Keeping the Feast Read Online Free PDF Page B

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