Keeping the Feast (16 page)

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 chores, 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,
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.

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.

M
ost 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 butter cookies that somehow had ended up in her repertoire of baked goods; a tin of her peanut butter cookies, still bearing the marks of the tines of her fork. Sometimes, in season, we walked out with a dozen of her fresh blueberry muffins. 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
. The minute we walked through the door, she would slip cherry-sized knobs 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 balls’ 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
(KEE-nah), which in itself is dialect for
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
, 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,
which my grandmother and mother always pronounced 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.

T
he 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 assumption into heaven; in other Catholic countries the feast is known as the Assumption, 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
’ executive editor, Joe Lelyveld, to ask another favor. John had made a glimmer of progress in Trevignano, but he was still desperately ill. He passionately 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
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
’ 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 reassured 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 chores 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 accumulated 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.