Three
THE SCHOOL YEAR STARTED—sixth grade—and I set to reaping another harvest of As and compliments. It was a kind of addiction for me: I would have done anything to cling to my place at the top of the class and keep the warm stream of adult approval turned in my direction. My grandfather went into the hospital that October with what the doctors called “a very minor heart attack,” which turned out to be the first in a string of very minor heart attacks that would eventually kill him. And probably he saw in me, upon his return, what I can see now in myself from a distance of thirty-five years: that there was something unnatural in my scholastic perfectionism, that an eleven-year-old boy needs some sweet water to drink other than the flattery of his elders; that there is a body there, supporting that flaming brain, and it ought to be given its share of the joy of use. When Grandpa came home from the hospital, one of the first things he said to me was “I met somebody in there, Antonio, who gave me the idea for you. After Christmas, I show you what it is.”
The idea for me. He said it as if there were one idea for each person in the whole of his or her life, one plan, decision, or secret word that could be fitted like a key into that person’s private padlock. The lock would pop, a thick steel door would swing open, revealing a landscape, and a road across that landscape, and you would only have to follow that road for your bereavement to transform itself into a life that was fulfilling and logical and free of pain.
The idea for me. For two or three weeks I was obsessed by the thought that there was an idea for me, that Dom had carried it home from the hospital like a dose of exotic medicine, known, in Brazil or Ghana, to cure the confusions of orphans. And then, when he didn’t mention it a second time, the idea of the idea for me sank gradually into the background, where it remained until the year passed on.
It was an odd and sorrowful Christmas season—gifts for me from every aunt and uncle and half the cousins. Books, two baseball gloves, school shirts, four pairs of thick socks, and the feeling that I could dampen the mood of any room just by stepping into it. There was a snowstorm on Christmas Eve, and I remember sneaking out my grandparents’ front door, away from a kitchen full of relatives, and walking the solar-system streets block after block, Jupiter to Mercury to Pluto and back. I watched the flakes swirl and shift in the streetlights. I listened to snow shovels scraping on front walks, and the whine of the wind between houses. I remember stopping at the corner of Mars Street and Mountain Avenue to study the spectacle of the approaching city plow, a circus of whirling gold lights and clinking tire chains, and a curved blade throwing up a surf of snow. The rumble and roar of it matched the mood of my hidden self—a dark, futile anger in the middle of a joyous night. I remember I was wearing the woolen gloves and hat my mother had knitted for me the Christmas before, shuffling along in my galoshes with the metal clips up the front, kicking up snow as if it were calf-deep dust, walking and walking, up one hill and down the next, and wallowing in an odd, vengeful satisfaction that the storm had broken the ordinary easy rhythm of the holiday. I made the corner from Park Avenue onto Jupiter Street, chilled and sweaty at the same time, and walked the last hundred yards across the vacant lot to my grandparents’ house. A glad yellow light poured from both kitchen windows. A car door slammed out front, and the sound echoed up the snowy street like a child calling out. I stamped my feet, pulled open the back door, and the bulge of happy talk was punctured with my first step through.
There was a film of self-pity over everything I said in those days, everything I did. I am ashamed to remember it. Uncle Peter sensed it, and made one or two gentle suggestions. “Get yourself a girl,” he said. “Have a regular thing you can look forward to every day—a candy bar, a TV show.” For a person so constitutionally incapable of bringing any amount of order to his own life—his uneasy marriage, his troubled finances, his addiction to betting, his inability to understand where he should settle on the spectrum that ran from his high, sweet singing voice to his association with the Johnny Blinks of this world—for all that foolishness, he was in possession of a certain intuitive wisdom that rose into view at difficult moments, a little sandbar of sanity that showed itself only at the lowest tides. In his own way—short on logic, long on heart—he must have sensed the sour note in the chorus, not only of my life, but of the greater family’s. His response was typical: in his parents’ kitchen, on that snowy Christmas Eve, he waited for a quiet moment, and said, without, I’m sure, having cleared it first with Aunt Ulla, “We’re havin a party up our house. New Year’s. Everybody has to come.”
Four
IT WAS A DIFFICULT TIME for Uncle Peter. Even before the death of my parents, he had begun a slow financial decline that would find him, in the last decade of his life, accepting handouts from nephews and flashing his worn-out charm on the aides in the poorest of Revere’s nursing homes. He had already gambled away all of his huge winnings on 1-2-6, so I don’t know how he managed to pay for that New Year’s party. Maybe a wealthy relative of Aunt Ulla’s died in Norway and left them money. Or maybe he’d had what he called one of his “miracle days” at Suffolk Downs, or had accidentally fallen into a regular working schedule in order to be able to buy Ulla and Rosalie the gifts they wanted for Christmas, and found he had a little bit left over. Maybe the other couples paid for the food and entertainment in exchange for Peter and Ulla having the “time,” as we called such things, at their house. I don’t know.
Everyone came. Every relative as far removed as second cousin, the cousins of my grandparents from Brooklyn, my mother’s sister Janice from New Jersey (who never wrote and never called, and lived the life of a recluse there, taking in stray dogs), neighbors from Jupiter Street, family friends, the boyfriends and girlfriends of my older cousins, Uncle Leo’s golfing buddies and our eccentric dentist Dr. Rose (who, with his fingers in your mouth, would go into endless detail about the latest trip he and his wife had made—to the Greek islands, to Tahiti, to the coast of Spain), Johnny Blink, Freddie Roof, Archie the Lip, Ulla’s mother and father—so out of place with their hay-colored hair and tight-lipped politeness. Everyone.
Uncle Peter had arranged for a trio of musicians to play, friends of his of course. They set themselves up in the finished basement—Rosalie’s playroom when she had been a little girl. This proved to be a mistake, because the younger cousins naturally took over that room, and in the early part of the night the musicians were forced to spend as much time protecting their drumskins, clarinet keys, and accordion bellows from flying toys and meandering two-year-olds as they did piping out their “Silent Night’s” and “O Sole Mio’s.”
Upstairs there was a makeshift bar—tended by Peter himself for the first half hour or so and then abandoned to the whims of his guests—and folding metal tables that Jeanne Mulligan (the Irish caterer who cooked Italian) had covered with enough food to feed six football teams. Cold cuts, antipastos, rolls and breads and crackers and cheeses, dishes of meatballs and lasagna, plates of tripe and stuffed peppers, plates of squid and eels and flounder, eggplant parmigiana, a bowl of shrimp and a quart of cocktail sauce, half a dozen pies, cookies, candy, a coffee urn going in the kitchen, sodas for the kids from a second cousin who owned the soda company and who brought along his wife and three beautiful daughters.
Dom and Lia and the aunts and uncles poured themselves drinks and fixed themselves plates of food and took up more or less permanent positions on the parlor sofa and soft chairs and the folding chairs Peter had borrowed from Saint Anthony’s Holy Name. But, for us, for the cousins, being still on that night would have been a kind of sin against the commandments of our bodies. Roughly according to age, we formed ourselves into groups. The middle group, to which I belonged, roamed the upstairs rooms, bouncing across beds, closing and opening doors, talking and singing and shouting, improvising games of tag on the staircase. Or we circled down into the cellar when the music stopped, and tickled the younger cousins, talked to them, brought them, as we had been brought, into the warm fold of our blood-a
ffection. We were the Benedettos, after all, and by the simple force of our love for one another we were going to fashion something worthwhile out of the mud and stone of our fate.
We had always taken an unadulterated joy in belonging to one another, but at no time in my memory did it show itself more than on that night. Even now there are such “times” among those of us who are still alive. Mostly now we gather after funerals, but there are happy events, too—a reunion, an eightieth birthday, a fiftieth wedding anniversary. My eye has been sharpened now, with age; I am more critical. I can see the insecurities and small feuds: who has made more money than whom and is a bit too proud of it, softened, spoiled. Who failed to invite whom to a child’s wedding. Whose daughter or son missed a funeral or a wake, forgot an important anniversary, ended up in trouble, borrowed money he or she did not repay. Looking at faces is my profession, and in some of the faces at these gatherings I see the shame of a half-failed life, the ache of an annoying mate, the shadow of anger and debt, and a certain provincial close-mindedness.
But even in spite of our flaws and failings, there remains some happy unity to that group, an instinctive loyalty that dilutes individual troubles. In some way I cannot analyze, we have learned—we have been taught—to ignore each other’s mottled surfaces and focus on what lies deeper. We want the best for each other. We say, “I love you,” before we hang up the phone. We look into watery old eyes and see reflected there a past that is impossible to reproduce in this fast and broken-up modern age, an age in which the younger members of the family have struck out on their own to make their fortunes, and ended up living like kings and queens on small, lonely, perfectly landscaped suburban islands.
Sure, the lens is coated with nostalgia. Surely some of the family’s rougher edges have been sanded down by my selective remembering. But there was a rare love there, palpable, obvious, all-inclusive. The death of my parents only added fuel to that love. It burned brightly in Uncle Peter’s house that night.
After the party’s opening stanzas, the smallest children were put to bed upstairs, watched over in shifts by the older girls. And then the bar, some of the food, and most of the action made its way down into the basement room.
There, gradually, as the last two hours of the year ticked away, a circus atmosphere sprouted from the soil of our stale grief. Uncle Leo—usher at the nine o’clock Mass, electrical engineer, teetotaler, a man who did not eat sweets and did not swear and would not kiss his wife on the lips in public—began stealing ice cubes from the bar and going around the room slipping them down the backs of the women’s dresses. Aunt Gina retaliated by putting a cube down Uncle Peter’s shirt, and he squirmed and danced and writhed and eventually, magically, shook it out of one pantleg with an expression of such comical surprise on his face that Uncle Aldo had to run for the bathroom. There was something wrong with the door handle there, and Aldo accidentally locked himself in. We heard him pounding and yelling at the top of the steps, and the more noise he made, the more vehemently Peter signaled for us to ignore him. My stomach ached, I could barely breathe from laughing. Rosalie was next to me with her arms wrapped around herself and tears sliding out of the sides of her eyes. I turned to look at my grandmother just as Uncle Spudsy sneaked up behind her and dropped a cube down the back of her dress, and she twitched and made faces and jumped around in her seat in a way that lifted her younger self to the surface. Grandpa Dom reached out, a bit drunkenly, and kissed her on the mouth. For a few minutes, while the band took a break, someone set a record on the phonograph, and a woman’s voice sang in Italian:
You better mar-ry a fire-man
He’ll come and go, go and come
And I understood the words, but not what the adults found so hilarious in them. I laughed anyway. Cousin Timmy laughed until he wet his pants. Even Aunt Ulla and her parents laughed.
The cellar hysteria drew people down from the parlor and the upstairs rooms. Soon all but the smallest children were awake again and sitting sleepy-eyed on the floor against their mothers’ shins, or in their fathers’ laps, and Uncle Peter was stepping through the crowd like a maître d’, filling glasses, coaxing a song out of the accordion player—a man named Benny Bostingaluccio, whose face was the color of a McIntosh apple and lined with veins, and whose nickname was Benny the Map. Father Bucci had his arm around the back of Aunt Laura’s chair and was leaning his bright pink face down toward her, an expression of childish joy in his eyes and a coffee mug half-filled with whiskey in his lap. Rosalie slipped outside with Cousin Catherine and returned to sit close to me with tobacco on her breath.
Finally, at 11:30, Uncle Peter went to the front of the room and stood there with his hands on his hips, looking at us the way, at the end of a difficult week, a master carpenter might look at a broken-down garage he has not quite finished rebuilding.
“Sing! Sing!” people shouted. But he would not oblige them.
“Sing, you bum!” Uncle Aldo called out.
“Go back in the bathroom, Aldo, willya?”
“Sing,” Aldo said. “You want to make us happy, sing for us once like old times.”
But Uncle Peter pursed his lips at the foolishness of the idea, stubbornly shook his head. “No singin,” he insisted. “No singin until we have somethin tremendous to sing about in this family.” And then, after a theatrical pause during which he pulled his thumb and second finger down over his nose three or four times, checked his fly twice, rubbed his bald head, pressed the back of a wrist to his eyelids, he said, “But if Tonio lets me, I’ll tell one story.”
A cheer filled the room. Heads turned to me, I smiled, nodded.
“I have to tell one story, don’t I, Tone?”
“Or you could sing,” I said, and a roar of laughter rose up. Someone squeezed the back of my neck. Someone else reached over and patted me on the arm. Even Aunt Janice winked.
“Madonn, now the godson’s gotta give me the needle. What about the rat story? Huh? Alright?”
Rosalie and I nodded together. Uncle Peter gathered himself, standing with his shoes almost touching at the heels and spread out at a ninety-degree angle, his dark trousers holding a sharp crease, his fingers playing up and down along his ribs as if there were piano keys there and he was practicing the scales. He was wearing a light gray sport coat with wide lapels, small circles of sweat beneath both arms. Toying with us now, he set to tugging at the sleeves of his shirt so that the expensive cufflinks showed, flicking a bit of invisible lint from one arm, taking out his handkerchief and wiping it back and forth across his forehead. He looked up, checking his audience, working it, then shook out his arms and began:
“This is last summer,” he said, though he pronounced the word “summah,” as we all did, and said “yahd” for yard, and “fiyah” for fire, and exaggerated his already troubled grammar to add another drop of comic effect. “Hot up my yahd like a fiyah, like Africa.” He winked at me, yanked on his belt. “Hot like you wooden bleeve up my house, and I’m out front clippin the hedge. I have my shirt off”—he moved his hands up and in toward his chest to help us imagine him without his shirt—“and I’m pourin out sweat like a hoss.”
Now he spread his hands, made them into loose fists as if holding the handles of the hedge clippers, and brought them together and apart like Benny the Map with his accordion.
“And I’m thinkin, Hottest day of the whole summah, and Ulla has me out here doin the hedge. The sweat’s pourin down into my good pants, and just when I’m about to give up and go inside, Mrs. Accetullo comes ovah from across the street. She looks at me like I belong in Danvahs State Hospital. ‘Watcha you haht, Pietro,’ she says, and she shakes a fingah at me like this heah.
“Watcha you haht,” he repeated, one finger sarcastically wagging so that the muscles of his arm and shoulder shifted and rolled beneath his sport coat. “After that I’m ready to quit forevah … pay some high-school kid to do the hedge clippin around heah. Watcha you haht. But I hear the screen door, and I know by the sound of the feet that
it’s Ulla, so I staht goin a mile a minute, chippin, choppin, a-beep, a-bah. Sweatin. Ulla comes up behind me with a glass of ice coffee, but I keep workin another minute like the hedge is the most important thing in the world when it’s ninety-nine degrees out and the game is on channel five, right? Then finely I stop.
“ ‘Take it easy, honey,’ she tells me.
“I say, ‘I’m takin it easy. You should see me when I’m really goin.’ “And she gives me one of those Norwegian looks, you know, those looks they learn because it’s too cold to really talk up there.” He skipped his eyes from chair to chair until he found Ulla’s parents, sitting at the back of the room with their drinks held in both hands between their legs. He shrugged at them half-apologetically. “The Norwegians are beautiful people, right? Of course they are, the best … the second best.” He winked at his in-laws and went on. “Where’s Tonio?” I says to her.
“ ‘In the pool with Rosalie,’ she says.
“ ‘Who else is in theah with em?’ I says, because the boys in this neighborhood, they’re like little bulls, like animale. But before she can answer me, I look across the street at Mrs. Accetullo’s house, and I see this heah unbleevable thing come out from undah her cah.” He glanced at his father, who was sitting not far from Rosalie and me, and for just a moment he seemed like a six-foot-three-inch boy, as if the entire performance were merely an elaborate reaching out for some sign of approval, some signal of forgiveness for the person he’d become, a former boxing champion who spent his days now carting wheelbarrows full of wood scraps around construction sites, and being paid in cash. “Pa,” he said, almost losing his momentum. “I swear to God it was a ratto the size of a wattamelon.” He held his hands two feet apart. “Ulla skeevas rats like Adam and Eve skeevad the snake. She screams in my eah; I thought the siren down the fiyah station went off, Pa. I thought I went deaf. I have the clippahs in my one hand and my ice coffee in the otha, I’m sweatin like a hoss, I’m half deaf, and this ratto the size of a German sheppid is comin straight across the street right at us. “ ‘Peetha!’ my wife is screamin in my eah. ‘Peetha! Do something!’
In Revere, In Those Days Page 9