by Nino Ricci
“What business is it of hers?” Aunt Teresa said when I told her about it. But she seemed to feel the same unease as at the last such request, as if unable to find the clear line of logic that would allow her to impose on Rita the family’s usual closed tyranny.
There were still the scratch-thin welts on Rita’s back, the faint half-moon of blue beneath her eye.
“Take her with you to school tomorrow, she can go from there,” Aunt Teresa said. “Anyway she’s better off there for a few days with your father the way he is.”
And it was as if she was sending her out like a signal of our failure, no longer trusting us to look after her.
Oddly Rita seemed the least blemished of us by what had happened, after a day or two shedding the first humiliation of her injury and putting on a child’s false forbearance, sensing the shame in our furtive glances, in Aunt Teresa’s brisk attentiveness to her as to a guest we had offended. Waiting for the bus the next day she seemed aware only of the reward her hurt had earned her, another weekend away.
“You shouldn’t let Elena’s mother see you when you’re changing.”
“You see me sometimes.”
“That’s different, I’m your brother.”
And by afternoon she was gone again, retreating up the school driveway toward the high, friendly voice on the phone, the untroubled television world I imagined Elena lived in.
My father came home that night, Aunt Teresa and I steeling ourselves for his return, stripping ourselves down to a blank emotionless silence.
“If he asks where your sister is,” Aunt Teresa said, “just say she’s at your uncle’s.”
But he didn’t ask. Whatever rage there’d been in him when he’d left was gone now, seemed sucked out of him, his whole body drawn and limp as if under-inflated. I worked with him for a while the next day in the new greenhouse, draining steam pipes and water lines so they wouldn’t crack in the cold.
“Go on home,” he said finally. “I can finish.”
But he held me a moment in uncertain silence, his hands working on independent in their slow, clumsy precision.
“How’s your sister?” The question seemed so hard-won that I flushed with embarrassment, felt as if he’d had to crack himself open to ask it.
“She’s all right,” I said.
But he was gone again before she’d returned.
My father spent the rest of the fall and then the winter in Detroit, working in one of the car plants there and boarding with his friend Marcovecchio. Every second weekend he came home, bringing laundry, workshirts, soiled overalls, all we knew of his other life, and taking back Aunt Teresa’s preserves and vegetables from Tsi’Alfredo’s greenhouses. Gradually a pattern developed, unspoken but somehow sanctioned, Rita’s continuing stays at Elena’s beginning to correspond more and more with my father’s returns. I overheard Aunt Teresa sometimes on the phone in her broken English, her voice loud with the forced brightness she put on for strangers; and then Friday morning she’d have a bag ready again with Rita’s clothes for another visit, my father clearly put out by these absences yet saying nothing about them, seeming to relinquish in his silence any right he had to object.
Then over Christmas Rita was allowed to spend most of the vacation at Elena’s. We appeared to have surrendered an important illusion in this, that we formed a family Rita was part of. But when my father came home for his own week or so of holidays there seemed not so much anger in him at her absence as a shame, a humbling as though he were home only through our good graces. All through his stay there was an air in the house of a general unburdening, our constant awareness of Rita’s absence seeming the thing that then allowed us to forget her.
Rita came home after the holidays bearing boxes of gifts the Amhersts had given her, a doll, a tinselly bracelet, a white blouse, a pleated skirt. Aunt Teresa looked them over with frowning displeasure but couldn’t bring herself to tell Rita to give them back.
“You don’t have to take anything from them after this, it’s not right.”
But there was a carefulness in how Aunt Teresa spoke to her, as if Rita held now a stranger’s rights that our treatment of her would be judged against. Rita seemed to sense the shift, lording her stay at the Amhersts’ over me with a childish authority.
“They had a tree, that’s where we put the presents. And then we went to a different church because they’re not Catholic, only Elena is because she’s adopted.”
She seemed merely to be repeating something she’d been told and yet toward some end, an impression or fear she wanted to plant in me.
“What happened to her real parents?”
“I dunno, she doesn’t have them any more.”
I began to see Elena differently after that, more dangerous somehow, more like Rita, imagined some whispering conspiracy between the two of them that they’d been slowly unfolding since their first coming together. They had friends at school, seemed to fit in, had a group of girls they played with whom they seemed the leaders of; and yet there was something not quite right in this, an apartness as if they were merely feigning their normalcy. Rita was almost bullyish with these other friends, so different than at home, playing with a reckless aggression that left her covered in bruises and scrapes; but then she and Elena would be off on one of their walks putting the others behind them like indulgences they’d grown tired of, joined then in what seemed an ominous complicity.
Their walks sometimes took them to the back of the schoolyard where Johnny Elias and his group hung out, sneaking cigarettes there behind the shelter of a workshed. I’d suffered a hundred humiliations from Johnny over my years at St. Michael’s, the one time we’d actually come to blows Johnny overwhelming me in an instant, his body unleashing itself on me with a single sudden blow of skilful violence. But Rita and Elena seemed drawn to him, hovering at the edges of his group as if weighing its promise against its threat.
“Hey girls,” Johnny would call out, seeming amused by them, by the couple they formed. “How’s your zubbrah today?”
I saw them linger sometimes half the lunch hour with him, always in half-retreat and yet held there by his teasing badgering, resented this power they allowed Johnny over them, the ammunition they gave him to hurt me.
“Vic-tore, my son, that’s some sister you got there. She’s going to be a real looker.”
But still Rita and Elena continued to gravitate toward the back of the yard, seeming to be fleeing a boredom, with their games and other friends, with their put-on six-year-old lives, the things inside them that found no place there.
In February I was called down to the principal’s office. Rita and Elena were there, Rita sitting demurely in a chair by one wall, contrite or feigning contriteness, Elena straight-backed beside her like a chaperon. The principal, Mr. Pearson, held his hand out to me as to an adult.
“Please, have a seat.”
Mr. Pearson had been with the school three years or so, taking over after Father Mackinnon had been transferred. With his sharper features, his narrow eyes, the slight hook of his chin, he had seemed then to replace Father Mackinnon just as the stern portrait of Pope Paul had replaced John in our hallway a year or so before; but under him we’d entered a period of odd leniency, the strap eliminated, the sisters increasingly replaced with lay teachers, the posts in the schoolyard that divided the girls’ side from the boys’ removed.
There was a package of cigarettes on Mr. Pearson’s desk, Rothmans, my father’s brand.
“It seems your sister and her friend were found in the schoolyard with these,” Mr. Pearson said. He swivelled toward Rita and Elena, frowning down on them. “A serious offence, very serious indeed. Normally it would require at the very least a week’s suspension.”
But it was clear already from the forced drama of his tone that Rita and Elena were in no real danger. Even they seemed to have understood this, sitting there in their careful attitudes of repentance.
“Do you understand, girls, what a serious thing it is you’ve done
here?”
“Yes, sir,” Elena said.
“Rita?”
“Yes, sir.”
He let them off with a week of detentions, to be served during lunch hour, threatened no meetings with parents, no letters home. But when he dismissed them he asked me to stay behind.
“I’d like to have a word with you.”
Some energy seemed to pass out of him when they’d gone. He paced the room a moment and stopped to stare out his window, looking oddly forlorn there against the desolation of the empty schoolyard.
“You know, Victor,” he said finally, “I should tell you this isn’t the first time I’ve had to speak to your sister. She’s very disruptive in class, it seems. I thought I should talk to you about that.”
I tried to guess what he wanted from me, what I might have done wrong.
“She’s not like that at home, sir.”
“I see.”
He sat again, removing his glasses an instant to rub the bridge of his nose. Something in his eyes then, suddenly bared like that in their startling blue, gave me the sense that he was about to betray me in some way.
“Victor, I should be honest with you, Elena’s parents have spoken with me. They think there may be some problems at home for Rita. What I mean is that your father doesn’t treat Rita the way he might treat – well, the way he might treat you, for instance. Does any of this make any sense to you?”
He appeared genuinely troubled now, wanting an answer. The air in the room seemed to thicken.
“You see Elena’s parents seem to feel that your father is, perhaps, well – mistreating her in some way.”
His voice had grown strained, almost whispery. It seemed to reach out and touch me like a hand, dangerous, insistent.
“Victor, do you understand what I’m asking you?”
“My father isn’t home much any more. He’s been working in Detroit and stuff.”
“Yes. I see.”
He leaned slowly back in his chair, seeming to draw away with him for the time the painful intimacy of a moment before.
“Victor, does your father ever object when Rita stays over at Elena’s?”
“No, sir.” The question relieved me, as if it somehow cancelled out the one before it. “He doesn’t say anything about it.”
“And how would you feel if Rita were – well, if she were to stay at the Amhersts’ from now on? I mean, if she were to always stay there, if she didn’t come home any more?”
I stared at the floor, my mind blank as static, straining to measure the gravity of my response.
“I don’t know, sir,” I said.
There was a long silence between us. He rose and stood at the window again.
“You’ve been a very good student,” he said finally. “We ought to have moved you back up with the kids your own age.”
I’d expected some little talk from him, some adult’s attempt at consolation or advice. But he offered only this compliment, generous, superfluous, seemed to have understood how little he could do to help me.
He took up the pack of cigarettes on his desk.
“I guess you better put these back wherever Rita got them from.”
Rita’s stays at Elena’s lengthened. I said nothing to Aunt Teresa yet it seemed she was aware of this slow defection, had capitulated to it as to something no longer within her control. It was to our house now that Rita seemed to come as a visitor, our routines shifting briefly to accommodate her, her remaining hangers of clothes in the bedroom closet kept there like things in storage. Between us there was an awkwardness like the forced intimacy of strangers, our silent morning preparations for school, our shared bed.
The house seemed held in a state of waiting, for something to change, to be over. With no work to be done on the farm I spent afternoons watching TV, the endless sitcoms that played on the Windsor station, the afternoon then merging seamlessly with the evening; I had only this awareness of home now, the long hours of television that filled my time there, the small hollowness that took shape in me every day and then its guilty relief in the living room’s darkness. I stayed up for the late movie sometimes, sneaking cigarettes from the cartons my father kept in his room and drinking half-glasses of watered-down wine. There were always the women in these movies, tight-dressed and sly or innocent, their untouchable closeness, the longing they left in me like fever; and afterwards, if Rita was home, I delayed going to bed, aware of her sleeping there, of her body, its pale unknowing slenderness and heat. There was a careful protocol now around our dressing and undressing, a charged, unspoken avoidance: we seemed to see ourselves suddenly as others might, to have the sense of some audience gauging our normalcy.
There was no certain moment that marked Rita’s departure from us, only her lengthening visits to the Amhersts, Aunt Teresa’s silent complicity in them, supportive or submissive, I was never sure which. But then finally one of her absences stretched on a week, then two, until all our house still held of her, her lingering smell on her pillow, her few remaining clothes, seemed merely remnants, no longer able to hold the shape of some impending return.
XI
My father came back from Detroit for good in early May. The day after his return Aunt Teresa enlisted Tsi’Alfredo to come by to tell him what had happened. The task seemed to irk him, set as he always was on keeping problems within the family.
“They want to keep her,” he said. He referred to Rita as “cchella catrara,” “that girl,” never by name. “I don’t know, maybe it’s the best thing.”
Aunt Teresa kept silent. My father showed Tsi’Alfredo a respect he would never show Aunt Teresa or Tsi’Umberto, seeming to see in him the closest thing he had in his life to a friend.
“I wish to God she and her mother before her had died and rotted in the womb.”
But he seemed so tired suddenly, so worn out with remembered pain.
He went through a sort of grieving afterwards, going about his work on the farm hunched like a sojourner, seeming made fragile by this unexpected resolution of things. I’d expected anger, a sense of betrayal; but some childishness in him seemed to have fallen away, his fraught, complex need for blame and recrimination. Perhaps all along he had wanted no more than to do the right thing, had always held out for that though it was the very thing that was impossible for him, that he could never see his way clear to.
Yet it seemed no real decision was ever made about Rita, by him or by any of us, that we’d merely given ourselves over to what had happened as to an act of fate, never daring, in our immigrant helplessness, to question what rules such matters were governed by here; and now that she was gone we seemed to fold ourselves over her absence like water rushing to fill a gap, the only proof she’d ever been with us our guilty silence and then the small evidences of her left scattered through the house like pricks of conscience, the clothes in my closet, a tooth-brush, an old pair of shoes left greying with dust on the basement shoe rack. At school she seemed by now a stranger, someone I had no claim to: she made a pretence for a time of ignoring me, childishly, hurtfully obvious, turning loudly away to her friends if I passed or staring through me as if I weren’t there; but then even this language between us began to falter, grow strange, giving way finally to simple awkwardness and then to silence.
The end of the school year was approaching, our grade-eight class preparing for confirmation. But it was as if some veil had been stripped from my eyes over the previous weeks, everything I had taken for granted till then seeming suddenly called into question. At confession I couldn’t get beyond the first ritual phrase, lapsing after it into hot, awkward silence.
“You know, son,” the priest said finally, “it’s a mortal sin to receive a sacrament while your soul is unclean.”
But there seemed no place inside me to speak from, no word in me that was true. I couldn’t understand how the world had come down to this, this futility in things, what mistake I had made.
“Perhaps you can do your own confession,” the priest said.
“Kooky, kooky!” she said. “You’re a kook!”
But when our glances met, her exuberance melted from her, only that message passing between us, our instinctive sibling shame and then our turning away.
At home whatever unease remained over Rita’s departure was layered over now by a wave of new activity, the farm beginning to undergo a great transformation. The ruins of the old boiler room were finally cleared away, the old greenhouses repaired and extended to the road; and work was begun on a new boiler room, back beyond the garage, and on two new greenhouses to come off it, stretching from the road nearly as far as the creek. It seemed almost miraculous, this transformation, this new farm rising phoenix-like from the ruins of the old; and yet in a sense we’d merely returned to the old order, Tsi’Umberto gone into partnership again with my father as if the past several years had been merely a digression, a slow excising of the flaw at the centre of us that had kept us from being a family.
We’d contracted the work on the boiler room to a man from Castilucci, Tony Belli. He and his men seemed a second family to us, with their noise and activity, their constant presence. We joined them for breaks sometimes, the coffee and sweets Aunt Teresa brought out, the slices of cheese and meat, the men pulling up crates and sawhorses and overturned wheelbarrows for seats, jocular, rugged with work.
“Oh, Vittorio, how’s la gallufriend?”
But my father seemed wary of them, grim still with inchoate emotion, hovering furtive around their work as if awaiting some expiation, some disaster. Then when building up one of the outside walls one of the masons forgot a window. My father was livid.
“Is it possible you couldn’t notice a thing like that? A child could see it!”
