In Revere, In Those Days Read online

  Acclaim for Roland Merullo and

  In Revere, In Those Days

  “In his willowy-tough style, Merullo creates characters as familiar as the man at the corner store, as breathtaking as a winner at the track.”

  —Boston Magazine

  “[This] novel is so true that it has the authenticity of a memoir. It will, I think, be compared—and favorably—to A Separate Peace. … I can’t remember the last time I was moved to tears by a novel in the way that I was, at several junctures, with In Revere, In Those Days. It is an extraordinary achievement.”

  —Anita Shreve, author of The Pilot’s Wife and The Weight of Water

  “Beautiful and shapely.… The rhythm of the chapters beguile.… The sacrament of Italian American family lives in the heart of the words, displayed with perfect clarity and utter humanity.… A pleasure to read, and to read again.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “A beautiful story—told with the compelling voice of a writer who is willing to approach the enormous question of redemption, and does so with truthfulness and striking decency.”

  —Elizabeth Strout, author of Amy and Isabelle

  “Emotionally complex, politically intelligent, beautifully written: Among the best from a novelist in the classic American tradition.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  “The gifted Merullo tells Anthony’s bittersweet coming-of-age story with crafty narrative and a beautifully vivid depiction of the time and place.… Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “A clear-eyed and compassionate fictional memoir of family, place, and first love, squarely in the tradition of such American masterworks as Richard Russo’s Empire Falls and Kent Haruf’s Plainsong.”

  —Howard Frank Mosher, author of The Fall of the Year

  Roland Merullo

  In Revere, In Those Days

  Roland Merullo is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Brown University. He has written for Newsweek, Forbes FYI, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other publications. He is the author of three previous, highly praised novels, the most recent of which, Revere Beach Boulevard, was a finalist for the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. He lives with his wife and two children in Massachusetts.

  Also by

  ROLAND MERULLO

  Leaving Losapas

  (1991)

  A Russian Requiem

  (1993)

  Revere Beach Boulevard

  (1998)

  Revere Beach Elegy

  (2002)

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 2003

  Copyright © 2002 by Roland Merullo

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, a member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Shaye Areheart/Harmony edition

  as follows:

  Merullo, Roland.

  In Revere, in those days : a novel / by Roland Merullo.—1st ed.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42634-5

  1. Italian-American families—Fiction. 2. Revere (Mass.)—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.E748 I5 2002

  813′.54—dc21 2002003454

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  for my cousins

  Acknowledgments

  I WOULD LIKE TO thank, first of all, my wife, Amanda, for her steady love and her courage. My gratitude, also, to Eileen Merullo, Steven Merullo, and Kenneth Merullo for their lifelong support; to Craig Nova for the dignity with which he leads the writer’s life and for many favors; to my friends Peter Grudin, Dean Crawford, John Recco, Blair Orfall, Arlo Kahn, Steven Cramer, Nadya Shokhen, and Volodya Tokarev for their encouragement and editorial advice; to Noelle Rouxel-Cubberly for her kind help with the details of Italian grammar; to Ed Desrochers for information about Exeter Academy; to Bob Jasse for his hometown enthusiasm; to the Massachusetts Cultural Council for a generous grant; to my aunts and uncles, living and dead, for their unfailing warmth, then and now; to my wonderful agent, Cynthia Cannell, for her loyalty and optimism; and to my superb editor, Shaye Areheart, and her fine crew, who supported this story from their first look.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Other Books by This Author

  Acknowledgments

  Book One

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Book Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Book Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Book Four

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Epilogue

  Tell me:

  Which is the way I take;

  Out of what door do I go,

  Where and to whom?

  THEODORE ROETHKE

  from “The Lost Son”

  Book One

  Prologue

  MY NAME IS ANTHONY BENEDETTO, and I live what might be called a secret life. By this I don’t mean that I’m some kind of sophisticated criminal—a safecracker, a cybercrook—masquerading as a good citizen. I’m not a former spy or undercover FBI agent who’s been sent to live in hiding with a new identity. Just the opposite, in fact. Those would be exotic lives, and my life is plain and ordinary, a smooth stone among a billion stones on a beach. I have a good marriage, a lovely daughter, a home on six acres in the hills of central Vermont. I work as a painter—portraits mostly—and though I make a respectable living at it, I am neither wealthy nor, outside a small circle of critics and artists, well-known. I dress in jeans and running shoes, flannel shirts in winter and T-shirts in summer, and I drive a two-year-old Toyota Camry that has, on its bumper, only a small SAVE TIBET sticker far over on the passenger side below the rear lights. Even that, I sometimes think of scraping away.

  If you passed me on the streets of this sleepy little town, you’d see an average-looki
ng middle-aged man burdened by the usual cares and lifted by the small pleasures of the modern domestic whirl. What I mean when I say “secret life” is that I often feel the visible part of me is a plain wrapper that hides a gem. I feel that way about people in general: there is the wrapping, and then there is a sort of finer essence. She is tall, sexy, greedy; he is loud, brilliant, addicted to amphetamines. We are crude, generous, beautiful, vicious; we wear a patchwork disguise made from a hundred talents, habits, and needs, and underneath it lies this spark of something else, something larger than our labels and flaws. You can see that spark clearly in children before the coat of the personality grows too thick. You can sense it when you first fall in love, before the beloved’s failings and troubles swell up into view; and then, later, if you’ve come to terms with the failings and troubles and have built a mature affection. It’s not that I don’t see the evil, pettiness, and pain in the world; believe me, I’ve seen it, I see it. It’s just that I also seem to have an eye for the secret essence that lies beyond that, the gem in plain wrapping.

  This is a story of the rescue of one soul. It’s the story of an ordinary kid who had all the shell burned off him, all the armor. Something like that happens to most people in the course of a life, I think, though not usually at such a young age. It takes different forms: the death of a parent, spouse, or close friend; divorce, disappointment, disability. Afterward, you go through the world naked and raw, skinless, hopeless. Sometimes the pain only grows worse as the years pass, and you end your life in a cold pool of despair. Other times—if you are lucky, or blessed, or, as the Buddhists would say, if your karma is good—someone comes along and heals you, or helps you heal yourself.

  I have lived now, healed and at peace, for half a life without ever feeling much inclination to tell this story. But two winters ago, after eighteen childless years of marriage, my wife, Regina, gave birth to a daughter. Our luck, our blessing, our good karma. And then, just about the time Rosalie reached the age where she was beginning to learn words, I was overtaken by an urge to write this down, to make it public. For her to read someday, I suppose. For myself. For the people who raised me.

  One

  THE STORY DOES NOT take place here in Vermont, but in a small city called Revere, Massachusetts, which lies against the coastline just north of Boston. Three miles by two miles, with a salt marsh along its northern edge and low hills rising like welts in an irregular pattern across its middle, Revere must seem to the outside eye like an uninspiring place. The houses stand very close to each other and close to the street—plain, wood-frame houses with chain-link fences or low brick walls surrounding front yards you can walk across in six steps. These days the city has a crowded, urban feeling to it: sirens in the air, lines of automobiles and trucks at the stoplights and intersections, thin streams of weeds in the tar gutters.

  But forty years ago, Revere was a different place. There were amusements and food stands along its curve of sandy beach, making it a sort of slightly less famous Coney Island. And there were still some open lots pocking the narrow streets, blushes of wildness on the tame city skin. Not far from where I lived, a mile west of the beach, was a large tract of undeveloped land we called “the Farms,” though nothing had been cultivated there since before the Korean War. For my friends and me, for city kids like us, the Farms was a landscape from a childhood fable: pastures, boulders, half-acre ponds, fallow fields where we turned over stones and planks and pieces of corrugated metal and reached down quick and sure as hunters to take hold of dozing snakes—brown, green, black. The snakes would slither and writhe along our bare wrists, and snap their toothless gums against the sides of our fingers, and end up imprisoned in mayonnaise jars with holes banged into the metal tops. We carried them home like bounty from a war with the wilderness, and sold them to younger boys for ten or fifteen cents apiece.

  The automobile had not yet quite been elevated to the position of worship it now holds. The streets were freer and quieter. Hidden behind the shingled, painted houses were backyards in the European style, with vegetable gardens given preference over lawns, with fruit trees and grape arbors, and ceramic saints standing watch over a few square feet of flower bed.

  Revere is a thoroughly modern place now, a corner of blue-collar America with chain stores and strip malls and yellow buses lined up in front of flat-roofed schools. A hundred new homes have been squeezed onto the Farms, streets cut there, sewer and electric lines brought in. But in some way I have never really understood, the city had a mysterious quality to it in those days, as if it lay outside time, beyond the range of vision of the contemporary American eye. Provincial is a word you might have used to describe it. But provincial means that a community believes itself to be living at the center of the universe, that it refuses to make an idol of the metropolis. Revere was provincial then, in that way. And, I suppose, proud of it.

  Even in the days when Jupiter Street was quiet enough for nine uninterrupted innings of a local game called blockball, even then there was an underside to the life we believed we were living. The collection of bad characters known as the underworld, or the mafia, or the mob, had a number of nests in Revere. These people, in my experience, in the experience of almost everyone in the city, had little in common with the fantasy underworld you see these days on movie and television screens. For most of us, the face of the mafia was found in nothing more terrifying than a coterie of local bookmakers—neighbors, family friends, the guy beside you in the pew at nine o’clock Mass—men who made their living from the yearning of their neighbors toward some higher, softer life. In this way perhaps they were not so different from modern-day suburban portfolio managers.

  The people in our neighborhood did not have executive jobs, did not commute into the city in suits and nice dresses, reading neatly folded copies of the Wall Street Journal, did not have parents and grandparents who had gone to college, and, with one or two exceptions, did not go to college themselves. They rode the subway into offices and warehouses in Boston, or drove their five-year-old Chevies to the factories in Lynn—where my father worked, in fact—and spent their lives in bland cubicles or hot, loud workrooms, performing the same few tasks again and again as their youth dribbled away. On Fridays they took a dollar from their pay envelope, walked down to the butcher shop on Park Avenue, and had a quiet conversation there with a man we called “Zingy.” Zingy would take the money, record the lucky number—a wife’s birthday, a father’s license plate—then sell his loyal customer half a pound of mortadella and a package of Lucky Strikes. And the workingman would go home to his cluttered life in his drafty house and fall asleep clutching a tendril of a dream that he might “hit,” that “the number” would come in for him and his family that one time, and then all the world’s harsher edges would be rubbed smooth.

  Of course, in Revere and elsewhere, one of the things that has changed in the last forty years is that the government has taken over Zingy’s job. Now people walk down to a corner store and print out their lucky number on a blue-edged lottery form, and carry away the receipt (something that, after certain highly publicized arrests, Zingy stopped offering). But they go to sleep holding tight to the same dream. Only now, a portion of the profits goes to the state, to be spent by bureaucrats and politicians, whereas in earlier times the money went from the bookies upward—or, more accurately, downward—to a handful of violent, sly men in smoky private clubs, to be spent on jewelry for their girlfriends and vacations in Las Vegas.

  The bookmakers were the mob’s menial laborers, though, and didn’t have exotic girlfriends or take exotic trips. Without exception, the ones I knew were affable, modest men who had stumbled into their profession by accident, or taken it up as a second job, the way someone else might put in a few hours delivering lost airport luggage or standing the night watch at an office building. But they were part of the fabric of Revere, too.

  Occasionally, the uglier side of that fabric was turned to the light. In the 1960s there was a turf war going on in Greater Bost
on among different factions of the underworld—the Irish, the Jews, the various bands of Italians. This was closer to the movie version, to that brutal, hateful way of life modern moviegoers seem so attracted to—as if it isn’t quite real and could never affect them. We would be listening to the news in our kitchen at breakfast and hear that a body had been found in a nearby city, or in Revere, a mile or two miles away—in the trunk of a car, on a street corner, behind a liquor store. Shot once in the back of the head, never any witnesses. Whenever these reports were broadcast, my mother would turn the radio off. I remember her bare freckled arm reaching up to the windowsill and twisting the nickel-sized black dial on the transistor radio, as though she might keep that aspect of Revere from my father and me, and maybe from herself as well. As if protecting us from life’s unpleasant truths was as simple as slicing away the mealy sections of an overripe cantaloupe and bringing to the table only the juicy golden heart of it. “That’s not Revere,” she would say. As if she were insisting: That is not cantaloupe, that part we scrape into the metal bowl and carry out to the garbage pail.

  I understand why she did that. Like most of the people in Revere, she and my father went about their lives in a straightforward, honest fashion, and didn’t much appreciate the fact that the Boston newspapers and TV stations gave so much attention to the mafia, and so little to the ordinary heroism of the household, the factory, and the street. I’ve inherited some of my parents’ attitudes. I don’t much appreciate the fact that, to this day, the Italian-American way of life has been reduced to a television cliché: thugs with pinkie rings slurping spaghetti and talking tough. My story has nothing to do with that cliché. Almost nothing.

  But the mob was a part of Revere in those days; it’s pointless to deny that. The Martoglios shouting at each other at the top of Hancock Street when I delivered the Revere Journal on Wednesday afternoons was part of Revere. The dog track, the horse track, the hard guys and losers in the bars behind the beach, the crooked deals worked out near City Hall, the lusts, hatreds, feuds, petty boasts—it was all as much a part of that place as the neighbor who shoveled away the snow the city plow had left at the bottom of your driveway on the night of a storm, when you were off visiting your mother or sister or friend in the hospital; or the happy shouts of young families on the amusement rides; or my grandparents’ neighbor Rafaelo Losco, who once, in the middle of a conversation with my mother, when I was five or six years old, broke from his cherry tree a yard-long branch heavy with ripe fruit, and handed it across the back fence to me.