A summer pilgrimage
CANZIO, WILLIAM DI
A SUMMER PILGRIMAGE FROM NEW HAVEN TO THE PIAZZA NAVONA WILLIAM DICANZIO his essay begins in Piazza Navona in Rome, inside the church whose design so inspires the square, Sant'Agnese inAgone,...
...Elisabeth and I have done nothing but talk to her for three days...
...It would be a long ride, but restful, with the train's taking over the work of travel and the scenery distracting me from my loneliness...
...My prayer mingled with what I knew of Madeleine's life: the alcoholic father, the Southern lady of a mother, who had evoked the scorn of her family for marrying a Yankee and who eventually would be hospitalized, while Madeleine was still a girl, after a mental breakdown...
...Not only had he "gone" with astonishing vigor all over a vulnerable pink rug, but, while being spanked, he stepped in the mess and spread it to furnishings yet unsullied...
...It's worse than I thought," Madeleine said to me on the phone from Zurich, "She's had a breakdown...
...At that moment I resolved to accept an invitation previously declined as an extravagance: to join her and Elisabeth, a native of Zurich, for the last of their three summer weeks together in Europe...
...Madeleine had called me nearly two weeks ago from Zurich...
...She spoke of her conversion and what followed: of the financial reality of being divorced from a man incapable of supporting his three children, aged four, two, and six weeks...
...there was no one her age...
...Rome was Babel, but very much alive...
...Beneath the city of domes, Rome in August was so hot that even the Romans were griping, as I was...
...They would take the train back to Zurich as soon as possible and try to book a flight to New York...
...A SUMMER PILGRIMAGE FROM NEW HAVEN TO THE PIAZZA NAVONA WILLIAM DICANZIO his essay begins in Piazza Navona in Rome, inside the church whose design so inspires the square, Sant'Agnese inAgone, under its startling dome...
...But I complied...
...Jennifer returned to school, with a reduced course load and weekly therapy, which is just what I might have suggested if I were her dean...
...we would honor her mother's enjoinder that she sleep in her bedroom, where her friend would be welcome to a sleeping bag on the floor...
...Are you sure...
...the couple's life in the theater in the 1960s...
...The older daughter meanwhile, tired from the long hours of her job at the bagel shop, would remain hermetically sealed in her bedroom till fifteen minutes before she needed a ride to work...
...When I gave the sixteen-year-old a firm set of instructions, she carried them out cheerfully: Spencer could not come back into the house until she had bathed him...
...the gradual manifestation of her husband's alcoholism, his paranoiac breakdown while a student at the Yale Drama School...
...So I leashed him on the back deck till the younger daughter, whose charge was his care, should wake from her slumber on the couch in the family room, where I noticed I had inherited yet another sixteen-year-old girl, a best friend who routinely spent the night, snoozing on the love seat nearby...
...My Jenny grew up on welfare...
...then divorce, annulment...
...No postcard "shots," this vacation, no: rather I took moody black-and-white nocturnes of the Tiber and the Trastevere...
...she drove to Maine to bring Jenny home again...
...she moved back in...
...When I saw Jennifer, I recognized her mother's wisdom: she was changed, not the bright, confident, varsity swimmer I knew her to be...
...You think she's some rich kid—like you," said Madeleine, "but she's nothing like you...
...That's how I found my way to a little hotel on Campo de' Fiori, between Piazza Navona and the Farnese, and to a room on the seventh floor, no elevator...
...A few minutes before the 10:30 Mass in English was to begin on the nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, I found myself smiling at the divine comedy of the church's decoration, where sculpted reliefs, their stone supple as music, transfigure martyrdoms into opera, and where the laughter of the musical angels who frame the reliefs ascends and echoes in the frescoed clouds of the dome...
...Instead of smiling, she frowned a worried frown and said, "Did I really go through customs...
...Meanwhile, near the end of July, Madeleine departed to begin her vacation by meeting Elisabeth in Zurich, where she would of course see Jennifer and assess the situation herself...
...He made no mention of, had no help to offer the widowed, the divorced, the never-married, who struggle to raise children on their own...
...Elisabeth called next morning...
...Was this really Jenny...
...Mass in English," the sign had read...
...Oh Bill," she said, "we didn't think you sounded like a dictator...
...Madeleine approached him afterwards, told him of the pain of being thus excluded, of her need, in fact, for even more of the church's support than it offers couples...
...I want to send her home—somewhere she feels safe...
...So I returned to my terrace, my city of domes, the midnight music of Campo de' Fiori, my one-sided dialogues with the hazy stars...
...I saw them off at the airport next morning...
...For sixteen years, she had fed, housed, clothed, and raised the three children, whose lives, she felt, daily called her out of her despair...
...What was the limit now...
...We were walking from one crowded cafe to another in the Zurich dusk, looking for a place to sit...
...So much for the alpine hike...
...Should I go back...
...then took a close-up of a winged, gap-toothed skull, crowned with laurels, carved on a portal of the Via Giulia...
...I had offered to spend the week between her departure and mine at her house in Guilford with her two younger daughters, aged eighteen and sixteen...
...The therapist wanted to see her again next morning...
...it was noisy and gritty, and the police had attitudes like teen-agers on steroids...
...then her conversion to Christianity, the healing of the eating disorders, the joyful pregnancies that followed...
...To hear Bach and Charles Ives in such a setting offered some proof of Walter Pater's subversive theory that all the arts aspire to the condition of music...
...hen why not give in, why not rest awhile in Zurich, with Elisabeth's apartment, the lake, the "beaches" and the baden, where the Zurichers accept the naked body with such nonchalance and trust that they may enjoy their city as they do their homes...
...But recovery takes longer than we would like...
...we would have spent a few days in that city, eating pastries and joking, and then would have traveled together by boat to Budapest...
...I qualified the rapturous poses of the angels of the Passion on Ponte Sant'Angelo by foregrounding them with the Ethiopian peddlers selling cheap wares at their feet...
...First it was the job at the inn: the place was too remote, she said...
...I could visit another friend of mine in Basel, maybe go hiking in the Alps...
...at eye-level, it seemed...
...ut I was not supposed to be there, and I was not supposed to be alone...
...Jennifer, Jenny...
...From time to time in May and June, Madeleine received transatlantic phone calls about behavior unlike Jenny...
...A quest...
...The basilica struck me as an artistic failCommonweal ure, so determined to impress you with its size, it seems smaller than it really is, the brilliance of Michelangelo and Bernini sabotaged by the vulgar political agenda of aggrandizement...
...Saint Peter's left me cold...
...The prognosis now, after a stay in the hospital, is hopeful: she is planning to resume classes in July...
...She would be welcome to stay at their house...
...soon a woman from Long Island would read from First Kings: He went a day's journey into the desert until he came to a broom tree and sat...then an angel touched him and ordered him...
...But the return ticket, for the end of August, had been bought at a good price far in advance...
...I spent the day running my postponed errands and, hoping for the best, departed next day as scheduled...
...She never said what was understood by those of us who listened: that the struggle was also a painful redemption, that the young actress who might have starved herself to death for her looks, had lived to become this splendid woman, whom honesty made eloquent...
...Next night, I heard an organ concert in Sant'Ignazio, my favorite of the big Baroque churches, where the nave's ceiling explodes in a funny, sublime vision of heaven wedding the continents of the earth...
...Could she come home...
...of never having finished college herself, therefore being without the education even to seek a job...
...At home, Madeleine thought, seeing the therapist, resting, with people who love her—me for a few days, and then another family friend who would be available after my departure—Jennifer would be all right until her mother's scheduled return...
...It was someone I had noticed on the platform (no wedding ring, but probably too young for me), whose gaze now, I could feel, kept returning from the window to my face...
...A shrine...
...yet I felt that if I did not get away and recover myself, the demands of the coming academic year would do me in...
...I had watched illness usurp their minds and drain the strength of their friends, of their families, their teachers, and even, or maybe most especially, of me...
...To the contrary, Madeleine has done a remarkable job of raising them: they are thoughtful, loving, intelligent, and, incidentally, beautiful...
...his attack and beating of her a few weeks after the third birth, witnessed by the four-year-old Jennifer...
...If he said yes, fine...
...but first the room would have to be redeemed from its fallen state...
...Elisabeth had since returned to Zurich...
...What was wrong, anyway...
...18:17July 1992 Meanwhile, the day I finished the first draft of this essay, I received a card from Lago di Garda near Milan...
...I was waiting for her on a bench outside, gazing at the water and the trees, not reading the book of theatrical theory I had brought...
...Everything that could be washed would be washed in very hot water, including the rug, which had acquired fleas...
...Later I regretted "coming down" so hard on my sixteen-year-old pal...
...My friend had departed for the U.S...
...She gave me instructions about taking her to a therapist who knew the family...
...Her sister tried to talk sense to her, "He's only a dog, Jen, and he's here, and he's going to stay...
...But the deserted streets, the scene of a car-full of men bargaining with a prostitute by the cemetery wall, disheartened me, made me admit what I already knew, that I would not find whatever I was seeking in the noise...
...the harsh consequences of being alienated from herfamily...
...You talked me into it," she said to Elisabeth, "I never wanted her to come to Switzerland to work—my instinct knew she wasn't ready, but no, you ganged up on me, you and her, the two of you—" "But I went abroad to work when I was even younger," said Elisabeth...
...I called, jumping and waving in the crush at the international arrival gates...
...But the U.S...
...in our bungling compliance with this desire, all our botched—or "sacrificed"—vacations had opened the door to baffling grace...
...Finally Madeleine's rage was exorcised, and Elisabeth's loyalty, sorely tried, prevailed...
...There, at the summit, nearly lost to sight in the sunlight of the lantern, mirth and music mingle with the image of the Spirit descending...
...I called Salzburg...
...When I finally sat on Elisabeth's bed in Zurich, at dawn and tipsy with jet-lag, I thought, "My system's too screwed-up to sleep...
...I called Basel...
...nearby, distant, a heavenly city of them: domes of churches whose names are little poems in English and arpeggios in Italian: Sant'Ivo alia Sapienza, Sant'Andrea della Valle, Saint Charles at the Four Fountains, the Trinity of the Pilgrims, and sternly presiding away across the Tiber, San Pietro in Vaticano...
...Celia would be arriving in the evening and had already invited Jenny to her house for a meal...
...the customers, old farmers...
...While Madeleine trusted that the girls would not need supervision, especially since neighbors had volunteered to stop by daily, still it would be reassuring to have an adult in the house with them for at least part of the time of their mother's absence...
...Would that help, or only escalate anxieties...
...Then what went wrong...
...adeleine and I reviewed my Roman photographs in a New Haven restaurant one evening, laughing at their Byronic gloom...
...My prayer, like my other creative efforts, suffers from interruption and stress, but indeed now I was praying, miserably and selfishly as the most desolate kvetching psalmist...
...Commonweal So I was left in Zurich with a return ticket dated nearly two weeks later, but with no itinerary, with no one...
...Will they make me go back...
...I tried to call Madeleine and Elisabeth in Salzburg for advice: no answer...
...A choir of Nigerian nuns was singing, as if giving voice to the carved music of the stone angels...
...When my students became ill, still they were my students, not my children, and there was a reasonable limit to my involvement...
...Sleepless that night, I doubted I could leave as scheduled...
...She believed that she had been grieving for her daughter even then, before her reason confirmed her unknown fears about the girl's well-being...
...I'm sorry if I sounded like a dictator," I said, "moving in and giving you orders...
...Madeleine's own elopement at nineteen with an actor...
...Rather I was praying...
...In all of this, she most solidly trusted in Providence...
...When I stepped through the door onto a double-decked terrace, I was stunned by the sudden answer to my question, by the revealed truth of my uncanny intuition...
...She enrolled on welfare, while, with scholarships, she finished college and earned a master's degree in special education...
...She asked me to travel down to Kennedy Airport to meet Jennifer, whom she was sending home from Switzerland, where the girl had been waitressing for the summer...
...for a conference that morning and would be returning the day of my departure...
...Couldn't Jenny get on a bus by herself...
...her mother's death two years ago released an inheritance which allowed her to make the down payment on the house in Guilford, the first house her daughters had ever lived in...
...The clean sweet tiny hopelessly expensive room made me smile when I saw it and feel, unaccountably, that I had been "brought" there...
...And we would invest in a housebreaking manual...
...I call the choice heroic not just because of the sickening expense of last-minute air tickets, nor because Elisabeth, who holds a hard job herself, could have stayed and had a real vacation with me as planned, but because Madeleine, anxious, overwrought, frustrated with the details of this abrupt departure, with clerks and computer printouts keeping her from her child, exploded in a series of scenes, full of reproach, scenes that exposed the scars of her long ordeal as a parent alone...
...He asked her not to go, but rather to stay and help him, and to speak in church on Corpus Christi...
...No, I was looking for a place I'd heard of where I was sure the noise would kill my silence...
...She wished to resign her eucharistic ministry in the parish and go elsewhere...
...her anorexia, bulimia, and the beginnings of a dangerous acquaintance with drugs...
...A couple of months ago she had been offended by a homily, delivered by her pastor, in which he held that spouses should love each other because children first learn about love from the environment of their parents' marriage...
...No answer...
...And loneliness increases the load...
...I called Guilford...
...Next day I boarded the train for Zurich...
...Madeleine, thankful for her presence during a critical time of Jenny's illness, was a single parent again...
...then strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God....''1 The journey and the music continued that night in Piazza Navona, where a crowd of thirty students danced a country dance in a long line, to an Italian folk tune that they were singing a cappella, as if the merry square itself provoked—no, re17 July 1992:17 quired—such behavior...
...Do you understand me?'' We had lunch together in the dining car, where I could not overlook another traveler at the next table, eating alone—poor fellow, I thought...
...I recorded the juxtaposing of a provocative poster for the Acqua Dance in Ostia (beer, swimming, disco) with the crumbling sacred fresco of another century...
...Remember," it begins, "the train from Rome...
...Eventually she was reconciled with her family...
...With the phone ringing and the suburban necessity of driving everybody everywhere, I was learning that even to manage a small household tends to become a full-time job—or, worse, that there was no predicting the demands that the business of life might make...
...Our vacation plans had begun to take shape last April, on the way to Easter dinner in Fairfield, which would prove to be a delightful event hosted by cousins of Madeleine...
...Jennifer was in the therapist's office in his house in this lovely New England setting...
...I decided to ask the therapist next day if he thought Jenny was well enough to stay without an adult until Madeleine's other friend, Celia, should return to Guilford on the weekend...
...I could go a week early, stay at Elisabeth's apartment, while she and Madeleine were in Salzburg...
...By now she'd had the chance to ponder some perplexing movements in her spiritual life: she had been weeping in prayer, for no reason it seemed, all summer, long before she left for Zurich and found Jenny so disturbed...
...Admission was free, a gesture whose generosity was not lost on me: how much, with the price of European utilities, did it cost the church to burn those constellations of chandeliers in the apse and the candelabra held by the angels of the transepts...
...She moved out...
...hen Jennifer...
...In the early days, members of Saint __________£_______________________________________ Cnmmnnwpfll Thomas More at Yale provided her some money, for which she gratefully accounted to the penny...
...In the bigger scheme of things, she conjectured, her botched vacation had been necessary for her to bring Jenny home, which was God's careful desire, or "will...
...These questions would be repeated, out of nowhere, a half-dozen times on the ride back to New Haven, when I could not help but note, with some self-pity, that it was becoming my mission to be what I was never taught to be in graduate school, a wound-dresser...
...Jennifer was weeping when she came out of the office...
...On the morning of the nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, I found myself gazing up into one of the domes whose shell I could see from my terrace, an artificial heaven, appropriating its resplendence from the excluded Roman sky: Sant'Agnese in Piazza Navona...
...I was even ready to give Spencer a smooch, till I found him cutting his sharp little puppy incisors on what I gasped to recognize as my Mont Blanc fountain pen...
...A reluctant departure was made at Milan, and I continued alone on the train into the Alps...
...Next morning, whatever had so disturbed Jenny seemed strangely put to rest...
...We would rendezvous in Vienna...
...She also never named Elisabeth, but I knew the difference Elisabeth made...
...How would Madeleine be able...
...My few days in her place made me understand her life as I had not before, convincing me that single parents are the heroes of this age...
...Now there was a new boyfriend, and an older, married man at the restaurant "coming on" to her...
...She interrupted my chatter about meeting in Vienna: Madeleine had spoken with Celia, who said that Jenny had swung down again and advised her immediate return to the U.S...
...Why did this feel like the Land of the Lotus-Eaters...
...It was now in such chaos that when Spencer, who had annexed it as his den, had an "accident" in there, two days passed before it was discovered...
...On arriving in the suburbs, I relished the contrast with my ivy castle: the sunny parlor, its windows opening onto grass and trees, the profusion of feminine patterns and colors, Pierre the cat posed on the couch, the spaniel puppy Spencer given the run of the house...
...The innkeeper would leave a message for the ladies...
...But if someone else, particularly a non-Italian, had likewise complained, I would have defended the city, which I was willing to for its passion...
...Here, though, was the child of the friend whom I had grown more and more to esteem in the five years of our acquaintance, of whose family I felt a part...
...The cheerful life of the piazze, by day, but especially by night, highlighted my loneliness, which crept into the pictures I took...
...All of which happened, but not before Elisabeth heroically chose to accompany Madeleine home...
...Certain papal tombs provoked my laughter with their pharaon-ic pretensions...
...Good...
...M'hai capitol "You are appealing...
...From the driver's seat, she gave me a how-much-can-I-get-away-with glance and said, "You know, you really get old and cranky when you teach...
...Rather, with her pushcart full of hand-me-down bags, she seemed pathetically confused and scared...
...What a price one pays who is expected to do what two must often struggle to do...
...I was still in Connecticut then, staying at her house with the two younger daughters...
...Though she returned to Switzerland, over the years the friendship had grown deeper—Elisabeth helping with clothes, books, other bills, contributing to Jenny's tuition, phoning weekly, often visiting at Christmas, and making sure that Madeleine had, at her expense, the yearly sabbath of a vacation with her...
...One night I finally rebelled against the solitude and rode the metro to the Protestant cemetery—and it was not to visit Keats' s grave...
...As Madeleine keeps caring for her daughter, we, her friends, will try to care for Madeleine...
...In these tender eyes and in this quiet voice, I felt the city of Rome, and perhaps even my divine lover, finally break the silence: Sei simpatico...
...Waiting for Jenny by the pond, I both resented the burden I had accepted and wanted to protect Madeleine...
...Now, half a lifetime later, a practicing Catholic Christian, I was ashamed of the wealth of the Vatican palaces...
...In two years at my current job as a college dean, I had witnessed the breakdowns of eight undergraduate women and four men...
...I decoded a subway map, schlepped my suitcase to the American Express office, and chatted one of the clerks into telling me where he would stay if he were visiting Rome...
...Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!' He got up, ate and drank...
...I mostly kept silent, sometimes stepping close to Madeleine to take over as primary listener, while Elisabeth, dazed, would hang back a few feet...
...What could be better...
...Other Commonweal 17 July 1992:13 pieces were likewise falling into place: Elisabeth had found Jenny a summer job in Switzerland, waitressing at a country inn, where she could practice her French and earn the money she needed for school next year...
...She had been writing a dissertation at Yale in 1978 when she met Madeleine at a prayer service...
...The elegant Swiss heiress, with her English so perfect one forgets she must be even more charming in her native German, was now director of Caritas, the Catholic Relief Service, in Lucerne...
...The terrace commanded the most astounding 360-degree view: domes, dozens of domes, spherical, conical, even spiral...
...Should I call Madeleine's sister in New Mexico...
...He believed she could manage quite well on her own until Celia's arrival...
...She broke down into a fit of sobbing after Spencer chewed an old pair of her reading glasses...
...I tried to joke about the American jeans in the designer shop windows...
...I sadly realized that my friends and I might have had fun while in a pizza parlor in New Haven, but alone like this, all Europe looked bleak...
...How could she work all day / 7 July 1992:15 at her job with emotionally disturbed children in the slums of Bridgeport and come home, by herself, to this...
...I balked at the request—I hated that ugly trip, which would cost me the better part of a day...
...This sentimental appreciation evanesced next morning, when I discovered that Spencer, whom I'd gotten out of bed twice to walk during the night, evidently believed that, like the folks he lived with, he too should wait till he got back inside to "go...
...After caring for Jennifer for hours in her illness, I needed someone to care for me, but there was no one...
...As we rolled out of the station someone slid back the glass door of the compartment where I was sitting by myself, and asked if one of the vacant seats were taken...
...Inevitably, we exchanged a mutually embarrassed greeting, and before I knew it, we were engaged in the most absurd and delightful flirtation, enhanced, if not made possible, by means of a bilingual dictionary...
...It sounded perfect when we planned it, but something frightening, which we did not understand, had happened to Jennifer, the oldest of Madeleine's three teen-aged daughters—the levelheaded, the studious one, the sophomore at Bowdoin...
...So I took a stroll, enjoyed the twilight on Lake Zurich, had an awkward restaurant meal alone, looked longingly at the crowds at hundreds of cafe tables...
...What, I heard myself saying aloud, do you want with me...
...her family's disowning her...
...After a single afternoon of boring repose on Lake Zurich, I went to the train station, bought a ticket for that night's wagon-lit, and woke up next morning in Rome...
...I was supposed to have met my friends, Madeleine and Elisabeth, yesterday in Vienna...
...I am not complaining about the girls...
...A summit...
...Then Elisabeth's parents intervened, arranging another job for her near Zurich at the restaurant of one of their neighbors...
...But it wasn't really the failed hike that disappointed me: rather, after a lonely summer and my taste of single-parenting, I was craving company...
...I had planned to spend the day in New Haven, tying things up for my departure, but that would have to wait...
...girl dumbfounded this fastidious Swiss couple in their seventies, with her sloppy bedroom and erratic behavior...
...As for Freud's observation that we all need work and love: my academic work, which I was naive enough to have brought with me, was going undone, and, in spite of the presence of grown children, I was lonely for someone to talk to...
...she felt lonely and isolated...
...Now I was riding the bus back from Kennedy with Jennifer, trying to answer her repeated questions with patience, to speak lovingly and reassuringly, not to betray my exasperation with my eyes, but all the while feeling that this was not fair, not after the year I had just lived through...
...She needed this time away...
...My last visit there, a college student, an idealistic apostate, I nonetheless had felt a romantic awe in the goal of centuries of pilgrims...
...So it was settled, and I felt a confident joy: folks would remark, "You deserve it...
...Why didn't they open my bags...
...What was missing...
...Besides, in my case, since we all really enjoy one another, it would be fun, and a respite for me from downtown New Haven and the forsaken-for-the-summer fortress where I live at Yale, Trumbull College...
...I had found myself, with my modicum of academic authority, sometimes clung to as reluctant savior, sometimes reviled in place of the father who might be absent from their lives...
...Instead I took her to lunch, for ice cream, to the lake, whatever I could think of...
...WILLIAM DI CANZIO is dean ofTrumbull College at Yale University, where he teaches English and theater studies...
...if no, I'd take it from there...
...The plane ride calmed me...
...when I woke, it was mid-afternoon...
...we thought you sounded like a father, and I've never had one of those...
...A pilgrim in spite of myself, restless, destination undetermined, I was strangely at peace in this church, as I was in its square, where art has played as carelessly as Wisdom before the throne of God...
...This essay is presented with the permission of those whose lives it involves and whose names have been changed...
...She came out of the therapist's office smiling, cheerful, ready, she said, for a new haircut...
...conceived this essay by a pond on a tranquil July morning...
...But Madeleine received a call from the college one night a week into term...
Vol. 119 • July 1992 • No. 13
