by Nino Ricci
I had the strangest feeling afterwards, not of relief or inevitability as I’d expected but a kind of disorientation, a nausea as at the thought of something unnatural or evil. Richard sat with me an hour or so in my house, touchingly solicitous, volunteering information though I asked for none, was uncertain what I was permitted, what could pass under the circumstances as normal.
“It was your aunt that called Ottawa, I think. They didn’t really say what had happened.”
“Ah.”
“Was he sick or anything that you knew?”
“I dunno, he had some pains in his chest.”
“Maybe that was it.”
There was a flight through London the next morning; Richard had already made the arrangements. I had only to pack, to take whatever I needed and leave the rest for him to ship home afterwards. He offered to stay to help me with my packing and then bring me back to Ibadan with him for the night.
“You could use the phone there, if you wanted to call home.”
I wondered how reasonable it would be for me to refuse these things, felt reassured at the small relief that seemed to pass through him when I did.
“I guess you probably just want to be alone for a while.”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to speak to anyone at the school. If you want I can wait till after you’re gone.”
“Okay.”
I spent the evening alone. I ought to have been going around, taking my leave, the adult thing, ought at least to have spoken to Mr. Tsikata; but I couldn’t bring myself to disturb anyone, be disturbed, wanted only to hold the still quietness at the centre of me till I’d understood what it seemed to be urging me toward.
In the morning Richard came before dawn. The students had already begun to rise; I could hear their distant morning sounds from the dorms, the sleepiness of voices, the dull patter of a thousand hurried feet as they moved toward the exercise grounds. In the sky the stars had only just barely begun to pale in the morning twilight: I seemed to be leaving as I’d come, from dark to dark, stealing away like some scuttling sea thing beneath the wrinkling surface of the day.
XXXII
My father had drowned in our irrigation pond. No one mentioned suicide and yet it seemed the word behind every other one, every condolence, every silence. The silence was the oppressive thing, at our house, at the funeral home, the long procession of solemn mourners before the closed coffin, reduced to a mute, awkward restraint in the face of our humiliation. I learned only the barest facts of what had happened, that he’d gone missing one day, that Rocco had found him several days later in the pond.
He had begun to build a new house. The old wooden greenhouses had been levelled and a pit hollowed there for the basement, trenches and poured concrete already sketching out its ghostly outline. He’d never mentioned the house in his letters and yet obviously he’d planned for it, set money aside, imagined a future in it. Already weeds had begun to crop up in the yellow soil that had been dug down to, a skid of blocks tottering there at the edge of a trench in abandoned waiting.
At the funeral Aunt Teresa wore black. She cut a stern figure, anachronistic, staunch and forbidding like the dark widows of Valle del Sole; but she was the one in control of things, who seemed to hold us together dignified and whole, coolly efficient and restrained as if my father’s death had been merely another of his childish excesses. It was Tsi’Umberto who appeared most stricken, his face a perpetual grimace as if his pain were a physical thing, unremitting – I’d never seen him like that, so broken, seemed to see my father in him suddenly, the same rawness of emotion, the same humility.
Rita was there, alone: I saw her emerge from the church as we were being arranged into cars for the procession, didn’t recognize her at first and then felt a start when I did at the instant’s transformation she underwent from young woman to sister. She was dressed in a grey suit, elegant and severe, dark nylons leading down to the small adult rise of her heels and her hair pulled back into a bun, a few loose strands hanging free from it over her brow as if in last girlish dishevelment. Now that she was there live before me the veiled complexities of our letters seemed a kind of indiscretion.
“I’m sorry about what happened and everything.”
There was still the familiar tentativeness in her voice; yet something had changed, some old deference been diminished, her adolescence seeming to have been peeled away to reveal this self-possessed adult underneath, with her stranger’s blue eyes, the intimation in them of all the things about her I couldn’t know.
“Maybe you could call me in a couple of days or something,” she said. “If you wanted to talk or anything –”
“Okay.”
But the following day I came down with malaria, my body still remembering the distant life I’d been leading a few days before. It hit hard and swift, a sudden drop into the darkness of it, seemed to have been coiled patient inside me awaiting this moment of weakness; I grew delirious, the world become a single dizzying pain, was aware of people moving around me but couldn’t shape an identity for them, was aware of speaking but as out of a dream. I couldn’t find the place in my mind that divided nightmare from waking; and then finally I slipped into a kind of sleep but my mind continued to race, seeking not a solution but a question, an equation whose answer was zero, an infinite series of numbers that would slowly collapse on itself till it came to nothing. In the morning the fever broke, my mind slowly groping back toward clarity; and then the symptoms began again, the creeping chill, the sudden drop again into the fever’s darkness.
I went on like that for days, lost track of things, was aware only of the landscape of my illness, my islands of sudden clarity and then my descent, the awesome pain there, the strange dreamy urgency of my thoughts. I had the sense people had turned against me, was relieved every time I grew aware of Aunt Teresa bringing in food, fresh clothes, wiping the sweat from me with a careful, undeserved humanity; but then the moment she’d gone I’d begin to suspect again some abandonment. Several times I was taken out to the hospital for injections, seeming enfolded then in the bright friendliness the world had put on to hold me; but afterwards I played out the scenes of what had happened as if to find in them some smiling duplicity, the moment that was wrong.
When the fever broke, definitively, I came into a strange euphoria, surfacing to it as into sudden daylight. For a day or so I went on like that, my mind scoured, without contents, a transparency merely for the world to pass through; but then slowly a structure of things began to take shape there again, my first buoyancy giving way to a gloom as if I’d awoken from a dream of calamity only to find after the initial relief that the calamity was real.
“Your sister called,” Aunt Teresa said.
It was the first time I could think of that she’d ever called the house.
“What did she say?”
“She just wanted to know how you were, that’s all. I told her you were sick.”
But I put off calling her back, wanting only to close out the world, to be sound again.
Aunt Teresa and I began to talk. She would be at the kitchen table in the morning when I awoke, sipping her coffee there, seeming to wait for my company as out of the lingering habit of not being alone.
“You know how he was, he was never happy, he could never forget what had happened. That’s how he was made.”
And yet his death seemed to have remained outside her, left her unimplicated, what she wanted now not an expiation but simply the tired sorting out of things after the inevitable.
There’d been the problem at the Italian club that he’d alluded to his in his letter, a small thing it turned out, ambiguous, some accusation by Dino Mancini’s board that a committee my father had been part of had misused funds; then in May his mother had died in Italy of a stroke.
“He’d never been back, he couldn’t forgive himself for that. It was hard for all of us, your uncle at least had been back the year before but I hadn’t seen her
since I came here. But to your father it was the end of the world.”
“But how did he seem, before that, I mean? There must have been something, some sign.” Though I couldn’t bring myself to mention his letter.
“You know how he was when he got into his moods for one thing or another, he went on like that for months. Who knew it was any different this time?”
Yet still I couldn’t think my way into his death, couldn’t find the essence of it in these explanations, couldn’t quite bring myself to believe in the truth of it. It seemed the important questions remained unanswered, the anatomy of his death, the small thoughts he’d had, the small steps he’d taken, how he’d climbed down the bank of the pond, how he’d stepped into it, how he’d held himself under. What he’d looked like, a few days later, floating there on the surface of the water.
If he’d carried on, it seemed now, remained whole, there might have been some meaning in his life, the virtue at least of persevering; but his suicide negated him somehow, seemed a line drawn through his life like a cancellation. He’d brought so little pleasure into the world, to others, to himself, had brought only unease, even now in his death.
Aunt Teresa said she’d found him crying once in the kitchen over one of my letters.
“You can’t understand what passes between a father and son, he said.”
When I finally tried to reach Rita she’d gone, off on a French immersion program with Elena in Quebec.
“I’m very sorry about your father,” Mrs. Amherst said. “I would have come to the funeral but I wasn’t sure, with your family and everything –”
She seemed truly distraught, had perhaps all along felt the guilt of our exclusion of her.
“I understand,” I said.
She gave me a number for Rita. I put a call through and got a voice in a thick Quebec patois; then finally Rita came on the line.
“Hi.” Hesitant, gingerly. “I tried to call you before I left, I guess you were sick or something.”
“Yeah.”
There was laughter in the background, the clink of cutlery.
“We’re staying with a family here, it’s pretty wild.”
She asked about my plans.
“I don’t know, I guess I’ll probably be back up at school in Toronto again.” But I felt reluctant somehow at saying so, knew from her letters that she would be there as well. “I applied up there anyway.”
“That would be great. Maybe we could move up together or something when Elena and I get back.”
“I’m not sure I can last that long here.”
I could hear myself trying to play on her sympathies.
“Yeah, I guess it must be pretty rough.”
But at the end there was no suggestion from either of us that I call again.
I began to work on the farm. My life seemed without direction suddenly – I wondered now what exactly I’d intended for myself, had vaguely envisioned continuing on in school and yet that plan had seemed always provisional, the mere background to some other larger, as yet undetermined fate. I remembered a story, “The Beast in the Jungle,” about a man who saved himself all his life for a destiny that never came to pass.
There was a new, second office in the boiler room now, bright with computer screens and lighted panels, part of some government pilot project; a researcher came by once a week to monitor it, Rocco and Domenic huddling with him in the office all seriousness and intent, caught up in their arcane new technologies and systems. They were clearly in charge of things now, knew how they worked, what needed to be done; and I wondered how I’d ever imagined that I was any better than they were, their own lives seeming now so much more purposeful and solid than my own.
Domenic had married, to a young dark-eyed woman named Marisa, the two of them living now in the family’s old house next to the new one, a modest bungalow in white brick, that Tsi’Umberto had built on the adjoining lot. Marisa had been sent over from Italy after some scandal there, a failed tryst of some sort, a family connection with Tsi’Alfredo having finally steered her toward Domenic. Their marriage seemed the last logical step in Domenic’s domestication; but the flaw in it, its convenience, appeared to bring out in him a gruff protectiveness. Perhaps he simply realized how fortunate he’d been after all, how precious Marisa was, lively, attractive, intelligent; for a few weeks my conversations with her were the only things I looked forward to, the sight of her in the mornings in her mannish working clothes, the wisps of hair that fell over her temples from under her kerchief. When she spoke of Italy there was a suppressed longing in her voice like the lingering heartbreak of early sorrow, a resignation too old for her; and it seemed she was the one who had made the sacrifice, catapulted as she’d been out of her youthful promise into the narrow islanded gloom of our farm.
Toward the end of July we gathered at Tsi’Umberto’s to read the will. Tsi’Umberto by then was returning to his old self, putting on a careful solemnity in the lawyer’s presence; but the lawyer himself, still Mr. Newland though he’d begun to grow old now, appeared almost lighthearted, elegant and trim and spry in a pinstriped suit, skimming over our own sombreness with a practised efficiency. The terms of the will were quite simple finally: my father had left me everything, his savings, his share in the farm, every cent. When Mr. Newland began to go through the figures I was staggered, the totals quickly rising well into the hundreds of thousands. Against these amounts my father had owed toward the farm only forty thousand dollars, the principal on the original loan he’d taken out twenty years before to buy it, and coming due in full at the end of the year.
This was my father’s legacy to me then, these unreasonable sums, this excess. Somehow I hadn’t expected it, had always imagined the farm heavily mortgaged, its profits slim, had hardly even considered I could have much of a stake in it when I’d been so removed from it all my life. Suddenly there amidst people who’d given their lives to it I’d become from nothing the principal – for the first time since my father’s death I had the sense what it meant to be his son, the gravity of it. It seemed there’d been a mistake, that somehow the strict rules of inheritance shouldn’t apply here; and yet already as Mr. Newland began to explain complications, monies that belonged to the company, taxes that had been deferred, I felt the resistance in me to any whittling away of this unhoped for birthright.
Later I met with Mr. Newland privately, at his office. There was a matter of life insurance, fifty thousand dollars, with double indemnity for accidental death.
“There’s an exclusion clause, of course. The death was listed as accidental but the company might do its own investigation, you should be prepared for that. Or they may be willing to settle for just paying the principal.”
There was also a codicil to the will he hadn’t mentioned: it expressed a wish, simply, that proceeds from my inheritance be provided at my discretion to Rita should she ever suffer financial hardship.
“It has no force in law, it’s only a wish, nothing more. If and when and how much is entirely up to you.”
I hadn’t reckoned on these lingering obligations, these ambiguities: I had the sense my father had simply handed his life to me whole, his responsibilities and his guilt, the onus of coming to grips with what he was worth, how he had died. His financial affairs were a tangle, all his assets somehow tied up in the company, a substantial tax due on them at once because of his death and then a further one due if I should choose to remove them from the company, as much as two-thirds of their value at stake; and then there were the conditions set on the sale of company shares in the company charter, Byzantine, the protections and balances, the contingencies. What I wanted was just to have what was mine laid out clearly before me, whole and intact, without entanglements; but it seemed my inheritance had meaning only within the context it arose from, that the only way to derive benefit from it was to step full into my father’s place.
For a few days I actually considered this possibility, began to see the farm in the light of it, what I’d have there,
an income, a purpose, a structure to my life; and when I looked at my life as it was I seemed to have little in it to oppose to these things. What most surprised me was how readily the others appeared willing to grant me a place among them, the deference in them as if they truly believed I’d taken on my father’s authority along with his assets; and being among them in their new respect seemed somehow to draw me back into their world, perhaps more known to me now, more instinctive, exactly in having been forgotten. But at bottom I knew I would go – for a month, perhaps a year, I could define myself within the bounds of what was possible there, the profits and the work, the small predictable promise of the future; and then my estrangement would begin again, whatever it was that was alien in me would grow large again.
I met with Mr. Newland once more and then with the accountant, Mr. Dirksen, ghostly and grim in his Mennonite pallor.
“A little planning could have avoided these problems, I told your father that. But you know how the older immigrants are, my own people are like that, they still act like before when they used to hide their money in a sock.”
Another meeting was arranged with the family, the options laid out; what we arrived at, after more meetings, more discussions, was an arrangement that on paper involved the creation of various company shares but in practise amounted to a kind of mortgage the others would pay out to me over the next ten years to buy me out. Of my father’s savings not much remained after taxes and various bills, his outstanding loan; and what I was left with was this intangible, not so much money as time, these ten free years like a hole in my life, a kind of slow penance, what I would owe him, would pay him, for all his own years of sacrifice and work.
We seemed far by then from the reality of my father’s death: it had been possible, after all, to extract him from what he had been, but only at the expense of losing him in these abstractions, sums of money that didn’t exist, neat red-sealed documents, obfuscations. There’d been an envelope in his safety-deposit box stuffed with some five thousand dollars in worn Canadian and American bills, hidden income, probably proceeds from the junk cucumbers we sold to a Lebanese trader from Detroit; and there’d seemed more of my father in those tattered bills, the feel of them there in my hands, than in all the hundreds of thousands he’d been worth on paper. I felt tempted briefly to press a claim on his insurance, wanted that hard sum of money, perhaps less for itself than for its tangible proof, conspicuous and large, that I’d taken something from his death; in the end what kept me from doing so was a sense of filial respect, not merely the threat of an investigation but that I ought simply to do what was right, what my father would have done, though afterwards I could think of a dozen contradictions of this image of integrity I’d formed of him.