In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  Classes ended, exams ended, the underclassmen packed their trunks and suitcases and headed off in their parents’ cars or in airport limousines. The seniors stayed on. We had three empty days in which to pack our belongings, collect our yearbooks, and tie up any loose ends in the bursar’s office, at the bookstore, at the Grill. I had Uncle Leo’s Instamatic, and I remember using half a roll of film taking pictures of the ten-foot-high wrought-iron gate that led into the main quadrangle, something I’d passed by four times a day for two years without giving more than a glance. We were nostalgic like that, excited, nervous, a bit tired from the strain of examinations. I was caught up in those feelings like everyone else, but beyond that, there was a constant note running through every hour of every day for me. Lydia, Lydia, Lydia.

  Graduation was scheduled for the first Saturday in June. On that Friday, after lunch, I met her in a side street behind the fire station, two blocks from Amen Hall, and we headed west in her car. She was wearing a short-sleeved black jersey and a loose summer skirt the color of cornmeal. The skirt rode a little ways up her legs as she worked the pedals and clutch. The day was humid and warm, and we could hear thunder grumbling in the western distance. There was a tangle of traffic on Main Street, some intermittent drops against the windshield. When we had worked free of the town and were heading into the countryside at last, we saw a spectacular display of lightning in front of us, and then a hard rain began to fall. “Do you have a lot of people coming up for graduation?” she asked above the sound of it.

  “Two cars’ worth. My grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins.”

  The wipers squeaked and slapped; she leaned forward and peered at the road.

  “You’ll be there, too, won’t you?”

  “I don’t think so, Anthony.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t care who knew.”

  She didn’t answer. We were traveling west on Route 101, the highway where her husband and son had been killed. Trucks sped past in the opposite direction, throwing clouds of dirty spray against the windshield. The heaviest rain had ended, but we could hear thunder behind us, and see the occasional bright flash in the mirrors.

  “The ceremony is going to be outdoors if the weather’s good,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant and grown-up, though something about the conversation, something about her posture and tone of voice and the way she would not look at me, made it seem that the wet ground was moving sideways under the wheels. “There will be a couple thousand people there.… You could just hang out on the fringe and give me a little wave or something, couldn’t you?”

  She didn’t smile or speak and seemed to me to be concentrating on the driving more than she really needed to. I did not like to think about the graduation ceremonies, partly because it meant leaving her in Exeter, and partly because I had promised Joey to take his sister, Regina, to the Principal’s Luncheon after the diplomas were awarded. Ever since I had slept with Lydia for the first time, it had been gnawing at me. I knew Regina wasn’t coming all the way from Sacramento just to meet me. On the other hand, I knew Joey had been building me up to her, that the Principal’s Luncheon was no ordinary date (there was a tradition at Exeter having to do with the number of boys who had eventually married the girl they took to the luncheon), that Regina would be coming east to visit an aunt in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for two weeks in late July, that I was supposed to be a virgin, and unattached, that I hoped to stay friends with Joey for the rest of my life. I couldn’t tell him about Lydia yet—it was still too private for me, too precious—but I did not like the feeling that I was living a lie.

  We turned off the highway and away from the darkest part of the storm. In a gusty rain we went north along a smaller road, two tar lanes that snaked past houses with rusty bicycles on their porches, peeling shingles, wheel-less pickup trucks on concrete blocks in muddy front yards. It was the domain of the poor of rural New England, another secret life. We came upon a sagging, dripping little town, and as we passed through the pitiful commercial strip, she said, “My sister’s gotten worse, she’s going to have to be hospitalized. I’m going out there to help care for her kids.”

  Her voice broke slightly on the last word. It made me happy to hear that break, to think that she would miss me, and then, arcing over that mean little happiness came a spark of understanding of what she was saying to me, and an explosion of self-pity. “It’s the truth this time?”

  She looked across the seat. “Not a very nice way to ask. Yes, it’s the truth.”

  “When are you going?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if I will.… After she dies. After everything is settled there, maybe.”

  We were in the country again, hills covered with fir trees, everything green and black and wet. We passed through another hard shower and a hard stretch of silence.

  “You’re just going to go then and not come back. That’s it?”

  “You make it sound like … like it’s as simple for me as—”

  “Isn’t it?”

  She didn’t answer, and I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep the rest of the words in. One more step in that direction, one more ugly sentence, and I felt we would be instantly transformed into enemies. I felt the possibility of that, the sweet, miserable power of it. Hurt for hurt. But I had never had much taste for purposely hurting people, and I thought there might still be some hope, something I had not understood correctly. So I swallowed once and took a breath and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your sister.”

  She drove on for a minute without speaking. I turned to look at her. “We’re very close,” she said at last. “I told her about Phillip and his girlfriend. I told her about you.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone. No one would understand it the right way. They wouldn’t believe it or they’d think I was bragging or they’d think it was about something else. My friends would think that, my family. Everybody.”

  She nodded twice as I said this, two small dips of her head that felt like love to me. We had never used that word, not during the hours when we were together in bed, not sitting on her sun porch, or saying good night at the door. There was real warmth in those times, friendship, physical joy, vulnerability, but now something new was set in place around them, the thin membrane of trust that always surrounds real love, and can be broken open with a single selfish action. She kept her eyes forward, but I could sense another wave of relaxation in her, the quick approach of tears. There is no feeling in the world like the feeling of losing someone you love to an early death. It is an immense experience, excruciating and absolute. It presses your face against a cold stone wall and holds you there like the hand of a torturer, giving you every opportunity to cry out that you believe in nothing, no kindness, no spirit world, nothing but the reality of your own pain and loss. Everyone cries out then. Everyone curses goodness into nonexistence.

  And then time passes; some people step back from the sharpest part of the pain and are able to look around and see that they are not unique, that they have not been singled out after all, that there is yet one more dimension to things, a dimension they had not seen or imagined. That kind of pain, and that movement into something beyond it, had marked my life, the way it had marked Lydia’s.

  For a moment then, I was able to step out of my dark closet of concern about myself and imagine what the breathing days were like for her, what that drive was like on the other side of the front seat. The wound of the death of her son had been reopened for her on that day—driving through the same countryside, with a young man she was trying to say good-bye to. Somehow I understood that, and somehow I was able to let go of the last of my hope then. It was as if, after months of probing and trying, we had at last stumbled upon the line of intimate contact between us, the deepest surface where we were joined, and that was enough.

  “Anastasia understands,” she said. “She’s in a great deal of pain now. You can hear the pain in her
voice when you talk to her on the phone. Her body is breaking down in a dozen different ways. She can no longer urinate. There’s no longer enough moisture to lubricate the lids of her eyes. She says it feels as if her bones are being cut with electric saws. But she laughed for a second when I told her. She said I was crazy, that I had always been the crazy sister. I could tell by her voice that she understood it the way I wanted her to, and didn’t judge me.”

  “Because she’s dying,” I blurted out. Lydia looked at me with two strokes of surprise at the corners of her mouth and one tear trembling at the side of her eye. She turned forward again, brushed at the eye, and after another minute, said, “Someday there will be someone special in your life, and you’ll want to tell her.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Wait till I die, and then tell anyone you want.”

  I looked away from her, out the side window at the black tree trunks. I had hoped to make one of my little jokes, but I could not get the words to come out. We went a mile in a miserable silence, and then I took a breath and said, “I’ll wait then, alright? That’s what I’ll do.” And that’s what I have done.

  We drove the back roads of eastern New Hampshire in the rain, listening to one of her tapes of Bach, a music I did not like then. We went all the way as far as the southern tip of Lake Winnipesaukee. In place of my elaborate fantasies of a future with her, I was left with a drizzling present moment—the silvery drops, the wipers knocking, the sight of the veins beneath the skin of the backs of her hands—and something fine and rare slipping away from me.

  We stopped for sandwiches and coffee in a place called Alton Bay. I remember a jukebox in the restaurant, and posters of Red Sox baseball players on knotty-pine walls. I remember trying to punish her with my stubborn silence, and then seeing how foolish it was to do that, how childish, how wrong.

  I insisted on paying for the sandwiches. By the time we finished eating, the rain had stopped, and we left her car in the unpaved lot and walked along the western shore of the big lake, the wind kicking up bits of grit against the sides of our faces, licking at the hem of her skirt. I had then, with her, a feeling I’ve known only rarely in my adult life. Walking along beside the lake, with the sun trying to break through the western edge of the rain clouds, I had the very clear sense that we were two pieces of the same living self. There were differences, of course—we were male and female, young and middle-aged, taller and shorter; we had different names and different histories and different ideas about things—but those were the equivalent of slight irregularities in the two halves of a peach that has just been sliced open. I turned, and our eyes met for a second as we walked, and it was as if we were each other’s reflected essence. I believe she felt it, too. She smiled. She reached out and put four fingers in the back left pocket of my jeans for thirty or forty steps, the way a grown woman might touch a grown man, and we walked as far as an old wooden bandstand in a park, then turned around and headed back along the shore.

  Epilogue

  IT SO HAPPENED THAT my cousin Augustine—named after my father—had come home alive and unhurt from Vietnam that same week, and so the party held at Jupiter Street on the day of my Exeter graduation was really for both of us. Rosalie and Caesar never made an appearance (though I thought I heard the ah-ooh-gah horn once on Park Avenue). Other than that, and my grandfather’s absence, and the way my little success seemed to highlight, all over again, the fact that my parents weren’t alive, it was not so different from the spontaneous gathering that had formed when our number came in, six summers before, almost to the day. Cousin Mike stood at the grill with an apron on, turning over sausages and hot dogs with a pair of tongs. The uncles smoked cigars and sipped from cans of beer, the aunts commandeered the picnic table and sent gales of laughter out over the yard. My grandparents’ old friends sat on lawn chairs in the shade, and the younger cousins raced back and forth at the edges of the crowd, screeching and shouting, building a little happy history for themselves.

  My grandmother sat on one of the metal lawn chairs under the grapevine, and I sat beside her there for the last part of the afternoon, getting up from time to time to refill her glass of orange soda or to bring her something sweet from the dessert table. The uncles, aunts, and older cousins gave me envelopes with cards and money in them; that was the tradition. My grandmother kept the cards in her lap, and it was nice to have that money, and nice to receive the compliments and congratulations, but, really, I was embarrassed by the fuss, especially with Augustine there.

  My mother’s friend Lois Londoner came, my cousin Angelo walking beside her holding a large, wrapped box. I took off the ribbon and the paper and found, inside, probably a hundred dollars’ worth of new drawing pencils, sketchpads, pastel chalks, brushes, and books on how to sketch and paint.

  “I just had a hunch,” she said, holding one of her shaking hands on my knee and leaning toward me for a kiss. “Probably you would have rather gotten money, but I remembered your mother saying you liked to draw and paint when you were a little boy. I just had this feeling.”

  The hot afternoon light changed and slowly faded. My grandmother kept the stack of envelopes on her lap, as if for comfort. From time to time she would reach out and lay a hand on my wrist. Once, she said, “Did you find somebody for yourself, Ahndonyo? The girl you like?”

  I said yes, I thought I had, the sister of a good friend, but it was too early to be sure, and she smiled, patted my arm, and looked at me for so long and with such love that it made me uncomfortable, and I turned my eyes away. I said, “I miss Grandpa.”

  “He has a gift for you.”

  “He does? He did? He left something?”

  “He told Uncle Peter to give it to you.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll see—Uncle Peter said he’ll give it later. After it gets dark.”

  There is a beautiful quality to summer evenings in Revere, a certain light, a certain softness to the air that has to do, I think, with its proximity to the ocean on the one hand, and its proximity to the smoke and steel of the city on the other. The salt and grit and moisture in the atmosphere seem to catch up the edges of sounds and spin them off into the shadows. The shouts of children, the slap of a screen door, even the rumble and mutter of the bus engines on Park Avenue—they reach your ear as something frail and sweet, accordion keys touched lightly beyond a gauzy curtain.

  Night fell, some of the neighbors left. Just when it seemed the party was finally ending, we heard someone cough loudly on the raised square patch of yard that was bounded on the south by the grapevine, on the east by the back of the house, and on the north and west by neighbors’ fences. It was full dark by then. I turned to look over my shoulder but, in the light from my grandmother’s back porch, I could make out only the bottom part of a pair of gray trousers, a sharp crease, expensive shoes. There was another cough, sort of a drawn-out throat-clearing, and everyone stopped talking and turned to try and see what was going on. “Your present, Ahndonyo,” my grandmother said.

  An empty moment, a hesitation, and then a beautiful voice striking and holding a long first note. It took me a few seconds to realize the sound was coming from my uncle’s mouth, because it had nothing in common with the voice he used for speaking, but was much higher and sweeter, as clear as a crystal bowl being tapped with the tip of a spoon. By the second note I already recognized the song he was singing. “Lenta Va La Luna, Lenta La Luna Va,” it is called (“Slowly Goes the Moon, Slowly the Moon Goes,”) a tremendously sad Neapolitan ballad about a grown man’s gratitude for the women in his life—his mother, his daughters, his wife. It is an appreciation of the purity and power of genuine emotion, and the territory—profound, mysterious, utterly vulnerable—onto which emotion opens the soul.

  His voice went around and around through the notes, twisting like sweet smoke above the yard.

  Tendo un braccio

  Tendo una mano

  Cercando il proprio cuore

  It was a high, elegan
t voice, something he would never have offered us on that night if Caesar Baskine or Johnny Blink or Angelo Pestudo had been anywhere within ten blocks of the house. He would never have shown himself to them in that way because he had come of age in a country of competition and money, in a subculture shadowed by terrified and violent men who believed their only hope of salvation was to terrify others, to close them up, to shake them free of the warm inheritance of their heart.

  Not a person in the yard moved or spoke; even the smallest children were fairly quiet for the two or three minutes the song lasted.

  I have to admit that when my grandmother told me about the gift, I’d pictured something like the inheritances of my Exeter friends—ten thousand dollars in my bank account, the deed to the house, or at least to the upstairs apartment, a car of my own, the horse Uncle Peter had once promised Rosie and me—something grandiose and expensive, some shiny symbol of my grandfather’s abiding love. Instead, all he had left me was this: a boxer, a former tough guy, singing in a high, beautiful voice on a summer night in Revere. I hugged Uncle Peter when he finished, and thanked him, and thanked my grandmother, but it was years and years before I really understood what had been given to me on that night.