A Freewheelin' Time (14 page)

Part Two

Fate

Small tall fragile still climbing upward down a hill legs that carry body prone hands that linger soft like stone at the bottom glad to find feet to rest with more to climb

(NOTEBOOK ENTRY, 1962)

Italy
and
Indecision

My mother and Fred,
who had married earlier in the year and had moved to his place in New Jersey, were planning a trip to France and Italy in June 1962 and my mother decided to take me with her. She wanted to revive the plans she had made for me to go to school in Italy after I graduated from high school—plans that had been destroyed by the car accident in March 1961.

But my life had changed in the last year.

Now it was a difficult choice for me: going to Italy meant leaving Bob and the life I was living in New York. It was a big decision, and no matter which choice I made, it would have a lasting impact. If I stayed, I might regret the opportunity missed for the second time. Before the car accident wiped out the dream of going to live in Italy, I had really relished the idea, but things were different now. I would be away from my love and my life.

I drove friends nuts asking them what they thought I should do. Terri Thal and Sylvia Tyson said the same thing: It’s a good opportunity to go to Europe, and if you don’t take it you might regret it. You will be back, and if this relationship is meant to last it will, even if you are gone for a time.

I wrung my hands and agonized. Bob waited me out. He tried not to make it difficult for me by pushing me to stay. It was my decision, he said, but he would much rather I didn’t go. He was really angry at Terri, though, for not reinforcing his view that I not leave him.

My mother did the opposite. When she pushed for me to go, I was nonplussed by her sudden interest in my life and well-being. My history with her made it hard to believe she was sincere. But I told myself that maybe I should accept her sincerity since she seemed genuinely happy with Fred and finally had financial security after some very hard times. She might be all right for real.

On the other hand, I wondered if her motivation to yank me out of my life might be to show her new husband that she was concerned about her wayward eighteen-year-old daughter. Fred knew where I was living but had no inkling I was “living in sin” with Bob. He was a respectable professor and an ex-navy officer who was no doubt put off by the freewheeling life her youngest daughter led. In any case, I knew my mother did not approve of Bob at all. He paid her no homage and she paid him none. They saw through each other in some way that had nothing to do with me.

In the end, I went mainly to stop the chatter of indecision inside my head. The tickets, reservations, and plans for a school in Perugia that had been made, confirmed, and paid for mostly by Fred were also hard to turn down, even though they’d been presented to me as a fait accompli. Fred and my mother had booked passage on the
Rotterdam,
leaving New York on June 9, 1962, and arriving in Le Havre, France, a week later. After a few days in Paris (Paris!), we would drive down to a town in the south of France where Fred’s son and daughter-in-law and her family lived. We’d spend a day or two with them, then drive through Switzerland to Italy over the Alps. It was an enticing itinerary but also a very long trip, and I had lingering worries about spending all that time with my mother and Fred.

N
either Bob nor I quite realized the implications of a departure that would lead to a long separation. We joked about the passengers I would have to spend a week with on a floating hotel. When the ship was ready to sail and it was time for visitors to disembark, we were still joking as we said good-bye. But wisps of sadness and foreboding enveloped me as I watched him walk to the stairs, then turn and smile and wave. The ship’s foghorn sounded over and over as the ocean liner began slowly pulling away from the dock, sliding out to sea toward the horizon. The people waving from shore were getting smaller and smaller until they were no longer visible.

I spent most of the voyage in a state of numbness. I wandered about the ship looking at the ocean during the day and watching it change color as the sky slipped into afternoon and into evening and into night. I watched the stars take over the sky and fill the horizon as the ocean turned an opaque black that made it look menacing and primordial.

I kept to myself, reading or drawing. I crawled out of my shell when I wandered into a group of kids my age listening to a young man play the guitar and sing folk songs. I hung out with them a bit and attempted to teach the guitar player the song Bob had written recently called “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Even though I stumbled over some of the words, I remembered the melody well enough to sing it to him, but since I can’t carry a tune he didn’t really learn it.

I
n Paris I was so happy to find a letter from Bob waiting for me at the hotel. I answered it right away. He described the ship sailing off and watching me, as I had watched him, getting smaller and smaller.

The drive through the French countryside was beautiful, but I barely noticed it. My spirits lifted during the time we spent with the French family Fred’s son had married into. They lived well. I remember sitting at a long table with other people in addition to the three of us and being served endless dishes of delicious food. A different wine was poured for each course and a sorbet to cleanse the palate was eaten between the meat and the fish courses. What a glorious way to live!

On the drive from France into Switzerland, my mother told stories from the time she lived in Paris toward the end of the 1930s, before the Second World War. It was after her first husband had drowned and she didn’t care about anything anymore and was willing to take risks with her own life. She went to Paris to work with a group of young Communists who were helping Italians escape from Fascist Italy. American passports donated by Italian Americans were altered and then smuggled into Italy. She became a courier, delivering the forged passports to a contact in Spain or in Italy. Italian partisans who wanted to join the International Brigades going to Spain to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War also used the passports.

As we got closer to the Swiss town of Montreux, the subject switched to poetry. Because my mother had read poetry to me as a child, I sensed the rhythm in language before I could understand the meaning of the words. The dramatic and romantic poems of Lord Byron became one of my youthful favorites. On a rocky island rising out of the water on Lake Léman in Montreux stood the twelfth-century castle of Chillon. Byron had written a poem called “The Prisoner of Chillon,” about a political prisoner held in the dungeons below the castle, and I wanted to visit it.

An inscribed gift from Bob

That day we seemed to have the castle to ourselves. I recited what I could remember of “The Prisoner of Chillon” and, although it was hardly fitting, “She Walks in Beauty,” the only other Byron poem I knew by heart. The prisons were dank dungeons carved from the rock that supported the castle’s foundation; prisoners were chained there for years on end. Byron’s poem was about a real person, François Bonivard, a lay official at a priory in Geneva who spoke out in favor of the Reformation and was rewarded by the Duke of Savoy with a sentence of six years shackled to a stone pillar. “The Prisoner of Chillon” spoke of the glory of sacrifice for a cause.

The words of Byron, Shelley, Keats and of the many other writers who had traveled to Italy in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth were good company as we drove over the Alps and into Italy.

A
fter traveling through landscapes I had seen reproduced in Renaissance paintings my whole life, we stayed in Florence, where I nearly fainted before the powerful unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo, not to mention the actual statue of David at the Galleria dell’Accademia. As I walked over one of the bridges that cross the Arno River, I thought of my uncle Peter and his recitations of Dante encountering his adored Beatrice.

Finally we made it to the medieval hill town of Perugia, in the center of Italy, between Florence and Rome. Perugia has a long history of hard and bloody battles fought against various popes. In the 1500s tall towers and spires were constructed by the nobility and the wealthy commercial class as symbols of their wealth and power, the same reasons skyscrapers are built today (Trump Tower in New York City is an example). The nobility were contesting the power of the Vatican, which ruled the Papal States, so the Church as a reprisal destroyed the towers, dismantling them and using the stones to build an underground city cum fortress. This would serve as fortification against future invaders who dared threaten its omnipotence. The Papal States and the states controlled by the great noble families—the Medici, the Sforza, and in Umbria the Baglioni—were constantly at war over power and control of the land that would become a united Italy about three centuries later, thanks to Garibaldi.

It is also interesting to note that in the regions of Umbria—of which Perugia is the capital—and Tuscany, unsalted bread is made to this day. The citizens refused to use salt when the Vatican levied a hefty tax on it in the 1540s. For the Papal States to tax salt, a prime resource that was as vital to food preservation as refrigeration became in the nineteenth century, was enough to provoke rebellion.

M
y mother and Fred were on their way to Sardinia. Fred was a devout Italophile who hoped to live in Italy when he retired from teaching. The decorous gentleman with his Anglo-Saxon ways had found his Anna Magnani, and he desired nothing but to live in her country of origin. He planned to buy a house in Sardinia and arrange to teach for half the year in semiretirement in the United States and live the other six months in Italy. Their plan now was to leave me in Perugia and continue their trip after the day or two it took to get me settled. They did just that.

The road trip was over, and suddenly I found myself in a strange town, with a room in a
pensione
on a street named Corso Garibaldi. I was enrolled in a three-month Italian language course at L’Università per Stranieri, the University for Foreigners.

Students came here from all over the world to learn Italian and take courses in Italian history and culture. Classes were conducted entirely in Italian, an excellent method of learning a language by complete immersion. The Italian course I was enrolled in would begin in a week. In the interim I would find my way as best I could. I had a sinking sensation that I had fallen for my mother’s wicked scheme to get me away from Bob—whom she hated, I now saw clearly—and away from my vagabond life with him in Greenwich Village, just to impress her new straight-up, Waspy professor husband. I felt sick.

Meals were included at the
pensione
and served at specific times, the signora who ran it explained before I went off to my room to unpack. I must have done some unpacking, but suddenly I was overcome by a feeling of anxiety that left me unable to move. I sat frozen on the edge of the bed with my hands in my lap like dead weights. My feet didn’t feel as though they were part of my body. I must have sat like that for hours.

Mealtimes came and went. At some point that day, or maybe the next morning, someone knocked on my door and asked me if I was all right. I wasn’t, but I said I was,
grazie,
and then like a zombie I went to the meal that was being served then—whatever it was. After sitting quietly and watching everyone having a fine time together, I excused myself and went back to my room to sleep.

Three days passed this way. By the fourth, I felt less numb: a sense of place and surroundings crept back in. Life was reentering my body. I had no towel and was in need of one. My hair was dirty. I was hungry. I wanted to write to Bob and let him know where I was. I missed him terribly. The shock of being on my own in this strange place where I had only a limited knowledge of the language and knew absolutely no one was terrifying. It is as if everything that had happened in my entire life came to a full stop in this little room in this medieval hill town in the country of Italy, the homeland of my family.

I looked up the word
towel
in my pocket dictionary:
asciugamano.
Oh my—how could I possibly pronounce that? I wasn’t sure I would be able to speak at all, so I underlined the word and, clutching the dictionary, I went out into the street, where everywhere people were going about their business. I joined the flow of people walking in one direction, hoping I would eventually pass a store with an
asciugamano
in the window that I could just point to rather than ask for.