In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  “I was on the ground then,” my grandfather said in the watery voice, “at the edge of the road next to a pear tree. I had fallen with my shoulder against the trunk of the tree. It hurt so much I could not move my arm. Even now, Tonio, when there is going to be rain or snow, it still hurts. The pears weren’t ripe but they were falling from the tree all around us. They hit against my legs, my chest, my face. I was crying for my father to help, but he couldn’t hear me because there was a noise all around, a tremendous noise, biggest noise you can imagine.

  “Everything was moving. Nothing was the way it was supposed to be. The trees, they were leaning sideways, the road was breaking open, the pears were falling before they were ripe. Nothing would stop moving even for one second, and then everything stopped all at once and the air was filled with dust as thick as smoke. In their yards near the sides of the road, men were yelling everywhere like crazy people. The cart’s two back wheels were broken in pieces. I heard animals making their noises all together, and I heard my father yelling, ‘Domenico! Salvatore! Domenico! Salvatore!’

  “Salvatore had a lump on his forehead as big as an apricot, and my arm couldn’t move and hurt me very much, and my father had cut his elbow and there was blood all through the arm of his shirt. But we could walk. We left the man there with his cart, and as fast as we could we went the rest of the way along the big road that led to the smaller road that led up to our village, Squillani.

  “There was dust in the air everywhere, Tonio. There were people hurt everywhere, people helping each other, screaming, crying, praying to the saints, to Mary, to Jesus to help them. There were little children who could not stop crying, and dogs that could not stop barking. As we got close to the bottom of our road, we saw two or three stone houses, cracked open as if the walls were only as strong as the shell of the egg. While we watched it, one of the houses fell down completely, like something made of paper. Somebody’s bed was there, right in the open air in a pile of cement and rocks. My father kept saying we should walk faster, walk faster.

  “In Squillani, not far from the top of the hill, there were more broken houses. The higher we climbed on the road, the more broken they were. It was like walking in a dream of hell. Dirt and ash and leaves floating everywhere, the screaming, the smell of smoke. It was still daytime but the day was dark, like God had hit his elbow on the switch that turned off the sun. People lit torches and made big fires. In the light from the fires you could see their faces and their broken houses, pieces of broken roof sticking out through windows, trees that had fallen down on gardens, trees lying across the street, houses with broken backs. Carts upside down on a pile of stones. Every few minutes the ground shook again, less than before. We stopped, and stood holding on to each other with our legs wide apart. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ my father kept saying to us. ‘Don’t be afraid.’ But his face was all covered with dirt and sweat, and his shirt was all dark blood, and it was very hard to look at him and hard to have to stop and stand there, not knowing what we would find when we got to our house, not knowing if the world was going to open up and swallow us or let us live.

  “But before we even got up to our house, which was beyond the top of the hill, on the back side, the east side, some of the boys who were a little younger than me came running down in the dark. They were calling the name of the sister I loved more than I loved my own father and mother, more than Salvatore, more than God, Tonio. ‘Eleonora is buried! Eleonora is buried in the earthquake!’ they said to us. Sometimes even now when I sleep, I hear them saying it. Even now. We ran the rest of the way up the road in the dark. When we reached our house, it was standing strong with only the windows and one or two parts of the walls broken. Our mother was out in the street in front, waiting for us, crying two dirty streams down her cheeks. The house next door—Alfredo Pierni’s house, Dr. Pierni’s grandfather—was broken in three pieces. One piece was leaning over sideways, and one piece was perfect as it always was. And the other piece was only a pile of glass and wood, concrete, big stones, everything in a place it wasn’t supposed to be. The quilt from a bed was there in the dirt, an apron there, the handle of a broom. I can close my eyes and see those things now, the way they were. My sister was under that … under those stones. My brothers and the men who lived near us were working by the light from the fires, lifting the stones up—they had only two metal bars and some pieces of wood—and pushing them over into the street.

  “Salvatore and my father and I went to work there, too. We were all tired and hurt—my arm would not move—but we worked. People had lit torches all around the half of Alfredo Pierni’s house that was crumbled—there was no electric then, Tonio—and the women and girls had brought some food there—bread, water, peppers, a little cold horse meat and wine. Sometimes the boys would stop working and get something to eat or bring some water to their fathers, and people were crying everywhere, and some people—men and women both—would start to scream or to pray out loud every time the hill shook again under our feet.

  “Sometimes, in the early part of the night, we thought we heard Eleonora calling out a name from under the rocks.”

  “What name?”

  Instead of answering, he paused again, touched his hat so that it moved an eighth of an inch closer to the center of the piece of newspaper, so that the world was that much more in balance. He looked up, swallowed, and went on. “We would stop and listen. Then everyone would start to move the big stones away from the place we thought we had heard the voice.

  “There were ten or eleven men and maybe twenty boys, but we were all tired and in some places the walls had fallen down in pieces bigger than this bench we’re sitting on, you and me. They had to be broken up with a hammer before you could move them. You would cut yourself on a nail or a piece of tile or glass, and you would have to stop working and move away from the standing part of the house whenever the shaking started again.

  “We could hear the bells of churches in the valley ringing all the time, and the women were praying to our saint, Stefano. It was midnight, then it was after midnight, and I was like a boy walking in sleep. We got near the bottom of one part of the pile. Someone yelled out that they saw an arm sticking up from between the rocks. I remember hearing someone say that”—Grandpa Dom repeated the phrase: “un braccio che sporgeva”—“and I was so tired, I heard it as if from under the water. I started to climb over the stones toward that place where they had seen the arm. My mother was crying very much now, and calling out Eleonora’s name. The women were around her. It felt like a dark dream feels. Then someone lifted me up out of the dream, Bartolomeo Agello, the strongman, the giant, who moved the biggest pieces of stone and who had a moustache that hung down on both sides below his face. He lifted me up under one arm, and Salvatore, my brother, up under the other arm. He carried us away, like you carry two puppies, so that we wouldn’t see Eleonora being taken out from under the stones, and we didn’t see her ever again after that, only the box they put her in to bury her, the way you saw your father and your mother in the church.”

  He fell abruptly silent, the last few syllables—“nèlla chièsa”—drifting away on the sea breeze. I waited for him to finish the story, to add a neat moral, a last drop of advice. But he only folded his hands in his lap and would not look at me. We sat there that way for a long time, staring out at the water. Every now and then he would move the fingers on his left hand forward so that they touched the back of my shoulder, and then take them away again. From time to time I would peek up at him, but he would not meet my eyes. A sadness hung in the air around us. It was somehow embarrassing. A mother holding a young baby stopped to ask him the time, and my grandfather shook his watch out from under the cuff of his shirt, and told her the hour, in his stilted, accented English, and we were back in America again. Seagulls floated in the air in front of us, climbing and climbing and letting the clams in their beaks drop onto the hard sand and break.

  My grandfather picked up his hat and stood. I threw the pizza box and the two Coke
bottles into one of the tall green trash barrels, and we walked to the bus stop on Ocean Avenue. We waited there, people walking past us toward the beach, people eating, smoking, laughing, as if there were an unlimited amount of time for those things. I worked the story this way and that in my mind. I gnawed at the shell of it, trying to reach a soft center. I had seen my grandfather every day of my life—in the yard, in the house, walking down the shaded sidewalk from his card game at the New Deal Club, in shirt and sport coat, his shoes shined, his nails trimmed, the white tufts of hair very neatly combed back. I believed I had a complete and perfect sense of his life. It was an ordered life, strict, scheduled, a man’s life, it seemed to me then. There was a great deal of love in it but not much laughter or tears, no exorbitant sprays of feeling, no fear. In some meandering and wordless fashion then, groping in a dark inner sea, I connected it to my father’s life, to the lives of my uncles, an assembly of turtles moving by instinct along grooves worn in the earth 20 million years ago, heavy with armor, all the soft innards protected, the head and eyes pulling back at the first sign of something alien, the first unfamiliar sound. Only in the dark green depths did they swim and play, and even then it was always with an awareness of the soft underbelly, predators knifing up through the wet darkness. Only within the family and within the walls of the home could they ever be really at ease, and even then they needed to keep this shell over everything, this manliness.

  The houses of the city slipped past beyond the bus window, paint over shingle over plywood, over life, and I struggled to set things in order in myself, to find my place in that parade of souls. My father’s father sat beside me, silent now after his long burst of speech, the city rolling past, invisible airs stirring and settling between us. He had pushed aside the armor for a moment so that I might have one glimpse of the tender way a man was made. The feeling of it swept across the vision of my mother’s face and body, my father’s casket, the same images that had haunted me, hour by hour, for weeks. An awareness of the magnitude and honesty of his gift came over me, a sense of being loved beyond question, beyond what I might do or fail to do, beyond what I deserved. I turned away so that he wouldn’t see, and I blinked and blinked and rubbed my sleeve across my eyes.

  By the time we stepped off the bus at the corner of Jupiter Street, my face was mostly dry. The sun had swung around and down beyond the end of Park Avenue, and the smallest breeze was slipping in along the grid of the planetary streets, and my grandmother and Uncle Peter were standing at the top of the back steps, watching us come up the sidewalk toward home.

  Two

  EVEN THE DEATH OF both parents doesn’t occupy the whole spirit and mind of a child. Even the intricate constellation of a large, warm family can’t fill in all the open space in a universe. I had my own life to live, I could not avoid it. And so, carrying my huge cargo of grief, I worked in the garden when my grandfather needed help, accompanied Uncle Peter whenever he let me, played with my cousins on Sunday afternoons, swam at Revere Beach, read baseball books in my small room before bed, walked down to the Little League field for my games. I had three close friends—Peter Imbesalacqua (who would, years later, after decades as a compulsive gambler, testify against a mafia capo and be put into the Witness Protection Program), Leo Markin (who would enlist in the marines, serve honorably in Vietnam, then leave Revere forever and make his home on a tiny Pacific island), and Alfonse Romano (who would also serve in Vietnam, but return home and make a career as a policeman, eventually becoming the youngest chief in Revere’s history)—and after the first period of my bereavement had passed, our games and explorations more or less resumed their normal summer pattern.

  I don’t see Leo or Peter at all now, and see Alfonse only a few times a year, but in those days the four of us were inseparable, a band of benign troublemakers. We all had our stories. Leo’s mother had died when he was a small boy. Alfonse’s father had disappeared and was never spoken about. And Peter—Vito’s son—seemed to have been born too close to the border between ordinary mischief and something worse.

  Some days we would meet at my house and walk east down Park Avenue, one of us bouncing the pink rubber ball off housefronts, one of us rattling the broomstick along people’s chain-link fences or knocking it hard against the light poles and NO PARKING signs. We’d pass the afternoon at the stickball courts calling out a fantastical play-by-play: Maris, Mantle, Monboquette, line shots into the screen in left. Some days we’d wander across Proctor Avenue to the Farms, and move through the fields and abandoned orchards there with snakes squirming in our mayonnaise jars, and our shoes and socks black with mud. Some days we roamed the yards on either side of Jupiter Street, as if the neighbors’ fences had been placed there only so we could refine our climbing skills. We set off M-80s behind Thayer’s garage, climbed onto Allen McCarthy’s roof, peered into his parents’ bedroom, and saw his mother in her underwear, touching perfume onto her breasts. We sprinted down Zwicker’s driveway holding bunches of stolen grapes against the front of our shirts. Once, we broke into the booth at the top of the bleachers at Paul Revere Stadium and stood there, calling high-school football games in deep voices, making ourselves into heroic tight ends and fearless linebackers. On that day, in the middle of our imaginary play-by-play, we saw a boy climbing the rows of the grandstand toward us. We made quick friends with him. The boy was new in town, slightly older, blond, tanned. He had a southern accent, and he impressed us by holding his cigarette lighter so that the flame licked lightly against the dry boards of the announcer’s booth. Two nights later he picked a lock, sneaked into the basement of Lincoln School, soaked some old books and papers in gasoline, and burned the eighty-year-old building to the ground.

  From time to time, the balloon of good feeling among the four of us would swell up too large, blocking our sense of our individual selves. We would argue over some small thing, pair off, wrestle in the dirt of someone’s front yard, and walk away scratched and triumphant, or scratched and beaten, sewing up the friendship again in an hour, or a day, or a week. We traded baseball cards and Pepsi bottle caps, fished for flounder off the Point of Pines Bridge, and, sweaty, dirty, happy, drank glasses of lemonade in each other’s kitchen on hot August afternoons.

  All that had happened before, all of it had been happening for as long as I could remember. What was different in that summer was that I began to be drawn into an exploration of my own solitude. Some mornings, after eating breakfast with my grandmother and grandfather in their sunny kitchen, I would step outside, turn right instead of left when I reached the sidewalk, away from my friends, and roam the city alone, as if the puzzle of living and dying could be worked out on Revere’s rough tar streets. Or I would climb the Park Avenue hill to the cemetery, kneel and cry for a while at my parents’ graves, pick bits of leaf off the seeded plots, finger the new-cut letters on the gray granite, then walk back and forth along the avenues of headstones, reading dates and names, as if putting my mother and father in such a long list of the dead might make things a little easier to bear. I had allowance money—a jar full of bills and coins in a corner of my little bedroom—and almost unlimited freedom. On some days I would dip into the jar, take the bus to the beach, and dive again and again into the cold water, then cross the Boulevard and buy a stuffed quahog or two slices of pizza, and carry my meal to the far end of the sand and eat it slowly, staring out to sea. Other days I’d climb the steep hill of Venice Avenue, intending to see if Rosalie or Uncle Peter was home; but I’d pass by their house and keep walking, down to Arnold Street, around the ramshackle factory that made wrapping paper, down to Olive Street, where my mother’s best friend, Lois Londoner, lived. Usually I’d walk on past her house without stopping, venture from there across the creek into Chelsea—a poorer, more tattered Revere—and walk as far as a corner deli where an old, one-legged Jewish man sold lox and cream cheese on a bagel, my secret passion, for sixty cents.

  I was too young to be so far afield alone, but a secret and mysterious solitude was sing
ing its first notes in me. Vaguely, blindly, in some dim, curtained sector of my thinking self, I was beginning to suspect that the face of the world was a mask, and I haunted the corners of Revere like a ghost, seeking its edges.

  On one of those walks, I found myself in Point of Pines, a part of the city that hangs off the northern end of the beach, and where, even now, the houses are generally among the most expensive in Revere. Angelo Pestudo, the famous underworld boss, had a home there; everyone knew it. Uncle Peter had told me stories about him; I’d seen his name in the papers. I had not gone looking for that house especially, but when I came upon a stucco mansion set back from the street, with a circular driveway, dark cars, a high wall, a swimming pool in the back from which I could hear the happy shouts of girls, I knew who presided over it. As I was passing the brick gate, I glanced in and saw a pretty girl there. She was thin, brown-headed, delicate-featured, about my own age, stepping barefoot down the hot tar driveway with a beach towel wrapped around her waist and her wet hair plastered back from her forehead. A heavyset man stood close to the house, watching her. I was walking very slowly, ambling, roaming, and after another step or two I realized she was coming to retrieve a beach ball that had skipped down the sloping drive and come to rest against one of the abutments of the gate, three feet from me. To save her a few burning steps I went back and rolled it up the drive. She stopped it with her foot—like a soccer player—looked at me as one might look at a servant, then picked it up and turned away without so much as a nod of thanks.