Keeping the Feast (21 page)

When I look back, I don’t remember either Peter or Anna asking many questions about their father’s illness; in fact, our discussions—which we tried to focus on John’s progress—seemed only in the short term to make them feel more distressed. We talked about it anyway, though we took care never to dwell on the lowest points of John’s illness, sensing that they couldn’t take it and didn’t need to hear it. Since they spent half their vacations with us, rather than living full-time with us, their absence distanced them from the concrete horrors of day-to-day life with a person suffering from depression. But that distance also had its negative aspects; one tends to be more afraid of unknown terrors than the everyday terrors one can grow used to.

We knew that firsthand from Anna’s initial reaction to John’s shooting, when she was eight, and she and Peter visited John in the hospital for the first time. Anna laughed and chattered that day, completely tearless, clearly happy to see him. We thought she was simply too young to have recognized the gravity of the situation. We were thick-headedly wrong. For the following autumn, when Christmas decorations started going up in Germany, Anna became convinced that her mother was going to die during the holidays. Her mother, John, Peter, and I tried to ease her fears but Anna could find no comfort. All the terrors of the previous Christmas—too powerful for her even to voice at eight years old—simply returned, that much stronger for having been festering underground for an entire year.

When the worst of John’s illness had begun to pass and he had just started to try to work again, Anna came alone on a weeklong visit. John told her about the old sketchbooks he had filled during his first trip to Europe at age twenty-three, when instead of taking photographs as souvenirs he had made sketches. He and Anna decided to buy new sketchbooks so that they could try their hand at a new series of drawings. One warm, sunny afternoon, the three of us took a long walk on the Oppio, another of Rome’s ancient hills, which faced the front door of our apartment. There they began sketching the apse of the Baths of Trajan. Anna was disappointed with her results, which, next to John’s, looked flat and childlike. When he suggested she alter a few key lines, making her straight horizontals into curves, Anna needed only an eraser and a few crucial changes to turn her flat sketch into a drawing with deep perspective, something that amazed us all. I cannot remember who was more proud that day, the father or his thirteen-year-old daughter.

I remember the first six months after we moved back to Rome from Trevignano—throughout the city’s long, languid autumn and its short, sharp, sun-filled winter—when John’s depression seemed utterly intractable. Sometime late in the long, damp spring that followed, just before the endless searing heat of the Roman summer had begun, the real John seemed to reawaken. The healing came in infinitesimal steps that never once resembled a smooth, upward path. It was always a jerky, tentative stop-and-go, a two-steps-forward, one-step-back sort of motion. The slightest change, glance, or comment could send John crashing and burning anew. But as spring turned to summer, I began to see that the dark hole he had been inhabiting was neither as deep nor as black as it had been, that while he often still looked terrified, he looked less terrified than before. It may have been that my own perspective was changing as well; I may have finally been able to see less terror in John because some of my own terror was beginning to fade.

And I remember that cool, sunny spring morning about two years into John’s depression when I realized it had been a couple of weeks since I had had a vision of coming upon his lifeless body. Later, I realized that I no longer felt so entrapped by his moods, that I was no longer a hostage to his illness. John’s silences began to melt away, and one day I was in the kitchen when I heard him laugh while reading a book. It was a tentative laugh, but a laugh nonetheless, and the first I had heard from him in what seemed like forever. I nearly cried at the sound of it.

During the worst of the illness we occasionally happened upon doctors who tried to make us believe that in these days of ever-improving medicines, one just has to experiment long enough to find the right drug or combination of drugs to put depression to flight. Perhaps for those comparatively lucky sufferers of drug-responsive depression, they might be right. But these were the same doctors who failed to mention that perhaps half the cases of stubborn, long-term depression they see are drug-resistant depressions, and that for those patients, no single drug or combination of drugs will work any magic at all. For these sufferers, the answer might lie in electroconvulsive therapy or in the simple passage of time needed for the chemicals gone awry in the brain to reverse themselves and return to their more usual state. The trick in that case is to keep the patient from killing himself while the healing inches forward.

John, with the help of a gifted doctor in Rome, a remarkably understanding editor and publisher in New York, a similarly patient bureau chief in Rome, and the fiercest personal determination to hang on to his life at all costs, managed the trick when his depression erupted about thirty months after the shooting. Like anybody living with depression, John was nothing short of heroic. But I know that it was also grace—not luck—and the strength of hope and prayer and anger and fear and love that brought him through.

I
remember the first time my father ever made us polenta, the yellow cornmeal mush that was basically his parents’ daily bread back in the farm villages near Verona, where they had been born. My father used coarse-grained polenta, the old-fashioned kind that takes forty minutes to cook, and he stood at the stove, incessantly stirring the bubbling yellow mass with a tall wooden spoon for what seemed to my ravenous ten-year-old self like hours.

My mother was simmering a pot of her favorite stew, what she always called Lamb Marky, braised chunks of lamb shoulder
alla marchigiana.
Its rich sauce, strongly flavored with minced rosemary and garlic, dry white wine, and tomatoes, simmered long enough with the meat to turn it a dark, russet brown. We had always eaten it with potatoes till that night, but I guess my father had gotten a sudden
wool-eee
for polenta, which, back then, was strictly a northern Italian peasant dish, a cheap, nutritious filler like pasta, potatoes, rice, or grits and utterly unknown to my mother’s southern Italian family.

When polenta begins to cook, it looks like yellow sand roiling about in boiling water. Only after much stirring and cooking over a slow flame does it finally thicken and pull away from the sides of the pan into a solid mass, a signal that it is nearly done. My father tipped the pot upside down over a cutting board, and like magic a steaming, yellow moon of polenta appeared. Like his mother, my father sliced it not with a knife, which would stick and tear the moist, grainy mass, but with a length of stout white thread, held taut like dental floss. I watched, fascinated, as he slipped the thread under one edge of the big yellow moon, then used both hands to pull the tautened thread firmly upward, producing a perfectly cut slice that he plopped onto each of our plates. My mother, standing at the stove, took each plate in turn and ladled out her lamb stew, dribbling the dark, meaty sauce over the bright yellow polenta.

I had been starving since I got home from school and smelled her stew already at a lazy simmer. Nevertheless, when the four of us finally sat down, I tried to eat as slowly as possible. From my first bite I knew that I wanted that feast to go on and on, and strangely enough, it has, because I have never forgotten how absolutely extraordinary it tasted to all of us that cold autumn night. It may have stuck in my mind because I was so hungry; or because my brother and I had watched our parents, laughing and cooking together, in our warm kitchen; or perhaps because the two of them produced a meal so perfectly honest and tasty that I knew that it was destined to be eaten again and again. I start craving it each year as we move deeper into autumn, but the real proof of its success may be that my father, over ninety now, still occasionally makes it for tiny dinner parties with his closest friends.

It was no mere accident that John’s family ate polenta too. Eating polenta was like a Masonic handshake or secret code that whispered we were part of a tiny tribe of unwashed northerners who, like the great tribe of unwashed southerners, all of them hungry or looking for a better life, had fled Italy late in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That John’s family in Jersey City used to sit around their kitchen table eating polenta (theirs usually smothered with a fricassee of chicken and dried porcini mushrooms) meant we shared a similar historical past. When we met, both of us thought that sharing a particular history—hard-pressed families seeking to make a new life in another world—would make sharing a future easier. Neither of us has ever thought otherwise.

 

 

 

 

A
s John’s health began to return, both of us were more than ready to kick-start our official marriage, which had in a sense been freeze-framed first by a bullet and later by depression. John was also beginning to feel strong enough to work. By the end of 1993, he had managed to write about a dozen articles for the paper; by 1994, working at a more normal pace, he had written about six times as many stories and had even begun to travel for occasional articles. At that point, John’s editors in New York said he could stay in Rome indefinitely as the
Times
’ roving European business writer. That meant we could get our goods out of storage and officially install ourselves in Rome.

The chance to be reunited with our books, music, furniture, and clothes, in storage for nearly three years, pushed John and me to move one last time in Rome, across the Tiber to Trastevere. It was a noisy, charming neighborhood of narrow, cobblestoned lanes that used to be filled with blue-collar families but was undergoing both gentrification and the loss of its traditional mom-and-pop stores. Today, most of the tiny vegetable and fruit shops, the dingy one-room groceries, the minuscule trattorie whose bills were figured on the paper tablecloths, have been replaced with tacky nightspots, bars, karaoke joints, and cheap pizzerias, the lot covered in graffiti that the city does not bother to erase.

We moved into a small apartment whose ceiling beams had been cut about the time the masts of the
Mayflower
had been felled, whose windows stretched nearly twelve feet high. The flat had no view, but was airy and light, and, lacking daylong direct sunlight, rarely felt like an oven, no small thing in a hot country that has yet to embrace air-conditioning. When we finally set up housekeeping after nearly three years of living in furnished flats, we were happy to be back to some sort of normality, but we also felt inundated by our belongings. Since both of us found it easier living pared down, I gave away boxes of kitchenware, clothes, books, records, and anything else we did not plan on using daily. My sense of isolation also diminished at this time, since John, feeling increasingly stronger, no longer feared the visits of friends and family. Within a couple of weeks, both of us felt we were settling into our new, old life: John working at the
Times
office, a ten-minute walk across the Tiber, and me writing from home.

Kick-starting our marriage meant more than just living once again amid our own belongings, more than just refinding each other after John’s long illness. I was in my mid-forties already, John nine years older, and I knew that if we were ever going to have a child together, there was already little, if any, time left. Ironically, it was my relationship with John’s Anna that had reawakened my old longing for a child of my own, a longing that I had been obliged to put aside repeatedly, when John was shot, when he got hepatitis, when he spiraled down, lost, into depression.

I had known Anna since she was five, and her openness toward me had always been a gift. I never played at being her mother, but I loved being around her and watching her mind and heart grow. Once when she was still very young she told me that she did not like the word
stepmother
because fairy-tale stepmothers were too mean. She tried to come up with a new, more neutral word to describe our relationship, and suggested that perhaps I could be her fa-wi, short for father’s wife, while she could be my hu-da, short for husband’s daughter. Even if her terms never caught on, the thoughts behind them took root. Over the years, she and Peter showed me repeatedly that the complicated relationship I had had with my mother did not necessarily mean I would provoke a similarly complicated relationship with all other small beings in the universe.

The idea of a child resurfaced shortly after we moved back to Rome and began our four-way meetings with John’s doctor and family therapist. John, who already had two children, who was fighting to come out of a serious depression, who was still trying to get back to work on a regular basis, was understandably far more hesitant than I about the idea, though I also worried that it might be too big a gamble. Still, I think our doctors understood far better than either of us at the time that I was likely to feel cheated in our marriage at some point in the future if we did not at least agree to try. In the end, our decision to try to have a child was not an intellectual choice but a visceral one: a now-or-never decision.

In June of 1996, on the advice of our doctors in Rome, we flew to London to consult with a fertility expert whom John’s doctor believed would be helpful to us both. It was our first weekend trip outside Italy in years, and we were excited at the thought of a weekend away together. The consultation was relaxed but to the point. The doctor was aware of our ages and relieved that neither of us was interested in doing anything scientific to enhance the utterly slim chances of a pregnancy (no drugs, no hormones, no surgical or fertility procedures, not even so much as the daily taking of my temperature). He told us simply that it was highly unlikely I would become pregnant, but that there seemed to be no physical impediments that would absolutely rule it out. That was how we wanted it; either I would conceive naturally or I would not. The trip to London was a balm: talking with the fertility expert there made me understand almost immediately that it was not so important that I become pregnant as it was that I consciously tried to leave myself open to new life—to our own as a couple, or to the possibility of a child. That John went along with it, despite deep reservations, was, I think now, what sealed our marriage vows, for I knew how much he was risking to agree. Quietly, then, I started hoping for a girl.