In a Glass House (42 page)

I left home for Toronto in the last week of August, a Sunday, my birthday, anxious now simply to be alone again, to be away. I
was to take my father’s car: in the contamination of his death it had sat in the garage unused the whole summer. I felt the ghost of him still there when I got into it in the position of mirrors, of the seat, the place arranged to hold him, felt a strange sensation as I altered things as if erasing him.

Then I had loaded my few belongings and was gone. Home, the farm, fell away in the anonymity of the road, its first pleasant moments of suspension when it seemed possible never to have to arrive. It was a brilliant day, the air crisped with the intimation of autumn, in its glassy clarity the landscape seeming charmed, the tidy white farmhouses, the silos and fields, the clusters of trees in the distance. As a child, remembering some story I’d heard, I’d sometimes imagined those endless clusters of trees as flying islands, wondrous and grand, quietly touched down there in that flat countryside in their beckoning magic; things then had still harboured secrets about themselves, like the first strangeness of my father’s farm, the promise and the threat of unknown things before they turned mundane.

Past Chatham I saw an amazing thing, fantastic like some trick of sunlight: a field full of hot-air balloons, dozens of them, blooming in the distance like a strange fairy-tale crop, still and multicoloured and huge. I pulled over to the shoulder, still uncertain whether I’d understood – some sort of festival seemed to be in progress, the field alive with movement, cars and concessions, people, strains of music. Then as I watched, the balloons began to lift off, one or two at first like tests and then more, a slow growing flurry of them, elephantine and graceful, drifting their weightless way with a languorous patience, goodbye, goodbye, until they filled the horizon. For an instant it seemed the world could not bear the magnificence of them, must
suddenly make itself over, become childlike and bright and unreal as they were to hold them; and then slowly they began to disperse and fade, small dots of colour like candy against the realer, stranger hue of the sky.

For their contributions to this book I am grateful to the following: Lee Robinson, for her ongoing advice and encouragement; Janet Irving and Peter Robinson, for their patience and support; Peter Day, Jan Geddes, and Greg Kelly, for their helpful suggestions; Veronique Naster for her expertise in childrearing; Alex Schultz, for his scrupulous eye; and Ellen Seligman, for editorial assistance above and beyond the call of duty.

I would also like to thank Mary Di Menna, Rosella Mattei, Lily Policella, and Elizabeth Puglia, with whom I worked in 1979 researching the history of the Italian community in the Leamington, Ontario, area, and Professor Walter Temelini, who oversaw that research and from whose writings I drew one of this book’s epigraphs.

The epigraph from
Crime and Punishment
follows the Constance Garnett translation (Modern Library).

For their financial support over the seven years in which this book and the trilogy it forms part of have been taking shape I thank the Explorations Program of the Canada Council, the Multiculturalism Directorate of the Secretary of State, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Arts Award Service of the Canada Council.

Nino Ricci’s first novel, Lives of the Saints, won international acclaim. In Canada it was the winner of the Governor Generali’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and in England of the Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Prize. A longtime bestseller, it formed the first volume of a trilogy that was adapted as a miniseries starring Sophia Loren. Ricci is also the author of the bestsellers Testament, winner of the Trillium Book Award, and The Origin of Species, which earned him his second Governor General’s Award as well as the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction. He lives in Toronto.