Katherine had been suffering from a similar homesickness. She was never fully at ease in our college town and missed her family in Michigan, the Midwestern sincerity, the strong Republican values of her father and his political circles. I could feel the tension radiate from her at dinner parties as friends of ours, over couscous and ciabatta, excoriated Cheney and Rumsfeld. She knew that she could not speak her mind in these circles. And she knew that I disagreed with her on almost all political matters. But I had learned to live with our opposing viewpoints and even found it exhilarating to hear her tell me, in private, why she rejected the principles governing my world. The part of me that had grown up in a blue-collar family light-years from the liberal chatter of the ivory tower also relished her unabashed embrace of the family values and enterprising spirit that had helped my own family climb out of centuries of Calabrian squalor and make it into the American middle class.
The morning of her accident, she had been driving to the State University of New York at New Paltz for a final exam in one of her humanities courses. She had a 3.75 grade point average and was majoring in history, after having been accepted into the college’s honors program the year before. But she was struggling to balance her pregnancy, her work as a Pilates instructor, and her life in a world far from her family in Michigan and actor friends in New York. At the end of the day, there were term papers to write and oral reports to prepare for, but there was no clear sense of where it was all heading, as she had not decided what—if any—career she wanted for her post-acting life. And then there were all those brainiacs to deal with. Once in North Carolina she told one of the fellows at the Humanities Center, a well-known Slavic poet, that she hated the film Pulp Fiction because it was, in her words, “immoral.” She certainly could have chosen a more politic term, but that was just how she was: transparent, emotional, direct, not given to abstractions and open-ended arguments. The poet gave her a vacant, confused look. My wife was breaking a sacred rule of the chattering classes: never make an unsubtle point about a major cultural phenomenon. And never hold art to the same standards as life. I wonder how he would have reacted if he found out her dirtiest secret of all: this lithe, artsy Midwestern girl was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican.
Unlike Katherine’s, my own career path had been a clearly defined one, even when I briefly stepped off it for some fun as a bartender or backpacker in Europe. Her return to college seemed logical enough to me: she was smart, would do well, and would get a decent job for her efforts. I wanted to have my domestic cake, with Katherine as stay-at-home mom, and eat it too, with her also going out and earning some money in a job that wouldn’t overly tax or distract her. Please, God, just let her earn $50,000 a year, I prayed, sometimes loud enough for Katherine to hear. I never imagined a life of financial hardship for us, not after all those years of study and sacrifice. Faced with the reality of our one-income household and my modest professorial salary, I began to increase the pressure on Katherine.
“Honey, just aim for something steady,” my typical harangue would go, “something more than a few hours of Pilates here and there.”
Shortly after moving to North Carolina, we went shopping on a gorgeous September day. We separated for a bit and made plans to meet at the car. A half hour after our appointed time, Katherine bounced over, apologizing for being late, but happily clutching a bag full of expensive cosmetics. My worry at her lateness turned to anger and I started shouting at her, asking where she’d been and why she hadn’t answered my calls. I said that we couldn’t afford the two hundred dollars of facial creams and exfoliants, that she had to change her ways and handle money better.
“You need to make some instead of just spending it!” I cried.
She burst into tears. I had struck a nerve in Katherine much deeper than her questionable home economics. Ever since renouncing acting, she had been trying to recover from the loss of her youthful dreams. Now, in her thirties, she feared that what she imagined to be her greatest gift, her beauty, which she had relied upon her entire life, would one day fade. The cosmetics were a cry for help—a plea I mistook for vanity. Instead of intuiting her needs, I made it about my fears of not being able to provide fully for her and our family. Katherine needed a loving word, and instead I played the part of the perfect brute, ruining a beautiful sunny day just as we were starting our life together.
Katherine was a dreamer—we both were, except that, unlike mine, her dreams weren’t tethered to the icy logic of credentials and connections. She lived in the moment, a place I rarely visited. This is why I had fallen in love with her. This is also why our otherwise happy relationship could plague me with worry about our future together.
My decision that first night in the hospital to move back “home”—I still used the word to describe my hometown of Westerly, even though I hadn’t truly lived there since high school—was partly because Katherine and I had felt so comfortable there as a couple. When she spent time with my family, Katherine experienced none of the tension and insecurity that rankled her when she was with my colleagues and academic friends. Loving Katherine had enabled me to reconnect to the person that I had been when I was growing up. I had spent years trying to smother my Rhode Island accent (“How fah from the pahk ah we?”). But when I had a bit to drink, or when I woke up first thing in the morning, the R would instinctively fade into H. I was a Luzzi, after all, Westerly High class of ’85, no matter how far I traveled away from the South County coast or how many degrees I collected. To understand how far I had tried to run from Westerly before circling back, all you had to do was ask my name. For years I had been pronouncing it differently from my family, preferring the Italianized “LOO-tsie” to their staunchly American “luz-zy” (rhymes with “fuz-zy”). As they were trying to assimilate to their new American life, I insisted on reclaiming legendary Calabria, looking for an Italianate pronunciation to distinguish myself. On paper, I had the same name as my mother and sisters—but I had taken to announcing it differently to the world, to show how much distance I had placed between my point of origin and myself.
A FEW WEEKS AFTER MOVING to Westerly I idled in the parking lot of a downtown bookstore, listening to an audiobook of Homer’s Odyssey, with the gravelly voice of Ian McKellen as Odysseus. I needed stories to get me through the long days in my hometown. I drove around for hours with the CD playing, skirting the coast and avoiding my mother, my sisters, and the fortress they were building around Isabel. I parked by the beaches and stopped to look out into the surf, listening to McKellen narrate how Odysseus negotiated one obstacle after another on his way back to Ithaca from the Trojan war. A seagull landed near my car and gutted a crab; Odysseus wandered while his wife, Penelope, waited, spinning wool and fending off suitors. Katherine had only been gone a few months, and I was back in the Calabrian bosom that I had left behind as a teenager, when I was determined to leave my Italian American immigrant world and never return. I was also back to teaching at Bard, doing all I could to remain connected to the college community that had closed ranks around me, just as my family had, to help me make it through the Underworld in one piece. McKellen continued his tale of Odysseus’s winding journey, splitting the waves of the Aegean and plowing its foam as he hurried in the direction of a home that had been entirely transformed, crowded with gluttonous and conniving suitors hoping to win Penelope’s hand.
“The queenly nymph [Calypso] sought out the great Odysseus,” McKellen spoke, “and found him there on the headland, sitting, still, / weeping, his eyes never dry, his sweet life flowing away / with the tears he wept for his foiled journey home.”
Odysseus looked out to sea by Calypso’s cave, tears streaming from him like summer rain over the Aegean. Calypso was a stunning sea nymph who had taken Odysseus prisoner and fallen in love with him, fulfilling his every desire but one: the irrepressible need he felt to return to his homeland. I had made it back to Westerly, my Ithaca. But when I drove along the coast, walked through the historic downtown, and