Keeping the Feast Read Online Free PDF Page A

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