Keeping The Feast is a Webnovel created by Paula Butturini.
This lightnovel is currently completed.
My mother’s fears were legion, though I did not know that when I was young, because she hid them so well behind various shields: gaiety, ferocity, silence, anger, and most of all, feigned normality. I always thought that one of her favorite lines-“We’re so normal we’re weird”-was meant as a statement of fact, not desire. She didn’t tell me about her depressions until I was twenty-eight. She didn’t tell me they had returned until another dozen years had pa.s.sed. Her two revelations were both too little, too late.
N ine months after the shooting, we were still in America, waiting until John’s doctors felt he had recuperated enough to return to work. He was not the only one impatient to get back. The truth was, I wanted John better yesterday. I wanted his liver count normal. I wanted his yellow eyes white. I wanted him bounding out of bed in the morning, as he always had. I wanted him giggling and teasing, gabbing incessantly. I wanted him dancing me around the kitchen, spouting Latin jokes. I wanted him wearing a belt, not those ridiculous suspenders. I wanted him looking into my eyes, not off into s.p.a.ce. In short, I wanted John back, the man I married, so that we could return to the years-long honeymoon we had enjoyed before I was beaten, before he got shot. I was preternaturally impatient to get back to our real lives, not these fake lives we had been living, with him playing patient and me playing nurse. ine months after the shooting, we were still in America, waiting until John’s doctors felt he had recuperated enough to return to work. He was not the only one impatient to get back. The truth was, I wanted John better yesterday. I wanted his liver count normal. I wanted his yellow eyes white. I wanted him bounding out of bed in the morning, as he always had. I wanted him giggling and teasing, gabbing incessantly. I wanted him dancing me around the kitchen, spouting Latin jokes. I wanted him wearing a belt, not those ridiculous suspenders. I wanted him looking into my eyes, not off into s.p.a.ce. In short, I wanted John back, the man I married, so that we could return to the years-long honeymoon we had enjoyed before I was beaten, before he got shot. I was preternaturally impatient to get back to our real lives, not these fake lives we had been living, with him playing patient and me playing nurse.
John had no idea how impatient I was at the time, when my idea of a helpful spouse was still naivete itself: patience, fort.i.tude, endurance. Only now do I think that I was not acting like a spouse at all, but like a child, a child who watches her own mother suffering in a similar way but who feels powerless to help, afraid to do anything but watch and wait, lie low and hope.
We were fortunate that the editors at The New York Times The New York Times could not have been more accommodating. They kept telling John to take his time and recuperate fully, though none of us truly understood how long that would take. But we were blessed that John’s editors in New York had arranged for the Bonn bureau manager to find and set up a new office in a tree-lined neighborhood of West Berlin so that it would be ready when John arrived. It would have been beyond us both to even try. could not have been more accommodating. They kept telling John to take his time and recuperate fully, though none of us truly understood how long that would take. But we were blessed that John’s editors in New York had arranged for the Bonn bureau manager to find and set up a new office in a tree-lined neighborhood of West Berlin so that it would be ready when John arrived. It would have been beyond us both to even try.
Ever so slowly John’s physical condition improved, while even more slowly he began withdrawing into himself. Although neither of us recognized he was slipping into depression until he was already there, his overall mood continued to slide imperceptibly downward and inward, worsening when I lost my job and the financial burdens fell more heavily to him, improving superficially and temporarily only when Peter and Anna were with us. Two summers after the shooting, we finally managed a visit to Trevignano with the children, with high hopes for what it might do for all of us.
But that longed-for vacation was cut short when John was called back to work early, to cover the revolution in Yugoslavia. There, exposed to the same kind of urban warfare he had seen in Romania, he began experiencing vivid flashbacks to the night he was shot. I begged him in nightly phone conversations to tell the foreign desk he had to leave, but he refused, saying he had to take the bad a.s.signments with the good. Had I been listening to my heart and not to my head, I would have made the call to the desk myself and let them know what was going on. But I was afraid to interfere. I still feel that had I called then, had John been ordered out of harm’s way before Yugoslav snipers started shooting in the streets of Zagreb as Romanian snipers had shot in the streets of Timioara, we might have avoided years of woe. But I did not understand this at the time. I had yet to figure out what my role in John’s recovery would have to be.
At precisely the same time John began experiencing flashbacks in Yugoslavia, my parents called me to say that my mother’s clinical depression, which had been lying low for some thirty years, had returned unexpectedly. My mother-my own introduction to the woes that depression can bring to a family-tried everything her doctors prescribed. Electroshock therapy, which had unfailingly pulled her out of her earlier depressions, was out of fashion in the early 1990s, supplanted by new drugs that the big pharmaceutical concerns were churning out. My mother started medication immediately after seeking treatment, but after a few weeks her psychologist sent her to a psychiatrist, saying she was not responding and that she needed a doctor who himself could prescribe stronger drugs.
As the days and weeks of that sunny, warm autumn pa.s.sed, it was soon clear that the new drugs were not braking her descent, but in fact hastening it. Like John, she too spiraled downward and inward until, in the middle of a mid-November night, she slipped out of the house and into the cold, black waters of Ash Creek, the salt.w.a.ter tidal basin that lay at the foot of their street. By the time she was found, it was too late.
The shock of her death was worse than any of us could have imagined, a devastation of body and soul. “Heartsick,” just a word or cliche before, took on an unutterable reality after. I lived, heartsick and unhinged, for months. When I think back to that time of violent grief, I think always of waves: waves of grief like body blows that started each morning before my eyes had opened; waves of pain that would convulse gut, heart, and head day after day, night after night. Were there waves slapping against the sh.o.r.e the night she slipped into the water? Or was the tide, as it so often did in that sheltered bay, rising silently, pulled by the moon, just as my mother was pulled into the water by her illness?
Months later, when I thought I had finally hit bottom, I realized with horror that my mother’s death had taken on a virulent life of its own, infecting us all in our own ways. Her death helped push John back toward the depression he thought he had left safely behind the monastery walls three decades earlier. At the same time, however, her death would propel me to be on top of John’s case, to remember always where depression could lead. In that way, I think, she helped save him, too.
Throughout that long, disturbing autumn of my mother’s last bout with depression, I felt a growing ache to take her on my lap and in my arms as if she were a child, to hold her tight, to try communicating physically that she was not alone. When I think back on those unreal weeks, I see myself sitting on the floor of our Berlin bedroom, a phone receiver glued to my ear, night after night talking to my mother in Connecticut, night after night talking to John in whatever Eastern European hotel room he happened to be staying. It is tempting to think that my mother’s full-blown depression made me miss the signals of John’s incipient one. But I am certain I would have missed them in any case, just as my father had missed them at the beginning of my mother’s descent. Perhaps we missed these initial warning signs because both John and my mother unwound quietly and at a crawl, because both were used to fighting depressive feelings on their own and hiding so well the ones they could not master.
But ignorance and the silence that surrounds mental illness played an enormous role, too. Neither my father nor I had ever seen the list-available these days on countless websites, in doctors’ office pamphlet racks, in newspaper articles, in books-of textbook warning signs for depression. Neither of us knew such a list existed. And even though we had lived for decades with my mother’s repeated bouts of depression, we both were still shockingly unaware of depression’s potential power and fury. In fact, it may have been our basic familiarity with my mother’s depressive collapses in the early 1950s, when she was young, that contributed to our inability to see that this one was different. In her first four brushes with the illness, my mother suffered mightily, but after electroshock she always pulled through. When she collapsed again, no longer young, we were worried about her health, not her life. And all of us accepted what the doctors told us at the time, that drugs were now the best, most enlightened treatment. If the medical community had begun to discover cases of drug-resistant depression, we certainly had never heard of it.
I could only make sense of a few basics. My utterly prudish mother had left the house in nothing but her nightgown. My mother, always cold and shivery, had gone out on a frigid, rainy night without a coat and boots and scarf and hat. My mother, who loathed cold water to the point of giving up swimming even in August, had willingly walked or jumped or dived into Ash Creek in the middle of November. My mother, who prayed on her knees nightly before getting into bed, who feared her G.o.d perhaps as much as she loved him, had broken the great taboo on taking her own life.
Intellectually I understood nothing about my mother’s death at the time it happened, although intuitively I began to sense that her depression had been of a depth that only a fellow sufferer might have begun to imagine. Though the coroner’s report of her death rightly and logically says suicide, my gut knows today that it was not my mother who took her life. It was the depression that took her life, the chemical imbalances in her brain that caused the depression that took her life. My mother, all five feet, one inch of her, fought heroically for most of her seventy-three years against those chemical imbalances. She battled silently and unceasingly, more than I ever really understood until long after her death.
It has taken me nearly twenty years to lose the denial, anger, anguish, terror, and confusion I felt after her death. It has taken me nearly twenty years to discover the depths of my admiration for the battle she waged. It has taken me nearly twenty years to be able to say, with pride and with love, that she fought like the tiny sc.r.a.pper she was. Ave! Ave!
10.
Fruit Salad.
The Clam Box was Westport’s premier fish restaurant for most of my childhood. An enormous hulk of a building, painted white with dark green trim, it sat high and dry on the old Post Road, a couple of miles from the beach. No clam shack catering to the beach crowd, it offered fresh lobsters, shrimp, scrod, turbot, sole, steamers in their own broth, tiny, fried little-neck clams, raw cherrystones, even finnan haddie for the odd sort who enjoyed his fish smoked.
Waitresses were generally middle-aged except for the summer help, twenty-one-year-olds drawn to the pricey restaurant by the potential tips. We all wore dowdy white dresses, dowdier white ap.r.o.ns, and sensible white nurses’ shoes; long hair was pulled back off the face and coiled neatly into a bun or French twist. When Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who lived nearby, would slip in for an occasional meal, the white-haired Greek boss would immediately dispatch his eldest, dowdiest, and most circ.u.mspect waitress to their table. Even first-year servers like me knew that our job was not only not to stare, but to keep the occasional swooning fan at bay so that the Newmans could enjoy a good meal, undisturbed.
Except for the post-lunch lull, we were run off our feet on the job. But the tips were solid and I needed every nickel to pay for my first trip to Europe later that summer. Somehow my exhaustion would lift each night once I arrived home, sat down at the kitchen table with my parents, ate a dish of blueberries or a cut-up peach, and counted out my nightly take. I quickly found my rhythm, and the tips, the mainstay of my earnings, began piling up.
One night I got stuck with a client who had slipped past the radar of the chief hostess, the boss’s tall, skinny daughter. A man of late middle age, alone, he was not the usual Clam Box patron, though in his crisp suit and rep tie he was dressed like one. Single guests, especially men who arrived half lit, were normally seated at the counter, apart from the main dining room, where they could be watched and kept from disturbing their neighbors. This man was trying his best to appear sober, but even I, who had seen only the occasional drunken boy at a prom, could see he was far gone.
Trying to focus his eyes, he rasped out his drink order in a venomous whisper, a double Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks. He complained, in the softest of voices, about the size of the gla.s.s and the shape of the ice cubes when it arrived, then tasted it and quietly accused the house of pouring him a Johnnie Walker Red at the price of the Black. Gla.s.sy-eyed, he quietly demanded a second scotch while ordering his food, and complained bitterly in a low voice about every item I brought to his table, from the bread basket and salad, to dessert and coffee. Each time I approached, he would spew forth whispered vitriol. If I tried ignoring him, focusing on my four other tables, parties of four and six, he would threaten softly to “have my job.” I never thought to alert the boss’s daughter, and each time I had to deliver a new course or clear a plate from his table my stomach would knot.
By evening’s end I was not expecting a tip, just another quiet onslaught when I brought him his change. But the large quant.i.ty of food he had eaten must have soaked up some of the scotch he had drunk, for suddenly he seemed to have sobered up. “Sorry,” he mumbled, looking down at his hands. He left a wad of bills on the table before he walked out. Stuffing his tip uncounted into my ap.r.o.n pocket, I hurried to help with the usual cleanup once the last guests left.
I drove home seething and settled myself at the kitchen table with my mother and father, who always waited up for me. They liked to hear the stories of my day as I counted my tips, in those days much of it in small change. That night, I burst into tears as I told them about my drunk. My mother, always sensitive to frazzled nerves in anyone, suggested my father make me one of his Italian fruit salads while I figured my night’s take, nearly $20 from my four normal tables. While my father was busy cutting fresh fruit into a soup bowl, I reached into my ap.r.o.n pocket and pulled out my last tip. My mother’s eyes grew wide as I counted and kept counting: $26, far more than the cost of his meal, and a fortune for those days, when the minimum wage was $1.60 per hour. The windfall, however, had not been worth the agida, agida, or aggravation, and my stomach started churning as my mind replayed the evening. or aggravation, and my stomach started churning as my mind replayed the evening.
My mother tried to cheer me up, reminding me what I could do with a tip of that size, while my father whipped a few table-spoons of olive oil with lemon juice, salt, and lots of freshly ground black pepper to pour on the fruit. I can still hear my mother’s voice that night, trying to draw out my frustration, coax my tears away. I can still hear my father beating that sauce with a fork before he placed his fruit salad in front of me and joined my mother and me at the table. They were a formidable team when their children were involved, Team b.u.t.turini, as my brother would describe them when he grew up, a team with a game plan and determination. When we were good, both of them were always there, rooting us on; when we were bad, only one of them would play the heavy. Each of them believed that no child should ever have two parents angry with them at once. That night my mother coaxed me to talk and urged me to eat; my father cut up the fruit; they both watched me chew, both listened to me unwind, until by the end of the bowl I was no longer sputtering with indignation and pique. Once I had worked through that mountain of fruit, my anger was spent. I stuffed my night’s take into the cigar box where I h.o.a.rded my tips, kissed them good night, went upstairs, and slept without the slightest difficulty.
I still make that fruit salad even if the sectioning of the orange and the peeling and slicing of the rest of the fruit all take time. Somehow it seems like time well spent, for as long as you have a sharp knife, it is the sort of routine kitchen work that both calms the spirit and sets the appet.i.te in motion. What I like best is hearing the rhythmic clickety-clack of my fork-an echo of my father’s-beating against the little blue-and-white Italian ceramic bowl I always use to make the sauce. What I miss most is the sound of my mother’s voice, trying to cheer me up. Even today I cannot eat that fruit salad without thinking of my mother sitting across from me at our kitchen table, and my father standing at the countertop, both of them listening to me rant about a drunken customer who left me a tip big enough to pay for my meals for nearly a week when I got to Paris.
My father came to Berlin to spend the rest of the winter with us, so that he wouldn’t have to mourn alone in a small house that suddenly seemed too big. Near the end of his stay he was desperate for sunshine, and John, who had to travel for a week for work, urged the two of us to fly as far south as we could. We hopped a charter flight to southern Portugal, walked along cool but fiercely sunny beaches, ate in simple seaside restaurants. I can still taste the dry white port, served cold with a twist of lemon, that we drank as an aperitif that first night. It was the first time anything tasted good to me since my mother’s death-the first time anything had a taste at all. Whatever freshly caught seafood we ate that night satisfied our hunger and soothed our soul. The cheerful noise of the restaurant helped, too, the easy laughter of the tables around us somehow helping to lighten our spirits. We ended that meal, and every other meal that week, with an enormous, juice-filled orange, freshly peeled and sliced into rounds at our table. Each time our waiter would cut the skin away-always in one continuous spiraling peel that would slowly bob up and down like an oversize Slinky-I would think back to our kitchen in Connecticut, where my father prepared his special Italian fruit salad for me that night twenty years earlier, where my mother was sitting across from me at our kitchen table, trying her best to make me forget my drunken client. By the end of that week, my father and I began to be able to talk again, about nothing and everything, the way we used to do at table before, before there was a ” before” to consider.
It was in Portugal, four months after my mother’s death, that I first experienced the healing that can come from a beautiful place and its food, even if I wasn’t yet fully aware of it. The strong winter sunshine; the cloudless, deep blue skies; the salt air; the laughing gulls; the feel of cold sand on tender winter feet; and the simple, good food served forth without pretense, prepared similarly to the way my father or mother or I might have cooked it at home: all of it helped put an end to the physical shock of my mother’s death. The grieving, of course, had just begun, but it was no longer a grief fueled by adrenaline and physical panic. It may not sound like much, but it was my first real step out of shock.
John’s own descent into clinical depression was so very gradual, creeping at such a lifelessly glacial pace, that I did not see it coming until long after it had arrived. When I think back now to that period, I see that John, normally sociable, jovial, and easygoing, an inveterate teller of hopelessly old-fashioned jokes, was increasingly withdrawing into himself. Normally never happier than when he was deep in work on a story, he seemed stressed, pained, and exhausted by his work, his usual effervescence and intellectual excitement gone. Normally thoughtful, caring, comforting, he seemed unable to look beyond his own nose. All pleasure had left him.
It remains galling to me even today that I was so blind to what was occurring. My mother’s death had so recently made me see the degree to which I had misunderstood her, throughout my childhood and well into adulthood, had misunderstood the role her clinical depressions had played in her complicated nature and our complicated relationship. Now that I knew the truth, how could I be so blind to the same disease in my husband?
At the time it seemed to me as if it all happened in one weekend, a week before we were to move to yet another new posting, this one in Chicago. We had already packed our things, flown to the States, and signed a lease on an apartment. We were staying a few days at my father’s house when John basically stopped speaking and seemed to curl up inside himself; he had realized too late that he was unable to put the Atlantic between him and the children, unwilling to leave Europe after twenty-five years. The move to Chicago was clearly that final drop of water that makes a br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.s spill over, an image doctors often use to describe the onset of depression. The old, lively light in John’s eyes, which had been dimming since he began suffering the effects of hepat.i.tis B nearly two years earlier, simply went out completely that weekend. Just as when he had had hepat.i.tis, John’s internal body clock was turned upside down, and he began sleeping and dozing throughout the day, while lying awake, usually in a panic, during the night. Sometimes he would break into uncontrollable sobbing, sometimes he would simply sleep or pretend to sleep or lie in bed, rigid, eyes closed, fists clenched. He could not or would not talk, other than to make an occasional grunting response to a question. Once I alerted John’s editor to the situation, the Times Times immediately gave John a reprieve, put our move on hold, and helped John begin treatment with a doctor in New York. immediately gave John a reprieve, put our move on hold, and helped John begin treatment with a doctor in New York.
A friend gave me a reference for a doctor of my own, and the first time I walked into her office, I told her I needed to know whether I was about to slip into a depression myself. I gave her a quick recap of what had happened to us over the past couple of years; I told her that I was feeling extremely tense and nervous, to the point that I often felt light-headed, nearly dizzy, and that I had a sense at times of watching-warily and from outside myself-all that was going on in my life. In response to her questions, I told her I was still able to eat, still able to sleep and not particularly weepy. She listened intently, this older, gray-haired woman whom I instinctively took to, and what she told me kept me going for a very long time. She told me it was normal that I felt tense and nervous, given the number of extraordinarily painful events that had occurred in my life in recent years. She told me that what I needed, more than anything, was a change of luck. She and I talked several more times that spring and early summer, and her commonsense approach to our predicament never failed to calm my nerves.
And then, as July approached, John seized on the idea of flying to Italy for vacation to see if a return to Europe might help brake his descent into full-blown depression. His doctor agreed on two conditions: that John continue taking the medicines the doctor had prescribed, and that they talk regularly and often by telephone. Once John agreed, we quickly made plans to fly back to Rome, meet Peter and Anna, and head north to Trevignano Romano for our usual summer stay.
11.
Soup.
When I was little, I loathed the canned soups my mother occasionally served for Sat.u.r.day lunch. Tomato soup had a sharp, cloying aftertaste that caught at the back of my throat. Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom made me gag. I hated the soggy texture of the vegetables in Progresso’s Minestrone enough to try to swallow them like pills, without chewing. I might grudgingly eat a small bowl of canned chicken soup with its mushy rice, but somehow, to me at least, all canned soups tasted more of the can or preservatives than they did of real food.
To this day, I don’t know if I was spoiled by the honest taste of homemade soups or just plain spoiled. Perhaps I simply had an overdeveloped sense of taste. But I do know that until I turned seven or eight, if it wasn’t my paternal grandmother’s chicken soup, or my mother’s copy of it-homemade, and often featuring one of my grandmother’s worn-out hens-I simply could not get it down.
Decades later, even the thought of my grandmother’s chicken soup still makes me close my eyes and take a deep breath of antic.i.p.ation: clear, golden broth with all the fat skimmed off after the pot had spent the night chilling. Angelina’s chicken soup smelled of onion, carrot, celery, celery leaves, garlic, handfuls of parsley, and a single bay leaf. It was served with tiny stars of store-bought pastina or, even better, with a few of her homemade fettuccine, chopped roughly into bite-size pieces and barely cooked.
At its best, my grandmother’s chicken soup would come out of the fridge in a Jell-O-like state. I loved to watch it, thick and clear, all aquiver, as my mother or father ladled it out of the kettle into a smaller pot for heating. When the ladle dipped into our battered soup kettle, the soup sometimes made a sucking noise, which I loved to listen for when I was little. But what I liked best was the resounding, rea.s.suring “plop” a ladleful of jelled chicken broth made when it fell into the smaller pot. I still don’t understand how the gelatin in the bones of the chicken necks and backs leach out into the soup, but I knew even then that it was the one thing in the world I liked best to eat.
Later, I fell in love with the rest of the family repertoire of homemade soups: my grandmother’s bean soup, started with salt pork, onions, carrots, and celery, minced together so finely that it turned into a paste; my mother’s split-pea soup, made only after a holiday supper yielded a meaty ham bone; her turkey soup, dark, strong, and made only once a year, after the Thanksgiving carca.s.s had been picked nearly clean; and finally her onion soup, made with a mountain of finely sliced onions that sweated and cooked over the lowest of flames, then simmered in quarts of her best broth. Each of those soups filled the entire house with its own aroma and whetted my appet.i.te so sharply that often I had to beg a tiny bowl of it before we sat down to eat.
I still have the recipes for all those soups, and like all the cooking of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, recipes-precise recipes-existed for just about everything any of us made. My mother cooked by the book. My father cooked by the book. And I, even in first grade, cooked by the book. I still have my yellowing children’s cookbooks, in tatters now: Mary Alden’s Cookbook for Children, Mary Alden’s Cookbook for Children, which must have been put out by Quaker, as nearly every other recipe includes Quaker-brand oats, cornmeal, or puffed wheat; and which must have been put out by Quaker, as nearly every other recipe includes Quaker-brand oats, cornmeal, or puffed wheat; and Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls, a first edition from General Mills, whose recipes feature the brand’s flours, not to mention its mixes for cakes, m.u.f.fins, biscuits, and frostings. I cooked my way through both of those books by the time I was ten, and my mother made my children’s meatloaf recipe for decades. We both learned early to avoid any recipe pretending to be Italian; neither the Quaker man nor Betty Crocker had a clue to Italian food.
The first supper I ever made for my mother and me-strategically planned so that the initial efforts of a seven-year-old occurred on the one night a month my father had a dinner meeting-came from Betty Crocker. My mother, famous for her impatience, had the great good sense to leave me alone in the kitchen. She retired to the living room, where she promised to be available to field any questions. Alone then, I browned chopped onion, ground beef, and salt in a tablespoon of fat, sprinkled the mixture with flour, then cooked it briefly with milk. Served over mashed potatoes, “Saucy Hamburger Crumble” disappointed as much as it delighted. Nearly fifty years later, my shame over the look of the gloppy, gray goo that I had produced nearly overpowered my pride in having actually cooked an entire supper by myself. Despite its blandness, the meal didn’t taste half as bad as it looked. Even a bad recipe has its uses: “Saucy Hamburger Crumble” was an unforgettable way to learn that food tastes better when it looks appealing.
When we landed at Rome’s airport shortly after dawn, John was deeply and clinically depressed, heavily medicated, still half asleep from the long overnight flight. His eyes-not his own eyes, but a stranger’s eyes that had mysteriously taken up residence in his head-sometimes glittered as they darted nervously from side to side. At other times, these stranger’s eyes-at once terrified and terrifying-appeared dull, lifeless, and unseeing, as if they were turned so far inward that no light from the outer world could possibly find its way in.
Waiting for Peter and Anna’s flight to arrive from Germany, John was trying his utmost to appear “normal” or at least as “normal” as possible under the circ.u.mstances. But his agitation was palpable. He ground his teeth. He did not speak. He worked his lips nervously, pursing and relaxing them uncontrollably. Even when the children appeared, his smile was, like his eyes, a stranger’s, crooked and frozen. But the children hugged and kissed him w.i.l.l.y-nilly, and we managed to find our rental car and pile our four small bags into its tiny trunk. We headed northeast, past the welcoming umbrella pines that still line the airport approach road, past the herds of fat sheep that used to graze on the parched fields, past the red-tiled roofs of old stone farmhouses that have since given way to high-tech factories and office buildings.
I do not remember if we sang on the way, as we always did (and still do), the songs and nursery rhymes of the children’s babyhood: “Froggy Would A-Wooing Go,” “Goosey, Goosey, Gander,” ” I Know an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly,” an hour’s worth of others. I do not remember if John spoke or slept, if the children were quiet or if they chattered.
All I remember is cresting the hill near the castle in Bracciano and seeing the sparkling lake spread out, round and crystalline blue, with our destination, the former fishing village of Trevignano Romano, on the far north side. I remember suddenly praying that the view; the house; the long talks and occasional dinners shared with our friends Ann and Joseph; the mornings of reading, drawing, and Ping-Pong; the afternoons of swimming and reading on the beach; our long, lazy meals on our wisteria-choked terrace; our strolls along the lakeside promenade; our long nights of solid sleep-that each of the moments we had for years enjoyed there would somehow help John’s horrors cease. As I drove along the winding lake road, I couldn’t wait to restart our habitual lakeside rhythms: our late breakfasts and very late lunches; our daily descent to the beach when the sun was well past its peak; a quick stop in the village to pick up a few bits of food for dinner on the terrace, where we would watch the fierce light mellow, then slowly fail. Only then would we make our one important decision of the day-whether the evening’s entertainment meant a round of Monopoly or another descent to the lake for a gelato and walk on the promenade before we went to bed. The Natansons’ simple guesthouse, gray with light blue shutters, had neither television nor phone, but around bedtime, if the wind was right, we could just make out the sound of a Verdi opera floating over the dark garden from Joseph’s ancient wooden radio. Neither of us ever found a better lullaby.
As soon as we drove onto the long, winding dirt track that led to Ann and Joseph’s pie-shaped property, the hilltop’s two resident dogs started barking their greetings and escorting the car. The chestnut trees-real chestnuts, not horse chestnuts-that lined the track already seemed weighted down with what appeared to be a b.u.mper crop. The brambles were thick and dusty, and I could see a profusion of blackberries, not yet ripe. The little peach tree, which produced ugly but succulent fruit, perfect for jam, was loaded with small green globes. We could not yet see what Anna always called Apricot Heaven, the tiny orchard of gnarled apricot trees that stood on a sloping terrace below a high rock wall that ran just in front of the house. But once we kissed Ann and Joseph h.e.l.lo, once we unpacked and went out to explore, we saw that the apricot trees were groaning with ripe fruit and we heard the yellow jackets buzzing madly, drunk on apricot nectar.
That was the July I entirely gave up cooking by the book. I mean that literally; my recipes and cookbooks-not to mention our furniture and clothes and virtually all of our earthly belongings-were in dozens of cardboard cartons, packed in Berlin in April and now sitting in a warehouse in Virginia, waiting for word to be moved to Chicago. As it happened, everything we owned stayed in that Virginia warehouse for two and a half years.
But when I say that I stopped cooking by the book, I mean it figuratively as well. Everything about our old life seemed to be in storage, somewhere far, far away. Our old life-a life of incessant work, deadlines, stories, interviews, and research; a busy, fulfilling life bubbling over with the children, family, friends, concerts, plays, movies, travel, reading, exploring-was suddenly on hold. John’s downward slide did not happen in a vacuum. Everything we had or knew or loved seemed bent on sliding down that dark, steep slope after him. We were here in Italy trying to stop that slide.
We tried to explain to Peter and Anna, seventeen and eleven then, that their daddy was ill, suffering a depression that was a delayed reaction to the shooting, though we had neither the vocabulary nor the expertise at that time to explain it very well. But even the youngest child is far wiser than most adults could ever believe, and if they did not always fully understand our attempts to explain their father’s illness, they could see it clearly for themselves.
Their daddy, who normally would sing to them, tell them his own father’s jokes from the 1930s, read to or with them, play Ping-Pong, sketch with Anna or talk world history with Peter, their normal daddy, the world’s fastest and most precise Monopoly banker, suddenly wasn’t there. He did not sing. Did not tell jokes. Could not read. Was too dizzy to play Ping-Pong, even in the shade. Had no interest in sketching. Or talking world history. Our prizewinning Monopoly banker could no longer make change, nor count out banknotes. He could not remember what he or anybody else had just said. Daddy’s body was there but somehow Daddy was not. This impostor daddy had all he could do to stay awake and occasionally focus his eyes upon them.
That said, John never stopped trying to be in good form for the three weeks the children were with us. But as our July vacation neared its end, and Peter and Anna prepared to fly back to Bonn and we were to fly back to New York, John dug in his heels and announced that he could not and would not go back to the States. He told me he feared he would spiral downward out of control if he went back. He asked me to call the Times Times’ executive editor in New York, Joe Lelyveld, and tell him that he felt his only chance at getting better lay in Italy, where he had spent so much happy time, where he would not be so far from Peter and Anna, where he, for whatever reason, felt somewhat safe.
Ann and Joseph had new guests arriving in August who would be staying the rest of the summer in the guesthouse we always rented. But they invited John and me to stay on as long as we liked in the extra bedroom of their own house, whose two windows looked out on their vineyard. John seized on their offer, and when I called New York, Joe agreed we could finish out the summer in Italy, to see if the sunshine, swimming, friends, and food might have a positive effect.
At the end of July, the children and I headed back to the airport, where I put them on the plane to Germany. I drove back to Trevignano slowly, with dread, knowing that all the energy John had expended trying to act as normal as possible for Peter and Anna-which was not normal at all, of course-would leave him doubly exhausted once they left.
He barely spoke when I returned. He packed his carry-on bag with his three knitted shirts, an extra pair of Bermudas, a pair of trousers, a bathing suit, and underwear, and carried it across the garden to our new quarters. I packed my little carry-on bag with my few things, cleaned up the house, and followed him.
It was a Sunday, and as usual, Ann and Joseph were serving up one of their standard lunchtime feasts, lasagne from the local pasta shop in the village and Ann’s famous Stretchy Chicken, a large hen generally stuffed with sausage meat, cubes of dry bread, sage and parsley from the garden, and various bits-onions, garlic, and celery-from her vegetable bin. (Its name came from the skill of the carver, their son, Stephen, whose slim knife could stretch the meat from any hen to fit the number of guests.) We sat down with the rest of the crowd. I ate the lasagne and moved on to the chicken and green beans, which were followed by a huge green salad. I ate homemade apple tart with a spoonful of gelato on the side, then drank a tiny cup of decaffeinated caff e caff e. Normally a big eater, John only picked at his food. The drugs he was taking for the depression played havoc with his digestion; a thin slice of chicken breast with a few forkfuls of boiled white rice was all he could handle.
After the meal, hosts and guests alike took the usual Sunday siesta, resting on lounge chairs, sofas, or beds in the cool of the thick-walled house or the shade of the plant-filled terrace. A short nap was the only thing possible in that fierce, midday August heat. Even the dogs slept. Only the honeybees droned on, the sole creatures capable of moving. Everybody else listened to their bodies and dozed, drowsy from the food, wine, heat, and sun. Later, when the worst of the heat had dissipated, we all gradually awakened, with that charge of energy that comes from a serious afternoon snooze. John alone remained lethargic, from the depression as much as from the drugs he was taking to fight it. Lethargic or not, we drove down the steeply curved mountain road to the lake, joining the rest of the Sunday bathers returning to the beach for a late-afternoon swim.
My father called me every Sunday afternoon of that difficult summer, when he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, when my brother’s childhood kidney disease had suddenly flared up. Week after week I had no good news to report, but my father always seemed to be able to dig down into his experience with my mother’s depressions to find something to tell me to help me keep going. If I complained that the man I was living with was not the man I had married-that the man who never stopped talking, revealing, joking, laughing since we had met had suddenly gone silent in my presence, that all our old ease and delight had turned into awkwardness and dismay-my father’s basic response was simple: “You’ve got to remember, it’s not John doing this, it’s the sickness.” It was a phrase I found myself repeating, like a mantra, but initially at least with little conviction and through gritted teeth. Still, it was those calls from my father, and my brother, too, that I looked forward to all week, and that-along with the Natansons’ attention-kept me from despair.
I wish I could say that I knew back then that Trevignano was the perfect potion for both of us, that it kept me cheerful and upbeat in the face of John’s worsening illness, that it reminded me of all the happy summers we had spent there in the past. But I can’t. Thinking of all our happy summers there in the past just brought home how unhappy I felt in that present, nine months after my mother’s death. What I wanted was my old life, when my mother was alive, when I brought home a monthly paycheck from a job I loved, when I lived with my real husband, not some impostor. While I knew that no amount of Trevignano sunshine, no amount of Ann’s good soup or Joseph’s excellent conversation could magically grant any of my desires, I could still think of no better place to try to heal.
Unconsciously, I was using our large stock of good memories from Trevignano to push away my fears about what would come next, what we would do if The New York Times The New York Times’ inst.i.tutional patience ran out before John healed. I found that if I focused only on the present, if I banished all thoughts of our suddenly uncertain future, I could get through a day. Each day I knew I just needed to get through that day. Nothing more. At some point I seemed to break it down even further. I had to get through the morning. I had to get through the afternoon. I had to get through the evening, and I had to get through the night. Meals punctuated the first three tasks, sleep the last. Without consciously knowing it, I began marking the pa.s.sage of a day by its meals. Suppers began to mean that John and I both had gotten through another day.
Italian suppers are traditionally light since the main meal is usually eaten at midday, and Sundays in Trevignano usually ended with a bowl of Ann’s trademark vegetable soup, followed by an omelet or a slice of ham, green salad, and finally, fresh fruit. I marveled at Ann’s soups and how she would dig deep into the recesses of her tiny refrigerator or pantry and pull out all the bits and pieces of vegetables that had eluded her during the weekend and would not survive till she returned the following Friday night. Ann would start whirling around her tiny kitchen, a sunny corner of the house’s main room, madly chopping anything she could find: an onion, a wilted leek or two, three tired carrots, a stalk or two of celery, some leftover zucchini, maybe a bowl of green beans, a slightly wizened bell pepper, a handful of Swiss chard or spinach-anything and everything, save beets, got cut up Sunday evening, thrown into the bottom of her ancient pressure cooker with a bit of olive oil and handfuls of herbs from the garden, and sauteed quickly until lightly browned. Then she would add salt and pepper and cover it with plenty of cold water, seal the pot, and let it cook until we were all back at the table, eager to eat again as the evening coolness descended.
Ann’s suppertime soups were always light, tasty, and unique, since the contents of her refrigerator differed from week to week. We used to joke that, like our old housekeeper in Poland, Ann could have made delicious soup even if she had access only to gra.s.s, herbs, and a few cups of clear water. Ann’s intuitive style of cooking-a harum-scarum whipping up of whatever ingredients she happened to have on hand into a delicious soup, pasta sauce, or chicken stuffing-was anti-recipe, the opposite of the rigid cookbook method I had grown up with. Since all my cookbooks were locked in a warehouse in Virginia, it was exactly the sort of unintended cooking lesson I needed. Like Ann, I started improvising in the kitchen, just as we found ourselves improvising in our life. We didn’t know it yet, but we were writing a new script for our new life.
At this point during his illness, John could barely speak, but Ann and Joseph and their grown children, Stephen and Phoebe, had a gift for talking to him as if nothing were wrong. Their ordinary conversations pulled John along, kept him in the orbit of normality, even if he felt that he was spinning out of control. Somehow their talk-from art and films to political gossip and worries about aphids on the roses or worms among the tomatoes-kept John tied to the reality of the present, even if he was hard pressed to respond. Tears could be welling in his eyes or running down his cheeks, but Ann or Joseph or Phoebe or Stephen would just carry on talking to him as if those tears were not there. Their redoubled chatter, whatever John’s mental state, was, perhaps paradoxically, a sign of their deepest care.
Joseph was especially gifted at drawing John out of the blackness that a.s.sailed him. A born raconteur, his intellectual barn-storming had been honed by his father, who required each of his four children to deliver at least one amusing story per meal. Though born into an old banking family in Poland, Joseph was studying art history at l’Ecole du Louvre in Paris when World War II broke out. He joined the Polish Army in exile and was among the Allied forces evacuated from Norway after the battle of Narvik in June 1940. Two of Joseph’s three sisters were still alive, in Poland, but he had vowed not to return as long as the Communists were in power. Now that the Communists had been ousted, he was already toying with the idea of mounting a traveling exhibition of his paintings throughout the country.
Joseph, whose slender, six-foot-four frame was crowned by a mop of silver hair, loved to carry on long and, given John’s silence, mostly one-sided conversations with John, sometimes in Polish, or Italian, or English, and often in all three. Joseph was working halfheartedly on a book of memoirs, and in the years before John became ill, he loved to pick John’s brain about the new Poland while telling him about his own youth in Warsaw and Krakow. Joseph, eighty-three that summer, talked readily about his life in Scotland and England after the war, when he had written books cataloguing Gothic and early Christian ivories. After working in London on The Red Shoes The Red Shoes in 1948, he moved to Rome to work on special painted effects in more than eighty films, from in 1948, he moved to Rome to work on special painted effects in more than eighty films, from Two Women Two Women to to The Name of the Rose The Name of the Rose, with directors such as Fellini, Zeffirelli, Pasolini, and his beloved De Sica. Joseph spoke endlessly and lovingly about his favorite novelists, such as the Brazilian Jorge Amado, and scornfully about abstract painters, whom he judged incapable of producing representational art. Only when coaxed would he discuss his own paintings and sketches: portraits, landscapes, still lifes and surreal dreamscapes.
During these endless weeks of illness, when summer slowly leached into fall, John remembers encouraging Joseph to push ahead on his memoirs, even though neither Ann nor the children spoke a word of Polish, in which he was writing them. To encourage Joseph, as well as to give himself a pastime during his illness, John began translating into English the neatly typewritten chapters Joseph already had completed. Joseph never asked him to take on this project, which was crucial, since it meant that the task was stress-free, done not under orders but for the sheer joy of exercising the brain.
John would spend an hour or so each day up in the bedroom loft that had been Stephen and Phoebe’s room when they were little, sitting at a small table and speaking his translation into an old tape recorder Phoebe had found for him. The idea was not so much to give the family an idea of what Joseph was writing but to give John the opportunity to benefit from the power of good work. Those taped translations, quivery voice and all, helped John lose himself for short periods and lessened the force of his affliction. It was a labor that took him out of his illness and briefly placed him back among the healthy, rather than among the tormented.
Joseph eventually finished his memoirs, but endless delays by his Polish publisher prevented him from ever seeing them in print. The book came out in Poland shortly before he died in 2003, at the age of ninety-four, and a copy arrived in Rome just after his funeral. Phoebe later sent us our own copy of the book, telling us that Joseph basically wrote it for John, since John was his only real reader and the only one who encouraged him to finish it.
During the three months that John and I lived in Ann and Joseph’s sunlit bas.e.m.e.nt bedroom, Joseph’s constant telling of stories, memories, tales, and adventures-related whether John answered or not-never let John completely slip away into the darkness of his thoughts. Normally Ann, Stephen, and Phoebe had to return to Rome to work, but Joseph, long retired, remained at Trevignano most of the time, painting, tending his vineyard, making the family wine, overseeing the olive harvest, doing endless ch.o.r.es from morning till night.
During our stay, Joseph spent less time than usual puttering in his vineyard or inspecting his few olive trees, his small apricot orchard, or his beehives, since he spent long periods of the day talking with John. The two men, both long and lanky, three decades apart in age, would sit like bookends on the shady terrace or inside the house’s big common room. Joseph’s voice produced a steady murmur, punctuated by an occasional hoot of laughter. That John was largely incapable of contributing much to the conversation did not seem to trouble Joseph, who was generally happy in front of an intelligent audience, no matter how small. They would break off reluctantly when ch.o.r.es finally called, though John began helping Joseph, as much as Joseph would let him, repairing the odd lamp or handing Joseph the tools needed to fix an errant grapevine. Like the translating of Joseph’s memoirs, it was stress-free busywork that was an enormous help in getting John through the day without panic.
John and I quickly fell into a routine of meeting Joseph on the terrace that overlooked the lake to eat our meals together. We started around eight, with thick slices of crusty country bread, with b.u.t.ter and jams from the garden’s fruit trees, perhaps a bit of cheese or yogurt with honey from the hives that stood below the house, and mugs of strong, milky tea. After working in the garden or doing other small ch.o.r.es, we met again for “elevenses,” milky coffee and a couple of simple, store-bought b.u.t.ter cookies, so we could keep our hunger at bay till the main midday meal about one p.m. I happily took on the cooking: a simple pasta or risotto to start; then some sauteed veal or chicken and a vegetable from the garden; a green salad tossed with olive oil, lemon, and sugar-as Joseph liked it-then fruit, followed by the inevitable siesta.
After we awakened, I would drive John down to town, where we would walk along the lake in silence-he was unable to talk with me, although sometimes he managed to respond briefly to an occasional question. Sometimes we would take a short swim. As evening came on, we would drive back up to Ann and Joseph’s property, and I would prepare a small meal, usually starting with one of the many minestrine, minestrine, light water- or broth-based vegetable soups that I was beginning to throw together, as Ann did. John could barely get down a few mouthfuls. light water- or broth-based vegetable soups that I was beginning to throw together, as Ann did. John could barely get down a few mouthfuls.
The drugs he was taking-various combinations were tried and rejected, as one after the other provided no relief from the blackness he felt-played havoc with his digestion. The doctors never found a drug or combination of drugs that lightened John’s depression. Eventually John’s doctor in New York, with whom he was having twice-weekly therapy sessions by phone, began explaining to us the concept of drug-resistant depression, a surprisingly widespread variant that the big drug companies do not often address in their advertising. But the doctor felt it was wise to continue experimenting with various drugs in the hope that one would finally kick in and alleviate the worst of John’s symptoms. In the end, the only drugs that ever did what they were meant to do were old-fashioned antianxiety medicines, useful in moments of crisis. Like my mother, John had been helped by electroconvulsive therapy during his original depression thirty years earlier, but the treatment was no longer available in Italy, which in the interim had banned its use.
Although Joseph always turned in early, he loved to listen to opera while propped up in bed reading. When Joseph said good night, John and I would head downstairs to our bedroom, past the sage plant that was as big as an old Volkswagen Beetle, just off the main cellar workshop. The workshop was filled from floor to ceiling with tools, paints, art supplies, winemaking equipment, lawn mowers, easels, workbenches, ladders; endless boxes and jars of screws, nails, bolts, and washers; and a general hodgepodge of miscellaneous gear.
Every night as we descended those stairs to get ready for bed, I could feel myself seize up. During the daytime I, like John, could distract myself from our situation; there was nothing like weeding a garden or preparing a meal or reading a fat book in the shade of a tree to focus my mind on the here and now, to head off worries about some possibly frightening future. But whenever I wasn’t distracted, I was finding it near impossible to be around John, for his collapse into suffering and silence unnerved me profoundly. I knew the man I had married was at least temporarily gone; I could not bear to think I might have lost him forever. I had just lost my mother forever to the same illness; it seemed d.a.m.nably unfair that I was facing it again so soon, this time with my husband.
It never occurred to me at that point to think about leaving John because he had become ill; I had promised long before we took our official marriage vows that I would never let him drift off into aloneness as he had in Germany. That promise, more than anything, is what likely kept us together, along with the fiercely stubborn streak I had so grudgingly admired in my father’s mother. Also at play was my own divorce. When my first husband told me he wanted out, my sense of self was shattered. I didn’t want to change roles and walk out on John.
My parents’ relationship must have affected my thinking, too, though it wasn’t something I thought about consciously. Still, I could not imagine how helpless my mother would have been had my father left her when I was born and she first took ill. And even though I did not yet understand my father’s halting steps toward getting over my mother’s death, I could sense that he was on the right path when he began explaining how-despite the finale-his marriage to my mother had in the ultimate reckoning been a warm, happy, and productive union-Team b.u.t.turini, as my brother liked to say.
How lucky John and I were to have older long-married friends, such as the Schanches in Florida and Ann and Joseph in Italy! These were friends whose marriages had never been of the garden variety, friends who were bighearted enough, open enough, warm enough to take us in when we needed somewhere to stay, friends who fed us, feted us, unconsciously reminded us of the worth of battling together through whatever came along. How lucky we were that Ann could shout at Joseph on occasion when he wouldn’t let her get a word in edgewise, how lucky we were to see him switch from petulance to delight at the words he finally heard her say. To be a comfort to one’s spouse, to be comforted by one’s spouse, to delight-and to growl-at one’s beloved, to find joy in both the delighting and the growling: that is my idea of a st.u.r.dy, happy marriage. When it works, it is like a prayer: finding and being utterly oneself and communicating that true self to another.
How lucky we were to have had those months of heat and sun with Ann and Joseph, where daytime was a balm. Outside, in the ever-present strong sunshine, as I weeded a patch of garden, picked a few ripe tomatoes for lunch, or briefly lost myself in a book, I could have moments of near peace. Just as John, listening to Joseph during their frequent daytime meetings, could be brought out of the darkness within him, toward the real world of light.
Upstairs, in the light, with Ann and Joseph, I felt safe and supported, never abandoned. But as night came on, as we descended the steps to the cellar, all the terror I saw in John’s eyes-or, better said, all the terror I saw in the eyes of that stranger masquerading as my husband-came flooding into my head.
In the daytime our bedroom felt absolutely cheerful, the walls covered with half a dozen of Joseph’s early paintings, the sun pouring in through its two wide windows, which faced southwest, toward the vineyards, from which Joseph always made the family wine. I had grown up around the maze of my grandfather’s grapevines and had never given them a second thought. But at night, Joseph’s vines, far more gnarled than Joseph himself, even if less than half his age, turned sinister for me. Every time I closed my eyes in that room I would dream about those vines. In nightmare after nightmare I saw myself coming around a corner of the house and finding John’s body, stiff and lifeless, hanging off some improbably tall branch, his limbs as twisted and gnarled as the grapevines themselves. Even in daylight, I was afraid of opening the cellar door and finding John’s body, swaying slightly off a jerry-rigged scaffold. By nightfall I was terrified, even when we descended those stairs together.
I do not know why my mind was so focused on death by hanging. The lake, extraordinarily deep, would seem a more likely possibility for someone thinking about taking his life. Romans flock to the sea in summer, and largely avoid lakes, viewing them as sad, gloomy spots. Perhaps it was my mother’s death by drowning that kept me from envisioning John’s lifeless body floating facedown close to sh.o.r.e; I had already been down that road and could not even imagine going down it again. All I know is that when my fears for his life surfaced, it was always a hanging body my mind summoned forth. A friend once suggested that it might have been that John’s depression, like my mother’s, loomed like a noose around my own neck-and life. But I can’t say for sure.
Neither of us slept well those weeks, no matter how much manual labor we accomplished during the day. We were eager to help Joseph with his ch.o.r.es, to pay him and Ann back at least partly for their kindness in letting us stay on with them. But I think we also were hoping that some of the heavy garden work, coupled with the walks by the lake and the afternoon swims, might translate into more tranquil nights, some restful sleep, an easing of the nightmares that haunted us both. As it happened, physical effort was a pointless exercise. No matter how much we tried to wear ourselves out during the day, our nights remained a terror, the heavy, leaden frame for an endless series of horrors dreamed, horrors dreaded.
Nightmares aside, John’s memories of those months in Trevignano are remarkably positive, given his clinical depression, and certainly more positive than mine. He can remember the psychological terrors of those weeks and the myriad side effects of the drugs he was taking: the stomach pains, the digestive complaints, the skin eruptions, the frequent episodes when his upper lip would suddenly blow up like a balloon. But today his mind focuses elsewhere when he recalls those endless summer-to-fall days: on digging and raking in the gardens, on picking the grapes, on helping Joseph make wine, on listening to Joseph’s reminiscences, on forcing his mind to translate Joseph’s memoirs. As black as he felt, it was also paradise, he tells me. Joseph was his medicine, he says.
Our minds remember differently. When John recalls our late-afternoon walks on the lakeside promenade, he remembers the glorious golden light of a day in early fall, the way it played and sparkled on the choppy waves that appeared like clockwork with the ponentino, ponentino, the freshening little west wind that blows up dependably toward the end of the day. the freshening little west wind that blows up dependably toward the end of the day.
My memories of those three months in Trevignano are more complicated. I have fond memories of Ann whirling about in her kitchen, talking about photography or lamenting the state of her tennis game, even as her hands flew and she threw together a fabulous meal. I loved seeing Joseph work at his easel, watching the oils he dabbed on the canvas turn so quickly into a vivid forest scene filled with four girls, hair flying and arms linked, as they danced in the golden light that filtered through the trees. I loved the relief I felt when I would hear John’s voice upstairs in the loft, forcing himself to concentrate on Joseph’s memoirs.