In a Glass House

by Nino Ricci

  Yet outside these meetings Terry and Mark seldom spoke about them, neither according them a special prominence nor disowning them, neither different than they were during them nor the same; and with the others, too, there seemed this balancing, this secret they carried within them and yet nothing about them betraying it, the way they looked or dressed, the other friends they had. I wanted their faith to mark them in some way, to charm their lives or simply make them outcast, anything that would test them, couldn’t reconcile this mundane ordinariness with their other, altered selves. Yet the marvel of it was how they seemed to live within this contradiction without tension, as if all the while merely feigning their normalcy, going out into the world as though part of some slow, quiet infiltration. Even Mark, who often hung out with some of the more popular boys, matching their rowdiness then with his own, could still move from that other self with perfect equilibrium into the complicit intimacy of our meetings, silent but then suddenly adding some comment or story, his doubts, his small confirmations, that conformed exactly to those of the others.

  “I didn’t want to go but something inside me said I should, and that was the day I accepted Christ. After I thought it must have been the Holy Spirit that made me go.”

  For my part I never spoke a word at these meetings, couldn’t find the place in me from which to enter into them, into the past tense of the struggles they charted; I was too far from these struggles or too close, had never believed enough or never been free enough from belief to feel it bursting on me in its newness. Yet I continued in my silent acquiescence, not feeling I had the right to reject the redemption being offered, what Terry and Mark after all had seen the need of in me when they’d picked me out sitting alone in my lunch-time desertion.

  I began to attend bible classes at the New Testament Church, Terry and Mark coming by for me Monday nights in an older friend’s dusty Polara. The church sat a mile or so beyond St. Michael’s on Highway 3, modern and spare like an auditorium, inside it blond wooden benches tiered down toward a kind of dais or stage that held only a simple lectern. Off the church was a small-windowed meeting room where our classes were held, in the same spare style, low couches and armchairs grouped round a coffee table as in a living room but the walls completely unadorned, the sense there of a pure, generic comfort, without eccentricity or waste.

  We were led by a man named Tom, thirtyish perhaps, blue-jeaned and loose-shirted but always immaculately trim, with the burnished energetic air of a television host. Each week we went over a few passages from the bible, Tom strangely literal in the interpretations he offered of them, seeming to see in them some simple code like a rule book we could follow. He read us an article once by a man who’d escaped from the Soviet Union, how hard it had been to begin to believe in God when he’d been taught all his life that God didn’t exist; but I was struck by the awesome freedom of that, of being without belief through no fault of your own, by the possibility, the monstrous hope, that the opposite might be true, belief itself no more than a learned thing, a lingering habit of mind.

  Then early in March a Billy Graham crusade came to the church. Terry and Mark and their friend came by to collect me, the church nearly full when we arrived, with an air of casual expectation as before a performance. The service got on with little fanfare, a hymn and then someone from the church introduced the night’s speaker, a smallish man in a black suit and white shirt, spindly like a caricature, his body tapering up to the high, black fullness of his hair.

  “It’s good to hear those raised voices.” But he seemed genuinely pleased with us. “I want to know you’re enjoying yourselves tonight.”

  He eased into his sermon, his voice carrying us with its gravelly resonance, bearing down from its first slow casualness toward a hard urgency as he circled various subjects, probing them strangely worldly and undogmatic; and then the subtle swerving, almost undetectable, into religion and Christ. At the end the choir struck up “Lamb of Jesus” and several other men came out onto the dais, taking places on either side of the minister; and finally people in the pews began to file down to them. The action seemed so orderly, so premeditated, that it took me a moment to understand what was happening, that they’d been converted: I felt I’d missed something, some crucial instant in the evening’s comfortable sobriety that had given rise to this outpouring of sudden faith.

  The minister was talking above the music, inviting people to come down, a cordial exhortation.

  “Don’t be shy, there’s room enough for all of you.”

  The friend who’d driven us to the service slipped past me suddenly to join the line. I was aware of Terry and Mark beside me, their careful unpressuring composure, their expectation: this was the moment they’d chosen for me, what the past months had been the prelude to, yet all I felt now was the familiar sundering in me, felt desperate with my failure even while I wanted to cling to whatever it was that made me different from the those who’d joined the line. But then suddenly I was there among them: I seemed to have stepped out of myself, saw myself standing there amidst the others as if my body had moved of its own strange accord. An usher directed me to a grey-haired man at the end of the dais, sombre and dark-suited and heavy-set; in an odd monotone he asked if I accepted Christ as my personal saviour.

  I would say the words only, test to see if saying them made them true.

  “I do.”

  But there was no breaking open of the heavens, no sudden flash of glorious light.

  Afterwards I felt hollowed out by my lie, had the sense there was nothing constant in me that held me together. For a few weeks I continued attending my meetings and classes but then began to make excuses, and gradually the first blithe, enigmatic pleasure that Mark and Terry had shown at what I’d done gave way to an awkwardness, one that seemed to have less to do with my lie than with some sudden understanding of what we were to each other, of our simple failure, after all, to become friends. Perhaps from the start that was all they’d been offering me, all I had wanted, the hardest thing exactly in being so precarious and small.

  For a time, though, Terry continued to invite me to various church functions, hayrides and singalongs, a Saturday barbecue, a Sunday picnic; and I went along, even beyond the end of the school year and into the summer, still resisting and acquiescing, still distantly hopeful of fitting in. What always struck me about these gatherings was the normalcy of them, the complex, ordinary humanness that stretched out like a web just beneath their bright surface, the prankishness between boys and girls, the conversations about school or sports or cars, the jokes and the horseplay; and it seemed at bottom that what joined people together was not their belief but something deeper, both more and less important, exactly this casual mundaneity they moved through so unthinkingly. In the end what I feared was not the religion, the testimonials and the prayers, familiar rituals by now, safe in their illusion of unanimity, but the empty moments between when I had only myself to fall back on, waiting silent in line to receive a hot dog off the grill from one of the grown-ups, sitting alone in darkening light on some stranger’s lawn with a paper plate in my lap to catch the relish that spilled from the end of my bun. It was these most usual things that seemed furthest from me, that people had barbecues at all, conversations, back yards, that they took so much for granted; and perhaps what I most wished for finally was not the transcendence of belief but simply to feel at home in this strangeness, this ordinariness.

  XIII

  With the new greenhouses finished and planted our lives at home had finally resumed their familiar rhythms after the disruption of the fire. There was the first false spring after planting, the promise of it, the earth smell and the heat, the greening rows stretched out in their newness though outside the ground was bone-hard and piled high with snow; and then the work, unrelenting, the silent bustle of hands, the endless tedium. The added help of my uncle’s family seemed to balance exactly the added work of the new greenhouses as if by some law, our time always filled as before; what seemed to matter
was not the work itself but simply that it should go on as it did without pause or slack. Jobs circled back on themselves as the plants grew, waiting always to be begun again: I passed whole weeks at the same chore, knew only its small, endless repetitions, just the animal part of me present, my knees, my chafed hands.

  We worked cut off from each other, lost in the separate hush of the walls our rows formed, the greenhouse sounds reaching us there like jungle static, the crack and hiss of the steam pipes, the tinny background drone of the old car speakers Rocco had connected up to a radio in the boiler room. Aunt Teresa and Tsia Taormina did the winding and suckering, keeping pace with one another as if they drew some solace from each other’s presence though their silence was broken only by brief, abrupt exchanges like the failed beginnings of conversations, Tsia Taormina’s voice tentative, neutral, Aunt Teresa’s dismissive and curt; Domenic and I spread straw, pruned leaves, pruned again. Sometimes Rocco joined us, sometimes Tsi’Umberto, a sort of foreman to us, the disembodied conversations he had with his sons reaching me then across the rows like a kind of familial shorthand, sporadic and arcane, having nothing to do with me.

  Tsi’Umberto seemed humbled by the new responsibility of the farm. We looked to him to be told what to do but he in turn always consulted, in his way, with my father, making declarations to him, needlessly grave and considered, which my father corrected or contradicted or simply concurred with with a dismissive shrug; he seemed most content, most himself, exactly when he was just working among the rest of us without any special authority. There was a hint of deference in him toward his sons now, toward Rocco especially, that was almost touching, a grudging yielding to them as if they’d freed him of all his past unforgiving hardness by simply becoming themselves: they were competent, self-sufficient, assured, had somehow weathered all the years of their father’s anger to become what his abuse of them had seemed all along to deny they were capable of.

  His deference extended to me as well, but differently, more abstract somehow, less directly earned, based perhaps exactly on what distinguished me from his sons, my separation from the life of the farm. At some point it had been decided that other hopes resided in me, other possibilities; I understood this distinction but not its genesis, whether it was the source of my distance from the others or a symptom, how they had come to make it at all when I showed them so little of myself. It seemed self-fulfilling, with its half-deference and half-condescension, the assumption I wouldn’t fit in, that I could be given only the simplest, least essential jobs, had somehow to be accommodated; and I both used it and resisted it, uncertain any more where my real life lay, both home and school now merely two limbos I moved between, each a waiting for an ending, for an opening into some truer other life.

  My father worked apart from us, caught up in his own silent, mysterious arrangements and preparations. He spent a week building storage niches along a wall of the boiler room, labelling them in his cryptic phonetic script; he arranged careful settings for our tools on a board behind the workbench; he hung numbered squares of painted plywood in each of the greenhouses, 1 through 6. There was something at once frivolous and grand in these projects – they seemed to flow from a vision of things imperfectly grasped, aspiring to a kind of North American modernity and perfection but revealing always in the end a makeshift immigrant crudeness. He’d furnished his office with a sleek metal desk, a filing cabinet, a swivelling armchair, maintaining a small professionalism even down to the store-bought lettering on the door. But then he’d covered the chair with a tattered blanket, had installed a rusting second-hand fridge, had bolted a two-by-four to one wall and attached to it hand-fashioned wire hooks, sharpened to a point on the grinder, that he poked bills and statements through to file them; and soon the room had lost all sense of its first businesslike spareness and newness, become merely clutter and crude improvisation, just as the storage niches, with their careful, misspelt labels, had soon become simply random catch-alls for whatever odds and ends came to hand, and just as the tool board, after a brief pristine newness, had soon fallen into perpetual disarray, the holders and pegs my father had placed there merely ghostly reminders of the first order he had tried to impose.

  He and Rocco looked after the watering and spraying, took loads in to Longo’s, did repairs. When one of the pumps broke down Rocco took it apart piece by piece to fix it, a kind of miracle, not simply that he built it up again, functioning and sound, but that he had dared risk the chaos of scattered parts in disassembling it; but my father seemed to take this competence in him for granted, seemed almost to call it up in him by his unthinking reliance on it. There was an equilibrium in their relationship, in its neutrality, its detachment, that made my own relationship with my father seem so fraught by comparison. He seemed to expect at once more and less of me than the others did – over a little thing he might rebuke me with sharp impatience, but then for some more serious transgression, a broken plant, a steam pipe left wrongly closed, show suddenly a grim indulgence, souring with his inturned anger yet saying nothing, seeming somehow to take the blame for my mistake on himself. There was a constant tension between us like the brooding, mute avoidance after an argument; but there had been no argument, only this tension without beginning, the instinctive darkening in him in my presence.

  On nights I’d had bible classes Tsi’Umberto had always assented to my early departures from work with an unquestioning solemnity, probably assuming they had something to do with school; but my father from the start had seemed to hold them silently against me, never quite daring to challenge me on them yet for that all the more suspicious of them.

  “Where is it you have to go, always to these classes?” he said finally.

  “It’s part of a church group I go to.”

  I thought he should be pleased, knew he wouldn’t be and yet was surprised by his anger.

  “What church group, what is that?”

  “It’s bible classes,” I said. “We study the bible.”

  “Sì, you and your aunt, all that garbage she reads, now she wants to rot your brain as well –”

  But already he’d drawn his anger back, made a grudge of it, though afterwards he seemed to imagine some conspiracy between me and my aunt, with her magazines and programs, some complex challenge to the order of things he represented. I sensed his hovering gloom whenever I left for my meetings, felt a defiance in the face of it but without conviction, knew how little he’d understood, how much I would have welcomed from him the excuse of his forbidding me to attend. And yet we’d simply gone on like that for weeks, his unspoken anger, my unwilling defiance, as if this was the only way we knew to communicate at all, this mortal conflict between us without purpose or source.

  Riding silent with him on Sundays to mass, feeling him there shadowy beside me, I had the sense sometimes that what divided us wasn’t our anger or our hate but merely this silence, my being unable to make the simplest offhand comment or begin the simplest conversation. There seemed some common ground between us I couldn’t break through to though I could sense every subtle motion of his mind as if he were a thing I myself had created, some need in him I couldn’t give myself over to though I couldn’t bear the pressure of it on those Sunday drives, his dark, hunched silences beside me. If I could have found the way to do these things then we might have entered perhaps into a clarity, become simply father and son, begun to take for granted how such roles unfolded. But instead it seemed he was the child and I the parent who had refused to indulge him, whom he kept his better moods from as if to protect them, the person in him who laughed too loud, was generous, went about his small private jobs on the farm, who at a wedding once at the end of the night had locked arms with some men at the bar and begun to sing, the group of them bellowing out like drunken soldiers to the near-empty hall in their quavering baritones.

  XIV

  One Sunday shortly after I’d started grade ten I came out from mass at St. Michael’s to find Elena waiting at the bottom of the church steps, her eye
s catching mine and then shifting darkly away to avoid my father beside me.

  “My mother said to ask if you wanted to come to lunch.”

  There was a car idling across the street, an older man in spectacles sitting eyes-forward in the driver’s seat, a woman beside him in a hat, the barest silhouette of Rita in back. My father had already taken the car in, seemed to have gathered at once who Elena was, who had sent her.

  “What does she want?” he said, in Italian, though as if he’d understood her, was merely seeking some sort of contact with me.

  “They want me to go eat with them.”

  “Mbeh, go on then.”

  And already he’d turned in shadowy retreat, seeming to draw a curtain between us.

  I hadn’t seen Rita for more than a year, caught a flash of her like a dream image as the car door swung open to let me in, her hair sleek as Elena’s now, cascading like hers in gentle curls that seemed to contain the oval of her face like a picture frame; but then once in the car I acknowledged her only in my silence, my instinctive subordination of her to my awkward introduction to Mr. and Mrs. Amherst.