In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  “She runs up the stairs and grabs her dress between her legs like this heah. Really, I’m not kiddin ya. What? Like this heah, I’m tellin ya. Look, up high between her legs.… Meanwhile, the monstah is comin down undah the hedge about this fah from my feet”—he twisted his hips and belly back and forth as he said this, going up on his toes like a linebacker attempting a ballet move, and some of the smaller cousins standing on the stairs started imitating him—“and waddlin into my property like he pays the taxes.

  “Now, natchrally, the neighbors heah Ulla screamin, and they’re out on their porches wonderin whether we’re havin a big fight or what. ‘What’s he up to now?’ they’re askin each other. ‘What’s he doin to that poor nice woman he married?’ ‘What kind of a mess is he makin out of things over theah?’ So I’m on the spot, Ma, like always, right? Right, Tone? Rosie, am I right? On the spot like always. So whadda I hafta do? I put down the clippahs and the ice coffee, I take the rake I was usin to rake up the hedge with, and like a nut I staht chasin the monstah down the side of the house. There’s a little alley theah, ya know?” He pointed up and toward the side of his house. “Grass. Leads from the front to the back, and I’m chasin the rat, and I staht raisin my rake up ovah my head and bangin it down right behind him, but not hittin him because I worry if I only wound him—it’s an old rake—he might turn around and go for my throat … or worse. And if I kill him, I’m gonna hafta spend the rest of the day diggin a grave in the backyahd in the ninety-nine degrees while the game is on, okay? So I’m playin’ now for time, see? The rat’s just goin into the backyahd now, and Ulla went straight true the house and is on the little back porch, screamin, ‘Peetha! Peetha! Rosalie and Tonio are inside the pool, Peetha!’

  “Gus and Anna’s kid is in the pool, natchrally. The godson. Doesn’t come up my house all summah”—another wink in my direction—“he has to be theah on the day the rat comes. And I know the rat is goin in right afta them, too. They love the watta to begin with, rats. Wheah else is he gonna go on a day like this? And so now Tonio’s fatha is gonna come home from the GE ovahtime and find a note sayin his kid just got bit by a rat up Uncle Petah’s and him and Rosie are up the Mass General now. That’s it for me, that’s the end of my reputation, right? My good name.” He pulled at his nose. “But just at that minute, I see Ruggierio Longo, who lives behind us. The old man, a paisan of Mama’s, right, Ma? He was heah a little while ago, but he went home to bed. It’s ninety-nine degrees out, and he’s ninety-tree, but he thinks he’s in the Old Country still, and he’s out in the sun pullin weeds from around his peppahs like the padrone is comin in ten minutes to make an inspection, can you imagine? Ruggierio hears Ulla screamin. He comes ovah to the back fence, and I’m tryin to defect the rat away from the kids, so I yell out, ‘Ruggerio!’

  “ ‘Pietro!’ “he yells back. This guy is a prince, Papa, I’m tellin you. If we were ever in trouble, he would climb ovah the fence and dive in the pool to save the kids if he had to, ninety-tree yeahs old.

  “ ‘Ruggerio!’ I’m yellin. ‘Ratto! Ratto!’

  “By now the rat is scared to death—Ulla scared him with that Norwegian screamin she does—and he’s gone by the pool and is headed for the fence at about twenty miles an awa. ‘Ruggerio!’ I’m yellin, right? And I’m still behind the bastid—excuse me, Father—just missin him with the rake, a-boom, a-boom. Am I right, Tone? Am I makin this up? Tell em.”

  By this time, Uncle Peter had worked himself up into a fit of tics and nervous twitches and was sweating as profusely as if it was, in fact, ninety-nine degrees in the room, lifting an imaginary rake above his head and banging it down in front of him, his face pinched tight in concentration, his bald head speckled with droplets, his eyebrows up, lips tight, eyes wild.

  “ ‘Ruggerio!’ “he yelled so loudly that one of the babies started to cry. He didn’t notice.

  “ ‘Pietro, doan-a-worry, Peitro! I’ma smashing the bastardo.’

  “Ruggerio has a spade up over his head. He’s ready. I’m followin the rat with the rake, just missin now, hopin the monstah will find the hole in the fence where Ruggerio’s dog comes true and pisses on Ulla’s flowers. The rat comes to the fence. I give one more tremendous smash with the rake just on the edge of his tail. He squeezes true the fence, just barely squeezes true, and BOOM! Ruggerio kills him with the shovel, once, on the head, bang, the rat’s layin theah dead as a rock.”

  Uncle Peter stared down at his feet. A droplet of sweat hung for a second at the end of his nose, then fell onto the top of his left shoe. “I stand there a minute, puffin and huffin,” he continued, “waitin to see that he’s really dead and not just playin. Finely I go ovah to the fence, and Ruggerio has a smile on his face from one end to the otha. ‘Atsa way, Ruggerio,’ I tell him. ‘Beautiful. I was tryin to get him since the front yahd. You’re ninety-tree, you take one smash with the shovel, and BOOM!’

  “ ‘Whatta we gonna do with him, Pietro?’ the old man asks me, lookin up, but by now I’m already turnin away. Ulla’s there, the kids. I did my duty, right? Wasn’t my property he died on. ‘Ul,’ I say, ‘go get Mr. Longo a nice glass of ice coffee, willya? Least we can do.’ ”

  He finished his story with a shrug, a sad clown’s face, a peek at his father. For a moment in his battered lips you saw a line of doubt, as if perhaps this wasn’t the kind of story he ought to have been telling about himself, wasn’t really the kind of thing he ought to have done. His audience had settled down, we were chuckling, smiling, wiping tears, the younger children still imitating his rat walk, the awakened baby whimpering. Aunts and uncles sighed, shook their heads at him, erupted in little aftershocks of giggling and snorting.

  Peter retreated to the bar to fish another beer from the leaky metal barrel there. It was ten minutes to midnight. People were checking their watches and looking around the room, searching for something to fill that small remaining piece of the year, when Rosalie stood up and rat-walked to the place her father had just abandoned. Among the cousins, she’d always had a reputation as an actress and a mimic, but, until that moment, she had never taken the wider stage. Now she stood in front of the family and struck a pose, feet splayed, small belly pushed forward, shoulders thrown back, and hands waving. “It’s Peter!” one of the aunts yelled out. Rosalie paced back and forth through gusts of laughter, tossing her shining black hair, swinging an arm in front of her, punching an imaginary shoulder, sticking an imaginary cigar into one corner of her mouth, and twisting her eyebrows down toward it as if there were something absurdly sour and offensive in the taste.

  “And so he squeezes true,” she said. “He squeezes true, and BOOM!”

  The air in the basement room pulsed and throbbed with laughter, as if we had all been pressed together inside the body of a guitar, and Rosalie had taken it from her father’s hands and strummed one happy chord. My grandmother was holding her chest in both crossed arms and rocking back and forth in her chair. My cousin Angelina was standing beside and slightly behind her, clinging to my grandmother’s shoulder and swaying forward and back like a girl on a carousel horse. Sabatino, one of my grandfather’s cousins from New York, was ho-ho-hoing like Santa Claus. And Johnny Blink stood against the wall, next to Uncle Peter, smiling the dull, dazed smile of a person who did not understand the language being spoken, but realized dimly, vaguely, secondhand, that something humorous might have been said.

  Rosalie let it run its course. She glanced at her father, checked her mother’s expression, winked at me. Her eyelids drooped slightly as they often did, giving her face a sleepy, sultry look. Her lips turned up just at the corners, and she seemed to me at that moment much older than she was and indescribably beautiful. “Alright,” she said when the laughter had almost subsided, “who’s this?” Her face changed suddenly, became serious. She met my eyes. I felt a tickle run across the skin of my arms and up the back of my neck, and then she looked away, stood up very straight, elbows slightly back, one finger adjusting an invisible pair of eyeglasses on he
r nose. She swung her head sharply to one side. “Anna,” she said, with a perfect imitation of an inflection I had not heard in six months and would never hear again, “how long till we eat, huh? Where’s Tonio? What happened to Roslee? Is she here for supper or what?”

  “Gus, relax, will you?” she answered, in my mother’s voice now, with my mother’s gentle sarcasm and raised eyebrow. “Go change your underwear or something.”

  There was a second’s pause, as if no one in the room could believe she had done what she had done, and then the remaining chirps and warbles of laughter converted themselves, by some mad alchemy, into a flood of weeping. I felt it penetrate my chest and rise up through my throat. I stared at my cousin, who stared back at me. There were tears running down into my mouth. I swung my head around the room at the perplexed faces of the younger children, at my aunts and uncles with their cheeks shaking and their hands across their foreheads as if to shade their eyes from a burning summer sun.

  Upstairs, in the abandoned parlor, the grandfather clock Aunt Ulla had inherited struck a few notes for the new American year, a somber, reliable song that promised some small improvement in the nature of things. I seemed to be the only one who heard it.

  Five

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, not long after breakfast—which was late that morning, and simple after the feast of the night before—Grandpa Dom called me into the narrow den and told me to sit in the soft chair, he had something he wanted to say. I lived then in constant fear of a certain kind of conversation I’d often imagined: my grandparents telling me, in voices that were sad but firm, that it wasn’t right for a boy my age to be living with old people, that I was being shipped out to Uncle Peter’s house so I could spend more time with Rosalie, or to Uncle Leo and Aunt Eveline’s house so there would be a dog and three boy cousins for me to play with, or that I was being sent away to Maine or New Hampshire to attend some school for orphans that the priest at Saint Anthony’s had told them about.

  Sitting there in the TV room with my imagination going full tilt, I felt as alone as a stranger on the streets of a cold stone city. But then my grandmother came into the room carrying a wrapped present the size of two shoe boxes side by side. Dom slipped into the kitchen and reappeared, standing near the door, holding something behind his back.

  “We wanted to give you this now instead of Christmas,” he said, “so the new year would bring the good luck for you instead of the bad.” He nodded to his wife. She handed the box across. Sitting where my grandfather had been sitting when he gave me the news about my parents, I peeled off the paper, lifted the cardboard cover, and saw a pair of skates there, hockey skates, and another pair of warm socks—my fifth—to go with them. I looked up. As Dom brought his hands out from behind his back, the object he’d been holding slipped from his grasp and clattered down against the radiator. He cursed quietly and picked it up—them up—two shellacked hockey sticks with VICTORIAVILLE written in red letters down the shaft.

  “The idea for you, Tonio,” he said, holding them out with a certain tentativeness, a certain vulnerability that made me think of Uncle Peter. “There was the hockey player in the hospital when I was there. A professional. In the room across from me. We used to talk. When I told him about you, he said this would be the idea for you. What do you think?”

  THAT AFTERNOON, DRESSED FOR the arctic, my grandfather and I carried the new skates and sticks to the bus stop at the bottom of the street. It was a holiday, the buses running infrequently, and I remember we waited there a long time, stamping our feet and swinging our arms to stay warm. We rode to the beach and boarded one of the blue subway cars waiting to leave Wonderland Station, me with the box balanced on my thighs, and Grandpa Dom sitting very straight in his wool overcoat, scarf, earmuffs, and gray felt fedora, holding between his knees two unscratched hockey sticks with black electrical tape wrapped in even bands along their blades.

  Rocking side to side against each other, we rumbled across the trestle at Beachmont Station—last stop in Revere—and rolled and clattered past the white wooden church steeple on the corner there. The train went through the frozen reeds of the salt marsh, past the stables of Suffolk Downs, past the lonely yellow screen of the drive-in movie, and the tripledecker porches of East Boston. We slipped behind the airport, where big silent jets glinted winter sunlight, taking off and landing, one after another, with such grace and ease that I could not look at them. When I opened my eyes again, we were in the tunnel beneath Boston Harbor, the train squealing to a stop at stations with names that seemed exotic to me, that seemed to stand as labels for pieces of another world: Deer Island, Wood Island, Devonshire.

  Near the end of the line we left the train and climbed into the city. Gusts of cold wind coursed around the skeletal beginnings of what would someday be called Government Center, blowing sheets of newspaper across the memories of the old Scollay Square, its burlesque halls and gangs of sailors careening through the streets in search of a little warmth.

  “There were houses here at one time,” Grandpa Dom said to me, pulling the scarf away from his mouth with one finger. “The West End this used to be, when I first came to this country. They knocked it down.”

  “Who?” I said. “Why?” But such a cold wind came up that we lowered our faces and plodded on.

  Carrying our awkward cargoes, we walked down the quiet sidewalk of Tremont Street, through Boston Common, across Charles Street to a wrought-iron gate that admitted us to a park with frozen flower stalks and bare gray trees. There was a pond in one corner of this park, and skaters there. Girls were spinning circles in the frigid air, boys racing back and forth slapping a puck and shouting.

  Dom sat me on a green slat bench and removed the cover from the box. Kneeling on the lid so as not to soil his trouser leg with the dirty trampled snow, he helped me lace my feet into the cold skates. They were stiff as wooden boots. I stood, wobbled; he rubbed his gloved hands over my cheeks, then straightened his scarf and said, “We try it.”

  We tried it. With girls in leotards making graceful pirouettes in the white-scratched center of the pond, and teenage boys flying here and there at the far end, and a few adult couples gliding along, arm in arm, my grandfather and I made one circumnavigation, tortuously slow, me with my ankles splayed, knees buckling, arms whipping like windmill blades; and my grandfather holding the parka hood at the back of my neck with one hand and shuffling along near shore in his rubbered shoes, feeding me a steady stream of encouragement: “Atsa way, Antonio. Atsa my boy. Oops. Alright, okay. Up we go, Marciano. Up, Graziano. Atsa way. Now we goin, you and me. Now we skatin.”

  One loop and I was exhausted. My ankles ached. My cheeks were pinched by the icy air, and my breath was leaving me in great white clouds. The lobes of Grandpa Dom’s ears showed beneath his earmuffs, white as teeth. A quick pulse skipped along the veins of his forehead. When we regained the bench and he had caught his breath, he said, “Ock is the idea … for you, Tonio … eh? Don’t you think?”

  Six

  AFTER THAT DAY, to the amusement of his friends and family, my grandfather—a tailor from a part of Italy where snow was as rare as a full belly—made himself into a student of the game of ice hockey. He watched the NHL on television, pored over the Record American sports pages, took me twenty or thirty times to Boston Arena on St. Botolph Street, where the Revere High School team played its games, and three or four times to Boston Garden to see the Bruins play. He enlisted Vittorio Imbesalaqua to build us a wood-framed net for the backyard, and then a plywood goalie that guarded all but the corners of it, and he would send me out there on weekdays after school with the five pucks he’d bought, and make me stay outside until I’d put fifty shots into the strings from twenty feet away. On vacation days and Saturdays, we met the 12:15 bus at the corner, rode to the beach, caught the subway into the city. We learned to transfer to the Green Line in order to avoid the cold walk through the wastelands of Scollay Square. At the Public Gardens we made one loop, then, as the weeks passed, two and thr
ee and four loops around the hockey players and the figure skaters—Grandpa Dom in shoes, me in my new skates.

  When we had rested a bit, we staked our claim to one corner of the pond, and my grandfather stood near the bank in his rubbers and earmuffs, leaning on his stick for balance, and slapped the puck more or less in my direction. I missed three-quarters of his wild passes, and had to slip and scrape and stumble to the far bank to retrieve them, dodging better skaters or watching them dodge me; learning to absorb their anger if I interrupted a play, bumping into young women cutting figure eights; falling hard in a tangle of legs, apologizing, getting up, skating back to my place with the puck flipping and fidgeting against my stick.

  Slowly, week by week, we learned. It wasn’t long before Dom could send the puck with some regularity in my general direction, and I could cross the pond alone without falling. Later, I learned to cross my ankles one over the other when I made a corner, and stop with both blades perpendicular and my weight leaned back, throwing a shower of ice up onto the cuffs of his pants.

  After each of these lessons, he would take me to a bakery on the edge of what had once been Boston’s West End. We would set our sticks and my skates in the corner, as though they were the tools of a hardworking tradesman and his apprentice, and sit by the window sipping hot chocolate. On one of those days—it was early in March, the ice had been slushy and soft and we knew hockey season would soon be over—he spent an especially long time cleaning his eyeglasses with his handkerchief, massaging the lenses, testing the hinges. And then he said, without quite looking at me, “The same fella told me about the hockey, he said there are schools where you can go. Fancy. For kids who are smart like you. Scholarships they have.… Prizes for people who aren’t rich.”