Epilogue
AFTER PAUL AND I SAID our goodbyes, I packed a bag and Teo drove me to Olbia, where I caught a flight to Naples and a cab to the Naval Support Activity Center in Agnano.
Your mother was staying at the marine barracks, in a special wing that had been set aside for pregnant navy wives waiting to deliver.
In the lounge, a big sign read: WELCOME TO THE STORK’S NEST.
I checked in to the American Hotel for a couple of days, but then Mary Lou called in a favor and got me a bed in the barracks with the other wives.
From there, your mother and I could easily walk back and forth to the hospital, where your father was out of the woods but a long way from making a full recovery.
It’s funny that I had made such a big deal out of avoiding the Stork’s Nest, because I found I rather liked it.
The barracks weren’t fancy, but there was a vending machine in the lounge, and in the afternoons, after Laura and I got back from the hospital, we’d buy ourselves Dr Peppers and sit around talking to the other women, who had come from Aviano and Salerno and Gela and, of course, La Maddalena.
The thing I liked about these women—and it’s the same thing I liked about most of the American women I encountered in La Maddalena—was that they could roll with the punches.
They had very little control over their own lives, but they approached all the unknowns of military life with humor and grace.
While my own days as a navy wife were numbered, I was grateful for an excuse to spend a few extra weeks in their orbit.
Your father was still hospitalized when your mother went into labor, but he didn’t miss much; at that time, American naval hospitals weren’t allowing fathers into delivery rooms. It was just me fetching your mother ice chips and coaching her through her contractions, which was hysterical because I had no idea what I was doing.
Laura’s labor was long, and she worried constantly that something was wrong.
But the doctor and nurses assured her that she was progressing normally, and at a little after two o’clock in the afternoon on September 7, you were born.
It was an honor, watching you enter the world, and maybe an even bigger honor to take the stairs down to the third floor and tell your father that he had a daughter.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man smile so big in my life.
Your father had gotten it into his head that he wanted to name you Ramona, and your mother let him, since she was so damn grateful that he was alive and capable of expressing an opinion one way or the other.
I remember, when she asked me what I thought of the name, I told her that Ramona Carpenter sounded like a famous novelist or playwright or something.
So I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me when I got your email.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
From Naples, I flew back to Olbia, where Teo picked me up at the airport and drove me straight to Sassari.
He’d spent the weeks we were apart sprucing up his apartment, and he was eager to show me the changes he’d made.
I let him tour me through the tiny kitchen, which he’d stocked with fruit and vegetables, meat and cheese, and the living room, where he’d hung the Mary Magdalene print beside a window.
“I love it,” I said, “but what I would really like to see right now is the bedroom.” And so he whisked me off my feet and down the hall, where he had made up our bed with fresh sheets.
Paul left Italy for New London while I was in Naples, and while he did appeal the letter of reprimand, his appeal was ultimately denied.
I learned about the results of the appeal process through Bev because she and Tim were stationed in New London, and sometimes Tim and Paul would go out for beers.
As Paul had predicted, he did not make lieutenant commander when he went up for promotion.
I would imagine this was a bitter pill for him to swallow, although he and I never spoke of it. In fact, we never spoke again.
Paul had offered to handle the divorce from the States, which was generous, but the whole thing took time.
In those intervening months, while we were still married, I found myself in a weird limbo.
I was no longer a military dependent, which meant I had no legal grounds to remain in Italy, but without a divorce decree, I couldn’t very well marry Teo and apply for permanent residency.
For a while, I carried my military ID card and my sojourner’s permit everywhere I went, hoping they’d get me somewhere if I was stopped.
When the sojourner’s permit expired, I got a tourist’s visa, which was good for only three months.
It was Teo who suggested I apply to the University of Sassari.
It was a good school, and I didn’t think I had a prayer of getting in, but I sat for the Esame di Maturità—in Italian—and when I passed, I was offered a place.
With my acceptance letter in hand, I could apply for a student visa, and when that came through, Teo and I breathed out a huge sigh of relief.
My plan was to study biology, with the hope that I could turn my attention to the marine life with which I’d become so enamored, so one of the first things I did after I’d enrolled was knock on the door of Professor Luigi Paccheti, who had given the lecture on the disappearance of seagrass meadows at the nuclear pollution conference back in the winter of ’75.
I explained that I wanted to study the effects of radioactive contamination on the Mediterranean’s underwater ecosphere, and when I told him how I had come to be interested in the field, he agreed to take me on as a research assistant.
I still used my parents’ address for anything official, which meant it was my mother who wrote to me in the winter of 1978 to tell me that a copy of my divorce decree had arrived in the mail. “Do you want me to send it to you?” she asked, but I told her to hang on to it for the time being.
That evening, when I told Teo that the divorce had come through, he gathered me into his arms and swung me around our tiny kitchen, ecstatic. “Will you marry me tomorrow?” he asked, and I laughed before realizing he was serious.
“Put me down for a second,” I said.
His face grew cloudy with concern.
“I want to marry you,” I explained, “but I’ve already had one rushed wedding.”
He understood completely, and we lived together in satisfying sin for two more years, while I finished my degree. Those days in our little apartment in Sassari were some of the happiest of my life.
Eventually, we did marry, at the Municipal Building in La Maddalena.
A church wedding was out of the question, since I was a divorcée, but Teo would have married me in the middle of a busy traffic circle if it meant he got to call me his mogliettina.
After the ceremony, we threw a big party at Bar Fiume, and at this wedding reception, I did not get too drunk.
Toward the end of the night, I found Teo in a quiet corner of the bar, talking to Francesca and my parents, and I wrapped an arm around his waist. “Have you ever seen anything more lovely?” Francesca asked my mother, and she smiled at us and said that she had not.
That whole day, I felt enveloped in love.
I don’t know how Mary Lou knew that we’d married, but one day a postcard arrived in the mail. On the front was a picture of the Santa Monica Pier, and on the back—in her perfect penmanship—was a note.
Best wishes on your nuptials. Wishing you every happiness.
XO, Mary Lou
There was no return address, but the Pasadena postmark was a good indication that Jim Jenkins had indeed gotten out of the navy.
I liked to think of them back in Southern California, where I felt sure Mary Lou was running the Junior League or the Garden Club or maybe both with the precision of a four-star admiral.
After earning my degree, I got a job working for the local health authority, but in 1983, we moved to Rome so I could study for a master’s degree in biology at Tor Vergata.
My focus, of course, was on marine ecology, specifically radioecology.
I landed a job with Italy’s National Research Council, where I worked for a small institute that studied coastal fisheries.
In Rome, Teo got a job writing for Il Messaggero’s national desk. Soon he was running it. We missed Sardinia and returned often, but we liked being close to Teo’s parents and his brothers and enjoyed watching Violetta and her little brother, Giorgio, grow up.
In 1985, my father died. It was a massive heart attack, so sudden that no one saw it coming, including him.
For that, I will always be grateful. By the time he died, the guy who didn’t like to cross the Ashley River had managed to acquire a passport and fill it with stamps.
He came to Italy to meet Teo soon after we moved in together, and again when we married.
After that, he and my mother made a point of visiting at least once a year.
Over the years, Teo and I took my parents to Florence and Venice, Milan and Genoa, but on my father’s last trip, we stayed close to home because he and my mother were there to meet their three-week-old grandson.