Mama used to tell a story of her childhood blithely, though with a barely perceptible undercurrent of agitation that suggested she was seeking to resolve something troubling in the tale. One day, when she was seven, she would recount, she was galloping with her mother, Daisy Chanler, in the Roman Campagna, and her horse, an eighteen-hand hunter, tripped. As Mama flew off, her skirt caught on the pommel of the sidesaddle in such a way that she was dragged along the ground, and as she was dragged she was kicked in the head by the horse. The horse then tripped again and fell on top of her—fortunately in a ditch, so she survived. When she came to, she said, her mother was far above her on horseback, looking down and instructing her on what to do. When asked why her mother had not dismounted to help her, Mama explained that Daisy had also been riding sidesaddle and it would have been impossible for her to get back on her horse without a mounting block.
By chance, a Roman nobleman was riding nearby and came galloping to the rescue. He got the seven-year-old back on her horse and they started home. Mama’s mother and her new friend rode ahead conversing, and Mama rode behind. Suddenly, her mother turned around and chided her sharply for interrupting her conversation with the Roman nobleman by talking in a loud way. This was the point of the story. Even when Mama was very old, she was stung by that chastisement. The criticism was unfair she would say because—as was later discovered—Mama had a concussion: she hadn’t even realized that she was talking. How awful it was to Mama, even when she was in her nineties, to think that her mother could believe she would knowingly babble in that way.
In the family we called Mama’s mother Grandma Chanler; her name was Margaret Terry Chanler, but here I call her by her nickname, Daisy, to distinguish her from Aunt Margaret and also from Grandma White. Daisy Chanler and I overlapped—I was eight when she died, in 1952—but the times when I saw her were relatively few because she lived in New York City and upstate: she was, in any event, not at all a cozy great-grandma. With big ears, a big nose, and tiny bright-blue eyes (she looked a little like a superlatively intelligent elephant), her face was brought into focus by sensibility and thought in a way that made one think of a liquid jewel, of wine.
Daisy numbered modernists among her close friends—Alfred North Whitehead was one of them—but when she travelled she took with her a relic of the True Cross. She was not much interested in children, but a child entering a room where she was holding court might be invited to cross the room under the eyes of all the adults present to kiss the relic as Daisy, sitting in state—as if on a throne and with wings—held it in her hand. She had acquired the relic through special connections with the Vatican for a private chapel she had had built at Sweet Briar, her Genesee Valley estate.
It was because of Daisy that we, on the Place, with the exception of Papa, were Catholic. She had been born and reared in Rome, the daughter of American expatriates who remained staunchly Protestant, but in her the nineteenth-century Protestant contempt for Catholicism did not take hold. The idea on the Place about Daisy and Catholicism was that she had been overwhelmed by the irresistible seductiveness of Catholic Rome and we, her descendants, had continued to be seduced in the same way. Daisy’s life was marked by autonomous choices—in this creating the great female narrative in the family—and her conversion to Catholicism was the most dramatic of those choices. With it she separated herself from her parents’ values as well as from Protestant America, and laid a foundation of her own. “Her life had a plan to it, like very good architecture,” my mother has said. “But it was one-way architecture. You had to go in, you had to be in her choices.”
Rapture was an aspect of Catholicism that attracted Daisy and yet there was a coolness about her too: “She was not tortured, not one bit, and all her children were,” my mother has said. She came from disturbance—there was trouble in the Terry family—and in marrying a Chanler she married disturbance; but she herself was undisturbed. In the family in my time, Daisy and her choices were at least as influential as Stanford was, and her idiosyncratic Catholicism was the principal medium of her legacy. Through it she remained present in our atmosphere long after her death; breathed in and out.
Even in my time, the family Catholicism retained a tinge of Daisy’s rebellion, principally in the form of feeling different from an American upper class that was perceived as philistine and xenophobic. Through Daisy the family was connected to Rome, where darkness was sophisticated and bloody and the light was deceptive and baroque—in contrast to our neighbors and cousins in their airy Episcopal church, so plain with a service in English and no gore.
Like Daisy, Mama maintained an active practice of devotion. She often went to daily Mass, and habitually read the office, a daily liturgy followed by contemplatives, as her mother had done. On the wall above her bed there was a crucifix by Giambologna, a bronze figure on a wooden cross set against red silk in an old leather frame. The objects of Mama’s private practice—her missal and a small silver crucifix, placed on a little table in a certain way—had the charisma of objects in medieval illuminations, and they projected a feeling of privilege too. An aristocratic style of spirituality, a European style, was a direct legacy from Daisy, who had moved in that portion of the Roman nobility which made up the Papal Court. Mama was never more the duchess than at Mass, first striding to the very front pew, genuflecting slowly, and taking her place on the aisle, the most conspicuous place in the church, with a rightful gravity. She was always the first to take Communion, not because the rest of the congregation necessarily accorded her first place but because from her seat in the front pew she was advantageously positioned.
Mama’s Catholicism was a medium of closeness to her mother, and as an adult I recognized that for me Catholicism was a territory in which I felt closeness to Mama. It was in this territory that I could see in her a passion for her life which, in her case, was the passion of her love for her mother. There were times when she was very old such as early mornings while she was still in bed, and had just put down the Breviary in which she had read the office—times when, coming in for a visit at such a moment, I would find her in a kind of awake repose, and I would feel her presence and my presence in combination deeply. It was not that she would be in a religious mood—it was not that at all. Rather, she was apt to be thinking about an event of the past that had come to mind, or perhaps about current events: it was that she was present on a variety of levels. Once, for example, she said, slowly, looking out the window at a spring day, “My great-uncle Sam’s father grew up on a farm in Jamaica, Long Island, and, when he was fourteen, joined the Army and fought under Washington in the Revolutionary War. It hasn’t been so long.” In these instances, it was not what she said so much as the ruminative way she said it and how that conjured up time as a space in which one could move backward and forward, rather than as a one-way, linear condition that was running out. Or she might be thinking about Richard Nixon and the Watergate fiasco. Or she would blend memories with reflections on contemporary affairs, comparing the experience of waltzing with a count in Vienna, for example, with the popularity of the Beatles. At such times, she seemed to float in her life—to be searching for the continuousness of the historical line with that of her own life, or for the continuousness of her life and mine, or for the connection between public events and private life.
In the atmosphere of repose that filled the room when Mama travelled back and forth in time, the hierarchy of age was dismantled and I felt an equality between us that was intimate. For some reason—perhaps having to do with her mood on those mornings—I associate that intimacy with Catholicism; I think of it as the equality of souls.
Catholicism was the one domain outside the family into which our family circle truly opened. And the Catholic idea of the soul lifts identity out of the web of familial relationships, affirming a person’s worth independently of their ordinary status in the family. It can make possible a kind of encounter that familial roles rule out and this was true in our family, even though our Catholicism was so separate from the wider world of contemporary American Catholicism that it was almost a cult.
In both the Red Cottage and the Bobby White household, the aristocratic charisma of Mama’s Catholic style was translated into a bohemian style of aesthetically pleasing austerity, a style that was also in its own way privileged; it was different from the way others lived. The liturgical year was woven into our lives: there was fish on Friday and delicious penitential food in Lent and Advent (lentils on a blue plate, brown bread on a board). Perhaps the Catholicism was deepest in our lives through a vision of a sacramental alchemy in the quotidian:
In the window and out the door,
The Lamb and the Dove on the tiled floor,
as my aunt Claire Nicolas White wrote. Claire was the eloquent bard of the quotidian vision:
When the key, turned in the lock,
Stops the treading of the clock,
Mirrored in a copper pot
Lies the open hand of God.
My mother’s gift for the accessories of love flickered with unusual brightness at christenings and First Communions: a tiny gesture with her hand would capture the breathtaking sanctity of an infant; a shift in tone would convey the heartbreaking purity of a little girl in her veil. She was also deft at turning a holy day into a circle of arrested time, principally through the meals that she cooked, which were rarely traditional; we might have bluefish on Christmas, for example. It was precisely their unusualness that made the meals sacred: the honoring of the humble bluefish accentuated its holiness, its aspect as a gift from our beloved local waters, and through this association we touched a quick of meaning that we could never have reached through a turkey or a ham.
In her memoir “Roman Spring” Daisy wrote that she disliked Protestantism, pure and simple, but in particular its insistence that God intervened in human affairs only in the time of Christ, “thus denying revelation and the miraculous to the present.” Therein lay the origins of our epiphanic daily life on the Place. She also recorded in her memoir that her good friend Giovanni Borghese had told her that to whatever he said in the confessional his confessor’s response was “Troppo naturale, Principe!” We on the Place too had a cavalier attitude toward the Catholic rules—the idea being that for sophisticated people the rules don’t apply. The interpenetration of culture and religion in Rome had swept Daisy toward Catholicism; she first knew music, for example, through hearing the sacred music performed in churches all over Rome. In “Memory Makes Music,” another memoir, Daisy describes the quality of an exceptional performance of secular music by writing, “We were in the presence of the Great Spirit.” This connection of art with the sacred was continued in the family, principally in the form of a distinction made between responsiveness and connoisseurship. In Mama’s view, Papa could not really understand Dante, because he was Episcopalian. (Her opinion was unchanged by the success of his translation of “The Divine Comedy.”)
Catholicism was connected to the most serious things in the family—it was as serious as class, it was as serious as art—and yet there was a lightness about it too. My mother was regularly moved to hilarity by the ways in which a Long Island accent surfaced in the Latin Mass at our local church. Jokes about holy cards, or even about doctrine, were commonplace in the gatherings in the Box Hill library. Vatican gossip of a cynical cast was a favorite, either contemporary or ancient scuttlebutt passed on through stories about Daisy. Daisy had liked to have powerful cardinals as her confessors. One to whom she went in a period when she and Wintie were living in Rome was Merry del Val, a right-wing Spaniard who was Secretary of State of the Vatican. At that time, an Irishman called Mutts was hanging around the Vatican, and Wintie found Mutts unattractive and refused to have him included in social events at their house. In the only instance in which it is known that Daisy was reprimanded in the confessional, Cardinal Del Val told Daisy that she had to invite Mutts.
Stories like this were on a continuum with Chanler stories, and some of them actually were Chanler stories—for example, the story of how, when Daisy and Wintie were about to be married in Rome, three major dispensations having been required, the cardinal who was to officiate then balked because Daisy’s father’s name was Luther. “His brother’s name is Calvin,” Wintie volunteered and, for some reason, his remark dissolved the tension and the marriage went forward. Aunt Margaret, of course, was not so easily placated. When Daisy had the private chapel built on the grounds of Sweet Briar, her and Wintie’s estate in the Genesee Valley, Aunt Margaret wrote to Daisy:
I have been crashing about half alive since October conscious of my brother’s humiliation at the hands of those who owe him everything. In your direction all is dark. Here love lies bleeding.
On the Place we would sometimes have Mass in the Parlor at Box Hill with the Whoopsie Girls—the gilded, half-nude, androgynous women who stood holding lanterns by the fireplace—looking on. One of our Smith cousins had become a convert to Catholicism, and then a priest. He was our own exquisite priest who understood us. He would say the Mass in the Parlor, and in lieu of a sermon he would tell cozy anecdotes about relatives and forebears and usually in some way flatter Mama. Daisy had been our Pope, and Mama had become our latter-day Pope in turn, though in this respect, one could tell, she felt herself to be a proxy, a mere shadow of her mother.
A related kind of hoedown that Mama enjoyed was drinks with Tommy Emmet, one of Aunt Alida’s sons. Tommy, who had been known to get drunk on more than one occasion and wrap himself up in robes and pretend he was the Pope, shared with Mama an interest in that portion of the Roman nobility known as the Black Romans—the portion that made up the Vatican court, “black” being the clerical color. The Blacks stood in contrast to the much despised Whites, the nobility from the north that had come in with Garibaldi. Black Roman families have about them an atmosphere of antiquity, dark violence, and labyrinthine treachery combined with a kind of stultifying snobbery possible only in the Old World. There is a sickly-sweet perfume to it. Daisy had had close friends among the Blacks, and Mama too, in her young womanhood, had moved in that world and that perfume lingered about her. You might not notice it on an ordinary day, but when she settled in with Tommy and cocktails for a Black Roman binge, and they started unearthing old rumors of scandal, the perfume would become strong and shocking, as the two of them began to look as if they were salaciously opening a rotten fruit, or stirring a witches’ brew.
Not only were the Black Romans probably the most reactionary circle in Europe at the time of Daisy’s conversion but the Church to which she, a young intellectual seriously engaged with modern philosophy, had converted was in what may have been the most reactionary period of its history. In the eighteen-seventies the Catholic Church, stripped of its worldly power by Garibaldi and the formation of the democratic nation of Italy, not only favored the tottering monarchies of Europe but opposed democracy so vehemently that voting was declared a sin. In this period the Vatican refused to have diplomatic relations with the nation of Italy. Indeed, after Pius IX lost control of Rome in 1870 he refused to leave the Vatican—refused to set foot in the new nation of Italy (in solidarity with him, some Black Roman families sealed up the front doors of their palazzi). It would be sixty years before Mussolini would coax the Church into reëntering the world. (One Black Roman family, nevertheless, still has its front door sealed.) Mussolini was a great favorite of the Black Romans. One of Tommy’s fondest memories was of dancing with Mussolini’s daughter at a Black Roman ball, though this came out in his sessions with Mama only when the evening had progressed to a point.
It is a paradox of Daisy Chanler’s life—creating an inversion that lived on in the family—that her greatest act of independence, her choice of Catholicism, was a movement toward the reactionary. However, the choice should be seen in the context of an irony of feminist history: in many aspects feudal society offered more scope to upper-class women than did the democratic Enlightenment society of the nineteenth century. In feudal society the aristocratic woman had power—or, at least, the aura of power. She was recognized to have an interior life of importance; she was understood to have a soul. Daisy, who found her own mother’s life drearily constricted, even pathetic, moved backward strategically into a cave that was spacious and gorgeous but was not connected to the future. She developed a backward-longing tropism for a luminous past that had largely vanished from the world even in her time, the cozy Renaissance Rome, for example, that was destroyed in her childhood by both real-estate development and the archeology of ancient Rome. But that past burned in her heart, illuminating it, making of it a kind of vigil lamp. She engendered in her children a feeling of exclusion from an unattainable world that was to be quested after, and they did quest after it, reaching for a mirage in their mother’s heart—a mirage of a past where they could not go in a heart that was unattainable to them also.
Daisy did not become a political reactionary. She simply disregarded the political character of the Church in her time in much the same spirit that she ignored Church censorship of reading material, or told the joke about a cardinal confessor who had let her off the hook when she smuggled some jewelry into Italy on the ground that “smuggling didn’t count.” She dwelt in a reactionary atmosphere but was unaccountable for it. “She was able to overlook much,” my mother has said, and so were we, in my time, in the “floating paradise” (as my aunt Claire describes it in a poem) of the Place.
Catholicism in the family mind was, in many ways, one and the same as Rome—not “Rome” taken to mean the Vatican but the entire city. This was a direct legacy from Daisy, who remained so deeply connected to Rome throughout her life that she developed a habit of bilocation. She wrote in her memoir “Autumn in the Valley,” which purportedly expressed her attachment to the Genesee Valley, that if she had been, at any time in the valley, stopped and asked, she could have told you where exactly she was in Rome at that moment. We on the Place were, in a vaguer way, bilocated too. We were not Americans exactly, and we were not Catholics, exactly, in the normal American meaning of that word. Our ancestry reached back to the founding of the Republic, but we were not at home here. We identified ourselves so fiercely with our local countryside that we felt any shift or change in its landscapes or its character as revelatory, yet we lived like a person with a lover elsewhere.
The world of the Place was a perverse one, in that what appeared on the surface ran in a direction opposite to what was happening underneath. Catholicism added to that perversity in ingeniously deceptive ways. The epiphanic visions in the kitchen, along with the south wind in the hickory, the mourning doves in the garden, the bread rising—on the bookshelf next to “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” banned by the Church—my mother skylarking through her scales in the morning, and the signature of the rose on the dining-room wall in the evening: all these were true, and all these enriched our lives and even awakened us, and all these also thickened the slick that was concealing from us the truths of our lives together and alone.
At five I began attending the parochial school on the far side of the potato fields that stretched out south of the Place. My school was overcrowded—two grades to a classroom in which seventy children or so were ruled through terror by an ignorant, overworked nun. We students were crowded together, yet to me parochial school seemed lost and far away, like Dad’s dusty California. The farm boys cracked their knuckles. The goody-goody swanned around, with light-brown hair that swung from side to side. Boys and girls were separated at recess. There were stories you heard, such as that boys might look in your patent-leather shoes to see a reflection of your underpants. The nuns administered beatings regularly, but only to the boys. The girls would have their ears boxed or a wrist slapped with a ruler, or would be made to stand in a briar hedge during recess.
I easily became attuned to the nuns’ fascination with details of the Crucifixion which, in retrospect, seems sadistic, as do their vivid imaginings of the experience of burning in Hell. For me as a child, however, these violent fantasies were pacifying. So was the drama: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” The physicality of Transubstantiation—“This is my body … This is my blood”—was gruesome to a child, but corporeal mysticism came naturally to me: soon I would be sensing the St. James landscape as a body. School was merged with church as we learned to go to Confession, had First Communion. The Mass took on meaning. The extremes of experience were represented in the Mass: its images and its messages were passionate. The Mass also afforded extreme privateness in combination with the commonality of a public ceremony and in that I discovered inclusion, as well as an interior space. It was Communion that drew me directly into that space where I sensed vastness and also something: a self, perhaps—a horse shifting in the dark.
In contrast to the false spirituality of lust and the terrible glamour of an eclipsed soul which underlay the brightness of the Place, this religion openly addressed violence, sadness, and abandonment; had forgiveness as its hallmark; and in full acknowledgment of suffering envisioned a cosmos powered by love. Here the spectrum of spiritual experience, from ecstasy to despair, was affirmed. Only when shadow is admitted can there be connection: otherwise, I have come to understand, we are truncated beings who are not wholly present, who like ghosts cannot achieve touch. The Catholic Church was a precious matrix of intimations of connection for me.
In 1952, when I was eight, Dad got a Guggenheim and the Rousseau family—there were four of us girls at this time—went to Rome. We arrived in October. I was slapped late into an Italian school and went into an almost total blackout from which I awoke a month later not only speaking Italian but dreaming in it. Soon, too, I felt that I knew the city like the palm of my hand: in recollection it seems as if I travelled all around constantly on my own. Since I was only eight, this cannot have been the case, but the sense of mastery was real. When I returned to Rome forty years later I knew the relation of parts of the city to each other—the Janiculum to the Spanish Steps, the Colosseum to San Giovanni—and found the placement of the booths in the Piazza Navona where figures for nativity scenes were sold, or of the Pietà in St. Peter’s, to be exactly as I expected.
We lived outside Porta San Giovanni, on the Via Sannio, in a vast apartment with long halls, terrazzo floors, and chandeliers. Though the apartment was palatial, there was no place for us in a way. The piano was in the living room, so that became my father’s studio, leaving bedrooms and the very formal dining room for the rest of us. (The kitchen was cold and dark and had only one chair at the marble table.) Footsteps rang out—click, click, click—on the terrazzo floors, especially in the halls: as winter came the cold of the kitchen spread out, as did—after our first electric bill—the dark. I remember little of life in the apartment, though in what memories I have I sense myself as a child there—small, dependent, unknowing—in contrast to my sense of myself in the city. The city engaged me with its colors and its light and its scents, and the aural texture created by the bells near and far. I absorbed Italianness. I learned an attitude and, with it, the street dialect, Romanaccio, beginning with lessons from our maid, Marcella, in what the right obscenities were with which to retaliate against insults at school. My mother had great faith in Marcella’s tutorials. She felt that I was learning something useful at last.
In addition to the liberating effect of living, for the first time, outside the cocoon of the Place it was the manifest layeredness of Rome and the complexity of its imagery that empowered and awakened me. Here, at last, was a metaphor that was the equal of my situation. The confusion of different periods, sometimes even in a puddingstone way—ruins growing out of the back of the Pantheon—was profoundly satisfying. I loved how the Forum was at a three-quarter depth below the contemporary street and the tops of the ancient columns showed above ground level, intruding partly into contemporary life in a way that made ambiguous whether it was the street or the Forum that was ghostly. A stony mustiness and darkness in certain churches seemed to be qualities I already knew. A contrast between oppressive monumentality in the city and then intimacy in an ancient place seemed to be something I had foreseen. Joy (the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the Campidoglio) and horror (holes in the ancient walls in which people lived) opened up in me registers of response that seemed to have been merely dormant. In Rome I was becoming myself. Here Christian churches sat frankly on pagan sites. Here the gruesome was everyday: mummified saints, with hair still on, in glass coffins; the rotten darkness of the catacombs; the old bloodiness of the Colosseum. In St. Peter’s, rotund, raspberry-hued prelates in bright silks scurried, looking like personifications of the seven deadly sins.
Mama and Papa came to visit us when we were in Rome. They stood out in their tweeds—Mama with her “bag”—and their solid shoes: they were elegant but with the air of good Republicans with a Social Register apartment on the East Side of Manhattan and orchestra seats to “My Fair Lady.” With them I went to smaller churches, like Santa Maria in Cosmedin, San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura, and San Pietro in Vincoli (all these names stayed vividly in my mind) where there was that duskiness of worn stone which was tough, which gave no quarter and had no softness: that I liked. Mama and I would kneel in the pews as Papa whizzed around the periphery gobbling up things to see. We would pray a little pointedly, perhaps, emphasizing the superiority of our entrée.
Mama in Rome on that visit had something about her of the hungry outsider. When she spoke of Rome on the Place she would get a look of her mother’s that was like a liquid jewel, or like wine, but when actually in Rome she was an American Wasp lady with a handbag. In Rome it was as if she had knowledge of a vision but no access to it. It was as if she were taking me to the edge of a territory that she could show me but could not enter herself. Mama systematically showed me the territories of her heart, filling me to the brim with the feeling of things, with the timbres of meaning, with the allure.
I didn’t see the Chapel of St. Felicity that Daisy had built for herself upstate until, in my mid-thirties, I took a trip with Mama to Sweet Briar, then owned by my great-aunt Gertrude Chanler. The chapel overlooked the wheat-filled Genesee Valley and the long lines of the hills that enclose it. On the outside it was plain white-painted stucco. Inside the walls had been frescoed by Mama and her sisters Hester and Gabrielle in a pagan bacchanalia of pomegranates and grapes. Even more shocking, perhaps, was finding there that uninnocent Roman austerity of dankness and dim light in which there were gleams (the gleam of the gilt on an icon, the metal of the incense boat). It was an austerity of whispers and glints, a stillness full of innuendo, a bareness that was stony. The chapel also had something about it of a playhouse.
Throughout the nearly forty years that our lives overlapped, I encountered Mama far inside her dream of her mother’s love—that is where one found her. When I ask myself what in that mirage-ridden world it could have been that she gave me which was real, which I could carry out, I think of a large solid jewel. It’s as if we had lived inside a complicated, dangerous court, run by a despot—that would be Daisy—where all transactions had been stylized to reinforce the despot. And yet, by an ingenious use of those very transactions, we’d devised a gleaming, faceted, deep-colored, and durable exchange of our own. That was the jewel. It’s simple really. She gave me love and attention. She had it to give by that time.
And there’s this. When I was in Rome as a child, a special family priest at San Clemente took us down through layers of older San Clementes, each more fragmentary, more obscure, blacker and more rotten. In the bowels of the earth near the bottom of our descent we came upon a dimly perceptible Roman arch: that was the earliest church. One could just make out a piece of the line of the arch, and get from it a feeling of a larger structure in the dark—but we went still farther down to an iron railing around a pit. There, after a while, we could discern, below and across from us, a pedimented window, a part of a Roman villa from pagan times. A house. Nor was this all. The surfaces dripped, and in the darkness below was a sound of rushing water.
And this. From three o’clock on Good Friday afternoon, the time of Christ’s death, until noon on Holy Saturday, when Christ rose, all the bells of Rome were silent. In this time, also, the door of the tabernacle in every church was left open, and there was no Host inside. This emptiness would be existentially brutal in any church in the world. But in Rome, where the bells were integral to daily life, their silence made the absence in the tabernacle not secret inside churches but as big as the city, as big as the sky.
There was a place on the Janiculum I think—it was on one of the hills—from which it was said that every bell in Rome could be heard, and on Holy Saturday that year we went there for a picnic. From the hilltop you could see all of Rome with its domes rising out of a patchwork of mellow hues in a golden haze, but I was lying on my side, a child, fingering some small wild plants, when the bells broke. One clang, a little hoarse, was the leading edge, and then came an explosion. Glory can burst forth from barren grief. The world can break open like a pomegranate.