In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  In short, my life became tame and ordinary, something it had not been since the death of my parents. It probably would have remained that way, too; I would have started to have faith in predictability and comfort if, late in the summer, Rosie hadn’t tried to kill herself.

  It happened on a rainy August Saturday, in the middle of the afternoon. She had been out someplace with Caesar, and when he left her off in front of my grandparents’, she walked back up to where she had lived before her mother abandoned the family—the forest-green house with cream trim on Venice Avenue—went into a neighbor’s garage, found a rope there, knotted the rope around a crossbeam and around her neck, and stepped off the empty fifty-five-gallon oil drum she had been standing on. The neighbor, Mr. Tokarev, heard the barrel topple. He ran into the garage and cut her down with his hacksaw. He called the ambulance, called Uncle Peter at the house on Jupiter Street, and said, according to what my uncle himself later told me, “Peter. Viktor Tokarev. Your daughter try to hang up her own body with the rope in my garage. I cut her down. The ambulance men, they take her in hospital now. I never tell nobody long as I live.”

  It is supposed to be the case that those who fail at suicide actually want to live, and are only sending out a last desperate cry for help. Perhaps that’s true, but it seems too simplistic to me. Since that rainy afternoon, I have formed a sort of mild obsession with people who try to take their own lives. I study newspaper accounts, formulating an imaginary profile of the victim, wondering about the personality quirks of the parents, the atmosphere of the home, the love life, the genetic predilection. Maybe Rosie was calling out to be saved—somehow it does not seem like her—or maybe there is just some invisible boundary to fatal unhappiness, and a person doesn’t realize she’s crossed over until it is too late.

  By the time she reached the Mass General, Rosalie was conscious, welts already looping around her throat as if, wrapped and ribboned, she were being presented to the emergency-room physicians as a gift. The Revere ambulance attendant—another friend—told Uncle Peter that the first words she said when he revived her were “I have to talk to Tonio,” but that came to me thirdhand, and I’m not really sure I believe it.

  She had turned eighteen a month before. By virtue of some old clause in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts statutes at that time, the state had the right to place her under psychiatric observation for thirty days because she had committed the crime of not wanting to live. We did not talk about her hospitalization—in the family or outside it—just as, over the previous year, we had not talked about Aunt Ulla’s disappearance. In both cases, Uncle Peter told his brothers and sisters the news, in person, told his parents, told me, maybe one or two of the older cousins, and then it was as if we wrapped that piece of our history up in an old wool sweater and pushed it under the bed, against the baseboard there, and left it to the darkness and dust. The code of silence was that instinctive, and so was our desire to protect Rosalie from the swirling eddies of Revere gossip. I tell it now, here, I tell everything here, only because I have come to believe it was this penchant for silence, this concern for what people might think, that, years later, ended up trapping her in her web of addiction and abuse, and eventually killing her.

  Still, a tickle of guilt sparks along the nerves. I can hear a voice saying, Why bring the rotten part of the cantaloupe to the table when you have guests, why tell? Because secrecy and shame corrode the soul is why. Because the truth gives it air and light. It has always been that way. It’s one of the few life lessons our wonderful family never quite seemed to master.

  Perhaps the reason was that we did not trust other people to be as generous in their judgments as we were in our own. We are, after all, the descendants of southern European village life, with its lethal gossip and unredeemable reputations. I’m sure that neither Grandpa Dom nor Nana Lia nor any of the aunts, uncles, or cousins thought less of Rosalie because of what had happened. I’m sure of that. Afterward, they didn’t shun her, or make a special condescending fuss over her. I don’t believe they thought less of Uncle Peter, either, though his faults as a father were obvious enough. If anything, it seemed to me, we loved Rosalie more because of her troubles. Her disguise had been ripped away. She was naked and humbled in front of us, no false little skirt of success, respectability, or manipulation to cover the ordinary human failings the rest of us hide by instinct.

  Still, even though he must have known this and felt it, Uncle Peter bore, after Rosalie’s first suicide attempt, the heavy weight of local disgrace on both shoulders. The eye of the world meant too much to him for things to be otherwise. I was old enough to feel it clearly by then, to see the change in his posture and hear the broken note in his voice. But I had not the smallest idea what to do about it.

  The day after she was sent to the psychiatric ward of the hospital in Woburn, thirty minutes to the north, we drove up there together, Uncle Peter and I, heading away from the house on Jupiter Street with enough food for an army. When we’d gotten clear of Revere, he turned to me as if I were the resident expert on all mysteries now that I’d completed a year at Exeter, and asked, “Where did I go wrong, Tonio?”

  “Nowhere,” I said.

  “The other cousins, the other families in the city, they don’t have things like this.”

  “Sure they do,” I said. “They just hide it better, that’s all.”

  I was talking as he wanted me to talk, as if I knew something, when in fact I did not. I was seventeen, and caught in a kind of terrified awe over what Rosalie had done. The night before, I had been awake past midnight, picturing the coarse rope burning the skin of her neck, picturing Mr. Tokarev scratching through it with his hacksaw, catching her in his arms, carrying her across to his house and up the short set of stairs and making the call to the police station with his fingers on her pulse. I was sure her unhappiness had something to do with Caesar, and I hated him, despised him, dreamed up elaborate fantasies of murdering him. “Maybe it’s because of Aunt Ulla,” I said.

  Uncle Peter always slouched to one side when he drove, left wrist guiding the wheel, left foot tapping to a radio tune, his free hand crushing the stub of a cigarette into the ashtray, adjusting the temperature or the volume, picking at the edge of the upholstery. He pursed his lips but did not speak.

  “Or Caesar maybe.”

  “Caesar,” he said bitterly. He yanked twice on his nose. “You know who Caesar’s uncle is? Angie Pestudo. You know who Angie Pestudo is?”

  “Sure. I saw him in his yard once. I threw his daughter’s ball back to her.”

  “When?”

  “A long time ago.”

  Another pause without any eye contact in it. “Caesar’s got a nice career all marked out for himself a couple yeahs down the road. He’ll go to work for Angie or Eddie Crevine, breakin legs. Perfect for him. Where does that leave your cousin?”

  “With bad people.”

  “Right. With bad people the rest of her life. With a guy who makes his livin breakin legs. How long you think it will be until he starts hurtin her?”

  He was a kind of prophet, my uncle.

  We drove a little ways through the commercial trashiness of Route 1, oversized signs squeezed into roadside lots: FURNITURE, SEAFOOD, CAR UPHOLSTERY, DISCOUNT SHOES—as if we were speeding through a hell of voices shouting promises that would not be kept. A question floated into my mind, something I had been wanting to ask about for as long as I could remember. “Are you connected to him, Uncle?”

  “Who?”

  “Pestudo.”

  He swung his chin around and fixed me with a look for so long, I thought we’d end up driving across the breakdown lane, across the sidewalk, and straight through the window of an auto-body shop. NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY. “Ah you serious?” he said at last, turning his eyes forward again and tugging on the wheel once to bring us back between the white lines. “Who put that idea in your head?”

  “Nobody. I just always wondered. You used to take us to those houses, Johnny Blink
, Joey Patchegaloupe. I thought maybe they were mafia guys.”

  “Mafia guys? Johnny Blink? Johnny Blink couldn’t spell mafia if his next meatball sangwich depended on it. Johnny Blink doesn’t know what the R stands for on the shift of a cah. When we were kids, we used to tell him it meant Rev. He’d put his father’s Packard in Reverse and push down on the gas a couple times. Almost broke your neck until he figured out we were jokin.”

  I laughed. But the story felt like a decoy to me. Like putting the puck over on your left side, drawing the defenseman’s attention there, while with your body and skates you were moving right the whole time.

  “Smart has nothing to do with being part of the mafia, though, does it?” I said.

  He reached across with his right hand and tugged on the lobe of his left ear. “Only with not gettin involved.”

  “Are you involved?”

  “You’re not gonna let it go, are you, Tonio?”

  “Not today, no.”

  Another one of his patented looks. We careened down an exit and skidded to a stop at the lights.

  We were in the suburbs now, or some neosuburban no-man’s-land between whatever Revere was—the metropolitan area, the outer ring of the inner city—and the leafy communities farther north; some terrain of slightly larger ambitions and slightly larger lawns and slightly better schools. A nowhere, it seemed to me, in spite of the tidy, soft feel of it. A nowhere between reality and the woods.

  “I’ll tell you somethin I never told you before,” he said. Then we went two blocks without a word. “One day, when I was done with boxin, Angie Pestudo called me up and invited me down his house. It was near Christmas, the day before Christmas, I think. He had his cellar set up like a private club—a bah with a bahtendah, a TV. Guys sittin around in leather chairs, twistin their pinkie rings and scratchin their balls. Walkin in there was like walkin into another country, Tonio, and he was the king. ‘Benedetto,’ he says to me, ‘you’re a hell of a fighter.’

  “ ‘I’m retired now, Angie,’ I told him. ‘My fightin days are done.’ We were sittin at one end of the room, away from the TV. Everyone else called him Mr. Pestudo, but I called him Angie because when we were kids in junior high we used to pal around. He was a fat little wiggly then, no good at sports. I used to rough up people who teased him, and I used to spend a little time at his house once in a while because his mother made a nice eggplant pahm. ‘My fightin days are over,’ I says. He had a cigar in his hand, thick as two of your fingers, and he wobbled it back and forth the whole time but didn’t light it. He liked to drink milk and Coke, can you bleeve that? Milk and Coke with ice. Some days he’d take a big risk … milk and Pepsi. ‘Why don’t you come work for me?’ he says. ‘What are you gonna do now that pays better?’

  “ ‘I’m goin in with my father,’ I told him. ‘We’re startin up a little landscape business.’

  “ ‘What does your father know from landscaping?’

  “ ‘Not much,’ I said. I was makin it up as I went, Tonio. I was pissin my pants that day. Thirty-one years old. Broke. Just married. Baby on the way, my boxin career all over, Angie Pestudo backin me into a corner. ‘He’s got a little money put away,’ I said. ‘I have the strong back.’

  “Angie rolled the end of the cigar around in his mouth and never moved his eyes off me. ‘Why don’t you put that strong back to work for me?’

  “ ‘My dad wants me,’ I said. ‘This was always a dream of his, landscapin.’

  “He was looking at me, Tonio, a look that could melt the bones in your leg. Grandpa had a dream about landscapin like you have a dream to go to Chelsea and sell ladies’ underwear in Kresge’s for the rest of your life, okay? But I had the story goin now, I couldn’t back off.

  “ ‘Two hundred a week,’ he says. In those days, on two hundred beans a week you could have a built-in pool in the yahd and go to Florida a month in the wintertime. I shake my head.

  “ ‘Three hundred,’ he says. One of the ball-scratchers turns around now; Angie’s starin at me. What am I gonna say?

  “I say, ‘Angie, listen. I have nothin but respect for you, and an offer like that, comin from you, a generosity like that, I’ll appreciate it until the day I die, bleeve me. But I couldn’t hurt some guy for owin money. I spent my whole life owin people money, you know me, you know how I am. Nobody would bleeve me if I went up to them and said, “Lissen, you owe Mr. Pestudo. Pay up now or else—’

  “See, I worked that angle. That I was too softhearted.”

  “Are you?”

  My uncle pretended to be checking the signs on the cross streets. He slowed down, he looked right, looked left, brought his eyebrows together, and when he started up his story again, it seemed to me that a key chapter had been left out, that something else had happened there in Angie Pestudo’s basement, but he would never tell anyone about it as long as he lived.

  “So eventually he let me off the hook and shook my hand and let me walk outta there, and he never bothered me about it again. And you know who ended up takin the job of collectin debts for Angie Pestudo, breakin legs? Ever hear of a guy named Fat Smithy?”

  A line of chill ran along the skin on my arms. A tractor trailer passed us, and for a few seconds the noise kept me from speaking. “Does he have a lump on top of his eyebrow?” I asked when the truck had pulled ahead.

  “Did he,” my uncle said. “They found him in the trunk of a Buick in Mahblehead. Last week.”

  “They did?”

  He nodded.

  “Who killed him?”

  “Eddie Crevine, most likely. Chelsea Eddie. One too many legs he broke, one too many things he knew about Eddie’s deals. But that was him. Like a little Ping-Pong ball was buried there under the skin, a mah-bel. Somebody who was in the room that day told him about Angie of-ferin me the job. He went up to Angie the next day and Angie gave him the position. Nice life, huh? Go around hurtin guys. One thing I never did, Tonio, I never borrowed money from those people. No matter how desperate I ever got, you understand?”

  I nodded, but there were words bunching up in my mouth. What do you do in those houses then? I wanted to ask him. Who are those people to you, really? But it was somehow impossible to speak the words. Maybe I was afraid of the answer he might give, I don’t know; afraid of spoiling my sense of who he really was. I’m almost sure now that he never had any official connection with the underworld—he would have lived a richer life. But it held a certain perverse attraction for him, as it holds for so many people: the false promise of being able to live above the law and all moral consequences; the sense of being tied to a group of people by a blood oath. Pete Benedetto had been famous at one point in his life, at a young age, so it was natural enough that he’d want to hold on to some of that, want to be something more than “just anybody.” What were his options? He could be a construction worker, or he could be a construction worker who drove a Cadillac and was on a first-name basis with Angelo Pestudo, who was welcome at the home of Joey Patchegaloupe. It makes me sad to think about it now. I want to say to him, You could have had a plain, small life, Uncle; you could have been just an ordinary laborer, and we all would have felt the same way about you. But it’s too late for that now.

  I turned and looked out the side window. We were passing a line of plain capes with no fences around their yards, one-year-old Buicks and Oldsmobiles out front. We stopped at a red light not far from a driveway in which a thin man wearing short pants and sandals was washing a car as tenderly as if it had a soul.

  “How do you know Fat Smithy anyway?” my uncle said.

  I pushed the tip of my finger against the metal button and rolled the window down another inch.

  “Tonio?”

  “I saw him in your house once.”

  “My house? On Venice Ave.? At what, a pahty?”

  I couldn’t look at him. I watched the thin man in short pants and wondered if I would end up like him someday, massaging the roof of my Oldsmobile on a sunny afternoon, mowing my little lawn and painti
ng my little house and pretending to myself that there wasn’t something enormous and terrifying about the world, that children weren’t trying to hang themselves, that men didn’t break people’s legs over a debt and then end up in the trunk of someone else’s car with a bullet in their brain. Probably now, my life is not so different from that man’s life, but it seemed to me at that moment like a suburban charade, a life that was too safe, too nice to be able to hold much truth in it. I studied that world for a few seconds, the light turned green, and then I heard myself saying, “He was kissing Aunt Ulla, I think, or touching her. They were in Rosalie’s bedroom. I came in without knocking. I was eleven or twelve.”

  Block after block we went before my uncle said, “Where was I?”

  “Out with Rosie. You’d gone by Jupiter Street to pick me up and take me to see a friend of yours who had horses. But I was out taking a walk that day. You missed me. I went up to your house looking for Rosie.”

  He swerved the car to the curb, banged the shift into Park, and cut the engine. He looked at me for a long time without speaking. I looked back. There was no love for me in his eyes at that moment. At last he said, “This is true what you just told me?”

  I nodded.

  “And you knew for five yeahs without sayin anything?”

  I looked down at the ashtray. “I didn’t know what it meant then,” I said.

  “You still don’t know what it means.”

  “It means Aunt Ulla was cheating on you.”