hair colored various shades of brown and blue and patent-leather purses in their hands. My grandmother stood just to one side of the casket with a handkerchief and rosary beads in her fingers, and kissed the cheek or shook the hand of most of those visitors. I watched her, studied her. It seemed to me that two out of every three people said something that made her start crying all over again, but that even beneath the steady stream of sadness, there was something stable and confident about her. I wanted that for myself.

  Once, when the river of visitors got dammed up near Aunt Marie, I watched my grandmother reach back, put a hand on her husband’s arm, and squeeze it twice. His body was hard as a stone beneath the nice suit—I know, I touched it, too—but she squeezed it as if it were alive and warm, as if she were setting loose sixty years of companionship to do battle against the cold sureness of death.

  Vito Imbesalacqua was there, of course, with his wife, Lucy, and their children, Peter and Joanie. My other close friends, Leo Markin and Ambrose Romano, shook my hand and squeezed my shoulder and sat with me for a while. Lois Londoner walked through the receiving line on Uncle Peter’s arm. Johnny Blink leaned against the back wall of the room with his hands crossed in front of him. In the middle of the session, Angelo Pestudo showed up with two bull-necked bodyguards. Pestudo was a short, solidly built man with eyes that seemed to be always one-third closed, and a beautiful head of white hair. He was dressed in a silvery silk suit, a white shirt with no tie, and shoes that shone as if they were lightly coated in some precious metal. Though most people pretended not to, everyone watched him. As he stepped through the door, you could feel a quiet ripple of attention go across the room; and then you could feel people try as hard as they could not to stare, not to show that they knew what he was and what he did.

  He did not take a place at the end of the long line, but walked right up to the casket and pretended to say a prayer there—making a foreshortened sign of the cross and bringing his fist to his lips. Then, with a movement that was as slick and forceful and natural as an Olympic figure skater’s turn, he cut in front of someone who was talking to my grandmother and hugged my uncle hard around the neck. There was something elegant about the way he cut in line. His timing was perfect, effortless: he seemed to have been trained from birth to do things like that, to break a rule in public and dare people to stop him. Someone was holding my grandmother by both hands and talking to her, which created a small opening, and into that opening he stepped, canting his wide torso sideways a few degrees so that the movement gave you the feeling he was apologizing, but knew he did not need to. He was a head shorter than Uncle Peter, and when he reached up to hook an arm around my uncle’s neck, the back of his suit jacket lifted up. I looked for a gun there, but there was no gun, no wallet, just the perfect cut of the silk trousers, a surface of fine cloth, without stain. He hugged my uncle and held him for a long time so that Peter had to lean over awkwardly, patting him on the back.

  “Ma,” I heard him say, turning to my grandmother when Pestudo finally released him. “Ma, this heah is Angie Pestudo. He’s in a big rush, but he came by to say he was sorry.” Pestudo leaned in to my grandmother and took one of her hands in both of his, the guards shifting their bullish bodies to either side and glancing quickly right and left as if assassins lurked among the cousins. I could not hear what he said to her, but from where I sat in the front row I could see her face clearly. She knew who he was; everyone in Revere knew who he was. He reached up and cupped the side of her face and her jaw in his hand, and that was the only flaw in his program, the only deduction as far as the judges were concerned. It was too familiar a gesture, and there was something aggressive in it, proprietary, as if, for the benefit of the audience, he was making a point about the relative worth of a heavyset old housewife and the king of the streets. My grandmother did not flinch. Gently, she reached up and took the hand away from her face, brought it back down to the level of her belt and held it there, all the while keeping her eyes fixed on his eyes. She was trumping the king. Without judgment, she was asserting what was right and proper in this room and what wasn’t. Pestudo seemed to know it, too. He cut his act short, bowed to her in a false way, then patted my uncle once on the arm, turned his back on the casket, and paraded with his entourage past the rows of folding chairs, past the ordinary people, the type of people who waited in line, and out into the night.

  Italian wakes, Irish wakes—there’s something of the festival to them. The cousins kissed and talked and took turns standing in the receiving line
, the men from the Holy Name Society came and said a rosary out loud; late in the session someone laughed once in the back of the room, and the noise knocked strangely against my ears. I wanted to observe everything—the pastiness of my grandfather’s embalmed skin; the trembling and sobbing of my aunt Marie, who could not be consoled; the perplexed eyes of the youngest cousins; the rugged face of Vito Imbesalacqua, who sat in the front row a few seats from me, staring at the body of his older friend with an expression that was almost proud, as if Dom had been assigned some difficult tailoring job and completed it well. I wanted to remember everything, hold everything in my mind.

  I wanted, especially, to talk to Rosalie. But she and Caesar huddled side by side in the receiving line and sat together in the folding chairs and stepped out the door for a smoke, exactly like a married couple.

  On the second night, Rosie wore a short dress the color of the mussel shells at Revere Beach—a deep, shimmering purple, with white stitching at the hem—more appropriate for a fancy dinner date than her grandfather’s wake. Halfway through the visiting hours, she came over and sat next to me. Her face was set in the beautiful half-smirk she wore whenever she saw me, and there was tobacco smoke on her breath.

  “It makes me think about your mother and father,” she said.

  I said it made me think about them, too.

  “I don’t know what to do with it, Tonio. It makes me just … it makes everything not make sense.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t seem like you know. It makes you sad, but it doesn’t seem like it wrecks you inside the way it wrecks me.” I’m learning from Grandma, I almost said.

  I had been looking at the banks of floral arrangements, at my uncles and aunts lined up there in their suits and dresses. Rosie had been talking near my right ear, and I turned to face her and saw her eyes and mouth formed into an expression I had not seen there since we were very young. It was as if she were standing in front of me with no clothes on, Rosie without her act. In that one instant I understood her completely—her masks and toughness, her funny stand-up routines that always kept you at arm’s length. I had an urge to say to her, But you’ll die, too, Rosie. You can’t stop it, you can’t change it. Which would have been a terrible thing to say.

  So instead I told her: “Everybody loves you. Your father loves you more than you can begin to imagine,” and I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her against me, so that our chests were a few inches apart and our heads side by side. She erupted in tears then, soaking the shoulder of my suit jacket, squeezing me and squeezing me and sobbing so loudly that eventually Caesar came by with some water for her in a paper cup. I took the water with my left hand and held it a little ways out from my body so it wouldn’t spill on us. Rosalie went on weeping, not acknowledging him in the smallest way. He stood there a minute, awkwardly tugging together the sides of his sport coat, then retreated to his place along the wall and watched us.

  Uncle Peter was watching us, too.

  I held the cup of water out and pulled her close with my other arm, and I tried to concentrate on the fear in myself, a fear I’d been cultivating in some dark garden since I was eleven years old. Now, though, some new light was shining on it, illuminating Rosalie’s life, Uncle Peter’s life, my grandfather’s dignity, Lydia Coughlin’s plainness, my grandmother’s constant prayers. For a moment it seemed obvious to me that the fear of dying was the whole driving force behind Angelo Pestudo. He had to master it; he had to wrestle it and pin it to the floor and convince himself and everyone around him that he was not worried about it, not afraid, when, in fact, he was more afraid than anyone. The prestige, pleasure, and power of his life meant everything to him: how could he even think about losing them? Being special, invincible, superior—his entire identity was tied up in those things: how would he ever be able to let them go and die like an ordinary man?

  For that small moment I saw everyone I knew in the light of the fear of death: everyone faced the same music and made up a different response. But what it always came down to was a choice between running and standing still, between distracting yourself in one of a million different ways, and looking straight at the end of the world as you knew it and walking on, in spite of what you saw there. I made a little vow to myself then, as to how I would try to live. Seventeen, just stepping out into the world, not knowing half what I thought I knew. I made myself a little promise.

  Eventually, Rosie leaned back and kissed me, then went off to wash her face and fix her makeup, and drive around the city until the early-morning hours with Caesar Baskine, trying to cobble together some kind of future for herself that did not include this room.

  The wake ended; the aunts, uncles, and most of the cousins returned to Jupiter Street to eat and talk. Very late that night, when all the relatives and friends had left the house, I was knocked awake in my little room by a sound I could make no sense of. A faint, regular creaking. Some peculiar bird outside the window, I thought. Or my grandfather’s ghost. I lay still beneath the sheets and listened, then got out of bed, pulled on a shirt and a pair of pants, and went into the kitchen. The sound was louder there, I recognized it. I went to the back door and saw my grandmother on the landing outside, wearing only her bathrobe and pajamas against the cool night. She had a basket of laundry at her bare feet, filled with her husband’s clothes, and she was reaching down and pulling out wet undershirts and socks, one after another, shaking them, draping them over the clothesline, pinning them in place. The pulley squealed, a drawn-out shrieking in the Revere night. She bent down for a pair of his socks, pinned them up, tugged once on the hems, lightly, to stretch them into shape, pushed the rope out with one hand.

  “Grandma,” I said quietly through the screen, “it’s late.” But she didn’t turn around.

  Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I went back into the kitchen, buttered two slices of Italian bread, and set them in the toaster oven until the butter in the center of each piece melted so that it almost looked as if an egg yolk had been broken there. When she finished her chore and came inside, she seemed surprised to see me, surprised that it was so dark out and there she was, in her bathrobe, barefoot, hanging clothes. I sat her at the table with the plate of toast in front of her, and she looked at it, then up at me.

  “Eat a few bites,” I said, as she had said to me so many times, “you’ll feel better.”

  Book Four

  One

  I MADE THE TRIP back to Exeter, as always, with scraps of the fabric of Revere sewn into the lining of my coat: my grandmother on the porch in her bare feet; Rosalie’s beautiful, unguarded face a few inches from mine; Uncle Peter scooping armfuls of flowers from the cemetery lawn and throwing them down into the open grave; relatives crowded into the kitchen at 20 Jupiter Street, picking at plates of food and letting themselves laugh, tell a story, or bubble over with tears, now that the funeral was over and the body in the ground.

  Like Joey, I began to feel that the end of the school year was speeding toward me then, that the days were fractions of days, chips of sunlight that were being washed out of our hands and down a sluiceway into the past. There was less than a month left of school, and a languorous air blew in through the open windows of our classrooms. Our teachers pressed and cajoled and pushed us on toward graduation like drivers whipping teams of thirsty horses past a cold stream. We rented canoes, paddled up the Exeter River, roasted hot dogs there and sipped from an illegal beer or two; the seniors in Amen Hall took to staying up until two o’clock in the morning playing a double-elimination Ping-Pong tournament and printing the results on a piece of white cardboard on the wall. I called my grandmother every third night, felt my grandfather’s absence tugging at me, at us, but I could not pretend I wasn’t happy then.

  On the next to the last Friday night in May, I was sitting in the buttroom playing bridge with Higgenbottham and Joey and Joey’s good friend Sterner, when we heard the phone ring in the corridor. Sterner was sitting nearest the door and got up
to answer it. “Suspend play for six minutes, gentlemen,” Higgenbotham called out. A moment later Sterner was back. “Benedetto, some babe for you.”

  Lydia’s voice was like a happy song in my ear. “The Coughlin pool is open,” she said when I answered. “Can you come over on Sunday?”

  I told her that I could, that I wanted to. When she asked how I’d been, I told her about my grandfather, and she said how sorry she was, that she knew how important he had been in my life, and I thanked her and went back to the table and finished the hand in a state of perfect distraction.

  Two

  ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Amen Hall was quiet as a library, my friends out on the fields or tennis courts, or finishing up a final science project in the lab. Joey had been invited to an end-of-the-season barbecue at the home of the track coach.

  I sat on the side of my bed, unable to open a book, turning my eyes to the clock every two minutes. At 4:05 I put my bathing suit on under my jeans, took a towel from the rack in the closet, and went down the stairs and out into the hot day. Because of what Joey had said about people seeing me and Lydia together, I decided to take a roundabout route to her house, choosing back streets and circling around behind the Exeter Inn like a spy.

  She was sitting by the pool. She stood up, said, “I’m so sorry, Anthony, really,” and wrapped her arms around me, her head turned sideways and pressing in against the top of my chest. We had never been physical in that way before—it was always handshakes and nods and a safe distance between our bodies—and I had never seen her in a bathing suit, her middle bare, her round breasts pushing out against the yellow fabric. I turned my back to her quickly—in my confusion I may have been rude—dove in and swam several laps. It probably would have been better for me at that moment if the water had been cold, but the pool was heated. I swam a few more laps, letting my blood quiet, then turned onto my back and floated, watching the clouds in a blue spring sky as they broke apart and knit together again in new shapes. I tried not to think about the feeling of her body against me. I tried to relax again into the sense of being in a place where I did not have to keep any part of myself secret, but I was unsure about that now. Something had changed. I was afraid of it.