One Sunday shortly after I’d started grade ten I came out from mass at St. Michael’s to find Elena waiting at the bottom of the church steps, her eyes catching mine and then shifting darkly away to avoid my father beside me.
“My mother said to ask if you wanted to come to lunch.”
There was a car idling across the street, an older man in spectacles sitting eyes-forward in the driver’s seat, a woman beside him in a hat, the barest silhouette of Rita in back. My father had already taken the car in, seemed to have gathered at once who Elena was, who had sent her.
“What does she want?” he said, in Italian, though as if he’d understood her, was merely seeking some sort of contact with me.
“They want me to go eat with them.”
“Mbeh, go on then.”
And already he’d turned in shadowy retreat, seeming to draw a curtain between us.
I hadn’t seen Rita for more than a year, caught a flash of her like a dream image as the car door swung open to let me in, her hair sleek as Elena’s now, cascading like hers in gentle curls that seemed to contain the oval of her face like a picture frame; but then once in the car I acknowledged her only in my silence, my instinctive subordination of her to my awkward introduction to Mr. and Mrs. Amherst.
“We’re so glad to meet you finally,” Mrs. Amherst said, surveying me in the back seat like a chaperon. She had the trace of an English accent, the plain, heavy set of her features seeming granted a sort of dignity by it. “We thought what a shame it was you hadn’t seen your sister.”
There was an air in the car of Sunday formality, Rita and Elena in their knee socks and Sunday dresses, Mrs. Amherst in her hat; I imagined them all fresh from the Amhersts’ other church, its unknown peculiarities.
“Mother, can we show Victor our bicycles?” Rita said.
I felt a kind of revulsion at her addressing Mrs. Amherst as Mother.
“We’ll see, dear, maybe after lunch.”
At their home my mind seemed stretched taut against the unfamiliarity of the Amhersts’ world, registering only vague impressions like low reverberations, the glow of wooden surfaces, the glint of cutlery and plates, Mrs. Amherst’s bright, brittle energy filling the kitchen like a glare. I watched her with Rita, with Elena, her not quite convincing displays of affection as if they’d remained for her other people’s children.
“Now girls, make a place for Victor there, he’s the guest.”
Next to his wife Mr. Amherst seemed inconsequential, shambling and rumpled and slight, boyishly deferential to her, seeming to see where she was merely a misty glow of positive qualities.
“It’s Mother who keeps the house together, what with the girls and everything, you can’t count on an old bachelor type like me for that sort of thing.”
He referred to Rita and Elena as the girls just as Mrs. Amherst was Mother, a kind of affectionate disowning of them, hardly ever addressing them directly but seeming to take a distant, shy solace from their presence.
I followed Rita to the garage after lunch to see her bicycle, our small charade of sibling affection.
“We’re not allowed to ride them on the street, only in the driveway or when Father takes us to the parking lot at school.”
There was a plastic wading pool propped up against a wall, an electric lawnmower, an assortment of garden tools, the small accoutrements of this mysterious other life she’d been assumed by.
“It’s very nice,” I said.
Mrs. Amherst drove me home. In silence she seemed to revert to a strange stolidity, pale and imposing and hard as a statue, her energy seeming then a shell beneath which her body remained inviolate. But then some switch would click on and the life would flow into her again.
“It would be so nice for your sister if you came over every Sunday.” She’d stopped the car at the foot of our driveway, seemed to resist the further intimacy of driving into the courtyard. “You know the way now, don’t wait for an invitation, just walk over from church whenever you’d like.”
At home no one mentioned the visit. My father seemed chastened by it, a kind of perverse integrity in him, showing me a muted deference as if in silent acknowledgement of my familial rights in this matter. At church the next Sunday I noticed his glance across the street as we came out, felt emboldened somehow by this tiny evidence of vulnerability.
“They said I should go over every Sunday.” Then the sinking in me, the thought of his dead retreat.
“If they’d wanted you to go they would have come to get you.”
“They said I should walk. It’s not very far.”
It was understood afterwards that I’d go to the Amhersts’ every Sunday after mass. My father never offered to drive me, seeming to relinquish at the church doors any claim he had to me; and the few blocks I walked to the Amhersts’ was like a chasm I crossed from our world to theirs, coming into their street as into a different country, the trees and front lawns and dappled light, the air of town calm, the houses with their windowed porches and gravelled drives huddled up intimately one next to the other. Amongst them the Amhersts’ house sat comfortably indistinguishable, solid and two-storeyed and square and then with touches of ornamentation like timid afterthoughts, false leaf-green shutters framing the windows and an eye of stained glass staring out from the gable.
Inside, the house had an air of sunny invitation, all blond wood and tidy furnishings and polished surfaces. There was a sunroom in back, lush with plants like a greenhouse, a dining room off the kitchen bright with lacquer and crystal. Yet the promise of these things seemed to remain never more than a backdrop to our kitchen meals, mysterious like a sudden glimpse of a home through a window, the play of light, the lives suggested and withheld. Going upstairs to the bathroom I’d cast sidelong glances into the other rooms there, the Amhersts’ bedroom with its curving dresser, Rita’s and Elena’s with its two narrow beds, its pink comforters, its smell of sleep. There was one door normally closed that I finally discovered ajar once, nudging it further to find a room filled with an odd assortment of old toys, jack-in-the-boxes, wind-up soldiers, dolls of every sort.
“So I see you’ve found my little room.”
Mr. Amherst had soundlessly come up behind me. He had a way, for all his shambling awkwardness, of drifting through the house surprisingly nimble and quiet, disturbing nothing.
“It’s just some things the family’s collected over the years that I put out here. Mother likes to keep them out of the way. Mostly my great-grandfather’s, I guess, he used to make them as a sort of hobby.”
We stood a moment as if sharing a secret, Mr. Amherst in sheepish pride and me in silent awkwardness beside him. Arranged as they were in the room’s curtained gloom the toys had a peculiar formality as if all along they had never been intended as playthings, their chipped and fading colours seeming the last shimmer of a promise that had never been fulfilled. There was a doll set apart on its own special shelf, bright-cheeked and stiff in its ballooning dress; there was a train with each car carefully sculpted through to its windows and seats. In a small glass-topped cabinet a tiny village had been set out, with inch-high people and small red-roofed houses, a church and a stable, skinny, intricate trees, every object infinitely detailed and frail, the scene they formed heartbreakingly placid and hopeful and pure with its tiny intimation of life; I imagined Mr. Amherst carefully setting out its fragile pieces, wondered what small private contentment would have taken shape in him then.
Our meals unfolded amidst the controlled relentlessness of Mrs. Amherst’s kitchen bustle. There seemed always some task to be tended to, some moment’s lull to be averted. She’d ask me questions about school, about home, veering toward dangerous ground and then away, with hidden motive perhaps, though afterwards she’d confuse things as if she’d merely been being polite, forget names and relationships, ask questions I’d already answered; and then just when it seemed we must taper off into silence she’d find some way to draw in Mr. Amherst, seeming to have at the ready an index of his anecdotes and thoughts.
“You know, David was in Italy during the war, wasn’t it Sicily you were in?”
And Mr. Amherst would be off on one of his stories, timidly loquacious, rambling through a haze of detail and digression toward some little insight or joke.
“I guess we’re all immigrants here in the end, I’ve always said that. There’s my own family – the first Amherst here wasn’t an Amherst at all, he was an Amsel, I guess the British brought him over from Germany to help fight the Americans. I always say that at least we had the good sense to change our name – that’s how I managed to trap Mother here, she thought I was good British stock.”
“I’m sure Victor doesn’t want to hear about all that.”
Though something yielded in her whenever his stories came around to her, seeming to reveal for an instant a surprising softness in her.
They’d met in England at the end of the war. I tried to picture their coming together, their younger selves, his bumpkinish soldier’s charm, her bustling Englishness, how they bridged the disjunction between them. What the names might have meant to her, Mersea, Essex County, their familiar ring; and then the arrival, the falling away.
“She didn’t much like it at the start, our Canadian ways, she won’t admit it, I know, but it’s true. But she made a way for herself I guess. She was the president of the IODE in three years, I guess if it wasn’t for her the hospital here might never have been built.”
“David, you know that’s not true.”
There were moments at these meals, the group of us gathered intimate at the kitchen table, the room warm with cooking around us, when I seemed to enter into some different idea of what a family was, held safe there and accepted like an honoured guest, even Mrs. Amherst then appearing transformed, fussing over me maternal and staunch as if she had truly made a place for me in herself.
“It’s so nice to have a young man in the house, just us girls and old fogies all the time.”
Yet in the end something seemed always held back, a question never posed, an unease never quite broken through; and sometimes the meals lapsed into a strange, deflated silence, broken now and then by cryptic shreds of conversation between the Amhersts like a kind of code and then the silence again. I imagined some revelation in those moments, some truth slitting the fabric of us, what Mrs. Amherst seemed to armour us against with her rallies of bright, forced enthusiasm. But there was only the silence, a lingering emptiness without nuance, and it seemed uncertain then whether any of the warmth I’d felt had been real, whether all that happened there wasn’t simply a matter of getting through.
My visits began to stretch into the afternoon. Until then Rita and Elena had remained merely peripheral blurs at the edges of our meals, always outside the focus of them, Mrs. Amherst serving them with a brisk suppressive efficiency; but now the three of us were left alone in the basement rec room, Mrs. Amherst plotting activities for us, television, tutoring, reading aloud. I thought some disguise would drop away from us then, that we’d somehow acknowledge among ourselves how out of place we all were in the Amhersts’ world. Yet Rita and Elena merely continued on in their demure poised politeness, the obedient children, seeming to see in me merely another grown-up, to be guarded against and pleased. Whatever separateness they had didn’t include me, was only theirs, safeguarded in the furtive glances that passed between them, in their whispering asides; I remained the outsider, in need of instruction.
“We’re only allowed to watch TV for an hour, then you have to help us with our arithmetic.”
There were always these rules that Rita protected the sanctity of, impersonal and absolute, so different from at home, where rules about what was acceptable, what should be done, seemed merely the expression of the house’s shifting moods, haphazard, to be guessed at; she seemed to hold them over me as in some elaborate game of make believe of which she was the master, the small contempt for me in her then the only sign that she remembered our past familiarity. I had the impression when I was with her that there was some logic I hadn’t quite penetrated, her world of Father and Mother like television appellations, her little rules, her picture-book curls; and then her dry, sibling kisses when I left her, our careful ritual of emotion, Mrs. Amherst supervising it with a tight-smiled discretion.
“Say goodbye to your brother now.”
At the end of these visits I felt always the same disappointment, the sense that some elusive pleasure or reward had been kept from me; and then there was the strange mood I had to come home to after them, my father’s shamed sufferance, his surrender of me to them as to an obligation he could neither participate in nor oppose, Aunt Teresa’s enigmatic detachment, her small buoyancy as if she approved of the visits and not, sympathized with my father’s hurt yet was pleased with it. After a while the visits had begun to seem a kind of penance our family paid that I both owed and reaped the benefit of, continuing on exactly through this ambiguity of emotion, the subtle equilibrium of it; and I could neither feel I’d had a choice in them nor escape the guilt of them, began slowly both to dread them and to dread they would end.
At Christmas the Amhersts came unannounced to our house. Even they themselves seemed thrown off balance by the enormity of what they’d done, by the air of sudden lull in our kitchen, the sight of our half-finished Christmas meal; and they stood an instant in strained expectation, fresh with cold from the outside, Mr. Amherst stooped and apologetic, otherworldly, Mrs. Amherst burgeoning with the unspent brightness of greeting as if interrupted in mid-sentence. She had undone the buttons of her coat to reveal a dress all in satiny floral, seeming ready if necessary to offer herself to us like a gift.
“I hope we’re not disturbing you, we just thought we’d bring by Victor’s present.”
They’d removed their shoes at the door, standing there now on our yellowing kitchen floor in their stocking feet; and that detail more than any other made them seem vulnerable suddenly, cast adrift.
“Get them some chairs,” my father said, in Italian.
There were awkward introductions, handshakes, Mrs. Amherst’s pained cheerfulness counterbalanced by our gloom. Tsi’Umberto introduced himself as Bert, a name I’d never heard him use before, seeming offered to the Amhersts now as an odd sort of concession or apology, for the room’s hot closeness, our dirty plates, the raw inelegance of our immigrant disorder.
Mrs. Amherst had handed me a small wrapped parcel.
“It’s nothing, we just wanted you to know how much we’ve enjoyed your visits.”
Then a silence, a lapse. They’d remained standing – no one had moved to bring them chairs. Mr. Amherst fiddled with the hat in his hands, staring into it; Mrs. Amherst smiled waxenly, at a loss.
“Go on, Vittorio,” Aunt Teresa said, impassive, conceding nothing. “Open your present.”
Another silence while I tore through the wrappings – a watch, elegant and expensive-looking, weighty in my hands.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure about the band, if it’s too large Mr. Amherst can take a few links out at the shop –”
Then silence again.
“Let me make you some coffee,” Aunt Teresa said.
“Oh, no, please don’t trouble yourself, we really can’t stay.”
For all the shame I felt when they’d gone, still it seemed we’d somehow got the better of them, had given up less ground than they had. But afterwards the tension surrounding my visits seemed to grow more acute, my father more moody, the Amhersts more inscrutable. I felt a change in how I was received now, a subtle shift like a modulation in a room as a cloud passed, some familiarity I’d begun to take for granted suddenly withdrawn from me, pulled back with the unthinking wariness that came after a humiliation or hurt. Mr. Amherst grew more ghostly and awkward, always mumblingly distracted around me now; his wife grew more painfully solicitous and bright. Then driving me home one day she seemed flustered suddenly as with some embarrassment between us, forcing a few minutes’ conversation but then lapsing into strained silence.
“Victor, I think you should know we’ll be asking to legally adopt your sister,” she said finally. She’d tried to put it as a pronouncement but there was a question behind it, vaguely touching in the power it seemed willing to grant me. “We just think that’s the best thing for her. We hope you’ll keep seeing her, of course – it’s not a matter of that, it’s just that we thought you should know.”
There seemed no question to me of their right in this matter, no objection I would have ever have thought to put into words. Yet some line seemed to have been drawn now that I had to fall on one side or the other of. My visits grew afterwards increasingly more awkward, the pressure of pretending that nothing had changed more intense; and Rita herself seemed more and more inaccessible, withheld somehow like the beckoning luminescence of the Amhersts’ house.
“Elena says you’re only my half-brother,” she said once, and it was as if she was making known to me where her own allegiances lay.
Then in the deepening gloom that had followed the Amhersts’ visit to us my father’s stomach ailment began to bother him again. There seemed something convenient in this, the way he began to make us always aware of his pain now with his constant grimaces, his sudden sharp intakes of breath. Our doctor put him back on a special diet and prescribed an array of pills, but my father only grew more morose, more sullenly distrustful, seeming determined to be ill. He had me drive him one night into Emergency at the hospital; the doctor came from home, angrily good-humoured, bundled in a parka against the cold.
“Mario, paesano, what’s the problem?”
He had my father checked into the hospital for tests. Sunday came and he hadn’t returned home; I called the Amhersts to explain that I wouldn’t be coming, though I had my licence now and could have driven over on my own.
“I hope it’s nothing serious,” Mrs. Amherst said.
But somehow I regretted having admitted this vulnerability in us.
The tests apparently showed nothing; but my father looked truly ill now, lying listless and dulled when we went in to visit him. Aunt Teresa brought him food from home but he hardly touched it.
“It’s in his head,” she said to Tsi’Alfredo. “This thing over the girl that woman wants to do, you know how he is about that.”
But in the end he was transferred to a hospital in Windsor; more tests, then finally an operation. Aunt Teresa was at the hospital the whole day, and then in the evening Tsi’Umberto and Tsi’Alfredo and I went up as well. My father was still recovering from the anaesthesia when we saw him, hardly aware of us. A nurse came in to change his intravenous, then a doctor, closing himself off with him behind the bed’s square of curtain. Through a gap I caught sight for an instant of my father’s belly as the doctor removed his bandage, the scabby outline there of the incision they’d made like a flap cut in cloth.
“The glue seems to be holding,” the doctor said afterwards, oddly jovial. “We got him just in time, he was half-rotten in there.”
“They said before there was nothing wrong with him,” Aunt Teresa said.
“Oh, well, sometimes you can’t tell with these things till you open someone up and take a look around. Anyway in a few months he’ll be as good as new.”
But my father seemed unwilling to recover from the first drugged stupor of his operation, remaining for days in the same state of restless half-sleep, fading in and out of awareness and mumbling odd imprecations like someone gripped in the delirium of a fever. Aunt Teresa condescended to him as to a child, impatient, overloud.
“What, Mario, what is it?”
He complained vaguely of headaches, of stomach pains; then when he was taken off his intravenous he refused to eat, and had to be put on it again. As his stay in hospital dragged on a quality of shame began to attach to it, our visits growing increasingly more strained and subdued. Nurses would come by to check on him, administering pills and making quick notations on the clipboard that hung at the foot of his bed, their grim smiles revealing nothing.
“Just something to help him sleep.”
“It’s the same story,” Aunt Teresa said. “The doctor says there’s nothing wrong, who knows what to believe.”
In the meantime we’d begun to have problems in the greenhouses. Some of the plants had contracted mosaic disease – Tsi’Alfredo noticed a patch of it when he came by one day, the upper leaves of half a dozen or so plants coming up gnarled and rough like lizards’ skin. Tsi’Alfredo was livid.
“Is it possible no one noticed anything till now? You’ve probably spread it to half the crop already.”
Other patches began to appear, small islands of plants here and there with heads stunted as if by frost. We had to mark off the infected areas and wash our hands and change our clothes after we worked in them. Since the disease affected only new growth it could be checked by clipping the heads off infected plants, thereby saving at least the few sets of fruit the plants had already put out. But every day new cases appeared, within a couple of weeks the greenhouses become a disconcerting patchwork of gaps as the healthy plants dwarfed the diseased ones. Our work was marked by a growing sense of futility: with no new growth to keep them thriving the infected plants had soon begun to look sickly and old, their remaining fruit maturing wrinkled and small and our production already beginning to fall off though we were not yet in mid-season.
It was over a month after his operation before my father returned home. He was visibly shrunken, seemed to have shed a layer of himself like a suit of clothes. For several days he stayed in the house, still in a fog, shuffling out stoop-shouldered to the sink to take a handful of coloured pills, shuffling back to his room. Then the Saturday after his return he finally came out to work.
“What happened with those plants?” But he’d remained dim and morose with fatigue like someone resisting being roused from sleep.
“Disease,” Aunt Teresa said. “You can see for yourself.”
And afterwards she had to sort through the tomatoes he’d picked to remove those he’d picked too green.
Sunday morning he prepared for church. A look passed between us, seeming to contain in it his sulky determination that things would go on as before, my visits to the Amhersts, his martyr’s hurt; yet the whole time of his illness I’d not been to see them, felt the resistance rise in me now at this drugged stubbornness in him, at being forced to choose.
He waited for me in the car while I finished dressing. The instant we’d set out I could see he shouldn’t be driving, the whole of him seeming mired in a dreamy slow-limbed torpor. Yet somehow I couldn’t bring myself to stop him, to try to reach him, took instead a strange angry pleasure at the danger he was exposing us to. Then at the town’s four corners he failed to stop at the light.
“Papà, there’s a car –”
We were into the intersection. There was a screech of tires, a horn, a dark blur of motion beyond my father’s window; and then miraculously my father had wheeled through to the cross-street and pulled to a stop at the curb. The other car was sitting in the middle of the intersection, aslant from its sudden stop, the driver already jumped from it and coming toward us red-faced and seething. But the sight of my father seemed to sour his anger.
“Asshole!” he shouted out, then climbed back into his car and sped away.
The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds, and in a minute more the few other cars that might have seen what had happened had driven on their way and the intersection had assumed again its Sunday languor; but in the becalmed silence that opened up then, my father and I still stalled there at the curbside, my heart still pounding, it seemed we’d just come through some prolonged ordeal, a chasm dividing the moment when the crash had seemed inevitable, the terror and the hope then that my father would die, from this awkward moment afterwards.
“I guess I better drive,” I said finally.
I came round to the driver’s side. My father had slid across to slouch against the other door; with the movement his coat had hiked up his back like a child’s. He shifted beside me as I moved the mirrors and the seat, trying to arrange himself, an instant’s painful exertion.
“Maybe you should just turn around and go home,” he said. “You can go back on your own after.”
He seemed as close as he’d ever come to asking me to stop seeing the Amhersts.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
For a moment some more certain concession seemed possible, some way of reaching him that would take away from him the guilt of the visits I wouldn’t make, make a gift of them to him; but finally I simply swung onto the road in silence, turning up the next sidestreet to circle toward home.