In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  He was staring forward now, tapping the bottom of the wheel with the side of his second finger.

  “It means she was a bad mother, a bad wife, that she’s going to hell when she dies, and so is he.”

  He tapped and tapped, as if counting through his options. “Did Rosie know?” he said after a while.

  “Not from me.”

  “Did you ever tell anybody?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Why?”

  “Not to hurt you,” I said.

  “Why’d you tell me now then?”

  “Because he’s dead now,” I said. “Because you can’t kill him.”

  I had turned my face away from him and was staring out through the passenger-side window without seeing anything. After a terrible stretch of silence I heard an odd noise and looked over to see him working the ring finger of his left hand back and forth between his teeth and cheek. He pulled once, and the ring slipped up easily past the wet knuckle. For a few seconds he studied it, nostalgically it seemed, or as if wondering how much he could sell it for. Then he started up the car again and drove, the ring clutched in his left fist, his arm hanging over the side. Somewhere in the next block he opened his hand and let the last of his connection to Aunt Ulla fall into the street.

  Nine

  WE PULLED UP IN FRONT of a three-story building that was set back from the road behind a sloping, parched lawn. It was a modern structure, oblong and cheerful, but the cheerfulness made it ugly: too many stripes of yellow and pastel blue—as if it had been built to hold teenagers who’d tried to kill themselves, but was trying to pretend otherwise. My uncle and I were each carrying a shopping bag full of food. We went past a sleeping receptionist in the lobby and stepped into an open elevator. When the doors closed, we stood side by side, facing them. I studied his blurred aluminum reflection, and it seemed to me that his head and neck were shimmering with anger. The feeling of it filled the moving metal box in which we stood as if the air around us were saturated with a poisonous gas that was just on the verge of combustion. By the time we reached the top floor, I realized that part of what created this feeling was his stillness. It might have been the only time I remember him not moving—no rearranging of the feet, no impatient working of the lips, no talking. He had a wife who’d cheated on him, a daughter with rope burns on her neck. One humiliation, one sadness after the next. The doors opened on a sweaty, chemical smell, but at least it seemed possible to breathe again.

  There was another receptionist on this floor, a woman with wire-rimmed eyeglasses sitting at a cluttered desk. Behind the desk stood a pair of white metal doors with small windows in them. There was metal mesh in the glass, and though we had been told it was a minimum-security ward, that no one here had ever tried to harm anyone but herself, the place felt just like a prison to me. Even at some distance from the doors you could hear the chaos—women shouting, loud radio music, the occasional eruption of freakish laughter—and, still without looking at him, I knew what Uncle Peter was feeling. Above the symphony of confusion and misery, I heard the receptionist say curtly, “Leave the food here. One of you in at a time.” A nurse walked past with squeaking shoes.

  “This heah’s her brother,” Uncle Peter said, and I looked at him then, not because of the lie, but because the voice coming out of his mouth had the quality of a lit fuse to it—sparking and sputtering, the small reserve of patience burning down toward an explosion I could feel in my own chest. For all his size, bravado, and tough reputation, he was really an exceedingly gentle man. I had never heard him reprimand Rosalie in anything other than a quiet voice, as if he turned down the volume when he was angry at her instead of turning it up, or as if he believed children were made of the thinnest glass. You could make a little noise around them now and then. You could tell stories, smoke cigars, carry them down a hallway under one arm. But you always had to set them down gently; you always had to be aware of your advantage in size and strength; you always had to keep a sort of soft cushion of chatter and affection between them and life’s hard edges.

  I had always thought of Uncle Peter’s boxing career as something noble, almost harmless—you wore padded gloves, after all; you had a referee there to stop the fight if things got too bad. But standing close beside him at that moment, I had, for the first time, a sense of the violence that has to lie in a boxer’s heart, the willingness to beat another human being bloody—not in imagination, but in fact—aim your punches at the open cut above his eye, smash his lips into pulp, knock him down, knock him out, send him to the hospital on a stretcher. “This heah’s her brother,” he said in the sizzling voice, “and I’m her father. We drove an hour to see her, bring her some special food she likes.” The sentences snaked out into the air around the woman’s desk, sparking.

  “One person at a time may meet with her in the visiting room,” she repeated in her flat, soulless way. “The orderly will watch you through the windows of the ward. Leave the bags here.”

  I could feel the heat radiating from Uncle Peter’s arms. It seemed impossible that the receptionist did not feel it, that she could maintain this careless manner while sitting so close. She was thin, harmless, officious, gray-headed, and she was moving the papers on her desk aimlessly, a signal for us to leave. Don’t, I almost said to her out loud. Don’t not look him in the eyes now. Don’t. Uncle Peter stood with his thighs pressed against the edge of the desk, beads of sweat above his top lip. It seemed to me that in another second he was going to pick up the desk and the woman both, carry them over to the elevator, and throw them down the shaft.

  “I’ll wait,” I said, trying to calm him. “You go in first, Uncle.”

  He did not move his eyes from the woman’s face, and at last she looked up through the lenses and smirked. He made a small movement then, almost a twitch. The fingers of his right hand moved half an inch before he caught himself. I’m sure she missed it.

  “Where’s the visiting room?” I asked her.

  She pointed her pen at a set of doors.

  Touching Uncle Peter then—I put one hand between his shoulder blades—was like touching the lid of a pot in which the water has started to boil. His spine was electrified, the muscles surrounding it as hard as the side of a furnace. We walked toward the doors the woman had indicated, and I saw movement through the glass, the beautiful swirl and lift of my cousin’s black hair. Uncle Peter went up to the doors and pushed, but they were locked from inside. I saw part of the orderly’s face in the glass, and when he unlocked the door and swung it out toward Uncle Peter, I had a glimpse of Rosie sitting in a chair with her hands between her knees, pushing them down into a white hospital gown. I raised one hand in a shy greeting, but she did not look up, did not even move when her father stepped into the room. The door closed.

  I paced back and forth in the reception area, listening to people yelling and laughing, like caged birds. I looked at the cheap framed water-colors on the walls, nature scenes—meadows with green hills in the background, rivers twisting through colorful autumn woods—and I wondered what I could possibly say to her. I felt as if I was walking along a polished linoleum path, with hell to one side and heaven to the other, only the heavenly scenes in the paintings had something dishonest about them, something so clean and nice and unblemished and fake that I almost would have preferred to be on the other side of the doors, with the screamers. Almost.

  I must have waited out there four or five minutes before the doors slammed open and I saw Uncle Peter stride through them, straight at me. He had Rosalie by the upper part of her right arm and was half-dragging, half-lifting her across the little foyer. He took hold of me with his other hand, and we made it onto the elevator before the receptionist looked up from her phone call. The elevator doors closed on the sight of her astonished face, the phone still in midair, the orderly just coming into view. I held on to Rosalie’s hand. “Come on,” Uncle Peter was saying to the elevator through his teeth. It was the voice he used with horses at the track as they made the last turn.
He was pleading with the god of luck. “Come on, come on now.” He was holding out a set of keys to me. “Tonio, go to the bottom and get the car, you know where it is. Drive it around front and get in the passenger seat and open both doors.”

  A faint dull bell. Second floor. Uncle Peter and Rosalie were out and moving toward the stairwell, and I continued to the ground level and walked out into the lobby—a decoy—stepping very calmly through the front doors and moving toward the car with the feeling of walking in a dream, my chest as tight as a drumskin, and the keys in my sweaty hand. When I was in the car, I tried to remember everything Mr. Whistlestop had taught me. I concentrated very hard on each movement. Put the key in the ignition. Turn it. Pump the gas once. Foot on the brake. Shift into Reverse. I backed the car carefully out of its space, put the shift into Drive, and was making a slow, careful loop toward the entrance when I saw Uncle Peter and Rosalie burst out into daylight like doomed lovers running toward the edge of a cliff. I had almost come to a stop when I saw the orderly banging through behind them. I heard him shout. Uncle Peter stumbled over something on the sidewalk and went down on one knee. He pushed Rosie on toward the car. It was safely in Park now, I was sliding across the seat, lifting the chrome door handle, watching her, watching what was happening behind her. Uncle Peter had turned but had not quite straightened up when the orderly reached him, and he made a movement so quick and short it was like the pumping of a piston in a firing engine. I saw the orderly grab his own throat and fall on his back on the sidewalk like a character in a silent film, his feet kicking as he gasped for air. There was something awful and at the same time almost funny about it. And then Rosalie was in the car on one side of me, and her father behind the wheel, and there were other people coming out the doors, and I turned to look at them over the top of the seat as we drove away.

  Rosalie stared forward in a dull, hypnotized way, as if she’d just awakened from a feverish sleep. I squeezed her hand. After a long moment, she squeezed back, then held on to me tight. We made it to the highway without hearing any police sirens. Uncle Peter traveled south only two exits—six or eight minutes—then left Route 1 and went the rest of the way on back roads, through Wakefield and Saugus, Cliftondale, North Revere, then down Mountain Avenue to Jupiter Street. Rosalie burst into tears when we stopped in front of our house. She shook and wept and sobbed with her head leaning sideways against my shoulder. Her father just sat there for a while, then he said, “We forgot the food,” but nobody laughed. He came around, lifted her up in both arms, and carried her down the sidewalk into the yard with her legs hanging down on one side of him, and her hair hanging down on the other.

  Ten

  MY GRANDMOTHER TOOK ROSALIE into the back bedroom, and I could hear the quiet tones of her voice there, but not individual words. Grandpa Dom, Uncle Peter, and I stood at the front windows of the parlor, waiting for the police. We did not look at each other or say very much. It was probably ten minutes before they appeared, a blue-and-white Revere cruiser with two officers in the front seat. We walked outside, and my grandfather and I stood on the screened porch while Uncle Peter went down to face them.

  On the porch there were two metal lawn chairs against the back wall, and a concrete floor, painted gray, that scratched against the soles of your shoes when you crossed it. Except to have access to the upstairs apartment, we hardly used it, preferring the privacy of the grape arbor in the backyard. From the porch you walked down six steps to a concrete walk. There was a flagpole to your right—my grandfather raised the American flag every morning with great solemnity—on a tiny lawn bordered by hedges high as my chest. Uncle Peter stopped there, at the end of the walk, at the edge of our property, his back to us and his hands held at his sides in a manner that suggested he would use them again if he absolutely had to, but would rather not. The two officers faced him at a distance of three feet, badges blinking in the sun.

  “Mario,” I heard my uncle say in a tight, small voice, “I took my daughter home.”

  Instead of answering, Mario looked up at the porch. Beneath the visor of his cap, his eyes went from my grandfather to me and then back again, assessing the second line of defense he’d have to go through if he managed to get past Uncle Peter. He ran his gaze over the front windows of the house as if he might see Rosalie there, glanced up at the second story, at the flag, at the hedges, swallowed, shifted his weight. “We got a call,” he said when his eyes had moved back to my uncle’s face.

  “I took my daughter home. She’s havin a tough time now. I decided home was the best place she could be now.”

  The younger policeman was staring at us as if we were felons. His partner, Mario, said, “What are we supposed to tell the hospital? You hit the guy.”

  “He’s alright, isn’t he?”

  “Sure he’s alright, but—”

  “Tell them you know me since I’m eating cookies and milk in first grade and that I’m a good father.”

  “Nobody said you weren’t, Pete. But they want you for assault; they think you’re a kidnapper.”

  “She’s my daughter,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  The officer’s eyes floated around again, seeking out an avenue between two loyalties. Then my uncle put a hand on his shoulder. I think there aren’t five people in the New World who would have put a hand on a policeman’s shoulder at that precise moment. The younger cop looked at him as if he had fondled the queen of England, but Peter wasn’t interested in the younger cop. The younger cop hadn’t eaten cookies with him in first grade and did not register on the scale of things that mattered, was not someone he would have called “a Revere person.” Probably, the younger cop had been born in the city and never had any intention of leaving, but just by virtue of the look on his face at that moment, he had ceased to be a Revere person for Uncle Peter, for my grandfather, and for me. Being a Revere person meant that, above and beyond everything else—the laws of the Commonwealth, the rules of the Church, the opinions of the richer, better-educated world—you had an instinctive empathy for other people’s pain and embarrassment. It was the same thing as “having class.” Having class was demonstrated by pulling another chair up to the table and setting an extra place when an unexpected visitor rang your doorbell at dinnertime—but this had to be done immediately and naturally, without even the smallest sign that it might be an inconvenience. It meant taking care of a neighbor’s child on short notice because the neighbor was having a rough day, or sending a flower arrangement to a friend’s mother’s wake, even if you couldn’t afford to, even if you and the friend hadn’t been on the best of terms lately. It meant walking up to someone who had beaten you—in an election, in sports, in an old romantic involvement—and offering congratulations, or going into a bar and offering to buy a round, no matter what number of strangers were sitting there, no matter how low your bank account, or your mood. There was a little bit of showing off in all of this, of course. But there was also a genuine largeheartedness, a sort of socialism of the soul.

  I watched my uncle’s fingers squeeze the blue-shirted shoulder, twice, in an encouraging way. Mario, the gesture seemed to say, whatever you do now you’re going to have to live with in this city for the rest of your life. Everybody is gonna know. You’ll walk down Broadway—next week, next month, next summer—and people will think, There goes the guy who put Pete Benedetto in jail for bringing his own daughter home.

  All of Jupiter Street seemed to go silent and completely still. Mario, my uncle, and the younger cop might have been painted on canvas.

  Mario scraped one fingernail down the cleft of his chin, twice. “She’s alright then?” he said. I saw my grandfather make a small, approving nod beside me.

  “Recoverin,” Uncle Peter told him. He had stepped onto the sidewalk and turned his friend so that they were facing partly away from the younger officer and looking down the street toward Park Avenue. They might have been scouting out their tee shot on the first hole at Cedar Glen. The tone of my uncle’s voice changed,
grew softer. His old self seemed to rise from the place where it had been buried when Aunt Ulla left him. You could see it in the way his arms and shoulders worked, the way he pressed his hands together as if in prayer and shook the fingertips forward and back, then swung them out and around, holding up only the index finger of each hand and making circles like a clown balancing two plates above his ears. He lifted one foot an inch off the ground and reset it in a slightly different position, tugged at the cuffs of his long-sleeved shirt, put a hand in his pocket and shook it so the change jingled, scuffed his other shoe, shrugged, wiped something from his bald dome, turned his big nose in toward Mario’s, touched him lightly on the elbow, the forearm, looked up at a bus passing on Park Avenue. All the time he was talking. “Baskine,” I heard. “Her mother … What can I do?” The matter was already decided, obviously. It was just a question of smoothing out the last little wrinkles in Mario’s conscience, lending him a warm overcoat to help him through whatever wintry bureaucratic troubles he might encounter back at the station. After a few minutes, I suspected they were no longer even talking about Rosalie, but about some greyhound on which Uncle Peter had inside information, a car he’d heard someone was selling cheap, the sister of a mutual friend who’d suffered a miscarriage and was recuperating now, and should they visit or just send a card.

  When they were finally finished, my uncle stepped over to the younger officer and shook his hand, squeezing the forearm at the same time and tilting his forehead down an inch so that the gesture had about it a feeling of both apology for an inconvenience and the consummation of a binding contract. Mario got back behind the wheel. The younger officer sent one last suspicious glance in our direction, slammed his door, and sat staring straight ahead. I watched the cruiser glide to the bottom of Jupiter Street, the little flash of brake lights there, the long policeman’s pause, then it turned right—the opposite direction from the police station—and disappeared.