Then he would walk very stiffly and self-consciously around the counter and go to work rinsing dishes and tending his grill, but I would always have the sense that three-quarters of his attention remained on our table, on my grandmother. She would sip from the coffee cup with the smallest of smiles at the corners of her mouth, then set it back on the saucer, break off a piece of the buttered toast and nibble delicately, not quite looking at me.
On that day I poured the milkshake into my glass, glanced at the back of Jerry the Zazz’s head, took a sip, looked over the bar again at his white hair, then leaned toward my grandmother and said, “He loves you.”
“Chi?” she said indignantly. Who?
“Jerry the Zazz,” I whispered. “He’s in love with you.”
“Ma che dici?” she whispered hoarsely. But what are you saying?
A quick red flush had risen to her cheeks, and I had a feeling similar to the feeling I’d had one day when I came home early from school and accidentally saw her naked. There had been some kind of a teachers’ meeting; we’d been let out an hour early. I had hurried home to change into my play clothes and had come in the back door without making much noise. I went through the kitchen, not paying attention, stumbled across the threshold of her bedroom, intending to say a quick hello, and knocked right into her where she stood at her bureau, fresh from her bath, spraying herself with Jean Naté, and wearing not a stitch. She saw the expression on my face and went into such a roll of trilling laughter that it rang in my ears long after I’d run out of the house.
It was like that now. For one or two seconds I felt as if I had caught her in something. There was the quick blush, a flicker of embarrassment, the secret smile, then she laughed quietly, turning her face out toward the window so Jerry the Zazz wouldn’t hear.
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
She looked back at me, shrugged, glanced over the bar. I kept watching until she was forced to speak. “I was with his wife very good friends when we were girls in the North End,” she admitted, so quietly that I had to strain to hear her. “His wife, she died very young, when she was bringing him their first child. All these years now he lives like a celibe. Grandpa says he’s waiting for the day when he can propose to me to get married, but it isn’t true.”
“It looks true.”
She smiled again, the small, secret, inward-turning smile you see on some paintings of the Buddha.
We sat there a long time that day. Probably the conversation with Father Bucci had lifted an enormous weight from my conscience, allowed me to move the scene with Aunt Ulla and Smithy off to the edges of my memory, because I felt especially happy and calm. It is not so easy to be a Catholic kid, to have God bleeding there in front of you every week, tortured for your sake. You can end up feeling like a walking, talking mortal sin, a scratched-up dirty doll, constantly watched. For a little while that day, I felt freed from that. My two Hail Marys had made me holy in God’s eyes. I remember asking my grandmother what she asked for when she prayed.
“Nothing, Tonio,” she said. She had finished the toast and was brushing the crumbs together on the plate, pressing her fingertip down on them and bringing the finger to her mouth.
“What do you say to God?”
“Nothing. I don’t talk, darlin. I listen.”
“He talks to you?”
“Not like we talk, you and me.”
“How then?”
“He talks by what He makes in the world.”
“What does He say?”
She lifted up her eyebrows once. She looked at me the way her son Peter sometimes did, as if the ordinary fences that stood between the adult mind and the child’s had been uprooted and carted away in the space of two breaths. It seemed to me that she was assessing my readiness to hear certain information, and that she was on the verge of deciding I needed to wait.
“Tell me, Grandma.”
She looked down at the table, and her attention settled on one of Jerry the Zazz’s rumpled cloth napkins. The napkin was as yellow as an egg yolk, with thin green vines sewn along its edges—I can close my eyes and see it now as if it were here on the desk in front of me. I have paintings and drawings of it everywhere on my studio walls, in file cabinets and dusty folders, pencil sketches, pastels, oils on canvas in various sizes. “What’s the story with the napkin, Anthony?” my dealer, Jeremy Stearns, asked once, and I did not even try to answer him. Grandma took hold of the napkin in her fingers and shifted into Italian: “Devi guardare molto attentamente,” she said. “E’ una lingua che vedi, che non ha nessun parola.”
You have to look carefully. It’s a language that you see, that doesn’t have words.
I looked and looked and had no idea what she was talking about. It was only a napkin. Most days it still is.
Jerry the Zazz came back to check on things, and asked about the napkin. “It was dirty, Lianna?”
“No, no. It was fine. Everything is fine.”
“She was telling me about God,” I explained, and the Zazz turned to me as if I’d spoken the name of someone he’d known many years ago.
“Ah,” he said, “God.” He patted me on the shoulder twice and walked away.
When we were finished with our food, I went behind the bar and used the telephone. A few minutes after that, Uncle Peter appeared, beeping the horn out front and smiling at us through the windshield of his car. Aunt Ulla was in the seat beside him, waving at me, burning her eyes into me. My grandmother squeezed into the front seat next to her. I climbed in back. We rode up Revere Street and along Broadway and, stoplight by stoplight, I could sense the holiness, the goodness, leaking out of me. By the time we turned onto Park Avenue, the world was ordinary again—telephone poles, curbstones, and the smoky summer smell of the streets.
I must have asked about Rosie, because I remember Uncle Peter turning to his wife and saying, “Why doesn’t she go to confession anymore?” And Aunt Ulla saying, “Why don’t you?” under her breath, without looking at him.
When he pulled up in front of my grandparents’ house, Uncle Peter reached across the back of the seat and took hold of my left forearm with one of his big hands. “Stay a minute,” he said. “Man to man.” And I could feel a kind of electric current pass into me from the back of Aunt Ulla’s blond head. When she and my grandmother had gone down the walk toward the back steps, Uncle Peter turned around to face me. There were little streams and twitches of trouble running in the muscles around his eyes. “Whatta you so nervous about?” he asked me.
“Nothing. What are you?”
He frowned, squeezing away any possibility of making a joke. “What do we do about her?” he said, and he looked terrifying to me at that moment, a man who could kill another man without much hesitation or regret.
“Who, Uncle?”
“Whatta you mean, who?” He peered at me from beneath a tangle of scars, until I squirmed and looked away and heard: “Rosie, who else? What do we do about her and this heah mongrel she’s goin around with?”
Thirteen
WE DID NOTHING. I started junior high that year, a ten-minute walk from home. Rosalie rode a bus to the old Garfield School, not far from the beach. That building has been torn down now, replaced by a beautiful modern structure with lots of glass and light, but in those days Garfield School was a dilapidated brick box, a local disgrace, a sort of minimum-security prison for ninth-graders. There, in that seaside cauldron of guerrilla cliques, fistfights, and antiquated classrooms, Rosalie began to melt away from her father and grandparents, and from me. I would see her on Broadway, walking past the fire station in a knot of ninth-grade girls, most of them smoking, all of them having perfected the hard smirk and sloped shoulders that served to protect them from the various humiliations that haunted the corridors of Garfield School. If she saw me, she would wave and call out my name, detach herself from the loose formation of friends just long enough to rub her cheek against mine, make a kissing noise, and peel off a few affectionate sentences, like bills from a roll in
her jacket pocket.
“How ya doin, cuz?” she would say, tilting one shoulder down and flicking the butt of the cigarette with her thumbnail, or blowing smoke straight up into the air in an unconscious parody of her mother, never quite meeting my eyes, never quite still.
“Good.”
“McKinley’s nice, isn’t it?”
“Sure, great.”
“Goin out with anybody?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged, looked away.
“You know what Grandma says: when you meet the somebody for you, you’ll be happy forever.”
“I know. You goin out with anybody?”
“Caesar, but not really.”
“Are you alright? Your eyes look different.”
“It’s the cold air. I’m with my friends now, gotta go, okay? But I’ll call you. You can come out with Caesar and me some night, alright? We’ll get a pizza at the Brown Jug or something, hitch a ride to New York for a cup of coffee, okay? Bye, alright? Be good.”
I’d watch her hurry away, flicking the cigarette once at the side of her leg, catching up with her friends in front of Rosa’s Subs and squeezing into the middle of them the way her father squeezed into his place at the rail at Suffolk Downs.
That fall Rosie was arrested for the first time—for possessing a small amount of marijuana. It was a harmless transgression of a foolish law, a matter of being in the wrong place, with the wrong friends, wrong cop walking the beat. But it was 1967, in Revere, and marijuana seemed to many people then—some of our relatives, even—like the advance guard of a monstrous new evil that was stalking their way of life. She was released into her parents’ custody. No one in the family talked about it.
Fourteen
IN A STRANGE WAY, that afternoon with my grandmother—at church and in Jerry the Zazz’s—was the high point of that period of my life, the summit of my self-esteem and happiness. It would be years before I’d feel holy again, or good, or blessed.
At some point after the short, hard moment in Uncle Peter’s car, something broke in me, and in my feelings for Revere. I’m not sure I have lived long enough, or will ever live long enough, to see that break through a clean lens. But I believe now that this change in me had something to do with the important place Caesar Baskine had begun to occupy in Rosie’s life. I was not jealous of him. I think that if he had been a different kind of boy, I might even have been mature enough then to be happy for my cousin, to want to do things with them once in a while, to wish them well. But it was as if the pettiness and roughness in him was a virus, and it made his relationship with Rosalie into a mutation of the normal pattern of teenage love. The virus twisted her; it infected Uncle Peter, and it infected me.
What happened first was that the streets, housefronts, and landmarks of the city—things that had always seemed to me to be painted in the colors of a perfectly good-natured welcome—turned inhospitable overnight. It was as if the sun had risen one morning a different color. It began to seem to me that Caesar Baskine was a truer representative of Revere manhood than I was, than Uncle Peter was, than Grandpa Dom was, and so I began to be estranged from my own place. And since that place had been so much a part of the person I thought I was, I began to be estranged from my own self, as well.
If it hadn’t been for the consistent affection of the Benedetto family, it is possible I would have snapped in two completely in those years, and ended up like some of the sad-but-pretending-to-be-happy middle-aged men I saw in the crowd at high-school football games. My uncle Francis had gotten me a job in the little wooden stall where coffee and hot dogs were sold at halftime, and amidst the great convivial tide of fans there, I would always see a few solitary souls, washed back and forth at the edges of things like broken pieces of shell in the surf. You could see the discomfort in their skittering eyes when they ordered, in the uncertain way they reached out for the paper cup—“This one mine?” They could not quite summon the unself-consciousness necessary to just do things the way people did them in Revere. They could not quite buy the local act, be part of the local scene, fit into a gang the way Rosalie did with her friends on Broadway and down the beach. And they had never found the courage to go away for a year or two, or forever, and make up an act for themselves. They functioned well enough, but there was not much joy in their functioning, not much style. Jostled by the crowd, they stepped away from the booth with their steaming cup in both gloved hands, then remembered, turned back, fished a nickel out of their coat pocket and reached out over someone’s shoulder to toss it at the tip jar, and the nickel always missed, always rolled down into the dirt, and you would hear them saying, “Sorry,” as they drifted back toward their place in the grandstand.
I might have ended up that way if it had not been for my aunts, uncles, and cousins. They were a strong sheath of muscle and tendon surrounding a fracture in a bone, and they held the bone steady, and held it, and held it, until, eventually, years down the road, the fibers cemented themselves together again and the bone was fit to bear weight.
I’M NOT SURE I HAVE the courage and the clear-sightedness to tell this part of the story, and I’m not sure I understand the sequence of events precisely enough to describe them well, but I know the beginning.
The beginning was McKinley School, the place Rosalie called “nice.” It was not nice, not for me, at least. It was a hulking, three-story structure with a slate roof and bloodred brick walls. There were wide-gauge screens over the windows on the first floor, and a small tar playground with two bent, netless basketball hoops and piles of litter against the fence. During my time there, eighth-grade boys initiated seventh-grade boys into the pleasure of attending by means of a ritual called “poling.” Small gangs of self-appointed polers would mill about the playground before the morning bell and chase down any seventh-grader foolish enough to wander onto the premises a few minutes early. The seventh-grader would be lifted up by the mob, held parallel to the ground—all this accompanied by howling and grunting and screaming, and observed with special interest by the seventh- and eighth-grade girls. The polee’s legs would be spread, and he would be driven like a ramrod into the metal pole that supported the backboard, testicles first.
I saw Stephen Brown poled. I heard the noise he made—a stifled scream—saw the metal pole shiver, watched him writhing on the dirty tar, his legs shifting back and forth, one arm held between his knees and his head arched back so that the veins in his neck stood out. There was a great deal of status in having been poled, and when he recovered in a few days, Brown became a kind of honorary eighth-grader. The honor seemed a dubious one to me.
There were good teachers at McKinley School in those years, teachers who cared, who encouraged, who made a valiant stand at the gates of the fortress of spelling and reading and math. But there was a teacher who turned his eyes away from a wrestling match at the back of the homeroom and, later, slipped a few dollars into the hand of the winner because the loser was a notorious troublemaker in class; teachers who pushed students against the blackboard, hard, who lied to us, pitted us one against the other with classroom balloting for “most conceited girl,” “best-built boy,” and the like; teachers who were caught up in the kind of cult of roughness that ruled the playground and, to some extent in those years, the city itself.
The king of this cult was a boy named Johannes Orto, widely acknowledged to be the toughest kid in McKinley School. Orto was not particularly mean, but he was as tall and heavy as an average-size grown man, tremendously quick with his hands, fearless, and as stupid as the trunk of a tree. I remember the math teacher, Mr. Craxis, becoming frustrated with his antics once and shouting at him across the heads of the other students: “Orto, what was our deal? You just sit there in this class, right? You sit there in the back row, and you make no trouble, and I give you your C for the year. Did you forget that already?”
The teachers were besieged; they cut deals, they ceded the playground to Orto and his crew the way governments ce
de distant provinces to bands of guerrillas. Or they tippled and mumbled behind their desks and failed to notice that my friend Peter Imbesalacqua had pinned a condom to the window screen of Room 7B in such a way that the afternoon sun cast a perfect shadow-phallus on the yellow shade. Class after class, we snickered over that, three-quarters of us having not the faintest idea what a condom was actually used for, or where in Greek mythology we should place the god Trojan-Enz. Weeks went by before someone in authority noticed and had the condom taken down.
Probably McKinley would have seemed less like a correctional facility and more like a school to me if I had continued to grow at a normal pace. My cousin Ernie’s son—my godchild—is a student there now, and I’ve driven him to school two or three times, and visited his classroom. It all seems so ordinary, nothing like the noisy, terrifying McKinley of memory. The boys and girls stand as high as my waist or chest or shoulders, and carry their books down the oiled, squeaking corridors like somber little soldiers in a jumbled peacetime march. They skip out the front door, they chase each other back and forth across the miniature lawn. The older ones drift off together in knots of three and four to sneak a cigarette or talk about a scandalous romance. They look harmless and very young, the way my friends and I must have looked to our elders. What seemed to me then like the outer edge of hell must have seemed, from the teachers’ point of view, like a sweaty day at the beach. We were, after all, merely acting out the insecurities and psychological dramas of our parents: the girls were required to be streetwise, at once flirtatious and cool, and the boys were required to be tough. Those were the commodities in which our mothers and fathers traded in the adult world. That was what they had instead of money.
In Revere, In Those Days Page 14