Authors: Nino Ricci
The bottom drawer, a double one, was locked or jammed shut, refusing to yield. I banged at the frame around it with a chunk of concrete to free it, then realized I had only to pull out the drawer above to be able to reach into it. Inside, jumbled into a heap, were a dozen or so bundles of paper tied round with string, my father’s erratic system of filing; like the photos they’d been reduced to a solid mass, heavy and mildewed with moisture.
I began to sort through them, coming at the bottom to a smaller bundle of what seemed like letters. As I peeled away its rotting outer layers I discovered an old Italian stamp decaying on an envelope’s corner and then the ghost of a familiar script, urging memory on me like a smell: my mother’s script, its long spidery loops, though in the instant I recognized it it seemed to lose all its nuance, become only itself, these pale watery scrawls of fading ink on rotting paper.
I brought the letters home. They were too damp for me to be able to pull the envelopes safely apart, to pry out from them whatever thin slips of paper might be folded inside. But instead of leaving them out in the open air to dry I hid them in a shoebox that I then tucked into a box of old clothes at the back of my closet. For several days the thought of them lingered at the edges of my awareness like some put-off obligation: they seemed a kind of wealth I’d accumulated but that I didn’t know how to spend. Then when finally I took them out again, my mind strangely blank, empty of expectation, they remained clotted still with damp; I could make out only the blurred faces here and there of envelopes, my father’s name on them and his old address, R. R. 1, the careful block capitals of CANADA at the bottom. But I couldn’t attach these things to a person, to a hand writing them out, to a room and a place in the past where it may have been possible to conceive them.
I hid the letters away again, thinking I might dry them in the oven at some point when my father and aunt were out. But later that week I noticed that Rita’s remaining clothes had been taken out of the closet, then that the box of old clothes at the back had been taken as well.
“It was just rags,” Aunt Teresa said when I asked about it. “I put them in the trunk in the basement.”
I found the clothes box empty beside the trunk, found the clothes piled neatly inside, but no shoebox.
“There was another box,” I said. “With papers.”
“Oh, that,” my aunt said, suspiciously casual. “I threw them out, I thought they were garbage.”
She said she couldn’t remember where she’d thrown them. I looked for them in the garbage pit between the apple trees, then in the drum nearby where we put garbage to burn, then along the bank of the pond. But my search for them lacked conviction: I felt only the guilty relief of being free of them, of their uncertain burden, was left again with the sense that something crucial was missing in me, normal human emotion, the way I reacted to things with only this emptiness at the centre of me.
I dreamt sometimes of Rita. She appeared obliquely, palely inert, as if under water or under glass, an icon the dreams seemed to circle but not involve. I dreamt of her once in a field, simply there at a distance: I was picking some fruit, yellowish-orange, pulpy and bloated and frail, found a robin’s nest under a vine, its still-warm pastel-blue eggs. I dreamt of her on a beach, for once simply a child like any other, turned from her imagining the shore would taper off to a trailing spit though it merely went on and on without end. When I awoke from these dreams I’d feel a lingering sense of incompletion, of some task not attended to, some duty not fulfilled. But then in the light of day I felt only a blankness where the thought of Rita should have been, couldn’t have called up now any certain feeling for her except the familiar deadness in me, and beneath that the small guilty thought that her leaving us was simply what I’d wished for all along.
I entered into high school as into a limbo, no sudden making over there as I’d hoped, no stepping out of the darkness I’d fallen into, merely a sort of perpetual furtive waiting without promise or purpose. The school, a citadel of pink brick amidst the old stone and clapboard homes of Talbot West, seemed a labyrinth after St. Michael’s, with its wings and outbuildings, its dizzying symmetry, its unfixed world, the thousand nameless faces that moved unconnected through its dozen halls. I had dreams of wandering lost in it, of being late for some crucial test and then discovering it was in a language I couldn’t decipher, all senseless hieroglyphs and scrawls.
What friendships I’d had at St. Michael’s seemed to fall away. It was the disconnectedness I couldn’t bear, being with people yet having nothing to say to them, not finding the simplest word that was true, exposed to them then in their uncertain threat. There were the other Italians at the school, the shadowy self-contained world they formed, Domenic and his friends from St. Michael’s, others from Our Blessed Virgin, lingering in their
groups in the high-ceilinged gloom of the technical wing. But with them it was the same, whatever relationship I had with them through the various Italian gatherings over the years seeming somehow suspended at school, only the dark nod of recognition if we passed each other and then we moved on. I began to search out circuitous routes from class to class to avoid the groups that formed outside classroom doorways between periods; I took to sitting alone during lunch. In the minutes then that I sat in hunched silence over my meal the cafeteria took on a painful clarity, every sound and image magnified, the clatter of plates, the bright flash of a dress or blouse, the dull, excruciating monotone of conversation; and then afterwards there was the great dead stretch of time to fill before the next period. I took to closing myself in a cubicle in the washroom to await the bell, sat staring at its scratched walls trying to blot out my thoughts, be nothing, not wanting the time I spent there, the shame of it, to be part of any memory of myself. Groups of boys would filter in, joking, mock-wrestling, thin slices of them flickering past the door slits.
“That kid must be a regular,” one said once, and stooped suddenly as if to look under my door.
Then two boys from one of my classes began to be friendly with me, sitting beside me one day at lunch, seeming to pick me out in the room like some project they’d decided to take on. But in the aloneness I’d retreated into by then my first response was only a resistance at their intrusion, at having to work now to present some acceptable version of myself.
“It must get kind of lonely sitting by yourself every day.”
“It’s all right I guess.”
Already they seemed diminished somehow, coming to me when my humiliation lay so plain on me; and each persistence
in them, their seeking me out between classes, their coming over every day now at lunch, seemed to diminish them further. There was an innocence to them that made me feel I had to protect them from me somehow, to hide at all costs who I was, how I saw them. This was true especially of one of them, Terry, with his blind too-insistent good nature, his corny humour like a family sitcom’s, his body bulging girlishly at his thighs to give him a slightly ridiculous air. The other, Mark, stylishly long-haired and slender and tall, was more canny, bland and unblemished like some new thing still fresh from its wrappings but seeming able to shift to fit in with whomever he was with as if he had quietly, undetectably willed his normalcy into being; and there was something familiar in this that made me feel sometimes that I was merely his deformed underside, capable perhaps of some simple transformation that would make me as flawless as he was, as inconspicuous.
The two of them formed part of a group called the One Way Challenge. I went along with them to one of the meetings, had got the sense from their explanations of a social club of some sort but then had to grope as the meeting unfolded to find what focus held it together, the oddly private revelations, the oblique, sudden references to religion and Christ. Four or five people spoke in turn, volunteering themselves at once tentative and sure, a girl who talked about the death of her father, a boy who’d spent two years in reform school. The last to speak, an older boy, his neck mottled with blood-coloured blotches like hickeys, spoke about a group he’d belonged to when he’d lived up north.
“We used to get drunk or stoned and then sit around in a circle staring at a candle. After a while you’d forget about everything except the flame, that’s all you’d have in your mind, and
the feeling would get so strong you couldn’t take your eyes away even if you wanted to. I guess it shows how powerful Satan can be when you let yourself be taken in by him.”
But in each case the stories were told in tones so plain and matter-of-fact and the group was so staid in its response, so quietly accepting, that I thought I’d misunderstood them, couldn’t reconcile their easy explaining away with what seemed the cryptic underside of things that had been revealed in them, what one might imagine existing but never actually being talked about or lived through.
Within a few weeks I’d begun to attend these meetings regularly. It was never clear to me what had drawn me into them, perhaps the uncertain allure of those first stories I’d heard, the hope of crossing over into their strange, familiar territory, perhaps simply the petty fear of not going along with Terry and Mark, of losing them, of having nothing else to fill the blank space my life seemed then. But even when the meetings had become predictable, suspect, the testimonials and their inevitable conclusion, the acceptance of Christ, even when the rebellion at this bright, forced certainty had grown large in me, still something brought me back to them. It struck me how wilful and hard-won religion seemed in these meetings, how transforming, wasn’t merely a given as it had always been in my life, pervasive and unquestioned as air – I felt something truthful in this, defiant, the group of us seeming hidden away in our upstairs classroom like early Christians in the catacombs.
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.