In a Glass House by Nino Ricci

Author:Nino Ricci [Ricci, Nino]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-7657-2
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2015-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

XVII

We had built another two greenhouses on the farm, joined to the ones from a few years before like reflections, their spreading lake of glass now filling the field that edged Tsi’Umberto’s house. Together the group of them formed a space exhilarating in its vastness, with its long vistas of posts like colonnades, its network of wires and pipes and machines, its glint of metal and glass; and the farm now had the modern, efficient feel of a factory, of something that had dwarfed us, made us irrelevant, grown larger somehow than the sum of our individual histories. One evening the lawyer came by, Mr. Newland, and set out a thick sheaf of documents on our kitchen table which my father and Tsi’Umberto and Rocco and Aunt Teresa set their signatures to in turn, Mr. Newland talking to them the whole time in an oddly casual way about taxes and shares and assigning them titles, president, vice-president, treasurer, as in some children’s game.

“I’d keep an eye on Teresa if I were you,” he said. “She’s the one with the real power in this organization, make no mistake about it.”

And in the sanction of these documents and titles and seals some new final order seemed to have taken shape among us, fixing us like the last coming together in a story or film.

My own role in this order seemed defined exactly by my exclusion from it, by how little I’d known of these changes and plans before they’d come to pass. Even Domenic, who had impressed me with his stubborn commitment to his small, private aspirations, doggedly finishing out his grade twelve and getting accepted into carpentry at the community college in Windsor, had finally instead been quietly drawn back into the family, going to work full time on the farm, morose but also grown larger somehow, more estimable, as if he’d compressed into a single chosen future the force of all the others he wouldn’t have; and this, too, had come to pass as from some natural rhythm in the family I’d lost touch with, a silent cryptic molecular working I remained unassimilable in. We’d recently bought a new stake truck, the inscription that had been on the doors of the old one, “Mario Innocente & Son,” so familiar that I’d long ceased to think about it, replaced now with “Innocente Farms Ltd.,” shadow-lettered green, white, and red on each door in a wide rainbow arch; and it struck me how far my father and I had remained from the simple promise of that original inscription, the vision in it of some inevitable working out between father and son.

But I saw these things now as from a great distance, my father, the farm, my life there, felt only my imminent parting from them, the sanction my outsideness gave to my release into some new, unknown, uncontaminated future. I saw my father sometimes working alone in the conservatory we’d built off the boiler room, tending the vines and fig saplings and

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