Keeping the Feast (25 page)

All of us burst into laughter. I was thrilled to see that at the age of two she had already learned how to celebrate the life we are given, around a table, with good food, close friends, and family.

N
early a year after Julia’s birth, John had long mastered his fears about restarting fatherhood, and the two of them would giggle happily on the floor together whenever John was at home. Julia delighted more than anything in the antics of “Little Man,” an imaginary figure whose two legs were John’s index and middle finger. Little Man got into trouble constantly, jumping onto plates, bouncing onto people’s heads, falling into teacups and coffeepots, and Julia loved him most when his antics got completely out of hand and he had to be punished, forced repeatedly to sit on the edge of the dining room table, forbidden to make a peep.

Late in 1999, more than six years after we had returned to Rome, we moved to Paris. To move from southern Europe to northern Europe when its summer light is dying and the cool, pewter gray of winter is at hand was perhaps not the best idea for a family that had unknowingly become extremely attached—physically and psychologically—to Rome’s glorious and comforting southern light. Even Julia, who was at first excited at the thought of moving to the city of Madeline and “twelve little girls in two straight lines,” was rattled by our transfer. Shortly after we moved, she began balking at getting out of bed in the morning, no longer jumped into her clothes once she did get up, and cried whenever we left the apartment.

John, without psychiatric help for the first time in seven years, was happy to plunge into his new Paris assignment. He was happy to have left Italy, happy to be back in a more stimulating intellectual environment, happy to be brushing up on his French. The only things he, like Julia, seemed to miss were the light and warmth of Rome. The three of us, in fact, were all shocked by Paris’s dirtiest little secret: that the weather in Paris is generally just a tad better than London’s, that the light of the City of Light is for many months of the year largely of the electric variety. I responded to the change in air and light by developing a three-year-long attack of chronic sinusitis that no amount of Western medicines could fight. It was not until, in despair, I consulted a Vietnamese acupuncturist and homeopathic doctor whose first treatment let me breathe normally again that I found I was slowly being taken in by Paris’s considerable charms.

And then, by the time I was beginning to feel at home in France, in the fall of 2002, John began to flag. A routine prostate operation went off without a medical hitch but triggered flashbacks to his shooting and everything that followed. Over the course of the following year, despite a resumption of talk therapy, he slid, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, down the long, familiar slope of depression. Ultimately, after trying the new antidepression drugs on the market, to no avail, he agreed to our doctors’ urging of hospitalization and electroconvulsive therapy, a modern version of the treatment that had cured him for thirty years after he left the monastery. It was a year from diagnosis to recovery this time, but the experience was remarkably different because we knew what we were dealing with, and all of us—me included—responded much more aggressively.

Throughout the period of his slide, we followed the doctors’ advice and tried to keep our home life as unchanged as possible. Night after night, I would cook one of John’s favorite comfort foods for supper—spaghetti with tomato, olive oil, garlic, and a handful of basil, or a
risotto alla milanese
yellow with saffron, butter, and Parmigiano; sautéed veal scallops finished off with a touch of white wine and sage; a platter of tiny green beans or a green salad made of baby field greens. While I was throwing the meal together, for few of our favorite dishes took much time to cook, John and Julia would set the table together, correcting each other if either of them misplaced the silverware or glasses. Once the table was set, John usually disappeared into our bedroom or into his corner chair in the living room to sleep or pretend to sleep, to try his best not to cry, to at least close his eyes and mind to the world until the food was ready.

But once he heard my usual summons,
“A tavola,”
no matter how bad he felt, he knew he was expected to pull himself together and join Julia and me at the table, then eat, hungry or not, and at least listen to the conversation if not take part in it. During the meal Julia would tell us stories from the school-yard: which second-graders were demanding daily tributes; who hadn’t done their homework; who had bled; who had cried; who had been mean or a comfort. Her stories and enthusiasms, like the simple meals I prepared, were a lifeline for each of us, keeping us afloat on those evenings when none of us could see any quick way—or any way at all—out of our latest situation.

John was hospitalized for nearly five weeks, but at his insistence, the doctors allowed him to spend weekends at home, a dispensation that made him feel less ill and that allowed him to see Julia regularly, as children were not allowed to visit the psychiatric hospital just north of Paris where he was being treated. He received eight rounds of electroconvulsive therapy during his stay and was remarkably less depressed upon his release, although all of us were shaken by the loss of a portion of his short-term memory, basically everything that had happened in the three to four months before his hospitalization. Despite that memory loss, within three months he felt well enough to try returning to work part-time.

Julia, who was six at the Christmas when John’s depression descended again, was flummoxed by the change in her father, the smiling, cheerful daddy who would play with her endlessly when he got home from work. She seemed fairly fine during the course of the day, going off to school, playing with her friends. But the edges of the day were too much for her. Soon after John became ill, Julia began waking up sobbing each morning. But once she was up and dressed, once she had eaten, we would walk off to school happily, just as each afternoon we would walk home together in similar high spirits. Only as she climbed into bed would her mood swing around again, and she would lie there fretting, weeping, unable to fall asleep for hours. Julia had always had the gift of falling off to sleep in a matter of moments, without problems; now she was nervous, frightened, afraid of the dark, demanding to sleep with a light on, demanding that I read to her until she was so exhausted that she would practically pass out.

The responsibility of caring for Julia pushed me to act much faster for John’s recovery than I would have had John’s illness been affecting only him and me. Frightened by Julia’s reactions to John’s depression and understanding more and more that all of us were suffering from it, I sought help for both Julia and me early in his illness. It was an easy decision, for the one thing I knew more than anything was that I did not want my daughter growing up the way I had, knowing somehow that something was very wrong with one of her parents, but completely ignorant of what that something was. Our family doctor suggested a colleague in the neighborhood whom he described as excellent at family therapy. It was she who very quickly helped me find the right words to explain to Julia in a manner that a just-turned-seven-year-old could understand.

Your daddy, I would tell her, sitting next to her on her bed, is sick. He has a sickness called depression. Depression is a sickness that makes you feel very, very sad, even though you have nothing to be sad about. It is not your fault that he has depression. It is not my fault that he has depression. It is not his fault that he has depression. It is just a sickness that he has and he is doing everything he can to get better. He is going to two or three doctors. He will go to the hospital if he needs to. He is taking medicines that the doctors prescribe. The only thing we can do to help him get better is have fun ourselves. We cannot become sad, too. Because if Daddy sees us having fun, he will start to remember that he used to have fun, too. And once he remembers that, then the depression will start to go away. But it will take a long time, so we have to be patient. And then one day he will not be lying in bed in the dark any longer, will not be crying in his chair in the living room. He will be back being the daddy you remember.

The night I first told Julia this story, she fell asleep instantly, after nearly four months of insomnia. It was a story I had to tell and retell incessantly, however, for a seven-year-old needs repeated reassurance. Whenever Julia began experiencing sleep problems, I would sit her down before bed and talk her through the entire explanation again.

Two years later, when her father was already long back to work and very much better, Julia began experiencing sleep problems once again. I told her that she had to try to figure out what was troubling her and why. I thought Julia’s insomnia was the result of a recent suicide in the family of a classmate, but my doctor and I felt that Julia would be helped most if she could figure that out for herself. It took her a few months, from spring until the night before John was due to start his summer vacation. Julia, nine at the time, came to me that night to explain what she thought had been troubling her.

“Daddy’s got depression,” Julia said quietly. “Does that mean I will have depression?” For the first time in my life I found I was nearly thankful that my mother had suffered from depression, for I could tell her honestly, and I did, that just because Daddy has depression does not mean that she would, too. I know that for sure, I told her, because my mother had depression and I do not.

Julia then spoke about her school friend Anna, whose aunt committed suicide on New Year’s Eve. “Anna’s aunt had depression and killed herself,” Julia said. “Does that mean Daddy is going to kill himself, too?”Anna’s aunt, I told her, had a different kind of depression, one that is harder to cure. Anna’s aunt, I told her, tried to get better or pretended to try to get better, but deep down she was still getting worse. Daddy’s treatment really and truly did make him feel better. And if Daddy’s depression comes back or gets worse, we will bring him right back to the hospital until they make him well again. I cannot tell you for sure that Daddy will never kill himself. But I know he will try his best not to do it. And I think Daddy and you and I have learned all sorts of ways to keep him from ever feeling that bad.

My nine-year-old with the greeny gold eyes looked at me, and it was clear she was wishing that I could have answered with the same degree of certitude that I answered her first question. Still, she accepted my answer, then lobbed me the ball for the third time, with an observation that still breaks my heart at the same time that it sets me free.

“Mama,” Julia said, “when Daddy got depression I felt like my real daddy went away and that a fake daddy came and took his place. It looks like Daddy but it’s not really Daddy.” At this, I felt tears suddenly stinging my eyes, for my nine-year-old, with her fine, wise eyes, had given me the most cogent personal description of depression that I have ever heard.

“You’re right, Jules,” I told her. “Depression does take away the person we know. But it doesn’t necessarily take them away forever.” And somehow, looking at her and taking her hands in mine, I felt that with the intimate knowledge of depression that she had deep in her soul, she had a most excellent chance of escaping the same illness that had so devastated her father’s and grandmother’s lives, and so changed our own.

T
hese days we own a small stone farmhouse, a low-slung, tile-roofed place half hidden by climbing roses and grape and Virginia creeper for most of the year. Its two-foot-thick walls make it feel safe and strong and comforting, and it has enough beds tucked into odd corners that we can almost always sleep the family and friends who journey to join us there. We bought it with the idea that it might, over time, become our own Trevignano, a safe haven for us all, even if it lies deep in the center of France on a gentle rise overlooking a lazy, willow-lined river, and not in the center of Italy, on a steep hillside overlooking a crystalline lake lined by umbrella pines.

We head to the house whenever we feel the need to flee the big city, whenever I need to feel thoroughly at home. The first time I saw our house it was a cold, late-October day, and when I pushed open the door to step inside I felt the same rush of recognition I experienced the day I first saw my old house in Dallas, the sense that I was home. The same thing happened in Dallas: that white clapboard wreck of a house—whose sturdy front door, outlined by a narrow surround of white wood and tiny windowpanes—entered my heart precisely because it reminded me of old New England houses that I missed seeing in Texas.

I have only felt more at home in our farmhouse the longer we are there; the house subconsciously evokes happy memories of all the places I have lived. I felt at home when I discovered that fig trees and acanthus—personal icons of our life in Rome—grew in our gently sloping meadow. I felt at home when I learned that an ancient Roman villa lies buried on the edge of our town, with ancient Roman artifacts occasionally popping to the surface during plowing season.

But it is not just memories of Italy that the house reawakens. The nightly racket of frogs that croak in the quiet river at the bottom of our meadow somehow reminds me of the mournful wail of the foghorn in the stone lighthouse off Penfield Reef, to which I used to love to sail in my early teens. I take comfort in the flocks of herons, egrets, and cranes, like the geese and gulls I used to see out our living room window in Connecticut, who take refuge in our quiet corner of France. I feel more at home each time Julia finds yet another fossilized seashell or ammonite embedded in our meadow’s rocky soil. When we bought the place, we had no idea that it was once at the bottom of a vast, prehistoric sea.

The house lies in a nature reserve, Le Parc Naturel Régional de la Brenne, a protected wilderness of forest, moor, lake, pond, and river punctuated by small stone villages and tiny farm hamlets, situated two hours east of the Atlantic. Built in the mid-eighteenth century, the house sits near the perimeter walls of a former Benedictine priory that was broken up during the French Revolution. It is a deep comfort for me to be able to pray in the monastery’s tiny chapel, which had been filled to its roof with sand and stone for generations, only rediscovered last century by the forebears of the family that lives there today. I often slip into the chapel to collect myself, sometimes to pray that depression never upends us all again. But it is my ultimate comfort to know that if or when it does, we have the doctors and the methods at hand to try fighting it off another time. Violence, blood, depression, and death are, I know now, part of life. Today I recognize them, respect them, fight them, and try as much as I can to keep them at bay, but I no longer pretend that they are not as much a part of life as birth or joy or love or the laughter, comfort, and strength that grow out of a simple meal shared with family or close friends.