At home that summer I had the sense I had to be accommodated like a visitor, a new formality in how the others treated me as if I couldn’t be expected to understand any more how things worked there. Only Aunt Teresa seemed comfortable around me, casual and confidential, speaking to me in an unusually colloquial English and calling me Victor instead of Vittorio, something I couldn’t remember her doing in the past.
There were tensions. We were building more greenhouses, three of them, running south from the boiler room to the irrigation pond, and my father and uncle were in the midst of some argument. All the familiar patterns, the familiar displacements, Tsi’Umberto’s sharp condescension toward his wife and sons, my father’s silences, the sense when they were near each other of two shadows, two glooms, silently hovering. Domenic had been brought in as some sort of partner in the new greenhouses but appeared grim with the new responsibility, his old rebelliousness still smouldering in him. He had a girlfriend from Detroit now who he brought down once to a wedding, a strawberry blonde with wide hips and pasty skin, and all night long he and his father seemed dark as if with the unspent resentment of some long, festering conflict.
A strangeness had formed around Aunt Teresa like a force field, something to do with her lingering odd religious inclinations, never talked about though the evidence of them was plain enough now, in the magazines she still received, in the meetings she went to every Thursday. But there was more to it than that, or less – the religion seemed merely a marker she used to distinguish herself, to make clear to the rest of the family, to other Italians, that she wasn’t one of them. There was nothing of the smug benevolence of faith to her, only the old cynicism, but backed up now by the threat of an unspoken moral prerogative; she was friendly with people, ready to laugh, to joke, and yet the threat was always there. At the beginning of the summer I was drawn to her because she appeared the one person with whom I could be myself, have a normal adult conversation; but it grew clear finally that her cynicism took me in too, whatever weakness I showed her seeming only to buoy her up in her own superior view of things.
My father had been elected president of Mersea’s Italian club that year. I couldn’t fit this fact into any image I had of him, had always thought of him as irredeemably crippled, outside of things; and yet he’d got by, made a way for himself, was to all appearances the very figure of success. He was the president of the Italian club; he had built up a prosperous farm. The new greenhouses would give us nearly four acres under glass: only a few inglesi and Dutchmen and four or five of the older Italian families had more. At parties at the club he was the one now to whom people came, whom families passed by to greet before supper, whom the men, weighty with confidences, sidled up to at the bar. What had seemed before a child’s sullenness had become in its consistency a kind of dignity – that was what people appeared to honour in him, that he had remained always true to his misfortune, his shame, respectful of it as to the memory of the dead. His very sinew and bone seemed shaped now by that struggle, since his operation his body having taken on a tawny muscularity like something slowly worked down to its essence, with none of the look of well-fed complacence of other Italian men his age.
Yet there remained something shambling about him, a creeping disorder at the edge of his life that might have been simply a comfortable indifference, the last secret retreat of his truer, less driven self, but that struck me as sad somehow, a failure of will, the threat against which everything else had been precariously won and held. He’d bought a new car recently, a cobalt-blue Olds, whispery with comforts, all hydraulics and murmurs and whirrs, an uncommon indulgence for him. But he treated it with the same mix of crude immigrant carefulness and neglect that he showed anything new, covered the front seat with a stretch of old, flowered tablecloth to keep it clean but left bills, church programs, cigarette packs, to collect on the floor, left the body spattered with insects and mud; and he seemed to repeat in it the tension in him between some dream of completion, some belief in himself, and the small apathy that slowly undermined it, just as after his first boyish ministrations he’d let the new boiler room slowly resolve itself into burgeoning islands of clutter, and just as he’d let the farm itself, despite his occasional sudden bouts of cleaning, slowly decay along its edges, the ramshackle barn, the garbage-strewn slopes of the pond, the chaos of brambled junk and rusting implements that lined the path to the back field.
Our house as well had surrendered itself to a slow deterioration, the walls discoloured, the floor tiles yellowing and worn, the kitchen counter rotting with damp around the rim of the sink. Loose tiles on the stairwell and in the entrance hall had been crudely tacked down with nails; tears in the vinyl of the kitchen chairs had been covered with electrical tape or simply been left to gape, wads of stuffing protruding. Aunt Teresa cleaned haphazardly, had the lassitude of a mother who’d just seen her children leave home; my father complained to her but there was a tiredness in his anger, something blunted or broken by the years of Aunt Teresa’s belligerence, her refusal ever simply to yield herself to the notion that they shared a household she was the woman of.
“Don’t think you’ll have me to look after you the rest of your life.”
And there was a hardness in her threat that made it sound plausible, made me think she’d seen through the waste of the life she’d had with us and was silently plotting her escape.
In the bathroom creeping moisture had begun to erode the plaster around the edge of the tub, chunks of it fallen away to reveal metal mesh and empty space behind. Taking baths I thought of my father, my aunt, sitting naked and alone there as I was, all the years they’d done that while the room had slowly decayed around them. I began to cry once, slow, heaving sobs that came up from my belly and chest – there seemed a darkness in things too deep to contemplate, a grief so endless that no crying could ever exhaust it. For perhaps the first time since school had ended I thought of Marnie, of all the things I hadn’t told her, wanted to render up to her now the whole of this moment, the cooling water, the crumbling wall, the room’s strange quality of light, amber and unreal like an autumn twilight after rain.
I worked together with my father a few days on the new greenhouses, the two of us setting rafters in place on the purlins while Rocco and Domenic followed behind to clamp them down. There was a tentativeness in him that seemed to want suddenly to include me in things, that hung in the air between us like a question.
“The young guys now it’s different, with school and everything, you can learn the right way to doing things.” His English made him seem vulnerable, rustic. “Half the time we just take a chance, we don’t know if it’s gonna help. You just learn every year. I thought if Rocco or Domenic did some course but their father just wanted them to work, that’s his business.”
But it hurt me to see him so shyly loquacious, to feel his need: I had nothing to offer him, wanted to be on good terms with him but only to disentangle myself from him, to define more clearly the line that divided us. In my vision of the future he had no place, was simply a liability to be gotten beyond.
I didn’t see Rita until the end of June, half-expecting some invitation that never came, then appearing impulsively at the Amhersts’ one evening gloomy with resentment; but afterwards my visits took on their old regularity. Certain details in the Amhersts’ house stuck out suddenly, idiosyncratic, the cow figurines on the window-ledge in the kitchen, the crocheted doilies in the bathroom, small touches of domesticity I hadn’t noticed before, that seemed out of place in my memory of Mrs. Amherst. But beyond these petty observations I seemed to take away from my visits nothing that was pleasurable or new. If there was any logic in the visits at all, what drove me to continue them despite their awkwardness, their tedium, the guilt I felt on returning home, afraid my father could read in me my skulking betrayals of him, it was only in the vague belief that my persistence would somehow be rewarded: Rita was all I had in Mersea, nothing else left there to hold me, not my family nor my abandoned friends nor the place itself, which had never seeped into my marrow, become home, my visits now merely a kind of waiting, some claim I was laying on Rita’s future.
I came over once or twice a week, arranging myself around Rita’s and Elena’s schedules, music lessons, Girl Guides, swimming. Their lives seemed endlessly leisured to me yet they talked about their various extracurricular activities with a bored dismissiveness, seeming happier simply to watch TV in the rec room. The rec room remained their enclave, where they seemed to live some secret other life, stripped of the privileges the Amhersts bestowed on them down to their realer, more common selves, merely bored adolescents as I’d been, awaiting some change that could transform them.
Rita had turned thirteen in the spring, the suggestion of a bra beneath her blouses and dresses giving her an air now at once solemn and slightly comical. There was a fraught, suppressed urgency in her, her movements childishly impulsive, tomboyish, but then reined in at the last instant as if she’d remembered suddenly this new, adult body beginning to take shape around her. Her hair had begun to grow long again, and she had a habit of reaching up with both hands to flick it back but with her elbows in tight at her sides like folded wings, seeming at once to display and to shield herself, like the young girls in Italy who’d cover their mouths with a hand when they spoke to hide their lipstick. We’d grown more awkward with each other, avoided contact, our bodies seeming charged like the like poles of magnets; but then sometimes she’d brush up against me or lean into me suddenly on the rec room couch and some message would seem to pass between us. She and Elena shared their hermetic jokes, sealed themselves off in their arcane adolescence, yet I had the sense that the two of us were always aware of each other, that the room hummed around us with that awareness like static.
I glimpsed once by chance through the sleeveless opening of one of Rita’s dresses the stiff lace of her bra, the pale mooning curve of the flesh that rimmed it. I avoided looking at her after that, realized that I had long avoided looking at her, had trained my eyes not to rest on her for more than a few fleeting seconds. But now each glance at her seemed more forbidden, etched in my mind like the quick furtive lines of a figure sketch. Images of her would flit past my mind’s eye, be suppressed, then be there again, the round of her shoulders, the hollow her throat dipped down to. I grew more distant with her, more fatherly, more severe, trying to retreat into a gruff, indifferent adultness. But some screen between us had fallen – we seemed to have become too familiar to each other again, to have reverted after the years of formality our separation had imposed on us to the brutal unspoken intimacy of siblings. She’d mimic love scenes from TV, aping their hackneyed dialogue, swooning into me on the couch; but there was a knowingness in her that chilled me, a kind of contempt, some dim awareness of the power she had over me. Every engagement between us seemed a tiny battle of wills, Rita drawing me in and then suddenly, pointedly, ignoring me, one instant all attention and the next casually oblivious.
She and Elena and I were watching TV the day Nixon resigned: the show we were watching cut out, a newscaster came on, then Nixon.
“This is boring,” Rita said.
We watched a few minutes longer, and then Rita got up to change the channel.
“Leave it,” I said.
But she’d begun to turn through the channels. Every one of them showed Nixon; but she continued to turn.
“I said leave it.”
She turned finally to UHF, found a station there in the midst of a movie, returned to her seat.
I was seething. I thought for an instant I’d strike her, felt the urge shoot through me like a spasm. Elena cast a furtive glance toward me from her seat, then we simply stayed as we were in charged silence.
I got up a few minutes later without speaking and left the house. I sat for a moment in the car, my blood pounding, then began to back out of the Amhersts’ driveway, heard a screech of brakes, hit my own: an oncoming car had swerved to a stop. It wheeled around me now, the driver leering.
“Asshole!”
I pulled into a parking lot on Talbot. My hands were trembling; I felt tears coming, didn’t want to stop them but felt too exposed there to allow them. In my sudden frailness I thought for an instant that I touched something true about my feelings for Rita, deeper than all the distortions, than my anger, than my need; but I wouldn’t give in to it, couldn’t bring myself to relinquish this clear instance of hurt I could hold against her.
I returned to the Amhersts’ only twice more that summer. The first time I sat watching TV again in the rec room, stuck in a sullenness which Rita feigned indifference to but seemed to circle around at a distance as if seeking the spot that would break it. It might have taken so little then to make things right between us, some small magnanimous gesture, adult and forgiving, a gesture the brother I wanted to be, light-hearted and winning and mature, would have been capable of. But instead I had only my sullenness to offer, which I could pass off at least as anger, was at least a language of sorts, more bearable than the mere confused awkwardness that seemed its alternative. Then toward the end of my visit there was a moment when she and Elena were joking together that I seemed genuinely forgotten. I saw myself for an instant as Rita might, with her child’s mixed sense of what people were, of what they might want from her, saw how she’d instinctively turn from me finally as from a question that couldn’t be answered.
My last visit, at the end of the summer, I had supper with the Amhersts. There was an air of finality about the evening, of the relieved beneficence that came before a departure. It was odd to be reassembled again in our old formality, to see Rita and Elena revert to respectful silence, become small again: for the first time at that table I had the sense that they were more strangers to the Amhersts’ world than I was, less comprehending of it, something in their containment making me feel suddenly the full measure of their outsideness, perhaps simply the distance that separated child and adult or something more, the strangeness of being here in this house they didn’t belong to.
“You’ll want to make sure you come out of school with a profession,” Mr. Amherst was saying to me. “That was my mistake, taking over the business. I’ve done all right, I can’t complain about that, but there’s no soul in it. After a while it’s just counting nickels and dimes.”
“Don’t be silly, David, you just did what you thought was right. It’s different now, kids have more choices.”
But it was odd to hear him speaking so plainly about himself, to hear that note of disappointment, of self-awareness.
Before serving coffee Mrs. Amherst sent Rita and Elena upstairs to do homework. Rita said goodbye to me before going up.
“So I guess you’re going back to school and stuff.”
“Yeah, on Monday.”
“I guess I’ll see you at Christmas or something.”
“I dunno, maybe I’ll come back before that.”
We brushed cheeks. I caught a whiff of the hot, milky smell of her breath.
“Well, goodbye then.”
And there was something different in her now, a shyness, a capitulation, as if we’d passed safely back into the separate spheres of younger sister and older brother.
Afterwards I lingered. Mrs. Amherst served sherry in the living room, bringing out an ashtray to allow me to smoke. In this air of adultness the Amhersts seemed transformed, less perfect somehow, more human. Mrs. Amherst filled and refilled her glass until she was subtly but definitely drunk, her face taking on a surreal, leathery quality like a mask and her speech edged with a small hysteria, slowly thickening from its learned flat Canadianness into a British burr. I could see her suddenly in another life sitting contented around some kitchen table in England with her family or friends, not the abstraction of Englishness I’d seen her as but merely at home, in her element.
“Do come again soon,” she said at the door, hugging me, an unheard of thing. “You’re practically part of the family.”
She seemed truly drunk now, Mr. Amherst standing beside her flushed with embarrassment.
“Maybe at Thanksgiving,” I said.
Riding home I could still feel the impress of her arms against my sides. I was glad to be leaving, to be spared a few months the awkwardness that would hang between us the next time we met because of that drunken moment of feeling.
The next day, rummaging through the trunk in our basement for boxes to pack my things in, I came on the corduroy dress I had bought for Rita years before, folded away beneath a stack of old linen. I felt a throb of shame at the sight of it: it seemed such a shabby thing now, though Rita had only worn it a few months before outgrowing it. I remembered having hidden it here, childishly possessive, to keep Aunt Teresa from turning it into rags or throwing it out, wanting somehow to prolong the value of it. I held it up to myself, amazed at the smallness of it, couldn’t imagine now the person Rita had been when she’d first worn it, the brief furtive pleasure she’d taken in it then, not daring either to revel in it or take it for granted. For the first time I felt a relinquishing in me, a turning over of her to her other life, though still with a child’s guilty instinct I carefully refolded the dress, set it back in its place.