Keeping the Feast (8 page)

John’s childhood Christmases were similar to mine, celebrated year after year at the same big mahogany table that now sits with pride of place in a niece’s dining room. Even the menus were not all that different. The Tagliabue family ravioli were rectangular and filled with meat, rather than round and filled with ricotta, but John remembers the same big slab of roast beef on the Christmas table in Jersey City that I remember on our table in Connecticut. Although my childhood memories of Christmas are happy, John remembers an undercurrent of sadness in his otherwise upbeat home. His father, Charlie, was sure to weep at some point every holiday. Charlie’s father had died decades earlier on an Easter Sunday, and Charlie’s mother on the Christmas Eve when John was nearly four. All John’s holiday memories struggle to reconcile the joy and the tears the holidays brought forth.

T
he first bad news of my life arrived by telephone, a cheery yellow model that hung on our cheery yellow kitchen wall. I have never fully trusted phones since. I like my bad news written down, so it can be read silently, so it can be brought to a quiet corner and taken in slowly, at a speed you can stand. When bad news is delivered in a rush of sobs or spoken words that charge into your ear and mind and heart and stomach, when bad news is disembodied from a human face, the badness of the news is magnified many times over. The mind—mine, at least—replays the sobs and the words and the news, over and over, without rest. The replays churn my heart, clutch my stomach, etch deep inside my skull the news I don’t want to accept.

I started hating telephones the year I was nine and my brother was two, when a phone conversation I overheard between my mother and hers let me know that he was suddenly dangerously ill. A toddler in yellow pajamas is an unlikely savior, but even at the age of nine I knew Danny had saved me. He kept me from being an only child, took half my mother’s heat. Unlike me, he was unfailingly good-natured and kept our mother too busy to brood. His mouth seemed permanently set in a wide grin, and he had the kind of dark-haired, long-lashed beauty so arresting that housewives pushing their carts through the A&P would stop my mother, a stranger, in the aisles to rave. I had pale blue eyes and pale “spaghetti hair,” as my grandmother Jennie used to sigh, brushing and brushing it a hundred strokes, hoping it might magically develop Danny’s curls, or my mother’s rich chestnut color. Nothing seemed fair. Saviors weren’t supposed to get sick. Saviors weren’t supposed to be in need of saviors themselves.

I came home from school to learn that Danny had developed nephrosis, a kidney ailment that, until the invention of cortisone, used to kill its victims before they were four. He was already lying in a crib in St. Vincent’s, the hospital where the nuns wore the same winged headdresses as the nuns at my school, but whose robes were a ghostly white instead of a comforting navy blue. I was not yet sure what it all meant.

My mother, always described in our family as high-strung, was acting higher-strung than I ever remembered her. I knew that high-strung normally meant yells—nervous, angry, howling yells that escaped her throat before she really knew they were lurking inside her head. High-strung meant that when you came in the back door from school, you waited till you rounded the corner from the hallway to the kitchen to see which mother had her hands in the sink. There was the mother who happily asked how school had gone and poured my milk and gave me a couple of my grandmother Jennie’s homemade oatmeal cookies. And there was the other mother, always a stranger, who would be standing there quiet and sad or shaking and howling with anger, her hands in dishwater or scrubbing at vegetables, trying to pretend nothing was wrong.

But on this day, she was sobbing and crying without control, a version of high-strung I had never seen, and frightened, I ran up to my bedroom. When I heard her dialing the phone, though, I silently slipped back down to eavesdrop from the front hall. Talking to Jennie, she sobbed more than talked. It took only a few minutes to realize that the brother for whom I had waited seven years might not come back home. She mentioned cortisone, a new drug then, which the doctors hoped might keep the disease in check, but even then they were concerned about its possible long-term effects.

T
wenty-four days after our wedding in Rome, I was downstairs in the Times house in Warsaw when I heard the telex machine in John’s attic office clatter to life. It was shortly after two p.m. on Christmas Eve. I was hoping it was John, finally cabling to tell me he had arrived in Romania, where he had been sent to report.

It was to have been our first Christmas and New Year’s together as newlyweds. We had had a full, happy holiday planned: an old friend was flying in from Rome, we were hosting Christmas Eve dinner with our closest Warsaw friends, and Peter and Anna were coming for the week after New Year’s. Then, the week before Christmas, the Romanians toppled Nicolae Ceauşescu, the most hated Communist dictator in the Eastern bloc. John was on his way to cover the heavy fighting, our personal plans abruptly overturned.

Ordinarily I would have gone to report, too, but five weeks after my beating, my wounds still felt fresh, my scars still hairless slashes, fish-belly white, across my scalp. I was still having severe headaches and felt drained after so little as climbing a flight of stairs. Most of all, I felt a strong premonition of danger.

Uncharacteristically panicky, I had cried and argued with John to refuse the Romania assignment, even though rationally I knew he couldn’t possibly beg off the story. Finally, I talked myself into believing that my premonition was nothing more than fallout from my beating. I heard myself agree that while he was gone I would try to salvage Christmas with the help of Cathy, our
Time
magazine friend from Rome who was already en route to Warsaw. John promised to do his best to return in time for Peter and Anna’s visit.

The next day, the noisy rattle of the telex machine sent me running up the two flights of stairs to John’s office. The telex was not, as I had been praying, from John but from my foreign desk at the
Tribune
. It was eerily short, with a peculiar demand: I was to call immediately one of the
Tribune
’s main editors, the man who had hired me, at his home outside Chicago. When I finally managed to get through, I was told what I had begun to fear: John had been shot.

Cathy and I spent the rest of Christmas Eve trying to sift through utterly conflicting reports about details of John’s shooting the previous night. The only solid information available was that he had been shot while riding in a car in Timişoara, the city where the revolution had erupted, and that the colleagues with whom he was traveling had left him in a municipal hospital before continuing on to the capital, Bucharest.

At some point I called the Los Angeles Times house to tell them the news, only to receive a second shock: One of our closest friends in Warsaw, John Daniszewski of the Associated Press, also had been wounded the previous night. Incredibly, he too had been shot in an unrelated attack in Timişoara the same night as my John, though neither of them knew the other was even there, much less lying wounded in different hospitals.

Later that evening, the remnants of our Christmas Eve dinner party gathered as planned: John Daniszewski’s wife, Drusie; Cheryl Bentsen, whose husband, Chuck, was trying to get into Romania for the
L.A. Times
; our house guest, Cathy; and me. Each of us was doing what came naturally: Cathy was drinking; Cheryl was smoking; Drusie was popping Christmas cookies; and I was in the kitchen, preparing the crabmeat risotto I had been planning to serve before news of the shootings had reached us. None of us was hungry, no one particularly wanted to eat. But I was hoping that the habitual motions of chopping onions and stirring rice would remind me of normality, make me feel less crazed, make both Johns somehow miraculously unhurt. It didn’t work.

I have a single photo of that Christmas Eve taken in our living room. The tree is standing in the background. Plates of Christmas cookies and cakes, baked before the news came in, are resting on a table in the foreground. Cheryl, chin in hand, is sitting in an armchair, staring off at nothing. “Christmas in hell,” I later wrote on its back, though we had not quite reached our destination yet.

Christmas morning, twelve hours after learning both Johns had been shot, Drusie and I set off to join them. Christmas dinner was the ham and Snickers special of the Polish airline. Christmas supper was take-out Chinese in Paris, of all places, where after a day of airline hell Drusie and I ended up, twice as far away from our wounded husbands as when we had started out that fogbound morning in Warsaw. Chopsticks in hand, we sat around the table of one of my John’s colleagues, who with his wife and two children helped us get through the surreal nightmare of that holiday evening. I was trying to talk myself into believing that John wasn’t badly injured, or that he might be evacuated to Yugoslavia by the time I finally got there. Deep down, I didn’t believe it for a minute.

W
hen I was seven or eight and still prone to occasional childhood fevers, I craved a cup of my mother’s sickroom tea. Nothing tasted better, when I had a 101-degree fever, than hot tea, not too strong, sweetened with honey and floating a thin wedge of lemon, served in one of my mother’s special china cups. The trick was to drink it at just the right speed, not so slowly that the tea began to cool, not so fast that the lemon failed to mellow in the hot, golden liquid. When the tea was finished, the lemon lay at the bottom of the cup, and I would gnaw the pulp away from the rind and imagine the fever germs withering away. Whenever I needed my mother’s sickroom tea, my mother and I would observe an undeclared truce: mother stopped barking, daughter stopped sassing. I almost always recovered by morning.

If the fever was higher—102, 103, or accompanied by flu or measles or stomach woes—the potion was ginger ale, cool and bubbly, a single ice cube bobbing in a highball glass. Once the fever dropped, my mother brought dry toast, too; hot, golden, and sliced into four triangles—never the two coarse rectangles of workaday toast—in an effort to appeal to my lost appetite.

As the illness began to wane, stronger potions would appear: Angelina’s homemade chicken broth, made from one of the oldest hens that pecked in the stinky coop in the back corner of their garden. I loved my grandmother’s chicken soup and the chicken feathers she stuffed into our pillows almost as much as I hated the chickens themselves and the acrid ammonia stench of their dark, airless henhouse. If my stomach was still weak, then the broth came plain, or with a bit of minced parsley added at the last minute. If I was feeling stronger, then it appeared with soft shreds of white meat and tiny, star-shaped pastina.

 

 

 

 

W
hen I got to the jammed surgical ward at Spital 2, the hospital in Timişoara where John had been lying for five days, going in and out of consciousness, I was struck as much by the hunk of heavy brown bread and the thick, gristly pork sausage—both untouched at the head of his bed—as by John’s gray, skeletal face. No dainty toast triangles here. No honey-flavored, lemon-laced tea. No fancy medical machinery. No antibiotics. Not even enough bandages. Just a sudden flood of patients, some moaning, some ominously quiet. And a truce of sorts. The fighting that had raged around the hospital a few nights earlier, as Ceauşescu’s security forces battled army regulars and the people of Timişoara, had stopped.

In my halfhearted attempt to stave off panic, I had tried to believe that the conflicting reports on the nature and seriousness of John’s wounds were overdramatized. But when the elevator doors at Spital 2 opened to reveal a huge gob of spit on the filthy floor, I no longer needed to see John’s eyes—wild and unnaturally bright in the gray, drawn face of a suddenly elderly stranger—to know that most of the condition reports that had filtered back to me had been hopelessly optimistic. He looked like a desiccated caricature of the man I had kissed good-bye at Frankfurt Airport five days earlier.

John was conscious, and relief flooded through his eyes when he recognized me, but he was also off his head, lapsing intermittently into incoherence from the infection already raging inside him. A nurse was dressing him in what was left of his shot-up clothes, and he was lying on an old-fashioned metal bed, his hands clenched, clearly desperate to be gone. He kept trying to apologize for having been shot. I took his hands in mine and held them tightly. I was hypnotized by the glittery, ghostly look in his eyes. Those eyes, in which I could see John present one instant, then gone the next, so terrified me that I could almost feel myself disappearing under their gaze. All real feeling—my terror, panic, exhaustion—was being sucked somewhere deep inside me. Holding John’s hands, held by his eyes, I felt as if a heavy shroud were slipping over my emotions and feelings, and I was shocked to hear myself suddenly speaking calmly, telling John to hang on, that after days of begging, a German Red Cross plane was waiting at the airport to fly him to safety.

Our trip from hospital to airfield was short, surreal. The orderlies brought John downstairs, literally folding him into the elevator, then folding him again into a filthy station wagon so small that they had to bend him at the knees, because at six-feet-two he was too tall to fit. I sat in front, next to a grizzled driver who was wearing a fezlike hat and stiff woolen coat and taking deep drags on a reeking Eastern bloc cigarette. John lay on his stomach directly behind the driver next to a short, filthy soldier in a World War I-style helmet and heavy greatcoat, smoking, too. The car was narrow as well as short and the silent soldier stood his AK-47 upright, the rifle barrel jammed against John’s cheek for the entire ride. John kept thinking it was most likely the same kind of gun that had shot him; I kept checking my purse, obsessively, to make sure I still had John’s hospital report, which the doctors in Munich said would be crucial.