It was a fine thing to be able to tell Uncle Peter on the way home.
He had something fine to tell me, too. “Good news, Tonio,” he said, when we’d paid the five-cent toll and were heading south along the highway. “Rosie and I are moving in upstairs, over you and Grandma and Grandpa.”
“What about your house?” I asked him, watching his face wrinkle and twitch and almost being able to read what he was hiding.
“Sold it,” he said, squeezing the wheel so that the muscles of his forearm flexed. “I sold it last week. To the bank.”
Five
I SAW ROSALIE THAT NIGHT. I’d been home less than an hour, just enough time to unpack my clothes and give my grandparents the latest news from school. She breezed through the back door, wrapped me in an exaggerated hug, and said, “Let’s go, Tonio. Caesar wants to take you for a ride.” Before I could really look at her, before I had a chance to ask what had been happening in her life, she had swept me out of the kitchen and into the front seat of Caesar Baskine’s light-brown GTO.
In all eras and all places, there have been men whose only real talent is an instinct for physical intimidation, a love of inflicting pain. I have seen them in Russia, in Mexico, in drafty Canadian bars. I’ve watched them walking their tough-looking girlfriends down the sidewalks of down-at-the-heels Vermont factory towns. The anger in their bones links them across all geographic and political boundaries, all the centuries. They seem to be challenging the very air around them as they move, seem to take even the most passing, casual glance as a personal insult, holding their hands out away from their hips as if ready to draw from a holster. Apparently free of physical fear themselves (I wonder, though, if they aren’t, in fact, ruled by it), they can sense it in others as surely as a thief senses an unlocked door.
This comes close to describing Caesar Baskine, though there were somewhat softer secondary characteristics that adorned his basic nature like flowers tattooed on a fist. I had known him slightly when I was growing up, had heard the stories about him—fighting stories mostly—seen him a few times standing on the corner with some of Revere’s famously tough older boys. When I was still in junior high and spending a lot of time at the skating rink, he would occasionally make an appearance there and extort dimes and quarters from kids like me—younger, smaller souls—coming up close in front of you as you were carrying your skates to the door, putting a hand on your shoulder, giving a little push, and saying, with a fake-innocent expression and no offer of repayment, “Hey, how about loaning me some money for the bus?” With this approach he might make a dollar or two in the space of half an hour, but it wasn’t really the money he was after. What he was after then, I’m sure, what he would chase for the rest of his life, was the sense of being large in the world—in the life of the city, in my cousin’s life—as some kind of a balm for the fact that he seemed to himself, in his most private moments, so painfully small.
As soon as I pulled the door of his car closed, he reached across in front of Rosalie and smacked me, backhanded, on the breastbone, in what was at once a gesture of affection and a signal of physical superiority. You’re one of us, the greeting announced. Here, get in line behind me. He had grown since the last time I’d seen him, not so much taller as wider—a square head on a square, thick neck, on rounded, muscular shoulders—and now he flaunted, in the unfortunate fashion of the day, a pair of reddish-brown sideburns that stood like bristled boots on his jaw-line. The front seat was lit by the street lamp. I could see a few days’ worth of rusty beard on his chin, between the sideburn tips. And there was a lively, almost an overjoyed glint in his pale eyes, as if, after years of planning, he had finally recruited Rosalie’s cousin over from the choirboy crowd to the forces of evil.
He wasn’t evil, though, not really, at least not then. Mean perhaps, even sadistic, but the main force twisting him was a nastier version of what Uncle Peter suffered from: a barely concealed and desperate need to be thought well of. It was my only small advantage over him.
He pushed down on the accelerator and zipped his racing machine between the cars parked on both sides of Jupiter Street. At Mountain Avenue he did not so much stop as hover, pushing the nose of his GTO halfway into the traffic lane, making two cars coming down the hill left to right move out and around him, then screeching in behind the second of those cars and crawling up on the poor woman’s bumper, gunning his engine with one foot on the clutch, swerving right and left, until, by the time we reached Mercury Street—five blocks—she was obliged to pull over and let him roar past.
Rosalie was pushed up close against him, leaving me unanchored on my half of the seat. I slipped my right hand down between the cushion and the door and held on, where they couldn’t see. I pressed my feet into the floor mat whenever we tilted to a stop. We careened along Broadway to Revere Street and then down to the beach, running yellow lights as they went red, the half-muffled exhaust system bubbling and backfiring, the car rocking at stop signs as Caesar revved his 389-cubic-inch V-8.
It was 1969, but we cruised the Boulevard in classic fifties fashion. From time to time Caesar would see—or pretend to see—someone he knew, on the sidewalk or in a car going the opposite way, and he’d make a big show of flashing his headlights or sounding his ah-oo-gah horn. This would be followed by a glowing elaboration of his friend’s credentials. “Johnny Mikelewski, best running back in the Greater Boston League,” he’d say. Or: “Ernie Livinio’s little brother. Beat the crap out of some Puerto Rican guy in Chelsea last week, sent him right to the friggin hospital.”
“Great,” Rosalie would say. “My hero.” But her sarcasm had a lining of affection to it. Caesar would smirk and lift the back of his hand up near her face, as if he were barely holding himself back from striking her. Or as if he were giving my imagination something to work on in later years. Then he’d pinch her thigh, hard, and she’d squeal and wriggle and nuzzle up against his arm.
At the northernmost end of the Boulevard the amusements and food stands gave way to a row of comfortable brick houses with small lawns, and there was less light, fewer people. Caesar pulled the front of his car in tight against the hurricane wall and killed the engine. We got out.
It was a raw, blustery night, no moon. Caesar put one hand on top of the wall and swung his legs over; Rosie and I followed. We walked down the sand toward the water, where the lights from the Boulevard could not reach us, and I felt the neat quiet world of the Academy slip off my back like a linen shirt floating away on the wind. The staid classrooms, Joey Barnard, Coach Rislin tossing pucks onto the ice—those things might have belonged to a soft, fake life I had dreamed about one night.
We walked to the edge of the water and stared out over the splashing, whispering surf. Boston Light blinked there, a fickle star caught between the noisy blackness of the sea and the silent, white-spotted sky. Caesar reached inside his RHS football jacket and took out what looked like a hand-rolled cigarette. “Ever try it?” Rosalie said, turning to look at me for the first time.
“Try what?”
She tilted her face sideways and turned her lips down at me the way I’d seen her father do a hundred times. “Grass,” she said impatiently. “Dope.”
“No.”
“You’ll like it. It makes you calm.”
I’m already calm, I wanted to say, but by then Caesar had lit the cigarette and, clamping his lips down on the trapped smoke, was tilting his head up and back in a stylized, thick-necked ecstasy. Rosalie mimicked him, I mimicked Rosalie. We passed the thing back and forth a couple of times, then Caesar tossed the tiny nub of it into the surf and said, “Hah!” very loudly.
The damp shoreline swirled and tilted. I turned away from them and walked south along the edge of the water, letting the cold waves lap against the soles of my sneakers, feeling the wind scraping my cheeks and bare hands. I had gone less than twenty yards when the row of streetlights curling off toward Winthrop took on a cast I can only describe now as angelic. Revere Beach had become a stage set for
a mildly ecstatic vision, a vision empty of the ballast of pain I seemed to have been carrying around with me for centuries. The night was no longer cold. The past and the future fell away neatly, and I coasted through the narrow strip of present with such a sense of ease and joy that I forgave Rosalie immediately and completely for her association with Caesar Baskine. Why turn away from someone who offered this: six puffs that erased all the pain of the past?
I swung around and saw them there in the distance, kissing, her body pressed against his as if she wanted to be welded to the buttons of his shirt. Strangely then, I was overcome by an urge to pray. I went down on one knee in the damp sand, and looked up at the sky above Boston Light as if the Jesus of the nine o’clock Mass were floating there, waiting to offer a word. But there was no Jesus in the sky, and no words came to me. What came, instead, was a sense of my mother. There was no real image, certainly not an image of the last time I had seen her—burned, unconscious, wired up to the beeping machinery of the last hours of life—just a faceless, scentless, soundless memory of her essence, as if she were standing there behind or beside me, with her feet on the wet beach stones and wet strands of seaweed. Look at this, Ma, I seemed to be saying to her without actually speaking the words. Look at us now, torn there and here as if we had no blood connection at all. Tell us where we go now. Tell me who I go with.
Then I was walking back along the shore, closing in on the spectacle of Caesar groping my cousin in the cold wind. To divert them, I stuck my rear end out, jutted my chin up into the air, and said, as Higgenbotham liked to say it, “The Acahdemy. I am a student at the Acahdemy.”
Caesar laughed, reached out to clap me on the back and nearly knocked me into the water. Rosalie took my elbow—I had been waiting for her to touch me—and led me up the soft slope, then seemed to change her mind. She drifted away, down the beach again. For a time, Caesar and I stood rooted in the sand, watching her. Then we floated over to the hurricane wall, leaned back against it, and immersed ourselves in a dull, quiet reverie. I was dimly aware of the surf, the cars swishing past at our backs, Rosalie’s coat swinging toward us down the beach and then passing by in front of me close enough to touch.
“It’s freezing!” she screamed, falling into Caesar’s lap like a starlet. She turned her eyes to me, and in them was something so close to hatred that even through the drug it hit me like a slap. She held on to him, one of his knees to either side of her. He pulled a set of keys from his jacket pocket and dangled them in front of her face. “Run up and start the Gee-Toe, Rosie,” he said.
“Right, boss. Yes, massah.”
When she’d gone, Caesar and I walked a little ways down the beach, aimlessly, twenty feet apart, flinging stones in the general direction of the surf, kicking shells, then, finally, making a wide loop back toward the car. The first elation of the drug had already given way to something arid and sour. My head was aching, the steel needles of Rosalie’s eyes were still lodged in me.
“So how is it, that school?”
“Pretty good.”
“Pretty good? You left Revere High hockey for friggin pretty good?”
“They have three football fields. Five basketball courts. Two hockey rinks.”
“Big shit.”
“You’d like it,” I said, though even through the remnants of the drug, the idea was utterly absurd to me, comical, farcical. I pictured Caesar Baskine in Mr. Goodyear’s history class and could not keep a short, mean laugh from bubbling out of me.
He seemed to know I was laughing at him, seemed to have been expecting it. He shoved me once in the shoulder, not very hard, and said, “Your cousin can be a cunt, know that?”
The word fell against my ears like a club. I walked on a few steps. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to have him out on the ice with me so I could skate circles around him, put the blade of my stick between his skates and lift it up, hard, into his groin; trip him as he skated toward the goalpost, or send him crashing into the boards. “You’re lucky she has anything to do with you,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“You know it, too. You’re the cunt.”
“Screw you,” he said, but with palpable affection.
“You’re a big dumb piece of shit; you have a barbell for a friggin brain. Your face looks like a hamburg somebody forgot to cook.” I had no idea what I was doing, talking to him like that. In another setting, he might have swung his fist into my teeth and left me lying there in a pool of my own blood, but I had accidentally struck the right note with him. I was speaking his language, spitting fearlessness into his face. He loved me for it.
“Screw you, Einstein,” he said tenderly. “You friggin Jew.”
We went on a few paces, close to the seawall by then. I could see Rosalie sitting in the front seat of the car, looking at herself in the rearview mirror, playing with a strand of hair. This way? That way? Which way will he like it better?
“You guys get to know each other on the beach?” she said.
“He’s no queer,” Caesar answered, as if I’d been tested, and managed a passing grade. “He’s okay, the friggin Jew.”
Rosie laughed.
Caesar’s crude assessment of her rattled in my brain as we drove through the dark marshland near Oak Island and back toward my grandparents’ house. Rosalie sat between us, one hand on top of his thigh. She lit another cigarette, blew a stream of smoke against the dashboard. No one spoke. We were all cool. Not a Jew or a queer among us.
By the time we made a last screeching turn onto Jupiter Street, the sourness of Rosalie’s cigarette smoke had slithered down into my stomach. Caesar pulled the car to the curb.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said. Rosalie laughed, glanced at me, looked away when I hugged her. Caesar crushed my hand. “You’re okay,” he said.
“Great car.”
I waited there until the taillights disappeared onto Park Avenue. I went down the walk at the side of the house, stumbled down the small half step that led into the backyard, and stood there holding on to one of the grapevine posts. After a few minutes I stepped into the garden and vomited twice onto the frozen stalks of the tomato plants. There were lights on in the kitchen. I sat out under the grapevine, spitting, rubbing a sleeve across my mouth, letting the last of the sourness drift away. I thought about my mother, about the feeling I’d had on the beach, the sense of her. It seemed to me then that it held some key to the night, to Caesar and Rosalie and me, and to why I had stopped loving this place. But I could not quite get my fingers around it and turn it in its lock. I bent forward and looked back up over my shoulder, past the edge of the grapevine to the dark windows on the second floor, and struggled to remember her face and her body as they had actually been—the small space between her front teeth, the hair pulled up and back from her forehead, the freckles near her ear, the muscles of her calves. Now, though, all of that was mixed up with Caesar’s words, with my cousin’s hand on his leg, with a dozen images from Higgenbotham’s magazines, and Amen-Hall-smoking-room comments about faculty daughters.
After a while the cold air reached me, and I climbed the back steps into the kitchen, closing the door a little too loudly. My grandfather came out from his bedroom. He took hold of my elbow briefly as he passed, telling me, quietly, to sit. Without its leaves, the table was an ordinary-sized piece of furniture, covered with a plastic cloth and supporting a centerpiece of plastic fruit in a raised white dish. Dom had his slippers on. He opened a cupboard and took out an unlabeled jug of red wine, uncorked it, poured two glasses. Whenever we had family gatherings at that table, the custom was that the adults were served full glasses of wine, and the cousins were served wine mixed with what we called “orangeade.” For the youngest, it was pure orange soda; for those in grade school, orange soda mixed with a spoonful of wine, swirling like blood in a glass of neon orange. Only the older cousins were served more wine than soda, and looking down along the table, you could guess our ages by the color of the drink in front of us. You could read there who could dri
ve and who was allowed to go out on dates, and who still had before them the great adventure of crossing over from the continent of childhood to some new land of kisses and speeding cars.
With the deliberateness of a priest at the altar, my grandfather set the two glasses of wine on the table in front of him, went to the refrigerator, poured into my glass no more than a capful of soda, and set it carefully before me. The mixture seemed too dark for me. I looked up at him, and he was sitting straight-spined, lips pressed tight, the satin lapels of his bathrobe lying unwrinkled on his thin, flat chest. He seemed to pray over the wine for a moment before the lenses of his eyeglasses swung slowly up to me.
“Bevi,” he said quietly. Drink.
When I had swallowed a sip, he said, still in Italian, and almost as if he were talking to an adult, “Allora, raccontami comè la tua vita là.” Alright, tell me about your life there.
We sat at the table until just before midnight, two hours past his usual bedtime, and I told him everything: what I was studying in each class, what the teachers were like; how Mr. Luckey, during a discussion of Conrad’s Victory, had tried to cure a boy named Braithwaite from saying Eye-talians; how, the night before vacation, when the Academy bell struck twelve, we all opened our windows and screamed out over the dark quadrangle, howling, barking, making the sounds of chickens and donkeys until Mr. Williams came out, and the police drove up from town, and one by one we quieted down and slipped back into bed. I told him about Joey, his running and his moods; about the hockey tryouts and Higgenbotham’s pinups covering the wall of his room, hidden—when his parents visited—by a discreetly tacked-up tapestry he claimed had been in his family since before the Civil War. The weather, the food, the sound of the Academy bell tolling out the hours over the cold campus, the way I would take the money he sent me and walk to the sub shop in town after dinner to fill my belly, the way we would sometimes stand in the stairwell near one of the faculty apartments and listen to Mr. Williams and his wife screaming at each other; the mixers with Brookles Country Day and the Pennyworth School, girls pressing their chests against the front of your sport coat when you danced to a slow song, the feel of their hair against your cheek, the smell of their skin.
In Revere, In Those Days Page 18