desk and said I could visit just one of the world’s great cities, Rome is the one I’d choose. I nearly made it once but got several lumps of shrapnel in my legs instead.
From the photographs it looks as if two thousand years of history are just lying in the streets. There’s a photograph of the Colosseum, for instance, with traffic roaring around it. The Colosseum—the actual Colosseum, the real thing, not a replica—is a traffic island. It’s simply incredible. And then there’s the Pantheon, built in 27 BC by Marcus Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus. Apparently its dome is the largest masonry vault ever constructed. As near as I can figure it—all of the books seem to use the metric scale and I have to convert it in order to get a real idea of the size—it’s 142 feet in both height and diameter. If you stand in the middle (you can still do this, it is virtually intact) light pours down on you through a thirty-foot-wide opening at the top. It must feel as if you are looking straight up to heaven. Think of the vision, the sheer genius required even to conceive of such a thing.
None of the books has a photograph of the dome itself, so I was sitting at my desk looking out at the driving snow—we have another full-scale blizzard on our hands—trying to visualize that vast and perfect space transfixed, as it must frequently be, by a great column of sunlight, when the boys announced their arrival home by slamming the front door.
It sounds a small thing, put like that: they slammed the door. Perhaps any single slam of a door is a small thing. But if it is not a single slam, if they slam it every time they go in or out, and if it is not one son who does it but every son, the effect is cumulative.
Nonetheless I did my best to ignore them. I told myself that it was my birthday and I wasn’t going to let anything spoil it and attempted to think my way back to Rome. The boys fought their way across the living room and into the kitchen. I tried not to listen. The crashes continued in there for a minute or two and then there was a brief pause followed by Corey—I could hear him clearly, here in my study, with the door closed—saying, “There’s
nothing
to
eat
in this place. There isn’t even any
bread
.” His footsteps clumped out of the kitchen and across the living room to the foot of the stairs and then, rather than climb them, he yelled, “Mum! I can’t find the bread! Is there any bread?”
By then I’d stopped pretending that I could ignore them. I sat here, struggling to contain the anger massing up inside me. I dimly heard Emily’s voice making some reply from upstairs—she is the only member of the household whose voice has no carrying power—and Corey yelled, “What? I can’t hear you!” And then Peter, still in the kitchen, shouted, “Stop shouting, stupid! You’ll wake the baby!” and immediately the baby’s wail drifted down the stairs. And suddenly I was beside myself with rage.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been that angry. I’m not sure how to account for it. Perhaps it was a combination of turning forty-seven and having a week-old baby upstairs. I will be almostseventy before this one is off my hands. I will have lived out—used up—my three score years and ten. If someone had told me thirty years ago that this was going to be the extent of my life, I simply would not have believed him.
This new child—number nine, eight of whom survive—wasn’t even supposed to be. John Christopherson specifically warned against Emily having more children after Adam was born. But she insisted and it is the one thing I cannot deny her; she knows it, and I know it. So maybe that was at the root of my fury. I don’t know.
Whatever it was, I heaved myself out of my chair and crossed to the door and flung it open and roared at them,
bellowed
at them, “
Will you be quiet! How many times do you have to be told!
”
And heard my father’s voice. Exactly his voice. His rage. And saw the
From the photographs it looks as if two thousand years of history are just lying in the streets. There’s a photograph of the Colosseum, for instance, with traffic roaring around it. The Colosseum—the actual Colosseum, the real thing, not a replica—is a traffic island. It’s simply incredible. And then there’s the Pantheon, built in 27 BC by Marcus Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus. Apparently its dome is the largest masonry vault ever constructed. As near as I can figure it—all of the books seem to use the metric scale and I have to convert it in order to get a real idea of the size—it’s 142 feet in both height and diameter. If you stand in the middle (you can still do this, it is virtually intact) light pours down on you through a thirty-foot-wide opening at the top. It must feel as if you are looking straight up to heaven. Think of the vision, the sheer genius required even to conceive of such a thing.
None of the books has a photograph of the dome itself, so I was sitting at my desk looking out at the driving snow—we have another full-scale blizzard on our hands—trying to visualize that vast and perfect space transfixed, as it must frequently be, by a great column of sunlight, when the boys announced their arrival home by slamming the front door.
It sounds a small thing, put like that: they slammed the door. Perhaps any single slam of a door is a small thing. But if it is not a single slam, if they slam it every time they go in or out, and if it is not one son who does it but every son, the effect is cumulative.
Nonetheless I did my best to ignore them. I told myself that it was my birthday and I wasn’t going to let anything spoil it and attempted to think my way back to Rome. The boys fought their way across the living room and into the kitchen. I tried not to listen. The crashes continued in there for a minute or two and then there was a brief pause followed by Corey—I could hear him clearly, here in my study, with the door closed—saying, “There’s
nothing
to
eat
in this place. There isn’t even any
bread
.” His footsteps clumped out of the kitchen and across the living room to the foot of the stairs and then, rather than climb them, he yelled, “Mum! I can’t find the bread! Is there any bread?”
By then I’d stopped pretending that I could ignore them. I sat here, struggling to contain the anger massing up inside me. I dimly heard Emily’s voice making some reply from upstairs—she is the only member of the household whose voice has no carrying power—and Corey yelled, “What? I can’t hear you!” And then Peter, still in the kitchen, shouted, “Stop shouting, stupid! You’ll wake the baby!” and immediately the baby’s wail drifted down the stairs. And suddenly I was beside myself with rage.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been that angry. I’m not sure how to account for it. Perhaps it was a combination of turning forty-seven and having a week-old baby upstairs. I will be almostseventy before this one is off my hands. I will have lived out—used up—my three score years and ten. If someone had told me thirty years ago that this was going to be the extent of my life, I simply would not have believed him.
This new child—number nine, eight of whom survive—wasn’t even supposed to be. John Christopherson specifically warned against Emily having more children after Adam was born. But she insisted and it is the one thing I cannot deny her; she knows it, and I know it. So maybe that was at the root of my fury. I don’t know.
Whatever it was, I heaved myself out of my chair and crossed to the door and flung it open and roared at them,
bellowed
at them, “
Will you be quiet! How many times do you have to be told!
”
And heard my father’s voice. Exactly his voice. His rage. And saw the
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