Revere Beach Elegy: A Memoir of Home and Beyond
By Roland Merullo
Beacon Press, Boston, 216 pages

We seem to be obsessed with the idea of generations, now as much as ever. Newscaster Tom Brokaw’s tribute to World War II vets, The Greatest Generation, hit the top of the best-seller lists in 1998. Lately, we’ve been using letters to categorize younger people–Generation X or Generation Y. Sometimes a negative label attaches to an age cohort: the Silent Generation of the ’50s, the Lost Generation of the ’20s.

We’re never sure that a new generation is going to be up to snuff. Alexis de Tocqueville said that Americans were just about the most anxious people he’d ever seen. We have no hereditary monarchy and no landed gentry in the European sense, and there are always new people coming into our society. We Americans are constantly re-inventing ourselves, which can, on occasion, call for a quantity of Xanax.

Questions of family and identity are at the core of Roland Merullo’s Revere Beach Elegy: A Memoir of Home and Beyond–not to be confused with Merullo’s acclaimed novel Revere Beach Boulevard. In particular, the book hones in on the issue of what children owe their parents, and the tensions, resentments, and disappointments that make up the fabric of such relationships.

Merullo and his father could hardly have lived more different lives. To be sure, the chasm between a father and son has long been a classic American story. (See John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and on and on.) Because we are such a dynamic society, the son often faces a much different universe than the father did, and this difference is a source of tension between father and son.

And then there is the place that provides a backdrop for this story of generations, of fathers and sons. When the author’s grandfather, a tailor from a poor hill town in southern Italy, came to America early in the early 1900s he settled his family in Revere, which still had the rolling hills of its bucolic past, but already was home to Italians, Poles, Jews, French-Canadians, Scots, Germans, English, and a few blacks. And already, the author notes, it was known for “political scandal, underworld dens, and racetracks.” Revere was not much different from places like Brooklyn, Jersey City, and South Philadelphia, offering “a certain rough humility, an emphasis on family loyalty and the vibrant, sometimes violent life of the street, a brew of American ambition and European tradition that would, in future generations, bubble over into something more sedate and suburban, leaving room for different immigrants, new dramas.”

I first saw Revere in the late 1960s, when my husband and I settled in the neighboring town of Winthrop. Something of the old, raucous beach town was still there. The roller coaster still clanged and rattled, and you could ride the bumper cars, but there was a terminal seediness about the honky-tonk strip, soon to be replaced by waterfront high-rises. I heard tales of Revere from my father-in-law, Max, who graduated from Revere High School and worked at one of the first frozen-custard stands on the beach, stirring the chilly glop with a wrench. At that time, football riots occurred with some regularity, and Max, who was Jewish, once got kneed in the groin by one Harry Della Russo, an Italian who later served as a state legislator. Max, who became a salesman, told the story with more glee than rancor.

Merullo’s father, born Orlando but turned into Roland by school age, also graduated from Revere High. In the Depression, boys from these kinds of families had no thought of going to college–that was for rich folks–so Roland studied civil engineering in night school. He married and got a job designing power stations and submarine periscopes. When war broke out, he tried three times to enlist but was turned down because of a punctured eardrum. Then tragedy struck: His young wife died in childbirth.

He recovered from overwhelming grief, married again, and had three sons. He never spoke of his first wife; his son, Roland Jr., learned of her only when he was eight, through a relative’s chance remark. In America, writes Merullo, this was a time of family secrets: “This was the 1950s and 1960s, when the ethos of emotional confession had not yet broken the polished shell in which we lived.”

He’s got that right. It is astonishing how many secrets were kept in those years. I have a number of friends who have been amazed, in adulthood, to discover half-siblings they never knew they had, or to hear tales of parents’ old marriages, criminal pasts, histories of abuse–all dark, jagged secrets hidden under the veneer of happy families.

When the author was just a boy, his father strode into the office of the Volpe Construction Co. and asked for a job. John Volpe, a future governor of Massachusetts, made Merullo a campaign worker for Christian Herter, then making his own run for the state’s top office. Herter was the embodiment of the Yankee establishment: smart, wealthy, and connected. The campaign job marked the start of a friendship that was to last many years and make the elder Merullo a player in the Massachusetts game of politics and patronage.

He knew people, he could do favors, and he got a good state job. But when Herter became secretary of state in the Eisenhower administration, Merullo declined the chance to go to Washington; his roots and family ties in Revere were too strong. He went to Herter’s side when the secretary made a presidential bid in 1960, but Herter was in a wheelchair by then, stricken with polio. Richard Nixon stepped in, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Not content with his state duties, Roland Sr. decided, at the age of 50, to get a law degree. He worked full-time while he studied at Suffolk Law School, graduated at the middle of his class- and failed the bar exam. And failed it and failed it and failed it. Friends and family counseled surrender. But on the fifth try, he passed. He started a law practice that made him more money than any state job.

What did his son and namesake do with the world of possibilities created for him by his father? He rejected all of it.

After attending public school in Revere and then Catholic prep school on scholarship, young Merullo went to Exeter. This was supposed to propel him into the world of wealth and privilege that men like Christian Herter took as their birthright. “My parents sent me to Exeter so I could get into Harvard,” Merullo writes, “so I could have what they and their neighbors did not have–a new car, a summer home, all the confidence and social ease and freedom from worry enjoyed by people in the fancier suburbs.”

But the plan backfired. Young Roland found the inhabitants of the world of privilege–he didn’t get into Harvard, but did go to Boston University and then to Brown–to be smug, self-satisfied, and contemptuous of places like Revere. Worse, he did not think they were truly happy or at peace, despite “their tennis clubs and silverware.”

After graduation, Merullo went on the road. Attracted to Russian literature, he volunteered for a cultural exchange program in the Soviet Union. He did an unhappy stint in the Peace Corps in Micronesia that left him with lifelong ailments. And when the young man returned home, it was not to the life that his parents imagined for him.

Merullo decided that what he wanted to do with his life was to find a true self, a true voice, a writer’s voice, rather than climb aboard the American treadmill of achievement. He held down a series of odd jobs. Now married to Amanda, a young woman he’d met before going off to the Peace Corps, he drove a cab, then started a one-man painting and carpentry business in southern Vermont. Too poor to buy a car, he kept his tools in a knapsack and rode to work on a bicycle.

His father was exasperated. Here was a son, after all, with an Ivy League degree, “and what was he doing? Living in the woods rebuilding porches for old Vermonters, reading at night in the Williams College Library because he and his wife could not afford to heat their apartment, nailing up clapboard in the freezing cold.”

The son’s argument that he was pursuing a career as a writer, that his itinerant tradesman’s status was temporary, did not mollify the anxious father. Once, during a visit to his son’s home in western Massachusetts, the elder Merullo asked outright, “When are you going to start taking responsibility?” The son just answered with a joke. But another time, when Roland Jr. visited his father in Revere and did some repairs around the house, he found a note from his dad saying how much he had enjoyed the visit, wrapped around a hundred-dollar bill.

Roland Merullo Sr. died peacefully in his sleep, without ever seeing Roland Jr.’s literary success–which makes the son’s sleep restless. The younger Merullo remembers, in the weeks after his father’s death, a dream in which his father was a passenger in a white limousine, and he sprinted after it, calling out, “Goodbye, Pa! Goodbye!” But his father just stared straight ahead, smiling, and didn’t see him. The father still occasionally shows up in Merullo’s dreams; he smiles but rarely speaks.

Though deprived of the chance to make good in his father’s eyes, the son has grown into a better understanding of his dad. The proud and stiff-necked young man who saw his father’s favor-granting and pulling of strings as somehow demeaning has, in maturity, come to see the triumph in his father’s rise: “Each year that passes, each incremental diminution of my own powers, brings a sharper understanding of the force of his will, the effort and self-belief and self-sacrifice and stubbornness that can be read between the lines of his resume. I have, it turns out, inherited a portion of his discipline, but what matters more to me is his gift of a sense of perspective, what he would have called his faith, a certain spiritual or psychological ballast that holds a person close to some center line, even amidst the greatest victories and the deepest bitterness. I keep a framed photo of him on the wall in the room where I write, and I say a word to it from time to time, when things are going very badly, or very well.”

Now a successful writer and a father himself, Merullo can appreciate the arc of a well-lived life, one in which good fortune is greeted with gratitude, disaster without bitterness, and the ego reduced to a still smallness of acceptance and peace.

The value of a memoir–perhaps all of them, but in particular American ones–is that the reader is allowed to share the arc of a life, usually one so different from his or her own. De Tocqueville was right about Americans. We are still anxious, trying to get it right. But the gift of the memoirist–if he or she is honest and clear, and Merullo is all of that–is to make us understand that there is no “right” way to be. Each life is its own small vessel, and the story of each vessel is important. The inhabitant of this one tells its tale honestly and with a sure prose touch.

Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University.