Keeping the Feast (13 page)

Trying to focus his eyes, he rasped out his drink order in a venomous whisper, a double Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks. He complained, in the softest of voices, about the size of the glass and the shape of the ice cubes when it arrived, then tasted it and quietly accused the house of pouring him a Johnnie Walker Red at the price of the Black. Glassy-eyed, he quietly demanded a second scotch while ordering his food, and complained bitterly in a low voice about every item I brought to his table, from the bread basket and salad, to dessert and coffee. Each time I approached, he would spew forth whispered vitriol. If I tried ignoring him, focusing on my four other tables, parties of four and six, he would threaten softly to “have my job.” I never thought to alert the boss’s daughter, and each time I had to deliver a new course or clear a plate from his table my stomach would knot.

By evening’s end I was not expecting a tip, just another quiet onslaught when I brought him his change. But the large quantity of food he had eaten must have soaked up some of the scotch he had drunk, for suddenly he seemed to have sobered up. “Sorry,” he mumbled, looking down at his hands. He left a wad of bills on the table before he walked out. Stuffing his tip uncounted into my apron pocket, I hurried to help with the usual cleanup once the last guests left.

I drove home seething and settled myself at the kitchen table with my mother and father, who always waited up for me. They liked to hear the stories of my day as I counted my tips, in those days much of it in small change. That night, I burst into tears as I told them about my drunk. My mother, always sensitive to frazzled nerves in anyone, suggested my father make me one of his Italian fruit salads while I figured my night’s take, nearly $20 from my four normal tables. While my father was busy cutting fresh fruit into a soup bowl, I reached into my apron pocket and pulled out my last tip. My mother’s eyes grew wide as I counted and kept counting: $26, far more than the cost of his meal, and a fortune for those days, when the minimum wage was $1.60 per hour. The windfall, however, had not been worth the
agida,
or aggravation, and my stomach started churning as my mind replayed the evening.

My mother tried to cheer me up, reminding me what I could do with a tip of that size, while my father whipped a few table-spoons of olive oil with lemon juice, salt, and lots of freshly ground black pepper to pour on the fruit. I can still hear my mother’s voice that night, trying to draw out my frustration, coax my tears away. I can still hear my father beating that sauce with a fork before he placed his fruit salad in front of me and joined my mother and me at the table. They were a formidable team when their children were involved, Team Butturini, as my brother would describe them when he grew up, a team with a game plan and determination. When we were good, both of them were always there, rooting us on; when we were bad, only one of them would play the heavy. Each of them believed that no child should ever have two parents angry with them at once. That night my mother coaxed me to talk and urged me to eat; my father cut up the fruit; they both watched me chew, both listened to me unwind, until by the end of the bowl I was no longer sputtering with indignation and pique. Once I had worked through that mountain of fruit, my anger was spent. I stuffed my night’s take into the cigar box where I hoarded my tips, kissed them good night, went upstairs, and slept without the slightest difficulty.

I still make that fruit salad even if the sectioning of the orange and the peeling and slicing of the rest of the fruit all take time. Somehow it seems like time well spent, for as long as you have a sharp knife, it is the sort of routine kitchen work that both calms the spirit and sets the appetite in motion. What I like best is hearing the rhythmic clickety-clack of my fork—an echo of my father’s—beating against the little blue-and-white Italian ceramic bowl I always use to make the sauce. What I miss most is the sound of my mother’s voice, trying to cheer me up. Even today I cannot eat that fruit salad without thinking of my mother sitting across from me at our kitchen table, and my father standing at the countertop, both of them listening to me rant about a drunken customer who left me a tip big enough to pay for my meals for nearly a week when I got to Paris.

 

 

 

 

M
y father came to Berlin to spend the rest of the winter with us, so that he wouldn’t have to mourn alone in a small house that suddenly seemed too big. Near the end of his stay he was desperate for sunshine, and John, who had to travel for a week for work, urged the two of us to fly as far south as we could. We hopped a charter flight to southern Portugal, walked along cool but fiercely sunny beaches, ate in simple seaside restaurants. I can still taste the dry white port, served cold with a twist of lemon, that we drank as an aperitif that first night. It was the first time anything tasted good to me since my mother’s death—the first time anything had a taste at all. Whatever freshly caught seafood we ate that night satisfied our hunger and soothed our soul. The cheerful noise of the restaurant helped, too, the easy laughter of the tables around us somehow helping to lighten our spirits. We ended that meal, and every other meal that week, with an enormous, juice-filled orange, freshly peeled and sliced into rounds at our table. Each time our waiter would cut the skin away—always in one continuous spiraling peel that would slowly bob up and down like an oversize Slinky—I would think back to our kitchen in Connecticut, where my father prepared his special Italian fruit salad for me that night twenty years earlier, where my mother was sitting across from me at our kitchen table, trying her best to make me forget my drunken client. By the end of that week, my father and I began to be able to talk again, about nothing and everything, the way we used to do at table before, before there was a “ before” to consider.

It was in Portugal, four months after my mother’s death, that I first experienced the healing that can come from a beautiful place and its food, even if I wasn’t yet fully aware of it. The strong winter sunshine; the cloudless, deep blue skies; the salt air; the laughing gulls; the feel of cold sand on tender winter feet; and the simple, good food served forth without pretense, prepared similarly to the way my father or mother or I might have cooked it at home: all of it helped put an end to the physical shock of my mother’s death. The grieving, of course, had just begun, but it was no longer a grief fueled by adrenaline and physical panic. It may not sound like much, but it was my first real step out of shock.

 

 

 

 

J
ohn’s own descent into clinical depression was so very gradual, creeping at such a lifelessly glacial pace, that I did not see it coming until long after it had arrived. When I think back now to that period, I see that John, normally sociable, jovial, and easygoing, an inveterate teller of hopelessly old-fashioned jokes, was increasingly withdrawing into himself. Normally never happier than when he was deep in work on a story, he seemed stressed, pained, and exhausted by his work, his usual effervescence and intellectual excitement gone. Normally thoughtful, caring, comforting, he seemed unable to look beyond his own nose. All pleasure had left him.

It remains galling to me even today that I was so blind to what was occurring. My mother’s death had so recently made me see the degree to which I had misunderstood her, throughout my childhood and well into adulthood, had misunderstood the role her clinical depressions had played in her complicated nature and our complicated relationship. Now that I knew the truth, how could I be so blind to the same disease in my husband?

At the time it seemed to me as if it all happened in one weekend, a week before we were to move to yet another new posting, this one in Chicago. We had already packed our things, flown to the States, and signed a lease on an apartment. We were staying a few days at my father’s house when John basically stopped speaking and seemed to curl up inside himself; he had realized too late that he was unable to put the Atlantic between him and the children, unwilling to leave Europe after twenty-five years. The move to Chicago was clearly that final drop of water that makes a brimming glass spill over, an image doctors often use to describe the onset of depression. The old, lively light in John’s eyes, which had been dimming since he began suffering the effects of hepatitis B nearly two years earlier, simply went out completely that weekend. Just as when he had had hepatitis, John’s internal body clock was turned upside down, and he began sleeping and dozing throughout the day, while lying awake, usually in a panic, during the night. Sometimes he would break into uncontrollable sobbing, sometimes he would simply sleep or pretend to sleep or lie in bed, rigid, eyes closed, fists clenched. He could not or would not talk, other than to make an occasional grunting response to a question. Once I alerted John’s editor to the situation, the
Times
immediately gave John a reprieve, put our move on hold, and helped John begin treatment with a doctor in New York.

A friend gave me a reference for a doctor of my own, and the first time I walked into her office, I told her I needed to know whether I was about to slip into a depression myself. I gave her a quick recap of what had happened to us over the past couple of years; I told her that I was feeling extremely tense and nervous, to the point that I often felt light-headed, nearly dizzy, and that I had a sense at times of watching—warily and from outside myself—all that was going on in my life. In response to her questions, I told her I was still able to eat, still able to sleep and not particularly weepy. She listened intently, this older, gray-haired woman whom I instinctively took to, and what she told me kept me going for a very long time. She told me it was normal that I felt tense and nervous, given the number of extraordinarily painful events that had occurred in my life in recent years. She told me that what I needed, more than anything, was a change of luck. She and I talked several more times that spring and early summer, and her commonsense approach to our predicament never failed to calm my nerves.

And then, as July approached, John seized on the idea of flying to Italy for vacation to see if a return to Europe might help brake his descent into full-blown depression. His doctor agreed on two conditions: that John continue taking the medicines the doctor had prescribed, and that they talk regularly and often by telephone. Once John agreed, we quickly made plans to fly back to Rome, meet Peter and Anna, and head north to Trevignano Romano for our usual summer stay.

W
hen I was little, I loathed the canned soups my mother occasionally served for Saturday lunch. Tomato soup had a sharp, cloying aftertaste that caught at the back of my throat. Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom made me gag. I hated the soggy texture of the vegetables in Progresso’s Minestrone enough to try to swallow them like pills, without chewing. I might grudgingly eat a small bowl of canned chicken soup with its mushy rice, but somehow, to me at least, all canned soups tasted more of the can or preservatives than they did of real food.

To this day, I don’t know if I was spoiled by the honest taste of homemade soups or just plain spoiled. Perhaps I simply had an overdeveloped sense of taste. But I do know that until I turned seven or eight, if it wasn’t my paternal grandmother’s chicken soup, or my mother’s copy of it—homemade, and often featuring one of my grandmother’s worn-out hens—I simply could not get it down.

Decades later, even the thought of my grandmother’s chicken soup still makes me close my eyes and take a deep breath of anticipation: clear, golden broth with all the fat skimmed off after the pot had spent the night chilling. Angelina’s chicken soup smelled of onion, carrot, celery, celery leaves, garlic, handfuls of parsley, and a single bay leaf. It was served with tiny stars of store-bought pastina or, even better, with a few of her homemade fettuccine, chopped roughly into bite-size pieces and barely cooked.

At its best, my grandmother’s chicken soup would come out of the fridge in a Jell-O-like state. I loved to watch it, thick and clear, all aquiver, as my mother or father ladled it out of the kettle into a smaller pot for heating. When the ladle dipped into our battered soup kettle, the soup sometimes made a sucking noise, which I loved to listen for when I was little. But what I liked best was the resounding, reassuring “plop” a ladleful of jelled chicken broth made when it fell into the smaller pot. I still don’t understand how the gelatin in the bones of the chicken necks and backs leach out into the soup, but I knew even then that it was the one thing in the world I liked best to eat.

Later, I fell in love with the rest of the family repertoire of homemade soups: my grandmother’s bean soup, started with salt pork, onions, carrots, and celery, minced together so finely that it turned into a paste; my mother’s split-pea soup, made only after a holiday supper yielded a meaty ham bone; her turkey soup, dark, strong, and made only once a year, after the Thanksgiving carcass had been picked nearly clean; and finally her onion soup, made with a mountain of finely sliced onions that sweated and cooked over the lowest of flames, then simmered in quarts of her best broth. Each of those soups filled the entire house with its own aroma and whetted my appetite so sharply that often I had to beg a tiny bowl of it before we sat down to eat.

I still have the recipes for all those soups, and like all the cooking of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, recipes—precise recipes—existed for just about everything any of us made. My mother cooked by the book. My father cooked by the book. And I, even in first grade, cooked by the book. I still have my yellowing children’s cookbooks, in tatters now:
Mary Alden’s Cookbook for Children,
which must have been put out by Quaker, as nearly every other recipe includes Quaker-brand oats, cornmeal, or puffed wheat; and
Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls
, a first edition from General Mills, whose recipes feature the brand’s flours, not to mention its mixes for cakes, muffins, biscuits, and frostings. I cooked my way through both of those books by the time I was ten, and my mother made my children’s meatloaf recipe for decades. We both learned early to avoid any recipe pretending to be Italian; neither the Quaker man nor Betty Crocker had a clue to Italian food.