In a Glass House by Nino Ricci Read Free Book Online Page B

overalls in my aunt’s bedroom putting together a small bed with high, barred sides.
    “
All-set
,” he said when he’d finished.
    I didn’t know what to make of my aunt, couldn’t understand what things looked like from inside her, how she missed theirgravity. And yet my father seemed diminished somehow since she’d come, his darkness become merely private and small, no longer taking the world in – around her he seemed to draw his anger back into himself as if to guard it from her, deferring it in his vague muttered threats to some uncertain final vindication. Tsia Teresa took to calling him Giovanni Battista, John the Baptist.
    “As if every little thing was the end of the world.”
    She spent her days in the house looking after the baby, but with an air of leisured repose like a town woman; outside now we were picking tomatoes every day, hardly able to keep up, but it never seemed to occur to her to come out and help us. Sometimes we’d come home at night and find her on the phone, and supper not ready, and the rage would seem to rise and fall again in my father, precipitous.
    “You should spend less time working with your mouth and more with your hands.”
    But my aunt always had an answer.
    “I don’t think it’s right, that there’s people here I haven’t seen for five or six years and I shouldn’t even say hello to them.”
    But what seemed to irk my father was not so much that she didn’t get things done as the languid air with which she did them, still managing despite it to make time for herself, for her phone calls, for her little projects. She had taken to listening to the radio, writing up lists of words from what she heard and repeating them over and over as if the sound of them might give up their meanings; but my father would darken with irritation at the sight of this.
    “That’s all they taught you with all your years of school, how to waste your time on this nonsense.”
    Then once when we’d fallen behind with the tomatoes myfather had us pick all day under a steady drizzle. But when Tsi’Alfredo and Gino came by the next day to help load we discovered that the tomatoes that had been picked in the rain had started to rot. We had to sort through the whole load bushel by bushel to pick out the bad ones, toward nightfall still hunched over our work in the courtyard.
    “Why isn’t Teresa out here?” Tsi’Alfredo said finally.
    My father sent me in to call her.
    “You should have said something before,” she said, standing at the back door in her apron and slippers. “I’m just starting supper.”
    “Forget about supper,” Tsi’Alfredo said. “If we don’t finish here nobody’s going to eat. These tomatoes have to be in by ten.”
    “Can’t you bring them in tomorrow?”
    “
Sì
, tomorrow. If he misses his turn tonight it’ll be three days before they let him bring in another load. And in three days you can make a nice sauce for the pigs with these tomatoes.”
    “Well you’ll have to wait, I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
    But by the time she’d come out we had almost finished, my father already gone to take the workers home.
    “See, you didn’t need me after all. Anyway what do I know about this kind of thing?”
    “You’ll learn,” Tsi’Alfredo said. “If you were my sister you’d have learned already.”
    “It’s true, you’re worse even than Mario, I remember what you were like.”
    When my father came home he left again at once to bring the load into the factory; he hadn’t returned yet by the time my aunt and I went to sleep. But when he woke me in the morning for work I could sense the rage still heavy in him from the previousnight. He was already on his way down the back steps when my aunt, her face still lax with sleep, came into the kitchen. Without a word he came up behind her as she bent to a cupboard and cracked a hand hard against the back of her head.
    “Ecc’ la signorina principessa!”
    “Oh!” My aunt had turned swiftly, alive