Sleeping with Cats (20 page)

We drove to Schenectady with the car radio on, scarcely able to believe what had happened. I had worked on Kennedy's campaign in Chicago and had been struck by his impact on a crowd and the electricity that came with him into a room. I had mixed feelings about him as a president. I had found the Cuban missile crisis terrifying—machismo out of control—and I didn't think he was doing what he could on civil rights. I was appalled by our Vietnam policy. But I surely preferred him to Nixon 100 percent. It was one thing to have mixed reviews on his presidency and quite another to accept his assassination. It was a turning point in modern American political history, assassination as a recall device or a way of preventing someone with whom you disagreed from continuing or gaining power.

We arrived at his brother's house in a state of mild shock. Sandy was about ten inches taller than Robert and treated him with an air of jocular contempt that set my teeth on edge. We were walking in with our luggage when Sandy said, “Hey, isn't that too bad about your friend Scotty. What a huge accident.”

That was how we learned that Scotty, along with several hundred Japanese, had been killed in a hideous railroad accident, when a crack express had cut right through a local train carrying commuters. There were two Americans among the six hundred or so killed, and Scotty was one of them. It had been on television.

I don't believe there was any malice in Robert's brother, only a lack of empathy, an inability to understand that Scotty and Robert had been intensely close and that Robert cared for him very deeply. Robert went into emotional shock, a zombie numbness I found terrifying. I had to get him out of there. He did not sleep at all but lay rigid that night in a kind of catatonia.

We spent the next couple of days in Eric's small Poughkeepsie apartment or in bars. We drank a lot and finally Robert was able to talk about Scotty. Scotty and Kennedy were somehow confounded into a dead martyr. Everything was changed for Robert, even as everything seemed to change in American politics. He was never able to cry, but finally he was able to talk. In my memory there is no snow but the light is gray, the wind is raw and always it is overcast and dank. All the bars we drank in blend into one dim hole where we cram into a booth. Eric was gentle and understanding to Robert. The days felt interminable and all I could do was hold him when he let me and try to get him to express his grief.

That winter we went to Ann Arbor and talked with political friends about Vietnam and the situation in the country. Afro-American friends were optimistic about Johnson, but I was less persuaded. I had been going to Ann Arbor a couple of times a year, but this time Robert went with me, because Scotty's death had made him feel he should do something political. My friends were starting Students for a Democratic Society, which grew into the largest and most visible antiwar and New Left group in the country—although at the time none of them knew that was what they were doing.

Ever since Scotty's death, Robert had been talking about going on an extended trip. He abandoned the idea of Japan. I suggested Greece. I was fascinated by Greek mythology, both the more conventional approaches and Jane Harrison's study of the chthonic elements. I am still an archaeology buff. In December, we began learning demotic Greek with the intention of leaving in the spring. I knew enough about Greek culture and politics to know that we had to learn demotic, not the artificial “purified” Katharevousa that was never the language of ordinary people. In January, Robert booked tickets on a Greek ocean liner sailing out of Boston, the
Vassiliki Frederiki.
We had a small private cabin well inside—not even a porthole. We were scheduled to depart in March.

Two weeks after Robert bought the tickets, we had a phone call from his mother. His father had met with an accident. He took the commuter train every day between Yonkers and Manhattan. That particular day while returning, he had dozed off. He wakened as the train was in the
Yonkers station and leaped out of his seat. The train was already beginning to pull out as he jumped off. He fell beneath the train and struck his head. As he lay unconscious, a second train ran over him and severed his legs.

I got on better with his father, the vice president of an engineering company, than I did with his mother, a housewife who had been a grade-school teacher until she had children. I could talk opera with the father. One of my Chicago boyfriends had been enamored of opera. We had gone to
Turandot
together and to
Don Giovanni
and
La Bohème
. We saw Robert's parents a few times a year, usually for an evening when we were in New York. It has always been the case that I have found the fathers of my husbands easier to please than their mothers. Although in general I get along with women better than with men, the same dynamic doesn't apply with in-laws. My fathers-in-law would get a twinkle in their eyes with me and there was always some rapport.

We drove to New York at once. Robert's father lay in the hospital bed, gray-faced, legless and in a coma, his head completely bandaged. Robert spoke to the doctors. He had enough scientific background—as did I—to understand that his father's brain had been largely destroyed, and he could not possibly regain meaningful consciousness. Robert's mother refused to accept this. She was buoyed up by stories of people who awoke from comas after days or months, and one of the nurses encouraged her belief. Robert found the sight of his helpless father being kept in a vegetative state on machines close to intolerable. Robert was at odds with his mother and the rest of his family, as was I, because we understood that his father was already gone.

Robert began to say to me that he was going to Greece regardless of what happened. He insisted we continue studying Greek and making preparations. We would leave our apartment as it was. One of his colleagues would take Arofa. We were leaving on the
Vassiliki Frederiki
as scheduled. I foresaw a terrible collision between Robert and his mother. It was fortunate for Robert that his father died just before we were to sail.

Every few years, in the time I was with Robert, he would grow seriously and vehemently unhappy with his situation. Often he dropped relation
ships completely, dropped projects, groups, commitments. Sometimes he left a job. Sometimes he left a city or a state or the country. It was his way of dealing with expectations that could not be met, with disappointments, with an intolerable feeling of being trapped. I would think twice now about going off for an indefinite period of time and leaving any animal in someone else's care, but I understood little then of how seriously a cat can take the departure of its person. Arofa was only a year and a month old when we left, and we assumed she would easily adjust to the people she was staying with.

Greece was my idea, and I liked it much better than Robert did. For the first time in his life, he developed serious allergies. He would not be free of them while we were together. I thought it might have something to do with being unable to mourn his father, whom he would not discuss. That was only a cheap guess. We had been close in Brookline, but in Greece, we were often distant. He was constantly comparing traveling with me to his backpack adventures with Scotty. Those had been realistically narrated to me when I first met him, but by now, they shone with the radiance of loss. The disagreements and discomforts vanished into the mythology of the perfect companion—which I was not. I liked comfort more than he did. I spoke Greek better and more readily. I could explain to the Greek peasants and shepherds and fishermen what I did—a poet was comprehensible. A systems analyst was not explicable in demotic Greek or probably in any form of Greek in 1964, and he often felt alienated. My knowledge of the mythology, history and archaeology made the landscape, ruins and artifacts meaningful. I had been dreaming the Mediterranean since I
was sixteen. He was largely indifferent to the landscape, and increasingly to me.

Still, we had our adventures. We ferried to Crete and fell in love with it. Crete was wild then, not a tourist destination. We met and visited a peasant family in a little village called Ano Moulia in the mountains—Crete is a long skinny island that goes up to a ridge pole of mountains from sea level and then down again toward Africa. You pass bananas growing in the morning, and by noon, it's snow-capped peaks. We met the mother of the family on the road and gave her a ride in our VW rented in Iraklion. We came to know the family well. In that little village with the well at one end and the latrine at the other, I contracted a periodic form of paratyphoid that would not be recognized nor dealt with for months.

When we left Rhodes for Mykonos, a storm came up. The wind was howling, the ship was pitching and rolling and heaving as if about to break in two. The deck passengers had long since taken shelter in the salon, for waves were breaking high over the decks and sometimes we seemed entirely underwater. We came to know two Australian women when one of them passed out on me. They were deck passengers who had come inside. They were bold, up for any side trip, raunchy and delightful. Soon most of the crew was seasick, and so was Robert. I have no idea why I did not become sick in that storm. I was certainly frightened, but after a certain point of alarm, I tend to get hard and steely. When events pass into real danger, I turn clear and focused.

My father's side of the family, to which I feel so little connection, may have contributed something to me besides glaucoma: they were seafaring men. I saw a plaque in Canterbury Abbey to a Captain Piercy lost at sea. I was once told that a great-grandfather Piercy was accused of piracy. Perhaps in my own private mixed gene pool, there is something that makes me less prone to seasickness. At any rate, there were only five crew and me standing as the storm was at its peak, and I was pressed into service helping to batten things down, stow flying furniture and help those who thought they were dying.

At two in the morning we arrived off the harbor of Mykonos. The ship signaled and a little fishing boat chugged and bounced out. We were still
bounding wildly, but passengers for Mykonos, including the two Australian women, Robert and myself, had to climb down a ladder. Then they threw our luggage on top of us, almost capsizing the fishing boat, and steamed away.

The next day, we were covered with livid bruises, from the luggage landing on us and probably from being flung about in the storm. On Mykonos the sun was shining in the morning from a sky as blue as hope and the light was creaking bright and dry on every windmill and dovecote adorned with the horns of the great goddess. Together the four of us walked and walked, picnicking and glorying in our survival. We heard that two boats had gone down in the storm.

I had begun collecting old Baedekers in San Francisco. For a couple of dollars I found guidebooks to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Bohemia, and to New York in 1890. They were far more detailed than anything produced since. But sometimes our information was a bit out-of-date. In the Peloponnisos, we spent four hours climbing the Akrocorinth, a great rock that sits over Corinth, crowned by the ruins of a temple of Aphrodite. We climbed hand over hand in the broiling sun, running out of water halfway up. It was a hard scramble, but we knew we would be rewarded by a great view from the deserted summit. When we reached the top, exhausted, the first thing we saw was not Aphrodite's temple, but a bus disgorging German tourists. A road had recently been built from the other side to the summit. A kiosk was selling refreshments and a sign advertised orange soda. We quenched our thirst and got a ride down.

Nearby on Greek Easter a middle-aged man (probably thirty-five and prematurely old from hard work) flagged us down on the road and brought us into his small house—little more than a two-room hut—to share their meal. They had killed the Paschal lamb, roasted potatoes with it and field greens. Since they had no refrigeration, it was a matter of eating the whole thing. It tasted great, but we got into trouble with the family patriarch. He had been in the States for twenty years in his youth, although he spoke little English by now, an enormous imposing mustachioed barrel of a man with bushy white hair and leathery skin and a
tendency to bellow. He explained he had worked on the great bridge at what sounded like You-frens. We had no idea what he was talking about, and he became instantly suspicious of us, saying we could not be Americans if we didn't know about the great bridge at You-frens. I asked him to write it down (in Greek). Then I pretended to recognize it and asked him how hard it had been to build such a wonder. By then I had figured out he had worked on a railroad bridge in California. To him, it was one of the great engineering marvels of all time, and if I understood him correctly, two men had been killed in its construction. Stuffed and having reassured them we were real
amerikani,
we drove on. The next day, we ate at a castle in the bay, a former retirement home for executioners where the food was not nearly so good.

We were often traveling in extremely poor districts. Yet the American military presence was striking. The village women went about in eternal black, carrying bundles of sticks on their backs, but all the shepherds had transistor radios and listened to rock music, and the village boys who had gone into the army had the newest, fanciest weapons and trucks. Everywhere in Greece we found lean hungry half-feral cats who responded to a bit of food and a pat with utter ecstasy. I felt guilty before them and wondered about the cat we had left in Boston—but at least she would be sleek and well fed and pampered.

We went north to Epirus and stayed in Ioannina. Now we were to cross the Pindus Mountains—the backbone of this part of Greece—on the highway indicated on our tourist map. After we had been going for a couple of hours, it became clear that yes, someday there might be a highway, but at the moment we were on a one-way journey—there was no way to turn around—on what deteriorated into an unpaved road and then a cart track and then little more than a shepherd's path. Our car climbed boulders and forded gulleys and gushing streams. We went up and up and up past the tree line and then we ingloriously bumped down the other side. When we finally got to Thessaloniki, the VW Beetle was half destroyed. Our best times together were when we found ourselves in trouble. The sightseeing bored him, and then so did I.