Keeping the Feast (22 page)

If it was Anna and Peter who gave me the courage to consider having a child; if it was John’s psychiatrist who helped us formulate the idea; if it was the London fertility expert who said it was a possibility, however unlikely, it seemed to have been a big family wedding back in Washington, D.C., that June that did the trick. Rice was thrown in the direction of John’s niece and her groom. A few grains must have bounced off and come my way, because a month or so after the celebrations, the doctors told me later, I was pregnant.

Not that I had any idea at the time. It was not until late September, two months later, when I made my ritual morning cup of tea that I noticed anything unusual. The tea, my usual English Breakfast, with milk, tasted metallic, bitter, nasty. I emptied it into the sink and made another in a different cup, thinking some soap residue might have contaminated the first. I sipped, and again that metallic, bitter taste filled my mouth. It was not until a few days later, still tea-less, that I realized I had missed my monthly cycle in August. I had thought little of it, because my gynecologist had been telling me for years that I seemed to be nearing menopause.

I told John my suspicion, but instead of floating on air, as I was, he blanched. The news clearly taxed his newfound equilibrium, and I soon felt as if I had been taken hostage again by his illness. I wasn’t so much worried that the pregnancy would send him back into depression as I was angry that his depressive tendencies might continue to threaten or rule our life together forever. The years following our wedding had been all about what
he
needed, never about what I might need. Now, the two of us reverted to psychological form: John feeling guilty and frightened for not being able to dance me around the living room in celebration of the thought that I might be pregnant, I feeling murderous that his depressive tendencies might ruin the joy I felt at the thought of expecting a child.

Most of the fears I had had about having children dissipated after my mother’s death. The joy I felt at becoming pregnant for the first time at forty-five seemed to erase the rest. This joy may have been partly fueled by psychological therapy, by the hormones that come with pregnancy, or by the idea that by being pregnant I was finally doing something that was not just about John or Peter or Anna but about me, my marriage, and our growing family. The joy I experienced was vivid, profound, and unchanging. I remember once at Sunday Mass thinking I had never truly understood the word
Alleluia
until I was deep into my pregnancy.

John had to work hard throughout those nine months to keep his fears at bay. And he did work incessantly with his doctor during this period to do just that, a decision I understood and appreciated. What made it easier was that I could understand his concerns, understand when he said that he did not want to be an old father, an exhausted father, a sick father. I could understand when he said he did not want Peter or Anna to feel sidelined by the birth of another child. I could understand when he said he found it terrifying to think that he was too fragile for the worry he knew he would feel about a delivery and birth. As disappointed as I was over his initial reaction, I also loved him for everything he did to overcome it. His doctor never let John’s fears get the better of him, and we took the doctor’s suggestion to do whatever it took to help John look forward to the birth rather than to fear it.

With that in mind, we traveled to northern Italy to visit Figino Serenza, the hamlet south of Lake Como where John’s paternal ancestors had lived for generations. John is his family’s unofficial historian, and we spent an entire weekend rooting around the basement libraries of local churches, eventually tracing the Tagliabue family’s genealogy back to the mid-1700s. Whenever we weren’t reading bound black church registries, we seemed to be eating long, delicious meals with John’s many cousins, who still live in the area and run a highly successful wood-veneer business.

In a similar effort to put the shooting further behind him, John overrode his fears enough to return to Romania a couple of months before the baby’s due date. He had an emotional meeting with Dr. Radulescu, the surgeon who had saved his life, and another poignant meeting with Georgina Stanea, the nursing administrator who had worked tirelessly to get Timişoara’s airport open long enough for the Red Cross to fly John and me to safety. While in Timişoara, John learned the name of the man who had shot him, and though initially curious, he decided that meeting his assailant would accomplish nothing. John was in Romania to write a magazine article for the
Times
about Romania’s future and our own. He was not there to settle old scores but to get beyond them, to look toward our future, not toward our past.

Throughout that fall, I kept my pregnancy secret from everyone but John and our doctors. At the end of the first trimester, in October, I told only my father, who I knew would be as thrilled as I was. But given my age, and my doctor’s initial concerns, I decided it would be wiser to keep our secret until I was fairly sure the pregnancy was likely to continue to term. Since it was autumn, and Roman apartments are notoriously cold in winter, it was physically easy to hide it under a couple of layers of clothes.

It was not until Thanksgiving—a feast we always celebrated by inviting any solitary American we knew who was unlikely to cook a turkey dinner for themselves—that we went public. We called Peter and Anna, all our brothers, and our closest friends to tell them our news. It was the happiest, most thanks-filled Thanksgiving I ever experienced, and until that point the only time in my adult life that I was not full of worry about one thing or another.

Back in September, when my breakfast tea suddenly tasted bad, my gut had told me two things: that I was likely pregnant, and that the best way to make sure all went well was to relax and enjoy it. It helped that I had never been afraid of pregnancy itself. Given my mother’s four bouts of postpartum psychosis, I was more concerned that problems might develop in the hormonal rush that occurs after birth, even though John’s doctor told me repeatedly that my mother’s problems did not in any way condemn me to have them, too.

It was during that first week of learning I was pregnant that I found myself deciding to try to keep even my concerns to the basics. Even if I was pregnant for the first time in my life at age forty-five, I was healthy, and in excellent shape. My mother had had her last child at forty; John’s mother had had him at forty-four. In my mind and soul, I felt I was carrying either a perfectly healthy baby or a frog. I knew that no amount of worrying would change the latter into the former. I had never been very good at praying for specific things, and decided I could not simply start now. My prayer, daily and unending, was to put my usual worrying nature aside and enjoy the pregnancy. That said, I felt absolutely held aloft by the prayers of my friends, as well as by our Italian neighbors and acquaintances, who could not have shown more interest had I been a beloved daughter.

Is there any European country more theoretically disposed to loving children than Italy? And since Italians themselves pretty much stopped having babies in recent decades—Italy has one of the lowest birthrates in Europe—there was nothing they liked more than taking vicarious pleasure in someone else’s pregnancy. Neighbors and shopkeepers on our old Trastevere street adopted me from the moment they learned I was pregnant. The elderly
barista
at the old café across the street from our flat, where I would buy our daily milk and occasionally drink an afternoon
spremuta d’arancia
, freshly squeezed orange juice, refused to accept payment the day he and his wife noticed I was expecting, and came out from behind the bar to shake hands and congratulate me properly.

Despite my obstetricians’ serious concerns, my pregnancy was utterly uneventful, as was the birth, a cesarean that was anticipated from my first visit. We found a clinic that would allow the baby to remain with me twenty-four hours per day, and this being Europe, where insurance companies do not overrule doctors, a cesarean meant I would be expected to remain hospitalized for at least a week. During the Christmas holidays, John, Peter, Anna, and I held a family powwow to come up with a name that would please us all. We asked the children to list all the names they liked, all the names they loathed. We discarded all their hated names, then in a series of eliminating votes, we came up with the one we all liked best. In the end, we all voted for Julia, a name that not only worked in many languages but that recalled John’s paternal Aunt Julia, the aunt he felt closest to and who had lived above them in Jersey City when he was a boy.

We soon learned that the birth would likely occur during Anna’s spring vacation, and she made plans to arrive in time to welcome her sister’s arrival. Anna was the first family member besides me to see Julia, since John was making a phone call at the time she was brought down from the operating room to the nursery. John and Anna had a special week together, just the two of them, at the time of Julia’s birth, and Anna, just sixteen, was able to talk at length about how the birth tore at her emotionally, making her both happy and sad. She was genuinely thrilled to hold Julia in her arms, genuinely sad to understand that it was Julia, not she, who would be living with their daddy full-time.

John told Anna that he could understand her conflicting feelings, but reminded her that she knew and had her daddy when he was still a young man, something that Julia would never be able to experience. “Do you remember when you were little and you used to dive off my shoulders into the lake at Trevignano?” John remembers asking her. “ I wonder when Julia will be your age whether I’ll still be able to have the strength to have her dive off my shoulders.” John’s words came from the experience of his own childhood, the last child of four, whose parents were a good deal older than those of his friends. John recalls growing up with only an older man as a father; he recalls being jealous of his two oldest brothers, eleven and seven years older, who knew their father when he was young and vital.

It was just last summer, when John, Anna, Julia, and I were at the French lake that has come to substitute for our old lake in Trevignano, that John recalled this emotionally charged conversation with Anna after Julia’s birth. He was in the water with both girls when Julia asked to dive off his shoulders. She did, several times. Then John suggested to Anna, a tall woman, twenty-seven at the time, that she try diving off his shoulders as well. Anna climbed up and dived, too, and when she came up for air, John said to her, “Do you remember our conversation in Rome?” When Anna assured him she did, he said, “ Isn’t it funny that you’re both able to jump off my shoulders? I guess I was wrong back then.”

That Anna, at age sixteen, could not only recognize but also speak about the uneasy mix of joy and sadness she experienced at Julia’s birth, to her father and to me, helped all of us immeasurably. Had she not been able to voice her sadness, it might have gone underground and blocked any happy tie between the two girls, or damaged her ties to John. A decade later, Julia flatly adores both Peter and Anna, looks forward to their visits as much as we do, and mourns when they head back to Germany. Peter, who keeps Julia in the
Monty Python
reruns both of them love, is already trying to convince John and me that Julia will soon be old enough to make the four-hour train trip to Germany to visit him and Anna on her own, without us.

Eight days after Julia’s birth, John saw Anna off at the airport, then came straight to the clinic to collect us. Even in the taxi on the way home, I could see that the powerful emotions of the week had affected him strongly. He was tense and noticeably quieter than he had been each time he and Anna together had come to visit. As afternoon turned to evening, his mood nose-dived. By nightfall he was barely able to speak, and I could see all the old symptoms of anxiety beginning to rise. It was the first time in some years I had seen John become so unhinged. I kept hoping he would be able to beat the symptoms back on his own, but by bedtime I knew he was losing the battle.

I called his doctor, who came to the flat at once and administered a sedative in hopes of braking John’s downward slide. The doctor’s arrival helped soothe me, too, for he took the time to admire the baby and remind me at length that birth, though easier to think about than death, is still a life-shaking event for anybody. The doctor’s soft, reassuring voice helped calm me just as his sedative had already calmed John. Once the doctor left, the three of us soon fell asleep. As I drifted off, I kept thinking that this was not at all the sort of homecoming I had envisaged. I wish I could say that I knew at the time that John would come around, but all I really knew was that he looked about to go off the rails again. Even the hint of that set me sinking, and I felt even worse that I had been so focused on my own potential post-partum problems that I had not foreseen John’s.

Throughout my pregnancy I had tried to avoid worrying, to simply let myself float along on a hormonal rush of well-being, physical and psychological. I hadn’t focused at all on the possibility that John might panic when Julia finally arrived. I knew how happy Peter and Anna made John, and I did not know then that he had panicked briefly when each was born. I simply never focused on the possibility that Julia’s appearance might panic him briefly as well. I felt stupid for being so blind, for not even entertaining the notion that John might not be all-embracing and joyful when we returned from the hospital. I felt cheated, too, as much for Julia as for myself.

Those first days at home after Julia’s birth alternated from one moment to the next between pure joy and utter dread. The joy of finally seeing my firstborn’s face, the dread that John’s setback would lead back down the road from which he had struggled, that Julia’s appearance in this world might somehow have to be traded for John’s health and sanity. John’s new anxieties terrified me for our future. As for the present, the rush of postpartum hormones was clearly keeping me off balance and disturbed; I could not read a newspaper without weeping, tears of joy over the slightest schmaltz-filled yarn, tears of unutterable sadness over just about everything else. I kept reminding myself to be thankful that, unlike my mother, I knew it was hormones—and not my sanity—that were in such a state of flux.