in the middle of the night whenever I was in distress and made comforting noises. And she came along with me when I went searching for answers as to why I was so sad. For the longest time, my therapy was almost vicariously shared by her. I'd call her after every session with a debriefing of everything I'd realized in my therapist's office, and she'd put down whatever she was doing and say, 'Ah… that explains a lot.' Explains a lot about both of us, that is.
Now we speak to each other on the phone almost every day-or at least we did, before I moved to Rome. Before either of us gets on an airplane now, the one always calls the other and says, 'I know this is morbid, but I just wanted to tell you that I love you. You know… just in case…' And the other one always says, 'I know… just in case.'
She arrives in Rome prepared, as ever. She brings five guidebooks, all of which she has read already, and she has the city pre-mapped in her head. She was completely oriented before she even left Philadelphia. And this is a classic example of the differences between us. I am the one who spent my first weeks in Rome wandering about, 90 percent lost and 100 percent happy, seeing everything around me as an unexplainable beautiful mystery. But this is how the world kind of always looks to me. To my sister's eyes, there is nothing which cannot be explained if one has access to a proper reference library. This is a woman who keeps The Columbia Encyclopedia in her kitchen next to the cookbooks-and reads it, for pleasure.
There's a game I like to play with my friends sometimes called 'Watch This!' Whenever anybody's wondering about some obscure fact (for instance: 'Who was Saint Louis?') I will say, 'Watch this!' then pick up the nearest phone and dial my sister's number. Sometimes I'll catch her in the car, driving her kids home from school in the Volvo, and she will muse: 'Saint Louis… well, he was a hairshirt-wearing French king, actually, which is interesting because…'
So my sister comes to visit me in Rome-in my new city-and then shows it to me. This is Rome, Catherine- style. Full of facts and dates and architecture that I do not see because my mind does not work in that way. The only thing I ever want to know about any place or any person is the story, this is the only thing I watch for-never for aesthetic details. (Sofie came to my apartment a month after I'd moved into the place and said, 'Nice pink bathroom,' and this was the first time I'd noticed that it was, indeed, pink. Bright pink, from floor to ceiling, bright pink tile everywhere-I honestly hadn't seen it before.) But my sister's trained eye picks up the Gothic, or Romanesque, or Byzantine features of a building, the pattern of the church floor, or the dim sketch of the unfinished fresco hidden behind the altar. She strides across Rome on her long legs (we used to call her 'Catherine-of-the-Three-Foot-Long-Femurs') and I hasten after her, as I have since toddlerhood, taking two eager steps to her every one.
'See, Liz?' she says, 'See how they just slapped that nineteenth-century facade over that brickwork? I bet if we turn the corner we'll find… yes!… see, they did use the original Roman monoliths as supporting beams, probably because they didn't have the manpower to move them… yes, I quite like the jumble-sale quality of this basilica…'
Catherine carries the map and her Michelin Green Guide, and I carry our picnic lunch (two of those big softball-sized rolls of bread, spicy sausage, pickled sardines wrapped around meaty green olives, a mushroom pate that tastes like a forest, balls of smoked mozzarella, peppered and grilled arugula, cherry tomatoes, pecorino cheese, mineral water and a split of cold white wine), and while I wonder when we're going to eat, she wonders aloud, 'Why don't people talk more about the Council of Trent?'
She takes me into dozens of churches in Rome, and I can't keep them straight-St. This and St. That, and St. Somebody of the Barefoot Penitents of Righteous Misery… but just because I cannot remember the names or details of all these buttresses and cornices is not to say that I do not love to be inside these places with my sister, whose cobalt eyes miss nothing. I don't remember the name of the church that had those frescoes that looked so much like American WPA New Deal heroic murals, but I do remember Catherine pointing them out to me and saying, 'You gotta love those Franklin Roosevelt popes up there…' I also remember the morning we woke early and went to mass at St. Susanna, and held each other's hands as we listened to the nuns there chanting their daybreak Gregorian hymns, both of us in tears from the echoing haunt of their prayers. My sister is not a religious person. Nobody in my family really is. (I've taken to calling myself the 'white sheep' of the family.) My spiritual investigations interest my sister mostly from a point of intellectual curiosity. 'I think that kind of faith is so beautiful,' she whispers to me in the church, 'but I can't do it, I just can't…'
Here's another example of the difference in our worldviews. A family in my sister's neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, 'Dear God, that family needs grace.' She replied firmly, 'That family needs casseroles,' and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace.
We walk out of St. Susanna, and she says, 'Do you know why the popes needed city planning in the Middle Ages? Because basically you had two million Catholic pilgrims a year coming from all over the Western World to make that walk from the Vatican to St. John Lateran-sometimes on their knees-and you had to have amenities for those people.'
My sister's faith is in learning. Her sacred text is the Oxford English Dictionary. As she bows her head in study, fingers speeding across the pages, she is with her God. I see my sister in prayer again later that same day-when she drops to her knees in the middle of the Roman Forum, clears away some litter off the face of the soil (as though erasing a blackboard), then takes up a small stone and draws for me in the dirt a blueprint of a classic Romanesque basilica. She points from her drawing to the ruin before her, leading me to understand (even visually challenged me can understand!) what that building once must have looked like eighteen centuries earlier. She sketches with her finger in the empty air the missing arches, the nave, the windows long gone. Like Harold with his Purple Crayon, she fills in the absent cosmos with her imagination and makes whole the ruined.
In Italian there is a seldom-used tense called the passato remoto, the remote past. You use this tense when you are discussing things in the far, far distant past, things that happened so long ago they have no personal impact whatsoever on you anymore-for example, ancient history. But my sister, if she spoke Italian, would not use this tense to discuss ancient history. In her world, the Roman Forum is not remote, nor is it past. It is exactly as present and close to her as I am.
She leaves the next day.
'Listen,' I say, 'be sure to call me when your plane lands safely, OK? Not to be morbid, but…'
'I know, sweetie,' she says. 'I love you, too.'
30
I am so surprised sometimes to notice that my sister is a wife and a mother, and I am not. Somehow I always thought it would be the opposite. I thought it would be me who would end up with a houseful of muddy boots and hollering kids, while Catherine would be living by herself, a solo act, reading alone at night in her bed. We grew up into different adults than anyone might have foretold when we were children. It's better this way, though, I think. Against all predictions, we've each created lives that tally with us. Her solitary nature means she needs a family to keep her from loneliness; my gregarious nature means I will never have to worry about being alone, even when I am single. I'm happy that she's going back home to her family and also happy that I have another nine months of traveling ahead of me, where all I have to do is eat and read and pray and write.
I still can't say whether I will ever want children. I was so astonished to find that I did not want them at thirty; the remembrance of that surprise cautions me against placing any bets on how I will feel at forty. I can only say how I feel now-grateful to be on my own. I also know that I won't go forth and have children just in case I might regret missing it later in life; I don't think this is a strong enough motivation to bring more babies onto the earth. Though I suppose people do reproduce sometimes for that reason-for insurance against later regret. I think people have children for all manner of reasons-sometimes out of a pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes in order to hold on to a partner or create an heir, sometimes without thinking
