Keeping the Feast (14 page)

The first supper I ever made for my mother and me—strategically planned so that the initial efforts of a seven-year-old occurred on the one night a month my father had a dinner meeting—came from Betty Crocker. My mother, famous for her impatience, had the great good sense to leave me alone in the kitchen. She retired to the living room, where she promised to be available to field any questions. Alone then, I browned chopped onion, ground beef, and salt in a tablespoon of fat, sprinkled the mixture with flour, then cooked it briefly with milk. Served over mashed potatoes, “Saucy Hamburger Crumble” disappointed as much as it delighted. Nearly fifty years later, my shame over the look of the gloppy, gray goo that I had produced nearly overpowered my pride in having actually cooked an entire supper by myself. Despite its blandness, the meal didn’t taste half as bad as it looked. Even a bad recipe has its uses: “Saucy Hamburger Crumble” was an unforgettable way to learn that food tastes better when it looks appealing.

 

 

 

 

W
hen we landed at Rome’s airport shortly after dawn, John was deeply and clinically depressed, heavily medicated, still half asleep from the long overnight flight. His eyes—not his own eyes, but a stranger’s eyes that had mysteriously taken up residence in his head—sometimes glittered as they darted nervously from side to side. At other times, these stranger’s eyes—at once terrified and terrifying—appeared dull, lifeless, and unseeing, as if they were turned so far inward that no light from the outer world could possibly find its way in.

Waiting for Peter and Anna’s flight to arrive from Germany, John was trying his utmost to appear “normal” or at least as “normal” as possible under the circumstances. But his agitation was palpable. He ground his teeth. He did not speak. He worked his lips nervously, pursing and relaxing them uncontrollably. Even when the children appeared, his smile was, like his eyes, a stranger’s, crooked and frozen. But the children hugged and kissed him willy-nilly, and we managed to find our rental car and pile our four small bags into its tiny trunk. We headed northeast, past the welcoming umbrella pines that still line the airport approach road, past the herds of fat sheep that used to graze on the parched fields, past the red-tiled roofs of old stone farmhouses that have since given way to high-tech factories and office buildings.

I do not remember if we sang on the way, as we always did (and still do), the songs and nursery rhymes of the children’s babyhood: “Froggy Would A-Wooing Go,” “Goosey, Goosey, Gander,” “ I Know an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly,” an hour’s worth of others. I do not remember if John spoke or slept, if the children were quiet or if they chattered.

All I remember is cresting the hill near the castle in Bracciano and seeing the sparkling lake spread out, round and crystalline blue, with our destination, the former fishing village of Trevignano Romano, on the far north side. I remember suddenly praying that the view; the house; the long talks and occasional dinners shared with our friends Ann and Joseph; the mornings of reading, drawing, and Ping-Pong; the afternoons of swimming and reading on the beach; our long, lazy meals on our wisteria-choked terrace; our strolls along the lakeside promenade; our long nights of solid sleep—that each of the moments we had for years enjoyed there would somehow help John’s horrors cease. As I drove along the winding lake road, I couldn’t wait to restart our habitual lakeside rhythms: our late breakfasts and very late lunches; our daily descent to the beach when the sun was well past its peak; a quick stop in the village to pick up a few bits of food for dinner on the terrace, where we would watch the fierce light mellow, then slowly fail. Only then would we make our one important decision of the day—whether the evening’s entertainment meant a round of Monopoly or another descent to the lake for a gelato and walk on the promenade before we went to bed. The Natansons’ simple guesthouse, gray with light blue shutters, had neither television nor phone, but around bedtime, if the wind was right, we could just make out the sound of a Verdi opera floating over the dark garden from Joseph’s ancient wooden radio. Neither of us ever found a better lullaby.

As soon as we drove onto the long, winding dirt track that led to Ann and Joseph’s pie-shaped property, the hilltop’s two resident dogs started barking their greetings and escorting the car. The chestnut trees—real chestnuts, not horse chestnuts—that lined the track already seemed weighted down with what appeared to be a bumper crop. The brambles were thick and dusty, and I could see a profusion of blackberries, not yet ripe. The little peach tree, which produced ugly but succulent fruit, perfect for jam, was loaded with small green globes. We could not yet see what Anna always called Apricot Heaven, the tiny orchard of gnarled apricot trees that stood on a sloping terrace below a high rock wall that ran just in front of the house. But once we kissed Ann and Joseph hello, once we unpacked and went out to explore, we saw that the apricot trees were groaning with ripe fruit and we heard the yellow jackets buzzing madly, drunk on apricot nectar.

That was the July I entirely gave up cooking by the book. I mean that literally; my recipes and cookbooks—not to mention our furniture and clothes and virtually all of our earthly belongings—were in dozens of cardboard cartons, packed in Berlin in April and now sitting in a warehouse in Virginia, waiting for word to be moved to Chicago. As it happened, everything we owned stayed in that Virginia warehouse for two and a half years.

But when I say that I stopped cooking by the book, I mean it figuratively as well. Everything about our old life seemed to be in storage, somewhere far, far away. Our old life—a life of incessant work, deadlines, stories, interviews, and research; a busy, fulfilling life bubbling over with the children, family, friends, concerts, plays, movies, travel, reading, exploring—was suddenly on hold. John’s downward slide did not happen in a vacuum. Everything we had or knew or loved seemed bent on sliding down that dark, steep slope after him. We were here in Italy trying to stop that slide.

We tried to explain to Peter and Anna, seventeen and eleven then, that their daddy was ill, suffering a depression that was a delayed reaction to the shooting, though we had neither the vocabulary nor the expertise at that time to explain it very well. But even the youngest child is far wiser than most adults could ever believe, and if they did not always fully understand our attempts to explain their father’s illness, they could see it clearly for themselves.

Their daddy, who normally would sing to them, tell them his own father’s jokes from the 1930s, read to or with them, play Ping-Pong, sketch with Anna or talk world history with Peter, their normal daddy, the world’s fastest and most precise Monopoly banker, suddenly wasn’t there. He did not sing. Did not tell jokes. Could not read. Was too dizzy to play Ping-Pong, even in the shade. Had no interest in sketching. Or talking world history. Our prizewinning Monopoly banker could no longer make change, nor count out banknotes. He could not remember what he or anybody else had just said. Daddy’s body was there but somehow Daddy was not. This impostor daddy had all he could do to stay awake and occasionally focus his eyes upon them.

That said, John never stopped trying to be in good form for the three weeks the children were with us. But as our July vacation neared its end, and Peter and Anna prepared to fly back to Bonn and we were to fly back to New York, John dug in his heels and announced that he could not and would not go back to the States. He told me he feared he would spiral downward out of control if he went back. He asked me to call the
Times
’ executive editor in New York, Joe Lelyveld, and tell him that he felt his only chance at getting better lay in Italy, where he had spent so much happy time, where he would not be so far from Peter and Anna, where he, for whatever reason, felt somewhat safe.

Ann and Joseph had new guests arriving in August who would be staying the rest of the summer in the guesthouse we always rented. But they invited John and me to stay on as long as we liked in the extra bedroom of their own house, whose two windows looked out on their vineyard. John seized on their offer, and when I called New York, Joe agreed we could finish out the summer in Italy, to see if the sunshine, swimming, friends, and food might have a positive effect.

At the end of July, the children and I headed back to the airport, where I put them on the plane to Germany. I drove back to Trevignano slowly, with dread, knowing that all the energy John had expended trying to act as normal as possible for Peter and Anna—which was not normal at all, of course—would leave him doubly exhausted once they left.

He barely spoke when I returned. He packed his carry-on bag with his three knitted shirts, an extra pair of Bermudas, a pair of trousers, a bathing suit, and underwear, and carried it across the garden to our new quarters. I packed my little carry-on bag with my few things, cleaned up the house, and followed him.

It was a Sunday, and as usual, Ann and Joseph were serving up one of their standard lunchtime feasts, lasagne from the local pasta shop in the village and Ann’s famous Stretchy Chicken, a large hen generally stuffed with sausage meat, cubes of dry bread, sage and parsley from the garden, and various bits—onions, garlic, and celery—from her vegetable bin. (Its name came from the skill of the carver, their son, Stephen, whose slim knife could stretch the meat from any hen to fit the number of guests.) We sat down with the rest of the crowd. I ate the lasagne and moved on to the chicken and green beans, which were followed by a huge green salad. I ate homemade apple tart with a spoonful of gelato on the side, then drank a tiny cup of decaffeinated
caff è
. Normally a big eater, John only picked at his food. The drugs he was taking for the depression played havoc with his digestion; a thin slice of chicken breast with a few forkfuls of boiled white rice was all he could handle.

After the meal, hosts and guests alike took the usual Sunday siesta, resting on lounge chairs, sofas, or beds in the cool of the thick-walled house or the shade of the plant-filled terrace. A short nap was the only thing possible in that fierce, midday August heat. Even the dogs slept. Only the honeybees droned on, the sole creatures capable of moving. Everybody else listened to their bodies and dozed, drowsy from the food, wine, heat, and sun. Later, when the worst of the heat had dissipated, we all gradually awakened, with that charge of energy that comes from a serious afternoon snooze. John alone remained lethargic, from the depression as much as from the drugs he was taking to fight it. Lethargic or not, we drove down the steeply curved mountain road to the lake, joining the rest of the Sunday bathers returning to the beach for a late-afternoon swim.

My father called me every Sunday afternoon of that difficult summer, when he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, when my brother’s childhood kidney disease had suddenly flared up. Week after week I had no good news to report, but my father always seemed to be able to dig down into his experience with my mother’s depressions to find something to tell me to help me keep going. If I complained that the man I was living with was not the man I had married—that the man who never stopped talking, revealing, joking, laughing since we had met had suddenly gone silent in my presence, that all our old ease and delight had turned into awkwardness and dismay—my father’s basic response was simple: “You’ve got to remember, it’s not John doing this, it’s the sickness.” It was a phrase I found myself repeating, like a mantra, but initially at least with little conviction and through gritted teeth. Still, it was those calls from my father, and my brother, too, that I looked forward to all week, and that—along with the Natansons’ attention—kept me from despair.

I wish I could say that I knew back then that Trevignano was the perfect potion for both of us, that it kept me cheerful and upbeat in the face of John’s worsening illness, that it reminded me of all the happy summers we had spent there in the past. But I can’t. Thinking of all our happy summers there in the past just brought home how unhappy I felt in that present, nine months after my mother’s death. What I wanted was my old life, when my mother was alive, when I brought home a monthly paycheck from a job I loved, when I lived with my real husband, not some impostor. While I knew that no amount of Trevignano sunshine, no amount of Ann’s good soup or Joseph’s excellent conversation could magically grant any of my desires, I could still think of no better place to try to heal.

Unconsciously, I was using our large stock of good memories from Trevignano to push away my fears about what would come next, what we would do if
The New York Times
’ institutional patience ran out before John healed. I found that if I focused only on the present, if I banished all thoughts of our suddenly uncertain future, I could get through a day. Each day I knew I just needed to get through that day. Nothing more. At some point I seemed to break it down even further. I had to get through the morning. I had to get through the afternoon. I had to get through the evening, and I had to get through the night. Meals punctuated the first three tasks, sleep the last. Without consciously knowing it, I began marking the passage of a day by its meals. Suppers began to mean that John and I both had gotten through another day.

Italian suppers are traditionally light since the main meal is usually eaten at midday, and Sundays in Trevignano usually ended with a bowl of Ann’s trademark vegetable soup, followed by an omelet or a slice of ham, green salad, and finally, fresh fruit. I marveled at Ann’s soups and how she would dig deep into the recesses of her tiny refrigerator or pantry and pull out all the bits and pieces of vegetables that had eluded her during the weekend and would not survive till she returned the following Friday night. Ann would start whirling around her tiny kitchen, a sunny corner of the house’s main room, madly chopping anything she could find: an onion, a wilted leek or two, three tired carrots, a stalk or two of celery, some leftover zucchini, maybe a bowl of green beans, a slightly wizened bell pepper, a handful of Swiss chard or spinach—anything and everything, save beets, got cut up Sunday evening, thrown into the bottom of her ancient pressure cooker with a bit of olive oil and handfuls of herbs from the garden, and sautéed quickly until lightly browned. Then she would add salt and pepper and cover it with plenty of cold water, seal the pot, and let it cook until we were all back at the table, eager to eat again as the evening coolness descended.