Keeping the Feast (23 page)

Over the next days and weeks, John worked even more closely than usual with his doctor to fight off the panic that occasionally rose within him, to master his irrational fears about whether he could be as good a father to Julia as he had been to Peter and Anna, about whether Julia’s presence might somehow damage the ties he had to his firstborn children. That he did in fact learn to master those fears and reverse the slide—all the while continuing to work and live with a newborn and a forty-six-year-old new mother who was herself worried about postpartum blues—impresses me still. That over the next weeks he was able to fight off his panic and turn himself into the very same father I had seen with Peter and Anna—loving, nurturing, playful, wacky—made me realize our marriage was on the right track again at last. I felt my bolting days were over, that it would be near impossible for me to walk out on a man who had conquered such panic, a man with whom his youngest daughter was so utterly taken.

 

 

 

 

T
he journal I kept of Julia’s early life is an old, tattered reporter’s notebook I grabbed in such haste the day we got home from the clinic that I started writing in it from back to front. The journal began as a simple feeding timetable, reminding me at what time I had last fed Julia and which breast she had emptied. At the time, my short-term memory seemed short-circuited, and I could not remember anything from one minute to the next. I had suffered this sensation once before in my life, during the first weeks of John’s hospitalization after the shooting, when I had to write down everything anyone said to me, since my mind could not grab, record, or play back any conversation, no matter how important.

Julia’s pediatrician, a young Italian mother with children of her own, was adamantly in favor of breast-feeding, and worked with Julia and me while we were still in the clinic to make sure things were progressing correctly. New mothers in Italy benefit from a midwife visit after they go home, a godsend for a first-time mother, who needs all the help she can get. I had read any number of books and pamphlets on breast-feeding before Julia was born, and all of them seemed hopelessly vague and romantic when faced with a squalling, starving infant who could not seem to latch on to a milk-engorged nipple. My brother once described breast-feeding as the most unnatural of natural acts, and until Julia and I finally got the routine down, I could not have agreed more.

All the books and pamphlets talked up breast-feeding’s economies, how new parents did not have to pay the price of expensive baby formulas to feed their child. None of them seemed to mention that a breast-feeding mother’s enormous appetite would more than make up for the difference. In those early days at home, I simply could not get enough food in my stomach to satisfy my hunger. And no matter how much I ate, the weight just kept falling off my bones.

For breakfast, I found myself eating eggs, potatoes, toast, fruit, yogurt, muesli, and the occasional bit of leftover meat. By ten a.m., starving again, I would down an enormous bowl of fresh ricotta, covered in tiny strawberries. By lunchtime I would be ravenous once more and would eat a bowl of pasta or a plate of risotto, followed by meat, a mound of cooked vegetables, a salad, and more bread than I had ever eaten in my life. Three hours and a nap later, I would be famished yet again and fix myself enormous slabs of Gorgonzola cheese on dark country bread. Once John got home, I would eat a supper as big as my lunch and follow it up with a few pieces of fruit.

John, who was cooking those first few days after my return from the hospital, could barely keep pace with my hunger. Even though Julia and I were growing stronger by the day, I hesitated to count on John to take up the slack, since he was still feeling overwhelmed after the birth, and I was simply too exhausted to buy and prepare all the food I needed to eat. We did not own a car, and there was no way to do food shopping except on foot, dragging one of those two-wheeled, old-lady shopping carts behind me. Although I could buy fresh pasta, bread, fruit, vegetables, and milk at nearby shops, the butcher was several blocks away, at the time too far for me to even consider. That second week out of the hospital, I was positively saved by Eleni, my Greek-American friend. Eleni, who had two children of her own, knocked on my door one morning when I was still too weak to be out of bed for long. When I opened the door, she was standing there with hampers of cooked food, all ready to be heated and served.

I can still taste Eleni’s Italian mother-in-law’s recipe for turkey breast poached until tender in milk, butter, and Parmigiano cheese, the creamy sauce flavored with bits of minced onion, carrot, and celery. I can still see Eleni’s enormous roulade of beef, big as my arm, stuffed with ham, cheese, spinach, and herbs, and flavored by a carrot-rich tomato sauce. Eleni brought a vat of homemade mashed potatoes, Italian-style, enriched and lightened with nearly a quart of milk. She brought a big container of cooked zucchini, another of rice, another of beans. No one ever gave me a better gift in my life than that hamper of ready-to-eat meals; to this day I do not know how I would have survived that second week at home without Eleni’s food. I suppose I might have eventually figured out a way to have one of our local trattorie deliver meals to our door, but by the time I had eaten my way through Eleni’s bounty, I was strong enough to do the shopping and cooking myself.

Both Julia’s pediatrician and my gynecologist discouraged me from switching to formula during two long bouts of mastitis. That meant breast-feeding every two hours for days at a time, while taking antibiotics. During the second bout, when Julia was about two months old, the gynecologist discovered I was on the verge of developing an abscess, which could mean hospitalization. “Julia needs her mother at home, not in the hospital,” the doctor told me, asking when I had last fed her. When I answered, “Just now,” the doctor did not hesitate: “ Well, then, Julia has just had her last natural feed from you.”

The doctor’s advice took me utterly by surprise, and I walked out of her cramped basement office, huge tears spilling down my cheeks, for my hormones were still in an uproar, from the birth or the breast-feeding or both. I knew the doctor was right, but I had not expected her pronouncement to be so sudden or categorical. Still crying, I walked out of her office into the normal chaos, pedestrian and vehicular, of the Viale Trastevere, the neighborhood’s biggest boulevard. I walked into our local pharmacy, tears still gushing, and handed one of the women behind the counter the doctor’s prescription for Julia’s formula and mine for shutting down my milk. This being Italy, the woman came out from behind the counter, handed me a pack of tissues, sat me down in a chair, and asked what was wrong. Still blubbering uncontrollably, I told her that my doctor had just decreed I could no longer breast-feed.

The entire shop—pharmacist, salesclerks, and elderly patrons alike—came to a momentary, silent standstill. Then, this being Italy, everybody in the shop started talking at once, offering comfort and advice and telling me not to be upset—that everything would be all right, that my baby would be fine, that I soon would be feeling like myself, that I should just take the pills as prescribed and go home and steal a long nap.

Group therapy over, I finally managed to stop crying, paid my bill, and walked the rest of the way home. I took a long nap, as suggested. At feeding time, I made up a bottle of formula and worried how Julia would react. Ravenous herself, Julia never missed a beat, and sucked on that plastic nipple until the bottle was drained. When she was through, I took my milk-stopping drug and prayed that the threatened abscess would be averted. During the coming days, my milk dried up as it was meant to and my hormones simmered down.

The elderly ladies in the pharmacy were correct. Everything was all right, my baby was fine, my husband was on the mend, and soon I was feeling like myself.

E
very family has its creation story. Mine was always recounted by my mother, in just the same way, with the same tone of regret. When I married your father, she would always begin, I didn’t know how to boil water. I couldn’t make a soft-boiled egg. I didn’t know how to make coffee, where to put it in the pot. If it hadn’t been for your father teaching me how to do everything, we would have starved. I don’t want you to grow up like I did, with my toast always buttered for me every morning. I want you to be able to do everything.

At some point after their wedding, years before I was born, Irma Rombauer’s
Joy of Cooking
showed up in my parents’ kitchen. It’s still there, covered in the same neat brown paper bag cover that we always used to cover schoolbooks. Decades later my mother bought the updated version, written by the mother and her daughter, and she complained forever after that all the good recipes were gone, and the ones that remained were all wrong. “Oyma” was how my mother always referred to the book and its author. “What does Oyma have to say about it?” she would wonder aloud, and when I was very little, I always thought that my mother knew Oyma intimately, that she was perhaps an old childhood friend, someone who had moved away, who inexplicably never wrote at Christmas but who had left indelible traces behind in her thick, heavy cookbook filled with basic recipes like griddle cakes, dry dressing, or roast beef hash.

After Oyma, Adelle Davis began appearing in our kitchen with alarming frequency.
She
, for we were never on a first-name basis with her, had written one of the early health-food bibles,
Let’s Cook It Right,
a 1947 book that much intrigued my father, as did
Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit,
a later volume.
She
was to blame for the whole-wheat-bread phase of my childhood, all those brown sandwiches I threw away at school after a bite or two out of the middle.
She
was responsible for tiger’s milk, a nasty concoction of molasses and brewer’s yeast. Her only saving grace, in my mind, was a recipe for pancakes made of potatoes, grated whole, skin included, and cooked very rapidly in a bit of very hot oil or fat, with a touch of raw onion thrown in toward the end. Everybody seems to love them still, despite their provenance.

Luckily James Beard, portly like my mother’s father, appeared to save me from other early health-food enthusiasts (like D. C. Jarvis, M.D., a Vermont folk doctor whose food credo centered around apple cider vinegar, which we sprinkled on everything from spinach to New England Boiled Dinner, and which we used diluted as a gargle and, mixed with honey, as a sleep tonic). We called him Jamesie, for reasons long lost, and we all own several of his cookbooks, filled with anecdotes that made us want to cook.

I can still taste Jamesie’s beef Stroganoff, which cooked in moments and which my mother always served with rice and a healthy shower of chopped, fresh parsley. I still make his chicken sauté with white wine and herbs. I still love to serve his light, white-wine-and-chicken-soup version of French onion soup, always using Parmigiano instead of the standard Swiss cheese topping. Our French friends love Jamesie’s Chocolate Roll, a fallen chocolate soufflé cooked flat on a cookie sheet and rolled, jelly roll-style, around a filling of freshly whipped cream. But as with all our favorite author-cooks, my family read Jamesie’s books as much or more for the sheer pleasure of the read than because we were looking to try a new recipe or to find out what one actually did with salsify or parsnips or quince.

When I was turning seventeen, I asked my parents to give me Julia Child’s landmark tome,
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
. Julia—we always warbled the
u
so it sounded more like “Juuuuulia”—was fun to watch on Boston’s public television station, and nearly as fun to read. Her thick cookbook, all 684 pages of it, sought to demystify French food for American home cooks. I found it useful for facts and basics and methods, but in the end too full of butter and cream, too complicated and fussy for our family taste. Juuuuulia stayed the course anyway, and my father bought her last cookbook,
The Way to Cook
, in his late eighties, reading it avidly, even if he had begun to lose interest in actually producing her recipes for eating.

I was in my late twenties and already living in Texas when my mother drove to a fancy mall in Stamford, Connecticut, one afternoon to sit in on a cooking class given by Jamesie himself. She came home bubbling and talked for an hour on the phone about her wonderful afternoon. Better yet, Jamesie had, when asked, been able to recommend a new Italian cookbook, recently published, that was nothing like the standard red-sauce wonders that had defined Italian cooking in the United States up until that point.

The book was Marcella Hazan’s
The Classic Italian Cookbook
, which eventually became the best-selling Italian cookbook in the United States. My mother bought two copies on the spot, one for herself and my father, and the other for me. We devoured Marcella’s book and its recipes like no other cookbook before it, and Marcella in no time supplanted all others in our family pantheon of kitchen gods. “Marcella says . . .” became our creed.

I actually met Marcella in Dallas a couple of years later, when she gave a cooking class at a new Williams-Sonoma store, and I dutifully presented her with my heavily stained copy of her first book to autograph. Marcella was happily shocked to find I had a first edition of her book, which had sold badly under its original publisher. And she was touched to learn that our Jamesie, her friend and colleague, James Beard, had been quietly promoting her behind her back.

A few years later, after my move to Rome, I called Marcella to ask if I could interview her for a story for United Press International’s feature wire while I was in Venice covering a medical conference. Wire service reporters often were forced to cover deadly boring stories, from taking dictation on the results of a Russian-Italian track meet to covering the summer visit of some Podunk mayor who had found his way to Europe. To have been invited into Marcella’s Venetian kitchen, to have watched her cook up a lovely lunch for me, which she then served on her terrace, to have a couple of hours in which to talk food and drink with my family’s favorite cook, in her own kitchen, more than made up for all the evenings of my life that I had spent with a heavy, black phone receiver scrunched between my neck and shoulder, and typing Russian names, letter by letter, hour after hour, from some beer-fueled sports stringer, “Medvedev, M for Mary, E for Edward, D for David, V for Victor . . .”