Keeping the Feast (17 page)

Dressed in our worst clothes, John and I helped Joseph, Ann, Stephen, and Phoebe, and a couple of other family friends harvest the rows of purple grape that filled the gently sloping field to the west of the Natanson house. After sorting, we took turns climbing into one of the barrels and stomping the grapes; then we helped pour the sticky liquid into Joseph’s plastic barrels, where it would ferment in the cellar, opposite our bedroom.

I took off my sandals that day, and after the first few moments of uneasiness—I had to banish the sensation, born no doubt from Halloween parties as a child, that my feet were somehow trampling eyeballs—I stomped away with the rest of the crowd, my toes and soles feeling the skins of the dark purple grapes sliding off the fruit till they hit the solid bottom of the barrel. It was a sticky, fruity, juicy, buggy afternoon when we stomped, wine therapy at its best, not from the drinking but from the making, in a crowd of friends eager to enjoy the day. Neither John nor I, both exhausted and exhilarated, wanted that long day to end. That wine-making weekend marked the end of our three-month stay. It was time for us to go back to the city, back to making another stab at real life.

Late the next morning, when we arrived, Rome was its usual mayhem and chaos compared to the birdsong and hush of our Trevignano days. But once we carried our suitcases up the stairs to our new front door, our tiny apartment seemed cold, all echoes and silences, compared to the warm bustle and hubbub of the Natansons’ lake house. We had each brought a single carry-on suitcase when we left New York in early July for what was to have been a monthlong vacation. Once we unpacked those two little bags, hung our few items of clothing on hangers, and tucked the rest into a chest of drawers, we had effectively moved in. We found ourselves looking at each other as if to say, “What now?”

I ran into each room, throwing open all seven of our windows. If we couldn’t have the birdsong and hush from the lake house garden, if we couldn’t have the warm bustle and hubbub of the Natansons’ house in Trevignano, we would simply have to make do with the commotion and uproar of Rome. We were going to get honking cars, screeching buses, whining motorbikes, and the elevated decibel level of normal Roman conversations, whether we were ready for them or not.

It was not yet noon, so I knew I still had plenty of time to do some food shopping at the Campo dei Fiori, which was only a five-minute walk away. I knew that the waist-high wicker baskets and wooden shelves lining the Campo’s bread shop would already be full: crusty round
pagnotte
, long
filoni,
flat
ciabatte,
slim
francesi,
and puffy
rosette,
the standard lunch rolls that look like full-blown cabbage roses and come with a giant air pocket inside, to stuff with salami or cheese or a slice of grilled eggplant.

The Campo’s bakery is usually seething with customers, the most fanatic of whom may push their way in and out of the tiny shop twice a day to ensure a meal with just-baked bread. If I arrived at the right moment, one of the middle-aged countermen, in his white lab coat, might be en route from the oven room carrying the latest batch of
pizza bianca
, which the younger bakers, their shorts, T-shirts, hair, hands, and feet totally veiled in a floury mist, had just pulled from the blazing heat of the
forno
.

Roman bread, by and large still honest, contains no preservatives and remains truly fresh for only a few hours.
Pizza bianca
, the simplest of Roman breads, is the most fleeting of them all, with a shelf life counted in minutes. Worked into a yard-long, foot-wide sheet, it is dribbled with olive oil, a shaking of salt and a sprinkling of rosemary. Then it is baked, briefly, until golden. At its best, just out of the oven, it is thin but not too thin, with a crusty top and bottom, and a soft, almost chewy center that is neither greasy nor pretzel-dry. It is then that it possesses a natural lightness and rustic sweetness that tastes better than nearly anything in the world. But when it is carelessly made or has sat too long, it can turn tough, heavy, doughy, or even sour, as if angry at being ignored.

Pulled from the oven on a long-handled wooden paddle, it is hacked into rectangles while still warm and sized according to the customer’s hunger. The huge baker’s knife whacks off first a single piece, and then that piece in two. In one motion the counterman claps the oiled sides together and wraps waxed paper around the bottom of the bundle, to keep fingers from getting greasy and to permit immediate eating, even before money changes hands. The best Roman bakeries turn it out in enormous quantities all day long, to give shoppers something to nibble on as they do their daily marketing, to get students to and from school without feeling faint. The smallest Italian bank-note in the early 1990s, a thousand-lire bill, then worth about seventy U.S. cents, used to buy a fair-sized slice, easily enough to tide one over till the next meal.

Like Roman students, I too had developed a
wool-eee
for
pizza bianca
before we moved to Warsaw. Long before I had even met John, I would leave the bakery with a day’s worth of bread in my left hand and a slice of warm
pizza bianca
in my right, to eat on my way home. I used to wonder what it was that made a plain piece of baked bread dough taste so good. It wasn’t just its flavor or texture, nor its golden color or slightly salty tang. I liked the ritual that came with it: the comforting warmth of the bakery in the quiet, slow-motion atmosphere before the crowds arrived; the countermen chatting softly and companionably among themselves; the murmured greetings when a regular customer arrived; the clean, sacramental smell of baking wheat; the golden color of the finished loaves heaped on golden pinewood shelves; the whacking sound of bread knife on breadboard. All combined, like a father’s hand around a child’s, to promise safety.

But
pizza bianca
was glorious, too, because it met some half-forgotten childhood standard of goodness. To eat a food reminiscent of some childhood treat, to eat a food that nudges strong childhood memories, is to return to the country, town, neighborhood, and family—to the very dinner table where we first encountered the edible world. “ What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood?” the Chinese writer Lin Yutang asked last century. What else, indeed?

I bought two pieces, enough for a hasty lunch. I bought four very ripe figs too, and four slices of
prosciutto crudo.
I could slice the warm figs and serve them with the ham, accompanied by the
pizza bianca.
We wouldn’t need another thing till supper. When I brought home the fixings for that first lunch in our new apartment, I had to spread it out on the bags in which I had carried it home, for the flat, though furnished, had nothing in the kitchen but stove, sink, and refrigerator. We went out to eat that night and the next, until we borrowed a car and drove to a discount shop on the edge of the city. We bought six of the most basic white restaurant plates and pasta bowls we could find and a half-dozen place settings of stainless steel cutlery. We bought one small and one large frying pan, a small saucepan, a spaghetti pot, a colander, a vegetable peeler, a cheese grater, a corkscrew, a can opener, and a good sharp kitchen knife that I still use to this day.

Via Giulia, the street where our flat was situated, was laid out during the Renaissance as an artery for pilgrims to the Vatican. Running just a block from the tree-lined Tiber, it is full of historic palazzi and overpriced antiques shops; before the marriage that made her the Princess Casamassima, Henry James’s celebrated heroine Christina Light lived in a palace just across the road from our tiny flat. But despite our apartment’s fine beamed ceilings and the high sheen on the few bits of antique furniture that graced our small rooms, I felt as if we were camping out.

Maybe that is why I threw myself back into the marketing and cooking I had so loved about Rome when we had first lived there. I prepared three meals a day that year in our narrow little kitchen, after buying whatever looked good in the market each morning. And like a potter centering clay on a spinning potter’s wheel, the mere act of cooking centered me, kept me close, available, ready to help, kept us fed, kept me sufficiently focused on present tasks so that I wouldn’t panic about the future, kept me going through the slow passing of a string of bad days, weeks, and months. Our friend Lou presented me with a doorstop of a cookbook that year,
Il Talismano della Felicità
—The Talisman of Happiness—one of Italy’s food bibles. I never actually used it that year, but I liked its heft and solidity, sitting alone on my kitchen shelf. More than anything, I liked its name.

At the time of our move, I remained obtusely oblivious to the depth of John’s illness, still naively hoping that his depression would magically disappear as suddenly as it had seemed to arrive, that once back in Rome, he would simply wake up one morning like his old self, eager to bound out of bed and race off to the office. Instead, despite intensive meetings with his new psychiatrist, three times a week, despite the total support he was receiving from his editors and colleagues at the
Times
, the move into the city only magnified the terrors and the darkness John was feeling.

Living an hour’s drive north of Rome, on a crystalline lake surrounded by hillside pastures, had helped John block out the idea of work. Moving to Rome and living a five-minute walk away from the office meant the idea of work and duty, obligations and responsibilities, could not so easily be held at bay. Living with Joseph—a friend, not family—had also kept John on good behavior. Joseph’s presence (like the children’s presence) obliged John to put on the best face possible, no matter how bad he truly felt. Without that obligation, without a nonfamily audience, it seemed harder for John to put on the show of trying to soldier on. Didn’t I deserve the same sort of “good behavior”? Of course. But I didn’t realize it yet, or know how to demand it of him. That would come.

W
hen I was little, my father, mother, brother and I ate virtually all our meals around a Shaker-style maple table, solid despite its spindly legs. If I do the math, I figure I ate nearly 15,000 meals at that kitchen table. It was just big enough to seat the four of us comfortably, and I never remember sitting at it alone. Even as I got older and often returned home late after swim team or softball practice or work, I never came home to an empty kitchen, which was where we always seemed to congregate. Even if my parents and brother had already finished their meal, they would return to the table to sit and talk with me as I ate the supper my mother had kept warm for me in the oven.

Grazing had not been invented back then, or if it had, it was a concept that had never made it past our door. We ate breakfasts together, the four of us seated around the kitchen table at seven-thirty a.m. Except for school days, when my brother and I brought sandwiches, fruit, and a cookie to school in brown paper bags, we ate lunch together as well, seated around the kitchen table shortly after noon.

My father’s office was five minutes away, and he and my mother ate lunch together Monday through Friday, a togetherness my mother did not always find comforting. She regularly complained that by the time she had gotten the breakfast dishes washed, the beds made, and the house straightened, it was always just moments before noon, when my father would reappear, to eat his lunch with her and read through the mail and his
Wall Street Journal
until he had to return to work.

A few hours later, we were all back at the same table, unfailingly eating supper together: meat, vegetable, and starch on a dinner plate, followed by a green salad with oil and vinegar in little wooden bowls, and fruit, sometime topped with vanilla ice cream, for dessert.

My father’s family had eaten practically every meal of their lives together as well, the four of them tucked into a corner of the simple kitchen my grandfather had fitted out with a bright blue gas stove whose rounded shape resembled that of a plump nineteenth-century woodstove. Their kitchen table was my grandmother’s work space as well, since their turn-of-the-century kitchen had no counters or cabinets, only a narrow, sun-filled pantry full of handmade shelves. Angelina, my father’s mother, would cover her kitchen table with an enormous wooden cutting board my grandfather had made, and I can still see and hear her beating a couple of eggs, warm from the henhouse, into a small hill of flour, making the tagliatelle,
maltagliati
, and
pappardelle
they loved to eat.

My mother’s family was no different, always together around their kitchen table at mealtimes, though rarely the four of them alone. Nearly always some cousin, aunt, uncle, friend, or neighbor who happened to drop by when food might be in the process of being served sat with them as well, especially during the Depression. My mother’s mother did not seem to worry if she had enough to go around. When the guests outnumbered the available food, my grandmother would simply fill everyone up with pancakes. My mother, who always loved to dance, would regularly tap-dance for the crowd after dessert was served, but when I was older she confessed that while she loved dancing, she had always hated the constant stream of uninvited guests that her own mother had loved. In her sixties, my mother was happy to make vats of soup and deliver them to the elderly couple ailing next door, but she never invited them to eat at her table. Still, her generosity seems to have rebounded on my father, now the oldest man on the block. His younger neighbors take care of him the way my mother took care of that earlier generation, mowing his lawn, shoveling his walk, bringing him meals.

Sitting around the family table, sharing meal after meal, was one of the few habits both my parents’ families shared. Apples and oranges they were from the beginning. Apples and oranges they stayed as long as they lived.

My father’s parents—blue-eyed, fair-skinned childhood blonds —had emigrated from northern Italy, near Verona, in the early 1900s. But neither hungered for a new life in
l’America.
Both sailed looking back toward shore. Leone Butturini and his bride, Angelina, had a sweeter dream than democracy or riches or freedom: they ached for land, potential fields of their own one day in the peach-growing village of Pescantina, where Leone was born. Though the money they so carefully saved and sent home was inadvertently lost through currency fluctuations after World War I, though they resided on and owned two city lots of Connecticut soil for the rest of their long lives, though he eventually even became an American citizen, they always stayed utterly Italian.