In Revere, in Those Days
Roland Merullo
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0375714057
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this richly evocative novel--the moving story of one boy's coming of age--acclaimed author Roland Merullo will make you nostalgic for a small Massachusetts city called Revere even if you've never been there. Providing a window into an unspoiled America of forty years ago, In Revere welcomes you to the fiercely loyal and devoted Italian-American family of the Benedettos.
Although he was orphaned as a child, young Anthony Benedetto was always surrounded by family, and the vibrant warmth of the Revere community. His Uncle Peter, a former Golden Gloves boxer whose days of glory were behind him, believed Tonio was bound for great things. So did his daughter Rosie, Tonio's favorite cousin, who would take many wrong turns--away from Tonio--through adolescence. His gentle grandparents, who took him in, encouraged him to claim a future outside of Revere, but the warm, unconditional love of his family, and the smells and sounds of Revere stay with him forever.
fender of a car with his arms crossed, he would almost always make a point of “checking in,” as he called it. This meant that if I was outside playing with the cousins, he’d break away, every half hour or so, from whatever conversation he was engaged in, and stand at the screen door or step out onto the back porch until he saw me. He’d always done this, years before my father died, and, in a different way, he does it still. If he stopped by the house on one of his unannounced visits and I was
above-ground pool, bubbled there a minute, and slowly sank. I SLEPT A DEEP, deep sleep that night, alone on the sofa bed in my grandparents’ parlor. Rosie slept in her own house, in her own bed. In the morning I sat at the kitchen table with my grandmother, eating toast and drinking coffee with extra milk in it, replaying everything I had seen and heard the day before. I was being cheated, I knew that—by God, by the aunts and uncles. Cheated or punished. My father was dead and my mother was
like a grown woman in terrible pain. “Next thing you know you’ll be hanging around with queers,” she said. “Why all the meanness all of a sudden?” I said. “What did I do?” “Nothing.” “You never used to talk like this before.” “I’m just joking, it’s a joke. Don’t be a girl about it.” On Mars Street, a man in a T-shirt stood in his front yard, teasing a German shepherd with scraps of turkey meat. Snowflakes landed on his bare arms, but the pain of the cold did not seem to reach him; or
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.
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