Keeping The Feast Part 5

It was nearly a year after John's depression had emerged in full force that I exploded in anger in the Piazza Trilussa, raging against his Frankenstein walk. After the explosion, I called his doctor and told him John was not the only one who needed to talk. I wanted some answers myself by that time, and at bottom needed to know if I was part of the problem, for by then I had begun thinking that if I was, then maybe it was time to bolt. The doctor a.s.sured me that John believed I was part of the solution, and suggested I meet with him and his colleague, a family therapist. By the next week, not only was John seeing the doctor his usual three times a week, but I was seeing the family therapist once a week, and both John and I were meeting the doctor and family therapist yet another day each week.

Both specialists suggested that what they referred to as my unnatural patience with John's illness was perhaps contributing to its length, a notion I had never entertained. Until that time I had been terrified that any voicing of my complaints to John might push him over the edge, to irredeemable madness or suicide. It was, I think now, a childlike reaction, a feeling of being powerless and trapped. As a child I had never even known my mother had been desperately ill for months at a time; as a child I never would have thought I might be able to do something to make her better. My parents' failure to discuss her illness openly was not unusual, given the times, but it led me to think that there was nothing I could do except wait till the storm pa.s.sed. Both doctors helped me begin to understand that it was not only natural to feel angry and impatient, but of enormous importance that I start demanding that John show me some signs of progress.

My anger had been quietly building over the months of John's sickness, but I became aware of it only toward the end of our stay in Trevignano, when I drove into Rome one afternoon to talk with an old reporter friend who also happened to be a Sister of Mercy. Sister Mary Ann Walsh was back in Rome on a visit, and we met at the U.S. seminary on the Gianicolo, a hill lined with umbrella pines and live oaks whose eastern end looks over St. Peter's Square. I remember talking incessantly to her, describing all that had happened, and being surprised myself at the angry subtext of it all. I don't remember what Mary Ann said that day after listening to my tale but I still have the letter she wrote soon after, in which she talked about the suicide of a beloved aunt, who, like my mother, had drowned herself in old age. She suggested I might not be praying right, and explained that at times she would get "t-eed-off with G.o.d and point out that He (or She) is the Almighty One-I'm not-so it's about time He (or She) did a little more for me. G.o.d's big enough to hear and respond to our demands," she wrote. " Tell G.o.d in strong terms what you're feeling."

I must have needed additional advice, though, because after moving back to Rome, I talked about this idea with a Jesuit friend before trying it out. John Navone listened to my explanation of Sister Mary Ann's advice and thought only a moment before telling me he thought it was absolutely sound. "Anger is about the only authentic voice I can imagine you having at this point," he said. My pew pounding started just a few weeks later, as if I had needed permission from both a nun and a priest to feel and communicate the anger that was undeniably there.

A few months later, in one of those peculiar coincidences that some people would describe as grace, others as luck, my sister-in-law, Chan, sent me a Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post article describing a friends.h.i.+p that had sprung up between a Benedictine nun living in a Connecticut monastery and a Jewish writer who lived in California. The writer, Rhoda Blecker, described how, at a particularly low moment in her life, she had begun trying to pray, an attempt she said took the form of "yelling at G.o.d." article describing a friends.h.i.+p that had sprung up between a Benedictine nun living in a Connecticut monastery and a Jewish writer who lived in California. The writer, Rhoda Blecker, described how, at a particularly low moment in her life, she had begun trying to pray, an attempt she said took the form of "yelling at G.o.d."

Pounding a pew sounded remarkably similar to yelling at G.o.d, and intrigued me enough that I filed the article away. I knew I wanted to write to these two women but I had no idea what I wanted to say. Months later, just before Christmas 1993, I wrote instead to St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Ma.s.sachusetts, where John had spent those four years between high school and college as a Trappist. In a short, dense note I described the troubles of our last few years and asked the monks to remember John in their prayers. Dom Augustine Roberts, the abbot, replied that John was still well remembered at Spencer and that my letter had been made available for the monks to read. He a.s.sured us that the monks were praying for us both.

Two weeks later, I finally managed to compose a long letter to Mother Miriam, the Benedictine portrayed in the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post article. I described our situation in detail, Sister Mary Ann's advice on praying, and my Jesuit friend's concurrence. I described to Mother Miriam how I had taken to banging my fist on the back of the pew in front of me whenever I went into the little church of Santa Brigida. Although I never got noisier than that, I described myself as yelling, albeit silently, at G.o.d, telling him I had had more than my share during the last few years, that he had been pus.h.i.+ng me around too hard and too long, and " article. I described our situation in detail, Sister Mary Ann's advice on praying, and my Jesuit friend's concurrence. I described to Mother Miriam how I had taken to banging my fist on the back of the pew in front of me whenever I went into the little church of Santa Brigida. Although I never got noisier than that, I described myself as yelling, albeit silently, at G.o.d, telling him I had had more than my share during the last few years, that he had been pus.h.i.+ng me around too hard and too long, and "Basta!" or "Enough already." or "Enough already."

When I finished my letter, I walked up the Aventine Hill to the church of San Anselmo, the Benedictine headquarters in Rome, and told the black-robed doorkeeper I was looking for a Mother Miriam who lived in a Benedictine abbey somewhere in Connecticut. He quickly found a fax number and the address, the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Back home, I decided to try the fax. The next morning our phone rang and a woman's voice, warm and full of joy, asked to speak to me. It was Mother Miriam, speaking on a line that had none of the usual hissing and buzzing of transatlantic calls in those days. When I asked where she was, she laughed and said not as far as I had thought, that for the past three years she had been living in Italy, just south of the great abbey of Monte Ca.s.sino, trying to reestablish an eighth-century monastery that had been burned and sacked by the Saracens in the ninth century and slid into an 1,100-year decline.

She said her old abbey in Connecticut had received my fax and faxed it on to her, and she had decided to phone immediately. Her unexpected call and the news that she was only a couple hours' drive south of Rome seemed unreal. I confessed to feeling as if I had gotten caught up in an episode of The Twilight Zone The Twilight Zone, that 1960s television show that celebrated the paranormal and the bizarre. She laughed, a great pealing bell of a laugh, and asked me to come, for were we not meant to meet?

Two months later we did, at the abbey of San Vincenzo al Volturno, where a handful of Benedictine nuns still spend their days and nights in an unceasing round of prayer and work according to the sixth-century rule of Saint Benedict. The nuns worked like farmhands when they weren't chanting the Holy Office or helping a group of British archaeologists dig through the ruins of what was once one of the biggest and richest monasteries in Italy. The monastery's lands once stretched from sea to sea across the entire middle of the Italian boot; its 1,000 monks inhabited what was in fact a monastic city of extraordinary beauty on a high plateau in Italy's still wild and largely unsettled Abruzzi Mountains.

That weekend at San Vincenzo was a moment of calm and rest for both John and me. Rome and our desperately complicated life seemed at the other end of the earth during our short stay. Mother Miriam neither preached nor played Pollyanna nor uttered pieties during the brief interludes when she and I would have a moment to talk. Instead, the afternoon before John and I left, she and I took a walk together inside the monastery walls. She simply encouraged me to continue down what was obviously a very difficult road, not to despair along the way, and to keep to that path until I found where I was meant to be.

Written down, it may not seem like much. But her words proved extraordinarily useful. Still, it may have been more her joy-filled presence that helped me most. To see someone so obviously full of joy about her rugged and simple medieval life-growing food; tending chickens; mucking out the barns; making cheese, wine, olive oil; cooking; and punctuating each day, which began at five a.m., with the chanting of the hours-reminded me that somewhere along the road of my own life I had lost not only the capacity for joy, but even the idea that joy still existed.

Although my memories of finally being able to yell at G.o.d while pounding the back of a pew in Santa Brigida have always been with me, I had, until writing this book, forgotten one of the most vivid and frightening telephone conversations I had had with my mother a short time before her death. The call occurred a few days after she had been put on a medication that her doctor hoped would help her from sinking further. Instead, it seemed that the pills pushed her over the edge.

My mother was barely able to speak that day on the phone, but she told me that when she tried to fall asleep at night, the faces of all the members of her family who had died had started appearing to her. They were speaking to her as well, she said. And they were beckoning. My mother, who always prayed on her knees every night before she went to bed, then confessed that there was something worse. In a voice full of terror and dread, she said she could no longer say her nightly prayers. Instead, when she looked at the crucifix on the wall, her entire being seemed to erupt in a silent howl, the epithet that she had muttered incessantly during her first depression that erupted at my birth: "sonofab.i.t.c.h." She was horrified at what she believed was blasphemy, and terrified of the consequences.

At the time, on a crackly phone line from Berlin, I did not hesitate a moment to tell her that her G.o.d on his cross would understand her cry, recognize her illness, not hold her accountable, not d.a.m.n her to h.e.l.l. But she simply could not believe me. Only now does it make sense to me why I, too, had been frozen in an overly patient silence during the endless months of John's depression, why I had not been able to pray in the only voice I had in those days, angry and fed up with the litany of woes that had come our way. My mother had yelled at G.o.d, and ended up a few nights later in the bitterly cold waters of a Connecticut salt marsh. She had been too ill to hear her words as a prayer, too ill to feel the grace that was there. It is only now, years later, that I can again see the grace that was waiting to catch her, the same grace that happened to catch me in time, a few lines of a letter from an old friend, a Sister of Mercy; a few words of concurrence from another old friend, a Jesuit professor; a few words of support from a new friend, a Benedictine from Connecticut who, like me, had ended up with an unexpected new life in Italy.

Our quiet weekend at San Vincenzo was a turning point for me. Not that I knew it then, but when I look back, I realize that although John remained deeply depressed and anxious, still p.r.o.ne to bouts of weeping or shaken by repeated anxiety attacks, I could see that he was no longer as utterly mad as he had been even a few weeks earlier. That he had felt strong enough to come with me to San Vincenzo, that he had been able to enjoy our exploration of the archaeological ruins coming to light in the dig, meant he had already begun to turn the corner.

His doctor had long been encouraging him to do things that brought him pleasure, and by springtime John had doubled his walks about Rome, heading out rain or s.h.i.+ne, with guidebooks or without, searching out ancient Roman architectural remains, medieval churches, views, museums, historic palazzi, losing himself in the city's past glories. We began pus.h.i.+ng ourselves out after supper, not only for our usual walks but for free concerts in the city's baroque churches or for the occasional upbeat, tension-free movie. Listening to chamber music in the peaceful silence of an old cloister, where one need only look up to see the stars, gave our weeks a loose schedule; time no longer yawned endlessly before our eyes. Days no longer seemed to last a week, weeks no longer seemed to last a month.

I continued to cook and we continued to eat three meals a day together, and as John's depression began showing signs of lifting, we found we could occasionally even invite a very close friend or two over to share a meal with us without John falling into a panic of fear. When September rolled around, after we had been in Rome for nearly a year, we went up to Trevignano for a weekend visit to the Natansons. It was chestnut season already, and the tall chestnut trees that lined the rutted car track to their gate were having a b.u.mper crop. The weekend happened to coincide with their daughter Phoebe's birthday, and John suddenly decided it was the moment for him to contribute to her birthday meal. I helped him gather a large basket of chestnuts, then watched as he cut crosses into their tough inner sh.e.l.ls and boiled them in milk until they were tender and mealy. He showed us how to help peel the inner skin off, for it is one of those tedious processes that require many hands, and then he put them through a ricer and beat in powdered sugar, finally mounding the chestnuts into a mountainous shape on a large platter. This he covered with freshly whipped cream, to make it look like the snow-capped peak that gives it its name, Monte Bianco. n.o.body said anything, for fear perhaps of breaking the spell, but I knew it was the first time in a couple of years that John himself had cooked anything, the first time he was truly able to come out of his misery and do something for somebody else. It was one more sign, the biggest one yet, that his depression was beginning to lift.

But it was by no means a straight, steady path back up to the light. Although that first year back in Rome seemed at the time to have lasted a decade, it was suddenly nearly over, our lease up for renewal. A close friend had a small, furnished apartment coming open about the same time, and we decided to put the horrors of the year in the Via Giulia apartment behind us. In October we would move into our friend Karen's sunny, light-filled apartment whose French doors provided a stunning view of the Colosseum in a section of Rome near the Forum that neither of us knew very well.

On paper it looked like a good plan. But we still did not realize the extent that even the tiniest change in routine or surroundings can terrify a person suffering from depression. And a move, even just across town, is no small change. John panicked as the move approached, and for the first few weeks in our new home, could barely speak from fear. His overreaction terrified me once more, and for the first few weeks, each time he went out for his daily walk I feared I would not see him alive again.

By Christmas, though, John began to accustom himself to the new apartment, its golden light, and the uninhibited view of the Colosseum, which loomed just outside our western windows. Slowly, our new surroundings in the heart of ancient Rome began to win him over. Once we began exploring the new neighborhood methodically, we fell in love with Rome a second time. I remember the day the two of us finally managed to get into Santo Stefano Rotondo, the oldest and one of the very few circular churches in Rome, which, at the time, was rarely open. The church, famous for its circular concentric naves, stands on the Celian Hill, which rose just behind our new flat.

We happened to arrive at a moment when fierce morning suns.h.i.+ne was pouring through the church's high clerestory windows. The light was falling in Jacob's ladders into the otherwise dark interior, casting a luminescent glow on the two rings of ancient columns that give the church its circular shape. It was the stark interplay of light and dark that captivated John and me on that visit, and I can still picture us standing companionably next to each other and staring at the strong shaft of light that fell on one of a pair of ma.s.sive Corinthian columns in the inner nave. I can still see the spiky stone acanthus leaves carved into that column's capital, and I remember trying to hold in my mind the light that was playing on them so that I might again have access to the light and peace the suns.h.i.+ne seemed to be giving off.

Acanthus grows everywhere in that corner of Rome, filling in the empty spots between more modern shrubs and trees, and its giant, s.h.i.+ny, spiky green leaves were a special comfort in winter, when many other plants were bare. The Greeks first carved acanthus leaves into the capitals of their columns, and the Romans copied the Greeks. To see acanthus growing live under the Corinthian columns where it was carved was one of those special gifts where the ancients speak to those of us living thousands of years later. John, who had spent more than twenty years studying and teaching Latin, redoubled his explorations of our new neighborhood after that visit. As the weeks pa.s.sed, he found that he was no longer just putting one foot in front of the other to pa.s.s the time during his long, doctor-free afternoons; slowly, imperceptibly, he once again began to see what he was walking past and even take pleasure in what he saw.

Our new apartment near the Colosseum had a tiny kitchen carved out of and open to the living-dining room, and one could cook and entertain conversations at the same time. It was a big improvement over our former apartment, where the kitchen felt isolated, away from the life of the house, a room for a servant instead of a family. As John slowly gained strength, we found we could increasingly invite small groups of close friends over to share a meal with us, to drink a gla.s.s or two of wine, to talk, to listen, to take pleasure in the company of old friends.

As the year pa.s.sed, the children continued spending half of their regular, seasonal vacations with us. The four of us would sit around the big wooden dining table, the Colosseum looking down upon us. After a meal, we would try to explain to Peter and Anna the course of their father's illness, to try to rea.s.sure them that he was beginning to feel more like himself, that the worst seemed to be over. How we searched-mainly in vain, it seems now-for words, phrases, explanations! I remember those attempts to explain and demystify Daddy's sickness, the children panicked in some ways, desperate for information on one level but just as desperate for silence, an understandable but vain hope that not talking about it might make the nightmare go away or, better yet, evaporate with neither trace nor memory.

Peter, in his late teens, seemed to seize up whenever we began to talk about John's illness, trying not to react or overreact, afraid perhaps to feel too much. Anna, six years younger, inevitably would cry, big tears spilling out of her blue eyes in neat tracks down her round cheeks. Even when our message was good-that the worst of the depression seemed to be behind him-Anna could only smile and sob at the same time.

When I look back, I don't remember either Peter or Anna asking many questions about their father's illness; in fact, our discussions-which we tried to focus on John's progress-seemed only in the short term to make them feel more distressed. We talked about it anyway, though we took care never to dwell on the lowest points of John's illness, sensing that they couldn't take it and didn't need to hear it. Since they spent half their vacations with us, rather than living full-time with us, their absence distanced them from the concrete horrors of day-to-day life with a person suffering from depression. But that distance also had its negative aspects; one tends to be more afraid of unknown terrors than the everyday terrors one can grow used to.

We knew that firsthand from Anna's initial reaction to John's shooting, when she was eight, and she and Peter visited John in the hospital for the first time. Anna laughed and chattered that day, completely tearless, clearly happy to see him. We thought she was simply too young to have recognized the gravity of the situation. We were thick-headedly wrong. For the following autumn, when Christmas decorations started going up in Germany, Anna became convinced that her mother was going to die during the holidays. Her mother, John, Peter, and I tried to ease her fears but Anna could find no comfort. All the terrors of the previous Christmas-too powerful for her even to voice at eight years old-simply returned, that much stronger for having been festering underground for an entire year.

When the worst of John's illness had begun to pa.s.s and he had just started to try to work again, Anna came alone on a weeklong visit. John told her about the old sketchbooks he had filled during his first trip to Europe at age twenty-three, when instead of taking photographs as souvenirs he had made sketches. He and Anna decided to buy new sketchbooks so that they could try their hand at a new series of drawings. One warm, sunny afternoon, the three of us took a long walk on the Oppio, another of Rome's ancient hills, which faced the front door of our apartment. There they began sketching the apse of the Baths of Trajan. Anna was disappointed with her results, which, next to John's, looked flat and childlike. When he suggested she alter a few key lines, making her straight horizontals into curves, Anna needed only an eraser and a few crucial changes to turn her flat sketch into a drawing with deep perspective, something that amazed us all. I cannot remember who was more proud that day, the father or his thirteen-year-old daughter.

I remember the first six months after we moved back to Rome from Trevignano-throughout the city's long, languid autumn and its short, sharp, sun-filled winter-when John's depression seemed utterly intractable. Sometime late in the long, damp spring that followed, just before the endless searing heat of the Roman summer had begun, the real John seemed to reawaken. The healing came in infinitesimal steps that never once resembled a smooth, upward path. It was always a jerky, tentative stop-and-go, a two-steps-forward, one-step-back sort of motion. The slightest change, glance, or comment could send John cras.h.i.+ng and burning anew. But as spring turned to summer, I began to see that the dark hole he had been inhabiting was neither as deep nor as black as it had been, that while he often still looked terrified, he looked less terrified than before. It may have been that my own perspective was changing as well; I may have finally been able to see less terror in John because some of my own terror was beginning to fade.

And I remember that cool, sunny spring morning about two years into John's depression when I realized it had been a couple of weeks since I had had a vision of coming upon his lifeless body. Later, I realized that I no longer felt so entrapped by his moods, that I was no longer a hostage to his illness. John's silences began to melt away, and one day I was in the kitchen when I heard him laugh while reading a book. It was a tentative laugh, but a laugh nonetheless, and the first I had heard from him in what seemed like forever. I nearly cried at the sound of it.

During the worst of the illness we occasionally happened upon doctors who tried to make us believe that in these days of ever-improving medicines, one just has to experiment long enough to find the right drug or combination of drugs to put depression to flight. Perhaps for those comparatively lucky sufferers of drug-responsive depression, they might be right. But these were the same doctors who failed to mention that perhaps half the cases of stubborn, long-term depression they see are drug-resistant depressions, and that for those patients, no single drug or combination of drugs will work any magic at all. For these sufferers, the answer might lie in electroconvulsive therapy or in the simple pa.s.sage of time needed for the chemicals gone awry in the brain to reverse themselves and return to their more usual state. The trick in that case is to keep the patient from killing himself while the healing inches forward.

John, with the help of a gifted doctor in Rome, a remarkably understanding editor and publisher in New York, a similarly patient bureau chief in Rome, and the fiercest personal determination to hang on to his life at all costs, managed the trick when his depression erupted about thirty months after the shooting. Like anybody living with depression, John was nothing short of heroic. But I know that it was also grace-not luck-and the strength of hope and prayer and anger and fear and love that brought him through.

15.

Polenta.

Iremember the first time my father ever made us polenta, the yellow cornmeal mush that was basically his parents' daily bread back in the farm villages near Verona, where they had been born. My father used coa.r.s.e-grained polenta, the old-fas.h.i.+oned kind that takes forty minutes to cook, and he stood at the stove, incessantly stirring the bubbling yellow ma.s.s with a tall wooden spoon for what seemed to my ravenous ten-year-old self like hours.

My mother was simmering a pot of her favorite stew, what she always called Lamb Marky, braised chunks of lamb shoulder alla marchigiana. alla marchigiana. Its rich sauce, strongly flavored with minced rosemary and garlic, dry white wine, and tomatoes, simmered long enough with the meat to turn it a dark, russet brown. We had always eaten it with potatoes till that night, but I guess my father had gotten a sudden Its rich sauce, strongly flavored with minced rosemary and garlic, dry white wine, and tomatoes, simmered long enough with the meat to turn it a dark, russet brown. We had always eaten it with potatoes till that night, but I guess my father had gotten a sudden wool-eee wool-eee for polenta, which, back then, was strictly a northern Italian peasant dish, a cheap, nutritious filler like pasta, potatoes, rice, or grits and utterly unknown to my mother's southern Italian family. for polenta, which, back then, was strictly a northern Italian peasant dish, a cheap, nutritious filler like pasta, potatoes, rice, or grits and utterly unknown to my mother's southern Italian family.

When polenta begins to cook, it looks like yellow sand roiling about in boiling water. Only after much stirring and cooking over a slow flame does it finally thicken and pull away from the sides of the pan into a solid ma.s.s, a signal that it is nearly done. My father tipped the pot upside down over a cutting board, and like magic a steaming, yellow moon of polenta appeared. Like his mother, my father sliced it not with a knife, which would stick and tear the moist, grainy ma.s.s, but with a length of stout white thread, held taut like dental floss. I watched, fascinated, as he slipped the thread under one edge of the big yellow moon, then used both hands to pull the tautened thread firmly upward, producing a perfectly cut slice that he plopped onto each of our plates. My mother, standing at the stove, took each plate in turn and ladled out her lamb stew, dribbling the dark, meaty sauce over the bright yellow polenta.

I had been starving since I got home from school and smelled her stew already at a lazy simmer. Nevertheless, when the four of us finally sat down, I tried to eat as slowly as possible. From my first bite I knew that I wanted that feast to go on and on, and strangely enough, it has, because I have never forgotten how absolutely extraordinary it tasted to all of us that cold autumn night. It may have stuck in my mind because I was so hungry; or because my brother and I had watched our parents, laughing and cooking together, in our warm kitchen; or perhaps because the two of them produced a meal so perfectly honest and tasty that I knew that it was destined to be eaten again and again. I start craving it each year as we move deeper into autumn, but the real proof of its success may be that my father, over ninety now, still occasionally makes it for tiny dinner parties with his closest friends.

It was no mere accident that John's family ate polenta too. Eating polenta was like a Masonic handshake or secret code that whispered we were part of a tiny tribe of unwashed northerners who, like the great tribe of unwashed southerners, all of them hungry or looking for a better life, had fled Italy late in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That John's family in Jersey City used to sit around their kitchen table eating polenta (theirs usually smothered with a frica.s.see of chicken and dried porcini mushrooms) meant we shared a similar historical past. When we met, both of us thought that sharing a particular history-hard-pressed families seeking to make a new life in another world-would make sharing a future easier. Neither of us has ever thought otherwise.

As John's health began to return, both of us were more than ready to kick-start our official marriage, which had in a sense been freeze-framed first by a bullet and later by depression. John was also beginning to feel strong enough to work. By the end of 1993, he had managed to write about a dozen articles for the paper; by 1994, working at a more normal pace, he had written about six times as many stories and had even begun to travel for occasional articles. At that point, John's editors in New York said he could stay in Rome indefinitely as the Times Times' roving European business writer. That meant we could get our goods out of storage and officially install ourselves in Rome.

The chance to be reunited with our books, music, furniture, and clothes, in storage for nearly three years, pushed John and me to move one last time in Rome, across the Tiber to Trastevere. It was a noisy, charming neighborhood of narrow, cobblestoned lanes that used to be filled with blue-collar families but was undergoing both gentrification and the loss of its traditional mom-and-pop stores. Today, most of the tiny vegetable and fruit shops, the dingy one-room groceries, the minuscule trattorie whose bills were figured on the paper tablecloths, have been replaced with tacky nightspots, bars, karaoke joints, and cheap pizzerias, the lot covered in graffiti that the city does not bother to erase.

We moved into a small apartment whose ceiling beams had been cut about the time the masts of the Mayflower Mayflower had been felled, whose windows stretched nearly twelve feet high. The flat had no view, but was airy and light, and, lacking daylong direct sunlight, rarely felt like an oven, no small thing in a hot country that has yet to embrace air-conditioning. When we finally set up housekeeping after nearly three years of living in furnished flats, we were happy to be back to some sort of normality, but we also felt inundated by our belongings. Since both of us found it easier living pared down, I gave away boxes of kitchenware, clothes, books, records, and anything else we did not plan on using daily. My sense of isolation also diminished at this time, since John, feeling increasingly stronger, no longer feared the visits of friends and family. Within a couple of weeks, both of us felt we were settling into our new, old life: John working at the had been felled, whose windows stretched nearly twelve feet high. The flat had no view, but was airy and light, and, lacking daylong direct sunlight, rarely felt like an oven, no small thing in a hot country that has yet to embrace air-conditioning. When we finally set up housekeeping after nearly three years of living in furnished flats, we were happy to be back to some sort of normality, but we also felt inundated by our belongings. Since both of us found it easier living pared down, I gave away boxes of kitchenware, clothes, books, records, and anything else we did not plan on using daily. My sense of isolation also diminished at this time, since John, feeling increasingly stronger, no longer feared the visits of friends and family. Within a couple of weeks, both of us felt we were settling into our new, old life: John working at the Times Times office, a ten-minute walk across the Tiber, and me writing from home. office, a ten-minute walk across the Tiber, and me writing from home.

Kick-starting our marriage meant more than just living once again amid our own belongings, more than just refinding each other after John's long illness. I was in my mid-forties already, John nine years older, and I knew that if we were ever going to have a child together, there was already little, if any, time left. Ironically, it was my relations.h.i.+p with John's Anna that had reawakened my old longing for a child of my own, a longing that I had been obliged to put aside repeatedly, when John was shot, when he got hepat.i.tis, when he spiraled down, lost, into depression.

I had known Anna since she was five, and her openness toward me had always been a gift. I never played at being her mother, but I loved being around her and watching her mind and heart grow. Once when she was still very young she told me that she did not like the word stepmother stepmother because fairy-tale stepmothers were too mean. She tried to come up with a new, more neutral word to describe our relations.h.i.+p, and suggested that perhaps I could be her fa-wi, short for father's wife, while she could be my hu-da, short for husband's daughter. Even if her terms never caught on, the thoughts behind them took root. Over the years, she and Peter showed me repeatedly that the complicated relations.h.i.+p I had had with my mother did not necessarily mean I would provoke a similarly complicated relations.h.i.+p with all other small beings in the universe. because fairy-tale stepmothers were too mean. She tried to come up with a new, more neutral word to describe our relations.h.i.+p, and suggested that perhaps I could be her fa-wi, short for father's wife, while she could be my hu-da, short for husband's daughter. Even if her terms never caught on, the thoughts behind them took root. Over the years, she and Peter showed me repeatedly that the complicated relations.h.i.+p I had had with my mother did not necessarily mean I would provoke a similarly complicated relations.h.i.+p with all other small beings in the universe.

The idea of a child resurfaced shortly after we moved back to Rome and began our four-way meetings with John's doctor and family therapist. John, who already had two children, who was fighting to come out of a serious depression, who was still trying to get back to work on a regular basis, was understandably far more hesitant than I about the idea, though I also worried that it might be too big a gamble. Still, I think our doctors understood far better than either of us at the time that I was likely to feel cheated in our marriage at some point in the future if we did not at least agree to try. In the end, our decision to try to have a child was not an intellectual choice but a visceral one: a now-or-never decision.

In June of 1996, on the advice of our doctors in Rome, we flew to London to consult with a fertility expert whom John's doctor believed would be helpful to us both. It was our first weekend trip outside Italy in years, and we were excited at the thought of a weekend away together. The consultation was relaxed but to the point. The doctor was aware of our ages and relieved that neither of us was interested in doing anything scientific to enhance the utterly slim chances of a pregnancy (no drugs, no hormones, no surgical or fertility procedures, not even so much as the daily taking of my temperature). He told us simply that it was highly unlikely I would become pregnant, but that there seemed to be no physical impediments that would absolutely rule it out. That was how we wanted it; either I would conceive naturally or I would not. The trip to London was a balm: talking with the fertility expert there made me understand almost immediately that it was not so important that I become pregnant as it was that I consciously tried to leave myself open to new life-to our own as a couple, or to the possibility of a child. That John went along with it, despite deep reservations, was, I think now, what sealed our marriage vows, for I knew how much he was risking to agree. Quietly, then, I started hoping for a girl.

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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 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. 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 Ma.s.s thinking I had never truly understood the word Alleluia Alleluia until I was deep into my pregnancy. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 Timioara's airport open long enough for the Red Cross to fly John and me to safety. While in Timioara, John learned the name of the man who had shot him, and though initially curious, he decided that meeting his a.s.sailant would accomplish nothing. John was in Romania to write a magazine article for the Times 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. 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 barista at the old cafe across the street from our flat, where I would buy our daily milk and occasionally drink an afternoon at the old cafe across the street from our flat, where I would buy our daily milk and occasionally drink an afternoon spremuta d'arancia 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 subst.i.tute 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 a.s.sured 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 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. 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, rea.s.suring 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.

Over the next days and weeks, John worked even more closely than usual with his doctor to fight off the panic that occasionally rose within him, to master his irrational fears about whether he could be as good a father to Julia as he had been to Peter and Anna, about whether Julia's presence might somehow damage the ties he had to his firstborn children. That he did in fact learn to master those fears and reverse the slide-all the while continuing to work and live with a newborn and a forty-six-year-old new mother who was herself worried about postpartum blues-impresses me still. That over the next weeks he was able to fight off his panic and turn himself into the very same father I had seen with Peter and Anna-loving, nurturing, playful, wacky-made me realize our marriage was on the right track again at last. I felt my bolting days were over, that it would be near impossible for me to walk out on a man who had conquered such panic, a man with whom his youngest daughter was so utterly taken.

The journal I kept of Julia's early life is an old, tattered reporter's notebook I grabbed in such haste the day we got home from the clinic that I started writing in it from back to front. The journal began as a simple feeding timetable, reminding me at what time I had last fed Julia and which breast she had emptied. At the time, my short-term memory seemed short-circuited, and I could not remember anything from one minute to the next. I had suffered this sensation once before in my life, during the first weeks of John's hospitalization after the shooting, when I had to write down everything anyone said to me, since my mind could not grab, record, or play back any conversation, no matter how important.

Julia's pediatrician, a young Italian mother with children of her own, was adamantly in favor of breast-feeding, and worked with Julia and me while we were still in the clinic to make sure things were progressing correctly. New mothers in Italy benefit from a midwife visit after they go home, a G.o.dsend for a first-time mother, who needs all the help she can get. I had read any number of books and pamphlets on breast-feeding before Julia was born, and all of them seemed hopelessly vague and romantic when faced with a squalling, starving infant who could not seem to latch on to a milk-engorged nipple. My brother once described breast-feeding as the most unnatural of natural acts, and until Julia and I finally got the routine down, I could not have agreed more.

All the books and pamphlets talked up breast-feeding's economies, how new parents did not have to pay the price of expensive baby formulas to feed their child. None of them seemed to mention that a breast-feeding mother's enormous appet.i.te would more than make up for the difference. In those early days at home, I simply could not get enough food in my stomach to satisfy my hunger. And no matter how much I ate, the weight just kept falling off my bones.

For breakfast, I found myself eating eggs, potatoes, toast, fruit, yogurt, muesli, and the occasional bit of leftover meat. By ten a.m., starving again, I would down an enormous bowl of fresh ricotta, covered in tiny strawberries. By lunchtime I would be ravenous once more and would eat a bowl of pasta or a plate of risotto, followed by meat, a mound of cooked vegetables, a salad, and more bread than I had ever eaten in my life. Three hours and a nap later, I would be famished yet again and fix myself enormous slabs of Gorgonzola cheese on dark country bread. Once John got home, I would eat a supper as big as my lunch and follow it up with a few pieces of fruit.

John, who was cooking those first few days after my return from the hospital, could barely keep pace with my hunger. Even though Julia and I were growing stronger by the day, I hesitated to count on John to take up the slack, since he was still feeling overwhelmed after the birth, and I was simply too exhausted to buy and prepare all the food I needed to eat. We did not own a car, and there was no way to do food shopping except on foot, dragging one of those two-wheeled, old-lady shopping carts behind me. Although I could buy fresh pasta, bread, fruit, vegetables, and milk at nearby shops, the butcher was several blocks away, at the time too far for me to even consider. That second week out of the hospital, I was positively saved by Eleni, my Greek-American friend. Eleni, who had two children of her own, knocked on my door one morning when I was still too weak to be out of bed for long. When I opened the door, she was standing there with hampers of cooked food, all ready to be heated and served.

I can still taste Eleni's Italian mother-in-law's recipe for turkey breast poached until tender in milk, b.u.t.ter, and Parmigiano cheese, the creamy sauce flavored with bits of minced onion, carrot, and celery. I can still see Eleni's enormous roulade of beef, big as my arm, stuffed with ham, cheese, spinach, and herbs, and flavored by a carrot-rich tomato sauce. Eleni brought a vat of homemade mashed potatoes, Italian-style, enriched and lightened with nearly a quart of milk. She brought a big container of cooked zucchini, another of rice, another of beans. No one ever gave me a better gift in my life than that hamper of ready-to-eat meals; to this day I do not know how I would have survived that second week at home without Eleni's food. I suppose I might have eventually figured out a way to have one of our local trattorie deliver meals to our door, but by the time I had eaten my way through Eleni's bounty, I was strong enough to do the shopping and cooking myself.

Both Julia's pediatrician and my gynecologist discouraged me from switching to formula during two long bouts of mast.i.tis. That meant breast-feeding every two hours for days at a time, while taking antibiotics. During the second bout, when Julia was about two months old, the gynecologist discovered I was on the verge of developing an abscess, which could mean hospitalization. "Julia needs her mother at home, not in the hospital," the doctor told me, asking when I had last fed her. When I answered, "Just now," the doctor did not hesitate: " Well, then, Julia has just had her last natural feed from you."

The doctor's advice took me utterly by surprise, and I walked out of her cramped bas.e.m.e.nt office, huge tears spilling down my cheeks, for my hormones were still in an uproar, from the birth or the breast-feeding or both. I knew the doctor was right, but I had not expected her p.r.o.nouncement to be so sudden or categorical. Still crying, I walked out of her office into the normal chaos, pedestrian and vehicular, of the Viale Trastevere, the neighborhood's biggest boulevard. I walked into our local pharmacy, tears still gus.h.i.+ng, and handed one of the women behind the counter the doctor's prescription for Julia's formula and mine for shutting down my milk. This being Italy, the woman came out from behind the counter, handed me a pack of tissues, sat me down in a chair, and asked what was wrong. Still blubbering uncontrollably, I told her that my doctor had just decreed I could no longer breast-feed.

The entire shop-pharmacist, salesclerks, and elderly patrons alike-came to a momentary, silent standstill. Then, this being Italy, everybody in the shop started talking at once, offering comfort and advice and telling me not to be upset-that everything would be all right, that my baby would be fine, that I soon would be feeling like myself, that I should just take the pills as prescribed and go home and steal a long nap.

Group therapy over, I finally managed to stop crying, paid my bill, and walked the rest of the way home. I took a long nap, as suggested. At feeding time, I made up a bottle of formula and worried how Julia would react. Ravenous herself, Julia never missed a beat, and sucked on that plastic nipple until the bottle was drained. When she was through, I took my milk-stopping drug and prayed that the threatened abscess would be averted. During the coming days, my milk dried up as it was meant to and my hormones simmered down.

The elderly ladies in the pharmacy were correct. Everything was all right, my baby was fine, my husband was on the mend, and soon I was feeling like myself.

16.

Cookbooks.

Every family has its creation story. Mine was always recounted by my mother, in just the same way, with the same tone of regret. When I married your father, she would always begin, I didn't know how to boil water. I couldn't make a soft-boiled egg. I didn't know how to make coffee, where to put it in the pot. If it hadn't been for your father teaching me how to do everything, we would have starved. I don't want you to grow up like I did, with my toast always b.u.t.tered for me every morning. I want you to be able to do everything.

At some point after their wedding, years before I was born, Irma Rombauer's Joy of Cooking Joy of Cooking showed up in my parents' kitchen. It's still there, covered in the same neat brown paper bag cover that we always used to cover schoolbooks. Decades later my mother bought the updated version, written by the mother and her daughter, and she complained forever after that all the good recipes were gone, and the ones that remained were all wrong. "Oyma" was how my mother always referred to the book and its author. "What does Oyma have to say about it?" she would wonder aloud, and when I was very little, I always thought that my mother knew Oyma intimately, that she was perhaps an old childhood friend, someone who had moved away, who inexplicably never wrote at Christmas but who had left indelible traces behind in her thick, heavy cookbook filled with basic recipes like griddle cakes, dry dressing, or roast beef hash. showed up in my parents' kitchen. It's still there, covered in the same neat brown paper bag cover that we always used to cover schoolbooks. Decades later my mother bought the updated version, written by the mother and her daughter, and she complained forever after that all the good recipes were gone, and the ones that remained were all wrong. "Oyma" was how my mother always referred to the book and its author. "What does Oyma have to say about it?" she would wonder aloud, and when I was very little, I always thought that my mother knew Oyma intimately, that she was perhaps an old childhood friend, someone who had moved away, who inexplicably never wrote at Christmas but who had left indelible traces behind in her thick, heavy cookbook filled with basic recipes like griddle cakes, dry dressing, or roast beef hash.

After Oyma, Adelle Davis began appearing in our kitchen with alarming frequency. She She, for we were never on a first-name basis with her, had written one of the early health-food bibles, Let's Cook It Right, Let's Cook It Right, a 1947 book that much intrigued my father, as did a 1947 book that much intrigued my father, as did Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit, Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit, a later volume. a later volume. She She was to blame for the whole-wheat-bread phase of my childhood, all those brown sandwiches I threw away at school after a bite or two out of the middle. was to blame for the whole-wheat-bread phase of my childhood, all those brown sandwiches I threw away at school after a bite or two out of the middle. She She was responsible for tiger's milk, a nasty concoction of mola.s.ses and brewer's yeast. Her only saving grace, in my mind, was a recipe for pancakes made of potatoes, grated whole, skin included, and cooked very rapidly in a bit of very hot oil or fat, with a touch of raw onion thrown in toward the end. Everybody seems to love them still, despite their provenance. was responsible for tiger's milk, a nasty concoct