I needed help—more help than any priest could give. I had no clue how to love somebody without a body, and so I reached out to another great-souled woman.
“I’M TRYING TO HOLD IT together,” I said to my grief counselor, Rosalind, at the start of our first meeting. Her office was in a nondescript development off coastal Route 1, about an hour from my mom’s house in Westerly. I had deliberately chosen someplace far enough from home to ensure that I wouldn’t be recognized. In my macho Calabrian culture, a man was expected to keep his problems locked inside, not bare them to a stranger, however qualified. For a man like my father, confession was something you did before a priest, in the privacy of the confessional, and psychoanalysis was for sissies. Other than my family, the only people who knew I was getting help of this kind were the anonymous patients I passed by in Rosalind’s waiting room before and after my appointments. But we understood the rules and never made eye contact.
Trying not to look like a broken-down soul, I wore a striped oxford shirt and wide-wale cords. After a few minutes of conversation, it was clear that, like my chaplain Georgia, Rosalind was put on earth to help others. I had never known such people until Katherine died. My family had granted me unusual kindnesses, but that was a primal, Casa Luzzi thing, decidedly intramural. Living with my tyrannical father, getting by with very little, inheriting Calabrian reservoirs of la miseria—it had all made these Batterson Avenue women tough and pragmatic. They saw life as a struggle and acted accordingly.
Like Georgia, Rosalind was schooled in the love of humanity. She had become a mother at a young age, raised well-adjusted and high-achieving children, and chosen her career for karma, not profit. That first meeting she told me it was too soon to try and get my life together and come to terms with what had happened. Too soon for everything. She was an earthy and capable Nordic woman, someone who could tend a large garden with strong hands. She was not sentimental, but she was emotional. My story got to her. I told her how and why I felt so guilty, that my not taking care of Isabel on my own was crushing me—and that I was caving under the weight of my family’s aid.
“Why can’t I do this on my own?” I asked.
“No, that’s not right,” Rosalind countered. “Isabel is getting the powerful love of a powerful family, exactly what she needs. And you are doing the best you can, under the circumstances.”
That was the refrain we kept coming back to, her most dearly held belief: people do the best they can in the place and time in which they find themselves, which is all they are capable of, even if retrospection or detached analysis tells a different story. These were Rosalind’s articles of faith: humans are essentially good and loving creatures. Sometimes that goodness and love become misdirected, but they are always there, driving the gears of the universe. Her creed, I would discover, was also Dante’s—but that would come later. Much later.
In Rosalind’s eyes, I was not who I feared I had become: a selfish careerist and calculating survivor, incapable of rising to the occasion and setting aside my own needs to raise my daughter. Instead, I was someone who was struggling to love himself again. Until I could do that, she believed, I would never love another human being—or be able to take care of one.
She sat and listened and told me that it was too soon—words that an impatient and striving nature like mine couldn’t accept. I couldn’t hurry my grief along into mourning, nor could I find that middle ground between surrendering to my family and striking out on my own with Isabel. All the while, she tapped her clogs on the cushioned footrest, looking at me with understanding blue eyes for our fifty-five minutes, while my own brown eyes passed judgment on everything in sight, especially myself.
Back in Westerly, I was using up my share of goodwill with my family. I had been the golden child indulged since birth, so deep down I expected my mother and sisters to handle the more demanding aspects of childrearing. This freed me for jaunts to the playground with Isabel, vanilla ice cream with her on the beach, and father-daughter sing-alongs at the local music program. Professionally, I may have inhabited ultraliberal turf, but I had been raised according to the gender dictates of ancient Calabria. I grew up watching my mother tend to my father like an aide-de-camp; I would never have admitted as much, but to me it was taken for granted that my mother would change Isabel’s diapers while I slept soundly.
With each midnight diaper changing that I slept through, with each afternoon nap I avoided by fleeing the house to play tennis or go work on my book, Isabel’s infancy was slipping through my fingers. My mother was devoted to Isabel, but she was old and tired, and her regimen of feeding my daughter consisted of goods that you could pick up at the gas station: Lipton soup, Nabisco crackers, Kraft mac and cheese, and Jell-O pudding, all hangovers from my nutritionally challenged childhood. I insisted on healthy and organic foods, but I let my mother and sisters do the shopping. I bought the essentials, the diapers and the formula; but, in my absence, I let the decisions for Isabel’s day-to-day care fall to them.
Isabel’s diet was not the only rein I relinquished. Most days, instead of taking Isabel with me to the park or to the library, I let my sister Margaret bundle her up along with her little cousins Michaela and Rosie and whisk her off to the Crystal Mall in Waterford, Connecticut, where Isabel would pass a spring afternoon riding a mechanical horse by a food court or putting coins into a pinball machine at nearby Chuck E. Cheese’s. To stop these trips I would have had to stop burying myself in my teaching and writing and emerge from the protective barrier of footnotes I had erected between the world and myself. Or I would have had to liquidate my puny savings and hire a child-care provider to help me raise Isabel on my terms. But I balked and took the path of least resistance.
My family thrilled to Isabel, and she to them. When I took her out with me, to lunch to meet a friend visiting from Bard or to the local Music Together along with the other yuppie progeny, Isabel clung to me in desperate, awkward shyness. She was out of her element, and longed to return to the warmth and chaos of the Luzzi brood, with cousins climbing over one another in a mad dash for potato chips and cupcakes, as the soundtrack of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse looped in permanently. With the stalwart rotation of my mom and four sisters, Isabel was forever on a fresh round of play dates and fun, from the soft-serve ice cream at oceanside Dusty’s to the thwacking pins at the Alley Katz Bowling Center. I had known and loved all these places growing up, but now this was her world, not mine, and I felt as though I were walking into a foreign country without the requisite visa each time I went to pick her up. She would smile at first when she saw me, but then start to fuss and eventually cry. Westerly was no land of exile for my daughter. It was the first place where she had known the love and camaraderie that made her infancy so happy, and made her a stranger to the tragedy that hung over her birth. Westerly was her home.
My family’s help had freed me to pursue my interests and my career—yet, I told Rosalind, I was suffering severe guilt over this ancient Italian division of labor. Rosalind insisted that I was making a mistake.
“It’s not so simple,” she would answer. “It’s not either you let your family raise Isabel, or you do it on your own.”
I was making an intellectual error, she suggested, not to mention a moral one. You’re doing the best you can, under the circumstances, she kept saying, but I found no comfort in her words. If I really needed to change the situation, she told me, I would find a way to do so.
I was living under the spell of what one author, Joan Didion, called magical thinking: the cool-minded craziness of those who expect their loved one back at any moment, ready to put on a familiar pair of old shoes. I knew