In a Glass House

by Nino Ricci

  “Colie, figliu miu, you’re the one that gives us the headaches with all the work you bring in for us.”

  It seemed he and Aunt Teresa must have met him at Longo’s Produce, where they’d been working over the winter; and I began to notice now how my aunt prettied herself in the mornings with lipstick and blush before going into work.

  The next party we attended was Gelsomina’s wedding – she had married an older man just arrived from Castilucci. In the reception line she hardly noticed me, absorbed in conversation with Aunt Teresa when I passed; but I thought she looked pretty and self-assured and adult in her billowing white dress, was envious of the way she held her husband’s arm locked in hers as if she’d taken possession of him.

  Then toward the end of the meal Colie appeared suddenly at the entrance to the hall and made his way toward our table. He offered a hand to my father, awkward and deferential, introducing himself as Ercole though the Italian sounds of the name seemed foreign on his tongue; but an aura of well-being emanated from him like a tangible warmth, making his awkwardness appear merely a kind of innocence.

  “Here, pull up a chair,” Tsi’Umberto said, half-rising as if ready to offer his own.

  “No, no, I’ll just grab a Coke at the bar. I just came to have a few dances with your sister here, I don’t want to make it seem like I’m trying to get a free meal.”

  Tsi’Umberto stared after him with an air of appraisal.

  “You should see the loads he comes into Longo’s with,” he said. “Two hundred crates a day, every day, like a factory.”

  Afterwards Aunt Teresa brought me to sit with them at a table at the edge of the dance floor.

  “In the old days when there was a wedding all the Italians were invited,” Colie said. “Ciociari, abruzzesi, parenti, forestieri, it was all the same. But now already there’s too many of us to fit in one place.”

  “The old days,” my aunt said. “You make it sound like you’ve been around since the beginning of the world.”

  “You’re just jealous because I was born here.”

  “You’re the one who’s jealous, the way you speak Italian, picking every word out of your mouth as if it was made out of glass.”

  “Let’s ask Victor, then. Where’s it better, here or in Italy?”

  But I didn’t know how to answer him.

  The bridal dance began, Gelsomina and her husband slowly making their way around the dance floor to a shower of confetti and coins.

  “That little fool,” Aunt Teresa said. “He probably only married her so he could stay in the country.”

  “I dunno, they look like a nice couple,” Colie said.

  When the bridal dance was over I thought they would join the other couples moving onto the dance floor, but they remained talking at the table. Colie thought my aunt should go back to school, learn English, become a teacher as she’d intended; but Aunt Teresa said she was too old already.

  “Too old!” Colie said. “Now who was born at the beginning of the world. My grandfather went back to school when he was forty.”

  “Dai, you’re just making a joke,” Aunt Teresa said.

  “You can ask him about it when you meet him, he’ll tell you himself.”

  But when my aunt pressed him it came out his grandfather had been arrested during the war when the police had found an old photo from Italy of his sons in their balilla uniforms.

  “They thought he was a fascist or something, they didn’t know every kid in Italy wore those things back then. So they locked him up for a year or so. He always says that was the time the government sent him to college.”

  But he told the story as if it were merely an anecdote, safely cut off from him in the past, so different from how other Italians talked about Canada, their stories always seeming intended to call attention to themselves, to impress.

  One Sunday not long afterwards Colie came to the house, driving into the courtyard in a long blue Biscayne. It was a warm spring day and Tsi’Alfredo and a few others had come by to play bocce, Colie sitting down to have a beer with them at the picnic table on the side lawn. He told a joke about an Italian who had just got off the boat.

  “So the first thing he sees when he gets off is a ten-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk. But he walks right past it. When his friend asks him later why he didn’t pick it up he says, ‘Well, I didn’t want to start working yet.’ ”

  The other men laughed.

  “Sì, sì, if only it was like that,” Tsi’Umberto said. “Lucky for you that your grandfather’s been in the country for forty years. The rest of us have to work for a living.”

  When the men started to play, Colie stayed behind to talk to Aunt Teresa. Tsia Taormina came out a few minutes later with Rita and Fiorina, Rita breaking away from her grip and toddling across the courtyard toward Colie.

  “Whey, what have we here?” Colie said, taking her up in his arms. “Who does this one belong to?”

  But the question seemed to take Aunt Teresa by surprise.

  “It’s mine,” she said abruptly, and Colie laughed. “Dai, let’s take a walk up the road, since you don’t know how to play bocce.”

  Afterwards he began to come by every Sunday for supper. He never asked about Rita again; I thought Aunt Teresa must have said something to him though perhaps he’d just assumed she was Tsia Taormina’s, seeming ready now simply to accept her as part of the family.

  “She’s such a quiet one this one,” he said. “So serious.”

  “We’re all serious in this family,” Aunt Teresa said.

  But Colie laughed.

  “You should have supper with some of the Canadians I know, it’s like a funeral sometimes – you get the feeling people have to force themselves just to find something to say. It’s never like that with Italians.”

  For several weeks we went on like that, his visits, our suppers, the imperceptible shift to beginning to think of him and my aunt as a couple. It seemed a kind of wonder that things could proceed as simply as they were, that we had only to await now the inevitable conclusion. And yet with each of his visits some apprehension in us appeared to grow larger, as if we could not quite believe our good fortune, couldn’t believe this innocence in him wouldn’t finally be shattered.

  Then gradually Aunt Teresa began to find things to criticize in him, his clothes, his hair, with her usual badgering good humour at first, but then with a growing cynicism, seeming almost to will him to take offence. Colie didn’t appear to notice any change, still laughing her off; and yet in conversations now he’d slowly turn his attention away from her toward my father and uncle like a plant bending gradually toward light, the job of courting him seeming as much theirs now as hers. Tsi’Umberto, at least, always saved his best face for Colie, even in the midst of some lingering family argument still all staunch hospitality and attentiveness the moment Colie arrived; and though I thought less of Colie for responding to this ready good humour as if it were real, still there was something in it to be grateful for, the way my uncle could fill the room with it when he wanted to. But my father had none of Tsi’Umberto’s skills at dissembling. In a good mood he could be as excessive and loud as my uncle was, laughing too hard and repeating the punchlines of jokes, seeming in a way then less clever than my uncle, less controlled, giving in to his own energy as in to a kind of drunkenness, not seeing there was something in it intended to impress. But his bad moods blunted his words and gestures like a screen, Colie turning from him then with the same unthinking instinct with which he turned from Aunt Teresa. My father would lapse into English sometimes, retreating into the formality of it as though to guard from Colie his truer self; but Tsi’Umberto then would have to strain to understand, his silence seeming to suck the air from the room.

  The tension surrounding Colie’s visits grew more palpable. The days and hours before them were filled with a grim expectancy; the visits themselves grew more awkward. We seemed to have lost all spontaneity, unable somehow to make a place for him any more, even my aunt’s sar
casm grown feeble as though she were merely struggling to play her role. I expected an argument, something to break through the tension and show what lay beneath it, and yet we merely continued on as always, the tension like a thing without source, that couldn’t be fought against. It was as if the house itself was rejecting Colie, was slowly turning him out simply because he didn’t belong to it.

  “I guess I won’t be coming by much for a while,” he said toward midsummer. “There’s the planting in the greenhouses and all that, we’ll be pretty busy.”

  “It’s just as well,” Aunt Teresa said. “We have the tomatoes coming on outside now.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He seemed to want something more from her, some sign, some way back, but she wouldn’t relent.

  “I guess maybe I’ll call you or something,” he said.

  But already it was as if he had never been part of us, even then before the weeks had passed and we’d heard nothing more of him. A sullenness settled over our house as after a death, no mention made of him and yet our silence only seeming to keep him constantly before us, to prevent us from simply getting on with our lives. We attended a party on the Labour Day weekend, an inauguration of the new club the Italians had built on the lakeshore, all pomp and circumstance though we appeared to sit the whole meal in brooding expectation, awaiting the person who didn’t come; and afterwards Aunt Teresa sat out the dance with the older married women at the back tables, what we had not yet been ready to admit seeming made plain now in her evening desertion.

  In the next weeks we passed through a kind of penance for what had happened, in the arguments that flared up at the slightest thing between my uncle and father; and in the midst of them Aunt Teresa herself seemed almost forgotten, closed off in her own private hurt as if she’d withdrawn suddenly from the family. The arguments followed the usual pattern, my uncle’s provocations, my father’s blind lashing out: it was as if my uncle had been the one who had suffered some affront for which he wanted retribution now, trying to extract it somehow from my father as the wellspring of all our troubles. Yet these squabbles seemed to bring my uncle no solace, left him merely irritable and grim as if he were in the grip of some emotion he couldn’t quite find a way to turn to advantage; and then finally we had settled back again into what seemed our usual bearable calm, with only a lingering throb of failed hopefulness and then silence.

  In the New Year a salesman came by the house one evening to talk about building another greenhouse. My father and Tsi’Umberto and Aunt Teresa sat around the kitchen table while he spoke, a family again, plotting the contours of our future.

  “The way he talked you’d think it was like going to the office,” my father said afterwards. “I’ll bet he’s never set foot in a greenhouse, with that suit of his. He probably sleeps in it.”

  But Tsi’Umberto kept coming back with a grimace to the figures the salesman had written out on the back of a catalogue.

  “I don’t see where we’re going to get that kind of money,” he said.

  “Mbeh, if it comes to that,” my father said, “you can tell the Farm Credit you want to buy into the farm, they’ll give you twice that much. Any kid with fifty cents in his pocket can get money from them, there’s no reason you can’t.”

  Tsi’Umberto nodded gravely, seeming filled for the moment with a sense of his own importance, and it appeared the matter was settled; and for the next week or so there was a vague, pleasant mood of anticipation in the house, of impending change. But perhaps all along my uncle had merely been biding his time: he had taken on again the dangerous, contented air he had whenever he held my father at a disadvantage.

  “There’s that inglese on the lakeshore trying to sell off his greenhouses,” he said one evening, bland, conversational, not seeming to implicate us in any way in what he was saying. “He’s asking almost nothing for them, he just wants someone to clear them off the property so he can sell it off for houses.”

  “If he’s asking almost nothing,” my father said, “it means they’re worth less than nothing. I’ve seen those greenhouses, they’re half rotten as it is. He’d have had to tear them down in a year or two anyway. I doubt anything would be left of them if you had to take them apart and then put them together again.”

  “Mbeh, if you could get them for nothing like that,” Tsi’Umberto said, with an air of authority, though he was probably just repeating something he’d heard at Longo’s. “For someone starting out it’s not a bad idea.”

  “I wouldn’t do it. It’s just taking someone else’s garbage.”

  “Sì, sì,” my uncle said, but with a petulance now, “you always have to have the best.”

  “What, you’re not seriously saying we should buy them?”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t be a fool. Nobody builds in wood any more like that.”

  “Sì, I’m always the fool,” my uncle said. “I’ll tell you why I’m a fool, because I didn’t see from the first how you’re dragging me into your big ideas just to get your money from the bank.”

  “Ma ‘stu cretin’, is it possible anyone can be so thickheaded? Do you think I needed your money? You’re worse than your father, idiot that he was, working like a slave all his life on those few acres of stones, and you’ll die and rot poor like him, the way you hold all your stupid pennies in your fist like a schoolboy!”

  “Ah, grazie, now I understand how you see things!” my uncle said, springing his indignation on my father like a trap. “You always want to be the big man, ah? The big man who married the mayor’s daughter, the big man who came to America. And now you thought you would use your brother to get your money so you could be a big man again, isn’t that it? But I won’t have any part of it, by Christ, even if I have to break my bones in a factory the rest of my life!”

  My father and my uncle didn’t speak to each other again for the rest of the winter. For months we lived under the shadow of their suppressed anger, and in the charged silence that settled over us the household appeared to split in two, my uncle’s family on one side of it, policed there by a violence that seemed intended in its excess as a reproof to my father, and the rest of us shifting like counterweights to the other. A careful pantomime worked itself out like a long wordless argument, separate meals, separate outings, separate work; even Rita had to be claimed now, no twilight space there to hold her in our sudden division. In the past, Rita had always been left at home with one of us whenever there was some party to go to, Fiorina often left as well though almost as if we used her to hide from ourselves the truer reason for Rita’s not coming. But at carnival that year it was Tsi’Umberto’s family that stayed home, Rita instead, as though to make clear whose side of the family she fell on, bundled up in her coat and hat and brought along with my father and Aunt Teresa and me, awkward and shy in the new dress my aunt had bought for her, hanging near me the whole evening in frightened wonder at the world’s sudden largeness and noise. My father hardly spoke, appearing injured by every glance, retreating at once after the meal to a back table to play cards; but still the silence when we drove home that night had nothing foreboding about it, for an instant the group of us seeming held together in the car’s dark, tight warmth by our own strange loyalty, an odd silent family joined in its awkwardness and injury.

  This time my father did not back down. When the ground thawed in April a bulldozer arrived to level a stretch of field alongside our greenhouses, then a few days later a truck delivered a load of metal trusses and rafters and posts. There seemed no adequate response my uncle could make to the mute fact of this hill of metal that lay glinting in our side field. But one day, taking with them a few suitcases and a wooden trunk, all they’d brought with them from Italy, my uncle and his family simply moved out of the house – as suddenly as that, as if my uncle had reached the decision only hours before. When we came home from school to find my aunt packing the trunk, I imagined they were returning to Italy; but it turned out they moved only next door, into a small clapboard h
ouse connected to a broken-down greenhouse and a few acres of land that my father had usually rented for his tomatoes.

  Oddly, their departure left no sense of relief in our house, only a strange lethargy, a torpor thick as sleep. The new trusses and posts remained lying where they’d been heaped as if my father had lost interest in them; Tsi’Alfredo came by and warned him to build while he had the time and the weather was good, but the spring planting began and still the trusses and posts lay untouched.

  Then Rocco came by one day to borrow our tractor and planter.

  “We’ll see if he thinks he can make it on his own,” my father said.

  But when Tsi’Umberto himself came by a few days later it was with the air of bland self-satisfaction he’d put on whenever my father had yielded to him in some argument, an air that seemed to deny there’d been any argument at all.

  “That old Ukrainian there, I don’t know what he cooked in that house, the whole place smells like cabbage.”

  He began to come by often then, to borrow tools, to use our equipment; we had to go looking for things, my father grumbling, making threats, but then saying nothing to my uncle. When we finally got around to starting work on the new greenhouse he came by to help raise the trusses, affable and expansive, almost claiming a share in my father’s accomplishment now that he had nothing to do with it; and my father put up with this as he did everything else, seeming somehow to have gained less by his victory than Tsi’Umberto by his defeat.

  It appeared only a matter of time by then before we’d be back more or less where we’d begun, a single family, bound by some twisted allegiance that infected us like an illness, that made sure there could be no new arguments among us, no new solutions. Aunt Teresa would stand at the kitchen window sometimes now with her face so emptied it hurt me to look at her, etched there against the light as at some threshold she wouldn’t cross, that she would turn from finally to wipe the table, rearrange a chair. And yet in all that had happened she was what we’d protected somehow, found a way to hold within our element as if around us we felt the pressure of a world that wouldn’t let us spill into it, that held us in the way the dykes at the Point kept the lake from seeking its level in the spring.