I have to tell you: I hate rap. I hate the bitches and the asses and the ‘ho’s. I hate the in-yo’-faceness, the pumped-up testosterone, the butted-out chests, the finger-jabbing, the ice, the six-packs, the balloon pants, the rings like brass knuckles. The pervasive boxer shorts, the Jockey bands where belts used to be. In yo’ face is not an attempt to connect. It means shut up, stay away. Move bitch. Get out the way, as the song says.
I know the socioeconomic justifications and the political roots. I like some of the bravado and the clever wordplay. There are songs that have opened my eyes and forced me to think. But most of it pretends that glamorizing guns and gangstas is keeping it real; it is misogyny decked out like a Courvoisier ad. I’m into havin’ sex, I ain’t into makin’ love, 50 Cent sings. No intimacy or mystery or love, God forbid any allusion to or regard for what comes next. Just poses and postures selling a crude idea of what it means to be a man.
The hills are alive with the sound of rap-blasting in suburbs, in Paris clubs, out of the cars that cruise up our street from the projects down the hill. Ghetto is a state of mind. To kids of every color — black, Asian, Latin, or white, like my son Joe — it’s an adjective, the coolest, the best. Now dat’s ghetto, you say if you’re ghetto. It came out of the ghetto, but now it’s not anywhere, it’s in kids’ heads. You can live in the ghetto and not be ghetto. On the other hand, my son Joe doesn’t live there, but he’s ghetto.
For the past couple of years, since the summer Joe turned ghetto, I have felt like I live in a rap video — rappers crowding the camera frame above me, looking down like they just kicked my butt and are ready to do it again. As my husband, David, and I have watched Joe take on the gangsta swagger and pout, we have wandered around like the iguana in Eddie Murphy’s “Dr. Dolittle,” muttering, “So young, so angry. Damn that rap music!” What did we do that our kid has embraced such a dark view of the world? Where did all we raised him with go? Where did who he was go? The star athlete, the student leader, the boy who wrote screenplays and directed the neighborhood kids in films, the kid who composed music on the piano so beautiful that other mothers cried . . . He thuggin? Oh he a thug. On da real. Looking back, there was no way that summer could have been normal. It began not with a party at the beach or a banana split. It began with me taking off my wig.
The autumn before, I had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Two things stand out from the misty light that bleached most of those first few days from my memory. One is that I had not been given a death sentence; there was a lot I could do to fight it. The other is Joey on the soccer field the day after we told him about my diagnosis. He said he was going to make a goal for me, and he did. In the slow-motion replay in my head, I can see him right after, his summer blond hair gone brown, turning to find me in the stands, pointing to me from the field. Just do it, his burning eyes said. He was eleven years old.
I began chemotherapy after Thanksgiving and started brushing out handfuls of my shoulder-length hair just before Christmas. As part of the instructions on helping kids cope with that side effect of chemo, they suggest making it fun, having your kids draw funny faces on your bald head. Joey and his younger brother, Nat, wanted no part of that. The coping mechanism for them was not to see my smooth, bare head ever, if possible. I searched out a wig that approximated my tight, dark, Italian curls, but the standard dealers had only shiny flips and big loopy ringlets. Then I found a woman who specialized in wigs for women of color. Through her, I bought a hand-me-down from a wealthy black woman that was a near-perfect match for my hair.
It wasn’t that the cancer was a secret. Everyone knew. But the boys could cope with my occasional nausea and fevers as long as we kept the rhythms of our routine — as long as I could pick them up at school and look normal. This worked pretty well until my eyelashes and eyebrows started thinning out too. Without those familiar signposts on my face, my hair seemed to get bigger. I looked like a country singer. So I switched sometimes to a cheap, short pageboy wig that I could wear with a baseball cap pulled down low. That had its problems too. Arriving at school in our family car with straight hair was one thing, but the day I told Nat I’d be coming with a friend in her car, it was too much. “You will have curly hair, though, won’t you?” he asked with a worried look.
By summer I had a feathery mantle of baby hair, just enough to let me abandon my wig. “It looks good, Mom,” Joe said cheerfully. “You look like Cal Ripken.” Actually, I wish I had looked as good as Cal Ripken. With a pale man-in-the-moon face still puffy from chemo, I scared even myself sometimes when I caught a glimpse of me in a mirror. Taking off my fake hair was supposed to be a relief. Instead, it seemed to lay open all our anxieties and fears that had somehow stayed tucked neatly away under my wig. Through the long winter and spring, I had just wanted life to go back to normal. But there was no normal, or at least normal wasn’t going to be what it used to be. We went through the usual motions of summer — the drive from swimming lessons to art camps to piano lessons to the grocery store — and sometimes we had an extra stop: radiation. I was required to go for fifteen minutes a day and therefore, some days, so were my sons. They would sit in the waiting room with women in hospital pajamas doting over them — two brave little men, their arms folded across their chests. Only God knows what they were thinking; I chose not to ask.
Sometimes we stopped at Mission Dolores on the way home. I was a long-lapsed Catholic; my religion by then was incense, candles, and the “Ave Maria” sung in Latin. David and I and the children had gone to church recreationally, mostly for the spectacle of the Christmas pageant, where children dressed as angels and shepherds tripped on their robes down the usually austere aisle — accompanied by live goats, donkeys, and bunnies — and everyone prayed that the Baby Jesus stand-in would make it to the altar without slipping from little Mary’s arms. One Christmas, in a fabulous faux pas, a pregnant goat went into untimely labor in the vestibule, her screams punctuating the telling of the Christmas story, something that perhaps only a mother could appreciate: a truly wrenching evocation of birth in a manger.
But now I was back at church, slipping in after my treatments, guilty as only a Catholic can be, daring to ask for whatever mercy could be spared, trying this time to deal directly with God and ignore the angry voices of my childhood, which demanded, Why do you deserve this? What have you done for God lately? One day, as I lit a candle at a time when the thought of leaving my children was particularly tormenting, warmth spread through my fingertips to my toes, a sense of calm I had never felt, telling me that everything would be all right. On another visit, as I sat silent in the dark, cavernous church, alone except for a caretaker fussing with the kneelers, the sun suddenly broke through a stained-glass window, drenching only me in a circle of gold, green, and purple light. My mind rationalized that Catholic architects had designed the church for just that effect and that tomorrow it would happen again to whoever was sitting in my spot, but my heart hoped it was a sign from God.
I didn’t talk to my sons about this. I just took them a few times to Mission Dolores to light a veladora, and I hoped that in the cool stone and serene faces of the saints, in the red light that is always lit to signify God’s presence, they would breathe in some of the security that Catholicism gave me as a child. Nat, who was eight at the time, seems to have an innate feel for both the simplicity and profundity of things. (He keeps scented candles by his bed to smell at night and once took an empty M&M bag to preschool so the other kids could share its faint odor of chocolate, its nostalgic whiff of sweetness.) As I had expected, the mystery of the church did its magic on him: He told me that the wooden eyes of Saint Joseph had looked at him, and another time he saw the statue move.
As summer went on, the boys cut their hair short, shorter than mine. I checked mine daily to see if it had grown. We made jokes about the cancer, but mostly we were quieter that summer. Strangely, what carried us through, what helped us cope, was rap. It drifted into our lives through the car radio and became the background rhythm to the strange dance that we were stumbling through. That relentless beat had always seemed so annoying when it boomed from the open windows of cars. Suddenly, it was something reliable, dependable, comforting almost.
And so were the words. The struggle to survive, the defiance, the loss of friends and family, the anger at being dealt a crooked hand, even the fragility of here and now sealed us in a trance. This was not a Beach Boys summer. We weren’t havin’ fun all summer long. We were shell-shocked street soldiers, trying to get to the next stop. The “angel thug” Tupac Shakur — whose premonition of his own violent death six years before had infused his songs with a poignant intensity — spoke to us from the grave: Baby, don’t cry. You gotta keep your head up. Even when the road is hard, never give up.
The rap poet Nas sang to his mother, who had died of breast cancer two years before:
They playing our song the lifebeat my hand on your waist
I grab your other hand and try not to step on your toes
Spin you around with my eyes closed
Dreaming I could have
One more dance with you mama
. . . I’d give my life up … to have
One more dance with you mama
We never changed the dial when that came on. We listened in silence. It spoke to us more than any cancer self-help manual could.
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David and I are liberals in a cosmopolitan city that considers itself one of the outposts of progressivism. We were committed to putting our children in a diverse public elementary school and lucky enough to get them into one where the parents were very involved and the racial mix mirrored that of the nation. This is no easy feat in San Francisco because much of the black middle class has immigrated to Oakland, driven out largely by rising housing costs.
When Joe’s adolescence came on with a bang during the fall when my treatments ended, we were blindsided: a basketball jersey, a headband, a pair of Air Force Ones, and before we could catch our breath, he was talking the gangsta talk. The first time I heard it, I thought it was some other kid outside our door. I done got locked out, an excessively manly voice said. Then I heard it again and again, and like a scary movie, the voice was inside the house. De popo’s comin. You mess wit dat breezy? Neva dat. She jockin me. I don chill wit dem.
For a while, friends and family hung up the phone when they heard Joe’s super-cool new voice and talk on our answering machine, thinking they had gotten the wrong number. When Joe did pick up the phone, they were bemused by the throaty voice that greeted them. “Yo’ mama’s on the phone,” he said one day as he handed me the receiver. My mama? Wasn’t she still his grandma? His man voice was moving him away from us and from his childhood.
We had always congratulated ourselves that Joe had built a rainbow coalition of friends at school. But overnight he stopped chillin’ with his white buddies. His sudden need, and to a lesser extent Nat’s, to be black (or more correctly, to be “ghetto,” the popular teen definition of being “authentically” black) took us by surprise. Of course, Joe denied it and laughed at other white kids who tried to act “black.”
“But you’re trying to be black,” I said one day in the car. “I’m just trying to be a cool white guy.”
Nat threw up his hands. “I admit it. I’m a wigga.”
It’s true, Nat was a “wannabe nigga.” Although he still fell asleep clutching a furry little bunny, he had also taken to wearing a do-rag and oversize white T-shirt to bed, which made him look more like an angel than a thug. At his birthday party, he was the token white kid. Actually, Nat had been conferred the status of nigga by one of his friends, a term that still burned my ears though I knew it was considered a form of endearment among some African Americans. “And Natty,” his friend had added, “I mean it in the nicest possible way.”
Nat’s foray into ghetto was mild and fanciful, but Joe’s, like everything Joe, was with great heart and a vengeance. “Our school is so white,” he complained one day. “There are only three black kids in my class.” I started to count off all the African American and biracial kids, but it was all he could do to be patient with me. “Oh her — she’s so white,” he huffed. “Him — you call him black?” By his definition, there were really only three “authentic” blacks, and he was one of them.
To a city boy like Joe, urban street-corner society was simply more interesting. The sidewalks were livelier, the styles hipper, the banter wittier, the music better, and the extended families of cousins and aunties and siblings more fun. White kids at school snickered at his transformation. “Didn’t that used to be Joey Talbot?” one mother giggled to a teacher. Although black kids are routinely expected to fit into white culture, the idea of a white kid becoming black seemed laughable to everyone but Joe’s African American friends.
We knew Joe’s need to define himself separately from us was a natural part of adolescence. “I’m trying to figure out who I am,” he reflected one day. “I think this is who I am.” But all attempts to convince him that he could not erase his white middle-class roots were to no avail.
When he was thirteen, we took him to see The Godfather, to expose him to an American classic and revive his interest in his Italian American roots — but that backfired. Soon after, describing how he averted fights between neighborhood kids, he explained to me, “I’m kind of like the Godfather. People come to me with their problems, and I help them work them out.” I looked at him — the thin arms that were lifting weights to get buff, the ethnic nose he was trying to grow into — and I immediately regretted that choice of films.
I realized then, with some awe, that he was still young enough to believe he could reinvent himself as anyone he wanted to be. I knew that, someday soon, his ghetto persona would probably not be accepted by either blacks or whites. But I marveled that, for now, by his definition, skin color was superfluous.
Maybe, after all we had been through, Joe’s need to reinvent himself as someone else was simply stronger than most adolescents’. Maybe he needed to go to a world where his parents and his old friends couldn’t go. Maybe my cancer had accelerated his hardening himself to be a man. But it was something else too. Once, a writer told me that after her divorce her son dropped out of the school band to become a loner skateboarder. When she asked him why, he said, “Mom, kids whose parents are divorced don’t play in the school band.” I think that, for Joe, the world of shiny soccer trophies and smiling two-parent families busying themselves for school bake sales just didn’t seem important anymore. Inside, he needed to connect with people whose lives seemed as hard and scary as his must have suddenly felt. And in his inner-city friends, he found that connection.
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In bookstores, the titles on helping kids cope with cancer in the family are shelved with those on raising children who are biracial or disabled. But none of the books tells you what to do when your cancer crashes up against your son’s becoming ghetto. I came out of a year of treatments with a childlike appreciation for life’s humble things. The pale clouds of winter, a glittery spider web could bring tears to my eyes. But I had also lost my son’s last year of boyhood, and I wasn’t ready. I’d get hurt by his sulking street self. While his eyes darted around to make sure he was not being seen with us at movies and on other family outings, I still wanted every second of our time together to count. I had no right to ask that of him, I knew. Give him time to find himself, I thought. But I also wondered sometimes how much time I had to give.
David and I were concerned with Joe’s transformation for other, more rational reasons. His lapses into bad grammar were to us like a jarring car alarm on a deserted street at night. All his interests — school, piano, film, soccer — seemed to shrivel against the pounding rhythms coming from behind his door. Sometimes I’d hear him working out a beautiful refrain on the keyboard, but then there would be the familiar grunts and shouts, and I knew it was just background for the main event: rap.
After all our family talks about the civil rights movement and African American history, we were actually appalled. Didn’t Joe know that most people were trying to get out of the ghetto, not into it? Joe and his pals weren’t thugs, but they all wanted to look like it. They studied the short lives and violent deaths of rap stars as if they were Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. We worried about what serious risks could lay ahead if Joe pursued the gangsta persona into the more dangerous years of high school.
But Joe’s new identity challenged our own assumptions and awareness as well. With Joe’s new friends in our lives, neighborhoods that we usually drove through only on our way somewhere else now became our destinations. I remember walking through double locked gates into a labyrinth of concrete halls to drop off one friend at a unit that had only a TV and a PlayStation — no chairs, no kitchen table, no beds. Dropping off another child meant driving through acres of public housing staggering down to the shipyards in San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point. Years ago I often went into these projects when I worked with teenagers in juvenile court, and later wrote about kids who were struggling to get out of them. But when had they built so many more of them? Why didn’t I know how the projects had multiplied? They might have been communities of Amish or Hasidic Jews for all my life intersected with them now.
The insidious face of inner-city poverty seemed to raise the stakes on everything — even the simplest get-together. Should we let Joe sleep overnight at the home of his new best friend, who lived in public housing? Would Joe be a target in a tough inner-city neighborhood, or just an unlucky victim of a stray bullet? Should I be honest about my fears with his friend’s mother or make excuses? A longtime African American friend of ours told us we were being too cautious, but when a man was shot down after a high-speed chase with the police on the street where Joe’s friend lived, it settled the question.
What I hadn’t expected was to find myself worrying about the safety of Joe’s friends in our neighborhood. We live in what middle-income San Franciscans consider one of the last affordable areas, a topsy-turvy mix of mostly aging bohemians, Latins, gays, lesbians, and white starter-house families. It is separated from one of the poorest, most gang-dominated neighborhoods in the city by one traffic-clogged boulevard that leads to the freeway. Like a Pied Piper, Precita Park sits on the dividing line, drawing together kids from both sides to play. Parents sit on the benches, watching their kids mingle but rarely mingling with one another. At dusk they retreat to their own side of the invisible line. At night we are connected by sirens: the people on our side of the line often awakened by wailing from the streets on the other side.
Our neighborhood is by no means sheltered or privileged. But when Joe started bringing new friends from the other side up to the house or even hanging outside with his black friends from school, I noticed the neighbors tense up. People on our block paused a while at their doorways before going inside, watching them. Someone always seemed to notice if one of the boys hopped the back fence to get a stray ball in a neighbor’s yard. When the boys rang the doorbell of a female classmate a few blocks away, her neighbor called the police. The girl’s white mother had a black boyfriend whom the neighbors were used to seeing around, but the sight of those boys climbing the stairs to her door on a Saturday afternoon alarmed them.
I doubt they even noticed Joe — they just saw a gang of kids who shouldn’t be there. They saw the scariest people in America — black teenage boys. I realized that everywhere these kids went — up the street, downtown — they were being watched. A few summers ago, as budding filmmakers, Joe and his white friends had rung doorbells in the neighborhood and run off, catching people’s reactions in a video series they called “Pranking and the Human Response,” a kind of precursor to Ashton Kutcher’s Punk’d. I knew that Joe and his new gang could never get away with something like that.
As I got to know the mothers of Joe’s new friends, I saw that they had their own apprehensions about sending their kids into our neighborhood, new turf that might hold unfamiliar dangers on the street. And they worried about their kids hanging out with some white boy whose idea of fun might be their sons’ trouble. “I was so relieved to find out that Joey was a nice boy,” one mother, Charmaine,* admitted to me one day. “You know, these white kids are bringing drugs and sex into the schools.”
Slowly, awkwardly (much more awkwardly than our sons, who by now called themselves “brothers”), we moved from polite to friendly, from talking through a rolled-down car window to coming in to chat. My new friends were mothers raising their kids alone, with little or no child support. Unlike me and my other friends — mostly atheists and agnostics — they spent long hours in church and believed strongly in the power of prayer. Two kids’ fathers were doing hard time. One boy’s father refused to pay child support to his mother, but said that if his son needed something, “he knows he can call me.” Another boy’s stepfather had just died of cancer, and his birth father lived across the country. “Sometimes I wonder, why is God doing this to me?” said his mom, a woman who was raising three children alone. “Then I realize, God is doing this to show me I have the strength to handle it.”
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Fall and winter of eighth grade in San Francisco are dominated by the hysteria of the high school application process. The stakes are high. Good public high schools are few, so many middle-income parents also apply to private schools they cannot afford, praying for scholarships or, like us, resigning themselves to taking out loans to pay tuitions of up to $25,000 a year. In fact, many private school scholarships go to families with incomes of $100,000 or more.
The crumbling, leaky halls of even San Francisco’s elite public high school, Lowell, can’t compare with the calm, safe havens the private schools offer. We visited pricey schools that supplied each student with a brand-new laptop, plush libraries that rivaled those of my college, campus “communities” that promised small classes and study support. Though the schools talked a lot about diversity and had elaborate, ultra-sensitive ethnic pride clubs, they seemed to have just a sprinkling of light-skinned black students in the mix. One school had enough clout to have drawn an elderly Rosa Parks to campus for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday to sing “We Shall Overcome” with the overwhelmingly white student body.
For thirteen-year-old kids, the application process is needlessly brutal — essays, interviews, tests, shadow visits, open houses, all while having to keep up their grades. For parents, it is obsessive. “This is my job,” is the familiar refrain from stay-at-home mothers. One working mother I knew took a leave from her job to keep up with the rigid schedules and paperwork required.
I went through the process like a stand-in in a life that was no longer mine. Up until a year or two before, Joe would have had a good shot at one of the top schools. But now his grade-point average was wobbly and his extracurricular activities weak. He had mustered the energy to make an impressive film in which he asks a wide variety of people to define what it is that makes them who they are. But he closes it with a tribute to Tupac — a big point of contention in our house that can be explained only by the insanity that had overtaken us. My husband — newly enlightened after seeing the film Tupac: Resurrection — argued that it was Joe’s artistic right to do so; I said that most admissions people know Tupac as just a thug who got himself killed, and it wasn’t worth the risk. But we both warned Joe to check his ghetto walk and talk at the door when he visited the schools. We made him wear Polo shirts and khaki slacks with belts. We threatened him about his grades. We even tried to force him back into volunteer activities. But Joe had his own volunteer project going.
We had put in an application at a new school whose mission was exciting: It promised to groom students for the twenty-first century with a curriculum that emphasized science, technology, ethics, and spirituality. Students would learn how to negotiate a “potentially troubling world” by studying world cultures and learning how to become “peacemakers,” according to its literature. Acknowledging the central realities of diversity and community, the school would “mirror the rich mosaic of the San Francisco Bay Area, reaching across its wide spectrum of race, culture, and economic circumstances” to draw its student body. Joe had decided that this sounded like a great opportunity for his friend Devon.
Devon was a kid who could benefit desperately from the support that only a private school could provide — and he could contribute much to other students’ understanding of the troubled world. His father was out of prison and pretty much out of the picture; his mother was struggling to support her children on a lot less than the cost of one year’s tuition. Beneath his serious street face, Devon had an open sweetness and unabashed curiosity about the world. Though guarded and awkward when I first met him, he soon revealed a deep heart and optimism about the future. Although he struggled in school, he had not lost his motivation to learn. But he was walking a tightrope, and his academic experience and support in the next few years seemed vitally important.
The school’s co-director of admissions, a charismatic young black man, appeared to be scouring the Bay Area seeking out underprivileged students like Devon. He had met Devon and liked him, and encouraged him and his mother to apply. They were thrilled. So Joe quietly took it upon himself to tutor Devon and help him with his application. Devon chose to write his application essay on his relationship to God. Joe edited it. The night before school tests, I could hear him on the phone with Devon: “Okay, now no cheating. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?” Late one evening, I heard him reassuring Devon, “You’re going to get in.” I kept in touch with the admissions codirector and Devon’s mom, to keep the process rolling. And then I held my breath for all of us. I was proud of Joe’s empathy and compassion, but I knew that his personal version of “community service” did not have the institutional stamp of validation that counted on school risumis.
While we middle-income parents of eighth-graders sweated through winter with our eyes on the high school prize, a tide of violence quietly began sweeping through the city. Thirteen African American teenage boys were killed during the year.
A young man whose sisters had tried to save him from the street violence that had claimed his mother was shot. Three boys on their way to high school were killed in their car. A fifteen-year-old was gunned down leaving a YMCA dance. Another boy was mistaken for someone else and killed; his cousin was shot a week later, on the day of the boy’s funeral. “Kids are dying right and left here,” Devon’s mother exclaimed to me one day.
The violence blew in across the city like afternoon fog off the ocean, settling deep into pockets of town — Lakeview, the Excelsior, Sunnydale, Hunter’s Point — and leaving others clear and untouched. Some of the murders didn’t even make it into the San Francisco Chronicle. None of the white, middle-class parents I knew talked about them. I wondered if they even knew about them. Would we have known had it not been for Joe’s impassioned updates on the subject? If one of the shootings had happened at a middle-class public school, San Francisco parents would have mobilized around it immediately as a school safety issue. But these happened in the shadowy places on the other side of those invisible lines. These are the things that we know without knowing.
My new friend Charmaine, however, took each one to heart. Arriving at our house looking particularly weary one day to pick up her son, she told me how hopeless she had started to feel. She went to memorial services for boys she would never know, wrote notes to their parents. She treated them as if she knew them. She couldn’t help but think about how hard someone had worked to raise them right, and how easily that care could be destroyed in the flick of a trigger finger.
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In the end, Joe’s new identity hurt him with the elite high schools and didn’t help Devon either. Joe didn’t get into any of the top private schools. Though he was accepted at the new school with the exciting mission, which was under-enrolled, Devon was not. The cost of a full scholarship was just too high, we heard; there were other kids with better grades, and his application had come in late. So it wasn’t that they didn’t think they could work with him. At least not officially. It was that it didn’t seem worth it. Unlike Joe, Devon would not be free to reinvent himself. “It’s probably better that he didn’t get in,” said the mother of a white student who was admitted to a few private schools, thinking she was providing some consolation. “He’d be on the bottom of his class there, but at a public school he won’t.”
The new school could be our chance to get Joe out of the ghetto, however. For months, it had been our salvation, beaming like the neon one-way sign on a fundamentalist church, pointing the way back to our side of the invisible line. But a curious thing happened the day we went to the school orientation. Out of about four dozen students who had been accepted into the first class, only two were black. The smiling African American students pictured in so many photos in the brochure were a lie. Some of the bright new freshman faces even belonged to kids from wealthy suburbs with excellent public high schools. Like that of all the private schools we had seen, this school’s vision seemed to reflect what white liberal parents would like to be true rather than the real truth, a fantasy that makes it easier for us to live with our choices.
One of the two black students there was a longtime friend of Joe’s, a middle-class boy whose parents are both African, and who is being raised by his black African-born aunt and white American uncle. I knew that top colleges accept many more students from immigrant African or biracial families than they do lower-income children whose families have been in America for generations. But how could there be any hope for the future if high schools did that too? “They’re looking for kids like him,” Devon’s mom told Joe, referring to the boy with African parents. “They’re not looking for kids like my son.”
“This school says they’re preparing kids for the future,” David whispered to me during the orientation, rolling his eyes. “This isn’t what the future looks like — it’s not even the present.” In the end, we were just too uncomfortable there. We withdrew Joe’s application. I realized then that all that time while we were thinking that Joe was moving off on his own, he had been moving us with him.
Fortunately, Joe had also been accepted to a fairly diverse public arts high school, where admission is based more on creative talent than on grades. But Devon literally slipped through the cracks of the public school system. While his mother pestered the school district and while the better public schools filled up, his application simply floated around for months like a plastic bag on the city’s windblown streets. Finally, he was assigned to the lowest performing high school in the city — one of the lowest in the state — a troubled school that is also notorious for gang violence. After last year’s shootings took two students’ lives there, the school’s principal was quoted as saying he expected that other students would not make it through summer to return to school in the fall. I asked Joe how Devon felt about his placement. “He’s scared,” Joe said.
On the afternoon of eighth-grade graduation, their last day of school together, I drove Joe and his friends back to our house for a sleepover. These could not be the goofy kids I had driven around all year, all braces and giant shoes, smelling of greasy onion rings mingled with boy sweat. With their slicked hair and suits, their cologne and corsages, they looked positively suave. I savored the sight of them in the rearview mirror. And for a moment that I knew wouldn’t last, I imagined them like this ten years from now, all young professionals getting together downtown after work.
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Summer is here again, an end and a beginning. Joe’s bedroom now doubles as a sound studio. In the room where his growth is still penciled on a doorframe, my teenager has created a web site to introduce the world to Bay Area rap. He brings kids up from the projects to record songs. He brings Devon over to make beats. He’s still angry that Devon didn’t get into that school, but he thinks his friend has a good future in rap. According to Tupac, Joe says, just as television news kept the horrors of the Vietnam War in front of America’s eyes, rap keeps the inequities of life in our ears.
Street life has warmed up with the weather. Teenagers cruise by at night and pause at the corner, their basses sounding the thumping throb of nowhere to go. Some people want us to go away, sings the hip-hop group Frontline. No, aint goin nowhere, we here to stay.
A stone’s throw from that corner, a few summers before my diagnosis, an apparition appeared at the chapel of Ave O Maria Immacolata. The Virgin Mary, with cascading hair and flowing robes, showed herself to the faithful on the verdigris gable of the chapel’s roof. She came only at night, enveloped in the scent of roses, and disappeared before the morning light. All summer long, carloads of the desperate and the curious quietly climbed the hill at night, where an altar of candles and flowers had been set up on the sidewalk. Though the parish priest warned that “intangible items” require a rigorous investigation before being recognized by the church, the faith of the parishioners was stronger than reason. It was said that in Mary’s presence an “overwhelming spiritual sense” washed over their bodies like the holy waters of baptism.
The Virgin appeared two days before the murder of two teenage lovers who were shot while picnicking in Precita Park on a sunny day, kids who must have thought their lives stretched out ahead of them. The Virgin left at the end of summer, but other miracles followed in her wake. Most recently, it’s been said that the hands of a teenage boy bled with a rose-scented oil, so much that the priest put it in a bowl and used it to bless those who attended the evening services.
It has been almost two years since my cancer treatments ended and nearly three years since my diagnosis. My hair is down to my shoulders, although the curl has never come back. Neither has the cancer, though. I’m in a new phase — the “survivor” phase. With breast cancer, you are a survivor unless the cancer comes back to kill you. So I live sometimes in a surreal dream of uncertainty, but uncertainty about the future isn’t solely my domain.
At night before bed, I rub my hands and body with rose oil. Then, sometimes, I lie awake worrying about the future of Joe and Devon and all the boys who now fill our house. They don’t have a prayer, the old saying goes. But then, I think, they do have prayers; prayers are something they have plenty of. They are living on teenage life force and their mamas’ hard work and prayers. They’re praying too, prayin’ hard for better dayz.
“Jesus Walks” is the name of Devon’s favorite rap song this summer. God show me the way because the devil’s tryin a break me down. The other night, when he was at our house, Devon wished me good night in a way my sons never would. “I’ll pray for you, Camille,” he said. I’ll pray for you too, Devon, and for all the boys with chunky medallions and falling-down pants who come to our house to rap their hard, silly, hopeful songs.
I have to tell you, I still hate rap. But just when I’m ready to ban it from our house forever, I hear a phrase from that vulnerable place in the rapper’s steely heart: the sweet nostalgia for his mother’s love. It’s a love that is, well, like my sons’ love for me — a tenderness and a sheltering that make me think of that day on the soccer field when Joe’s fierce eyes told me he was with me in the fight for my life. As much as he’s changing, that has stayed the same. “I love you, Mom,” the super-cool voice croaks from his bedroom sometimes, just before he drops off to sleep. Then, quietly, waiting until he’s at the edge of consciousness so he doesn’t know, I brush his forehead with a kiss, a blessing, and savor that glow before the night exhales its darkness and the moment is gone.
*The names of some people in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.
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Excerpted from “Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves,” edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses. Published by HarperCollins and coming out in paperback in January 2006.
“Dance,” by Nasir Jones and Chucky Thompson, copyright 2002 Sony/ATV Songs LLC, Ninth Street Music, Inc. and Publisher(s) Unknown. All rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Songs LLC and Ninth Street Music, Inc. administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
A friend once told Eleanor Coppola, “Life is like knitting an argyle sock. You can’t see the pattern until you’re nearly finished.” In her new book, “Notes on a Life,” Coppola takes up the work she started 30 years ago in “Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now”: her struggle to establish her own professional identity in the dynamic, engulfing world of America’s first family of film. It’s a battle that she often seems to be losing, but by the end of her second book, as she nears the age of 70, the threads of an artistic life stitched together in starts and fits emerge into a beautiful, integrated pattern.
“I am an observer at heart,” Coppola tells us in the opening of “Notes on a Life,” and her honest and ironic takes on celebrity from its fringes are sometimes reminiscent of the reporting of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. When Marlon Brando charms her on the set of “The Godfather,” she writes that it was “as I imagine a hit of heroin to be: stunning, short-lived and dangerously seductive”; later he ditches her when she has arranged to interview him for her documentary on “Apocalypse Now.” (By contrast, Kevin Costner’s deliberate attention to her when they meet suggests to her that his wife trained him to understand “how uncomfortable it is to be the invisible person.”) When the family is photographed after one of her proudest moments as a mother — when Sofia, accepting her best screenplay Oscar for “Lost in Translation,” thanks her mom for her encouragement — the only trace of Eleanor in the newspaper photo the next day is her elbow.
Part of the tension in the book comes from the seeming contradictions in Coppola’s life: She is a soft-spoken, introspective artist married to one of the world’s most flamboyant and ambitious filmmakers; a mother who longs for solitude yet feels left out when not with the family; a wife who deals with mundane domestic tasks while the rest of her family is in the exciting throes of filmmaking wizardry; a millionaire several times over who was raised to write grocery lists on the clean insides of used envelopes for thriftiness.
Coppola was raised in the small town of Sunset Beach, Calif. Her father, a political cartoonist for the Los Angeles Examiner, died when she was 10; her mother, a housewife, was more interested in books than housekeeping. (Eleanor’s teenage rebellion was “baking perfect lemon meringue pies, sewing all night, and working two summer jobs.”) She met and began dating Francis Coppola in Ireland when he was directing the Roger Corman splatter film “Dementia 13″ and she was an assistant to the art director. In 1963, several months into their relationship, she discovered that she was pregnant and considered giving the baby up for adoption. But Francis was ecstatic: “I’ve always wanted a family,” he said, and the couple was married the next weekend. Another child followed soon after, leading her to write, “My life was shaped by pregnancy.” In 1986, her son Gian-Carlo was killed in a horrific boating accident. The Coppolas immediately took in his girlfriend, Jacqui de la Fontaine, who was two months pregnant at the time, and they found solace in the gift of a granddaughter, Gia.
Outside of her book and documentary about the making of “Apocalypse Now,” “Hearts of Darkness” (co-directed by George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr based on her footage) which won several awards, Eleanor Coppola is relatively unknown for her own work. Her early artwork in the ’70s included conceptual installations with artist Lynn Hershman Leeson in a fleabag hotel above the Broadway strip joints and in the Coppolas’ 22-room home in San Francisco. Playing on the idea that many visitors to the latter came mostly to see a famous filmmaker’s home, she removed his five Oscars from their glass case and replaced them with the miniature Oscars given to the winner’s wife to wear as a necklace. She also paid Sofia and son Roman to stay in a bedroom where a TV played a video of Sofia’s birth and a sign read: “The author’s most important work, expected to take 21 years to complete.”
But it seems that it was after the death of Gian-Carlo that she truly found her voice in “Circle of Memory.” The installation consists of a circular chamber with straw bale walls, where salt falls in a thin stream into a glowing mound in the middle of the room and a soft wash of children’s voices recite the alphabet. Visitors are invited to call up memories of children who are missing or who have died, and write messages to insert in the walls. The installation broke attendance records at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, where it was first exhibited.
For many women, one of the most fun aspects of reading Coppola’s new book is discovering how much of her life seems like ours — albeit in more spectacular settings. She gets caught up in stupid arguments with her kids, eavesdrops on their conversations in carpools, brings a Tupperware of chocolate chip cookies to Sofia on the set of “Marie Antoinette” when she is worried that her daughter is getting too thin. Doing mundane household chores, she admits that she sometimes feels “as if my brain is a rusting file cabinet full of useless information.” Yet she persists and ultimately triumphs. For any woman who is struggling with career and family, or whose husband’s work always seems to take precedence over her own, “Notes on a Life” is a bittersweet portrait of modern American womanhood.
I spoke with Eleanor Coppola on a soft, breezy day in early summer on the porch of her 1885 Queen Anne Victorian in Napa Valley, as we sipped glasses of spring water and nibbled on cookies from a plate neatly pressed with a single forget-me-not stem.
You met Francis on the set of his film “Dementia 13,” where you were both working. Why didn’t you continue to work together in film?
I thought we were going to be working together, and that he was going to make these little low-budget, Roger Corman black-and-white films. In fact, I went on the next film with him and I was making sets, and then I discovered I was pregnant and we got married. We had two children back-to-back, and by the time I was ready to go back to work and wanted to work, his career had advanced way beyond me. The people he was hiring were professionals; they weren’t just friends and everybody kind of helping out.
That kind of left me in this limbo because we had a deal that if he was going to be gone more than two or three weeks, we’d take the whole family on location. So that, of course, uprooted me to go with the children and cut off projects that I might have started outside the family. When we got to “Apocalypse Now,” and I got this idea to shoot a documentary, it was a lifesaver because it gave me a form of expression on these locations where everyone else is engaged in some creative process and I’m the one shopping for the mop.
In the book, you are often shopping for mops and trash bags and doormats. Why didn’t you hire somebody to do those kinds of things?
I came from a background that didn’t prepare me for the kind of life that we were living in. Francis did too. My mother never had a cleaning lady, his mother never had a cleaning lady; his family never had a nanny, my family never had a nanny. I didn’t know how to find the person who could come in and shop for these things that I needed — it would be faster if I just went and did it myself! I should have gone to hotel school or something — there I was, the mistress of this 22-room house and this place out here, and I came from a house with one bathroom. I just didn’t have a clue.
It seems that you have a lot of input into his creative process. Is this true?
I don’t think about that because I have that kind of dialogue with a lot of creative people I know. I just say what I’m thinking and there’s a lot of back and forth. He’s pretty focused and single-minded. I’m not one of those creative partners with him, not one of his collaborators. Maybe I’m the audience.
At one time, in the ’70s, he asked me about a particular part of this project he was working on. I thought, Oh I’m his muse, I’m so important! Then the next day I was down in the kitchen and he was asking the baby sitter the same thing. So I know he just uses whoever is around as a sounding board, and I’m part of the sounding board.
You wrote about your discomfort when Diane Keaton told you she had modeled the character of Kay Corleone in “The Godfather” on you. What did you find so repugnant about that?
I thought that character was completely repressed by the family. I identified, of course, with the WASPness of this person in this Italian environment, but she didn’t come out of it that well. I wasn’t wanting to be the model for that, but I also understood her seeing me as the WASP woman in this Italian family.
Francis was criticized quite a bit for casting Sofia as Mary Corleone in “Godfather III,” and you were criticized for letting him do it. Some people actually called it “child abuse.” Do you think that it was good or bad for her to go through that experience?
At the time, I didn’t know if it was going to be good or bad. After the fact, I think it was a good life lesson. It taught her how to stick with it through a really hard experience and do the best you can, even if it’s not easy and even if not everybody likes you or likes it. That’s one of the great things that our kids learned from Francis — that it gets hard and then it gets harder and it still gets harder and you keep going and it gets harder and you keep going. You don’t just stop or give up. It’s part of the creative process: having the will and the ability to stick with it when it’s hard. It’s easy to do it when it’s fun and thrilling, but to stick to the hard part.
When your children were growing up, you worried about how your unconventional family life would affect them. Looking back now, what do you think?
It cuts a little bit both ways. Mostly I think it’s been good for them because it’s given them a comfort in the world. Both Sofia and Roman shot films in Europe and they were totally at ease doing it. I know some kids who grew up here in Napa and moved to San Francisco, and it was too much traffic and too many hills and they moved right back. So I think it’s given them access to the biggest possible canvas, and that part is really good. Of course, they missed some of keeping up on their Little League or whatever you miss when you leave a lot.
In the book, you write that you often said to Sofia when she was growing up, “Everyone is going to expect you to be a spoiled brat. Please surprise them.” Your children are certainly not slackers. How did you manage that?
It helped not to live in Hollywood, and that they were growing up here, in what was at the time an agricultural community and small town. I like it that they both come back and see friends they went to school with — that they feel a connection to their roots.
I was constantly trying to figure out how to keep them well-behaved because, of course, we stayed in hotels when we traveled a lot, so my kids ate in restaurants a lot and threw their clothes around, and the maids cleaned up after them. But I think they got a good work ethic from Francis because he is an extremely hard worker. There was just the pleasure of working. Roman worked on his first film when he was 16. We also had these financial ups and downs, so there was always sort of the unmentioned fact that “you know, we could be in a down moment when you mature and you’re going to have to take care of yourselves.”
You have written about your marriage going through some pretty tough times. Why did you stay with Francis?
I feel like that’s kind of old news, so I’d like to keep focused on this book, which is not about that.
How has your relationship with Francis changed over the years?
We’ve both gotten more accepting of each other. He’s gotten more accepting of my projects. You can see that in the book. He was disapproving of that conceptual art thing in our home, but he was approving of the Circle of Memory project — you see him coming to it at the end, bringing Gia and being supportive. So it’s just evolution.
At one point in the book, while you were in Paris with him when he was doing the publicity for “Rainmaker,” he tells you that he must work that day, but you are free. The remark upsets you and later that day, on the Pont Neuf, you actually consider jumping off the bridge. Why were you at such a low point?
I was being pulled away again from what I wanted to be doing. It looked so glamorous to everyone else: I’m sitting in Paris and my husband says I don’t have to work, and all of the conventional wisdom is saying I should be happy as all get-out. And I am not happy, and it has to do with not being able to do the work of my heart in that circumstance.
Because of the way you were raised, and the tension you felt between work and family, were you determined that your daughter be an independent woman?
Because I loved art, I always had an art table in the kitchen and a lot of paints and clay and paper, and Sofia just took to it like water. I thought it was because she was a girl; I didn’t know it was just her. So I did encourage that. And I think because I wanted that independence myself, I tried to make her feel that she could do anything she wanted; that there was no stigma about being a girl.
When your son Gian-Carlo was killed, you wrote that you were “as angry as you could be.” How did that anger come out and how did you come to grips with it?
I was filled with anger and I knew that I didn’t want to hang onto it because it’s poisoning your system. Intellectually, you know that in the bigger picture, there’s life and death, and chaos and order, and accidents and triumphs, so you know that you need to integrate it. That’s another treasure about Napa. I knew that I could just walk down these dirt roads and scream my guts out and no one would hear. I was free to just release the emotion in me.
Before Gio’s accident, my emotional life — the range of the highs and the lows — was smaller. After the accident, my lows went way down, and you’re lost down there for a while until you begin to recover. And then you realize that your highs have gone way up too: your ability to appreciate the children that you do have, the days that you do have, this grandchild that we did receive. It extends on both ends.
A lot of couples split up after a child’s death.
Ninety-two percent of couples do.
Did Gio’s death bring you and Francis closer?
In the long run, but in the beginning it’s just too difficult because everyone grieves in their own way. But finally, you’re the only two people who have those memories together — of your children, your family.
What did you get personally and professionally from doing “Circle of Memory”?
Personally, I liked the integration of my life and my art. Sometimes in art, you do something that’s outside of you, but that was a way to express my life experience. Professionally, it was well received. It’s been in three cities in the states, and the south of France last summer, and it’s going to Salzburg this summer. It has a profound impact on people who visit it, and it’s a neat thing that I’m setting an environment for people to have their own experience. Some people remember children there. One woman said, “I sat down in there and my father started to speak to me.” So it’s whatever you bring to it. And I like that better than saying, “This is art and you need to look at it this way.” It’s a container for your own experience.
You write at the close of the book that you are happier than you’ve ever been. Why?
As the years go by, you just learn more, so you know what you need for yourself. I’m just more aware that I need to do this creative work, and Francis got used to the idea, and the kids were gone, so I had more time to do it. The more self-satisfied I was with that, the more pleasant I was as a wife. I think we just learn how to be more adept at our life’s path, so to speak.
You’ve said that you kept a journal to “explain yourself to yourself.” But why did you decide to share so much private and honest information about your life with the public?
That’s a question I have a hard time answering even for myself. But once I’ve written it, once it’s in the manuscript, it’s not connected to me anymore, and I feel pretty detached from it. It could be somebody else’s story — like a book I’d like to read if somebody else wrote it.
Rose opens her eyes and he is there — his breath soft on her face, hollow little chest, eyes lit like half-moons in the night. When he was 4, nightmares of fire would send him bursting into their bed to wedge his body between hers and his father’s. Now he is whispering to her to come and see the midnight stars. They stand outside, two tiny human figures under an enormous sky. Rose is shivering in her robe and slippers. Toby’s feet are on the ground but his head is floating somewhere above, her 8-year-old guide through the galaxy.
Rose opens her eyes again. He is not there. Toby, the eldest of her three sons, died eight years ago, but he comes back to her often in her dreams. A parent’s worst nightmare. Now she wonders, Is that watching your child die or outliving him? For a while, it seemed that she was sentenced to live out the nightmare literally. Sleep would plunge her back into his early dreams of burning buildings and dizzying cliffs, and she would be helpless to save him. After a while, his dream-self got older. Now sometimes he is a young man, robust and healthy, as he was before cancer killed him at the age of 30. When she has these dreams, she knows it will probably be a good day.
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I met Rose when I was 24 in what now seems like another life. Nancy, a law student and dancer, had become my best friend and Toby my boyfriend when they each came out to San Francisco to start their adult lives. All of us were shedding childhood and convention, trying to figure out our places in the world; within the triangle of our friendship, I felt safe to be anything, to try out everything.
Nancy and I were friends until her death from cancer four years ago, just after her 40th birthday. I thought Toby had left my life years before, when we split up and went on to marry others. Yet as he and Nancy were linked in my life, so were their deaths — they died four years apart to the day. Each died within weeks of my sons’ births — no sooner was I flooded with the overwhelming instinct to protect my children than I was up against the jarring impossibility of doing that. Since then, I have been unable to separate them from my children — I often see Toby in the eyes of my older son, Joey, and hear Nancy in the laughter of my younger son, Nat.
For a long time, the lingering connection to my dead friends both fueled my love for my children and made me fearful. When my children were babies, I could avoid probing those feelings, but as they grew older and I started saving baby teeth or wisps of hair, trying to hang onto the parts of them that were slipping away, I could no longer ignore the proximity of loss. I began to think of Toby and Nancy not only as my friends, but as other mothers’ children. And so this year, on the anniversary of their deaths, I found myself drawn to their mothers, and through them, back to my friends.
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Toby was my first real love. We met in the clouds, on the 24th floor of a posh Nob Hill Hotel where we both waited tables. We were both creative and ambitious and romantic — and that drew us together for five years. When we got off work at 2 in the morning, we would sneak into the supper club where performers like Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald headlined, and Toby would do a private show for me, playing Gershwin or Bach on the piano until the security guards kicked us out.
At that time, Toby was studying photography. I remember he would wind my legs around each other like taffy or sit me naked near a window to catch the light falling in halos on the curves of my body, shooting photos while a pot of spaghetti sauce bubbling on his tiny gas stove provided the apartment’s only heat. He was the perfect first love — artistic and sensitive and playful. When he was hellbent on moving in with me, he showed up at my door to woo me with a bowl of freshly made chocolate chip cookie dough; when I was angry and he didn’t know what to do with me, he’d turn me upside down by my heels and shake me. He gave beautiful and quirky gifts — a finely embroidered antique blouse, a bolt found while hiking under the Golden Gate Bridge. He pried open the French doors that had been carelessly painted shut in my tiny apartment so that I could hear the bells from Grace Cathedral on Sunday afternoons.
Toby quit school after a year; five years later, he was assistant cameraman at George Lucas’ special effects studio, Industrial Light and Magic. When I think of Toby, I think of light and stars: I picture him on the roof of our building, sitting in a director’s chair under an indigo sky, guiding me through the constellations before the fog wrapped around us and swept the view away.
The other person who opened up my young adult world was Nancy. We met in VISTA, the domestic Peace Corps, working at a San Francisco law office that represented children. In my eyes she was worldly — she had worked for the defense in the San Quentin Six trial and become friends with celebrated defendant Johnny Spain; and she was chic — she wore high heels with shorts and let her bra straps show long before it was stylish, a perfect role model for the shy woman I was then. She had a blessed sense of how to pamper herself and others — together, we drank freshly ground coffee, with cream, in bed; took saunas; ate oysters when either of us had any money; browsed at tacky lingerie shops.
Nancy was steely determination and generosity entangled with a wry, sarcastic sense of humor. When she became a partner in a criminal defense practice, she provided her clients with more than legal help — she gave them jobs, sometimes money and much of herself, in friendship and faith. But her first love was dancing. Even in a business suit she looked like a dancer — I used to imagine her gliding through court, her rib cage high, hands flowing in graceful arcs as she argued her cases.
Nancy held my hand through my breakup with Toby, at my wedding to David and through my first childbirth. A few months later, when I learned of Toby’s death, she was the first person I called.
It was at Toby’s wedding that Rose first noticed something wrong. Toby and Ellen, an animator and producer, had met at ILM and moved to Los Angeles, where they were married in 1989. “I remember looking at him at the ceremony and his back was shaking,” says Rose. “He was pale and his eyes were kind of bulging. I wondered if he was high and for a minute I was irritated. Then I thought, Well, it’s his wedding.”
We are sitting in the den of their 350-year-old farmhouse in Connecticut. When I first came to this house almost 20 years ago, I thought she and Bob were the coolest parents I had ever met: Rose was a vivacious, 39-year-old mother of three sons — Toby, Todd and Troy — and still looked like a model in a bikini; Bob was an illustrator who was just breaking into fine art with a series of highly sensuous paintings of dancers. I got much of my encouragement to make sense of the world through words here, from this family; it’s difficult to be returning to write about them without Toby. So much in this house is familiar — the only thing new to me is the story of how he died.
The autumn after the wedding, Toby thought he had an ulcer; his doctors examined his upper body and found and removed a tumor in his lung. But by his first wedding anniversary, he still didn’t feel well. The following month, they discovered cancer “everywhere,” according to Rose — under his navel, in his rectum, the stomach walls, the portal veins to his liver. Rose remembers flying out to California to see him as if in a dream. “He just laid his head in my lap and said he was frightened. He looked so thin. I said, ‘You’ll be all right. We’re going to get you well.’”
Toby’s doctors had told Bob and Ellen that the cancer was terminal, but Rose couldn’t believe it. “I felt like my stomach had dropped out,” she says. “You hear things like they’ll have 1 percent chance of surviving if it gets to the organs and you think, well, my child is going to be in that 1 percent.”
At Ellen’s invitation, Rose and Bob moved in with them and began to take care of Toby during the day while Ellen worked. Rose remembers a night soon after, when Toby was in excruciating pain. “I wished it was my pain. I remember rocking him, saying, ‘We’re going to get through this.’ And I believed we would — I had to.” But by the time they got him to a hospital, he was almost unconscious. The oncologist told them he had three months to live. “He said, ‘I don’t want to see you back here again. Let him die in peace.’”
They did not talk directly about his death again. Instead, they lived with a kind of wordless understanding, taking their cues from Toby. Miraculously, he continued working as a cameraman on a television pilot. After he grew too weak to walk, Rose and Bob would help him to a director’s chair on a crane. He finished filming three weeks before his death.
Bob had transferred his studio to Toby and Ellen’s house. He was in the middle of a series for the Scottish Ballet production “What to Do Until the Messiah Comes.” His paintings suddenly became charged with anguish, the dance an allegory of Toby and Ellen’s life. Toby would sit near his father, strumming his guitar while he watched Bob paint. One day he lifted an eyebrow and said, “Dad, if I die, I know you’re going to paint me.”
Ultimately, Rose and Bob believe, Toby died of starvation. His 6-2 frame had shrunk to 98 pounds, the skin stretched so tight on his face he could no longer close his mouth. “Two nights before his death, he came into our room and said, ‘Mom, can I lay down there with you and Dad?’” Rose recalls. “He never left. Maybe he just wanted to crawl back into the womb. We’d just hold each other and reminisce. He said, ‘Mom, if I kick the bucket, these are the things I remember.’ He talked about how much he loved Ellen and Bob and me, about ILM; he talked about you. Then he said, ‘If I live, these are the things I want to do,’ and he talked about directing a movie, having children.”
Rose says she can still see Toby’s face in the moments before he died. “He looked at me with those big brown eyes — I remember they seemed bigger than ever because that was almost all that was left of him. He opened his mouth as if he was about to say something to me and then he closed his eyes and died. Maybe he was just taking a breath, maybe he didn’t have anything to say. But that will haunt me until I die.”
The family had all been there; she and Ellen were hugging him when he died. “We were talking with him until the last breath, telling him we loved him and not to be afraid,” Rose recalls. “The only thing we didn’t do was go with him. And I would have gladly taken his place.”
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Parents never completely stop feeling responsible for their children’s health and safety; when a child dies, they still feel somehow to blame, no matter how old the child or what caused his death. For five years, Rose tells me, she reviewed Toby’s life and found guilt in even the smallest details — from whether she let him eat too much candy as a child to a family fight that was a turning point in his life. Toby had been out drinking with high school friends when he flipped his parents’ Jeep. “Fortunately, no one was hurt, but Bob blew up,” Rose recalls. “He said, ‘After graduation you’re out of here.’ I think it was too soon — he had just turned 18 and he wasn’t ready. Intellectually, I know it didn’t cause the cancer, but maybe it had some impact, weakened his immune system. Maybe I should have stood up to Bob more.”
Alone in San Francisco, Toby got a room in a transient hotel. “He’d call and say, ‘I’m thinking of coming home.’ I’d say, ‘Come back,’ but Bob would say, ‘Stick it out a little longer. I’m sure you’ll find work.’ He was talking from his own experience: When he was 18, he went to New York with his portfolio, stayed for a week and came home. He didn’t want Toby to have that regret.” If Toby had lived, I realize, this would be part of his success story, what made him, but now it is forever tinged with sadness.
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In the last century, when up to half of the babies born in the United States died in childhood and parents could lose all of their children in a single epidemic, it was a common practice to photograph the dead or dying. Most of the postmortem photos disappeared with the people who treasured them; some that remain, including many of children, are gathered in a collection called “Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America.” They are strangely beautiful, reminders of an age when people looked more steadily at death because they had no choice. In some, the grieving mother cradles a dead child in her lap like a stiff little doll. In one sequence, a ball lies on a bed near the limp open hand of a dying boy; in the next picture, the child is dead. Many were the only photos ever taken of these children, and they were cherished — hung in homes, worn in lockets, sent to relatives and friends.
Bob did paint Toby. His work now hangs in their home: huge, grief-wreathed portraits of a young man whose gaze stays clear and serene while disease destroys his body. They are both beautiful and raw, filled with a palpable rage and tender, bereaved love. And for a year after Toby’s death, they were almost all Bob could do.
“When a woman loses a child, she loses her past, present and future,” he says. “A man loses his future. Toby was an extension of me.” The only way for Bob to reclaim him was through painting. “As long as I have pictures of somebody, I have them. I don’t know that I could ever go back and do them now. I don’t think I could do a realistic picture of his face anymore. But he’s still there, in some way, in every painting I do.”
Death hovered over the birth of my second son, Nathaniel. I had placenta previa — a condition that meant the blood flow to his body could be cut off at any time during gestation — and he was born five weeks too soon, weighing less than five pounds, his lungs not ready to breathe on their own. After he was whisked from my body to a respirator, the doctor told my husband he might not live through the night.
Nat was in the intensive care nursery for two weeks. When he was still too weak to nurse, I would go to the hospital twice a day with a cooler of pumped milk to bottle-feed him, then go home and empty my breasts again. I probably should have worried that we weren’t bonding enough, but I just felt lucky. Nat and I were on the edge of a world of children who were hovering between life and death — some born weighing only a couple of pounds. I would see their mothers in the nursery day after day, standing sometimes for hours, their hands lying on their children’s tiny bodies through portholes in the incubators. Some of those babies would make it and some would live for maybe six months and die. Then they would take the still child out of the incubator and disconnect the tubes and the mother would get to hold her baby for the first time.
Nancy was not at the hospital for Nat’s birth. She joked that going through labor with me once was enough. But she was too sick, had been in too many hospitals herself by then. Or maybe the irony was too much. The same machines that were literally breathing life into my son were being used more and more frequently to keep her alive — and for how long?
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I drove under an empty blue sky through the Massachusetts Berkshires to the home of Nancy’s mother, Suzanne. “I’ve been planning to make a Nancy album,” Suzanne says, carrying in a box of photos and notebooks as we sit down on the sofa. “But it was two years before I could look at these, and then I just put them in a box and couldn’t touch it until today. And that’s doing well for me.”
On the mantel is a kind of shrine to Nancy — photos, candles, poetry and an old Christmas ornament, a pair of ballet slippers dangling on a pink ribbon. Each year on the anniversary of Nancy’s death, Suzanne goes to a peace pagoda near her home in Amherst and sits by herself with a book of poetry. “But I try to focus on her birth more than her death. I know Nancy would prefer that.”
Then, as if it was on her mind, she recalls the day Nancy was born. “When they brought her to me in the hospital and I saw her huge violet eyes and blond hair, I couldn’t believe she was mine,” Suzanne says, ruffling her cropped dark hair, which is currently tinted the color of wine. “I always had a terrible fear that I would lose her — she seemed too good to be true.”
On the wall is a photo of Nancy at her first tap recital, rosy rouge circles smudged on her cheeks. “She was always moving, always dancing,” Suzanne says. “When she was a child, you could hardly catch her. You would reach out to hug her and she would slip through your fingers, she was gone.”
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After raising four children with Nancy’s father, Les, Suzanne reversed course midlife — she divorced, went back to college to study psychology and fell in love with her current mate, Susan. Listening to her talk, it seems that sometimes during that period, she and her eldest daughter reversed roles. “Nancy drove me to my first class and I was shaking like a leaf. She said, ‘You’re going to be fine. What time is class over? I’ll be here to pick you up.’ Like a mother taking her kid to kindergarten.”
In 1984 Nancy married Howard, a psychiatric nurse and aspiring musician. Like Rose, Suzanne first became alarmed while her child was home for her wedding, when she noticed a mole on Nancy’s leg. Nancy avoided having it checked out; when she finally did, it was melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer. Nancy’s doctors immediately removed the mole and a large amount of tissue on her leg. They thought they had gotten all the cancer, and a few years later, she and Howard were able to adopt a baby boy, Aaron. But then a new tumor appeared on her lungs.
I ask Suzanne when she knew that Nancy was going to die. “Aug. 26, 1991,” she answers. “It was a beautiful sunny day, a few weeks after Nancy’s 37th birthday. I answered the phone in the kitchen. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew. The cancer had reached her liver. Nancy was crying, but I felt like I had to hold it together for her. The mother has to be strong. If you’re not, how will your child be?”
But when she hung up, Suzanne fell apart. “Shards of glass pierced my being,” she wrote in her journal that night. She began having “dreams of dragons, mountains and roads to travel — roads that are too long and I’m lost and I waken shaking … I am melting in a pool of helplessness.”
Nancy began commuting between her home in Oakland and City of Hope, a cancer treatment center in Southern California, where she underwent an agonizing regimen of chemotherapy, interleukin and interferon treatments. And Suzanne began commuting between Amherst, City of Hope and Nancy’s home. “I lived tentatively,” she says. “I felt like my feet were never touching the ground, I was never firmly ensconced, any minute I might need to get on a plane.”
Over the next three years, she watched as, one by one, parts of her daughter seemed to fall away — her work, her strength, her possessions, her beauty. “She had long hair when she went into City of Hope,” Suzanne recalls. “The nurse gave her a pep talk. She said, ‘You’re going to lose your hair, but it might fix you.’ I’ll never forget the day she was combing her hair and chunks — not strands — chunks of her long blond hair were falling around her. She cried. I went back to my room and cried.” Another night Suzanne broke into tears watching the Olympics, seeing the parents of the medalists bursting with pride. Yet she and her daughter rarely talked about death. They danced around the subject, talking instead about recipes or the weather or people they knew. Nancy would talk to friends about her treatments and feelings in front of Suzanne, but not to her.
Suzanne began to feel a free-floating anger. “I didn’t even see it. I was really angry at God, but I didn’t know how to have a conversation about it with God, so I started picking on other people. You think you’ve gotten your children through everything, that they’re safe. And that’s when the anger comes in.”
The only person she couldn’t get angry with was Nancy. She did once, six weeks before Nancy’s death, and she still regrets it. Suzanne had scolded Aaron for something minor and Nancy yelled at her. “I went to my room and stayed in there like a little kid. The next morning, we were alone in the house and she said, ‘Mom, why are you mad at me?’ She patted the seat next to her and said, ‘Sit down and talk to me.’ I said, ‘I’m not mad at you, I couldn’t be mad at you.’ And she said, ‘Yes, you could.’ I regretted it terribly. It was OK for Nancy to get mad at me, but not for me to get mad at her.”
Suzanne’s biggest regret is that when she could do less and less to protect her daughter from her growing pain, she found herself finally wishing Nancy would die. “If anyone had ever told me I would think for one second, ‘Please, God, take her now,’ I would have told them they were crazy. But I couldn’t bear to see her unable to get out of the bath or bed, unable to keep food down, unable to breathe.”
At home on the Friday before she died, Nancy began gasping for air. “We turned the oxygen up all the way, got the bag that she kept packed for the hospital and rushed her into the back seat of the car,” Suzanne remembers. “Aaron started screaming, ‘Mommy, don’t go!’ He ran after the car and I ran after him. We stood on the street, my hands on his shoulders, tears streaming down both of our faces. Nancy turned and looked back at us. I’ll never forget the look of terrible pain and torture on her face — it’s a look no mother would ever want to see.”
The next day Nancy was well enough for Aaron to visit for the last time; that evening, she and Suzanne watched game shows on TV before she slipped into a coma during the night. I saw Nancy for the last time the next morning. She was as pallid as the hospital room, her limp body propped up in the bed. All that was left of her was her breath. I held her hand to my heart, as she had held mine in labor. She had not only been my friend — she had helped shape my life and I could not imagine the shape of a future without her. I couldn’t speak the words I should have said; I said them silently and willed them into her.
At around midnight, Nancy’s breathing became very labored and her doctor suggested increasing the morphine to ease her discomfort. Suzanne knew this could ultimately cause her to stop breathing. “What would you do if it were your child?” she asked him. “She won’t live more than a few hours,” he said. “I would turn it up and let her go quietly.” So Suzanne and Howard agreed, and an hour later, Nancy’s breath left her.
A small child who is separated from his mother cannot comprehend the loss — he still expects that she will respond to his cries. The child will look eagerly toward any sight or sound that may be his mother, using all his resources to recapture her any way he can. Psychologists call this behavior “searching.” The mother is the center of the child’s universe, and when the mother is gone, the child feels not only her loss, but lost himself.
A mother who loses a child often does the same. No matter how expected a child’s death is, the mother’s hope for a miracle can become a physical prayer, so strong that it continues even after death. A child’s absence is simply too unnatural; if the parent is alive, her mind insists that the child must be alive somewhere too. If the longing is strong enough, she may see the child or hear him moving about or calling to her.
“For the first few years, I thought, Toby’s just gone for a while. He’ll be back,” says Rose. The first time she saw him was on a stage in London, shortly after his death, when she was shooting photos of dancers in rehearsal. “The light was falling on his face and hair, but his body was partly hidden in the curtains,” she recalls. “He was wearing his glasses, like he used to. My heart was pounding. I grabbed the telephoto lens to get a better look, but he was gone.” Later, she found out it was the ballet’s young composer. “But that used to happen a lot — I’d see a young man and think it was him.”
Suzanne still remembers a phone call on the first anniversary of Nancy’s death. “I picked up the phone and I heard Nancy’s voice on the other end.” The caller was her daughter Julie, but the feeling was so strong, Suzanne kept waiting for Nancy to return. “I thought maybe she couldn’t be here for a while, maybe she was with Aaron,” Suzanne says. “Then one day I was thinking about her and the wind chimes outside started ringing, although there was no breeze. And I knew it was Nancy. Now I feel her close to me from time to time. When I’m really in a bad place and I ask for her to come, she does.”
Suzanne talks to Nancy and also writes to her, filling up the pages in the journal that Nancy left incomplete. Her notes to her daughter are touchingly conversational — about summer storms, Aaron’s growth — like the things they used to talk about, or a mother’s letters to a daughter who is simply away for a while.
Aaron is now 9 years old; his curiosity about his mother brings her back to him. When he visits Suzanne, he likes to sleep in Nancy’s childhood bed. This year he told Suzanne he would like to have the robe that Nancy always wore. “Sometimes I look up in the clouds and she’s up there, she sees me,” he said. “Sometimes I wish I’d die so I could be with my mommy.”
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Nancy’s journals, which begin before she was married, are like a window into our shared past: filled with poems, postcards, autumn leaves, quotes and lengthy ramblings about torturous love affairs. Then the melanoma sneaks in, like a rude interruption. Nancy fantasizes about having George Winston music piped into the operating room and writes about a dance she will choreograph, “Hospital Dance,” set to Winston’s “Thanksgiving.” There are program notes: “In mid-December, I was diagnosed with melanoma, a potentially fatal form of skin cancer. My life went through a series of abrupt, unexpected, emotional upheavals. I was not ready to die.” Later she writes, “I’m too young and healthy and besides that it wouldn’t be fair.” Turning the page, I find a list of questions for her doctor about treatments and life expectancy and then her handwriting stops.
For a long time, I thought Nancy and I needed to talk about her death. When I was away from her, I would think of new ways to broach the subject, but she would always wave me off. I thought she was not following the necessary steps to dying in peace — she was “in denial,” refusing to “bring closure,” not taking her “journey of acceptance.” Now I understand that she was dancing with death — making deals, buying time, agreeing to put up with whatever physical torture her treatments required to gain time with her son. Aaron was the one thing she could never let go of. She told me once, “Sometimes I think if I’m good enough, maybe God will let me live.”
I remember the last time I saw her at home. Her burning blue eyes had almost lost their light, her body was shrunken, as she told her sister Julie, “to the dancer’s body I always wanted.” Just as she did not want to talk about her death, I had found it increasingly difficult to talk about my life. We were folding clothes in silence when she said, “I’m not afraid of the pain — I know the morphine will take care of that. I just wish I could figure out how to leave behind five years of clothes for Aaron and five years of frozen dinners.”
Even as her wish to live drowned out everything else, she was preparing to die in a quintessentially motherly way: attending to tedious domestic tasks, cleaning up the messes she anticipated after she was gone. When she was strong enough, she tidied dresser drawers, labeled shelves in Aaron’s closet, sorted through his clothes. She made a photo album for him called “Mommy and Me.” She may have even started scouting for her replacement: After she died, Howard found the business card of a woman he had not seen in years. Nancy left a note saying that she had run into her and ended it: “P.S. She’s single.”
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When mothers talk of a child’s death, they say that the emotional pain becomes physical — overwhelming and unendurable, like the pain of childbirth. But women seem wired to forget the pain of childbirth, while the pain of a child’s death appears to be limitless. Researchers trying to ascertain the endpoints of grief have yet to determine if there is a limit to parents’ mourning. Rose and Suzanne would say there is not. “It softens after about seven years,” says Rose. “It never goes away.”
A woman carries a baby in her body and when that child dies, no matter how old he or she is, the mother feels that something has been cut out from inside her — the loss is as profound and permanent as becoming a parent. I asked Rose and Suzanne how childbirth and child death changed their lives.
“A woman named Elizabeth Stone wrote that having a child is ‘to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body,’” Suzanne says. “That’s what becoming a parent is like. And now I’ve lost that piece of myself.”
Rose thinks back to Toby’s birth. “I remember holding him when he was a newborn, being scared to death. Here was this tiny human being that I was responsible for, and the love and commitment is for life, even after he’s married and has children. And when you lose that child, it takes a part of you out that never returns — a part of your heart. A light goes out forever. You just learn to live with the loss.”
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I looked at photos of my children a lot on that trip. I memorized Joey’s skinny knees and the deep brown pools of his eyes; the kissable curve of Nat’s chin and the sprinkling of cinnamon freckles across his nose. I devised my own waltz with mortality. I will become the perfect mother, I thought, I will write down every deed and phrase. At home, Joey hugged me with his ever-ready love and said, “I felt empty when you were gone.” Nat held back, needing to know that I was not going to disappear again. The next day, when I was untangling a hopelessly knotted shirt that he was trying to get over his head, he burst out, “I love you, Mom,” and threw his arms around me.
But the problem with trying to live every day as if your children could die is that life gets in the way. Dishes pile up, homework needs to get done, bills must be paid. Work pressures rise, children misbehave. A few weeks later, Joey and I were at the grocery store. We were on our way to Disneyland and had a cart bulging with chips and SnackPack cereals, and he was whining for a 25-cent toy in the gum machines. Suddenly, that toy became a point of honor, all that stood between me and spoiling him rotten.
Oblivious to my tough-love stance, the checker reached into her pocket and gave him a quarter. “How can you resist those big brown eyes?” she cooed. I shot Joey a look and he made the weakest possible effort to refuse her money, then ran off to the machine before she could finish insisting that he take it. The checker looked at me softly. “I know, it’s not good to spoil them,” she said. “But I lost my son when he was 11, so let me spoil him just a little.”
Johnny Fontaine, the Sinatra clone in “The Godfather,” is
caught in a private moment of weakness in the shadows of Vito Corleone’s
study, away from the adoring swoons of his female fans. His face hidden in
his hands, he whispers that his voice has gone weak and his career is
faltering, thanks to a certain female actress who has made him lose his
senses. “You let women dictate your actions and they are not competent in
this world, though certainly they will be saints in heaven while we men
burn in hell,” admonishes the Don, exhorting him to stop whimpering about
his voice and act like a man. It is the kind of wisdom about family and
manhood and business that the Mafia hero dispenses throughout the film –
and that took on a jarring new dimension when author Mario Puzo announced this spring that
the old Don himself was actually based on, well, his mother.
“Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth, in my own mind I heard the
voice of my mother,” Puzo confessed in the new preface to his novel “The
Fortunate Pilgrim,” which was re-released in April. “I heard her wisdom,
her ruthlessness, and her unconquerable love for her family and for life
itself, qualities not valued in women at the time.”
Certainly, those qualities were not valued in Puzo’s Italian-American
female characters. Locked out of the family business, the women who
were married to the mob seemed to have little to do beyond looking pretty
and getting blown up. His men, on the other hand, were dynamic
supermen — cold-hearted killers, yes, but also devoted family men, guys
who could go to work, knock off a few enemies, carve out a little more
territory and still remember to bring home the cannoli. They were the
inspiration for the generation of rising mobsters that included John Gotti.
The Dapper Don with the sunlamp tan and Brioni suits carefully cultivated
his image after that of Puzo’s mobsters. Now, it turns out, the Dapper Don’s
role model was really a welfare mom who held her family together in the
tenements of Hell’s Kitchen while her husband broke down under the stress.
As much as I loved “The Godfather,” Puzo’s sex roles never rang true to me.
My Sicilian-American grandmother had no Mafia connections to speak of, but
she definitely controlled the strings in her family. With an eighth-grade
education, Mary trained herself as an electrician and bookkeeper. She did
all the household repairs, sewed her own clothes, crocheted beautifully,
made beer and was a gambler and card shark, the only woman allowed into the
poker games after family dinners. She was strong-willed: When she developed
Parkinson’s paralysis at a tragically young age, she fought it by expanding
into intricate crocheting projects that required ever greater degrees of
precision. “She would try anything and could do everything,” my father
recalls. “She was the strong one in our family, but as an Italian wife, she
had to make my father feel like he was the strong one.”
“She made all the decisions in a way that made him feel like he had made
them,” interjects my mother.
One of the few acceptable places where Italian and Italian-American women
of her generation could show off their competency, of course, was in their
cooking — which could partially explain why Italian food ranks as
one of the two premier European cuisines. Carol Field’s newest book on
Italian cooking, “In Nonna’s Kitchen,” a collection of regional recipes,
folk wisdom and family histories from Italian grandmothers, provides a
glimpse at how cooking was both oppressive and liberating, and how the hard
life helped shape a tradition of home cooking in which imagination and
resourcefulness were lifted to an art.
The first thing that struck me about “In Nonna’s Kitchen” was the name.
My nonna never cooked in her kitchen. In the days when most lower-class
American homes did not have furnaces, the kitchen, with its wood- and
coal-burning stove, was the warmest place in the house, and Italian-American family life centered around the kitchen table. My grandmother’s
kitchen was always kept gleaming and spotless, the place where the rocking
chair displayed her handmade lace doilies, where the family sat around or
listened to the radio at night, taking turns on the chair nearest the
stove. “I grew up believing there were two kinds of people,” says my
father. “The Italians, who lived and ate in the kitchen, and the people who
had everything — cars, furnaces, vacations. They were the Americans.”
Now my nonna’s back porch was a different story because it was the
tradition of many Italian-American immigrant women to do their cooking
there or in the basement. The porch was the headquarters of Mary’s family
empire, where the endless rhythms of the laundry and the endless tasks of
cooking somehow meshed together in the steam and the San Francisco fog. On
a single gas stove, she fried up “skinny steaks,” simmered spaghetti sauce
and boiled the laundry in a huge kettle, stirring it with a long wooden
stick. On one end of the clothesline, drying ribbons of pasta dangled
overhead like ropes of licorice; on the other, shirts and trousers puffed
and fluttered above the chickens and herbs in the yard. Like all
self-respecting Italian-American women, my grandmother was
armed with cooking utensils that could easily have doubled as weapons,
from the bastone — a huge, clublike polenta paddle — to the mezzaluna, an
ultra-sharp, crescent-shaped blade with handles on both ends.
“The beauty of the house is order,” reads the spidery handwriting in Mary’s
book of cooking notes, and her house was so well-ordered that the weekly
menu plan is stamped into my father’s memory like the mass in Latin: fish
and polenta on Friday, pasta and pot roast Saturday, chicken fricassee and
risotto on Sunday … The rotating main course was preceded every night by
homemade soup and salad and followed by a slice of Parmesan cheese and a
homemade dessert.
Grandma’s cooking in any culture is “make-do” cuisine — and especially in
Italy, where even “haute” chef Marcella Hazan says there is no such thing
as “haute cuisine,” only family-style cooking. On this side of the
Atlantic, my urban grandmother was blessed with an exceptional array of
ingredients to make do with because my family exemplified nearly every
Italian-American stereotype with the exception of Mafia membership. Fresh
fish came from her father, a Sicilian fisherman who shoved out before dawn
every morning from San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. From her
father-in-law, my paternal great-grandfather, came bouquets of leeks,
pearly green cabbage and other fresh vegetables. An orphan in Genoa who had
lived largely on chestnuts and rice (and saw meat just once a year at
Christmas), he became renowned for the produce he sold from his cart to the
plush Nob Hill hotels. My grandfather, Ernest, a teamster by profession who
sang a booming “Pagliacci” at family dinners to the endless embarrassment
of his Americanized grandchildren, stomped grapes to make his own wine and
aged it in barrels in the basement.
For holidays, Mary prepared elaborate multi-course meals that included her
specialty, hundreds of delicate homemade ravioli — a remarkable feat in
the days when food had to be bought and prepared fresh every day. (My
old-country grandfather actually resisted buying a refrigerator until
1972.) Some modernized Italian-American women had begun to cut corners by
bringing bowls of their homemade ravioli filling to the delicatessen to be
wrapped into ravioli, while they stood guard to make sure that no one
absconded with their filling. But my grandmother was not about to share
credit for her signature dish with a delicatessen. So for two solid days
she cooked, rolling out thin sheets of egg pasta on every flat surface on
or near the porch and shaping it into ravioli, roasting turkey and ham,
preparing homemade pies (the only food ever cooked in the wood-burning
stove) — and stopping only to attend mass and to cook and clean
up after the other family meals.
My grandmother died when I was small and most of her cooking secrets died
with her. Sadly, although I possess her recipe for Genovese-style ravioli,
I have neither the energy to make the pasta nor the stomach for the
filling, which quite adamantly calls for “four brains.” Fortunately, “In
Nonna’s Kitchen” fills in for women like me who don’t have a nonna in the
kitchen. Because these days I don’t try any recipe longer than a page, many
of those in the book are, for me, pure food for thought, voluptuous-sounding
dishes that I would rather just imagine, such as ravioli filled with prunes
and figs and laced with cinnamon butter, a traditional Christmas Eve dish
in northeastern Italy, or Pasticcio de Maccheroni, an elaborate concoction
handed down since the Renaissance, which is actually several courses
and sauces contained inside one delicate pastry crust. But the recipes that
won me over are those with names that suggest a quiet victory over
leftovers, such as Spaghetti Made Just a Little Differently and ‘Ncip
‘Nciap, a scramble of leftover chicken, red onion and eggs that is named
for the sound of the chopping knife.
Most interesting are the nonnas themselves, whose stories and
personalities spill out of the pages and enrich the recipes. Though they
range from rural, white-haired contadinas who remember when all bread was
baked in communal ovens to chic urban grandmas who wear miniskirts and
watch American soaps, they represent a tradition of cooking and a way of
life that has been disappearing rapidly during the last 50 years as Italy
has become more urbanized. (Interestingly, where
la cucina della nonna is being preserved, it is often by grandsons
and male chefs in trattorias and small restaurants.) It is a style of
cooking based on simplicity and need, and on a philosophy that nothing
should be wasted. After cooking over wood gathered from the yard, one of
the women recalls slipping the leftover embers between the sheets to heat
the family beds, then reserving the ashes for washing clothes. Warming up
around a kitchen stove would have been an unspeakable luxury; another
woman, a communal farmer, remembers evenings spent in the animal stalls,
heated by the breath of the cows, husbands talking while the wives sewed.
The lives of these women make that of my grandmother — who actually got to
sit at the table with the men and boys after serving them — seem downright
liberated. There is, for example, the story of Antonietta deBlasi Rocca, a
Sicilian woman whose family traveled to the sea every summer. While the men
and boys swam daily, the women were barred from the beach because it was
believed that immersion in the water would irreversibly “deplete their
energy.” Mysteriously, however, the men’s
energy could be replenished by eating large quantities of hard-boiled eggs.
So for two months, while the men bathed every day in the blue waters of the
Mediterranean and got fatter, the women sweltered in the kitchen, trying to
come up with new and improved ways to serve hard-boiled eggs. Only tears of
frustration could have led to Antonietta’s exotic recipe for fried
hard-boiled eggs in a saffron onion sauce!
In fact, the collective philosophy of cooking presented in the book is so
unfussy, so sensual and creative, it makes you want to stew the Martha
Stewarts in their deglazed, reduced and worked-over juices. These are women
who have built entire cuisines on leftover bread (and used the leftover
leftovers to make children’s dolls), who invented treats for their
grandchildren by filling thimbles with chestnut flour and toasting them
over an open fire, who can demonstrate how to get 28 pieces out of a
chicken or make a single egg feed four.
In the days when many of our grandmothers scramble egg substitutes and
swear by their microwaves, these nonnas are still tossing fistfuls of pasta
into the pot and drizzling on olive oil with abandon. Some of them throw
their hands up in exasperation when Field tries to pin them down on
measurements or ingredients. Even just reading the recipes, you feel them
at your elbow, instructing you to set pheasants in a pan “one next to each
other, like fiancés,” or to add a little pasta cooking water to the sauce,
or to judge seasoning and doneness by touch, never taste. “Touch with your
fingers, your hands,” says one. “You’ll know when it’s right. Just look.”
My favorite piece of wisdom came from Ida Lancellotti, a woman
known for her light and crispy gnocchi. She used to fry up to 500 of the
potato dumplings at a time for the village workers who came to her family’s
osteria in Soleria. When the men came in on their morning break,
they ate them for breakfast with onions, pork cracklings, prosciutto and
salami, chunks of parmesan and wine — until, she recalls wistfully, the
day a stranger showed up requesting brioche and a cappuccino, and it was
the beginning of the end of an era. Ida believes ambience in the kitchen
(or, I would add, on the porch) is the most important ingredient in
cooking. As she rolls the dough gently between her fingers, she warns that
her recipe may not turn out as well for someone else; she is convinced that
it is the warmth of her hands that makes the dish. She’s probably
right.
An intimate conversation with a woman on the front lines of America’s most emotionally charged debate.
BY CAMILLE PERI | She knows it is killing, but she doesn’t believe it is wrong. As a
doctor, she has performed hundreds of abortions, but as a mother of three
small children, she has been forced to reexamine the values that propelled
her to become pro-choice. Over time, says Dr. X, who requested anonymity out of concern for her safety and that of her family, her views about abortion have changed.
That kind of admission is rare in a public debate in which the truth
has generally been the first casualty. The latest battle in this epic war has raged
over “partial birth” or “late-term” abortion (depending on whose language
you use), with pro-life activists charging that some women are terminating their pregnancies in the final days before delivery for reasons as trivial as not
being able to fit into a prom dress — a sensational charge that was never substantiated. The pro-choice side lost some of its own credibility when
Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion
Providers, announced that he and his colleagues had similarly misled the
public by claiming that late-term abortions were performed rarely and only
on women whose lives were in danger or whose fetuses had multiple
deformities — true for last-trimester abortions, but not necessarily for
those done earlier.
Ultimately, however, while pro-choice advocates adhered
to their traditional stance that abortion is a women’s rights issue,
pro-life advocates forced the focus on the fetus, splashing their campaign
with gruesome imagery that made even some veteran pro-choice supporters
squeamish. Rational questions about the timing and safety of late-term
procedures paled next to images of crushed skulls and suctioned-out brains.
Predictably, the crucial ethical questions about abortion that
the battle raised have been lost in the angry cacophony of the debate. Does
pro-choice need to mean pro-abortion at any point in a pregnancy? Is
abortion solely a women’s rights issue? If not, when does a fetus gain
rights — at the first sign of a heartbeat, or the first gasp of breath?
Physicians such as Dr. X, who performs first-term abortions at a clinic in
the Pacific Northwest, face these kinds of ambiguities every day. (For
this, they are called “hired assassins” by one side and hailed as heroes on the
front lines by the other.) Dr. X reflected on her
views and experience — as a woman, a doctor and a mother — and provided
some insight into some of the moral complexities that the abortion debate
has thus far sorely lacked.
You have been involved with doing abortions, as an assistant and then
a physician, for about 20 years. What was it that first gave you such
strong convictions about abortion?
When I was very young, my cousin got pregnant. She was 15 years
old. It was before abortion was readily available, and in order to have one,
she had to go before two psychiatrists and testify that she would kill
herself. Then she was put to sleep for the procedure and had to stay
overnight in the hospital and it was really a big deal. She didn’t have to
go to Mexico, but it was a harsh, guilt-inducing experience for her.
When she found out she was pregnant, though, she told my aunt and
my mother. I saw that my mom believed it was a really important choice for
her, that she shouldn’t have to bear the consequences of getting pregnant
and bearing a child when she clearly was not ready to. So I came away from
that experience feeling that this had been a shame-inducing experience for
her, but that it also made a difference that she was supported by her
mother, my mother and me.
When you began assisting in abortions, did you see abortion primarily
as a women’s health issue?
Yes. I got involved in women’s health when I was in college in Santa
Cruz in the 1970s. I was part of a group of women who started a women’s
health center. That was the time of the self-help movement, learning how to
do your own cervical exam and all that — it was a very exciting time. And
in 1972, even though abortion was legal, there was no place that it was
provided in Santa Cruz County. It was a Catholic-dominated county and the
big hospital there was the Dominican hospital. A physician came down from
San Francisco and asked our group for people who would help him as
counselors and medical assistants and he opened an abortion clinic one day
a week.
So it was during that time that all the ideology came into it for
me — that women should have the right to make choices about what happens
to their bodies and that men in positions of authority shouldn’t be
legislating those choices. For me, that was all very clear-cut, but what was
not clear to me was what it meant to be pregnant and have a child. I just
felt strongly that a woman shouldn’t be forced to do something against her
will.
Did you stop doing abortions for a while?
Yes, when I went into family practice, I was working at a hospital where
that service was provided in a separate clinic, and because all my patients
had that available to them, it didn’t feel necessary for me to be doing
them.
Why did you start again?
A year and a half ago, I was approached by a former student who was
working for an abortion clinic and she said that they were having a hard
time finding physicians to do abortions and wondered if I would be
interested in doing them. I said yes.
Did you have any hesitancy or qualms about it this time?
I was only hesitant because of all the intervening history of violence
against abortion providers, and now I had a family to consider. Right after
I started working, there were telephone threats specifically against the
doctor, although not me by name, just saying that they were going to kill
the doctor in the clinic. So I had to wear a bulletproof vest. Lately,
however, things have actually calmed down.
Did being a mother change your views about abortion?
I actually had an abortion during the first year of my internship.
I just felt like I couldn’t have a child and be a good parent when I would
be working 100 hours a week for the next three years. Then, after my
medical training, when I finally felt like I had the time to put into
raising children, I had some trouble getting pregnant. During that period I
became acutely aware, at the first inkling of pregnancy, that this was the
beginning of a life.
So when I went back to doing abortions and saw the fetus on the
ultrasound, I recalled the early days of my pregnancies, when I found out
I was pregnant and saw the baby on the ultrasound, and it really felt like
this is a baby, a very real and potential being. Now, I do feel that this
is a potential person and it does not have a life of its own outside of the
mother, but I also am really aware that when you’re ready to embrace a
pregnancy, you can embrace it from the very moment you conceive or are
aware that you are pregnant.
Faye Wattleton said recently, “I think we have deluded ourselves into
believing that people don’t know that abortion is killing. So any pretense
that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that
we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus, but it is the women’s body, and
therefore ultimately her choice.”
I believe that very firmly. You look at the ultrasounds and there’s a
fetus with a heartbeat and then after the procedure, there’s the fetus,
usually in pieces, in a dish. It was alive one moment and it’s not the
next. I don’t believe it’s a painful experience for the fetus because its
nervous system is not “wired” so that it can feel pain at that point. I
don’t believe, as some anti-abortion people would have you believe, that
there’s a “silent scream.” But it’s very clear to me that it’s killing a
potential life. And I found that hard at first.
It never made me think that this was not the right thing to do,
however. Unless there was a perfect world, where women really had safe and
100 percent effective birth control and access to it and there was no such
thing as rape and if there was, if the children were born into a society where
they were supported and women were supported in raising children, then
maybe it would be a different story. But none of those things exist. And
having been through three pregnancies and knowing what kind of physical
toll that takes on people, I still believe very strongly that women should
not be made to carry a child for nine and a half months when they don’t
want to.
Still, there was also a sadness for me about the procedure that I
hadn’t really felt before I’d had my own children. In a way, though, I feel
that makes me a better provider because I can talk to women about the
children they have, about the difficulty of the decision, and let them
express their ambivalent feelings and still support them.
Are there any situations that have been particularly poignant or
difficult for you?
I can think of one woman who I saw a couple of weeks ago. The whole
time during the procedure, she talked about her two sons and all of their
accomplishments and how wonderful they were. Clearly she was broken-hearted
to be having this procedure. But her husband just could not accept having a
third child and there were financial problems that would have made it very,
very difficult for them and the other two children. She knew it was the
right decision, but it was a painful one for her.
So there are women who are married and who have families but for
one reason or another — because of a bad relationship, or domestic abuse,
or financial constraints — it’s really not a good decision to bring another
child into the world. For some people, it’s a fairly straightforward
procedure, but for others, it clearly is a sad event.
Do you ever see women who are getting abortions for reasons that seem
frivolous to you — and does it make you angry?
What makes me angry is people who aren’t being careful about birth
control, who don’t make an effort to get a birth control system in place
for themselves and have had several abortions. But it’s usually those
people who also make me think, “Oh great! They’re not having a child” –
even though I think it’s an awful way to do your birth control. I firmly
believe that I cannot use my own value judgments in deciding when it’s
right for a person to make this decision or not, however. Ultimately it
really is the woman’s decision and she is the person who has to carry all
the consequences.
How did having two daughters affect your views on abortion?
Well, I hope that they won’t have sex before they’re mature and ready
to have sex, and that they will use birth control and try to avoid becoming
pregnant when they don’t want to be. But if either of them becomes pregnant
before they are ready, it’s extremely important to me that abortion be
available to them — and available in the way that I provide it, which is
in a safe, clean environment with lots of support and lots of nurturing. A
situation where they’re not made to feel ashamed or guilty.
Do you still see a lot of shame on the part of women who get abortions?
It’s incredible to me how much shame and guilt people have about it.
Women will come in, having made this decision, and say, “You know, I don’t
believe in abortion.” I always have to stop at that point and say, “I
understand this might not be a situation you ever imagined you would be in,
or that this is a sad and a hard decision to make, but you really cannot
say that you don’t believe in abortion if you’ve made this decision for
yourself here today. You have to tell people that you do believe in that
choice for people.” I can’t tell you how many people tell me that. Or
they’ll say, “Gee, you’re so much better looking than I expected,” as if we
were supposed to come in with hunchbacks and moles on our faces.
Sometimes they’re surprised that I have children, or that I talk
about my children and that I want to talk about their children. Last week a
very young girl came into the room, and I was with a counselor and a
medical student that I’m training to do abortions. The girl said, “Have any
of you ever had an abortion?” and I said, “Yes, I have.” The medical
student was shocked. After we left the room, she said, “I can’t believe you
said that to her.” I told her that I think it is really important to let
people know that it happens to all kinds of people and it doesn’t have to mean
the end of your life, or that you’re doomed to a life of bad decisions. It
doesn’t have to be a shameful thing.
as a family practice physician, you also bring babies into the world
and help patients who are having difficulty getting pregnant. Is it
difficult psychologically to play both roles?
Well, you always see these tremendous ironies — kids 14 or 15 who get
pregnant at the drop of a hat and and don’t want to be and other people who
desperately want to be pregnant and are doing every kind of high technology
thing to get pregnant and still can’t. And sometimes you’re
delivering babies into situations where you know there will be “less than
adequate parenting.” Of course, I have my own personal feelings about them,
but as a physician I think my role is to try to support a woman to make
the best decision for her at that point in time. If she decides to carry a
pregnancy, I try to support her in that and try to hook her up with the
services she needs in order to be the best parent she can be. If she
decides to have a termination, my role is to deliver that in a high-quality
environment.
When the American Medical Association endorsed the recent ban on
“partial birth” abortions, it was the first time the AMA took a stand on
abortion, even going against the recommendation of the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which opposed the ban. It seemed to open
the way for Congress to intrude in other medical decisions.
I believe that this should not be a legislative issue. I do not
believe that health-care issues are legislative issues. I think, for
example, that Bill Clinton coming out and saying that women should have
mammograms at a certain age is ridiculous. Frankly, the only reason he
chose breast cancer is because it’s a big, political, physical illness,
and because of his personal experience with his mother’s death. It’s all based on emotion and politics, not science. Neither
Congress nor Bill Clinton have the information to make these kinds of
decisions.
Even though some “partial birth” abortions are performed before the fetus
is viable, it seemed much more difficult for the public to deal
psychologically with the nature of the procedure.
You know, they’re not pleasant procedures to describe or to hear, but
frankly, a lot of what we do to people in medicine is not pleasant. When
you see CPR on TV, for example, it looks like everybody survives and it’s
really an easy procedure. But in fact, its very violent. People’s ribs and
breastbones get broken and there’s blood and body fluids all over the place and tubes
stuck in all kinds of orifices. Much of what we do can look violent and
aggressive. Abortions done late in a pregnancy are much harder on the woman
as well, but the majority of late-term abortions are for medical reasons.
Would you be comfortable doing late-term abortions?
I really feel comfortable doing procedures that are 12 weeks and under.
Even between nine and 12 weeks there’s a big jump in development, and from
12 to 16 there’s another big jump. If I felt that the availability of
late-term abortions was resting on my shoulders, I might have to rethink
it. But emotionally, I would prefer not to do them.
Have you referred women for them?
I have referred women in the 20- to 21-week range who’ve had amnios
that show significant congenital problems. Nobody has asked me for a referral for anything less serious than that.
Some people talk about the “moral value” of the fetus becoming more
complex as it develops and edges closer to birth. Do you think there are
any circumstances where the woman’s decision should not be considered
paramount?
My feeling is that if a fetus is viable outside of a mother’s body at
the point when she makes her decision, then an effort should be made for
that infant to be born and survive and not be cared for by the mother, if
she doesn’t want the child. The mother is going to have to go through a
procedure one way or the other in order to deliver this baby from her body,
and I think then the fetus’ life at that point is a separate life.
Do you think the pro-choice side was weakened in the latest debate by
sticking to its traditional focus on the woman?
Yes, I think we have to really face the issue of what we’re doing and
embrace it in all it’s difficulty in order to be able to
defend it. For years, because I knew abortion was available to my patients,
I didn’t really have to deal with it. I wasn’t worrying about it for
myself; I was trying to get pregnant. But having started to do these
procedures again really forced me to think about what I am doing and what
we are asking people to accept. And my experience as a parent made me
understand the whole complexity of it much more than when I was supporting
it before I had children. I think people who are pro-choice have to do that
in order to be believable.
Have you worked with any men who do abortions?
Most of the providers in our area are men. One of the providers that I
respect a lot is an older guy, in his 70s, who has been around long
enough to have cleaned up after women who tried to abort themselves or who
had back room abortions. He is just a staunch believer in abortion, having
seen all those. People forget those times, because it’s been legal for a
long time, but he’s really seen it all. He’s raised five daughters and he
still does this because he believes so strongly in it.
On the other hand, he’s really an old school kind of ob-gyn in that
he always tells women, “Oh, I’m not hurting you, this isn’t pain you’re
feeling” — things that I would never dream of saying to a woman. Women are
often very appreciative of having a woman there to do the procedure.
Would you have an abortion now?
After I had two children, I went back and forth about having a third
child. My husband and I tried and weren’t able to and then we made a
decision not to have a third child and then I got pregnant. So it was
actually a big shock. My husband was ambivalent about having a third child
and we talked about terminating the pregnancy, but I realized that at that
time in my life, I could not make a decision to have an abortion. I did at
a previous time in my life, but I couldn’t any longer, at that moment in my
life.
I saw that it would be an inconvenience, but it would not
be the make or break issue in my life. I knew that my husband could
accommodate it. I knew that our financial situation could accommodate it.
And at that point, I felt like this is a situation where I have to make
room for this child in my life.
But that doesn’t change my feeling that abortion must be
available for women as a choice. I think that women need to think
about themselves and their own bodies and whether they can go through that
experience, but they also need to think about the health and balance of
their whole family. It’s really destructive to bring a child into the world
that is going to unbalance a family and maybe lead to the breakup of a
family by adding more stress, emotionally and financially. You really
have to think of the well-being of the people who are here in the world at
this time.
