Keeping the Feast (3 page)

We used to arrive, pale and wan, craving the sun, the heat, the food, the wine, the daily Monopoly games, the hours of reading, the afternoon swims, the naps on the beach, the nightly stroll on the lakeside promenade with ice cream dripping off our cones. We craved the trumpet vines that surrounded our bedroom windows and the cosseting of our older friends, Ann and Joseph, who had built two simple houses on the land, to use as a weekend retreat from the daily chaos of life in Rome. After three blissful weeks in Trevignano, we would leave tanned and rested, nearly restored. The best years, we arrived at the height of fig season, when a neighbor would leave enormous wicker baskets of green-gold figs on our back steps. Anna, seven or eight then, and I would stand around the basket and devour them, three and four at a go—our luggage, even the lake, forgotten. Nothing seemed to banish our hungers more than those meltingly soft figs oozing the thick, honeyed juice of an Italian summer.

After the troubles started, then multiplied and multiplied again, we stubbornly tried to keep to our ritual summer cure. We flew to Rome, met the children, and drove back up to the lake. There were no fat figs on the steps that summer, though. The neighbor who had always welcomed us with the fruits of her tree had died suddenly, shortly before we arrived.

Even if I try to list the troubles simply, objectively, without elaboration, without a frame, I still sound to myself like one of those thin, nervous women—their lips working, their eyes not meeting the camera—who used to appear on
Queen for a Day
and tell their tales of woe. The woman with the most pitiful story and the most copious tears won the crown and the fur-trimmed robes. She won the long-stemmed roses, and maybe a refrigerator or some big cash prize. Under the crown and the robe, the winners would sob and laugh, cry and dissolve before the whirring camera. I watched that show with horror as a child, seeing grown-up terrors of loss and suffering paraded across the little octagonal screen of our first television set. It was a peculiar show for its time, oddly un-American, designed to reward trouble, to let a loser win. But I kept my horror of it well hidden, knowing the show would be forbidden if I let on how terrified it left me. I hated to watch it but hated to miss it, afraid this key to the grown-up world of troubles and fears might get away from me. If I watched, took in, and learned its secrets, maybe I could be ready for the adult terrors that obviously were waiting to be grown into, just like the bulky winter coat bought cheap at the end of the season for the following year’s wear.

The troubles that, in fact, were waiting started in Prague on November 17, 1989, the first night of what later came to be called the Velvet Revolution against the country’s Communist leaders. Czechoslovak antiterrorist police waded into a peaceful crowd of student demonstrators and beat everyone in reach. I was there to report on it and they beat me unconscious in the street, then dragged me off with a colleague who had tried to intervene, hauling us into a building entryway, where they could continue to beat us, with impunity and without witnesses.

Five weeks later it was John’s turn. Two nights before Christmas, a sniper hiding in the darkness of a city street in Timişoara, Romania, fired at the two-door Peugeot in which John was riding, shattering the car windows, tearing through doors, dashboard, seats, trunk, engine, and roof. The car was demolished, but neither the Frenchman at the wheel nor the two other Americans in the backseat were hit. John was struck by only one bullet, which he remembers “scurrying like a mouse” across his entire middle before he passed out.

I know that a riot stick connecting with a human target makes a sharp
thwack
ing sound when it hits a skull, and a slightly muffled, duller
thwock
when it hits flesh. I know that hundreds of shiny white plastic riot sticks catch and reflect streetlamps as they whoosh and flail like crazed metronomes in cold night air. I know what a gunshot sounds like. But I wasn’t there when John was shot, so I can only wonder about the specifics of the scene. Was there a flash of white light when the sniper squeezed the trigger? Or maybe just a dirty yellow spark? I’d like to know if the bullet was spit out with a spike of blue smoke, or whether a puff of gray fume wafted lazily up into the December night. Had I been standing hard by, would I have heard the bullet cut the air? Would it have whined or screamed or whispered or made no sound at all?

I needed fifteen simple stitches to close the two long gashes in my head and a couple of weeks for my hugely swollen face to look again like mine. Had my beating been the sum of it, I probably would have nursed a longtime fear of uniformed men wielding riot sticks, but would have few other lingering concerns. But a bullet that pierces a car door, a parka, a sports coat, a sweater, a shirt, trousers, and underwear—a bullet that splits a belt in two, then chews its way across a body I knew and loved—causes an entirely different level of injury. The body is only the first victim; the soul, the psyche, the spirit are each ripped apart as well. People who had learned this lesson in their own particular ways—a wise hospital orderly in Munich, friends who had lost a child, an acquaintance who had once been knifed in the chest—tried to warn us early on that our lives would never be quite the same. They tried to let us know that any biography-changing trauma such as a car wreck or a heart attack was likely to split a life in two, into the time before and the time after.

But we weren’t ready to take in their wisdom. It was only over the years that we began to understand that the troubles that befall us alter, permanently, not only our view of the world but our position in it. We still had so very much to learn. Who would have thought that patience could be a vice? And anger a virtue? Who would have thought that there are times when it is not only natural to feel angry and impatient but of enormous importance to demand that a sick person show signs of getting better? Who would have thought that the most fundamental of human rituals—buying, preparing, eating, and sharing our daily bread—would have become our tether to normal life as we struggled to make the crossing from our old life before to our new life after?

The Romanian surgeon who first saved John’s life said the bullet slammed into his right side, shattering his pelvis and sending shards of bone deep into the surrounding muscles. The German surgeons who saved his life later said the bullet then tumbled and danced its way across the rest of him, skimming close enough under his spine to shatter the tip of one vertebra and slightly fracture two more. Ultimately, though, it skimmed under his spinal column and chewed across the rest of him, exiting his left side just above what was left of his belt. Doctors—first in Timişoara, and later in Munich—had to cut open John’s back to expose and clean the tunnel the bullet had made. They had to clean out the bits of bone, metal, paint, dirt, grease, and shredded cloth that the bullet carried with it. They had to kill the inevitable infection that followed, and weeks later, when there was enough new flesh to stitch, they had to sew up the long, deep trench—about as wide and deep as my forearm—that they and the bullet had made.

No one ever found the bullet that found John, so the experts were forced to theorize about what exactly hit him. The Romanian doctors thought it was a dumdum, a soft-nosed bullet that expands upon hitting a target so as to produce maximum damage as it travels through the body. One of the Munich surgeons, an avid hunter, said the bullet may have been absolutely ordinary, but that the impact of bullet against car door, bullet against pelvic bone, so destabilized its course that it mimicked the malignant bob and weave of a dumdum.

Whatever it was, we still have a fabric footprint of how and where the bullet slipped in. Romanian hospital workers somehow managed to save most of John’s clothes despite the bloody bedlam of an ill-equipped hospital emergency room inundated with casualties when the revolution erupted in Timişoara a few days earlier. The staff wrapped John in his parka before our emergency flight to Munich, and he actually wore it a couple of times the following winter, but only till we managed to replace it. The holes were too noticeable, too disquieting, and we finally threw that parka out. We stashed his sports jacket and khakis out of sight in an old wooden cupboard. Later, I cut them up, saving a few square inches around the holes where the bullet slipped in. Then I stuffed them into a drawer along with everything else I had saved from the shooting, enough to fill a four-inch-thick binder.

If I pull the swatches out of the file, I can see two raggedy holes in the herringbone tweed where the bullet entered the bunched-up sports jacket. Far clearer is the single hole in the khakis, perfectly centered on the seam where waistband meets trousers, directly above the right rear pocket. I used to look at these bits of cloth occasionally, as if they could tell me what had happened and why. But no matter how many times I looked, the holes refused to speak.

Years later, I still have difficulty even connecting them to a shooting. Shootings, I still like to think, happen to drug dealers or innocent passersby in New York, to foreign tourists visiting Miami. They happen to people who clean guns or keep them under their beds. They happen to soldiers, to policemen, to mafiosi, to people who have enemies. They don’t happen to my husband, my family, to me. I suspect my response of utter disbelief is standard for anyone who hasn’t been blindsided by some sort of shock: the sudden diagnosis of a rampaging cancer, the overnight loss of a family’s life savings. Shocks like these hammer home the notion that a history of good luck is no amulet for the future.

I
n some ways, I think a move to Italy was destined to be as much in my future as a move from Italy had been in my family’s past. As a child, I moved only once, from the Fairfield side of Ash Creek to the Bridgeport side. We went from a two-bedroom flat we rented to a three-bedroom house we owned; from a lumbering two-family house overlooking a reedy marsh full of red-winged blackbirds to a two-story, single-family colonial, whose western windows looked out over the broad expanse of a saltwater tidal basin full of gulls. I was nine, my brother, Danny, two, and my mother always said that we spent that entire first day clattering up and down the straight wooden staircase that led to our new, separate bedrooms.

My parents never dreamed of moving again, and my brother still lives an hour away from the old house, but it seems the delight that took hold of me that first moving day left me hungry to move on. Family history played a role, too. My family had started out in Italy; at some elemental level I needed to go back, to see what they had left and why, to see what my life might have been like had my grandparents or their families not packed their trunks and gone to
l’America.

My first move on my own, to college just west of Boston, was the bliss of freedom. The move to a cramped apartment in Hart-ford, Connecticut, nearly four years later, to marry, was all joy. The move to a quirky flat in the top story of a historic house in Plainville, Connecticut, was magic, especially when I landed my first reporting job at a nearby newspaper. The move to a Dallas suburb three years later—during an endless New England cold spell that left me shivering in our thin-walled, insulation-free apartment—was a revelation: one could actually avoid winter, forever, with something as simple as a move.

My next move, alone, to an old neighborhood of down-at-the-heel wooden houses in Dallas itself, was painful but right. My six-year-old marriage had long been dying, and a judge was about to grant the divorce my first husband had sought. The house that I spent the next three years restoring was my psychologist. I hammered, sanded, patched, painted, laid floors and sub-floors, ordered wallpaper, planted iris, staked tomatoes, picked green beans, and tended herbs in a heat so intense that my basil plants grew waist high. I could rock to and fro in one of my old front-veranda swings and smell the basil baking in the sunshine or the figs drying on the branches of the old tree that kept the sun at bay.

It didn’t bother me that I no longer had a bed, and was sleeping on foam camping mats on the restored parquet flooring of my new bedroom. With a window seat as my headboard, I lay happily under twelve-foot ceilings and a glittering crystal chandelier that had been so obscured by sixty-five years of grime and dust that I initially thought it was made of black plastic. My mother came to visit shortly after I moved in, to make sure I was surviving the divorce proceedings, the first in our family. It was a singular moment, with a certain fragility hanging in the air, not only because neither of us dared bicker with the other for the few days we were together. I was twenty-eight, she sixty-one, and over a long pot of tea and slices of apple cake at an old-style café not far from downtown, she told me a story I had never heard, a story that, in a heartbeat, seemed to explain the central puzzle of my childhood. Her story, though I didn’t know it at the time, would also prepare me in some ways for what was to come later in my life with John.

Squeezing lemon into her tea, she spoke in a confessional tone I had never before heard her use. She told me she had developed the baby blues after my birth. Not the normal come-and-go baby blues but the kind that come and stay. This being the 1950s, and my mother never given to revelations, she kept her illness secret, except for the family. Her older sister, Marie, would call her daily to try to get her to stop sobbing. Auntie would talk and talk, telling her to put on her coat and hat, dress me warmly, pop me into my carriage, and get out into the fresh air. My mother usually managed to follow her sister’s advice, day after day pushing the carriage across the Ash Creek bridge into Black Rock, tears rolling down her cheeks, her favorite epithet, “sonofabitch,” escaping softly, in whispers, into the air.

The only professional advice she remembered receiving came from the doctor who delivered me. “He clapped me on the shoulder,” she said, her voice still shaking with rage and emotion nearly three decades later. “He clapped me on my shoulder and told me to buck up,” she said. “ ‘You’ve got a nice baby there to take care of. Get on with it.’ ” She tried, heroically, it seems to me now. And with my father pitching in when he got home from work, and my mother’s parents pitching in while he was at the office, and my aunt playing psychologist by phone and in person, time went by. Still terribly ill by the time I turned two, she underwent electroshock therapy, done as an outpatient procedure in those days, and soon she came around.