Part 4
But it was also the time and place where I realized that John appeared to be nearly as sick as my mother had been, where I began to fear that he could end up as she had, a suicide. As summer began to turn to autumn, it was also the place where I began to worry what my role should be when it was time to take a new step forward, knowing that we couldn't simply hide out in Trevignano indefinitely. I felt powerless and trapped, and thought my only weapon was a frightened patience. But my anger, which I had managed to keep in check all these months, began to make itself felt, too. I just didn't know yet that anger, righteous anger, might have its own role to play.
12.
Pizza.
Most Friday evenings of my childhood, my mother and I performed the same ritual, driving across town to her parents' tiny apartment to pick up a week's worth of meat and eggs. The meat came from Gabriel's Meat Market, run by Cousin Paul's paternal grandparents; the eggs from the chicken and goat farm in nearby Easton, run by my mother's cousin Josephine and her husband, Bob, the only Connecticut Yankee in our extended family.
I loved going to that apartment for many reasons, in part because my grandfather Tony might be wearing his policeman's uniform, eating early so that he could go to work as a special cop at one of Bridgeport's many movie houses. He would always put down his fork to say "Hi, doll" and give me a bear hug. A strong but plump man with bulging biceps, he gave hugs that felt like pillows, different from the hugs I usually received from my father, who was affectionate but bony. I also loved visiting there because my mother's parents were easygoing and cheerful, and there was nothing they liked more than to shower treats upon their grandchildren. Every week we each got a quarter, to be put into our savings account, and later, when their weekly donation doubled, we got to keep the second quarter to spend as we liked.
My mother and I always left their apartment loaded down with goodies: the meat and eggs my mother had ordered the night before; a tin or two of Jennie's homemade spritz; the Swedish b.u.t.ter cookies that somehow had ended up in her repertoire of baked goods; a tin of her peanut b.u.t.ter cookies, still bearing the marks of the tines of her fork. Sometimes, in season, we walked out with a dozen of her fresh blueberry m.u.f.fins. Other weeks it might have been an entire pan of brownies wrapped in foil, or half an apple pie, or her sour cream coffee cake-which I still make-topped and filled with walnuts, cinnamon, and sugar. In the summer, Jennie always threw in extra produce from their miniature garden, a couple of tomatoes or green peppers.
But the best thing about going to their place on a Friday night was the possibility that Jennie might have made a traditional pizza for supper. All sorts of pizza used to appear on their table, perhaps because my mother's family came from Naples, the cradle of Italian pizza. I could take or leave the actual pizza, a flat, round pie slathered in tomato and cheese, but I couldn't resist her way of using up her leftover pizza dough to make pizza fritta pizza fritta. The minute we walked through the door, she would slip cherry-sized k.n.o.bs of dough into a kettle of bubbling oil, where they would sizzle, puff up, and turn golden. When she lifted them out of the fryer, she would douse them with granulated sugar, which didn't melt but clung in crystals to the dough b.a.l.l.s' hot surface. The sweet crunch of sugar played against the slightly salty softness of hot, fried dough, and my mother and I could never get enough of them.
And every Easter Sunday, a totally different sort of pizza, one meant to break the long Lenten fast, appeared on our breakfast table. It had a double crust like a calzone, but it was flatter and wider, shaped like a foot-long strudel. My grandmother called it "pizza gain," an Anglicized version of pizza china pizza china (KEE-nah), which in itself is dialect for (KEE-nah), which in itself is dialect for pizza ripiena pizza ripiena, filled pizza. "Pizza gain" was stuffed with many of the foods one could not eat during the fo rty-day Lenten fast: prosciutto crudo prosciutto crudo, dried sausage slices, fresh runny cheese, and hard grating cheese all mixed together with endless fresh eggs from cousin Josephine's farm. We would cut into them on Easter morning, and on every subsequent morning until they were gone, a treat so rich that two slim slices would make a meal. I loved the Russell Stover's pecan-studded caramel egg that my grandmother arranged to have appear in my Easter basket every year, but I would have traded that egg away in a heartbeat for a whole "pizza gain" of my own.
Occasionally on a Friday night when my grandfather was working, Jennie, my mother, and I would go out for pizza. Our favorite pizza parlor in my grandmother's North End neighborhood had a sign outside that said APIZZA, APIZZA, which my grandmother and mother always p.r.o.nounced ah-BEETS. We would order a huge wheel of a pie with tomato sauce, sausage, and cheese, to be shared three ways. Waiting hungrily for it to arrive, my mother would announce that this time she would be patient and not blister the roof of her mouth on the bubbling cheese. The vow would evaporate with the arrival of the pie, and she would inevitably bite too soon, the hot cheese blistering her mouth once again. "How can I wait when it smells so good?" was my mother's perpetual refrain. which my grandmother and mother always p.r.o.nounced ah-BEETS. We would order a huge wheel of a pie with tomato sauce, sausage, and cheese, to be shared three ways. Waiting hungrily for it to arrive, my mother would announce that this time she would be patient and not blister the roof of her mouth on the bubbling cheese. The vow would evaporate with the arrival of the pie, and she would inevitably bite too soon, the hot cheese blistering her mouth once again. "How can I wait when it smells so good?" was my mother's perpetual refrain.
My father's family, on the other hand, wouldn't go near it. Neither of my father's parents ever ate a pizza, either in America or in northern Italy, where the very idea was as foreign as sushi or fried rattlesnake. My father, who ate everything, also drew the line at pizza. He had tried it as a teenager and become so ill that for decades he resisted even going to restaurants where pizza was served. Nearing eighty, he finally admitted that it probably had been the schooners of beer he had downed on that adolescent outing to New Haven rather than the pizza itself that made him so violently ill.
Through my childhood, though, pizza was a border that my parents' families would never cross. Pizza-the totem of our differences-defined us, separated us, brought some of us together, kept the sum of us apart.
The heat of a Roman summer generally builds unceasingly from early May until the mid-August feast of Ferragosto. By mid-August, virtually all things green-save the cypresses and umbrella pines that make the landscape Roman-have long ago turned a sere golden brown, and one begins to doubt the very existence of clouds, of rain, of cold. Just before the holiday, Rome becomes a veritable ghost town, as the city's inhabitants head for long beach vacations along the country's limitless coasts. Then, seemingly without warning, about August 15, the sun-bleached skies turn gray, storm clouds scud across the sky, and the rains, finally, blessedly, begin to fall. Temperatures drop a few degrees during these few days, the summer torpor wanes, siestas shorten, and thoughts turn to the coming grape harvest, the purchase of school supplies, and the cold season ahead.
The ancient Romans celebrated these annual rains as the Feriae Augusti, proclaimed by Caesar Augustus to mark the start of his very own month. Centuries later, the Catholic Church deftly chose the same date to celebrate the Virgin's a.s.sumption into heaven; in other Catholic countries the feast is known as the a.s.sumption, but in Italy it remains Caesar's feast, Ferragosto. Despite its imperial origins, the timing of the holiday likely started long before the Romans, when the Etruscans, Sabines, and Umbrians were still wandering Rome's seven hills. Statues of Mary may well be paraded through Roman streets on August 15, but the ancient rhythms of the impending end of summer and the ripening of autumnal fruits-grapes, chestnuts, and persimmons-are really what is at play.
Even though it will be weeks yet before vacationing Romans return to the city-school generally reopens in mid-September-once the thunderclouds of Ferragosto arrive, one knows instinctively that summer's end is not far off. It was just after Ferragosto 1992 that John asked me to place another call to the Times Times' executive editor, Joe Lelyveld, to ask another favor. John had made a glimmer of progress in Trevignano, but he was still desperately ill. He pa.s.sionately felt that he would only tumble into an endless abyss if he returned to the States at summer's end. Could Joe find a way to let us stay on in Italy, where John had spent happy times working before, so he could try to pull himself together there?
Joe got back to us quickly, agreeing to let us stay on in Italy as long as we moved to Rome, where psychiatric help could easily be found and John could restart serious treatment for his depression rather than continuing piecemeal care as he had at the lake by phone from his doctor in New York. John's job description for the immediate future, Joe said, would not involve journalism but psychiatry, and he instructed us to find a small, furnished apartment in the city. For the time being John was to work full time with medical help until his depression lifted. He was not to even try returning to work until he and his Roman doctor, still to be found, judged him ready. In the meantime, the Times Times would continue to pay John his full salary, a decision that freed us from financial panic. Rome was cheaper than Berlin, and once I started freelancing again, we knew we could pay the bills. would continue to pay John his full salary, a decision that freed us from financial panic. Rome was cheaper than Berlin, and once I started freelancing again, we knew we could pay the bills.
Joe's granting of our request both calmed and terrified John, and alleviated many of my short-term worries. John was utterly relieved to know we could remain in Italy, but he was-like many victims of depression-also panicked at the thought of even the slightest change to his daily life. He would literally lose his breath at the thought of having to leave the security of our quiet country life in Trevignano and exchange it for the noise and bustle of Rome and the eventual return to the pressures of work. But for me, it felt like the first time since John had taken ill that we were no longer floating aimlessly; we now had a concrete plan for the foreseeable future. That the plan involved returning to Rome, where we had met, fallen in love, and married, where the two of us had worked, where we spoke the language and knew the story, only added to my sense of relief. More important than anything was the idea that we would be coming back to a place where we both felt thoroughly at home, and safe.
At some point during September we began driving into Rome to look for an apartment not far from the Times Times' bureau so John, once he was feeling stronger, could walk to and fro, avoiding the chaos of the city's traffic. Finally, after repeated trips, we found a simple flat on the Via Giulia, a block from the Tiber and a five-minute walk from the office.
On one of our searches, we stopped at the American consulate, which friends told us kept a running list of English-speaking doctors in the city, including psychologists and psychiatrists. We took the list back to Trevignano and studied it, looking for names that indicated an Anglo-Saxon medical background. High up on the list, since his surname began with a B, was the psychiatrist we eventually called first. We had an exploratory chat with him by telephone; his British accent rea.s.sured John that his treatment could take place in English. The doctor listened carefully, asked a few measured questions, and agreed to take John on once we moved to Rome.
Meanwhile, John and I got to stay in Trevignano a bit longer, until the Rome flat could become ours. I have vivid memories of those last couple of weeks in the country. In addition to our usual routine of sharing meals and taking afternoon naps, followed by long, lazy swims, we tried to help Joseph with any ch.o.r.es around the property that needed more than two hands. The physical work in itself offered a kind of recuperation. I remember hauling out of the cellar and into the sunshine the enormous plastic and wooden barrels Joseph used for crushing his grapes and fermenting his wine. We hosed spiderwebs and a year's worth of acc.u.mulated dust out of the plastic barrels, and the cleansing felt therapeutic. Then we repeatedly filled and emptied the wooden one with water so that the staves would swell and lock in the liquid that eventually would go inside. The last weekend of our stay, we helped with the amiable chaos of the family's annual grape harvest. Between the physical release and camaraderie, we were able to put our worries aside momentarily and let go in actual enjoyment.
Dressed in our worst clothes, John and I helped Joseph, Ann, Stephen, and Phoebe, and a couple of other family friends harvest the rows of purple grape that filled the gently sloping field to the west of the Natanson house. After sorting, we took turns climbing into one of the barrels and stomping the grapes; then we helped pour the sticky liquid into Joseph's plastic barrels, where it would ferment in the cellar, opposite our bedroom.
I took off my sandals that day, and after the first few moments of uneasiness-I had to banish the sensation, born no doubt from Halloween parties as a child, that my feet were somehow trampling eyeb.a.l.l.s-I stomped away with the rest of the crowd, my toes and soles feeling the skins of the dark purple grapes sliding off the fruit till they hit the solid bottom of the barrel. It was a sticky, fruity, juicy, buggy afternoon when we stomped, wine therapy at its best, not from the drinking but from the making, in a crowd of friends eager to enjoy the day. Neither John nor I, both exhausted and exhilarated, wanted that long day to end. That wine-making weekend marked the end of our three-month stay. It was time for us to go back to the city, back to making another stab at real life.
Late the next morning, when we arrived, Rome was its usual mayhem and chaos compared to the birdsong and hush of our Trevignano days. But once we carried our suitcases up the stairs to our new front door, our tiny apartment seemed cold, all echoes and silences, compared to the warm bustle and hubbub of the Natansons' lake house. We had each brought a single carry-on suitcase when we left New York in early July for what was to have been a monthlong vacation. Once we unpacked those two little bags, hung our few items of clothing on hangers, and tucked the rest into a chest of drawers, we had effectively moved in. We found ourselves looking at each other as if to say, "What now?"
I ran into each room, throwing open all seven of our windows. If we couldn't have the birdsong and hush from the lake house garden, if we couldn't have the warm bustle and hubbub of the Natansons' house in Trevignano, we would simply have to make do with the commotion and uproar of Rome. We were going to get honking cars, screeching buses, whining motorbikes, and the elevated decibel level of normal Roman conversations, whether we were ready for them or not.
It was not yet noon, so I knew I still had plenty of time to do some food shopping at the Campo dei Fiori, which was only a five-minute walk away. I knew that the waist-high wicker baskets and wooden shelves lining the Campo's bread shop would already be full: crusty round pagnotte pagnotte, long filoni, filoni, flat flat ciabatte, ciabatte, slim slim francesi, francesi, and puffy and puffy rosette, rosette, the standard lunch rolls that look like full-blown cabbage roses and come with a giant air pocket inside, to stuff with salami or cheese or a slice of grilled eggplant. the standard lunch rolls that look like full-blown cabbage roses and come with a giant air pocket inside, to stuff with salami or cheese or a slice of grilled eggplant.
The Campo's bakery is usually seething with customers, the most fanatic of whom may push their way in and out of the tiny shop twice a day to ensure a meal with just-baked bread. If I arrived at the right moment, one of the middle-aged countermen, in his white lab coat, might be en route from the oven room carrying the latest batch of pizza bianca pizza bianca, which the younger bakers, their shorts, T-shirts, hair, hands, and feet totally veiled in a floury mist, had just pulled from the blazing heat of the forno forno.
Roman bread, by and large still honest, contains no preservatives and remains truly fresh for only a few hours. Pizza bianca Pizza bianca, the simplest of Roman breads, is the most fleeting of them all, with a shelf life counted in minutes. Worked into a yard-long, foot-wide sheet, it is dribbled with olive oil, a shaking of salt and a sprinkling of rosemary. Then it is baked, briefly, until golden. At its best, just out of the oven, it is thin but not too thin, with a crusty top and bottom, and a soft, almost chewy center that is neither greasy nor pretzel-dry. It is then that it possesses a natural lightness and rustic sweetness that tastes better than nearly anything in the world. But when it is carelessly made or has sat too long, it can turn tough, heavy, doughy, or even sour, as if angry at being ignored.
Pulled from the oven on a long-handled wooden paddle, it is hacked into rectangles while still warm and sized according to the customer's hunger. The huge baker's knife whacks off first a single piece, and then that piece in two. In one motion the counterman claps the oiled sides together and wraps waxed paper around the bottom of the bundle, to keep fingers from getting greasy and to permit immediate eating, even before money changes hands. The best Roman bakeries turn it out in enormous quant.i.ties all day long, to give shoppers something to nibble on as they do their daily marketing, to get students to and from school without feeling faint. The smallest Italian bank-note in the early 1990s, a thousand-lire bill, then worth about seventy U.S. cents, used to buy a fair-sized slice, easily enough to tide one over till the next meal.
Like Roman students, I too had developed a wool-eee wool-eee for for pizza bianca pizza bianca before we moved to Warsaw. Long before I had even met John, I would leave the bakery with a day's worth of bread in my left hand and a slice of warm before we moved to Warsaw. Long before I had even met John, I would leave the bakery with a day's worth of bread in my left hand and a slice of warm pizza bianca pizza bianca in my right, to eat on my way home. I used to wonder what it was that made a plain piece of baked bread dough taste so good. It wasn't just its flavor or texture, nor its golden color or slightly salty tang. I liked the ritual that came with it: the comforting warmth of the bakery in the quiet, slow-motion atmosphere before the crowds arrived; the countermen chatting softly and companionably among themselves; the murmured greetings when a regular customer arrived; the clean, sacramental smell of baking wheat; the golden color of the finished loaves heaped on golden pinewood shelves; the whacking sound of bread knife on breadboard. All combined, like a father's hand around a child's, to promise safety. in my right, to eat on my way home. I used to wonder what it was that made a plain piece of baked bread dough taste so good. It wasn't just its flavor or texture, nor its golden color or slightly salty tang. I liked the ritual that came with it: the comforting warmth of the bakery in the quiet, slow-motion atmosphere before the crowds arrived; the countermen chatting softly and companionably among themselves; the murmured greetings when a regular customer arrived; the clean, sacramental smell of baking wheat; the golden color of the finished loaves heaped on golden pinewood shelves; the whacking sound of bread knife on breadboard. All combined, like a father's hand around a child's, to promise safety.
But pizza bianca pizza bianca was glorious, too, because it met some half-forgotten childhood standard of goodness. To eat a food reminiscent of some childhood treat, to eat a food that nudges strong childhood memories, is to return to the country, town, neighborhood, and family-to the very dinner table where we first encountered the edible world. " What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood?" the Chinese writer Lin Yutang asked last century. What else, indeed? was glorious, too, because it met some half-forgotten childhood standard of goodness. To eat a food reminiscent of some childhood treat, to eat a food that nudges strong childhood memories, is to return to the country, town, neighborhood, and family-to the very dinner table where we first encountered the edible world. " What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood?" the Chinese writer Lin Yutang asked last century. What else, indeed?
I bought two pieces, enough for a hasty lunch. I bought four very ripe figs too, and four slices of prosciutto crudo. prosciutto crudo. I could slice the warm figs and serve them with the ham, accompanied by the I could slice the warm figs and serve them with the ham, accompanied by the pizza bianca. pizza bianca. We wouldn't need another thing till supper. When I brought home the fixings for that first lunch in our new apartment, I had to spread it out on the bags in which I had carried it home, for the flat, though furnished, had nothing in the kitchen but stove, sink, and refrigerator. We went out to eat that night and the next, until we borrowed a car and drove to a discount shop on the edge of the city. We bought six of the most basic white restaurant plates and pasta bowls we could find and a half-dozen place settings of stainless steel cutlery. We bought one small and one large frying pan, a small saucepan, a spaghetti pot, a colander, a vegetable peeler, a cheese grater, a corkscrew, a can opener, and a good sharp kitchen knife that I still use to this day. We wouldn't need another thing till supper. When I brought home the fixings for that first lunch in our new apartment, I had to spread it out on the bags in which I had carried it home, for the flat, though furnished, had nothing in the kitchen but stove, sink, and refrigerator. We went out to eat that night and the next, until we borrowed a car and drove to a discount shop on the edge of the city. We bought six of the most basic white restaurant plates and pasta bowls we could find and a half-dozen place settings of stainless steel cutlery. We bought one small and one large frying pan, a small saucepan, a spaghetti pot, a colander, a vegetable peeler, a cheese grater, a corkscrew, a can opener, and a good sharp kitchen knife that I still use to this day.
Via Giulia, the street where our flat was situated, was laid out during the Renaissance as an artery for pilgrims to the Vatican. Running just a block from the tree-lined Tiber, it is full of historic palazzi and overpriced antiques shops; before the marriage that made her the Princess Casama.s.sima, Henry James's celebrated heroine Christina Light lived in a palace just across the road from our tiny flat. But despite our apartment's fine beamed ceilings and the high sheen on the few bits of antique furniture that graced our small rooms, I felt as if we were camping out.
Maybe that is why I threw myself back into the marketing and cooking I had so loved about Rome when we had first lived there. I prepared three meals a day that year in our narrow little kitchen, after buying whatever looked good in the market each morning. And like a potter centering clay on a spinning potter's wheel, the mere act of cooking centered me, kept me close, available, ready to help, kept us fed, kept me sufficiently focused on present tasks so that I wouldn't panic about the future, kept me going through the slow pa.s.sing of a string of bad days, weeks, and months. Our friend Lou presented me with a doorstop of a cookbook that year, Il Talismano della Felicita Il Talismano della Felicita-The Talisman of Happiness-one of Italy's food bibles. I never actually used it that year, but I liked its heft and solidity, sitting alone on my kitchen shelf. More than anything, I liked its name.
At the time of our move, I remained obtusely oblivious to the depth of John's illness, still naively hoping that his depression would magically disappear as suddenly as it had seemed to arrive, that once back in Rome, he would simply wake up one morning like his old self, eager to bound out of bed and race off to the office. Instead, despite intensive meetings with his new psychiatrist, three times a week, despite the total support he was receiving from his editors and colleagues at the Times Times, the move into the city only magnified the terrors and the darkness John was feeling.
Living an hour's drive north of Rome, on a crystalline lake surrounded by hillside pastures, had helped John block out the idea of work. Moving to Rome and living a five-minute walk away from the office meant the idea of work and duty, obligations and responsibilities, could not so easily be held at bay. Living with Joseph-a friend, not family-had also kept John on good behavior. Joseph's presence (like the children's presence) obliged John to put on the best face possible, no matter how bad he truly felt. Without that obligation, without a nonfamily audience, it seemed harder for John to put on the show of trying to soldier on. Didn't I deserve the same sort of "good behavior"? Of course. But I didn't realize it yet, or know how to demand it of him. That would come.
13.
At Table.
When I was little, my father, mother, brother and I ate virtually all our meals around a Shaker-style maple table, solid despite its spindly legs. If I do the math, I figure I ate nearly 15,000 meals at that kitchen table. It was just big enough to seat the four of us comfortably, and I never remember sitting at it alone. Even as I got older and often returned home late after swim team or softball practice or work, I never came home to an empty kitchen, which was where we always seemed to congregate. Even if my parents and brother had already finished their meal, they would return to the table to sit and talk with me as I ate the supper my mother had kept warm for me in the oven.
Grazing had not been invented back then, or if it had, it was a concept that had never made it past our door. We ate breakfasts together, the four of us seated around the kitchen table at seven-thirty a.m. Except for school days, when my brother and I brought sandwiches, fruit, and a cookie to school in brown paper bags, we ate lunch together as well, seated around the kitchen table shortly after noon.
My father's office was five minutes away, and he and my mother ate lunch together Monday through Friday, a togetherness my mother did not always find comforting. She regularly complained that by the time she had gotten the breakfast dishes washed, the beds made, and the house straightened, it was always just moments before noon, when my father would reappear, to eat his lunch with her and read through the mail and his Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal until he had to return to work. until he had to return to work.
A few hours later, we were all back at the same table, unfailingly eating supper together: meat, vegetable, and starch on a dinner plate, followed by a green salad with oil and vinegar in little wooden bowls, and fruit, sometime topped with vanilla ice cream, for dessert.
My father's family had eaten practically every meal of their lives together as well, the four of them tucked into a corner of the simple kitchen my grandfather had fitted out with a bright blue gas stove whose rounded shape resembled that of a plump nineteenth-century woodstove. Their kitchen table was my grandmother's work s.p.a.ce as well, since their turn-of-the-century kitchen had no counters or cabinets, only a narrow, sun-filled pantry full of handmade shelves. Angelina, my father's mother, would cover her kitchen table with an enormous wooden cutting board my grandfather had made, and I can still see and hear her beating a couple of eggs, warm from the henhouse, into a small hill of flour, making the tagliatelle, maltagliati maltagliati, and pappardelle pappardelle they loved to eat. they loved to eat.
My mother's family was no different, always together around their kitchen table at mealtimes, though rarely the four of them alone. Nearly always some cousin, aunt, uncle, friend, or neighbor who happened to drop by when food might be in the process of being served sat with them as well, especially during the Depression. My mother's mother did not seem to worry if she had enough to go around. When the guests outnumbered the available food, my grandmother would simply fill everyone up with pancakes. My mother, who always loved to dance, would regularly tap-dance for the crowd after dessert was served, but when I was older she confessed that while she loved dancing, she had always hated the constant stream of uninvited guests that her own mother had loved. In her sixties, my mother was happy to make vats of soup and deliver them to the elderly couple ailing next door, but she never invited them to eat at her table. Still, her generosity seems to have rebounded on my father, now the oldest man on the block. His younger neighbors take care of him the way my mother took care of that earlier generation, mowing his lawn, shoveling his walk, bringing him meals.
Sitting around the family table, sharing meal after meal, was one of the few habits both my parents' families shared. Apples and oranges they were from the beginning. Apples and oranges they stayed as long as they lived.
My father's parents-blue-eyed, fair-skinned childhood blonds -had emigrated from northern Italy, near Verona, in the early 1900s. But neither hungered for a new life in l'America. l'America. Both sailed looking back toward sh.o.r.e. Leone b.u.t.turini and his bride, Angelina, had a sweeter dream than democracy or riches or freedom: they ached for land, potential fields of their own one day in the peach-growing village of Pescantina, where Leone was born. Though the money they so carefully saved and sent home was inadvertently lost through currency fluctuations after World War I, though they resided on and owned two city lots of Connecticut soil for the rest of their long lives, though he eventually even became an American citizen, they always stayed utterly Italian. Both sailed looking back toward sh.o.r.e. Leone b.u.t.turini and his bride, Angelina, had a sweeter dream than democracy or riches or freedom: they ached for land, potential fields of their own one day in the peach-growing village of Pescantina, where Leone was born. Though the money they so carefully saved and sent home was inadvertently lost through currency fluctuations after World War I, though they resided on and owned two city lots of Connecticut soil for the rest of their long lives, though he eventually even became an American citizen, they always stayed utterly Italian.
My mother's parents-brown-eyed, olive-skinned, with thick, dark hair and a few rogue genes that produced the occasional blue-eyed cousin-rarely looked backward. Indeed, Jennie Comparato had no Italy to look back to at all, being the first of her eleven siblings and half siblings to be born not in Naples but on Mulberry Street in New York. Her husband, Antonio, from the dirt-poor Neapolitan hinterland, went through immigration at Ellis Island in 1906 with his parents, sister, and older brother, Pietro. Antonio came out Tony. Pietro came out Pete. But Pete and his parents and sister came out with one last name, Tony with another. Both brothers spent the rest of their ninety-odd years arguing placidly, but pointedly, over who left immigration with the right family name. Neither ever established which was correct. Neither, in the end, truly cared. Considering themselves Americans, what did a final vowel really matter?
Two sets of grandparents, two separate worlds, my mother's parents embracing America, my father's parents ignoring it. My mother's mother smelled of Faberge; my father's mother of Cocilana cough drops. My mother's mother wore snazzy high heels, sheer stockings, and fashionable dresses; my father's mother favored clunky lace-up shoes, thick cotton stockings, old-lady dresses before she was old.
My father's parents drank the wine my grandfather Leone made in the cellar from his own fat blue Concords, filled in with cases of California grapes. Leone's grapes grew on homemade iron-and-wire trellises that outlined their ma.s.sive vegetable garden and formed a shady arbor over the heavy wooden table and benches he had built to eat their summer meals al fresco. My mother's parents, perhaps convinced that wine would brand them forever as hopeless greenhorns, drank, when they drank at all, "Blood Marys," as Tony always called them. We always ate and drank with my mother's family or with my father's family, never both sides of the family at once. They were just too different to spend time together.
For months after we moved into Rome, John would hide himself in our bedroom and sob or cry at some point or points nearly every day. I felt the little ground we had gained in Trevignano had been lost. A ringing phone-an emblem of the outside world, his old job and life-was the most likely event to provoke the floods of sobs and tears. Some days John's sobs and tears were howls, which rang and echoed through the flat. Some days his sobs and tears were silent, accompanied by a heaving chest, clenched fists, and occasionally by the hollow, horrifying sound of his banging his head against the iron bedstead or the bedroom wall. Some days the sobs and tears were m.u.f.fled, when the sudden ring of our phone or doorbell caused such terror that he would burrow under the bedspread, pillows, blankets, and sheets, trembling uncontrollably until he felt the terror had pa.s.sed.
Worse than the sobs and tears, though, was John's silence. From the time I met him until the time of the shooting, he had never once stopped talking. It was the quality and the quant.i.ty of his talk that so drew me to him in the first place, and to lose that part of him was to lose a lot. Now he might grunt an answer if I pressed him, he might nod, but he did not converse. Had he been a quiet sort before his illness, it might not have been so difficult. But John had always loved to chat and talk, kibitz, and joke. To me it seemed as if John's normal effervescent self had been surgically excised, leaving only the sullen, somber sh.e.l.l of a stranger I could no longer even recognize.
It made me sullen and somber, too, and frightened. I never really wondered at that time whether everybody whose spouse struggled with depression felt the same way I did. I never even thought to pose the question to my father, who had been through five bouts of my mother's recurring depression, who called me unfailingly every Sunday to talk for an hour. But even if I never posed the question directly, I know now that my father was trying to respond to my worries whenever I complained to him how difficult it was to live with someone who was, for all intents and purposes, no longer mentally there, and who no longer reacted as if I were there, either. "Just remember, Paula," he would repeat endlessly, in a voice filled with concern for the two of us, "it's not John, it's the sickness."
As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, I felt increasingly helpless with each new spasm of terror John suffered. He was usually in bed, trying to nap, when one of these episodes started. I would hear him from the living room or kitchen, doing his best not to make much noise as he keened into the bed linens. I would listen a bit at first, hoping the terror might just pa.s.s this time, but when it did not pa.s.s-and it never pa.s.sed-I would go to him and try to calm him, with soft words or none at all. Often I simply encircled him with both my arms, an embrace meant to say he was not alone, that I would not let him go, that I would not let him be flung off into nothingness. But those embraces, I see only now, were meant as much for me as for him. If I held on tight enough, I hoped that he-and I-would hang on, too, and not be flung off this revolving globe the way my mother had been. If he hung on, maybe I could, too. The three meals I prepared for us and that we ate together each day were simply another kind of embrace, a way to remind him that he was not alone, that I was not abandoning him.
Nothing I ever said or did during these moments of panic and terror seemed to have any effect, positive or negative, on John. After a certain amount of time had pa.s.sed, the terrors seemed to die away of themselves. John would slowly turn slightly less frantic, then perhaps catch his breath. Once he caught his breath, the panic might begin to recede; once the panic began to recede, then slowly his breathing might calm; once his breathing would calm, he might even fall asleep, or feign it, his eyes shut, but his body still rigid, as if waiting for the next onslaught.
The rigidity of his body during the height of these terrors in turn terrified me. I felt as if I were watching a horror movie, as if an alien being had slipped into my husband's soul and sucked his spirit dry, and left his body filled with wood, stone, metal, or concrete instead of blood and guts, the pulse of life. During these months, whenever John moved, he walked with the stiff, rocking gait of a B-movie horror monster. He lumbered and lurched when he moved, his knees locked or nearly locked, and he rocked first to the right, then to the left, as he swung his legs first outward, then forward with each step he took.
Because everything was still in storage, we had few belongings when we moved back to Rome from Trevignano, just three changes of summer clothes and the half-dozen bright yellow bath towels and the few bits of kitchenware we had bought when we moved in. Yet I found I rarely missed any of our stored belongings. Our lack of possessions did not in any way mean that our daily life was simple, but rather that we had simplified our daily life. A much simplified life was all either of us could possibly handle, as we tried to make the psychological move from the vacationland security of Trevignano to the workaday chaos of Rome.
I never consciously chose to put aside my terror of what might be coming. I never consciously chose to stop looking ahead, as I always had, far into the future. But at some point, within weeks of moving back to bella Roma bella Roma, I found that I was more comfortable when I looked only as far as three meals ahead of myself. Before I even knew what was happening, it seemed I had found my comfort wandering through the food stalls that lined the Campo dei Fiori.
Cooking was my way of trying to make us both feel at home again, to make us feel as safe and nourished as we did as children, when we ate all our meals surrounded by utter familiarity and routine. During that year on the Via Giulia, I went to the Campo six days a week, to multiply the good I took away from each visit. I bought enough food to last for a day, two at most. Everything we ate seemed to have been picked just the night before, just for us. During that year, I cooked every comfort food from my childhood and John's: pastina in chicken broth for me, simple risotto or chicken baked with garlic, rosemary, and potato wedges for John. I bought every seasonal fruit and vegetable I could find; I catered to every wool-eee wool-eee that made itself known. that made itself known.
Talking to the vendors at the Campo, I learned to make Roman comfort food, too: oversized tomatoes stuffed with rice and herbs, and baked with potatoes; straccetti straccetti, or "little rags," of tasty beef, barely cooked in hot olive oil with garlic slivers and fresh rosemary, then topped with fresh, peppery rughetta rughetta; baby artichokes braised in olive oil, water, and handfuls of parsley and wild fresh mint, the artichokes so small and well trimmed that we could eat them whole, along with the long, narrow stem. Even today, just the thought of those old Roman dishes makes me long for them and the strength they gave me to face another day. It was during that year on the Via Giulia that food solidified as an emblem for us, of good times remembered from childhood, of healing in that stretch of trouble, of promise that we would once again have a future to enjoy, if only we could hang on till the fever of depression pa.s.sed.
Never mind that most days started badly, with a nightmare that would jerk me out of sleep so suddenly that it seemed as if a rifle had fired, a bomb had exploded, a siren had screamed in my brain. Never mind that my eyes would fly open in the darkness and I would awaken to find myself already sitting up, my hands in fists, my breath coming fast, one leg half out of the covers, ready for fight or flight, I never knew which. John would stir in his sleep at the commotion and I would lie back down, trying not to fidget while the dreams that had awakened me continued to run, fainter and fainter, in my head. For an hour I might lie there pretending to rest, but the effort would wake me so thoroughly that in the end there was nothing to do but get up and escape. I would dress, throw open the oversize bolts on our heavy front door, and walk the five minutes to the Campo.
Day after day, listening to the gulls and bells-for Rome, in the quiet of early morning, retains the medieval cacophony of a city of wheeling seagulls and pealing church bells-I would make my morning walk. Day after day, I found, my breathing would slow and my heart would stop racing shortly after I walked into that enormous cobblestoned rectangle of open s.p.a.ce. It might have been the uncharacteristic hush of early morning that soothed me. It might have been the comparative calm of the merchants, who at that hour would be companionably stacking endless wooden or cardboard flats of fruits, greens, vegetables, and roots in relative silence, adjusting their dirty white tarps or huge ombrelloni ombrelloni to keep the sun or occasional rain at bay. All I am sure of is that by the time I arrived at the Campo, I felt better than when I had slipped out of the flat, leaving John to toss, moan, and shout in the last hour or so of his ever-restless sleep. to keep the sun or occasional rain at bay. All I am sure of is that by the time I arrived at the Campo, I felt better than when I had slipped out of the flat, leaving John to toss, moan, and shout in the last hour or so of his ever-restless sleep.
The sun would be up, throwing a soft half-light over the cobblestoned piazza. Some of the vendors would still be swallowing their morning shot of caffe caffe as they unloaded the last of their produce. The oldest, the thick-fingered grandmothers in dark dresses whose children and grandchildren had long since taken over the running of the stand, would already be surrounded by cases of tangled, muddy greens: as they unloaded the last of their produce. The oldest, the thick-fingered grandmothers in dark dresses whose children and grandchildren had long since taken over the running of the stand, would already be surrounded by cases of tangled, muddy greens: rughetta, cicoria, spinaci, broccoletti, scarola rughetta, cicoria, spinaci, broccoletti, scarola. These they would strip, trim, wash, pick over, and otherwise prepare for the pot until it was time to close for the day.
I liked the Campo best then, when the light in the square was soft and pink, when everyone in it seemed unnaturally subdued, the vendors still fighting sleep rather than the demands of customers or the sun's fierce heat. Even at that hour, the smell of wood smoke and just-baked bread would be seeping out of the doors of the bakery at the northwest corner of the square. I liked to stroll among the vendors first, not buying immediately but searching out what looked best to bring home for that day.
A half-dozen fresh eggs, a bit of straw clinging to their sh.e.l.ls. We could eat a soft-boiled egg for breakfast, followed by thick slices of crusty bread from the bakery. Jam, for John, we had, but maybe some more b.u.t.ter from the dairy shop, along with a slice of Gorgonzola and a fresh mozzarella di bufala, mozzarella di bufala, chased and captured in the whey-filled bowl by the counterwoman's hand, then encased in a small plastic bag. A few late purple-skinned figs, perhaps, or a fat bunch of blue-black grapes, with just the right glossy sheen. chased and captured in the whey-filled bowl by the counterwoman's hand, then encased in a small plastic bag. A few late purple-skinned figs, perhaps, or a fat bunch of blue-black grapes, with just the right glossy sheen.
The figs, paired with a slice of coppa coppa, would be perfect for lunch along with a quick soup made from last night's leftovers. The grapes for dessert. And for dinner, spaghetti doused with a tomato sauce flavored with fresh basil, minced garlic, and olive oil, all barely cooked so that the garlic's taste stayed light and sweet. The pasta would be followed by thin scaloppine of pink veal, cooked quickly with a big, fresh sage leaf and a small piece of prosciutto crudo prosciutto crudo on top-so good they would fulfill the promise of their name, on top-so good they would fulfill the promise of their name, saltimbocca alla romana, saltimbocca alla romana, and truly seem to jump in one's mouth. A half-kilo of fresh and truly seem to jump in one's mouth. A half-kilo of fresh broccoletti broccoletti, their long, skinny, bitter stems parboiled, then sauteed for a few moments in hot olive oil, minced garlic, and a tiny, hot peperoncino rosso. peperoncino rosso. A small salad of tossed greens. A fat pear for dessert, with more of those blue-black grapes. A small salad of tossed greens. A fat pear for dessert, with more of those blue-black grapes.
Those few moments of marketing, in the early quiet of my Roman mornings, were the only moments of semi-normality I lived during those weeks and months after we moved back to Rome. Greeting the people who sold us our food, talking with them about what looked best, were my daily attempts to live like other people, to live a normal life as I always had. The tomatoes and broccoli; the baby artichokes and spinach; the mozzarella and scaloppine they sold me; everything I carried home, cooked, served, then ate three times a day at the tiny oak table in our dining room became my lifeline to normality. For even though John could not talk, he could eat, and the two of us-somehow-managed to eat most of our meals in a silence that was at least companionable. For the entire year we were there, those quiet meals at our narrow oak table were a thrice-daily truce. Not once did John experience an anxiety attack at table. Not once did he sob. Silent tears never ran down his cheeks. And once his doctor discontinued the medications that weren't helping anyway, his digestion and appet.i.te returned to normal. He may not have been able to talk at table, but neither did he act out his troubles. It all reminded me of his convalescence in Munich, when the doctor ordered him to eat so that his body would have the power to heal. It reminded me of my childhood illnesses, when after a week in bed I had suddenly gotten back my appet.i.te and couldn't wait to eat.
An hour after one of our mealtime truces, I might be back to spitting bullets or sinking into a funk of my own, or listening, panicked as ever, to John banging his head against our iron bedstead. But each of those companionable, if silent, meals we ate together helped keep us both in the same quiet if rocky orbit, instead of shooting us w.i.l.l.y-nilly into the blackness of inner s.p.a.ce.
Each morning I would plan our day's three meals by what appealed to me in the market. I rarely made a list, just searched the stalls for what looked best. I would slip the bags of produce, meat, bread, and dairy products over my arms and head home. I would pause every morning in Piazza Farnese to push open the heavy door of Santa Brigida and kneel in the tiny chapel whose nuns chanted the holy hours at various times of the day.
The chapel, with its flickering candles, was almost never empty, and I found myself drawn to it each morning, especially to the painting of a Madonna and Child on one of the side walls. The Madonna, serene and smiling-guilelessly, happily-at the babe in her arms, always seemed to calm my nerves. I never knew exactly why. It may have been because I would unconsciously become the child when I walked into the chapel and basked in the gaze of the mother who could smile serenely and guilelessly and happily at me. Or it may have been because I was looking for instruction on how to smile myself, serenely and guilelessly and happily, at the child I had never managed to have. Whatever the reason, I always left Santa Brigida with enough strength to go back home for another day.
On the very worst days, when John had had an exceptionally bad afternoon or night or week, I might go into the chapel for days in a row and simply kneel there, my bags in a heap at my feet, tears running down my cheeks. On those days I would sometimes find to my horror that I was not only crying but pounding my fist on the back of the pew in front of me.
Ironically, as the months rolled by and John remained dangerously ill, the banging of my fist on that pew slowly brought home the idea that it was not enough for John to see his doctor three times a week. I too needed help for myself, and could no longer stay-like the child I had been-waiting for my mother or husband to get better while I watched. I began to understand that I had to help force the issue or we both risked going under.
The truth is, the period of John's depression was more terrifying for me than when John was lying in the hospital in Romania, worse than when he was unconscious and nearly dead in the intensive-care unit in Munich. During those early days after the shooting, the John who was lying there physically wounded was still the John I had met and gotten to know, the John with whom I had fallen in love, the John whom I had married. But after all these months of depression, the John with whom I was living did not just seem a total stranger, he was was a total stranger, caught in a vise of darkness so crippling that I did not understand whether I could or should imagine a future with him alive or dead. a total stranger, caught in a vise of darkness so crippling that I did not understand whether I could or should imagine a future with him alive or dead.
It all came to a head one day on one of our occasional walks together through the city. Usually John would spend a part of every day alone, simply walking the streets of Rome's historic center. At the beginning John's walks were often just for the sake of motion, putting one foot in front of the other, often blindly, just to help make the sun go down faster, so that he could take his next round of medications and return to the oblivion of sleep.
But on this particular day, we were out on the streets together, and for whatever reason, I fell behind him on our path across the Piazza Trilussa in Trastevere, a neighborhood just across the Tiber from our apartment on the Via Giulia. I watched him, just ahead of me, walking like a stick figure, rigid, tense, knees locked, rocking from side to side as he made his way slowly across the piazza in front of me. And for the first time since he had fallen ill, I felt not a whit of pity or sorrow but only pure, murderous anger. Anger not just toward his illness or our circ.u.mstances but fully and directly toward him, for letting his illness utterly hijack our life.
Before I knew it, I had become the madman, and found myself howling at him at the top of my lungs in the middle of the piazza, screaming and crying that if he didn't stop walking like Frankenstein that very instant, everything would be over between us very soon.
John-fittingly, perhaps-has no recollection whatever of this scene in Piazza Trilussa. But I remember it vividly-the moment when, for me, at least, the logjam was broken; the moment when I stopped waiting for him to get better and simply started trying to live again, as normally as one can during the unearthly, erratic abnormality that pa.s.ses for everyday life during a family's imprisonment in depression.
14.
Pears.
Until he was about to turn ninety, my mother's father, Tony, rarely talked about Italy, the place from which his family had fled. Tony's Italy, when he mentioned it at all, meant a few scrawny goats-too few to feed a family-foraging on the steep, rocky hillsides of a poor village near Naples. Pressed to explain, Tony always demurred with a smile but in a tone that brooked no further questions: " It's better here, doll."
So when Tony told his two daughters that he wanted to celebrate his ninetieth birthday with a roast kid, cooked whole in a pit in the backyard "like in the old days," they were understandably flummoxed, for no pits had ever been dug in the backyards of their childhood, no goats ever roasted. My mother and aunt never understood their father's last big wool-eee, wool-eee, an old man's attempt to revisit the childhood he had shut off, the secrets and shames of his family's hard life on both sides of the Atlantic. an old man's attempt to revisit the childhood he had shut off, the secrets and shames of his family's hard life on both sides of the Atlantic.
My mother's family never talked about these secrets openly, but instead let slip whispers: how Tony's big brother, Pete, had lost most of his toes to burns as he slept near a campfire while tending the family's tiny flock one bitterly cold night; how their mother died young, shortly after they emigrated; how their new stepmother fed them only what was left after her own children had eaten; how my grandmother Jennie's good-hearted cousins, the Romanos, used to slip the brothers food from their tiny grocery, basically keeping them alive. I've always wondered how much of a role grat.i.tude played in Tony's decision to ask my grandmother to marry him, when she was only fifteen; I'll always wonder what provoked Tony's own descent into depression when he was already the father of two. All that has filtered down through the family's web of secrets was that he was unable to work for a couple of years, and that my grandmother, Jennie, took a factory job to keep the family solvent.
The only pleasant memory of Italy that Tony pa.s.sed down to us came when he was in his nineties. It was, of all things, the memory of the pears of his youth. I never thought to ask him if the pears he remembered came from his family's own tree or from some wealthy landowner's nearby orchard. For all I know, Tony's memory of giant Italian pears may have come from a glimpse of a fruit vendor as the family pa.s.sed a Neapolitan street market en route to the harbor from which their boat would leave for l'America l'America.
For whatever reason, Tony's memory of pears-"This big!" he would say, gesturing with his hands each time he spoke about them-struck a chord deep within me. Until I moved to Italy, I a.s.sumed he was dreaming an old man's dream when he spoke of those pears, that no pears on earth could ever be as big or juicy or richly flavored as the pears of his memory.
I was thirty-two when I first moved to Rome, and Tony, who outlived my grandmother by three days short of a year, had been dead for just a few months. It was early August when I moved, and the first fruits of that season's pear harvest were just coming into the city's string of neighborhood outdoor markets when I arrived. I hadn't thought about Tony's mythical pears for ages, until early one morning, at my tiny outdoor market near the Trevi Fountain, I stumbled across a wooden flat of pears so enormous, so perfectly greeny gold, that I could suddenly see Tony's plump, white hands moving in my mind, hear his gentle voice saying, once again, "This big!"
I bought a half-dozen of them, as if to confirm my grandfather's memory. I climbed the five flights of steep stairs to my tiny flat, then chose the biggest and ripest of the lot and placed it on one of my landlady's small white salad plates. I grabbed a small, sharp fruit knife and walked out to my back terrace, which overlooked a single, tall palm tree sheltered amid a warren of ochre-colored walls. I put the plate down on the table and realized with a start that Tony's memories had not been playing tricks on him. That pear was, in fact, "this big!"-plenty long to extend beyond the plate in each direction.
Tears suddenly started to roll down my cheeks, as Tony's voice and gesturing hands came back to life. Grief, which knows how to hide, and where, and for just how long, stopped hiding that morning. My grandmother Jennie had died a month after I moved to Europe, "of a broken heart when you left," my mother had told me hurriedly over the phone, a week after Jennie's death, after the wake and funeral ma.s.s, after the burial, after the family and friends had left. My mother, I felt keenly, was drawing blood to punish me for my flight, keeping my grandmother's death a secret until she was already buried.
Tony lasted 362 days longer, spending more and more of his afternoons and evenings at my parents' house, napping in his favorite chair by the window that overlooked Ash Creek. I never knew about the first funeral, and though my mother did not keep the news of my grandfather's death a secret, she did not want me to fly home for the second. Sitting on my little terrace in Rome, smelling my roses and jasmine and looking at the neighborhood's tall, sheltered date palm, I cut Tony's mythical pear into quarters, peeled it, cut out the seeds. Tears still running down my cheeks, I conducted my own private funeral and said good-bye to them both.
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