Authors: Nino Ricci
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 house 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.
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.