College was better. Others seemed more like me: bright and awkward, a collection, perhaps, of Tonio Krögers and Stephen Daedaluses—or the American female version of these. Many were indeed artists: dancers, poets, painters. But we saw ourselves reflected in one another and yielded to a spirit of community. Twenty years after graduation from Bryn Mawr, as a candidate to be its dean, I was asked to say what made Bryn Mawr different from other colleges. Someone asked this—I think it was a trustee—as I sat in a roomful of faculty, trustees, and students being put through my interview paces. As if confronted with a Delphic riddle, I felt myself tunneling into depths of buried knowledge for the answer. It couldn’t be that Bryn Mawr was unrivaled in being an elite women’s college. After all, it was one of seven sisters. Nor, I thought, was it unique in being small or Quaker-affiliated, or highly intellectual. I kept excavating and at last felt my response taking shape. “The girls who choose Bryn Mawr,” I said, “have often been outcasts and misfits. When they come to Bryn Mawr, they’re transformed.” And I set forth my theory of our empowerment in our collective oddity. The answer the person was looking for was that Bryn Mawr enrolled more international students than other colleges did. What I had said still seems to me a deeper truth. But I wasn’t offered the deanship.
After college, I spent a year away from school. My summer job, arranged for me by my mother, was in Rome, writing movie publicity for the American producer Joseph E. Levine—his company was making a film starring Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren. A couple of times I went out to Cinecittà and once glimpsed the director Vittorio DiSica talking to his stars on the far side from me of the set, but mostly I was clocking time in a little office off the Via Venito, pounding out copy on my typewriter in which I took little pride of authorship. Then I was back in New York in the textbook department at Harper & Row. For the first time since I’d started kindergarten, I felt free in these jobs of all the pressures of academic achievement. I did what I was asked to but didn’t need to try to be the best, didn’t have to hole up in a library or worry about tests and term papers and grades. That year I made it my goal to be easier and more gregarious, someone who had fun and lots of friends, a person with and within a social circle, the express opposite of a Stephen Daedalus choosing “exile, silence, and cunning,” and even of a Tonio Kröger with his apartness and his longing for Hans and Ingeborg. You might say I wanted to be Hans or Ingeborg, not long for them.
At New Year my mother urged my friend Helen and me to give a party as a way to improve our social lives. “Girls, give a party,” she pronounced, as if that would set all good things in motion, and offered her apartment on East 65th Street as the venue. Helen’s mother sent a Virginia ham up from Middleburg, Virginia, where she lived, and we made up our guest list. Donald Fairey, my future husband, came to that party, the date of a Bryn Mawr classmate. I remember thinking he was handsome and can still see him silhouetted against the living room window, looking down and cupping his hands to light a cigarette. Donald had no memory of the party when I met him again three years later.
The success of the party pleased me—I hadn’t thought I was someone who could bring people together like that. Virginia Woolf’s catalytic hostesses Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay weren’t particularly in my thoughts then, but I had a sense of our party as endowed with the kind of glow Woolf might have accorded it in one of her novels. The guests, the food, and the setting were the party’s components, but then something spontaneous seemed to happen—something that emanated from Helen and me, or rather from us in conjunction with everything and everyone else, to create a sense of wholeness. When the next year I was back at school, my master’s thesis topic became “The Quest for Unity in To the Lighthouse,” a study of the overcoming of the feeling of apartness as Woolf’s thematic and formal concern.
My own sense of apartness had also dissolved in a love affair that began my summer in Rome and continued, on and off, over the next few years. I met Ezio Tarantelli in the Villa Borghese, when, sitting on an adjoining bench, he plucked a laurel leaf from a tree, crumpled it and asked me to smell its fragrance. I was twenty-one and Ezio twenty-two. He was a student in economics at the University of Rome—the best student in the university, he boasted, and that impressed me. In the summers he supported himself by working as a tour guide since he spoke English, French, and some Spanish as well as his native Italian, and soon I was riding along in the buses as Ezio conducted tours of Roma di notte.
At first I had resisted him in my usual skittish way, and then I didn’t. The relationship was sexually exciting, in fact my first fulfilling sexual experience, and it was playful in a way that minimized the differences between us. We were playmates, comrades, co-conspirators in exuberance, he a male Italian economist and I a female American student of literature, but we seemed the same—each drawn from a separate and potentially lonely gender into some miraculous commonality. I
