In a moment, she called me into the dining room, told me to sit at the polished table there. She brought from the kitchen two steaming plates of rice and lentils and a loaf of French bread, sliced along its length, with butter melting into it, and she poured herself a glass of wine and sat down across from me.
When we’d been eating for a few minutes, she said, “Did you skip lunch today?”
“Sorry.”
“It’s alright, but there’s plenty where that came from, you know, and no time limit.”
“Sorry.”
“I’d offer you some wine, but there’s a rule at the school about drinking alcohol, isn’t there?”
“I drink it all the time at home. Since I was five. I miss it.”
But I had never tasted white wine. It seemed sweet and feeble to me, a diluted dessert. I remember finishing the first dish of rice and accepting her offer of a second, and eating two-thirds of the loaf of bread, then telling her, when she asked, that I drank coffee at home, too, and watching her pour the coffee and grate fresh coconut over three scoops of chocolate ice cream in a glass bowl.
Little by little, the plainness and straightforwardness of her manner wore away at my self-consciousness. I began to be slightly less polite, slightly less young. In a certain way, she was the polar opposite of Uncle Peter—still and straight-faced, where he would have been moving and joking—but I began to hear myself speaking to her as I spoke to him, in a voice that sounded like my own voice, unadorned.
I was so happy to be doing that, so at ease, that I talked too much that night. Way too much, as we used to say on Jupiter Street. I felt somehow compelled to tell her everything about life in Revere, everything from the layout of the planetary streets and the slow disintegration of the Boulevard amusements to the names of my aunts and uncles and the details of the menu at our Sunday gatherings. When the ice cream was finished, and the coffee was finished, and another cup of coffee was finished, and I knew I shouldn’t stay much longer, I felt as if I had painted the floor of the room with my flood of words and had looked up to find myself standing alone in a corner, far away from her. “What do you do there in the woods?” I said, because it was the first thing that came to mind.
“I sit.”
“And think?”
“No. I sit and not-think.”
“How can you not-think?” I asked her, but the moment I spoke those words, it was as if a light clicked on in my mind’s little seaside cottage. For a few seconds I was out on the river again, and jogging back through a downtown that was brighter and clearer than it should have been, a hundred times more precious. Not-think. I was sitting with my grandmother in Jerry the Zazz’s and she was holding up a napkin in front of her as if a yellow piece of cloth held within it the key to life. Not-think. Not-think. The idea of it was so radical and impossible, and yet so completely familiar to me, as if people had been preparing me to understand it for years but I had simply never turned my mind in that direction. I wondered if all the adults in my life already knew about this but had just never found a way to convey it. I told myself then that I would make a career of not-thinking. I’d put it in the Exeter yearbook under “Professional Aspirations.” Anthony Benedetto: Not-Thinker.
“We’ll sit together sometime, I’ll show you.”
Why? I almost said. I remember catching the word in my mouth as it was on its way past my teeth. Not: Why sit and not-think?—I had some idea about that already. But: Why me? Why did you invite me here? Why are you so nice to someone you don’t know? Why are you different? What is it that makes you seem so different?
I don’t remember leaving her house. I must have thanked her half a dozen times for the good food, and shaken her hand, and probably called her Mrs. Coughlin again. But I do remember walking back to Amen Hall that night, slowly, in the crisp autumn air, past the Exeter Inn and the Catholic church, and past the quiet, white-clapboarded homes on Main Street. I remember it, in part, because the town fire alarm was sounding, a series of air-horn blasts summoning volunteer firefighters from the far-flung corners of the county. Just as I reached the edge of campus, Joey Barnard was crossing the street. “You skipped hockey puck, you hockey puck,” he said. “Want to go see if we can find the fire?”
“Is it close?”
He sniffed the air in answer, and we followed the smell toward the center of town. At the end of Main Street, the housefronts were washed by red and blue strobes, the road blocked by a police cruiser parked sideways and an officer standing next to it, waving traffic into a detour. Fire hoses lay like huge twisted shoelaces across the middle of the street, and as we passed the policeman and followed the curve of the sidewalk, we could see aluminum ladders angling up from the engines, and long stiff sprays of water.
Waterman’s Cobbler Shop was burning. Waterman’s Cobbler Shop and the two floors of wood-frame apartments above it. Firemen came and went in their helmets and rubber coats, training the spray from their hoses on scarlet tongues that curled through the top-floor windows, and on the two buildings to either side. A barricade of sawhorses had been set up on the opposite sidewalk, and Joey and I stood there in a small crowd. More fire engines arrived, two ambulances. Great clouds of smoke bubbled out the back of the building, and word spread among the onlookers that there had been two adults and two children in one of the upstairs apartments. So far, someone said, only one of the children was accounted for, a boy, badly burned but expected to live.
We stayed there three-quarters of an hour. Voices squawked from radios in the cabs of the closest engines, and shallow ribbons of water twirled along the middle of the street, making the pavement rippled and red-streaked. From the faces of the firemen and the silence of the little crowd, you had the sense that the second child and its parents were sprawled about the rooms above Waterman’s shop, choked and charred, crossed over already into some other chamber of the spirit-maze. “Goddamn,” Joey kept saying under his breath. “Goddamn it.”
After a little while, there was more smoke and less flame, then no flames at all. Through a confusion of machinery and men we watched a stretcher being carried along in front of the store windows and into the back of one of the ambulances. The ambulance drew away without hurrying, and I saw a fireman, his face soot-streaked and shining with sweat, leaning straight-armed against the back of one of the trucks and wiping his eyes.
“Rough for the kid who lived,” I heard someone behind us say, then Joey nudged me and pointed at his watch, and we turned away from the sad spectacle of it and headed home.
On the way back, I remembered an ordinary moment with my mother. We had gone swimming at Revere Beach. She was waist-deep in the sea, moving her arms back and forth across the surface in gentle strokes and encouraging me to come in deeper. I remembered her clearly then, perfectly, as one remembers a person in a dream—her voice, her shoulders, the way her wet hair fell along one side of her neck. I turned my face away from Joey and tried to hold the feeling of that vision. But it would not be held.
We said nothing on the walk back, and nothing at all as we pissed, and brushed our teeth, in the bathroom across the hall.
When we were settled in our beds and the lights were out, he said, through the darkness between us, “You have to wonder about God on nights like this.”
“Yeah.”
“You have to wonder if there’s anything there at all.”
“There’s something,” I said.
“Yeah. What, though? That’s the question.”
“That’s the last little secret.”
“Not little, Anth. Not to me.”
In a few minutes his breathing changed. He turned over in the bed and moaned once, then was still. For a long time I listened to the night sounds: a breeze against the screen, cars passing on Court Street, the hum of engines and tires rising and falling away, and the empty spaces between them.
Sixteen
AFTER ANOTHER COUPLE OF chance encounters in the woods, Mrs. Coughlin and I began spending time together in a more or l
ess regular fashion. It was an association of two lonelinesses, that’s all.
On Sunday afternoons I would call her from the pay phone in Amen Hall, then walk the seven blocks to her house. She drove a new red Volvo station wagon. She would be standing outside near the car when I arrived—in her red down vest and the fleece-lined gloves that made her hands look comically enormous—and we would drive half an hour or so in one direction or another and find a place to walk. Sometimes we would go to the seacoast, to Rye, and walk along the ocean in the raw winter wind. Sometimes we would travel south and west, out into what was then New Hampshire farm country and is now Boston’s outer suburbs, and walk along dirt roads past poor-looking clapboard-sided homes with barns tacked on out back, and stone walls running at the edges of cold pastures. Pickups rattled down the road. Men we did not know would raise a hand to us in greeting as they passed.
There was no more plan to those excursions than there had been to my solitary Revere walks. She drove as the mood suited her, stopped when we saw a place that looked empty and wild and good for walking. She was not very big on conversation, and I think she felt, at first, that there was something strange, almost wrong, about our friendship.
Partly because of that, a persistent awkwardness haunted the edges of those first afternoons. We were, after all, an odd couple, not relatives, or lovers, not teacher and student. I was a little more than half her age. Over the course of that winter, though, a cold, icy winter with very little snow, we designed another arrangement, a free-form architecture of companionship that combined the emotions of all of the above. Since she did not spend a lot of time giving me advice, since she was always straightforward and unarmored, it was easy for me to let go of the cushion of deference and modesty with which I softened my relations with older people. She did not like sports, she said, and never came to my hockey games. So it was impossible for me to cling to my on-ice persona around her. Beyond what I told her, she did not know anything about Revere and the traditions and values of Italian Americans. She was unashamedly rich, unashamedly quiet; yielding in conversation yet without any of the lacy, false trappings of femininity I was used to seeing in the Greater Boston girls I spent time with during the summer months: the coquettish looks and laughter, the preening and teasing. She listened to classical music on the car radio and curled loose strands of hair back around her ear with her second finger. She drove with both hands on the wheel and flinched when trucks passed going the other way. When she locked the keys in the car once in Hurleysville, she said, “Oh, well, dammit then,” and sat on the hood while I walked to the nearest farmhouse and called Triple-A. She listened attentively to her radio when there was news about the Vietnam War; she cooked Indian food and Moroccan food and wouldn’t let me see her sculptures; she had a secret addiction to Mounds candy bars and allowed herself only one a day; she wrote checks to Amnesty International and the local animal shelter. Sitting with her in the car or in a restaurant was like sitting alone with your better self—and there was something tremendously pleasing in that. What connected us, I think, was the forced humility of people who have been roughly touched by death. An appreciation for the magnitude of absence. The absence of a person you loved, the absence of a Creator’s mercy.
I was still playing hockey, still going out with Uncle Peter after the Saturday games. My grandparents would be there some days, too, if Grandpa Dom was feeling up to it. We’d always take Joey along, and go to the steakhouse we liked on the outskirts of town, and sit in a round booth there, talking about hockey or school or the wonderful future everyone assured us we would soon see. Sometimes my grandfather and I would have our wordless language going again. He’d sit beside me in his pressed pants and put his thin arm around my shoulders, and I would feel—as I sometimes felt with Lydia Coughlin—that words had been invented because the weight of a genuine intimacy between two souls, a real spiritual connection, was too much to bear for very long in silence. Too sweet. Too intense. You had to rise up out of it after a while and start breaking creation into nameable pieces again.
Grandpa Dom and I would sit that way for a little while, the meal over, half-full coffee cups in front of us, and it would seem to me, as it had seemed to me as a boy, that we were two parts of the same alert creature. There was the sense that we were waiting for something un-nameable, but that we could afford to be patient about it. Conversation floated around us, the waitress came and refilled our cups, we sat there, connected, looking out at the world.
On the day after the game with Choate and a meal like that with the people I cared most about in the world, I went to Lydia’s house just after noon and we drove up toward the foothills of the White Mountains. There was a lot of snow in the high terrain, and we rented snowshoes at a cross-country ski lodge and climbed up into the woods. It was a cold afternoon, but the sun was shining above the western hills, and the air was charged and sharp. She was a good snowshoer, and I had never done it before. Struggling and tripping, I followed her up the trail and across a high pasture of swirling white gusts, where the only sound was the stuff, sluff of the shoes, our breathing, the wind, and the occasional crack of ice in the frozen limb of a tree.
We made a large loop back to the ski lodge. We took off our snowshoes there, brushed the frozen coating from the cuffs of our pants, and sat drinking mulled cider next to a fireplace while the skin of our faces thawed. There was a small trouble in her eyes that day. I wanted to find a subject that would clear it away, so I said, “You promised you’d teach me this not-thinking trick. You said you’d show me how to meditate.”
She held the cider mug in both hands with her fingers spread. She smiled sadly, a gold crown flashing on one of her back teeth. “I’ve been showing it to you the whole time.”
“It’s pretty subtle then?”
I’d meant it as a joke, but she looked steadily at me, her lips barely turning up. “It’s ordinary,” she said. “It’s what’s left over if you take all the fuss away. I spent a month at a retreat in a monastery in Nova Scotia once, and over the front gate they had a sign, ‘No Fuss.’
“Sounds boring.”
“Boring is like a door you go through.”
“To get to what?”
“To get to this peculiar kind of generosity and happiness that’s different from any other happiness, that can’t be taken away from you, no matter what.”
I thought about that, I watched her. I said, “Sometimes, happy is the last thing a person would see on your face.”
She brushed at the cuffs of her jeans. “It hasn’t been the greatest year for me.”
The sun was just going down behind the hills when we stepped outside again and into her cold car. On the highway, as if paying me back for my bluntness in front of the fire, she asked if I had a girlfriend. It was a subject we had never gone anywhere near.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“There are nine hundred and ninety-six boys at the Academy, and eighteen girls. The ones I think are pretty all have steady boyfriends.”
“What about in Revere?”
“There are a couple of girls I’m friends with. We don’t go out, we’re just friends. We go to the beach together with other friends, to movies sometimes when I’m home, that’s all.”
“Have you ever really dated anyone?”
I rolled the window down half an inch and let the cold air whistle in.
“Too personal?” she said.
I shook my head. “I’m just embarrassed, that’s all.… Hockey player. Student Council rep. Never had a girlfriend.”
“Don’t you have mixers with girls’ schools sometimes?”
“Sure.”
“Do you go?”
“Sure I go. I dance a little. Sometimes I find a girl I like, and we hold hands and sit someplace and talk for a while. Sometimes I call her up the next week, or for the next few weeks. I just don’t … I’m not good at it. I don’t know what to say. I get shy. I’ve never even really kissed anyone, and I’m a goddamned senio
r in high school.”
She laughed. I felt as if I’d shaved eight years off my age in the space of four minutes. Through the side window I looked out at the passing scenery, the hills, and the small towns tucked into cold valleys: white church spires and slate-roof houses. It was my great shame, this lack of a romantic life. My uncles and aunts joked with me about it, tenderly, affectionately, but it had gotten so that the edges of my brain went raw at the mention of the subject.
“What about you?” I said, because I felt she had pushed me tight into the corner of the seat.
“I guess I came at things from a different direction. I kissed my first boy when I was thirteen. My parents had a summer home in Delaware, and he and I took sailing lessons together, and we used to sneak down to the beach at night and kiss for a half hour at a time. I made love first when I was a freshmen in college, which was early for a woman in those days. It was my birthday, I’d gone out and had beer and pizza. I was underage, and I was a little bit drunk, and there was a boy who had a reputation for sleeping with a lot of girls. All I had to do was bump against him as we were getting up from the table, and that was that. He drove me back to the dormitory in his daddy’s car, took a detour to the playing fields, and climbed on top of me in the front seat. Very romantic.”
“What about getting pregnant?”
“A good Catholic question,” she said. And then, after a moment, “It’s a good question; I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t get pregnant that first time. Purely by luck. After that I went to a doctor and got a diaphragm.”
I did not know what a diaphragm was. We drove another few miles before I could bring myself to look over at the side of her face. She had a small, straight nose and gray eyes, and the top of her ski hat was pressed down against her forehead.
“I meant, what about boyfriends now?”
“My husband’s been dead less than a year. He was having an affair when he died. I didn’t know it. The woman came and told me herself, a week after the funeral.”
In Revere, In Those Days Page 25