At first, Uncle Peter could not quite look at us. He squeezed his nose a couple of times. He stood on the sidewalk with his back to the porch and his hands on his hips, glancing left and right. Then, at last, he turned, mounted the stairs, opened the screen door, and said to his father, “Mario Andreottla, Pa. He used to come to the back door when we were kids and call me like this heah: ‘Hi-oh, Pee-tee!’ Remembah?”
Eleven
WHEN MY UNCLE AND GRANDFATHER went inside, I stayed out on the steps and looked across the street at the green-trimmed windows of Millie Santosuosso’s house. My grandfather’s flag stirred in a small breeze, causing the rope to tap against the pole. It was a thin rope, hardened by rain and sun, and when it hit the pole, the hollow metal echoed like a meditation bell in the small front yard. Only one week remained before I was supposed to be back at Exeter—Joey Barnard had called a few days earlier, excited about starting the new term—but it seemed impossible to go back there after what had happened with Rosalie. One of the peculiar aspects of being a Revere person, of having class, was that, since we shared so thoroughly in each other’s suffering, there was a certain amount of guilt associated with success and happiness, with getting out and away. It is, I think, to this day, the quality that keeps people from ever moving out of that place or places like it. Our antennae were so finely tuned to the potential for misery in the world, the asphalt-and-salt martyrdom of neighbors and friends, that good fortune always felt like a mixed blessing. Sure, you wanted to hit the number—everybody wanted to—but what blaze of envy would your new wealth spark in the hearts of the other people on the street? What kind of tragedy would God visit upon you for thinking too much of yourself and flying off to some overpriced Manhattan hotel where you didn’t belong? Sure, I wanted to be back with my friends in Amen Hall, skating on the magnificent rinks, sitting in my sport coat and jeans around a hardwood table, while groundskeepers mowed the lawns outside and Mr. Haydock talked to us about the French Revolution. But how was I supposed to leave my cousin with the rope burns on her neck, my uncle with his big debts and broken-up family? Or, leaving them, how could I ever really be at peace with myself up there, in my little New Hampshire paradise?
I remember Ray Recupero raising his hand once in catechism class and posing a question to the nun: “How can a person be happy in heaven, Sister, if he knows that somebody else—maybe his cousin or his neighbor or his friend, anybody in the world—is burning in the fire in hell?”
A Revere question, I think. The question of a good Catholic boy. But more than that as well. Now, from a distance of 150 miles and thirty-five years, it sounds in my ear like the great unasked question in the discussion of American poverty: how can anyone ever move out, move up, without dragging an enormous stone of guilt and sorrow behind them? What little bell tolls in the mind of the boy from Bedford Stuyvesant who graduates from Harvard and settles in the suburb, or the girl from a Virginia hollow or a plain Midwestern factory town who sits in a restaurant in Soho listening to her friends complain about the salad dressing? How much of that chorus of sweat and compassion accounted for Joey Barnard’s dark moods? How much of it was part of what threatened to glue me there that day, right there, to the weed-edged sidewalks of Jupiter Street, for all time?
Twelve
IF THERE WERE REPERCUSSIONS from the kidnapping, they never reached me. No doubt one of the uncles, aunts, or family friends was asked to make a phone call to a childhood pal who had become a judge, district attorney, or chief of police. That was the way things were done then in Revere, in eastern Massachusetts. That is the way things have been done everywhere, since the beginning of time. There is the written law—precise, logical, merciless—and then there is the messy, merciful, half-corrupt human web of debt, affection, and influence that hangs around the law on all sides.
Rosalie recovered, the welts around her neck healed. The day before the start of the school year, we went to the beach together—far down toward Point of Pines where none of our friends were likely to see us—and waded around in the ocean for half an hour, feeling for an old innocence there on the sandy bottom.
It did not work very well. We had not been innocent in that way for the better part of a decade, since the day my parents’ plane crashed; we had barely spoken for the better part of a year. But the whole afternoon had about it a feeling of reconciliation, even rebirth.
This may have been because Caesar hadn’t called or come by since the rainy Saturday when Rosie tried to kill herself. I was buoyed by the hope that he was gone from her life now, for good, that proximity to death had somehow cleared her vision. Uncle Peter seemed to have been infected with the same optimistic delusion: in the days when Rosie was being nursed back to health by my grandmother, he regained some of his old cheerfulness. He scraped and painted the square-topped picket fence that protected the hedge out front, helped his father and me put the early tomato harvest into canning jars, to be used for gravy in the middle of winter; he even jogged around the block a few times in a T-shirt, shorts, and shoes. We both had an instinctive sense that if we could just get Caesar Baskine out of the picture, Rosalie would blossom into the woman she was meant to be—an adult version of the happy, feisty, confident soul she had been in early childhood. She’d marry a man we liked, have children we adored. We’d gather for Sunday meals and go to the beach together on Saturday afternoons, and, for another ten or twenty or thirty years, we’d put off the thing we feared most: the breaking up of the Benedetto family.
Rosalie and I splashed, shouted, dove under the cold water a few times, then ran back up the shore and toweled ourselves dry. We left our shoes and shorts there and carried our towels north along the sand, past the PRIVATE—RESIDENTS ONLY signs that were posted at the place where Revere Beach legally ended and Point of Pines Beach legally began. We walked around the point to the bridge over the Pines River. It was dead low tide. We squeezed between the pilings of the bridge and walked under the highway. From there we could look out over the river—a wide inlet, really, an estuary—and past the salt marsh to the sprawling gray General Electric plant where my father had worked until five days before he died. A waterlogged wooden beam had washed ashore. We laid our towels on it and sat.
“Looking forward to school?” she asked after a while.
“I’m thinking of not going.”
“Not going!”
“It’s phony up there. It’s not real.”
“And this is?” She swung her arm toward the strip of auto dealerships and donut shops that stood on either side of the highway. She shoved me so hard that I almost slipped off the beam. “You’re a big hockey star, you’re a genius. And you’re gonna stay here, you dope? And what, spend the rest of your life down Bill Ash’s eating slices of pepperoni pizza and talking about some great slap shot you did when you were fifteen?”
I shrugged and looked straight ahead at the factory buildings. “I’m not a star, Rosie, and I’m not a genius, either. Your father says I’m the smartest kid in Revere. I’m not, and you know what? I wouldn’t care if I was. It doesn’t matter to me anymore, being smart. I’ve had enough of it in my life.”
“So now what? You’re gonna try being stupid for a while, see if that’s any better?” She shoved me again, not so hard. “Boy, do I hate this modest crap,” she said. “It’s ten times worse than bragging. You’re going back up to that school and you’re going to Harvard and become a doctor, or I swear to God I’ll never speak to you again as long as you live.”
“You hardly speak to me as it is. We haven’t had a talk since before I left home. I call and you pretend you’re not there. You hug me but you can’t look me in the eyes.”
“I don’t want to talk, Tonio. You don’t get it.”
“But why? If something’s wrong, we can change it, we can fix it.”
“I don’t want to fix it.”
“It drives me crazy when I hear you say things like that, Rosie. It’s a kind of giving up. You have all these people who love you, who want to h
elp you, make your life happy, and you … It’s like whenever somebody’s nice to you, you spit in their face, you think they’re a loser, you—”
Two police cars sped across the bridge into Lynn, sirens wailing. Rosalie covered her ears with her hands, then got up and walked to the water and began tossing stones and pieces of shell into the current. Her life seemed to me then like a twisted, knotted piece of wire. I had believed for a long time that I could pull on it here and there, unravel it, make it more or less straight. I had been in love with her since I was two, a completely illogical and innocent love. But something broke in me there on the beach: I began to give up. I stared at her, half in love still, half furious.
She had already made most of the transition from beautiful girl into the beautiful woman she would become. The beauty was courtesy of her mother’s genes, perhaps. She’d inherited Uncle Peter’s natural athleticism, too, and had the tight waist and strong legs of a gymnast without ever having done an hour of exercise in her teenage life. I was seventeen then, an age when the sight of a girl in a bathing suit—her shape, her skin, the way her hair fell against the tops of her bare shoulders—would imprint itself upon my mind long after the actual human being had disappeared from view. I’d be sitting in my room with a book in my lap, or washing my chest in the shower, or lying in the dark between the sheets, and the curve of the muscles of a girl’s calves, or the flat place between the front of her hip bones, or just the memory of the movement of her legs would come absolutely alive again in my inner eye. It would be, then, as if I were standing still and running at the same time. Some new chemistry would sprint up through the middle of me, a reflex built into the species a hundred million years ago. Of what use were the strictures of the Church and the cautions of the nuns against that?
For a few seconds I allowed myself to look at my cousin that way, as a kind of revenge, maybe, a weird offshoot of my frustrated love. She had her back to me. She would bend over and feel around in the sand next to her feet, then straighten up and make an overhand toss, and I could see her breasts shifting against the fabric of her bathing suit when she reared back, then her spine and the backs of her legs. For a minute or two I was swept up in it. For a minute or two I pursued an absurd little vision of Rosie and me having some kind of future life together, saving each other. Not married, naturally, but allies of some sort, confidantes in the world beyond Revere, a grown-up brother-and-sister team.
“Let’s get out of here, Tonio,” she called, and for the time it took to draw and release one breath, I thought she meant something else.
I picked up our towels, we squeezed back between the damp pilings. She said, “You haven’t asked me about Caesar.”
Something in the way she said his name rang in my ear like a caution.
“I noticed he didn’t come see you,” I said carefully.
“Didn’t come see me. Didn’t call. Didn’t nothing.”
“I noticed that.”
“Know why?”
“Why?”
“Because we had a big fight that day.”
“I thought that might be it.”
“Know what the fight was about?”
“What?”
“I was pregnant.”
We startled a trio of seagulls as we turned the corner. They flew a little ways up the sand, singing a loud chorus of complaint. From where they had been perched, you could look all the way down the curl of Revere Beach, past the high white hills of the roller coaster.
“Shocked, right?”
“When are you having it?”
“I’m not. I went to a doctor, in Nahant. He took care of it.”
“What do you mean?”
She was crying now, suddenly, one hiccup of grief in the salt air, tears on each cheek. I took hold of her hand and she wrenched it away, then, after three more steps, she grabbed my wrist in a vice grip. We walked on that way, as if I were hostage to her misery and she were marching me down the shore toward some encounter in which one of us would be imprisoned and executed, and the other set free.
“He took it out of me.… I was bleeding for a week, Tonio.”
“Took it out of you? What do you mean, ‘took it out of you’?”
“He pulled it out. He killed it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, Tonio. Grow up.”
I swallowed. I said, “Alright, I just—” And then: “Does your father know?”
She shook her head so violently that a teardrop flew off her cheek and landed against the skin of my shoulder. A jogger passed us on the sand, headed north. He stared at Rosalie for a few panting breaths, ran his eyes up and down the front of her body, plodded on.
“I’m not going to be able to have babies now, ever. Caesar was so pissed off, he said he’d never speak to me again. He wanted it. He has a job lined up, and he wanted us to have a little house and a little baby. And I didn’t want to. I don’t know why. Don’t ask me why. A girl I know, Elaine, she told me about this doctor in Nahant. You can practically see his house from here if you turn your head that way. I had to decide right away because the longer you wait, the bigger a sin it is. I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. I went out there all by myself, and there was a woman there, his nurse, and she let me into the house, and he took me into the cellar office and pinched it out of me with tweezers. It hurt like mad, Tonio. I bled and bled all over his table and his rug, and they kept me there and held towels against me, and she fed me eggs and bacon, and I threw them up all over myself. It cost three hundred dollars and now—”
“Where did you get three hundred dollars?”
“I got it. Don’t ask me where I got it, and I did it, and now I’ll never have kids. I can’t go to church now; I can’t even go by the church without feeling like a devil. I can’t even look Aunt Laura in the face anymore.”
“Aunt Laura gave you the money?”
“Don’t ask me, I said.” She let go of my wrist and struck out at the air with her left hand, once, twice, uttering a sound like someone who’d been kicked in the stomach.
We walked over to our sneakers and dungaree shorts, carried them up to the wall and sat there, brushing sticky grains of sand from between our toes with the corners of the towels. Cars passed behind us on the Boulevard, and I was ambushed by a memory of my father sitting on the gritty front steps with me on a hot happy night. How does the baby get in there, Pa?
Rosie sat back on the wall with her knees bent and her arms around her shinbones. We looked out to sea, squinting.
“Is that why you … tried to—”
“No. I knew you’d think that.”
“Why then?”
I looked away from her, out at the Nahant Peninsula, at small sparks of sunlight reflecting from the windows of the shoreline houses there.
“I don’t want to be with him,” she said. “I don’t care if I ever see him again.”
“Don’t then.”
“I will, though. I know I will. It’s like I knew it the first day I saw him. He knows it too.”
“Bullshit, Rosie.”
She laughed a two-note false laugh. “First time I ever heard you swear.”
“That’s bullshit superstition. You’re too old for that now. You can do whatever you want with your life. You can go live in Boston, or California, France, Italy. Good-looking, smart boys will want to go out with you. You’re absolutely beautiful; you’re one of the nicest girls I’ve ever met—”
“Out of all those thousands?”
“You’re smarter than you give yourself credit for and a million times too good for shithead Caesar Baskine. That’s just bullshit, what you just said.”
She shuffled her feet an inch back and forth on the wall and pulled the tops of her thighs in against her chest. I turned then and saw the thin twist of a smile at the corners of her mouth, another moment I’ve never been able to quite get down on canvas to my own satisfaction. Even if I had, I would never have exhibited it, not that smile, not on my cousin’s face. Becau
se it was the closest thing to evil I ever saw in someone in our family. It was clear to me then that my words, the logic and caring of them, were like lengths of kindling Rosie was collecting. She was going to take all the kind and uplifting things everyone in the family had ever said to her, any belief in anything hopeful or good, and pile them onto an enormous bonfire.
What my wife would say to me on the afternoon of Rosalie’s funeral was true: at some point the idea of self-destruction had been planted in her, and we tried and tried and could not dig it out. Who planted it there does not matter. What matters is that Rosalie might have turned away from that idea, and instead she indulged it. She chose Caesar Baskine and kept choosing him, even after he had gone to court a dozen times, to jail twice. Even after he had repeatedly beaten her. In some perverse way, she liked to have people talk to her the way I was talking to her; it brought that small, bitter, superior smile to her mouth. It was, for her, just the kind of dumb faith in resurrection that her loudest inner voice mocked. The world could be a good place, we were saying to her, a peaceful, hopeful place. She knew better.
Something passed through me when I saw that smile. In the way young people know something, a wordless way, I understood that whatever unblemished love had existed between us was finished. There would be a connection, still; there is a connection even now—we named our daughter after her, in fact. You don’t stop loving someone because she no longer loves herself; it’s just that the love has no place to go, no port in which to unload its cargo. Your ship plies the coastline endlessly, looking for a calm bay, for welcome. It might occasionally be signaled closer to shore, but it is never allowed to dock.
We walked back to Wonderland Station and took the Park Avenue bus home without saying much beyond what we had already said. She kissed me at the door, I remember that, a kiss on the lips that had nothing but the past in it. And the next day, when Uncle Peter knocked on the door of my little bedroom, I was packed and ready to leave.
In Revere, In Those Days Page 23