Keeping the Feast (15 page)

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 grass, 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 assailed 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 Kraków. 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
in 1948, he moved to Rome to work on special painted effects in more than eighty films, from
Two Women
to
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 basement 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 chores 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 chores 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 butter 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 chores, we met again for “elevenses,” milky coffee and a couple of simple, store-bought butter 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 sautéed 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,
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 damnably 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 Butturini, 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 sturdy, 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 shore; 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.