In a Glass House (33 page)

We sat silent. Rita shifted and drew in her leg, instinctively tugging the hem of her skirt over her knee.

“You’re not angry or anything are you?”

“Why would I be angry?”

“I dunno, you just seem – I dunno.”

The discomfort between us was palpable now. I hadn’t imagined this moment like this, the insufficiency of it, the inarticulateness, yet somehow I couldn’t bring myself to compete with whatever version of things had already taken shape in her.

“So how do you feel about all this?”

“It’s sort of strange, I guess. At first it was like a kind of game to find out but now I don’t really feel anything about it, it’s like it has nothing to do with me. I mean it’s not as if I ever knew her or anything. Is that weird?”

“No, it’s not weird. It’s pretty normal, I guess.”

But there seemed a rift between us now.

“Anyway if you ever want to talk about it again –”

“Sure.”

But there was such a relief between us at dropping the matter, such a tangible drawing away, that it seemed unlikely we would speak of it again.

We took a walk along the beach. The detritus of spring had not yet been cleared away there, the driftwood and garbage that
the storms had thrown up, giving the beach an air of abandonment, despite the picnickers and the sunbathers.

“It’s weird how things happen,” Rita said. In our silence I’d imagined her hopelessly lost to me, was surprised now at her note of timid intimacy. “I mean how I came to live with the Amhersts and all that, it all seems so unreal now.”

“Anyway it looks like everything worked out in the end.”

“Yeah, I guess so. It’s just, I dunno, I feel like I’ve been two people or something, it’s been so different.”

But I could feel myself withdrawing from her, resisting this intimacy though it was what I’d thought I wanted.

“Do you remember much? I mean, from when you were living with us?”

“I dunno, not really, I guess I was pretty young. I remember what’s-her-name, Tsia Taormina, she was nice, I guess I thought she was my mother or something. And Aunt Teresa, going into the greenhouses and when she used to read to me and stuff, though the first time she came to see me I didn’t even recognize her.”

But her memories seemed strangely uncontaminated – she might have been recalling some calm, pleasant childhood, light-filled and unremarkable.

“I guess I must have been a real brat,” she said.

“No. You were pretty quiet, really.”

“It’s funny, I don’t remember it that way. I always think of myself as being really noisy or something, I don’t know how to describe it.”

We’d come back to the car. I offered her a cigarette, and for a few minutes we sat silently smoking, Rita staring out, oddly composed, toward the lake.

“God,” she said finally, “remember that time we got called down to Pearson’s office, I thought for sure you were going to
tell him I’d been lying. I guess everything would have been different then.” She wagged a finger in the air in imitation of Mr. Pearson. “ ‘No dawdling in the halls, now, girls!’ ”

I searched back through my memory of that day, could remember only the buzz in my head as from the sound of a fingernail scratching a blackboard.

“Lying about what?”

“About the bruises and stuff.”

I felt myself redden.

“I didn’t say anything about them. What did you expect me to say?”

But I’d misunderstood.

“I dunno, I guess I thought you’d tell him the truth, that I’d gotten them playing and stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“You mean you didn’t know? All those bruises and stuff – not the first ones, that was just what started it. But after that, the ones I got playing, we used to tell the Amhersts I got them from your father. It was Elena’s idea, she thought I’d be able to stay with them then. I thought you knew.”

A small rage had taken shape in me.

“How would I know?”

“I guess I just thought you’d figure it out.”

She’d presented the story so innocently, like some harmless delinquency we could laugh at together, feel complicit in.

“You’re not angry are you? I was just a kid.”

“No I’m not angry, I just don’t like the idea of everyone thinking he was some kind of a monster.”

We sat a moment in charged, awkward silence. I’d ruined things now; whatever fragile understanding we’d established seemed broken.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said finally. “Anyway I guess everything worked out for the best.”

We drove back to the Amhersts’ without speaking. My anger had vanished, had left now only the awkwardness of our silence, though each moment it stretched on seemed to make reconciliation more impossible. When I pulled up to the Amhersts’ it was Rita who was the first to speak.

“So I guess you’ll be gone when we get back.” Tentative, probing; she seemed to be inviting me to offer again to come out to the airport and yet somehow I pretended to myself to have understood the opposite, that she preferred me not to come.

“I hope you have a good trip and everything,” I said.

“You too. Maybe we can write or something.”

“That would be nice.”

She leaned forward awkwardly and brushed her lips against my cheek.

“Well, goodbye.”

And though a hundred times in the following days I ached to call her, still each passed until finally the day of her departure had come and gone.

I had taken a job for the summer when it had grown clear that I wasn’t needed on the farm, hired on by a group calling itself the Italian Historical Committee that had received a government grant of some sort to research a history of Mersea’s Italians. They had put in a notice at Manpower requesting four students to do the work; and though the whole notion had seemed suspect to me still I’d applied, been asked in along with several others for an interview, been finally taken on as the project’s co-ordinator.

The committee was vaguely attached to the Italian club, our interviews held in the boardroom there and the club secretary, Colomba, quietly managing things in the background, reassuringly competent and efficient. But the other members of the group were an unlikely assortment of aging farmers and brassy, middle-aged women and a few younger, better-spoken people who seemed held up as the committee’s veneer of credibility.

“We’re still working out the details of how this is going to
work,” one of them said. “There’s a professor up at the university who’ll be helping you out with that.”

The committee’s chairman was a man named Dino Mancini, round-faced and round-bellied and suave, his own comments always in an ostentatiously casual English, easing themselves into the discussion now and then like innocent afterthoughts. He reminded me of the self-styled
galantuomini
who used to sit out on the terraces of the bars in Rocca Secca, full of pretence and condescending camaraderie, vaguely powerful though only some dubious, half-forgotten distinction or parentage made them so. During my interview he’d eyed me the whole time with a kind of paternal magnanimity as if making allowance for some obvious flaw in me.

“I’m sure you speak
abruzzes’
and all that from home but maybe with the
sciusciar’
or the Sicilians you’ll have to speak a little Italian now and then. Do you think you can handle that? Just enough to get by, I mean, I know you were born there and that, maybe you studied it in school.”

“I think I can manage all right.”

But then when the interviews were done he seemed to grow more expansive, instinctively deferring to me as the only male among the students they’d hired.

“You guys, you’ve been to school, we got the idea but you kids gotta decide what’s the best way to do it. We thought it might just be about the first ones who came over but it doesn’t have to be just that, we should talk about what we’ve done, the club and all that. Whatever way you can find to do it, that’s good. All those houses on the lakeshore, for instance, when my old man came over before the war it was one hundred per cent English there and now it’s all Italians.”

“What we have in mind,” one of the younger men said, as if interpreting, “is the sort of book the town put out for the centennial, you know the one. A history book, the first people, photographs, that sort of thing.”

“But you don’t expect us to write the book as well?” I said. “It takes years for that kind of thing.”

“We realize that,” Dino said. “That’s the professor’s job, he’s gonna be doing the book – you guys, all you have to do is the research.”

I hadn’t mentioned the job to my father but somehow he’d found out I applied for it, finally coming round to the subject sullen with suppressed curiosity.

“You don’t want to get mixed up in all that book business,” he said heavily. “It’s all politics, you don’t understand it, that damn Dino Mancini and his gang there.”

But I hadn’t sensed any conspiracy; the group had seemed too unfocused for that.

“I dunno, he seemed all right.”

“Yah, those guys, they make everything sound nice, they always want to make it seem like they’re doing such a big thing for the Italians. I don’t say Colomba’s like that but the others, they don’t know, they just do whatever Dino says.”

It seemed I’d ignored the obvious, had once again stumblingly, wilfully, set myself against him, taking on a project that given his own past he could only regard as a threat. Yet the topic had animated him, as if he were grudgingly pleased at this common ground that had opened up between us, this opportunity to instruct me.

“Anyway it’s too late now, I already said I’d do it.”

“
Mbeh
, you’ll find out how these things work. I said from the start they have to involve all the Italians in a thing like this
but Dino’s got his own ideas, he just wants to make a big deal that his family was one of the first.”

And finally his resistance appeared less a personal thing than simply his usual scrupulous fidelity to his own peculiar code of what was right.

The group of us that had been hired met at last, along with the committee, with our elusive advisor, Professor Mariani, just back from a visit to Italy and seeming still caught up in the first flurry of return. I had expected some thin-faced pedant, oozing condescension the way people of status in Italy had; but Mariani gave off the air of a broad, chaotic vitality, all emotion and single-mindedness.

“It’s a different world over there now, completely different, never mind all the problems about the south. Fashion, technology, art, it’s at the front of everything. And the amazing thing is it’s a socialist country, free medicare, everything. The workers get free resorts in the mountains, for God’s sake, hotsprings, everything paid.”

“I don’t know,” Dino said, “I can’t see that. Every time you open the paper you see the government’s changed again over there.”

“But that’s the point! It’s the bureaucracy running the country, not the politicians. Here you have a government in for five years, they want to change the whole country around. There’s no continuity!”

It was Colomba who finally steered us round to the subject at hand. But there was a confusion now about the nature of the professor’s involvement.

“Maybe there’s some mistake, I never said for sure I could do it. It’s a wonderful project, it needs to be done, but we’re talking maybe years of work if you want to do this thing right. I’ll need funding, I’ll need to take time off of teaching –”

“It was my understanding,” Dino said, “that this was all settled.”

“No, Dino,” Colomba said. “Maybe that wasn’t clear. The professor said he would help the students to get started on the research, that’s all. The book, that’s another thing, we have to get the money first and then we’ll see.”

We began to talk about how to proceed with the research. My father’s suspicions seemed unfounded now: the professor wanted us to interview every Italian in the area, even down to the second and third generations.

“If they start doing everyone they have to finish that way,” one of the committee members said. “We don’t want people saying we did some and not the others.”

“We can’t say that. Maybe there’s some people who don’t want to do it.”

“Then that’s their problem, we can’t force them.”

“I don’t know, we gotta be careful,” Dino said. “We don’t want the Sicilians for instance saying we didn’t include them.”

“What, have they said something already?”

“Not that I heard, I’m just saying.”

“That’s what I’m telling you, we have to make an effort. But how can we force them?”

But we seemed no closer to a plan than we’d been at the start.

“What we need to know,” I said finally, “is what exactly you want us to ask people.”

“Everything,” the professor said. “Not just about here but what it was like over there, how they lived, what they ate, who ruled over them, the
padroni
, the government, Mussolini.”

“What is he telling us?” one of the older men said, in dialect. “What does Mussolini have to do with it?”

But the professor had understood.

“Ah, ah, don’t tell me the people didn’t like Mussolini, he was a hero in the south! Most of those villages had never seen a schoolhouse until Mussolini.”

“Look, Professor,” Dino said, “it’s all right to talk about the old country and all that but we don’t want a thing like that show they did on the radio a few years back, about the life in the village and that sort of thing. There was a lot of people upset about that, you know all that stuff about going to piss in the stable and so on. I don’t deny things were different there, but it’s not the kind of thing we’re trying to do.”

“What we gotta decide,” Colomba said finally, “is what the book is gonna be. Maybe a chapter on each thing, like the centennial book, on the old country, on the trip, maybe something about the religion or the culture, something like that.”

“What culture?” someone said. “There’s no culture, they’re all farmers.”

“What do you mean there’s no culture?” the professor said, mischievous, triumphant. “What about
agri
culture? We’re talking about the most basic form of civilization!”

It grew late. It was decided our research team should come up with a list of questions on our own and then discuss them with the professor before proceeding.