She told me that a miscarriage a couple of years later sent her back for more shock treatments, after six months of depression. A second miscarriage provoked the same response, the same treatment. My brother’s birth, seven years after mine, provoked a yearlong collapse, she said, but a last round of shock treatments brought her out of it again.
I sat across from her, our cake plates empty, our teacups drained. I had no memories of anything she had related. Nonetheless, the puzzle pieces of my childhood suddenly seemed to find their place. Much as she loved me, she found me a source of both joy and pain. My birth had made her a mother; my birth had made her insane. Her story explained her shakiness, her anger, her mood swings, our complicated mother-daughter life, my uneasiness in her presence, the reason I disliked hugging her. Had I known all this earlier, I would not have had to fight so hard to keep her at bay.
“ Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I asked, without a trace of my usual pique.
“Because I was afraid you wouldn’t want to have children,” she said. She paused a moment, looking at the crumbs left on the solid, white café china. Then she looked up. “Having children is the best,” she said, taking a breath. “And the worst.”
T
wo years earlier, in 1977, my first husband and I had moved to Texas so that I could take a job with United Press International. My salary more than doubled—providential, since my husband was out of work—but it was UPI’s nature as an international news agency that interested me most, for it meant the chance of a transatlantic posting sometime in the future. Dallas back then was a tight, closed world so provincial that a local, university-educated colleague was deeply shocked the day he learned I was a Catholic, despite my blue eyes and dirty-blond hair. “Darlin’,” he muttered, “you sure don’t look Mezkin.” After five years in Dallas—and three weeks after I finished restoring my beloved old house—I finally got the first of the transatlantic transfers I had been hoping for. Within months I was living alone in London, editing UPI copy from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and helping cover, at a distance, Britain’s improbable war over the Falkland Islands. I was thirty-two. Later UPI transferred me to Madrid and then back to London before bouncing me, a year later, to Rome, a city I so loved I was not sure I could ever leave.
I would probably be living there now if I had not met John late in the summer of 1985. Long based in Bonn, the former West German capital, John was on a yearlong assignment in Rome. We met in passing on a broiling August day at an outdoor pool where foreign reporters could swim practically for free. A couple of weeks later we met again, when a small group of mutual friends got together at a restaurant whose terrace, crammed with vines and plants, enjoyed the slight breeze that often descends upon Rome late of an August evening. My brother, visiting from Connecticut, was with me that night, as was Lou, a writer and English professor who was one of my closest friends. Both of them took to John that evening as easily as I did.
My brother had to fly back to the States the next day, but Lou was with me a week later when John made good on his offer to cook everybody one of his mother’s best risottos. The recipe started out like a
risotto alla milanese,
made with butter, onion, rice, chicken broth, saffron, and Parmigiano, but ended up enriched with dried porcini mushrooms and skinny
luganega
sausage cut into what John described as “ Tootsie Roll-sized pieces.”
Wedged into the narrow galley kitchen of a colleague, John seemed utterly at home as he whipped up the meal, sidling from countertop to stove and doling out joke instructions: insisting that the onions be cut just so, wheedling for a bit of red wine for the cook, and suddenly breaking into a mad whistling as he began to grate the Parmigiano. “You absolutely
have
to whistle while grating the cheese,” he announced, raking the cheese across an old-fashioned hand grater and explaining that in a household with four large, hungry boys and a very large, hungry father, Parmigiano always had a way of mysteriously disappearing during the grating process in their Jersey City kitchen. His mother, he said, could only keep to her budget if she required her helpers to whistle as they grated, for as long as they were whistling, they could not be eating it when her back was turned.
John, who had tucked a dish towel into his trouser waistband to serve as an apron, cooked a huge batch of risotto that night, and Lou and I and the other friends who were there finished it off in short order, marveling that none of us had ever eaten a risotto like it before. When somebody murmured that she was full, John responded without missing a beat, “Barrels are full.
You
have had sufficient.” He looked at us and laughed: “Chapter three, verse two, May Tagliabue’s own Bible of personal rules of behavior.”
Since my own kitchen was minuscule, with no oven and just two tiny gas burners, Lou offered to host a similar meal a week or two later so that I could make good on my offer to make the group one of my family’s favorite dishes,
gnocchi verdi
—tiny, light dumplings made with ricotta and spinach—served with a mild, buttery tomato sauce enriched with a bit of cream. Late one night we all crowded into Lou’s small kitchen while I made the gnocchi dough. John pitched in to help with the messy job of forming cherry-sized gnocchi in the floured palms of our hands. Laughing and chatting easily, we rolled and rolled the sticky dough in tiny balls as flour flew in all directions. Even Lou, fastidious to a fault, agreed the floury mess on his countertop and floor was easily worth the taste.
Maybe it was John’s Jersey accent or his help in the kitchen that so reminded me of home. Maybe it was his innate gentleness or the kindness and light I saw in his eyes. Maybe it was that he looked like a cross between Alan Alda and my mother’s cousin Tom, or that his face was as boyish as his too-short chinos. Whatever it was, all I knew was that within a few weeks, for the first time since my divorce six years earlier, I felt drawn to a man instead of wanting to flee; felt promise, not fear.
John and I first came to know each other over what seems now like an endless series of dinner tables, most of them set on the cobblestones outside simple Roman trattorie, because when one works until ten or eleven or midnight, night after night, movies or concerts or museums are not real options. So after John had finished filing his nightly story and after I had closed the UPI bureau, we fell into the habit of meeting up with other reporter friends for late, light, cheap suppers of honest food and nonstop conversation.
It was here—over tables covered in white butcher paper, tables that wobbled on the uneven cobblestones, over small pitchers of Rome’s trademark sour white wines—that John and I watched and listened to each other kibitzing with friends, where we first dared to open up to each other. We would talk and eat, eat and talk, for hours, all under makeshift roofs of giant white canvas
ombrelloni
, oversized parasols that spout like mushrooms outside so many Roman restaurants.
We might talk about the day’s news, Italian politics, Vatican pronouncements, boneheaded editors, whatever new archaeological or architectural details we might have discovered that day, for
bella Roma
is an endless trove of nooks and crannies filled with visual treasures just waiting to be noticed during a morning stroll to the market or the office: a tiny fountain in the shape of a foot-long barrel tucked into the façade of an otherwise nondescript palazzo; the ornately carved capital of an ancient Roman column peeking out of a pockmarked, dirty wall.
Working our way through small bowls of spaghetti with fresh baby clams, or a small grilled sea bass, a mound of barely cooked spinach, or bowls of tiny blueberries, raspberries, and currants, we would talk, listen, debate, argue, regale. John, who had studied and taught Latin at Bonn University and worked at an institute of medieval Latin for years before becoming a reporter, had a way of mixing the erudite with the goofy, going on at length in pig Latin, then bringing in a few lines from Horace or Virgil to hammer his point home. Once the cooling night air signaled it would soon be time to end the evening, his jokes would start coming. John would somehow manage to get us laughing at his father’s oldest, corniest jokes—What was the head singing as it floated down the Hudson River? “I ain’t got no-body,” he would warble—before we settled our bills and adjourned.
When I recall those evenings, I always think of that magical moment, hours after sunset, when Rome’s night breezes began blowing out the hot, stale air of the day, when that curious mix of city streetlamps, car headlights, and restaurant lanterns started casting a magical pink-gold light across a seventeenth-century palazzo’s crumbling ochre walls or over a Baroque façade half hidden by a wall of ivy or Virginia creeper. The sensation I had of having eaten well, of having talked away the burdens of the day, of having laughed and joked and relaxed, of having felt embraced and supported by food and drink and talk and companionship, unconsciously brought to mind those comforting meals I used to eat—day after day, year after year—around my family’s kitchen table.
One night after a long, lazy supper out with friends, John and I decided to take a walk on the Pincio, a steep, high ridge on the edge of the Borghese Gardens that looks west across the center of Rome toward the Tiber and beyond to the enormous dome of St. Peter’s. It has been a magical view, I would guess, since the days of the emperors, when the ancients strolled through the same sort of pleasure gardens, then known as the Horti Pinciani. We stood on the broad lookout of the Pincian parapet, where even without moonlight we could make out dozens of church cupolas, St. Peter’s great dome the most visible of all. We stood, content, gazing across Rome’s night skyline and picked out the domes we could most easily identify, the ziggurat top of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, the broad, flattish dome of the ancient Pantheon, the grand dome of Santa Maria del Popolo, which rose literally at our feet.
I remember that night we sat, content, on a green park bench as words tumbled out of us willy-nilly in a way neither of us had experienced before. John told me about the wooden astrolabe, quadrant, and sextant he had built when he was nine or ten after founding a club, the Junior Men of the Sea, and how he and his friends would climb his garage roof in Jersey City to try to sight the North Star. In turn, I told him about the fishing lines my sixth-grade friend Jeannie and I would cast into Long Island Sound when the snapper blues were running, and how we would scream with joy when those tiny voracious bluefish would seize the raw bacon we had used as bait.
John told me about his father, who could be the life of the party one moment, sad and teary the next. I told him about my mother, another life of the party, who loved to push away her fears on a ballroom dance floor.
John told me how filled with joy he had been during his first three years as a young monk in a Trappist monastery just after high school. He told me how he had fallen into a depression during his last year at the monastery, how electroshock treatments had helped bring him round, how bereft he felt later when he returned to the world outside the abbey walls. His talk of beating depression, given my mother’s history, only made him feel more familiar.
I told him how full of joy and promise I too had been when I first married, and how deeply I had longed for a passel of children, preferably boys, to avoid another complicated mother-daughter life. I told him how bereft I too had felt later, when I first realized that my marriage had irretrievably failed. I told him about lying on my back in bed, awake and alone one awful night in Dallas years earlier, when I suddenly realized that the thought of having children with my first husband brought only cold horror, not joy, to my mind. I told him how my left arm had been half hanging off the edge of that unhappy bed and how I felt as if my blood and soul had drained out of my dangling fingertips, and with them, the marriage and the children I had once hoped to have.
We were still sitting on that green park bench when I finished speaking, and as I looked at John I felt a sorrow deep inside me dislodge. The horror of that Dallas night began to melt, the sadness that had settled in with the horror fading away, too.
Suddenly the tall, thin, brown-haired man with the kind brown eyes who was sitting beside me on that green park bench seemed utterly familiar, as if I had known him for decades. Suddenly, seamlessly, we seemed to be talking about the future, our future, together.
John remembers experiencing that same sense of familiarity just after we met, a feeling that after years of trying, he had finally come home. “ I knew very quickly that wherever you were would be home,” he wrote to me recently. “That’s been true even after twenty years and more.”
I know I came to love John because he wrote chatty letters home to his mother every week, because even in his forties he called her “Mother”; because he still referred to his father, long dead, as “Daddy.” I came to love him because he never stopped talking about his parents, three brothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews, and above all, about his children, Peter and Anna. I came to love him because his family was enormous, as mine once had been.
As time passed I loved him because he spoke broadly and listened deeply, because I knew he would never bore me, no matter how long we lived. I loved him because he could speak English, Italian, German, Spanish, French, and Latin, because he could read ancient Greek and a smattering of Hebrew. I loved him because he could not read music, but could read and sing Gregorian chant. I loved him because he was not afraid of tears, his own or mine. I loved him because he grew up eating not just pasta but also, like my family, polenta, that cheap, yellow cornmeal mush that kept generations of northern Italian peasants from starving. I loved him because he loved the two children he had, and because he told me he wished he could give me a child, too.