Keeping the Feast (19 page)

An hour after one of our mealtime truces, I might be back to spitting bullets or sinking into a funk of my own, or listening, panicked as ever, to John banging his head against our iron bedstead. But each of those companionable, if silent, meals we ate together helped keep us both in the same quiet if rocky orbit, instead of shooting us willy-nilly into the blackness of inner space.

Each morning I would plan our day’s three meals by what appealed to me in the market. I rarely made a list, just searched the stalls for what looked best. I would slip the bags of produce, meat, bread, and dairy products over my arms and head home. I would pause every morning in Piazza Farnese to push open the heavy door of Santa Brigida and kneel in the tiny chapel whose nuns chanted the holy hours at various times of the day.

The chapel, with its flickering candles, was almost never empty, and I found myself drawn to it each morning, especially to the painting of a Madonna and Child on one of the side walls. The Madonna, serene and smiling—guilelessly, happily—at the babe in her arms, always seemed to calm my nerves. I never knew exactly why. It may have been because I would unconsciously become the child when I walked into the chapel and basked in the gaze of the mother who could smile serenely and guilelessly and happily at me. Or it may have been because I was looking for instruction on how to smile myself, serenely and guilelessly and happily, at the child I had never managed to have. Whatever the reason, I always left Santa Brigida with enough strength to go back home for another day.

On the very worst days, when John had had an exceptionally bad afternoon or night or week, I might go into the chapel for days in a row and simply kneel there, my bags in a heap at my feet, tears running down my cheeks. On those days I would sometimes find to my horror that I was not only crying but pounding my fist on the back of the pew in front of me.

Ironically, as the months rolled by and John remained dangerously ill, the banging of my fist on that pew slowly brought home the idea that it was not enough for John to see his doctor three times a week. I too needed help for myself, and could no longer stay—like the child I had been—waiting for my mother or husband to get better while I watched. I began to understand that I had to help force the issue or we both risked going under.

The truth is, the period of John’s depression was more terrifying for me than when John was lying in the hospital in Romania, worse than when he was unconscious and nearly dead in the intensive-care unit in Munich. During those early days after the shooting, the John who was lying there physically wounded was still the John I had met and gotten to know, the John with whom I had fallen in love, the John whom I had married. But after all these months of depression, the John with whom I was living did not just seem a total stranger, he
was
a total stranger, caught in a vise of darkness so crippling that I did not understand whether I could or should imagine a future with him alive or dead.

It all came to a head one day on one of our occasional walks together through the city. Usually John would spend a part of every day alone, simply walking the streets of Rome’s historic center. At the beginning John’s walks were often just for the sake of motion, putting one foot in front of the other, often blindly, just to help make the sun go down faster, so that he could take his next round of medications and return to the oblivion of sleep.

But on this particular day, we were out on the streets together, and for whatever reason, I fell behind him on our path across the Piazza Trilussa in Trastevere, a neighborhood just across the Tiber from our apartment on the Via Giulia. I watched him, just ahead of me, walking like a stick figure, rigid, tense, knees locked, rocking from side to side as he made his way slowly across the piazza in front of me. And for the first time since he had fallen ill, I felt not a whit of pity or sorrow but only pure, murderous anger. Anger not just toward his illness or our circumstances but fully and directly toward him, for letting his illness utterly hijack our life.

Before I knew it, I had become the madman, and found myself howling at him at the top of my lungs in the middle of the piazza, screaming and crying that if he didn’t stop walking like Frankenstein that very instant, everything would be over between us very soon.

John—fittingly, perhaps—has no recollection whatever of this scene in Piazza Trilussa. But I remember it vividly—the moment when, for me, at least, the logjam was broken; the moment when I stopped waiting for him to get better and simply started trying to live again, as normally as one can during the unearthly, erratic abnormality that passes for everyday life during a family’s imprisonment in depression.

U
ntil he was about to turn ninety, my mother’s father, Tony, rarely talked about Italy, the place from which his family had fled. Tony’s Italy, when he mentioned it at all, meant a few scrawny goats—too few to feed a family—foraging on the steep, rocky hillsides of a poor village near Naples. Pressed to explain, Tony always demurred with a smile but in a tone that brooked no further questions: “ It’s better here, doll.”

So when Tony told his two daughters that he wanted to celebrate his ninetieth birthday with a roast kid, cooked whole in a pit in the backyard “like in the old days,” they were understandably flummoxed, for no pits had ever been dug in the backyards of their childhood, no goats ever roasted. My mother and aunt never understood their father’s last big
wool-eee,
an old man’s attempt to revisit the childhood he had shut off, the secrets and shames of his family’s hard life on both sides of the Atlantic.

My mother’s family never talked about these secrets openly, but instead let slip whispers: how Tony’s big brother, Pete, had lost most of his toes to burns as he slept near a campfire while tending the family’s tiny flock one bitterly cold night; how their mother died young, shortly after they emigrated; how their new stepmother fed them only what was left after her own children had eaten; how my grandmother Jennie’s good-hearted cousins, the Romanos, used to slip the brothers food from their tiny grocery, basically keeping them alive. I’ve always wondered how much of a role gratitude played in Tony’s decision to ask my grandmother to marry him, when she was only fifteen; I’ll always wonder what provoked Tony’s own descent into depression when he was already the father of two. All that has filtered down through the family’s web of secrets was that he was unable to work for a couple of years, and that my grandmother, Jennie, took a factory job to keep the family solvent.

The only pleasant memory of Italy that Tony passed down to us came when he was in his nineties. It was, of all things, the memory of the pears of his youth. I never thought to ask him if the pears he remembered came from his family’s own tree or from some wealthy landowner’s nearby orchard. For all I know, Tony’s memory of giant Italian pears may have come from a glimpse of a fruit vendor as the family passed a Neapolitan street market en route to the harbor from which their boat would leave for
l’America
.

For whatever reason, Tony’s memory of pears—“This big!” he would say, gesturing with his hands each time he spoke about them—struck a chord deep within me. Until I moved to Italy, I assumed he was dreaming an old man’s dream when he spoke of those pears, that no pears on earth could ever be as big or juicy or richly flavored as the pears of his memory.

I was thirty-two when I first moved to Rome, and Tony, who outlived my grandmother by three days short of a year, had been dead for just a few months. It was early August when I moved, and the first fruits of that season’s pear harvest were just coming into the city’s string of neighborhood outdoor markets when I arrived. I hadn’t thought about Tony’s mythical pears for ages, until early one morning, at my tiny outdoor market near the Trevi Fountain, I stumbled across a wooden flat of pears so enormous, so perfectly greeny gold, that I could suddenly see Tony’s plump, white hands moving in my mind, hear his gentle voice saying, once again, “This big!”

I bought a half-dozen of them, as if to confirm my grandfather’s memory. I climbed the five flights of steep stairs to my tiny flat, then chose the biggest and ripest of the lot and placed it on one of my landlady’s small white salad plates. I grabbed a small, sharp fruit knife and walked out to my back terrace, which overlooked a single, tall palm tree sheltered amid a warren of ochre-colored walls. I put the plate down on the table and realized with a start that Tony’s memories had not been playing tricks on him. That pear was, in fact, “this big!”—plenty long to extend beyond the plate in each direction.

Tears suddenly started to roll down my cheeks, as Tony’s voice and gesturing hands came back to life. Grief, which knows how to hide, and where, and for just how long, stopped hiding that morning. My grandmother Jennie had died a month after I moved to Europe, “of a broken heart when you left,” my mother had told me hurriedly over the phone, a week after Jennie’s death, after the wake and funeral mass, after the burial, after the family and friends had left. My mother, I felt keenly, was drawing blood to punish me for my flight, keeping my grandmother’s death a secret until she was already buried.

Tony lasted 362 days longer, spending more and more of his afternoons and evenings at my parents’ house, napping in his favorite chair by the window that overlooked Ash Creek. I never knew about the first funeral, and though my mother did not keep the news of my grandfather’s death a secret, she did not want me to fly home for the second. Sitting on my little terrace in Rome, smelling my roses and jasmine and looking at the neighborhood’s tall, sheltered date palm, I cut Tony’s mythical pear into quarters, peeled it, cut out the seeds. Tears still running down my cheeks, I conducted my own private funeral and said good-bye to them both.

 

 

 

 

I
t was nearly a year after John’s depression had emerged in full force that I exploded in anger in the Piazza Trilussa, raging against his Frankenstein walk. After the explosion, I called his doctor and told him John was not the only one who needed to talk. I wanted some answers myself by that time, and at bottom needed to know if I was part of the problem, for by then I had begun thinking that if I was, then maybe it was time to bolt. The doctor assured me that John believed I was part of the solution, and suggested I meet with him and his colleague, a family therapist. By the next week, not only was John seeing the doctor his usual three times a week, but I was seeing the family therapist once a week, and both John and I were meeting the doctor and family therapist yet another day each week.

Both specialists suggested that what they referred to as my unnatural patience with John’s illness was perhaps contributing to its length, a notion I had never entertained. Until that time I had been terrified that any voicing of my complaints to John might push him over the edge, to irredeemable madness or suicide. It was, I think now, a childlike reaction, a feeling of being powerless and trapped. As a child I had never even known my mother had been desperately ill for months at a time; as a child I never would have thought I might be able to do something to make her better. My parents’ failure to discuss her illness openly was not unusual, given the times, but it led me to think that there was nothing I could do except wait till the storm passed. Both doctors helped me begin to understand that it was not only natural to feel angry and impatient, but of enormous importance that I start demanding that John show me some signs of progress.

My anger had been quietly building over the months of John’s sickness, but I became aware of it only toward the end of our stay in Trevignano, when I drove into Rome one afternoon to talk with an old reporter friend who also happened to be a Sister of Mercy. Sister Mary Ann Walsh was back in Rome on a visit, and we met at the U.S. seminary on the Gianicolo, a hill lined with umbrella pines and live oaks whose eastern end looks over St. Peter’s Square. I remember talking incessantly to her, describing all that had happened, and being surprised myself at the angry subtext of it all. I don’t remember what Mary Ann said that day after listening to my tale but I still have the letter she wrote soon after, in which she talked about the suicide of a beloved aunt, who, like my mother, had drowned herself in old age. She suggested I might not be praying right, and explained that at times she would get “t-eed-off with God and point out that He (or She) is the Almighty One—I’m not—so it’s about time He (or She) did a little more for me. God’s big enough to hear and respond to our demands,” she wrote. “ Tell God in strong terms what you’re feeling.”

I must have needed additional advice, though, because after moving back to Rome, I talked about this idea with a Jesuit friend before trying it out. John Navone listened to my explanation of Sister Mary Ann’s advice and thought only a moment before telling me he thought it was absolutely sound. “Anger is about the only authentic voice I can imagine you having at this point,” he said. My pew pounding started just a few weeks later, as if I had needed permission from both a nun and a priest to feel and communicate the anger that was undeniably there.

A few months later, in one of those peculiar coincidences that some people would describe as grace, others as luck, my sister-in-law, Chan, sent me a
Washington Post
article describing a friendship that had sprung up between a Benedictine nun living in a Connecticut monastery and a Jewish writer who lived in California. The writer, Rhoda Blecker, described how, at a particularly low moment in her life, she had begun trying to pray, an attempt she said took the form of “yelling at God.”

Pounding a pew sounded remarkably similar to yelling at God, and intrigued me enough that I filed the article away. I knew I wanted to write to these two women but I had no idea what I wanted to say. Months later, just before Christmas 1993, I wrote instead to St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, where John had spent those four years between high school and college as a Trappist. In a short, dense note I described the troubles of our last few years and asked the monks to remember John in their prayers. Dom Augustine Roberts, the abbot, replied that John was still well remembered at Spencer and that my letter had been made available for the monks to read. He assured us that the monks were praying for us both.