We followed him along the sidewalk to a chain-link gate with a strand or two of rusting barbed wire on top. The sentry there was winding and unwinding a whistle on a string around his middle finger. “Little John B. in the sixth,” he said to my uncle, by way of a greeting.
Peter patted him on the belly; the man reached out two fat fingers and tapped the top of Rosalie’s head and my head as we passed. Beyond him, we found ourselves in a rich cosmos of horse smells and sagging wooden stables leaking hay. Thin small men with brightly colored silk shirts and leathery faces sat on corral fences with their elbows on their knees, talking, smoking, staring at Rosalie in her tight jeans as if she were bringing them a delicious hot lunch and they had not yet eaten breakfast. Or they paced back and forth in the dirt like animals who were themselves about to be saddled and ridden.
Every one of them seemed to be on intimate terms with Uncle Peter—which was not exactly a surprise, given the state of things in the other places he took us. Trainers, jockeys (“the great, unappreciated American at-letes,” he liked to call them), maintenance men, security guards, hangers-on—they nodded to him in a serious way, the way of comrades about to go into combat; or they grinned, snapped a salute, mouthed a crude punch line in Spanish. He laughed, hugged, threw a mock jab, slapped rear ends, squeezed forearms, winked, flashed the thumbs-up, exercised his talent for making everyone around him feel they were extraordinary, that a homely face or lowly profession was merely a mask, a costume, a mistake that hid the most royal and noble of souls.
He led us along one of the dirt side streets and into a stable—dark, sweet-smelling, vaguely ominous. He stood with his hands on a half-door and told us, “Don’t move for a minute. Let your eyes get used to the not-so-much light.”
When my eyes got used to the not-so-much light, I saw that he was smiling at a thoroughbred on the other side of the half-door the way wealthy collectors smile at paintings they have just purchased. The horse was like nothing I had ever seen—no other horse, no circus animal or zoo animal, nothing. It stood in the shadows, eyeing us, ducking its dark head and snorting, as if pleading with us to let it run. The muscles of its black flanks twitched. It stamped its delicate feet in the hay. Rosalie let out a squeal of delight, wrapped both arms around me and squeezed so hard that, for a moment, I thought Uncle Peter had given her the horse as a birthday gift.
“Somethin, huh?” he said. “I’m gonna buy you kids one like this when you graduate high school. We’ll build a little stable for him in the lot next to Grandpa and Grandma’s house. We’ll get ridin lessons, alright? Whattaya say?”
What could one say?
He led us out of the stable and down another dirt avenue, past one turn of the oval track, to another sentry at another, smaller, chain-link gate. “Little John B. in the sixth,” Peter said to him. And then: “My brother Gus’s kid, Tonio. And Rosalie, my sweetheart, my girl. Today’s her birthday.”
This fellow, owner of an enormous bulbous nose and an abundant belly, pushed one arm elbow-deep into his pants pockets, wrestled out a roll of bills, and peeled off a ten. He folded it twice and placed it daintily in my cousin’s hand. “There you go, Rose,” he said. “Buy yourself something nice from Angelo Cece.”
Two more pats on the head. We stepped past Mr. Cece, through the gate, and moved toward the grandstand. As we walked, Uncle Peter leaned down and said out of the side of his mouth, exactly as if we were adults, “Angie Pooch. Went to be a priest out of high school, then quit because he couldn’t stand a life without women. Has the most gorgeous wife you ever seen, and she’s happy as a clam every time you see her. You believe that? Ugly chidrool like him?”
He sauntered along, separating a crowd of bettors in front of the grandstand as if he were Moses. The places along the rail were all taken—it was only ten minutes until the next race—but he walked up and stood so close behind someone, practically sweating down the back of his collar, that the man eventually sidled over enough to create one more space. Peter motioned Rosalie into the space, motioned me in, waving and making a face when I hesitated. “Their first time heah,” he announced. “My girl’s birthday.” Our neighbors to either side moved and shifted an inch, two inches, and soon there was room at the rail for all three of us. Cigar smoke floated around our faces. Horses pranced a few feet away. Drawn-out announcements—not unlike the announcements you hear before a boxing match—floated and echoed above our heads: “Aaaand wearing the r-red silks and carry-ing one hun-dred nineteen pounds, Maxine’s Chief.” Women with binoculars and cheap jewelry, men studying racing programs beneath the visors of their golf hats, the red and yellow silks, the smells, the tote board in the center of the infield with its code of numbers—Suffolk Downs looked to me on that day like a sweaty, smoky paradise, an Oz. Rosalie was acting like a nun on her first visit to the Vatican.
“Why do the jockeys have whips, Papa?” she asked excitedly.
“Those ain’t whips, honey.”
“They look just like little whips, Papa. Look, he’s hitting his horse with it.”
“Those there are fly swattahs, honey. They use them to keep the flies off the hoss when he’s runnin.”
“How can the flies stay on them when they’re running that fast?” I asked.
Uncle Peter gave me a peculiar look—critical, perplexed, as if there was something obvious fluttering in the air over Rosalie’s head and I was too stupid to see it. “Flies stick on you when you run, Tonio?” he said. “Sure. Alright, then. What makes you bettah than a hoss?”
“My uncle was a champeen boxer,” I said, because it came to my mind to say it, and he looked down at me, pinching his eyebrows together, and for one-tenth of one second I thought he might cry.
“Almost champeen,” he said, recovering. “Almost champeen you can take to the loan office at the bank on a sunny day, and the lady there will give you a calendah to take home.”
As the minutes ticked down to the start of the race, the activity around us, casual and pointless when we arrived, took on an urgency you could feel in your fingertips. The thoroughbreds were being turned toward the starting gate. Some of the people around us hurried off in the direction of the grandstand, from which a thrilled murmur spilled into the air. There was a quickening everywhere, a jump in pulse that could be read in the muscles around Uncle Peter’s eyes.
“Now I’m gonna teach you two guys how you win money on the ponies,” he said. “So listen.” He took a cigar from the inside pocket of his sport coat and lit it with a fancy inlaid lighter. “See this?” He held the lighter up toward me, as if it were evidence in an ongoing case against him. “Gold and motha-of-pearl. Your aunt gave me this when we got engaged.” He stuck the cigar into one corner of his mouth, plopped the lighter back into his pocket, yanked from another pocket a dog-eared program, unrolled it to a page on which the horses in the sixth race were listed, squatted down so we could see, and began making circles and check marks with a golfing pencil, covering the page with the hieroglyphics of the gambling life. Six-furlong speed, track condition, odds the last six times she went off, speed out of the gate, weight, jockey, trainer. See?
Rosalie, who hadn’t passed in a math assignment since two Christmases ago, was following his pencil and nodding her head with the confidence of an MIT sophomore. Something seemed to have been lit in her, some fuse in the curl of the DNA. I can see the moment as clearly as if it were etched onto this page—Rosalie’s birthday, the murmuring crowd, the sun making tiny regular ribbons of shadow on the just-raked track as the horses pranced and whinnied. And Uncle Peter turning his jaw out away from us so the smoke from his cigar would drift in the other direction, pointing with the nub of the pencil, looking at her, at me, to see if we understood.
We understood well enough—me with my facility for grasping and storing up semi-useless bits of information, and Rosalie in a different way, with her organs and bones, her whole self. There was a mysterious symmetry of blood operating in that moment between her and Uncle Peter, a confluence
of need, a fitting together of small discontents and urges. From birth, it seemed, her father had been infected with a horse-player’s faith in spectacular possibility, a preference for grandiose failure over mundane survival. That view of life, that deadly faith, was a sequined jacket he had been trying on her since she’d been old enough to use a spoon. Trying it on and eyeing it. Taking it off. Folding it up neatly, setting it on a shelf in a closet that Aunt Ulla never used. Trying it on again, six months, a year later. Biding his time until he had an ally in the house. On that afternoon, for the first time, he set the jacket over Rosalie’s shoulders and saw that it fit her perfectly. In the first moments of her fifteenth year on earth, by a dusty oval not far from America’s first public beach, my cousin had been introduced to the idea for her.
All my uncle’s calculations and notations were purely for our benefit, a first lesson in the grammar of the track. He had been given what was known as “a tip” on that race. He told us we each had two dollars to bet with. He would place the bets for us, since we were below the legal age, but it was up to us to pick a horse. “I’m goin with Little John B., though, myself, just so you guys know. I think he looks like the hoss that wants it the most, don’t you?”
We hurried up to the windows and placed our bets a few seconds before the bell sounded. We watched the race with the tickets in our sweaty hands, in a crowd of screaming adults, and, a few minutes after it ended, we stood beside our happy friend at the betting window as he counted out new bills into our palms. Little John B. in the sixth, it turned out, had been good information.
Eleven
LATER THAT SAME SUMMER—it was a breezy weekday afternoon with storm clouds bunching and swirling above the hills—I left the yard after lunch and set out on one of my solitary walks. The best part of those walks was that I never knew where they would lead me. I never allowed myself to have any destination in mind. I might make a sudden stop opposite Bibsy the shoemaker’s, cross Park Avenue there, climb the steep hill of South Furness Street, then wander down Vane to Broadway for a five-cent ice-cream cone at Cardell’s. Or I might continue straight up Park Avenue and pray at my parents’ graves, then leave by the back gate and walk the streets of Malden, the next city west, until I came to my cousins’ flower shop, where they would feed me a Moxie and ginger snaps and drive me home. Or sometimes, seeing a bus come over the hill, I’d sprint to the nearest orange-banded lightpole and climb aboard, jump off again at the top of Shirley Avenue, and stroll down past the delis and shoe stores, the butcher shops with Hebrew letters in the windows, ending up at Revere Beach Boulevard and the amusement rides.
Occasionally that summer I would bump into Rosalie there, on the Boulevard, and we’d spend a little time together, replaying our latest adventure at the horse track or the “crap-metal” yards, before she drifted back to her older friends and I went on alone. Those meetings with her were fleeting and coincidental—almost always near the beach. Leaving Jupiter Street with her Malden Street friends, she would seem to me to be swinging out and out, into the cool darkness at the edge of the universe, and then I’d see her on the Boulevard sidewalk, and she’d see me, and we’d move close again for a few minutes, and it would be like watching a comet looping back into view—racing, burning, passing just close enough so you could feel the tug of its gravity, then shooting away again into the dark. I’d go on about my solitary adventure with a twist of disappointment in my belly, a new layer of loneliness set neatly on top of the old.
On this stormy August day, I had turned right at the bottom of Jupiter Street and was heading nowhere in particular when I was overtaken by a desire to see her. Because of the weather, I suppose, I had the sure sense that she was at home, instead of at the beach. So I crossed at Achenbach School, angled down Dale Street to the corner of Venice Avenue, and began the long climb. A few hard raindrops slapped the street, the clouds whirled in purple shreds. I hurried on.
When I was still a block away from her porch, the rain started to fall steadily, smacking against my shirtfront and face. I broke into a run, skipped through the gate, up the front steps, knocked once on the door, and pushed through. There was a grumbling of thunder outside. I went through the parlor, kitchen, and TV room, looking for her, taking an orange from the counter and spinning it in the fingers of one hand as if it were a baseball. I opened the cellar door and called her name down into the darkness. I climbed the stairs to the second floor. There was another clap of thunder, a hard ticking of rain against the windows. “Rosie?” I tapped once on the door of her bedroom, pushed it open, and saw Aunt Ulla half-lying, half-leaning against the headboard with Rosalie’s pillow supporting the small of her back. She was wearing a cream-colored summer dress with a pattern of small blue and yellow flowers on it—I remember it perfectly—and the dress was pulled up around her hips and a man was kneeling between her legs with his back to me.
I thought, at first, for that first instant, that it was Uncle Peter, helping her on with her stockings, or massaging her feet as he sometimes did. I thought she might be having one of her headaches. And then the expression on her face reached me, there was a small convulsion of the muscles around her mouth, and she said the syllables of my name in a way that made me want to have another name. The man was built like a sumo wrestler. He was not Uncle Peter. He swiveled on his knee and looked at me over his shoulder, dropped his eyes to the orange in my right hand as if it might be a pistol, and then drove them like dark-handled knives back up and into my face. I had seen him somewhere. In one of the houses we’d visited with Uncle Peter, or at a family party, or sitting behind the wheel of a car in the driveway while Peter leaned down to say a last word. He had an unforgettable face, handsome in a terrifying way: bright green eyes, short hair the color of the spots on a banana, and a wide forehead, on the left side of which, just above his eyebrow, a lump the size of a marble pressed up from beneath the skin. His lips pulled back slightly, as if he might snarl. I stood very still. Aunt Ulla was pushing at the bottom of her dress and trying to sit up, and rain beat against the window beyond the bed. The man knifed his eyes into me for another moment, then stood—lightly, quickly, the way a much thinner man would move—and brushed roughly past me and out the door without speaking. “Smithy!” my aunt called after him. I heard Smithy’s feet on the steps, quick feet, and then the front door slamming closed, and then thunder.
“Tonio,” she said. She was sitting on the edge of the bed by this time; she seemed to be trying to catch her breath.
Two words squeaked out of me. “Rosie home?”
She shook her head, chewed on the inside of her cheek, pulled down the front of her dress. “She’s out with her father. They went out.”
I stood there as if everything but my eyes had been paralyzed. She tugged the dress down another inch. The walls, the carpet—every surface of every object in the room—Rosalie’s bureau, her Beatles poster, the fabric on the pillows of her bed—seemed to be humming just beyond the range of the human ear.
“They left twenty minutes ago. They went to get you first. They were going up Route One for ice cream and then to a farm in Topsfield where they have horses. They were supposed … I thought they went to get you.”
“Are you alright, Auntie Ulla?”
She stood up without answering, and seemed only then to compose herself into the aunt I knew, cool and distant, taller and blonder and bigger-chested than the other aunts, the only one among them who wouldn’t offer you something to eat the moment you’d taken two steps into her house. “Come downstairs now,” she said. “I’ll make you an ice cream.” I shuffled my feet, surprises multiplying in the charged air. We went downstairs. I sat at the kitchen table while she moved between the cupboards and refrigerator, keeping her back to me. In a minute there was a bowl on the table, next to the orange I’d appropriated—four Oreo cookies with mint–chocolate chip ice cream spooned carelessly on top, a glass of milk. A sharp crack of thunder rattled the panes of the glass in the back door and echoed down into the valley w
here I lived. The rain followed with such force, it seemed it would press through the walls and leave us lying flat, side by side, in muddy puddles. I did not like mint–chocolate chip ice cream.
She sat opposite me and lit a cigarette, tapping it against a glass ashtray and blowing smoke straight up in the air. For a little while I toyed with the ice cream anyway, reaching past it with my spoon and breaking off pieces of the black wafers. I could feel her eyes on me. At last, when I had pretended to eat for what seemed a long time, I looked up.
“That man was a doctor,” she said. “Auntie Ulla is sick.”
“You are?”
She sucked hard on the cigarette, nodded with a throat full of smoke.
“Are you very sick?”
“Yes.”
I looked down. The ice cream was melting around the edges of the bowl. There were flashes of lightning in the yard, and the tremendous rain, and I wondered if Rosalie and my uncle had been caught in it, up at the horse farm in Topsfield.
“I never told anybody but you,” she said. “And you can’t tell anybody either. Ever. If you told somebody, it would make Uncle Peetha so sad he’d have a heart attack, he might die.”
In Revere, In Those Days Page 12