In a Glass House (2 page)

Our house, of white clapboard, appeared to stand in those first days like an object frozen in a moment of time and then forgotten, with an air at once of abandonment and preservation. My father had preceded us there but whether by days or weeks or months wasn’t clear, only the barest evidences of him scattered here and there, a few dishes in the kitchen cupboards, a dirty towel on the rack in the bathroom, as if he had come like an intruder, feline, ready for flight, the house still seeming to await some small crucial act that might shatter its chill calm. There was a modernness to it that I thought of as what was foreign, not Italian, the preternatural gleam of the kitchen with its chrome table and chequer-board tiles, its porcelained fridge and stove, then the living room with its picture-book decorum, the sofa and armchair there, faded and worn but imposing, a different order of things than what I’d known in Valle del Sole; a hundred mysteries seemed to shelter there, the radio above the fridge whose insides slowly warmed to a glow as it came on, the telephone with its distant buzz like insects mindlessly churring. But if the house had any informing spirit it didn’t seem to reside in its objects, which despite their novelty gave no feeling of welcome to the rooms that held them, refusing to give up their histories, sitting stubborn and mute in their separate spaces like things that had turned their backs to you. The only thing that
betrayed them in this was a smell, a faint odour of mothballs and sweet rot and something else, not as simple as sweat or the smell of a breath but definitely human, lingering on the furniture, in the cupboards in the kitchen and pantry, in the chintz curtains left at the windows, and stealing over me sometimes to leave an odd hollowness in me like a gloom, the creeping intimation of whatever unknown lives had gone on there before us.

The day after my arrival a girl named Gelsomina came to live with us to look after the baby. On the train my father’s awkward ministrations to the baby had seemed to draw attention to it as to a magical thing, women in the seats around us bending to coo to it in their senseless languages, slowly taking it over for its feedings and changes while my father sat darkly by. But now it was brusquely turned over to Gelsomina like something to be quietly disposed of. Gelsomina was the daughter of my father’s cousin Alfredo – I remembered the visit he’d paid my mother in Valle del Sole the previous fall after her troubles had begun, come back from America then in his fancy suit, though now he spoke as if he hadn’t seen me since I was a baby.

“
Ma guarda cuist
’, do you remember your Uncle Alfredo? Look how big you are, I remember when you were as small as a cabbage.”

But his friendliness seemed forced, almost bitter, put on more for my father’s benefit than for mine.

Gelsomina, thin-limbed and moody, dark like the back-country urchins who’d come into school sometimes in Valle del Sole from their distant homesteads, was strange with me as well. I was sure we’d known each other in Italy, could call up images of her from the gatherings of my father’s side of the family in Castilucci; but she gave no sign now of this past between us, as if we could no longer be the same people we’d been once, now
that we were in Canada.

“I’m only helping here until I can work at the factory again,” she said, making it seem as if she’d been in the country a long time already, though her father had brought the family over only the previous fall. “I was there before but I had to leave because one of the
inglesi
told the boss I wasn’t sixteen yet and it was against the law. But it’s just they can’t stand to see the Italians make the same money they do when they’ve been in the country a hundred years.”

Tsi’Alfredo and his wife Maria brought things for the house, pots and pans, a washboard, jars full of tomato sauce, a stack of diapers. Other
paesani
came by as well, people who called me by name but who I recognized only vaguely or not all, couldn’t connect to a place or a time; but if they had gifts they’d quietly turn them over to Gelsomina, as if shielding my father from the shame of their generosity. My father would tell Gelsomina to bring glasses and wine, and sometimes he’d talk with these visitors in such a casual way that the shadow around him receded and he’d seem transformed, different from the man who had sat beside me on the train, from the one who in some painful way was my father; but other times he sat silent at his corner of the table and the guests talked only among themselves.

There were two bedrooms in the house, one off the pantry and one off the living room. My father slept in the first, in a bed with a headboard of slim metal tubes like the bars of a cage; Gelsomina and I shared a double bed in the other with the baby. For all this compelled closeness, Gelsomina and I hardly spoke to each other – the house seemed to impose its own silence on us, to police and enforce it. Even the baby was quiet, its blank eyes probing the world with what seemed an unnatural calm, though often in the middle of the night it would begin to whimper and
I’d watch through a haze of sleep as Gelsomina soundlessly rose out of bed to make up a bottle. I’d go into the kitchen with her sometimes, taking comfort from her cool efficiency, the way she moved through the room undaunted by its porcelained strangeness, the chrome taps, the dark coils on the stove that slowly melted to red as the heat fed into them. The milk she used came in large thick-lipped bottles that the milkman left every morning on the steps inside the back door; before warming it she’d mix in a cupful of boiled water into which she’d stirred a few pinches of sugar. When the bottle was ready she’d touch the nipple against her wrist to check its heat, then nestle the baby with practised ease in the crook of an arm, her movements so certain and smooth they seemed instinctual; but there was an edge in them too, an urgency, one that seemed less protective of the baby than of the silence that ruled over the house.

My father was working shifts at the canning factory then, on top of the hours he spent on the farm. To me it seemed only that he came and went like a spirit, his presence never certain but somehow lingering around us always, like the house’s strange smell. In my sleep I’d hear his truck starting up in the middle of the night, its lights flashing past the bedroom window a moment later like a dream, but then in the morning I might be awakened by the sound of his hammer and rise to see him already stooped on a catwalk atop one of the greenhouse roofs, home again though I hadn’t heard him return. Gelsomina, at least, seemed to make some sense of his movements: once a day, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes at night, she’d fill a big silver lunchbox with sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and set it out on the back steps, from where it would disappear each time my father’s truck pulled out of the driveway and appear again, empty, several hours later. But then often at
mealtimes Gelsomina would set a third place at the table that wouldn’t be filled. Sometimes a day passed when my father didn’t come into the house at all; and then at night we’d see the boiler-room light still burning when we went to bed.

The worst times were when my father was sleeping. He slept, as he worked, in erratic fits, without apparent pattern, perhaps asleep when Gelsomina and I awoke in the mornings, or coming suddenly into the house in the middle of the afternoon and disappearing almost at once into his room; and each time he closed himself behind his bedroom door he set the seal on a second order of silence. Gelsomina and I would take the baby out to the front porch then, which was separated from the living room by a thick door with a heavy latch we had to remember to click back so we didn’t lock ourselves out, and there we would sit out our exile on chairs we’d brought out from the kitchen, the baby set on a mattress of blankets on the wood floor. The porch had windows all around, pleasant and warm when the sun was shining, with an air of dreamy indolence that made me think of summer days out tending the sheep in Valle del Sole; but almost every day now was cloudy and wet, the April wind rattling through the windows then and our breaths hanging in the air with the damp cold. After a half hour or so the baby would begin to whimper, its little fists reddening and its nose beginning to run; but Gelsomina would merely wrap it more tightly in its blankets and rock it in her arms to silence it.

The baby didn’t have a name then, seemed too small somehow to merit one – at night, tucked between Gelsomina and me in bed, its body looked so tiny and frail I was afraid I’d roll over and crush it in my sleep. It hadn’t grown at all since it had been born, only its eyes showing any change, clearing slowly
from murky grey to a pellucid blue till it seemed some spirit had crawled up inside it and was peering out now from its hollow sockets.

“It’s a bastard,” Gelsomina said. “My mother says your father should put her in an orphanage.”

But instead we merely kept up our careful avoidances, the baby closed away in the bedroom whenever my father was in the house, at meals Gelsomina sitting sideways in her chair to be ready to rise if it should begin to cry. A line seemed to divide the house in two at the living-room door, Gelsomina seldom bringing the baby into the kitchen and my father, for his part, seldom crossing beyond it. Every day I half expected that someone would come to take the baby away from us, and that our lives would assume then some more normal course; but the weeks passed and still the baby remained.

Then one night I was awakened by the baby’s cries, unusually insistent and loud. Beside me Gelsomina was already up, rocking the baby in her arms with a troubled urgency.

“
Calmati
,” Gelsomina hissed. “
Calmati!
”

But the baby only cried more fiercely, in the moonlight her face seeming gnarled like an old woman’s.

“Here,” Gelsomina whispered, setting the baby in my lap. Its thin hair was dank with sweat from the spring mugginess of the night, the first warm one we’d had since I’d arrived. “Hold her while I make a bottle. If she wakes your father he’ll break both our heads.”

So my father was asleep, then – Gelsomina must have heard him come in after we had gone to bed. I tried to silence the baby by rocking her, clutching her close to me hoping to smother her sound with my body; but her small fists hit out against me to
push me away. I panicked and clamped a hand down hard against her mouth; but in an instant her chest had begun to heave so wildly that I pulled my hand away in fright.

Gelsomina returned now with the bottle. The baby resisted it at first, seeming too intent on her crying.

“Oh,
basta!
” Gelsomina whispered.

Then finally she took the nipple and grew quiet again, instantly transformed by her silence, made suddenly toy-like and harmless again when a moment before she had seemed so monstrous.

Gelsomina’s eyes flashed to mine.

“Go back to sleep. Anyway it’s not our fault.”

But it seemed some demon had got into the baby now: over the next days she grew more and more unmanageable, sleeping fitfully, crying at all hours, as if she had only just overcome the shock of her early birth and was suddenly bursting on the world with all the energy and rage of a newborn. My father said nothing, only grew more shadowy, more elusive, sleeping less often, coming in less often for meals.

“She must be sick,” Gelsomina said. “My sister cried like this when she had the colic.”

“Do we have to take her to a doctor?”

“A doctor! Who’ll pay to send her to a doctor? If she dies it’ll be better for everyone.”

But the baby did not die, only continued for days her incessant crying. Gelsomina kept placing a palm on her forehead but could feel no fever there – except for her crying the baby seemed normal, her limbs beginning to thicken, her hair filling in, her cheeks puffed out with what looked like ruddy health.

My father had stopped coming in for meals entirely now. Then one night, while Gelsomina and I sat wide-eyed in bed
trying to quiet the baby, we heard the back door slam, saw my father’s shadow pass outside our bedroom window, saw the boiler-room light go on, then off again; but my father didn’t return. The next day was Sunday, when we usually had lunch at Gelsomina’s house; but well past noon my father still hadn’t come in from the fields. Finally Tsi’Alfredo called on the phone.

“Tsi’Mario said I should tell you we can’t come today,” Gelsomina said. “He has to get the field ready to plant.”

Tsi’Alfredo’s voice crackled loud an instant from the other end.

“He told me to call,” Gelsomina said, “but I forgot.”

But she was making things up – she hadn’t spoken to my father at all.

“Why did you say that?” I said afterwards.

“Mind your own business. Do you think I want to go back to the factory again?”

My father switched back to the night shift at the factory that week. But he didn’t come into the house any more to sleep, the rotations of his lunchbox on the back steps the only evidence that he had come into the house at all, at night his footsteps sounding from the boiler room when he came to collect it. Then one afternoon Gelsomina made me go out there with her while my father was in the back field.

“I just want to see,” she said.

“See what?” I said.

“Never mind what, just come.”

It was the first time I’d been out to the boiler room. I had thought it must be a kind of house, with its glass windows and false-brick walls, but it seemed merely a storage place where so many odds and ends had been heaped haphazardly over the years. A boiler rose up near the entrance like an outsized bull, a tangled web of pipes and shafts and cables leading away from it;
then beyond it the room was all dark clutter and filth, wooden storage niches along the walls crammed with strange implements, switches and fittings, lengths of pipe, coils of wire, a workbench littered with oily tools and tin cans and with a mess of gears and metal shafts that looked like the remains of some great engine. A film of coal dust covered everything like a pall, the windows so powdered over with it they let in only an eerie twilight. Along one wall, though, was a bank of niches that looked newly built, unpainted and fresh, its tidy slots seeming hopeful somehow in their empty newness.