In Revere, In Those Days Read online

  Though I sometimes want to, I cannot paint a place, or a family, or a life—my place, my family, my life—in the pretty hues of cheap jewelry. I can’t give only one-half of the truth here, because what I want to say to my daughter is not: Life is a sweet cantaloupe, honey; smile and be glad, eat. But: Life can be bitter and unfair and mean, and most people rise part of the way above that, and some people transcend it completely and have enough strength left over to reach out a hand to someone else, light to light, goodness to good, and I grew up among people like that—not in sentimental novels or on the movie screen, but in fact. They were imperfect people, who struggled to see the decency and hope in each other, and if I can be like them, even partly like them, I will, and so should you. A road across the territory between too extremes, a middle way—that’s what I want to offer her. Between denial on the one hand and despair on the other, between sappiness and cynicism. A plain road, across good land.

  Two

  WE LIVED—MY MOTHER, father, and I—in a wood-shingled, gambrel-roofed house on Jupiter Street, in the western part of Revere, a seven-minute drive from the Atlantic Ocean. Domenic and Lia, my father’s parents, owned the house; we rented the rooms on the second floor: kitchen, two small bedrooms, living room, bath. In winter the old iron radiators clanked and hissed, and my father tacked ribbons of speckled gray felt to the window frames. From the middle of June to Labor Day, we sweated in our beds.

  On the morning after one of those June nights, we had just sat down to breakfast when the buzzer sounded at the door. I was eleven years old, there were three days left of school, and the morning air was touched, as it often was, with the salty breath of the ocean. I remember it blowing in through the screens, the soft, excited voice of summer, whispering something about an afternoon at the beach. And I remember the buzzer sounding, harsh and brittle, just as the food was being served. My mother let out an exasperated sigh at the ugliness of the noise. My father frowned, looked over at me, lifted his chin in the direction of the hallway. I trotted along the squeaking wood floor and pushed the plastic button at the top of the stairs. The handle clicked, the door swung inward, and one of my father’s five brothers stood there with the sun shining through the porch screens on his bald head, one hand in the pocket of his fine silk pants, the other arm held slightly away from his body.

  He looked up at me, blinked, pursed his lips, but did not make any move to step across the threshold. Something played beneath the muscles of his face, some half-suppressed comic pulse. “What are you doin?” he said, jingling the change in his pants pocket.

  “Eating.”

  “What, eatin? What are you doin, eatin?”

  “Pancakes.”

  He squeezed his eyebrows together, puckered the muscles at the corners of his lips. He still had not moved. His face was a mask of perfect seriousness, a battered and misshapen face, prototype for some Rush-more of the bankrupt and brokenhearted. He said, “Fluffy or flat?”

  “My mother makes them nice, fluffy. She heats the syrup on the stove and melts the butter in it.”

  “What’s the syrup?”

  “Regular Jemima.”

  “And she heats it up, you shuah? That’s what a gourmay cook in Paris would do. You positive?”

  I nodded.

  He jingled his change again, tugged twice at his big nose. “What else?”

  “Three more days of school left.”

  “School? What, school? What three more days? You’re not goin today. You’re skippin. We need to ride around.”

  “I have to.”

  “Have to, my eyeball. You’re skippin. How’s your girl?”

  “I don’t have a girl.”

  “No?”

  “No, Uncle.”

  “Then who was that gorgeous blonde I seen you walkin with down Broadway last night, then?”

  “Aunt Ulla,” I said.

  At this, he almost smiled. He made a big fist and lifted it slowly into the yellow light. “You’re goin around with my wife? I’ll come afta ya.”

  “Tonio, who is it?” my mother called from the kitchen.

  “Uncle Peter.”

  “Well, tell him to come up; your pancakes are getting cold.”

  “He likes them flat, you make them fluffy. He won’t come.”

  “Listen to this kid, willya?” he said from the bottom of the steps.

  “Aunt Ulla loves me, not you,” I told him. “You’re finished. We’re running away to California without you.”

  He was starting up the steep wooden stairs now, shined shoes scuffing each tread, his head lowered, his nose like the rudder of a ship, holding him more or less on course. “California,” he said when he was halfway up, the next to the last syllable pronounced “fawn.” Cali-fawn-ya. “Where you gonna get the dough?”

  “From you. She raided your bank account.”

  “What bank account?” he said, and the twist of a smile appeared on his mouth at last. “Who told you I have a bank account?”

  He squeezed his hands into fists, huge scarred fists with which he had, at one time, fashioned his small moment of fame. He plodded up the last two steps and swung a roundhouse right, three-quarters speed. I reached up my left arm and half-blocked it, half-slipped the punch as he had taught me … only his other hand was driving an uppercut into my belly and would have caught me, hard, but just as it reached the front of my shirt, he popped the fingers open, flashed a silver dollar, slipped it into my pocket. In the next instant he had picked me up in one arm and was carrying me along the hallway as if I were a two-year-old. He hoisted me over the back of the chair and set me down there, gently, then touched my father on the side of the neck with the backs of three fingers, kissed my mother, took the empty seat at one end of the table.

  “Gus,” he said, swinging his eyes to my father and pulling twice more on his nose. “Gus, I had this unbleevable dream.”

  Three

  AT ONE TIME IT had seemed that this uncle, Peter Domenic Benedetto, would break the mold he had been born into, the hard pattern of life in his city by the beach. For a few years it had appeared that even the cables of loyalty to a neighborhood and affection for a family—those twin steel bonds of the working class—could not hold him. Born fourth in a family of nine children, he seemed an ordinary enough boy at first. But shortly after he started school, some hidden gene bloomed in him, some inheritance from a deep ancestral past of field-workers and stone workers: he grew and grew. In the third grade he was a head taller than the tallest of his classmates; he had the arms and shoulders of a miniature man. By the sixth grade, he stood five feet eight inches tall. By the ninth grade, he was two inches over six feet, 180 pounds; he’d been introduced to boxing, and was already something of a local legend, sprinting up the steep hill of South Cambridge Street with a brick in each hand, knocking out school-yard bullies, happily and naturally taking on the role of protector of his family’s good name.

  He was not especially nice-looking—the big nose, the slightly protruding brow—not especially adept at schoolwork. But he had the gift of being remarkably at ease with people, all types of people, in all kinds of situations, and he had his phenomenal strength and an exquisite singing voice. His voice was at the high end of the tenor range, delicate, complicated, almost girlish in certain notes. In his middle age, the years when I saw him almost every day, that voice became a source of great shame to him; his rugged face was also a source of shame, as was the fact that he had worked his way up through the Golden Gloves finals, far up into the heavyweight ranks, only to be beaten senseless in his twenty-eighth professional fight, the fight that would have made him a national star instead of a local one. It was typical of him, probably typical of all of us, to be ashamed of what might elsewhere be considered a source of pride. We lived—men and women both—by our own skewed set of commandments: unblemished toughness, unquestioned self-sacrifice, generosity carried to the point of the absurd. Anything short of perfection was, for us, a species of failure. All our strength came from
that, and all our wreckage.

  For my uncle, that defeat in the ring marked the farthest stretching point of the cables of the city of Revere. After that brief foray into the outside world (he had been beaten at Madison Square Garden with his father, brothers, and one sister in attendance; he’d been knocked down twice in the first round by a black contender from New Jersey named Edgar Wellison; his nose had been broken, his lips rearranged. My father told me he had somehow stayed on his feet until the final minute of the tenth round, then fallen over sideways like a wooden soldier and spent the next six days in the hospital), Uncle Peter retreated to familiar territory and settled without a great deal of visible regret into the life he was living when he visited us on that June morning. The doctors advised him never to box again, and he never really resisted them. Though he joked about his fighting days with some grace and humility, he never brought up the subject first, never showed off old newspaper clippings, would even sometimes step outside for a few puffs from a cigarette when the subject came up. He sang in church and nowhere else, and then, after his only child reached the age of First Communion, stopped going to church. On his sprint up the slippery, dirty, bloodstained heavyweight hill, he had seen things and met people his siblings could only imagine—he’d been to exotic places like Nevada and Arizona, shaken hands with senators and show-business personalities, been treated to drinks and meals at fancy Manhattan clubs—and in one of those places he’d had the great misfortune of meeting Ulla Berensen, the sexy blond daughter of Norwegian immigrants. He courted her with lavish gifts he could not afford and elaborate promises he would never be able to keep, married her, brought her back to the clapboard house on Venice Avenue his boxing earnings had paid for, fathered a daughter named Rosalie, who became my close childhood companion, and for the next forty years he made money with his back, working odd days here and there as a laborer for friends who owned small construction companies.

  One of the first things you noticed when you were introduced to Uncle Peter was that he could not be still for more than a few seconds at a time—it was no doubt a part of what had made him such a good boxer. He drove around the city on mysterious errands of his own making, took day trips to Rockingham Park to bet on the thoroughbreds when he should have been working, mowing the lawn, or taking Rosalie to the beach; he shifted and swung and danced (he was, my mother told me, a marvelous dancer) around any room he inhabited. Even on that morning, he sat at our kitchen table for only a minute or two, and then was up and pacing, setting his coffee cup on the counter and tracing a tight arc out to the edge of the hallway, swinging back, retrieving the cup, lifting it to his misshapen lips and setting it down again without drinking, going up behind my father and massaging the muscles on the tops of his shoulders for two seconds, winking at me, raising his eyebrows at my mother, swinging around, peering out the curtained kitchen windows at the Sawyers’ house, studying the faded shellac of the hallway and a crack in the porcelain sink, sitting back down and stealing a sip from the cup, running a palm over his bald head as if to check for some miraculous second growth of thick black hair.

  Even as a child I sensed that he had acquaintances from the darker worlds. What, exactly, those friendships meant to him—personally, financially—I don’t think any of us ever really knew. Maybe they were his way of staying connected to what he saw as a larger life, something more impressive than the loan payments and trimmed lawns of the ordinary dimension. Maybe he owed some kind of illicit debt and spent his life doing favors for those people, working to pay it off. I don’t know. Sometimes when we visited him at his house on a Saturday evening, or on Sunday after Mass, there would be a car parked out front at the curb, on the NO PARKING side, and a Joey or Mickey or, most often, a person he called “Johnny Blink,” in the living room, oozing over the armchair like a toad in syrup. Even as a boy I understood that these relationships, this peculiar lifestyle of his, caused some trouble between Uncle Peter and Aunt Ulla. More and more as time went on, she would be upstairs when we visited, incommunicado, a terrible breach of family etiquette. A headache, Uncle Peter would say with his broken smile. One of her headaches. Or she had gone to church to say a novena, supposedly, or was visiting relatives up in Maine.

  A man of infectious, indefatigable optimism, my uncle nevertheless seemed slightly tentative when you saw him with his wife, slightly diminished, as if she refused to buy a ticket for his grand performance and he knew it. At other times, too, he carried with him the scent of tragedy. It was as if he were a symbol of what might happen if we dared to reach past the boundaries of our place and our own people, a reminder of the kind of punishments that could be meted out by the non-Revere nations, by the moneyed tribes of the western suburbs and beyond.

  But on that fine June morning he was lit up like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. He’d had a dream, an unbleevable dream, and had carried it down like a box of expensive silks from the bedroom on Venice Avenue. “Gus,” he said, getting to his feet again and starting to pace. “Anna. I saw the numbah last night in my sleep. One, two, six. That’s the numbah today, I know it like I know my own shoe size. How much can you put on it?”

  Four

  COINCIDENCE, FATE, KARMA, LUCK, the mood swings of a merciful God—it fascinates me now to listen to the ways we explain life to ourselves and each other. This is how the Lord has made the world, some people say, and, reading from a list of simple rules, they pack the entire mystery of the universe into one cheek, and spit it out at you through a syrupy smile. Or they insist, like petulant children, that nothing has any meaning, that everything from the angle at which sunlight strikes the surface of the earth to the chemical makeup of the blood running through a placenta is only the random careening of spiritless molecules.

  These theories, I believe, come mostly from fear. My theories come mostly from fear. The fear of facing a life that remains unboxed and uncategorized: storms of bad fortune and shining rainbows of good luck that have no apparent connection to one’s behavior. We send up prayers—that we should survive the hour, that our basketball team should win, that our sister’s X rays should be negative, that this eighty-year run of evaporating joys should mean something. Or we stamp our feet, wave our arms, and insist it means nothing, leads nowhere, cannot possibly lead anywhere.

  As if we know.

  I went to school that day. Uncle Peter drove me, in fact—though it was only a few hundred yards from the door of our house to the steps of Barrows School. He left me off at the playground with a handshake, a kiss, and this piece of advice: “Always remembah who you are, Einstein, who your family is.” And he promised to bring Rosalie there at 2:15, when the school day ended, and drive us up Route 1 to see a friend of his, a man with a built-in swimming pool, his own horses, and six flavors of ice cream in a walk-in freezer. All through my lessons I thought about it, the pool, the ice cream, the chance to meet one more of his legion of legendary friends, another Johnny Blink, Joey Patchegaloupe, or Bean-bag Pipistrillo. When the bell sounded and we spilled out the doors and down the cement steps, I waited on the sidewalk a little while, calling good-byes to my schoolmates as they drifted off along Mountain Avenue, fingering the silver dollar in my pocket, watching for his Cadillac. After half an hour passed and he didn’t show, I made my way back down the short, not very steep hill of Jupiter Street toward my grandparents’ house, carrying my disappointment in both arms like the remains of a beloved pet.

  My father was, of course, at work. Instead of going up the steps, through the screen porch, and ringing the buzzer at our front door, I turned down the side walk and into the yard. My mother was leaning out my bedroom window, taking in a line of wash, the pulley screeching above the hot afternoon like a bothered gull. “Is that your report card?” she said when she saw me. “Is it good?”

  I took it out of its envelope and held it open to her.

  “Anthony, you know I can’t read it from up here. Is it good, honey?”

  “Two Fs, two Ds,” I said. “The rest isn’t bad.”
<
br />   “Anthony.”

  “It’s good, Ma.”

  “Grandpa’s waiting for you under the grapevine. Come up for a snack when you’re finished. But change out of your good pants first if you’re going to work in the garden, alright?”

  My grandfather, Domenic Anthony Benedetto, was a slight, erect man, bald on top but not in the extravagant manner of Uncle Peter’s baldness, always very soft-spoken and carefully dressed, a man who gave off an air of being completely at peace in his body with its thin shoulders and thin arms and thin, fine hands. What hair he still had was white and as fine as cornsilk, set off by a pair of eyeglasses, the top frame of which was the color of coffee beans. His eyes were a lighter shade of those same beans, his lips often slightly compressed over large, somewhat yellowed teeth. On warm afternoons he was in the habit of sitting under the grapevine on a metal lawn chair and smoking; though, if the mood struck him, he might take the subway into Boston and visit friends at the tailor shop where he’d once worked. And if there was lightning in the summer sky, he would move the chair out onto the middle of the lawn and sit there, admiring it, daring the fates, while his wife and daughters called to him, frustrated and terrified, from the house, and the storm’s first drops spanked the concrete walk.