In a Glass House Read online

  VII

  With my uncle’s family gone our household seemed stripped down again to its essence, all of us suddenly dangerously visible, lacking the spectacle of Tsi’Umberto’s arguments to distract us from the awkwardness of one another’s presence. We retreated to our separate rooms, the one wealth my uncle’s departure had left us with, the rest of the house become just a passageway we moved through uneasily, with no sense of ownership or comfort. The living room took on an air of abandonment, the bed removed so that only the threadbare armchair and couch remained; in the day no one bothered so much as to draw the curtains there, the room like a recess at the centre of us awaiting the family we couldn’t be.

  Work on the greenhouse didn’t go well. First the men who sank the posts set the last three on one side out of plumb and they had to be redug; then afterwards two of them settled lower than the others beneath the weight of the trusses. Those first mistakes seemed to spoil the whole project for my father.

  “You’ll see, for the next forty years now those two bays will be a pain in my ass, while those bastards just get their cheque and go home. The idiots, a child could have seen the mistake.”

  “They were probably in a hurry to get to the hotel to drink,” Tsi’Alfredo said.

  My father would bring his grievances to Aunt Teresa, with a peevishness that was a sort of clumsy sleight of hand, an appeal for sympathy and a denial of any need for it, like a child’s false stoicism. But my aunt always said the thing that seemed most calculated to irritate him, allowing herself to see into his need only enough to use it against him.

  “You should have let Rossi do it,” she said about the posts. “At least he’s Italian.”

  “What does Rossi have to do with it, idiot, he doesn’t have the equipment for that kind of thing.”

  She’d gained weight since Colie had stopped coming round, looked aged beyond her years, a shadow of dark veins beginning to appear on the fleshy surface of her calves. She seemed always at one remove from things now, uninvolved in some core of herself with their small daily unfoldings. At home she let housework lapse, the floors going gritty, the bathtub rimmed with scum; at work, back full time on the farm now after her one winter at Longo’s, she carried a small transistor radio with her always, lost to us then in its static hum. There was a program she listened to faithfully that came on in late afternoon on one of the Detroit stations – it seemed a kind of news show, talked about the riots in Los Angeles, the war in Vietnam, though in a tone charged with a strange urgency, at once sure and deeply troubled. Eventually the magazines began to arrive, with articles about God and the bible, Aunt Teresa reading them from cover to cover in her slow, careful way; but if she ever referred at all to the program or to the things she read it was only to bring up some fact about how bad things were in the world, as if every small, private problem were proof of some general malaise.

  Rita’s care fell mainly to me again. We shared a bed in the converted porch my uncle and aunt had slept in, at night Rita a tiny ridge beside me beneath the excess of blankets Aunt Teresa covered us with to make up for the room’s damp cold. In the mornings I’d wake her when I got up for school; but beyond that she was on her own, seeming to have fashioned for herself a small, quiet life with its own child’s logic and order, the meticulous care she took to wash and dress, the private games she played. There was something disturbing in this, in her self-sufficiency, the way she could close the world out as if only the little of it she needed was real. She’d spill long strings of words sometimes as she played, in mixed English and Italian, rolling them out as over a hilly landscape, racing them into a blur and then gradually slowing them to a strenuous clarity, cryptic declarations that moved in and out of sense; but then she might ask some child’s simple question or make some child’s observation and seem suddenly normal again, unremarkable.

  She was four now, her baby fat long gone, melted from her to leave a willowy angularity that seemed at once sickly but somehow natural to her, as if her tiny intricate hands, her bony limbs, the pale oval of her face, had all assumed some perfect final proportion. She might almost have been pretty, with her child’s delicacy and her limpid eyes, as brightly blue now as a primary sky in a drawing; and yet there was always an air of slovenliness about her, her hair slightly oily and limp though she brushed it every morning with a slow solemnity, her clothes, mainly hand-me-downs from Fiorina, always shabby and ill-fitting. Fiorina would parade before her conceited and prim in her new school clothes and I’d see the veiled longing in Rita, the knowledge of what she couldn’t have, how she’d balk sometimes at the clothes I set out for her in the morning.

  “I don’t like that one.”

  “That’s all there is, you have to wear it.”

  But I’d begun to pick out always the shoddiest things, wanting somehow to display the injustice of them before Aunt Teresa.

  “Why do you always have her wear those old rags?” she said finally. “She must have other things.”

  “She needs something new,” I said.

  “We don’t have money to go wasting on clothes like that. She has all those things of Fiorina’s to wear.”

  I decided to take matters into my own hands, slipping downtown after school one day to Schwartz’s clothing store on Erie Street with a few crumpled bills in my pocket that I’d taken from Aunt Teresa’s purse. The Italians shopped at Schwartz’s because you could bargain with him, referring to him as “the Jew” though the label conjured for me only scanty, contradictory facts, that the Jews had suffered during the war, that they’d crucified Christ though he’d been the king of them.

  “You’re Mario’s son,” Schwartz said when I came in, mournful and slow, seeming to sort my image from his mind like a photograph. “On the 3rd Concession.”

  It disturbed me to be recognized like that, to be noticed, but when I’d told him what I needed he nodded conspiratorially as if he’d gathered up in an instant all the circumstances that had brought me there and was prepared to guard them for me now like a secret. His shop was all dizzying disorder, the walls piled with dusty half-open cartons and the gloomy aisles crammed with clothes carousels and racks, hats and cellophaned shirts, tie stands, pleated trousers; but Schwartz manoeuvred his way through it unthinkingly, stopping at a rack at the far corner to pull a frilled, pink dress from it, displaying it for me with a tiny flourish against the bare dappled flesh of his forearm.

  “Maybe something like this?” But he saw my eyes dart to the price tag dangling from it and nodded, considering.

  “Yes, perhaps you’re right,” he said. He had an odd lilting accent, pausing a split instant before syllables as if afraid he might injure them. “You need something more sub-stan-tial for a girl that age.”

  He found a dress in blue corduroy in a bin in a back room.

  “Maybe this is more what you want.”

  At the counter he winked at me, avuncular, as he handed me my parcel. For an instant he was no longer simply the Jew who sold clothes but a man who might have some secret other life, who would close up his shop at night and walk slowly out along Erie Street toward some house on the edge of town, who might have children, a wife, who ate meals at some kitchen table and listened perhaps to the radio. I wanted to ask him that suddenly, if he had children, but it seemed too strange a thing, too out of keeping with my own role as a child.

  I walked home along the highway and then up our concession road, my shoes crunching strangely loud against the gravelled shoulder in the late-afternoon chill. My father gave me a dark look when I came out to the greenhouses to work.

  “Where have you been?”

  “I had to stay for an extra lesson.”

  “Bravo,” my father said, immediately assuming some infraction though my reports were always good. “If you don’t want to do what you have to there, don’t come looking to me after.”

  I kept the dress from Rita till Sunday, wanting to save the secret of it, the expected still, silent moment of her pleasure; but then when she
came out wearing it Aunt Teresa noticed it at once.

  “Where did that come from?”

  I hadn’t considered this, hadn’t thought anyone paid this much attention to Rita, paid any attention to her at all.

  “I got it from Tsia Taormina,” I said.

  “Ma come, she brought over all the clothes she had just the other day, that wasn’t with them. It looks almost new.”

  My father was eating breakfast. He stared at Rita strangely for a moment, Rita seeming to shrink beneath his gaze with the sudden intimation of guilt, of some violation; but I sensed no anger in him, no understanding, only a blank curiosity as if he were seeing her for the first time.

  “What’s wrong with it, it looks fine,” he said finally.

  There was a moment of silence, of suspension, a sort of gap we wavered in for an instant, but then it passed and the matter seemed dropped. Then when my uncle and aunt came over for lunch, Tsia Taormina, with her typical blundering good intentions, made a big show of praising Rita for how pretty she looked.

  “Ma guarda, where did this come from, ah? Someone must have bought you a little gift.”

  But Rita seemed traumatized by now with her confusion, shying away from her in timid silence.

  “Dai, Taormí,” Aunt Teresa said, letting Tsia Taormina’s comments fade into the usual indifference people showed her, “give me a hand with these dishes.”

  Afterwards Aunt Teresa took me aside.

  “Tell me the truth, Vittorio, you bought it for her, didn’t you, you took the money from my purse. Dai, I won’t say anything to your father.”

  But the thing had got so out of hand now that I burst into tears.

  “What a crazy thing, did you think we’d let her go naked?” she said, and took me in her arms, the first time in years she’d done such a thing. Yet I didn’t understand this forgiveness in her, the unreasonableness of it, felt robbed by it somehow of whatever had been right and true, had been defiantly my own, in what I had done.

  From then on Aunt Teresa began to pay more attention to Rita, coming for her in the morning to look after her, taking her out with her when she went to work. But though this was what I’d thought I’d wanted, now I resented the implication that we hadn’t managed all right without her. She got me to bring children’s books home from the school library, sitting with Rita at the kitchen table sometimes after supper and sounding out their stories to her in her awkward, ill-sounding English; and Rita would sit silent and still, the patient student, staring up wide-eyed at the pictures my aunt showed her or watching her face to see how lips formed around words. There seemed an element of subterfuge in Rita’s attentiveness, a careful stifling of herself as if she’d understood that my aunt’s ministrations were a kind of performance she had to be grateful for; and I cherished this small resistance in her, glad that I saw it when Aunt Teresa did not, simply forged on with her lessons until she herself grew tired or bored. But then gradually some more instinctive bond began to take shape between them. I’d come into the greenhouses sometimes after school to find Aunt Teresa silently at work while Rita played at the end of her row, the two of them lost in their own thoughts but still seeming always aware in some animal way of each other’s presence; and I felt cheated then by Rita’s not seeing how easy it was for Aunt Teresa to be kind to her, how little she risked, began to look always for the small oversight or cruelty in my aunt that would betray the fragile trust Rita had begun to show in her, hated that meanness in me but knew with the stubborn sureness of childhood that Rita was the only thing that truly belonged to me.

  But in the end even when my aunt’s small betrayals did come, her fits of irritation, her inattentiveness, her beginning to treat Rita as if she were any normal child, there was no atonement in them for me. I’d watch Rita’s spirits fall at some refusal or reprimand, Aunt Teresa simply carrying on oblivious, though for Rita, who had experience neither of scolding nor of forgiveness, each of these little slights was like a catastrophe. But she’d be inconsolable then if I tried to reach her, warding me off in her stubborn silence as if even the slender, precarious love of Aunt Teresa was worth more to her than the whole of my own.

  VIII

  When by the winter the new greenhouse was finally built and planted, my father seemed to give in at last to a grudging satisfaction, relaxing into his accomplishment now that the threat of it had passed.

  “You’re a big shot now,” Tsi’Alfredo said.

  “Sì, a big shot, when the bank owns even the screwdrivers I used to put the damn thing together.”

  But I saw how he’d look up and down the greenhouse with an air of ownership, contented and grave, how he’d fiddle with valves and switches to make sure everything was perfect.

  As part of his new expansiveness he bought a television, at long last bringing us into modernity, a squat, peg-legged General Electric we set in a corner of the living room. It seemed to shift the house’s whole centre of gravity, always there as a presence, full of potential, holding more life in its tiny screen than all the empty rooms it ruled over. Within a matter of weeks it was already hard to imagine what we’d done without it, how we’d ever managed to fill in the hours between supper and bed; and in the new window it provided on the world we seemed at once brought out of ourselves and yet made more intimate, gathering around it every night as around a fire, sealed off in the living room’s sheltered space as if nothing existed beyond us, or was real.

  My father exercised an unthinking tyranny over what we watched, seeming to use the television simply as a kind of soporific to ease himself into sleep after work yet showing an odd discretion in his choice of programs. Some logic governed these choices but one that appeared to have little to do with the shows’ storylines, was more a matter of their tone or of the certain colouring they gave things, the police shows with their grim seriousness, the westerns with their laconic gunmen and their spare, remote worlds. Often he’d come into a show half-way through or fall asleep before the end of it as if attracted merely to its flow of images, like a cat to a moving object; but then the following week he’d have me search it out for him again, already seeing special value in it simply because it was familiar. Gradually each night of the week took on its schedule, its inevitability, one that within a few months had begun to order our time as tightly and precisely as the bells that marked out the day at St. Michael’s.

  In Rita this control my father had seemed to become the focus of some hard, child’s resentment. She had quickly developed a proprietary attachment to the TV, settling in front of it after breakfast and still there before it when I returned from school, ignoring me then as if to make the point that she had something of her own now, didn’t need me; and then in the evening she’d hover in the living room in silent protest, stubbornly protecting her claim against my father’s temporary usurpation.

  Sunday afternoons, though, Rita and I had the television to ourselves, my aunt and my father usually out and the two of us settling furtive in my father’s recliner to watch it, the afternoon stretching before us in dead Sunday repose. I took a guilty pleasure in these afternoons, some wariness between me and Rita seeming briefly to fall away then, the television a sort of point of neutral contact that brought us together exactly by freeing us of each other, Rita beside me neither affectionate nor not, simply there in her small unmindfulness. We watched the afternoon movies on Channel 4, tearjerkers mainly, with always some wrenching parting or separation, an accident, a death; Rita followed them with a quiet absorption yet remained also canny somehow, merely curious, even when my own throat was tight with suppressed tears seeming always outside the emotion of them as if she’d understood better than I had that the things we were watching weren’t real.

  These movies led on into the first shows of Sunday evening, “Lassie,” “The World of Disney”; but there was always the tension then of my father’s imminent return from the club. We’d hear his truck come up the drive, hear the back door slam, his footfall on the steps; then in the kitchen he’d l
inger absently a moment watching Aunt Teresa preparing supper, make some gruff, perhaps almost good-humoured criticism or complaint, his way of greeting her. But since Aunt Teresa usually simply ignored him or made some dismissive response he’d turn finally toward the living room, his air of tired contentment at once falling away because Rita was there; and then with the same instinctiveness with which he drew around himself his sudden grimness he’d have me change the channel, seeming thus to empty us from the room, to reclaim it from us.

  Rita would sit in silent resistance during all this, shutting out my father as surely as he did her. But then once he’d come something would crumble in her and she’d withdraw into her hurt as into a tiny fortress. All evening then I’d be aware of her sullen aloofness, its rebuke of me for my own failure to prevail against my father in some way. She seemed to understand how I betrayed her: I wanted to think of my father as someone who could not be opposed, whose will would forge on against any resistance from me like a juggernaut; but it was my resistance that wasn’t sure enough, that was blunted every time I saw the grimness that came over him in Rita’s presence, some part of me then always siding with him over Rita.

  In the end it was Rita who prevailed against him, simply pressing herself up against the television one Sunday when my father told me to change the channel. By the time I’d understood that I ought to have pulled her away at once, made her invisible, it seemed her presence there had already become too undeniable.

  “What’s the matter with her?” my father said.

  But he seemed to regard her with an odd detachment: she might have been merely some strange inanimate thing that had blown up against the television by chance.

  “She wants to watch ‘Lassie,’ ” I said, emptying my voice of commitment. “It’s a story about a dog.”