Keeping the Feast (20 page)

Two weeks later, I finally managed to compose a long letter to Mother Miriam, the Benedictine portrayed in the
Washington Post
article. I described our situation in detail, Sister Mary Ann’s advice on praying, and my Jesuit friend’s concurrence. I described to Mother Miriam how I had taken to banging my fist on the back of the pew in front of me whenever I went into the little church of Santa Brigida. Although I never got noisier than that, I described myself as yelling, albeit silently, at God, telling him I had had more than my share during the last few years, that he had been pushing me around too hard and too long, and “
Basta!”
or “Enough already.”

When I finished my letter, I walked up the Aventine Hill to the church of San Anselmo, the Benedictine headquarters in Rome, and told the black-robed doorkeeper I was looking for a Mother Miriam who lived in a Benedictine abbey somewhere in Connecticut. He quickly found a fax number and the address, the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Back home, I decided to try the fax. The next morning our phone rang and a woman’s voice, warm and full of joy, asked to speak to me. It was Mother Miriam, speaking on a line that had none of the usual hissing and buzzing of transatlantic calls in those days. When I asked where she was, she laughed and said not as far as I had thought, that for the past three years she had been living in Italy, just south of the great abbey of Monte Cassino, trying to reestablish an eighth-century monastery that had been burned and sacked by the Saracens in the ninth century and slid into an 1,100-year decline.

She said her old abbey in Connecticut had received my fax and faxed it on to her, and she had decided to phone immediately. Her unexpected call and the news that she was only a couple hours’ drive south of Rome seemed unreal. I confessed to feeling as if I had gotten caught up in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
, that 1960s television show that celebrated the paranormal and the bizarre. She laughed, a great pealing bell of a laugh, and asked me to come, for were we not meant to meet?

Two months later we did, at the abbey of San Vincenzo al Volturno, where a handful of Benedictine nuns still spend their days and nights in an unceasing round of prayer and work according to the sixth-century rule of Saint Benedict. The nuns worked like farmhands when they weren’t chanting the Holy Office or helping a group of British archaeologists dig through the ruins of what was once one of the biggest and richest monasteries in Italy. The monastery’s lands once stretched from sea to sea across the entire middle of the Italian boot; its 1,000 monks inhabited what was in fact a monastic city of extraordinary beauty on a high plateau in Italy’s still wild and largely unsettled Abruzzi Mountains.

That weekend at San Vincenzo was a moment of calm and rest for both John and me. Rome and our desperately complicated life seemed at the other end of the earth during our short stay. Mother Miriam neither preached nor played Pollyanna nor uttered pieties during the brief interludes when she and I would have a moment to talk. Instead, the afternoon before John and I left, she and I took a walk together inside the monastery walls. She simply encouraged me to continue down what was obviously a very difficult road, not to despair along the way, and to keep to that path until I found where I was meant to be.

Written down, it may not seem like much. But her words proved extraordinarily useful. Still, it may have been more her joy-filled presence that helped me most. To see someone so obviously full of joy about her rugged and simple medieval life—growing food; tending chickens; mucking out the barns; making cheese, wine, olive oil; cooking; and punctuating each day, which began at five a.m., with the chanting of the hours—reminded me that somewhere along the road of my own life I had lost not only the capacity for joy, but even the idea that joy still existed.

Although my memories of finally being able to yell at God while pounding the back of a pew in Santa Brigida have always been with me, I had, until writing this book, forgotten one of the most vivid and frightening telephone conversations I had had with my mother a short time before her death. The call occurred a few days after she had been put on a medication that her doctor hoped would help her from sinking further. Instead, it seemed that the pills pushed her over the edge.

My mother was barely able to speak that day on the phone, but she told me that when she tried to fall asleep at night, the faces of all the members of her family who had died had started appearing to her. They were speaking to her as well, she said. And they were beckoning. My mother, who always prayed on her knees every night before she went to bed, then confessed that there was something worse. In a voice full of terror and dread, she said she could no longer say her nightly prayers. Instead, when she looked at the crucifix on the wall, her entire being seemed to erupt in a silent howl, the epithet that she had muttered incessantly during her first depression that erupted at my birth: “sonofabitch.” She was horrified at what she believed was blasphemy, and terrified of the consequences.

At the time, on a crackly phone line from Berlin, I did not hesitate a moment to tell her that her God on his cross would understand her cry, recognize her illness, not hold her accountable, not damn her to hell. But she simply could not believe me. Only now does it make sense to me why I, too, had been frozen in an overly patient silence during the endless months of John’s depression, why I had not been able to pray in the only voice I had in those days, angry and fed up with the litany of woes that had come our way. My mother had yelled at God, and ended up a few nights later in the bitterly cold waters of a Connecticut salt marsh. She had been too ill to hear her words as a prayer, too ill to feel the grace that was there. It is only now, years later, that I can again see the grace that was waiting to catch her, the same grace that happened to catch me in time, a few lines of a letter from an old friend, a Sister of Mercy; a few words of concurrence from another old friend, a Jesuit professor; a few words of support from a new friend, a Benedictine from Connecticut who, like me, had ended up with an unexpected new life in Italy.

 

 

 

 

O
ur quiet weekend at San Vincenzo was a turning point for me. Not that I knew it then, but when I look back, I realize that although John remained deeply depressed and anxious, still prone to bouts of weeping or shaken by repeated anxiety attacks, I could see that he was no longer as utterly mad as he had been even a few weeks earlier. That he had felt strong enough to come with me to San Vincenzo, that he had been able to enjoy our exploration of the archaeological ruins coming to light in the dig, meant he had already begun to turn the corner.

His doctor had long been encouraging him to do things that brought him pleasure, and by springtime John had doubled his walks about Rome, heading out rain or shine, with guidebooks or without, searching out ancient Roman architectural remains, medieval churches, views, museums, historic palazzi, losing himself in the city’s past glories. We began pushing ourselves out after supper, not only for our usual walks but for free concerts in the city’s baroque churches or for the occasional upbeat, tension-free movie. Listening to chamber music in the peaceful silence of an old cloister, where one need only look up to see the stars, gave our weeks a loose schedule; time no longer yawned endlessly before our eyes. Days no longer seemed to last a week, weeks no longer seemed to last a month.

I continued to cook and we continued to eat three meals a day together, and as John’s depression began showing signs of lifting, we found we could occasionally even invite a very close friend or two over to share a meal with us without John falling into a panic of fear. When September rolled around, after we had been in Rome for nearly a year, we went up to Trevignano for a weekend visit to the Natansons. It was chestnut season already, and the tall chestnut trees that lined the rutted car track to their gate were having a bumper crop. The weekend happened to coincide with their daughter Phoebe’s birthday, and John suddenly decided it was the moment for him to contribute to her birthday meal. I helped him gather a large basket of chestnuts, then watched as he cut crosses into their tough inner shells and boiled them in milk until they were tender and mealy. He showed us how to help peel the inner skin off, for it is one of those tedious processes that require many hands, and then he put them through a ricer and beat in powdered sugar, finally mounding the chestnuts into a mountainous shape on a large platter. This he covered with freshly whipped cream, to make it look like the snow-capped peak that gives it its name, Monte Bianco. Nobody said anything, for fear perhaps of breaking the spell, but I knew it was the first time in a couple of years that John himself had cooked anything, the first time he was truly able to come out of his misery and do something for somebody else. It was one more sign, the biggest one yet, that his depression was beginning to lift.

But it was by no means a straight, steady path back up to the light. Although that first year back in Rome seemed at the time to have lasted a decade, it was suddenly nearly over, our lease up for renewal. A close friend had a small, furnished apartment coming open about the same time, and we decided to put the horrors of the year in the Via Giulia apartment behind us. In October we would move into our friend Karen’s sunny, light-filled apartment whose French doors provided a stunning view of the Colosseum in a section of Rome near the Forum that neither of us knew very well.

On paper it looked like a good plan. But we still did not realize the extent that even the tiniest change in routine or surroundings can terrify a person suffering from depression. And a move, even just across town, is no small change. John panicked as the move approached, and for the first few weeks in our new home, could barely speak from fear. His overreaction terrified me once more, and for the first few weeks, each time he went out for his daily walk I feared I would not see him alive again.

By Christmas, though, John began to accustom himself to the new apartment, its golden light, and the uninhibited view of the Colosseum, which loomed just outside our western windows. Slowly, our new surroundings in the heart of ancient Rome began to win him over. Once we began exploring the new neighborhood methodically, we fell in love with Rome a second time. I remember the day the two of us finally managed to get into Santo Stefano Rotondo, the oldest and one of the very few circular churches in Rome, which, at the time, was rarely open. The church, famous for its circular concentric naves, stands on the Celian Hill, which rose just behind our new flat.

We happened to arrive at a moment when fierce morning sunshine was pouring through the church’s high clerestory windows. The light was falling in Jacob’s ladders into the otherwise dark interior, casting a luminescent glow on the two rings of ancient columns that give the church its circular shape. It was the stark interplay of light and dark that captivated John and me on that visit, and I can still picture us standing companionably next to each other and staring at the strong shaft of light that fell on one of a pair of massive Corinthian columns in the inner nave. I can still see the spiky stone acanthus leaves carved into that column’s capital, and I remember trying to hold in my mind the light that was playing on them so that I might again have access to the light and peace the sunshine seemed to be giving off.

Acanthus grows everywhere in that corner of Rome, filling in the empty spots between more modern shrubs and trees, and its giant, shiny, spiky green leaves were a special comfort in winter, when many other plants were bare. The Greeks first carved acanthus leaves into the capitals of their columns, and the Romans copied the Greeks. To see acanthus growing live under the Corinthian columns where it was carved was one of those special gifts where the ancients speak to those of us living thousands of years later. John, who had spent more than twenty years studying and teaching Latin, redoubled his explorations of our new neighborhood after that visit. As the weeks passed, he found that he was no longer just putting one foot in front of the other to pass the time during his long, doctor-free afternoons; slowly, imperceptibly, he once again began to see what he was walking past and even take pleasure in what he saw.

O
ur new apartment near the Colosseum had a tiny kitchen carved out of and open to the living-dining room, and one could cook and entertain conversations at the same time. It was a big improvement over our former apartment, where the kitchen felt isolated, away from the life of the house, a room for a servant instead of a family. As John slowly gained strength, we found we could increasingly invite small groups of close friends over to share a meal with us, to drink a glass or two of wine, to talk, to listen, to take pleasure in the company of old friends.

As the year passed, the children continued spending half of their regular, seasonal vacations with us. The four of us would sit around the big wooden dining table, the Colosseum looking down upon us. After a meal, we would try to explain to Peter and Anna the course of their father’s illness, to try to reassure them that he was beginning to feel more like himself, that the worst seemed to be over. How we searched—mainly in vain, it seems now—for words, phrases, explanations! I remember those attempts to explain and demystify Daddy’s sickness, the children panicked in some ways, desperate for information on one level but just as desperate for silence, an understandable but vain hope that not talking about it might make the nightmare go away or, better yet, evaporate with neither trace nor memory.

Peter, in his late teens, seemed to seize up whenever we began to talk about John’s illness, trying not to react or overreact, afraid perhaps to feel too much. Anna, six years younger, inevitably would cry, big tears spilling out of her blue eyes in neat tracks down her round cheeks. Even when our message was good—that the worst of the depression seemed to be behind him—Anna could only smile and sob at the same time.