The Italian Teacher(25)

“Well . . .” the professor responds, stretching out the pause. “You are correct in point of fact.”

Pinch didn’t think there were points other than fact. Chastened, he resumes his febrile note-taking, throat blotchy. In bed that night, he replays his classroom blunders, burning with self-scorn, tugging at his hair. Barefoot, he opens the refrigerator, plucking pieces of cold rigatoni from a bowl. “Come here often?” he says, smiling at a red-sauce spatter on the linoleum. “It was dinner. But is it art?”





22


His emaciated grandmother wears penciled eyebrows that rise in skeptical arcs, her short yellow hairdo pasted down, giving Ruth the impression of a shriveled lemon. On her dining table in Montreal, she places a sweet loaf, candied cherries and almonds glistening, and she urges Pinch to eat, then to eat more (it’s awful). She touches none herself. “I’m on a diet.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t be,” Pinch responds, wishing to please the only relative he knows in this country, who is also paying his tuition.

“Since 1926.”

“What is?”

“My diet.”

He laughs—Ruth meant this as wit yet she appears annoyed at his response. She returns from the kitchen with two china teacups tinkling in saucers, each containing perfectly clear hot water. He sips, unsure if this too is a joke and whether he’s allowed to smile. Instead, he thanks her. Much of that afternoon he is expressing gratitude. She wants this, expects this—and repudiates it when offered.

Pinch always worried that involving himself with Ruth risked awakening hostilities between her and Natalie. The two women never communicated by phone, only the rarest letters, which Natalie read in a fury, one hand clasping the writing paper, the other hand clasping her shirt. Seated across from Ruth, who is supporting him, who is acting far more like family than Natalie has for years, Pinch feels poignant kinship for his absent mother. “What was Natalie like when she was little?”

Ruth fails to offer a portrait so much as a case study, telling of crippling anxiety, intense friendships that ended in fiery breakups, a girl who was insufferable in adolescence. Pinch attempts to broaden this account, adding his mother’s subsequent accomplishments, how she set herself up overseas, raised him alone in Italy.

A framed photo of David sits on the mantel, and Pinch expresses regret that his grandfather died before they could meet.

“That’s what she told you? Before you were born?”

Pinch—distressed to learn of his mother’s deception—nevertheless claims that he must’ve misunderstood. But Ruth pursues the topic, seeking the safety of anger. She speaks as if having wanted to state this for years, to correct what her daughter has lyingly fed her Italianized grandson, who wasn’t even brought up remotely Jewish, who knows nothing of David, nothing of our past or our lives in Canada. “Did she tell you David put a gun to his head? That he shot himself?”

Pinch nods.

“Did she tell you that he didn’t die? That he didn’t do us that favor. Couldn’t even get that right. He went on for years. And who had to nurse him?” She jabs her own chest.

“Why did he, Ruth?”

“He was miserable,” she says unhelpfully. “Kept telling everyone how decrepit he was. What’s funny,” she adds with an inauthentic smile, “is to shoot himself! You never saw a less violent man. They didn’t even let him fight in the war. He was a man who went around on a bicycle, for God’s sake! He lay upstairs for years, brain half removed. But he was too healthy in body—wouldn’t fade away, not for years. How does a wife say she prefers her sick husband to die? I’ll tell you how: ‘It’d be a mercy.’ Meaning, ‘a mercy’ to me.”

“And to him,” Pinch says.

“You weren’t here. Someone never brought you.” Ruth allows her cigarette to leak a gray curlicue, never inhaling. “Here’s the strange part: I was broken up when David did pass away. Why?” She scrutinizes Pinch.

He looks to the man’s photo: wiry, bald, stern.

“Of everyone, it was your mother who was closest with him. Why else run so far away? Not because she hated me—well, not only that.”

After the subject of David exhausts itself, any other topic seems frivolous. She doesn’t dismiss Pinch, though—it’s as if she can’t face his leaving, so will sit here, saying “Mmm . . .” to his dull accounts of classes. Abruptly she stands. He gets to his feet, pledging to return. She tells him to write first. He does so, almost every two weeks, asking about her daily life of which she revealed so little. At first he proposes a return visit. But she never writes back—unless he falls slack in his correspondence, whereupon a two-line letter arrives, containing neither salutation nor her name, just “Do you need stamps?”





23


Toronto is swallowed beneath clouds. As the plane shudders, Pinch grabs an armrest, nervously flicking the ashtray, peering in at elbows of cigarettes there. It’s summer break, and he is flying back to London. As a freshman, he performed well but not so superlatively as to gain notice, instead dissolving into the blinking ocean of survey-course undergrads. His letters to Natalie described fellow students, told tales of camaraderie, all fabricated. His was a solitary year; he counted down until today.