East Coast Girl
Our second stay in Tokyo started off promising. We got the dog after a number of days. We rented a superb half western half eastern house. I was unable to find a job and was very frustrated at my pointless endless days. Bill would be upstairs in his office with his secretary working away and I would be downstairs reading the Japan Times or a book. It was then that I first noticed this flash of light in my left eye. I thought it seemed to happen when I was hungover but eventually it just happened any old time.
Eventually by the time we got married on February 14, 1974 at a civil ceremony at Tokyo Town Hall that I didn’t even have to be at, it was clear to both of us that our relationship was over. Bill was drinking heavily, cheating on me on so many levels with so many people I could hardly keep track. I, too, was having my own dalliance with an Alitalia airline pilot. Alitalia had been on strike for six weeks and the Alitalia crews were holed up in the Hilton where I was a member of the rooftop pool.
Finally after a stint as a bartender for Romy’s, a bar in the Roppongi area, I had saved enough money to buy my Aeroflot ticket to Rome via Moscow. Away I went. While in Rome I continued to get the occasional bursts of light but immediately developed an ovarian cyst and had to have surgery to bursts of light which persisted when I awoke from surgery and which would remain an unasked question. Finally, I decided I could not make it in Rome. I was dating very unhappily an American architect who was a consultant to Brown Daltas and I decided to kill two birds with one stone and leave. I went to Connecticut and spent a few miserable days with my miserable parents and then kept on going to Washington D.C. where I would stay with Nancy LeRoy who had been my best friend in Tokyo. She and her husband Sandy were on the brink of splitting up although she used her assignment to Ottawa with the State Department as justification.
I found a Manpower temp position with a bank in downtown D.C. and had found an apartment in Van Ness. I was interviewing with a number of law firms. One evening lying in bed at Nancy’s, I was rubbing my eyes and realized that if I put my hand over my right eye, I could not see anything. Meaning I had no vision in my left eye. I went to work the next day and asked my boss if she could recommend an opthamologist. She recommended a group on G Street. I went over there. Drops were administered and through various test models it was indeed determined that I had minimum vision in my left eye. A dye was administered with that the Dr. could see a large tumor growing from the optic nerve and this tumor had pushed through the retina. Further testing would have to be done at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia. In the meantime I was scheduled for every test known to man at George Washington University Hospital and Walter Reed Army Hospital.
I trundled off to Philadelphia and radio isotopes were administered. Dr. Shields was my surgeon. He determined that I was the first female on the East Coast to have this very rare form of cancer: metastatic melanoma within the sclera of the eye. I was 31 years old.
I contacted the American Red Cross who found Walter Kaplan in Africa somewhere on a hospital project and he started to make his way to Philadelphia. The test results were positive and they could not wait for him to arrive. They proceeded with eye inucliation and I woke up from surgery with my head encased in gauze. Finally Walter arrived and I stayed with him in a hotel while I was fitted for a prosthetic eye. He returned to Rome. I went to stay with my high school classmate Marianna Shaw, newly divorced from John Hetherington, and their two children Adam, 9 years old, and Alix, 4 years old. She was having family counseling and therapy from psychologist Stephen Glass who she ultimately would marry. She died last year. They enjoyed 32 years together.
I went back to Washington, D.C. and Nancy informed me that it was too stressful for her having me in the house; that I must move. I had been unable to keep the Van Ness apartment because of my medical problems and I was not hired for any of the jobs that I interviewed for. One day the phone rang and it was Walter in Rome, asking me to come back and that Ben Brown at Brown Daltas was offering me a job. So I returned to Rome. Moved in with Walter and took up job with Brown Daltas. I would be with Brown Daltas for six and a half years. Walter not so long. He filed a complaint with the American Embassy that I was a threat to his reputation due to my emotional instability as a result of my health issues.
He left me with no choice but to move out. I was living in a pensione across the street from the office when I started dating my son’s father. Pretty soon in to the relationship, he said I could have his apartment in Trastevere because he was going back to Cambridge. Our relationship was troubled right from the very beginning. I did not love him and he was an extremely difficult man to deal with personally and professionally. However, that did not stop me getting pregnant on the night of my 34th birthday. Our son was conceived while on vacation in Sperlonga. Needless to say, he did not return to Cambridge.
Eventually he and Spero Daltas came to a parting of the ways and we moved to Boston, Massachusetts in Fall of 1980. I got a job with Hill Holliday. He went to work for a competing architectural firm. We bought a condominium in the South End. Very shortly into our stay there, I got pregnant again. This time it had to be terminated. We had an enormous mortgage and my earning capacity was essential.
On December 8, 1981 John Lennon was assassinated. As I awoke from tubal ligation surgery it was on the television that the Pope had been shot. Shortly after that we returned to Rome. Spero and Peter had patched up their differences.