But I had stopped growing. Average size in fifth grade, slightly below average in sixth, I stepped into the classroom on the first day at McKinley School and discovered that my classmates, boys and girls alike, had risen up around me over the summer like skyscrapers around a four-story office building built in the 1920s. In seventh grade, I stood four feet ten inches short. One afternoon before the start of English class, Janet Siskovitch somehow got hold of my penny loafer and held it up over her head, and I reached and jumped and could not come close to snatching it back from her. Arnold Wiggio, also my size but a bit stockier, was thrown out the window in music class while Mr. Johnson plunked blindly at the keys of his upright piano and half heartedly urged us to sing “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Wiggio was unhurt—the window was only ten feet off the tar of the playground—but with the shoving and rabbit-punching, the fistfights and threats, the poling, the little game in which a house key was scraped against the back of a hand until the skin broke and bled, the swaggering Orto and his cigarette-smoking lieutenants, McKinley was a jungle biosphere: what counted was force and cunning. Lacking those, you might resort to camouflage: try as best you could to blend into the cracked paint of the walls or the metal and concrete of the stairwells; or you might work out a system of joke-cracking and wise remarks and, betraying your cousins and friends, ride like a trembling bird on the shoulders of the rhinoceros, pecking away fleas and beetles now and then, making yourself useful, staying safe.
My arms were like twigs next to the arms of most of the other boys. I prayed for hair to grow above my top lip. At night, I used to stand in my little room in my grandparents’ house, take hold of myself around the ribs and pull upward, as if puberty might be summoned with a few good yanks of the bones. I developed all sorts of clandestine strategies for showering and changing at the YMCA, anything to hide my smallness and hairlessness. In spite of what I’d told Father Bucci, I had been an allstar shortstop in Little League, but I did not even bother to try out for Babe Ruth League, the next level up. The diamond was too large there, the pitches too fast, the other players twenty or thirty or fifty pounds heavier and sometimes a foot taller. Instead, I played stickball at the tennis courts with old neighborhood friends—some of whom were close to my size—buried myself deeper in the shame of good scholarship, and spent hundreds and hundreds of hours cultivating the idea for me: shooting pucks at the plywood goalie Vittorio Imbesalacqua had made, and passing every winter afternoon at the MDC rink, or at the pond in the Public Gardens with my grandfather.
A small, slight man himself, a tailor in a time and place where most of his acquaintances were stonemasons and construction workers, a quiet, dignified, opera-loving man in a race of boisterous Americans and gregarious Neapolitans, Grandpa Dom seemed to have an acute understanding of the perils of being a small man who didn’t like to hurt other men. I found out much later that it had been his idea for Uncle Peter to bring me out into the backyard three or four times and give me boxing lessons. I took to those lessons the way I took to my schoolwork—diligently, patiently, obediently. Blocking punches, throwing punches, dodging punches—I could do those things well enough. The problem was, I did not want to do them. I did not see any reason to smash my fist into someone else’s face, and that philosophy was a great liability for a boy at McKinley School. Anyone could challenge me, push me, slap me around, and the most I could manage was to take hold of their wrists and wait until the fight was broken up, and then lace up my hockey skates on the weekend and bang into bigger boys to prove to myself that I wasn’t a coward.
I made the Bantam Team, then grew an inch and a half in eighth grade, and another inch and a half in ninth, and earned a spot on the Revere High School Junior Varsity, though I was still the smallest member of the team and did not see much playing time. Once, in a game against Winthrop, with my grandfather and Uncle Peter in attendance, I took the place of an injured left winger and skated half the length of the rink with the puck before a defenseman put his shoulder into my chest and nearly knocked me out. That was the extent of my local heroism on the ice. Still, it used to give me a strange sort of pleasure to be knocked down like that, checked, tripped, smashed into the boards. I would get up, set my helmet on straight, and chase after the player who’d checked me, protected by the pads and the rules, more or less fearless.
But there were no pads on the street, and no rules, and no point to the things that went on there, as far as I could see. Except that, in the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, the girls—even my favorite cousin—seemed attracted to boys who liked to fight. Even the teachers seemed to admire them above everyone else. And if the cousins and uncles weren’t telling stories about Uncle Peter’s days in the ring, they were reading from a mythology of masculine violence: Frankie Lucca had broken someone’s nose for insulting his sister; Uncle Aldo had beaten someone to a pulp for stealing his wallet at the Revere Theater; John-John Sawyer, who lived next door, liked to punch his hands against the shingles of his parents’ garage to toughen the skin.
These stories—partly true, partly embellished—were passed along by men and women both, to boys and girls both, proudly, innocently, like parables, like prayers. The war in Vietnam was tearing the neatly pressed fabric of the country to shreds in those years—1967, 1968, 1969—and young men went to war because of stories like that, because the battlefield was the ultimate test of their toughness, and toughness was the ultimate test of their goodness. That is the trick the nation plays on its poor and working-class sons and daughters.
But in those years, I would have given anything—anything—to be tough in that way. Sitting beside me under the grapevine on the night Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, smoking a cigar and staring out at the tomato plants, Uncle Peter said, as if temporarily converted to nonviolence, “Tough doesn’t matter, Tonio. I broke Burly Goodman’s jaw down the beach when I was your age. One punch. He was a linebacker on the football team and three years older than me, and he said something about Italians I didn’t like. You think that did me any good in the long run? You think I’m proud a that now?”
“You sound proud.”
He frowned, looked away. “Lissen,” he said when he turned back, “I wasn’t smart in school, I wasn’t nice-lookin, even when I was a kid, alright? I had one thing goin for me, I was strong, I was tough.”
“The most important thing,” I said. “The best thing to have going for you.”
“Bullshit,” he told me. It was the first time he’d used a word like that in my presence. “Look at me now. I’m a slave for other people. I sweat, I break my back, and whaddo I have?”
“You have a Cadillac, you have a nice house. You have the prettiest wife of anybody. The most friends.”
He seemed not to hear. He let out a breath of sweet smoke, reached down and wiped something off his shoe. “I showed you how to box, didn’t I?”
“It doesn’t work when I fight in the street. I’m afraid. I hate it.”
“Everybody’s afraid. Lissen, forget fightin, I’m tryin to tell you. Forget it. You gut a great life layin out ahead of you. You’re gonna be somebody special, a doctor, a senator, and you’re worried about bein tough in ninth grade?”
But that advice was like a whisper of encouragement in a chorus of howls and jeers. The future was a speck of might be against an enormous, ninth-grade IS. Rosie had drifted away from me and toward the meanest, roughest kid in the city—didn’t that show what was important, and what wasn’t? I was a dwarf with skinny biceps who went to church every week and got all As without trying, a scrap of a boy washing back and forth at the edge of manhood, leaning forward tentatively from the back of the crowd and saying, “That one mine?”
“What do you think?” my grandfather asked me when I came home after a particularly miserable day. “What do you think about going away to one of those schools we talked about? Not now, Tonio, but maybe next year or the year after? What do you think?”
Book Three
One
IT WAS
A BLUE, brilliant, seaside September morning. The tops of the two old maple trees in front of Mr. and Mrs. Sawyer’s house shifted and tossed in a light breeze. Uncle Peter pulled up to the curb in his brown-and-gold Cadillac—the last new car he would ever own—and lifted my suitcases from the sidewalk into the trunk with an artificially happy expression on his face, as if he had just lost a high-stakes poker game and was pretending the money didn’t matter. Aunt Ulla had left him a few weeks before. Left him, left her teenaged daughter, Rosalie, left a note, flown to Norway with a wealthy new American boyfriend on the vacation she had always dreamed of, a vacation that marked the end of her association with the Benedetto clan, and the end of her time in Revere, Massachusetts.
Many years later she would step into my life again, once, briefly, a gray-blond, bejeweled, seventy-five-year-old drifting along the edges of a small crowd at an art opening in Chicago. The show was called “Faces of Revere,” and on the walls of the gallery were portraits of some of the uncles and aunts, of Dom and Lia, Father Bucci, Rafaelo Losco and his wife, Teresina. I was standing with Jeremy Stearns, my dealer, and a young woman who collected portraits and whose name I do not remember. I looked up and saw Aunt Ulla hovering in front of the four-foot-by-four-foot face of her former husband. I recognized her immediately. My first instinct was to slip into the men’s room.
But the collector and Jeremy moved half a step to the side and sank deeper into business talk, and I set my plastic glass down and made myself walk across the room and say hello.
“Hello, Anthony,” she said, in a voice coarsened at the edges with money and age. In her pearls, pantsuit, and carefully applied makeup, she seemed as polished and hard as the gallery’s marble floors, but she also seemed at peace with herself in a certain way, as if she had at last found the place she’d been destined for. It surprised me—the poise, the air of casual distance, of confidence. It surprised and angered me. I had not realized until then how ambitious she was, how badly she had wanted to find herself in a station higher than a wood-frame house on a crowded street in Revere. Until that moment, I had not realized those things about myself. She clasped my hand in both her hands and looked up at me. “Very, very wonderful work.”
I nodded, gestured toward the canvas, and said, “Someone you might remember.”
“Oh yes, of course.” She half-turned toward the painting, and then, since I was watching to see what effect it might have on her, she caught herself and faced me full again. “How is Peter these days? Are you in touch?”
Rosalie had been dead three months—Ulla had sent an arrangement of flowers to the funeral home; my uncle, struck down by his grief, was a patient in a rehabilitation clinic on Revere Beach, where I visited him on Sunday afternoons and pushed him along the Boulevard in a wheelchair. “He’s fine,” I said. “We have lunch in Boston every Friday.”
She knew I was lying. For a moment the veil parted, the same veil she’d always worn around me, and I could see that my lie had made friendly contact with the liar in her, as if we had at last found the frequency on which we could speak without static. Or as if the fact of Rosalie’s death and Uncle Peter’s misery somehow justified the decision she had made all those years ago. Her eyes flickered to either side, and she said, in a quiet, pleasant-seeming voice that was not quite a whisper: “You hate me, don’t you? You’ve never been able to forgive me.”
“You didn’t come to Rosalie’s funeral.”
She flexed the muscles near the right corner of her mouth. She looked away, but only for the time it took to blink. “I wanted to,” she said. “I tried to. I got packed and dressed and took a taxi to the airport.… But I just couldn’t face all of you. I cashed in my ticket and went straight home and didn’t get out of bed for three days.”
I stared at her. The usual marks of age on her pretty face. The false sociability. The poise, manufactured gregariousness, and fear of ordinariness you sometimes find in the upper classes. I said, “You’re everything I hope my daughter won’t grow up to be.”
One spark of hurt then. She opened her mouth and closed it. And at that moment I remembered, very precisely, the look on Rosalie’s face on the day I told her I was going off to the eleventh grade at Phillips Exeter Academy: a tough-girl smirk built on a foundation of cauterized wounds, as if her mother’s leaving and my leaving were only two more events confirming the true architecture of the human soul. I shifted my weight, ready to walk away, but Ulla rested a hand on my arm, a proprietary hand, all the past in it.
“Rosie forgave me before she died.”
Do you really think so? I almost said, but we had reached a territory I was not able to navigate, the territory of my old, impotent rage. I turned my back and left her there, standing beside the painting of Uncle Peter.
But that was many years after the day I left Revere. With the obvious exception of my mother and father, we were all alive, together, and more or less healthy then, and, until Uncle Peter’s arrival, the morning wore a somewhat forced air of celebration. Rosalie had promised to ride with me to Exeter, New Hampshire, and see that I was safely settled in, but when he pulled up in front of the house, Uncle Peter was alone. “You’re number two in her life now,” he joked by way of an apology.
“Which makes you number three,” I told him.
He cuffed me on the shoulder. There was uneasy laughter from the small delegation that had assembled, Uncle Aldo and Aunt Laura, Grandma and Grandpa, my little cousin Nicky, who wanted very badly to be a hockey player someday, like me. I hugged and kissed them, stalling, hoping to see Rosie drive up in Caesar Baskine’s GTO. But she’d had enough abandonments for one season. Uncle Peter slammed the trunk. I took one breath and looked around at the houses and telephone wires, the rusting TV antennas, the lines of cars at the curbs, the garden and the grapevine, and the windows on the second floor of my grandparents’ house. Then I made a small, awkward wave, climbed into the passenger seat next to my uncle, and rode away.
WE MADE A PASS through the cemetery—“for luck,” Uncle Peter said. He slowed down but did not stop at the graves, then cut across the northwest corner of Revere and up onto Route 1. For the first few miles he sat staring straight forward, eyebrows pinched together, left wrist draped over the top of the wheel, his bald head nearly touching the roof of the car. I noticed he was still wearing his wedding ring, though he had announced to the family that he and Ulla were separated (we were Catholics; the word divorce was not used), that the marriage was over. If he ever met the rich bastard who had stolen her away from him, he said, he’d kill him with his own hands, drag the body out into the middle of Broadway, and then walk down to the police station and turn himself in.
When we passed Danvers State Hospital, he shifted his weight, glanced at me across the seat, and said, “What’s this all about anyway? This goin away to a rich kids’ school. Grandpa talk you into this?”
“They gave me a scholarship.”
“I know they gave you a scholarship. You’re gonna be a great hockey player someday; you’re the smartest kid ever to come out of the city of Revere. Who wouldn’t give you a scholarship? What I’m askin is why did you take it? Revere High wasn’t good enough for you?”
I did not know why I had taken it. Because Rosalie had sailed away from us with a thick-necked future felon; because I was terrified by the slow failing of my grandfather’s health and the slow accumulation of the weight of age on my grandmother; because, though I had grown five inches over the summer, I was still not at peace with the rough idolatries of the neighborhood I had once loved. I had my hockey games—after years of hard practice, I had made the varsity squad at Revere High and seen some playing time; I had my friends; I had, still, the comfort of family gatherings. But in some way I could not fathom, my parents’ deaths had begun to hurt me more instead of less, as if, as my body changed, the sadness had spawned offspring in my cells—an ancestry of absence, a genealogy of grief. I did not want to be a kid anymore, fussed over and vulnerable. I wanted to make a life for myself
, without waiting, a life beyond the borders and barriers of Revere.
“I don’t know why, Uncle,” I told him. “I don’t know.”
“Beautiful,” he said, in a harsh, sarcastic tone he had never used with me. It was like one of his playful punches thrown too hard. And I threw back, as he himself had taught me to.
“You’re pissed off because Aunt Ulla left,” I blurted out in my nervousness, my fear of him abandoning me.
“Mr. Psychologist now.”
“And because Rosalie’s out of the house most of the time. You’re pissed off at me because of them.”
He turned his face to me, and it seemed ugly at that moment, all twisted lips and scarred eyebrows, all shadow. “Since when do you talk to me like that?”
“It’s true, though.”
“Don’t throw the truth like a punch.”
“You started it.”
“You’re the one who’s leavin.”
“I’m not leaving, I’m going to school. I’ll never leave, I’ll never leave you. You’ve been a father to me for five years. I’ll never leave you as long as I live.”
He kept his eyes forward, blinked, swallowed. “You’re in a small club then,” he said, trying for a joke and just missing.
A few miles of highway slipped past the windows—billboards, neon signs, cheap storefronts facing broken-up tar lots—a spiritless and gaudy landscape, all money and the legacy of dreams of money.
“And you’ll find somebody better than her,” I said. “You’ll see. Lots of women will want to be with you.”
“Sure,” he said. “Hundreds. Thousands.”
I kept watching him. He flexed his fingers on the wheel. “They’ll be after your money,” I said. He turned his jaw toward me, a little broken light playing at the edges of his lips. “They’ll go out with you just to be able to sit in a car like this.”
In Revere, In Those Days Page 15