At around three a.m. Isabel’s cries would often echo throughout the hallway. I would awake to them, prop my head against the pillow for a moment, and then pad across the hallway to where my mother would already be holding Isabel in her arms.
“Lassa jera, ci penzo io,” she would say as I loitered by the crib. “Leave her be, I’ll take care of it.” Usually I would demur, sliding past my mother and Isabel and retreating to my bed and fetal sleep.
But one night, for no reason other than the faint call of that same instinct that had otherwise abandoned me, I awoke with a start as Isabel’s sobs sent me running to the crib.
“Dai, lascia stare, ci penso io,” I answered in standard Italian to her Calabrian dialect. “Let go please, I’ve got her.”
My mother scurried off, half in worry that I would drop or mishandle or fail to quiet Isabel, half that I was losing precious sleep when I needed to get my strength back. Ours was not a house where grown men held crying babies at night.
As I held the chaos of my hysterical baby in the dead of that winter night, I imagined the impact between Katherine’s jeep and the oncoming van, the crunching of metal and explosion of debris along the narrow country road. Isabel’s actual screams merged with Katherine’s imaginary ones, signaling to me that the world was fundamentally a place of disorder and violence. It was a constant reminder that I hadn’t been able to save my wife, that I might not be able to protect my daughter. The ill-fated turns, the undertows, the black ice, the live wires—they were everywhere.
Seven hundred years earlier, in the throes of his doomed youthful love for Beatrice, Dante too sensed the fragility of life when he dreamed of the ladies with wild hair and their menacing words. Dante intuited his vision as an omen, a sign that his love for Beatrice was star-crossed. Now that the heavens had indeed misaligned in my own life I could not get Dante’s fateful syllables with their rolling R’s out of my head. Tu pur morrai.
Isabel wasn’t crying out of fear or for her mother at three a.m. But I heard them as fear or longing. My rational mind understood that she blessedly knew nothing of these sentiments, yet her cries gave voice to my own anguish. I was in charge of protecting her, but it was my mother who spent her days holding my daughter in her arms. Grief had compromised my sense of other people’s needs, even my daughter’s—the bundle of life I was now cradling and comforting, our two hearts pounding as we clung to each other, both of us desperate for the human touch as we rode the arrow shot by exile’s bow, neither of us knowing if and where it would ever land.
I wasn’t the only one eviscerated by Katherine’s death. She was unlike the other women I had brought home to meet my family. She did not have a fancy college degree or silver nose ring; she knew not a single band of alternative music or misunderstood, avant-garde foreign filmmaker, as Katherine’s tastes ran toward the all-American and wholesome, from Top-40 pop to Ellen DeGeneres stand-up comedy. The coeds from the Rhode Island School of Design and Oberlin and fissured nuclear families had rankled my mother and sisters with their arch comments and indifferent hygiene. They regarded my family as loveable Martians, quaintly inscrutable creatures beholden to passé virtues like marital fidelity and the severest home economics. In Katherine, my family finally had someone who did not disdain big-box retailers and suburban raised ranch houses. She was a woman without irony, the slightest tinge of snark.
“Joe, I really hope you don’t screw this one up,” my younger sister, Tina, had said to me the first time she met Katherine. Her look was as grave as her tone of voice: this could be a grown-up relationship, her eyes suggested, you’ve had your fun; now get real.
Mogli e buoi dei paesi tuoi, the Italian expression goes—wife and oxen from your hometown. Katherine was from my metaphysical village.
A few years before I met Katherine, I had been engaged in graduate school to a brilliant woman who promised me a life I had dreamed of, a world of affluence and high culture, everything I had lacked growing up. The night after passing my oral PhD exams, I met Amanda for the first time in an Ethiopian restaurant just off campus. Her graceful gentleness and guileless blue eyes, framed by wire glasses, arrested me. The next morning, in rough shape from a night of celebrating, I made a point of waking up early to hear her eight thirty a.m. paper on Brazilian history; within a few months we were basically living together, editing each other’s papers, planning trips on graduate student stipends to her parents’ properties in London, Saint Croix, and Princeton. One night, her father, a vigorous bon vivant who had built a thriving law practice, took us to a restaurant near his home in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
“Try the python,” he prodded, “or the kangaroo.”
The exotic menu was filled with the wildest game, and as I stared across the table at Amanda the world felt like an endless banquet of all the foods I could never have imagined or afforded. She was taking me to a new village, one far from the one where I had grown up in Rhode Island, and it was filled with kindness, respect, and love. I ordered the kangaroo.
In 2000, two months after receiving my doctorate and three years into our time together, I asked Amanda to marry me on the beaches of Watch Hill, the wooden carousel cresting on the horizon behind her. In tears, she said yes. I didn’t tell her that I had only bought the ring the day before, and that I had been wracked with doubt on the walk to the jeweler, a trip I had taken after months of wavering. Something deep inside me was saying, Stop, don’t do this. I tried nonetheless to love Amanda the way that she deserved, and I felt like a fool for even thinking of giving up the magical possibilities that life with her held. But my admiration and affection for her refused to blossom into true love. As the wedding approached, my misgivings began to manifest themselves in petty remarks and outbursts, as though I were goading her into fights that she knew neither of us believed in. Perhaps she could sense my ambivalence, and it made her usually low-key self become tetchy and irritable. Soon enough we were fighting nonstop. I became annoyed at how, in the manner of academic liberals, she found so many things “offensive” or “unjust,” even though she had benefited from American capitalism in every conceivable way. She began to lose patience with the company I kept: guys like me, laddish and uncouth boys who had not spent their lives in the polished worldly institutions that had been the air she breathed. The day we went to pick out our wedding invitations—a tasteful but outrageously expensive medley of sylvan designs on heavily bonded paper—we had a blowout fight over nothing in particular.
“What’s happening to us?” she asked.
“Are we making a mistake?” I replied.
That April, six weeks before our wedding and with the invitations already mailed out, we called things off.
A thought flashed across my mind that first night in the hospital after Katherine’s death. I would go home, back to my metaphysical village, to the place where more than any other I could be myself, with no need to impress—a longing Katherine understood viscerally. Katherine and I were both a bit lost in the new lives we’d chosen and the comfort of familiarity we’d left behind. I missed my home state, its beaches and weather-beaten shingles, the old-world wealth and new-world eccentricity. “Welcome to Rhode Island,” I recall our longtime cartoonist Don Bosquet