Morry didn’t blink.
In a way, I thought it was a shame he didn’t get further along in the campaign. Morry wasn’t ready for the Oval Office, but he had intestinal fortitude and heart, two qualities in short supply in Washington.
We finished the book, he was happy with it, and when we couldn’t find a publisher, he ended up self-publishing it. He handed it out at events around the country, often mentioning the nice Jewish girl who wrote the book, pointing at my name on the cover and declaring I deserved all the credit.
Eleven
Haunted
After all . . . what is the past but what we choose to remember?
—Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter
Writing other people’s lives is a bit silly, like playing dress-up, clomping around in your mother’s pumps that don’t quite fit, but it also lets you have a momentary sense of what it’s like to be someone else. That’s what I told myself I was doing: rehearsing for my real life. But meanwhile, inhabiting the minds and lives of other people for a decade had afforded me a comfortable lifestyle: I could rent a nice place in one of the most expensive cities in the world; I didn’t have any debt and I could take vacations and still save for the future. The money had been a great excuse to put off being fully present in my own interior life, which for a writer pretty much is your life.
By this time I had reached my midthirties, and I had to face the fact that this had become my real life, whether or not I had gotten here accidentally rather than purposefully. I could no longer hide under the guise of ingénue or mentee. My youth and its promise had long since exceeded their expiration date. Time to grow up. We all define “growing up” a little differently. But before I could make room for myself and my own memories, I had to exorcise the ghosts of others. Growing up also meant getting married and having kids, two things that had eluded me. Washington is not an easy town for relationships. People work long hours and put their jobs first, and I had been guilty of both.
Though my book business kept me plenty busy, it was mainly a solitary endeavor, and I appreciated the human interaction that part-time teaching provided. By 1996, I had been teaching Introduction to Journalism at Georgetown University for four years, every Monday evening on the second floor of White-Gravenor, a decaying Gothic building. My classroom was below some sort of science lab that periodically oozed an unknown liquid through its floor onto my classroom’s ceiling.
Because I taught in the evenings, I had minimal interaction with the regular full-time faculty in the English Department, but that fall semester after working with Morry, I did meet and get to know a colleague, an eighteenth-century-literature scholar, Dennis Todd, whose classes were scheduled during the daytime. One day Dennis mistakenly got a piece of mail advertising a journalism event. He brought it to me and we began talking. That led to a drink down by the Potomac that turned into dinner at an Italian restaurant across town.
Then, unexpectedly, he offered to wash my car. I realize that sounds vaguely obscene, but it was nothing more than a kind gesture when he noticed my car was splattered with mud. The car washing won my heart, and that led to him inviting me to stay for enchiladas, and the Mexican food stole my stomach. Twenty years later, he’s still making me enchiladas (the car washing, not so much). We moved in together, married, and had a daughter just fourteen months after meeting.
I love being married and having a family and sometimes wonder what took me so long to settle down. Was it something about me? Or was it something about Washington? Why was it so hard to make a connection in a city whose currency is connections?
This is something that bothered me for quite a while: Before I met my husband, while I was working with Mrs. Clinton on her book, I began to despair that I was spending my days (and nights) involved in, entrenched even, in others’ lives both professionally (ghosting memoirs and manifestos) and personally (I loved children and since I didn’t have my own, I found ways to have them in my life: I volunteered at Children’s Hospital; took care of friends’ children; taught children how to ice-skate; and, most importantly, devoted myself to my niece and nephews).
But these surrogates weren’t enough, so I found a shrink, signed on for weekly appointments, and committed to jump-starting my personal life. The irony of paying someone to listen to me narrate my own story was not lost on me. And the therapist, being a creature of Washington, seemed fascinated by the stories I told because—let’s face it—there were good characters in these stories, even if I knew they weren’t my stories. Listen to the one about Bob Woodward! Hillary Clinton! The senator who committed an indiscretion! The war hero who ran for president! Everyone else’s story was easier to tell than my own. If I kept this up, I could spend forever without ever having to face my own demons.
After several months, I began to run out of material and decided that these sessions weren’t helping, and so I pulled the plug. End of that story? Nope. Not in this town. Flash forward two years, and I’m married with an infant. I get a letter from the shrink, addressed to me at Georgetown’s English Department, something to the effect of “I can’t find you. Your phone number has changed. Could you please get in touch with me?” I speculated it must be something about the final bill. But why did she wait this long to contact me? Nervously, I dialed her number.
I should have guessed what she wanted. She wanted to write a book, and she wanted to hire me to help her. The violation of boundaries in this proposition was stunning and immediately obvious, at least to me. But this was Washington. A city with no borders: The personal is the professional, the private the public, and vice versa.
So why didn’t I tell her no or even point out the ethical implications of working with someone who could catalog my secrets, phobias, and failures like they were butterflies? I dunno. Maybe I need a different shrink to answer that. Maybe it’s as simple as I needed a gig, and she offered me one.
I was on hiatus from another book project, a sinking ship of a manuscript by a senator who shall remain nameless. Suffice it to say he had a female problem, though I know that doesn’t really narrow things down much, does it? His wife didn’t approve of his book project, and she seemed to resent my presence in their home. The files and I were exiled to the basement of the basement, which felt like taking a day hike through Stalin’s gulag. This basement banishment seemed to underscore a shame that went along with this profession. Ghosts were to be spirited away, ignored, treated with disdain. A magazine piece I had read years before about celebrity memoirs quoted a book editor as noting that ghostwriters were “basically typists.” That one had stung.
I secretly agreed with the senator’s wife that the project was a bad idea. They had worked through their problems, or maybe around them; in any event, they seemed to be in a good place. So why revisit an unfortunate past? I believe he was compelled by an overarching sense that he was misunderstood and that his transgression had been exaggerated by the media and that it unfairly eclipsed a lifetime of public service.
At one point, I found myself standing outside their senatorial house in the August heat—when I was seven months pregnant, round and squat as a pumpkin, and sweating like a Sumo wrestler—listening to the wife threaten me that if this book had anything in it to hurt her husband, she would . . . I kept silent though I wanted to note that her husband’s secrets were safe with me. After my Woodward experience, I was now the Fort Knox of collaborators.
As the months went by it became clear that the senator was destined not to finish his memoir, and that was just as well. I now had a baby to care for and had taken the semester off from teaching. So when the shrink with no boundaries came along, I was in need of a new gig. She would compensate me well. I told myself it would be a temporary and convenient solution.
Except it didn’t feel temporary, and it was anything but convenient.
Almost immediately, she started calling several times a day, starting as early as 7:00 a.m. Her reliance on me quickly became suffocating. She knew I wasn’t working on anything else, but I ha
d told her that that could change. She expressed concern about whether I would continue to have enough time to work with her but quickly added she didn’t resent the time that my daughter required. It struck me as an odd thing to say.
One day she brought over a gift for my daughter that one of her patients had made. It was a clown doll, its torso and limbs pieces of Styrofoam covered in cloth; its nose, eyes, and mouth were plastic buttons attached with straight pins. Talk about a choking hazard. Even worse, it had that creepy horror movie clown thing going on.
Dennis took one look and said, “This is getting really weird.” Then he picked it up and, holding it at arm’s length, took it out to the trash. After that, I gently began to push back against her ever-encroaching insertion into my life, but she pushed back even harder. Psychologically, of course, she had the advantage. As her patient I had shared with her my demons and my weaknesses—relevant here, my people-pleasing tendencies. The situation felt claustrophobic. And then, as happens too rarely in life, opportunity knocked on our door.
One evening, Dennis came home with a letter on official Georgetown University stationery. “We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected to be the professor-in-residence for the academic year 1999–2000,” it said.
The chaos of our first year of parenthood had caused us to forget that Dennis had applied for the Villa program in Italy. I had studied Italian in college and lived there for the summer after graduating from Berkeley. My 1995 post-Village trip had renewed my determination to return someday and stay for a long time. This sojourn wasn’t decided on a whim but rather was the end point of a slow-burning and ever-mounting desire that we shared to live in Italy and that I had to escape from Washington. And now we were going to do just that. Nine glorious months in Italy.
Like Henry Adams’s Democracy character Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, who said she dreamed of running off to Egypt, I, too, was disillusioned with Washington. “Democracy has shaken my nerves to pieces,” Adams’s character proclaimed. “Oh, what rest it would be to live in the Great Pyramid and look out for ever at the polar star!”
The Georgetown compound wasn’t just any villa; a Rockefeller had bequeathed it to Georgetown University. It was blissfully located in Fiesole, an ancient hill town that sits just above Florence: Villa Le Balze. Le Balze means “The Cliffs.” Let that roll off your tongue and automatically the shoulders relax and exhaling becomes a natural and involuntary activity, something you no longer need to remind yourself to do.
Dolce far niente. Sweet to do nothing. Sweet to get the hell out of Washington.
We gave our landlord notice, put our belongings in a storage unit, stowed our car in Ben Bradlee’s country home barn, and fled to Italy with our twenty-month-old daughter.
After a long flight, then a car ride through Florence and up a long, winding one-lane road to the town of Fiesole, we arrived at the Villa Le Balze. We were shown to the villino (little villa), a two-story apartment in a separate building across a garden from the main villa. From nearly any vantage point on the grounds, there was a truly breathtaking vista of Florence below, overlooking the river Arno. And just a short but heart-stopping walk up to the top of the hill stood Fiesole, a village with Etruscan ruins, a Roman amphitheater and temple, an eleventh-century cathedral, and numerous structures dating to the Renaissance.
The villa grounds included an internationally recognized maze of gardens and an active olive grove from which came the best olive oil I’ve ever tasted. Two amazing cooks were on duty to make lunch and dinner for the students and faculty, as well as housekeepers and gardeners to keep everything tidy and beautiful. The villa had survived being bombed during World War II, and it was still elegant with its high ceilings and big windows with panoramic views. The library had a piano and spectacular old bookshelves. It was the perfect place to sip a glass of red wine and curl up with E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View.
We didn’t know much about how Georgetown had ended up with the villa. We had heard through the university grapevine that a Rockefeller had left it to Georgetown so she wouldn’t have to leave it to her children. The truth, as it so often does, turned out to be more complicated. According to Dominick Dunne, in a splashy Vanity Fair piece, the fabulously wealthy granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, Margaret Rockefeller Strong, at age seventy-seven married her second husband, Raymundo de Larrain, who, thirty-three years her junior, convinced her to rewrite her will and leave her assets to him rather than her two children from her first marriage. A lawsuit ensued. The New York Times reported that the children’s lawyer “argued that Mr. de Larrain had deliberately isolated their mother from her servants and from the Rockefeller family, then manipulated her into changing her will. In her final will, signed in Florida, the children were disinherited.”
But at age eighty-two, Margaret had signed away the villa to the university in 1979, a year before she rewrote her will, and six years before her death. Did her husband convince her to do that? Did Georgetown? The truth was more complicated than the rumors we had heard. Her obituary notes that during the spring before the winter she died, she and her husband were awarded honorary degrees from Georgetown for their work on behalf of “culture, peace and world harmony” (the lack of familial harmony notwithstanding, apparently). Why she turned over the villa to Georgetown and not her children or her husband may be unknowable.
Uncontestable was how spectacular the gardens were. Her father, Charles Augustus Strong, a philosopher and author, had retreated there after his wife, the daughter of John D. Rockefeller, died. Though he owned the land, there was no existing home.
But Fiesole was a lovely, peaceful place for a widowed father of a nine-year-old girl to set down roots, so he hired two well-known English architects to design and build the villa. Here, Margaret could play among the olive groves and garden statues, and Charles could host other philosophers, among them his old friend and Harvard classmate George Santayana. It was a setting that appealed to young and old, to anyone who appreciated beauty and tranquility.
Just below Le Balze, to the east, literally across the road, was the Villa Medici, considered to be the first true Renaissance villa, which in 1458 had been the summer retreat of Cosimo the Elder and was now where the Argentine soccer star Gabriel Batistuta lived. To the north is the Villa San Girolamo, the setting for Michael Ondaatje’s bestselling novel The English Patient.
Though we are not related to the Rockefellers or anyone else remotely rich or fancy, we were treated like royalty from the moment we arrived. My husband was addressed by one and all as Professore, and I was Signora. Our daughter, walking but barely talking, was called a variety of endearments including carina, bambina, bella.
Sasha had been an easy baby and she was an easy toddler. She slept through the night, took naps (the entire country took naps!), rarely fell ill, and had a happy, sunny disposition. In equal measure, she loved pasta and the attention of our students; there were about two dozen of them living at the villa for the semester. And for peer companionship, Sasha made friends with one of the cooks’ small children, whose farm we regularly visited for playdates. I would marvel at my good fortune as I wended my way through Tuscan hills illuminated by the Italian sun, and I didn’t miss driving through suburban Washington among its cranky commuters.
We quickly settled into a routine, with Dennis focused on teaching while I cared for Sasha. For the first time in eighteen years, I had time on my hands. I wasn’t expected to teach. I didn’t have a publisher breathing down my neck. I was there, gratefully, in the role of faculty spouse, with no other obligations than to mind our daughter. I could write, drink wine, and reflect on my life. Or just drink wine. I didn’t feel like writing. I was having too much fun. We felt so incredibly welcomed in Italy. Wherever we went, people fawned over Sasha. Bakers, maître d’s, shopkeepers, merry-go-round operators—everyone had at least a smile and usually a dolce for her.
More than anyone else, the Italian director of the program, Marcelo, and his wife, Cinzia, made us
feel at home. Their daughter was exactly the same age as Sasha and, though they didn’t share a language, they did share their toys, which is all that matters when you’re two years old. And so it was to Marcelo we turned when we learned that for every Christmas holiday, the university muckety-mucks (wealthy alums and donors) took over the villino, and we would have to temporarily vacate the premises for three weeks.
Marcelo suggested we spend the first week, leading up to and including Christmas day, in Orvieto, a town in the region of Umbria. He arranged for us to borrow the villa’s vehicle, and we drove there, first staying at a nunnery that took in boarders to help with the bills. The village was a magical place, particularly at this time of year, all lit up with holiday lights, fresh snow blanketing the cobblestone streets, and the smell of warm bread wafting out of the many bakeries as we strolled around, stopping for coffee, sweets, and vino whenever the spirit moved us.
Most of that week, I was able to live only in the moment, a state of being that usually eludes me. But when I did think of our future, it was about the house we would buy and the home we would make when our Italian days came to their conclusion. Though I wasn’t eager to return to Washington, I was excited to think about putting down roots. Before getting married, I had moved almost every two years, leading the typical young, single person’s nomadic life. Moving so frequently had lost its appeal, and I looked forward to staying put in one place. It was in Orvieto that I found a brass door knocker for the house that Sasha would grow up in and leave from for college. I decided that one of Dennis’s first household chores in our future home would be to affix that knocker to the front door so that each time we entered the house we would remember our time in Italy.
Marcelo had suggested that after Umbria we travel to Tuscany, where his parents were caretakers on a farm. He said there was a converted barn for guests where we could write and make nice dinners amid the rolling hills. It sounded heavenly, and we readily agreed. So after Christmas, as the rest of the world braced for Y2K, we made our way from Umbria to Tuscany, following Marcelo’s handwritten directions along a dirt road to where Marcelo’s parents eagerly awaited us.
Pretend I'm Not Here Page 22