by Nino Ricci
When other visitors came it was Rita who covered for her, taking coats and offering coffee, Elena meanwhile hovering gloomily in the background seeming at once angered and humiliated, not only by her mother’s drunkenness but by her father’s death, by the sordidness of it, the intractability. In the small-town domesticity of the Amhersts’ house she looked like a foreign species, someone who’d walked in by mistake. For a while she stood pretending to look through a bookshelf against one wall of the living room. I could see some of the guests smiling nervously in her direction, trying to work up the resolve to approach her, then finally turning away.
Rita was wearing the same dark dress suit she had worn to my own father’s funeral less than a year before.
“You don’t have to stay,” she said. “It must be awkward for you.”
“It’s all right.”
Coming out of the bathroom upstairs I slipped into a little room whose shelves and glass-coloured cabinets held Mr. Amherst’s collection of toys. Things his great-grandfather had made, mainly, a wooden train set, a tiny village complete with people and houses and trees, but also others, old jack-in-the-boxes, yellowing painted-cheeked dolls, that had obviously been bought. I had seen the collection only once before, when I’d stumbled on it by chance during one of my Sunday visits years earlier. It struck me as odd suddenly how it had been sequestered away here all these years like some shameful secret. It looked even more forlorn now than it had when I’d first seen it, as if something in Mr. Amherst, some passion or sense of wonder, had remained forever closed up here, had never found any expression outside this roomful of yellowing, unused toys.
The day after the funeral Rita called me at my aunt’s to say she and Elena would be ready to leave the following morning.
“I thought you’d stay on a while,” I said.
“I don’t know. Mom thinks it’s best.”
Mrs. Amherst came to the door when I arrived for them. She seemed to have managed to pull herself together: there was a sense in the house of some gargantuan effort made, of everything drawn up around her like a cloak.
“There’s no point in their missing any more school than they have to,” she said.
She was wearing rouge on her cheeks, just slightly over-applied. Around her the house sat in calm, quiet orderliness like an extension of her: this was what she had always been to me, these varnished tabletops, these lace doilies, this cut glass; these were the things that had always seemed to hold her in place.
But once we were on the road it came out that she was thinking of selling up and returning to England. There seemed something unconscionable in this, preposterous, that these solidities she had ruled over could be allowed to vanish without a trace.
“But she’s been here for years,” I said.
Rita was staring out through the side window.
“I guess she never really felt she fit in,” she said. “She doesn’t have much to keep her here now.”
There was an emotion in the air I couldn’t place, a sort of inchoate churning of things, the inexpressibility of loss. In a matter of days, the very foundations of Rita’s and Elena’s lives, their whole idea of home, had shifted, fallen away.
“There’s you two,” I said.
“Yeah.” But there wasn’t any anger in this. “Though maybe it’s a question of who’s leaving who.”
It sounded like a confession, the acknowledgement of the need to run, to get past, to start again. No looking back. In the rear seat Elena had stretched out and closed her eyes as if nursing a headache.
“Thank god it’s over,” she said, and then we were on the highway again, counting the miles across a desolate February landscape.
VI
Not long after we’d returned to the city Rita showed up at my apartment one afternoon, unannounced, a stack of library books cradled in one arm.
“I was wondering if I could work here for a while,” she said, not quite looking me in the eye.
The books’ grey, generic covers gave them the look of props, imitations of books. At the top of them, incongruously, was a tattered paperback.
“Everything okay at your place?”
“Yeah. I just needed to get out for a bit, that’s all.”
She set herself up at the kitchen table as she used to do in the fall, spreading her books around her, setting a writing pad out for notes. But when I came to look in on her, she had the paperback propped open inside one of the library books.
“You want a coffee or something?”
“Sure. Great.”
I hadn’t really talked to her much about Mr. Amherst’s death – it seemed like something that had lodged in her throat, some word, some tail-end of a thought, that she couldn’t get out. But I couldn’t find the right way to bring the matter up.
“I was meaning to ask you if you’re going to be all right for money now,” I said. “If it’s going to be a problem.”
“I don’t know. Mom didn’t really talk about it. I could always get a part-time job or something.”
“I should give you something to tide you over.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
But I went into my room then and there and made out a cheque to her. I wavered a moment over the amount, then settled on a thousand dollars. That was less than half of what I received every month from my cousins from the sort of mortgage they paid me to buy out my father’s share of the farm. But when I handed the cheque over to Rita I felt embarrassed at its apparent excess.
“I can’t accept this,” she said.
I felt like my father: emotion in him had always been translated across gifts, sums of money, sudden acts of excessive generosity.
“You don’t want to be working while you’re in school,” I said.
She eyed the cheque uncomfortably.
“I’ll work it off in the summer.”
“That’s fine.”
Evening came on. I invited Rita to stay for supper, pouring us wine from a gallon I’d brought from home. While I busied myself with pots and pans she sat chopping vegetables at the kitchen table with a careful, small-handed deliberateness. Between her and Elena, it was Elena, oddly, who was the more domestic one, who seemed more at home in a kitchen, who in their apartment would instinctively clear away glasses and ashtrays, re-establish order; whereas in Rita there was always a tentativeness about such things as if she had never quite grasped the essence of them.
“I was thinking about something you wrote in one of your letters from Africa,” she said. “About the first time we’d seen each other again after I’d gone to live with the Amhersts.”
I could still remember that reunion: it had been a year or more after she’d gone, and the Amhersts had come in their car to St. Mike’s to invite me to lunch after mass. In my memory of the event it had the feel of a scene from a movie, my father turning away from me at the church steps and then the waiting car, the shadow of Rita in back.
“You said you felt like you couldn’t reach me. That I was like a picture, that’s how you put it. That you knew there was something behind it but you couldn’t get at it.”
I was surprised I’d been as open as that, had always thought of our letters as more careful, more oblique.
“That more or less says it, I guess.”
“It was just – I don’t know. When I thought about all the things I didn’t understand back then, how stupid everything was.”
“You were only a kid,” I said.
“I know. It’s just sad, that’s all.”
We had our dinner in the living room, Rita taking her place at the end of the couch. We had got into the habit of eating there in the fall whenever she’d stayed for meals, to avoid the knocking together of elbows and knees at the cramped kitchen table.
“Sometimes I think how strange it is that I spent the first six years of my life on your father’s farm and then never saw it again,” Rita said. “Not once. I’ve never even gone past it. It’s like some fairy-tale place that stopped existing once I
was gone, even though the whole time I was growing up it was there, just a couple of miles away. I have this picture of it in my head, how it was then, and it’s never changed. But it’s probably completely different now.”
“I could take you there one day, if you want.”
“Do you remember your neighbours from across the road? What was their name? They were so blond, almost white. I guess they were Mennonites.”
“The Dycks. We never had that much to do with them.”
“I went over there once, on my own. I remember it so clearly. I must have been about five – I just crossed the road like that, as if it had only just occurred to me that it was possible to do that, that there wasn’t some invisible wall holding me in. And then there I was in this completely new place, with that little red house they had, and the barn across from it, and the trees, those huge trees. A man came out from the house, this big, blond man with boots on – I knew I should have been afraid but he was smiling, and he came over and just picked me up as if I hadn’t done anything wrong at all, as if this was exactly where I was supposed to be. We went into a room in the barn that was full of pigeons – there must have been a hundred of them, it seemed like, up along the rafters and then in some nests that were built along the walls. He took me to one of the nests and there was a pigeon inside, and he moved her a bit to show me the eggs she was sitting on. He never said a word, at least that’s how I remember it. He just showed me these eggs as if he was sharing a secret with me.”
Outside, it had begun to snow. Great, fat flakes were falling against the windows and into the street, muffling the sound of traffic and the whirr of the streetcars as they passed.
“It’s funny how people remember things,” Rita said. “Like Elena. Some of the things she comes out with.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. Some of the things she says about Dad, for instance.”
She had barely touched her food. She stared down at it now, moving it around on her plate with her fork.
“What kinds of things?”
“Just something she said. Not to me, to one of her friends. About our being adopted and all that.”
“That seems pretty indisputable.”
“It’s not that. It’s just how she put it.”
She was still staring down at her plate.
“It’s bothering you,” I said.
“It’s just – she made it seem like he was some kind of weirdo or something. Because we were girls and all that. The way he used to watch us sometimes.”
None of this accorded with what I knew of Mr. Amherst. He’d been such a harmless man, with his timid anecdotes and jokes, his boyish deference to his wife. Toward Rita and Elena he’d always seemed to maintain a sort of self-deprecatory pride as if they were special things he couldn’t quite account for, didn’t quite understand.
“Did he ever do anything to you?” I said. “I mean, touch you or anything.”
“No. That’s just it. It wasn’t anything like that.”
She still wouldn’t look at me.
“It was like she was taking him away from me,” she said. “It was like he was all I had but she was taking that too.”
She had started to cry. I went over and took her plate from her, and because she crumpled a bit then, because I could feel her body giving in to me, I sat down beside her and put an arm around her.
“She’s just angry at him, that’s all,” I said. “She’s angry at him for dying.”
We sat for a few minutes without speaking while she cried. She had turned in to me slightly so her head was resting against my shoulder. At some point, without even quite being aware what I was doing, I leaned in and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
“Are you going to be all right?” I said finally.
“Yeah.” She wiped her eyes. “Sorry about that.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
The snow was still falling when she left. I watched from the corner window as she made fresh tracks in it on the sidewalk before disappearing in its swirl toward home. For the longest time after she’d gone I could still feel the impress of her body against mine, the heat of her skin against my lips.
I dreamt that night, for the first time in months, of my father. He appeared rising out of the pond in which he had drowned himself, dripping algae and weeds like some underworld god, at once himself and not, at once the particular gloom he had been in my life and something more elemental, more general, the force of all fathers in their haunting, larger-than-life peculiarness. Afterwards, awake in the night, I thought of Rita cradled against me and it broke my heart to think of this need in us, this endless procession of fathers we turned ourselves over to as if we huddled still in some primal dark, guided only by the animal sense of what could protect us, and what could hurt.
Once as children, Rita and I had crouched in silence behind a row of packing crates in the barn to hide from my father. We’d heard his footsteps coming up while we were playing, and had hid, with no other motive than the fear that he should find us there, being children. Rita couldn’t have been much more than three at the time and yet she had crouched beside me in perfect, almost unbreathing stillness, so feral had been the awareness of danger in her. We could see my father like an enemy through the slits in the packing crates, could feel the barest tremble of earth as his steps moved near, then away; and then he was gone. Afterwards, I’d wanted to hold Rita in my arms and take her fear from her, make it small. But instead with a ten-year-old’s diffidence I’d simply helped her up roughly from her place, and sent her home.
VII
The next morning, a Saturday, she came by my apartment again, simply there against a blaze of frigid, snow-reflected light at the fire-escape door, hunched and shivering from the cold.
“I was on my way to the market. I didn’t mean to bother you.”
She was wearing an old oversized blue parka I remembered from her high-school days, gone a bit ragged now.
“Not at all. Really. Come in.”
We stood shyly at the door while she took off her things.
“Have you had any breakfast?”
“Actually, no.”
“I’ll make you some.”
She settled herself at the kitchen table near the rad while I started breakfast, huddling up against the heat. The sun coming in through the window there lit bits of orange and red in her hair.
“I wanted to say I was sorry again. About last night. I didn’t mean to break down like that.”
“Don’t mention it.”
She had pulled her legs up on the chair, had pulled her hands up into the floppy sleeves of her sweater. I had the sense I could have whisked her up from where she sat, this economical package she’d hunched down to, and hardly felt the weight of her. I remembered her as a baby, how hopelessly tiny her limbs had been then, how soft the underside of her head, how I’d been afraid of breaking her each time I’d held her.
“I hope you and Elena can work this thing out,” I said. “Maybe if you talked to her about it.”
“She’s not that easy to talk to these days.”
“I guess you’re right.”
We ate in the kitchen. The heat from the stove and the rad had made the room steamy.
“Do you have any plans for the day? I mean, apart from the market.”
“Oh. That wasn’t anything important.”
From the moment she’d arrived it had seemed that there was some tone between us that would have been the right one, but we hadn’t found it yet.
“We could go for a drive if you wanted.”
I had tried to put this offhandedly but still felt infected by the intimacy of the previous evening, the memory of holding her in my arms.
“Actually,” she said, “that would be very nice.”
We set out early in the afternoon. Almost as a kind of joke, we’d settled on driving down to Niagara Falls – Rita had never been there before, though it had been a regular destination for people from Mer
sea.
“I remember that film,” she said. “With Marilyn Monroe. The one where her boat is drifting toward the edge of the falls.”
The weather had turned overnight to a brittle cold, the city streets skinned over with an unmelting slick of icy wet from the previous evening’s snow. But out on the outskirts, the cold seemed to have sucked the roads dry. We followed the expressway through the built-up outer suburbs – they stretched unbroken for miles, a string of quaint-sounding older communities, Streetsville, Port Credit, Lorne Park, that had slowly been swallowed up by the city, their sea of snow-covered roofs just visible above the sound walls that lined the expressway. Further out, the houses gave way to warehouses, silver-glassed office buildings, the occasional factory sitting desolate amid fields of asphalt or snowy rubble. Watching the landscape fly by us from the warmth of the car put me in mind of the Sunday afternoons that Rita and I used to spend alone watching TV when we were small, Rita cradled against me in my father’s armchair in the living room’s sheltering warmth while outside it was winter and cold.
Past Hamilton I veered off onto a secondary highway. We were in open country now, the road flanked by grey-limbed orchards and by the orderly rows of a crop I couldn’t place at first: vineyards. It was strange to see grapevines in that flat, snowbound countryside, frozen there in their rows by the bright cold like startled pilgrims.
“Almost like home,” I said, but then, seeing that Rita hadn’t understood, added, “The vineyards. Like Italy.”
“Oh.” We seldom spoke about Italy. Sometimes it would come to me to share some memory with her, but then the instant I’d try to put it into words it would seem false. “I guess you made your own wine and all that, when you were there.”
“To tell you the truth I can’t remember,” I said, and laughed.
“When I was in England, I kept imagining that that was what Italy might look like. Those rolling hills and little villages.”
She had been to England a few years before, to see Mrs. Amherst’s family.
“I wouldn’t have thought England, exactly. But I suppose from here it might look that way. All those old buildings and things.”
