Rome 1976
I was working for an engineering firm in Piazza Mattei for a completely crazy man, Guido Bordoni. Their engineering assignments were mostly in Lagos, Nigeria. Apparently, a terrible place. Being sent there actually would make one engineer burst into tears and Bordoni would slap him to pull himself together. There was Dott. Pozzo from Milan. Shelly from Chicago and a red-haired English woman whose name I don’t recall and many, many engineers.
Walter and I were limping along. He would disappear, lie about where he had gone and when he had come back. The early fun days were over. I still had my place in the Pincio but spent a lot of time with him in Via Cassia embroiled in bitter arguments.
One evening, Bordoni, drunk possibly from lunch time, accused Shelley and me of being lesbians. There was nothing wrong with that on the face of it just that we weren’t and he was being unnecessarily provocative. He had said when he hired me that if he was ever mean or inappropriate that there was a lapis lazuli clasp for my coral necklace (that Walter had given me) and that I should pick it up when I left. So I did.
Walter was very unhappy with this decision of mine. Worrying how it would make me even more dependent on him. I determined to leave. I gave up my bedsitter and booked a ticket for New York. For the first few days I stayed with my parents but my mother was in a particularly psychotic state and so I left, getting standing room only on the Presidents Day weekend to Washington, D.C. It was arranged that I would stay with Nancy and Sandy Rosenblum, old friends from Tokyo days, at their house in Chevy Chase till I found a job and an apartment.
I found an apartment in Van Ness. I interviewed for a job with a law firm. In the mean time I was working temporarily for a bank in D.C. And one of my assignments was to pull stock prices from the Wall Street Journal. I noticed that I was having increasing difficulty reading them and that these flashes that had plagued me as far back as Japan were happening more and more frequently.
One night Nancy and Sandy and I attended their daughter’s high school play and while in the darkened theater I put up my hand to brush a strand of hair from my face and realized I had no vision in my left eye. When I got home in my bed I tested it again against the window in my bedroom and sure enough nothing just blackness.
The next morning I asked my boss at the bank to recommend an ophthalmologist and off I went to one on G Street. I sat in the darkened room with my chin wedged in the contraption with bright lights. He looked and peered up, down, left and right, and finally he went out and conferred with his colleagues, and each one filed by to take a look. He went back out and conferred with them again. He detached me from machinery and asked me to take a seat by the side of his desk. He turned the lights on.
He said “You have a problem.” “Oh, what is that?” I inquired. “We suspect you have a lump in your left eye. More specifically it is a tumor growing on your optic nerve. And it has to be removed as soon as possible as it has metastasized. We believe you have what is known as metastatic melanoma.” I was gobsmacked. First of all, I had never heard of such a thing. Secondly I was 32 years old just about to get a job and move into a new apartment.
“How do you remove a tumor from an eye?” I asked barely holding on from fainting. “You don’t in the case of a tumor growing on the optic nerve, you remove the eye.” And with that, I fainted dead away.
Batteries of tests at George Washington University Hospital and Walter Reed Army Hospital confirmed his prognosis. Surgery was scheduled for a few days later in Philadelphia at the Wills Eye Hospital. Surgery would be performed by the pre-eminent ophthalmic surgeon, Dr. Jerry Shields. I took the train down to Philadelphia to Wills and checked in. I had an old high school friend in Philadelphia, Marianna Shaw and it was arranged that I would spend a few nights with her when I left the hospital. I had my surgery and was back in my room with my head wrapped in bandages when I heard the familiar creaking of Walter’s shoes.
I will give him that much that as bad as things were between us, he came all the way from Africa to Washington, D.C. He met me on the train at Philadelphia and stayed with me for a week in a hotel in D.C. before returning to Rome. I spent this time getting fitted for a prosthetic eye. I resumed my temp job at the bank and continued staying with Nancy and Sandy. Nancy was getting ready for her assignment with USIS in Ottawa and so I found a residence to stay in. But two things happened: Walter sent me an airline ticket and my mother sent me $400. So I was on my way. I arrived in Rome to Walter and our dog, Valeria, and hopefully a new start.
By mid-June, he was not even speaking to me. Endless hours of silent meditation followed by brooding silence. I did not nickname him Weird Walter for nothing. By this time I had found a job with Brown Daltas whom I would be employed with for the next six years. Shortly thereafter Walter came home one Saturday waving a piece of paper saying that I was a risk to an American abroad; that I was unstable, etc. So I packed up my little overnight bag and moved out. I stayed in a pensione across the street from Brown Daltas for a number of weeks until one of the architects, Peter Sugar, said he was moving back to Cambridge and I could have his Trastevere flat. I sent for my ton of stuff in Tokyo which had been in storage and was looking forward to getting settled. The only problem was Peter did not go to Cambridge and by default, I ended up living with him. In the summer of 1978, I became pregnant with our son, Tobias, who was born in April of 1979.