In a Glass House Read online

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  In a Glass House

  “Extraordinarily powerful.”

  – Toronto Star

  “Brilliant.… Assured and perceptive.… Few will come away unaffected by his insight into human personality or unimpressed by his articulate, analytical – but never artificial – style.”

  – NOW magazine (five-star review)

  “This is a deeply sensitive, spiritual book.… Ricci has written a profound essay on the human soul.”

  – Sunday Telegraph (U.K.)

  “Lyrical, evocative … a compelling and rich tale.”

  – Windsor Star

  “Ricci turns the dross of domestic drama into something fluid and haunting, rich and strange. So shrewd and discriminating are his observations that he has managed to write a novel as impalpable and intricate as life itself.”

  – The Guardian (UK)

  “Impressive.… Brimming with energy and vitality.… Marvellous. … In a Glass House is superb.”

  – Kitchener-Waterloo Record

  “In a Glass House is an important contribution to the literature of ‘otherness’ – describing the alienation felt by immigrants to a new land.”

  – Winnipeg Free Press

  “Ricci is an accomplished novelist.”

  – Victoria Times Colonist

  BOOKS BY NINO RICCI

  Lives of the Saints (1990)

  In a Glass House (1993)

  Where She Has Gone (1997)

  Testament (2002)

  The Origin of Species (2008)

  Pierre Elliott Trudeau (2009)

  Sleep (2015)

  Copyright © 1993 by Nino Ricci

  Cloth edition published 1993

  First trade paperback edition published 1994

  This e-book edition published 2015

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-7710-7657-2

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  Cover design: Terri Nimmo

  Cover image: Karen Beard / Photonica

  Series logo design: Brian Bean

  McCelland & Stewart,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  for Jan and Gary Geddes

  and for Peter Day

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  “And we shall all come forth without shame and shall stand before Him. And He will say unto us, ‘Ye are swine, made in the Image of the Beast and with his mark; but come ye also!’ And the wise ones and those of understanding will say, ‘Oh Lord, why dost Thou receive these men?’ And He will say, ‘This is why I receive them, oh ye wise, this is why I receive them, oh ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.’ ”

  – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  Crime and Punishment

  Cristofiru Culumbu, chi facisti?

  La megghiu giuvintù tu rruvinasti.

  Christopher Columbus, what have you done?

  You’ve ruined the best of our young.

  – Calabrian saying

  I

  The town of Mersea rested on a small bluff that looked out over the shores of Lake Erie; and had the waters of that lake not reversed their flow from the Mississippi to the St. Lawrence when some cataclysm of nature opened up the Niagara Gorge, the few acres of raised land on which Mersea sat might have remained an island, cut off from the mainland by ten or fifteen miles of shallow lake. Even still, much of the land around Mersea had had to be reclaimed from the marshes, the country roads that lined the lakefront on the eastern side of the township, toward Point Chippewa, raised up on twenty- or thirty-foot dykes; and after the thaw and heavy rains of spring you could drive down those roads and have the strange, thrilling experience of seeing the lake on one side higher than the land on the other, only a man-made ridge with sides sloping at smooth forty-five-degree angles holding back tons of water from seeking their own level.

  Highway 76 formed the spine of the township, St. Mary’s, over which Mersea presided, known despite its muddy winters and springs as the Sun Parlour. It came down from the big divided highway to the north and cut through the centre of town, intersecting Highway 3, the old Talbot Road, to form the town’s four corners before ending finally at the lake, where it was extended a few hundred yards into the water by the Mersea dock. The concession roads came off Highway 76 with a Euclidean regularity, as if some giant had merely taken a great pencil and ruler in hand and divided the wilderness into a tidy grid. In Italy the roads had snaked and curved to the rhythm of the land like a part of it, but here it seemed the battle against nature had been fiercer, the stakes higher, the need to dominate more complete. Only two roads broke the pattern – the old Talbot Road, which weaved in and out among the concessions, sometimes following at a distance the curve of the lake, sometimes veering suddenly north or south without apparent reason, conforming to some forgotten agenda of its original builders; and the lakeshore-hugging Highway 13, which from the west connected up a string of lakeside communities before dipping down into the Point and ending abruptly at the entrance to Point Chippewa National Park.

  The first Italians in Mersea, from before the war, had bought up farms on the lake, along the stretch of highway known as the Seacliff because of the fifty- or sixty-foot rise that ran along the shore there. Other Italians had settled around them as around a nucleus, along the lakeshore itself or north of it where the Talbot Road, coming west out of town, rose up along the Ridge, the remnant of a former shoreline that followed the Seacliff at a distance like its shadow. But my father had bought a farm further north and east, on the 3rd Concession. We were
the only Italians then who lived east of Highway 76, until the Massaccis, a year or so later, bought a farm on the 12 & 13 Sideroad; and though by road we were only four or five miles out of town, could see from our back field the weathered wall of the Sun Parlour Canning Factory, with its ad for Caporal cigarettes, the pink brick and white clapboard gables of the houses on the town’s outskirts, the stucco tower of St. Michael’s church, still the farm seemed remote and forgotten, like a place cut off from the world. It was strange to see so many houses spread out across the countryside the way they were along those concession roads, each one separate and discrete, set off in its own tiny realm as if in enmity; and in that flat landscape, with no point from which you could hold the world in a glance, you got no sense of where things stood in relation to one another, only of endless, random repetition, the openness pressing down on you, holding the world back. When visitors came to see us during my first weeks on the farm, it seemed in my seven-year-old’s dim imagining that they could not have reached us by anything as simple as a road but must have bridged a strange chasm as wide and blank as the sea.

  Those first weeks in Mersea were like a journey through fog – objects seemed to emerge like phantoms, shimmer briefly into focus, fade away. People too: the strange half-familiar faces of the paesani who came to visit us, sullen and restrained as at a funeral; my father. When he’d come for me in Halifax after the crossing, the two of us, face to face then on the long train ride in, while the baby sat apart in its hamper like some parcel to be delivered, he had seemed after his five years’ absence from my life like someone who had nothing to do with me, who was outside of me like a stranger, who I had to think about, be awkward with, only because I was sitting beside him. But more and more it began to seem that some shadow surrounding him took me in too, that he was not just outside but inside me somehow, so I could not see how things were now except through his shadow.

  Sometimes, during those first weeks, I would wake suddenly in the middle of the night and for a moment, in the darkness, feel a disorientation so complete that I might never have known what a world was, or a bed or a chair. My mind in that instant seemed to mirror exactly the darkness of the room around me, seemed to contain no thoughts, no past, only a sudden panic and terror; and it was only when I could put together a little story in my head, a boat, a train, until I arrived finally at the bed I was lying in, that the room around me slipped into dim focus, and the panic passed. I thought then that the blackness I fell into on those nights must be like death, that I had dreamed of being dead, because sometimes, afterwards, I could remember an image of myself closing my eyes and sinking into a sleep as dark as the sea; though it was never the moment I closed my eyes that frightened me but the moment I opened them, when I emerged again into everything strange and new and forgotten, as into the sudden horror of being born, or born again.

  II

  My father’s land, about thirty acres in all, was split part way up by a creek that wound its way through the farms on the 3rd Concession, the land on either side sloping gently down to it to form a tiny valley. Beyond the creek was open field, indistinguishable from the other fields that flanked it, whatever private history it might have had revealed only in the occasional arrowhead or fossil that the plough churned up in the fall. But the front part of the farm, with its strange buildings and variations, the cavernous barn and kiln, the irrigation pond, the greenhouses with their white wooden frames and their weed-choked alleys, the coal-dust-filled boiler room, was its own little world, as compact and multifaceted as the tiny villages, often merely the centuries-long elaborations of single families, that had clung like outcroppings to the rocky slopes around Valle del Sole. When I first arrived at the farm its tidy arrangements, the trees that rose leafless in an orderly row along the edge of the driveway, the little courtyard formed by the house and garage and kiln, made it seem like something in a picture, without dimensions, unreal; it might have been set out by some titan child, who had simply placed this tree here, this house, this red barn, like so many giant toys. The roofs of the greenhouses then were covered with a thin crust of snow that made me think of sugar, though here and there the snow was cut away in perfect dark squares – I thought the squares must form some kind of pattern or code, but they were only spots where the glass had broken, and the snow had fallen through.

  Our house, of white clapboard, appeared to stand in those first days like an object frozen in a moment of time and then forgotten, with an air at once of abandonment and preservation. My father had preceded us there but whether by days or weeks or months wasn’t clear, only the barest evidences of him scattered here and there, a few dishes in the kitchen cupboards, a dirty towel on the rack in the bathroom, as if he had come like an intruder, feline, ready for flight, the house still seeming to await some small crucial act that might shatter its chill calm. There was a modernness to it that I thought of as what was foreign, not Italian, the preternatural gleam of the kitchen with its chrome table and chequer-board tiles, its porcelained fridge and stove, then the living room with its picture-book decorum, the sofa and armchair there, faded and worn but imposing, a different order of things than what I’d known in Valle del Sole; a hundred mysteries seemed to shelter there, the radio above the fridge whose insides slowly warmed to a glow as it came on, the telephone with its distant buzz like insects mindlessly churring. But if the house had any informing spirit it didn’t seem to reside in its objects, which despite their novelty gave no feeling of welcome to the rooms that held them, refusing to give up their histories, sitting stubborn and mute in their separate spaces like things that had turned their backs to you. The only thing that betrayed them in this was a smell, a faint odour of mothballs and sweet rot and something else, not as simple as sweat or the smell of a breath but definitely human, lingering on the furniture, in the cupboards in the kitchen and pantry, in the chintz curtains left at the windows, and stealing over me sometimes to leave an odd hollowness in me like a gloom, the creeping intimation of whatever unknown lives had gone on there before us.

  The day after my arrival a girl named Gelsomina came to live with us to look after the baby. On the train my father’s awkward ministrations to the baby had seemed to draw attention to it as to a magical thing, women in the seats around us bending to coo to it in their senseless languages, slowly taking it over for its feedings and changes while my father sat darkly by. But now it was brusquely turned over to Gelsomina like something to be quietly disposed of. Gelsomina was the daughter of my father’s cousin Alfredo – I remembered the visit he’d paid my mother in Valle del Sole the previous fall after her troubles had begun, come back from America then in his fancy suit, though now he spoke as if he hadn’t seen me since I was a baby.

  “Ma guarda cuist’, do you remember your Uncle Alfredo? Look how big you are, I remember when you were as small as a cabbage.”

  But his friendliness seemed forced, almost bitter, put on more for my father’s benefit than for mine.

  Gelsomina, thin-limbed and moody, dark like the back-country urchins who’d come into school sometimes in Valle del Sole from their distant homesteads, was strange with me as well. I was sure we’d known each other in Italy, could call up images of her from the gatherings of my father’s side of the family in Castilucci; but she gave no sign now of this past between us, as if we could no longer be the same people we’d been once, now that we were in Canada.

  “I’m only helping here until I can work at the factory again,” she said, making it seem as if she’d been in the country a long time already, though her father had brought the family over only the previous fall. “I was there before but I had to leave because one of the inglesi told the boss I wasn’t sixteen yet and it was against the law. But it’s just they can’t stand to see the Italians make the same money they do when they’ve been in the country a hundred years.”

  Tsi’Alfredo and his wife Maria brought things for the house, pots and pans, a washboard, jars full of tomato sauce, a stack of diapers. Other paesani ca
me by as well, people who called me by name but who I recognized only vaguely or not all, couldn’t connect to a place or a time; but if they had gifts they’d quietly turn them over to Gelsomina, as if shielding my father from the shame of their generosity. My father would tell Gelsomina to bring glasses and wine, and sometimes he’d talk with these visitors in such a casual way that the shadow around him receded and he’d seem transformed, different from the man who had sat beside me on the train, from the one who in some painful way was my father; but other times he sat silent at his corner of the table and the guests talked only among themselves.

  There were two bedrooms in the house, one off the pantry and one off the living room. My father slept in the first, in a bed with a headboard of slim metal tubes like the bars of a cage; Gelsomina and I shared a double bed in the other with the baby. For all this compelled closeness, Gelsomina and I hardly spoke to each other – the house seemed to impose its own silence on us, to police and enforce it. Even the baby was quiet, its blank eyes probing the world with what seemed an unnatural calm, though often in the middle of the night it would begin to whimper and I’d watch through a haze of sleep as Gelsomina soundlessly rose out of bed to make up a bottle. I’d go into the kitchen with her sometimes, taking comfort from her cool efficiency, the way she moved through the room undaunted by its porcelained strangeness, the chrome taps, the dark coils on the stove that slowly melted to red as the heat fed into them. The milk she used came in large thick-lipped bottles that the milkman left every morning on the steps inside the back door; before warming it she’d mix in a cupful of boiled water into which she’d stirred a few pinches of sugar. When the bottle was ready she’d touch the nipple against her wrist to check its heat, then nestle the baby with practised ease in the crook of an arm, her movements so certain and smooth they seemed instinctual; but there was an edge in them too, an urgency, one that seemed less protective of the baby than of the silence that ruled over the house.