Epilogue #3
The last time I saw your father was in the fall of 1997.
The cancer had metastasized to his liver, and his doctor had said he likely had less than six months left.
You were in college—I’m not sure your parents had even told you yet—and your dad decided he wanted to take your mom to Europe, so they did London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome in one two-week sprint.
It was all too much for him, but he was intent on giving your mom as many happy memories as he could before things got worse.
Teo and I tried to convince them to stay with us in Rome, but I think the nights were already getting hard, and your dad wanted more privacy than we could give him.
They stayed at a nearby hotel, and we arranged to meet them for a couple of meals.
One night, we had dinner at a little place in Trastevere that I’ve always loved.
It was warm enough to sit outside, and we had some good wine and talked about the old days.
Laura made Teo retell the You can have it any way you want story, and when he did, she admitted—for the first time—that I had done the right thing by leaving Paul.
“It’s not that he was a bad guy,” she said. “But he was the wrong guy for you.”
Bobby agreed with her, and then somehow we got talking about the night of the accident.
“Paul was a mess that night,” said Bobby. “Anyone could see it. In hindsight, I should have said something.”
“You couldn’t have known,” said Laura, and I nodded in agreement, then poured us more wine.
“Can I ask you something, Bobby?” I said.
“Yeah, sure.”
“The night we talked. In the infirmary. You told me what happened in the containment room, but you didn’t tell me the shielding was missing.”
“I didn’t?”
I shook my head. “I’ve always wondered why you didn’t say anything.”
“Paul was your husband.”
“Whom you knew I was cheating on.”
He blushed. “Do you want the truth?”
I nodded.
“I wasn’t wearing the right respiratory gear.”
“You weren’t?”
“Lots of guys didn’t wear it back then. I’d go so far as to say none of us did.”
“And if you’d been wearing it—”
“It wouldn’t have mattered so much that the shielding was missing.”
“Did Paul know that?”
“Yeah, sure. He was in the same boat. None of us doing what we’d been taught.”
I sat there staring at your dad in disbelief.
Here he was at the end of his life, with a firm understanding of how he was going out and why.
He had every reason to be bitter, to blame Paul and even me for what was happening to him, but—rightly or wrongly—the only person he blamed was himself.
I’m going to sound like I’m a hundred years old when I say this, but they don’t make them like that anymore.
At the end of the night, we hugged goodbye. I pretended there was some chance Teo and I would fly east in the coming months, and that if we did, we’d pay your parents a visit. I’m sure they saw right through the charade, but it was too painful to call our parting what it was.
Your father died about six weeks later, although I learned about it some months after that when a letter from your mother arrived in the mail.
She described his final days, with the two of you at his bedside, as some of the most important of her life, and I know she took tremendous comfort in the knowledge that you would carry your father’s light into the world.
AFTER DINO WENT AWAY TO college, I got an offer to return to Sardinia and run the regional office of Italy’s environmental protection agency.
My job was to—if you can believe it—oversee environmental monitoring, as well as public health prevention, pollution control, and emergency management preparation.
It was work I couldn’t do in Rome, and I was glad for an excuse to get back to Sardinia and to spend more time in La Maddalena.
The timing was good because Teo was no longer working in the newsroom.
He had published a couple of nonfiction books, including one on the rise of NATO in Italy in the postwar years, which received critical acclaim.
And so he liked the idea of slowing down and working on something new.
He chose as his next subject the effects of weapons testing in Sardinian communities like Quirra and Teulada.
It turned out that all those sick and dying shepherds he had written about in the mid-seventies had been exposed to heavy metals and radioactive materials in the soil.
In the book, which did well, he argued that Italy must stop auctioning off Sardinia’s most precious resources to foreign military powers.
It was a message that Italians everywhere were ready to hear.
As we grew older, Teo and I returned to La Maddalena with increasing frequency, until I finally retired and we moved here full-time.
The apartment his parents owned is still in the family, but we live in another unit—in the same building—that we purchased a couple of years ago.
It’s on the third floor, and like the others, it faces the sea.
Bernardo died in his seventies, of lung cancer, but Francesca lived into her mid-nineties.
I think I always knew she would. She was a spitfire until the end, never inclined to keep her mouth shut if she could use her voice to protest an injustice.
She voted communist into her seventies, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the PCI dissolved, and Francesca was forced to reexamine her worldviews.
In her later years, like a lot of older voters, she moved toward the center, which in Francesca’s case just meant she voted for the Radical Party until the day she died.
Bianca inherited her mother’s apartment.
She has three children, who are now old enough to have children of their own, and not one of them lives on the island.
So she kept her house in town and uses the apartment to put up her children and grandchildren when they come to visit.
I love hearing the kids’ shrieks from the balcony where I long ago took Italian lessons.
We still see Luca. When the region built a lab in La Maddalena in the late seventies, he applied to be the director.
I doubt the benefits were as good as working for CNEN, but by that time, he had married Matilde, and he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
Bruno stayed on at CNEN and kept trying to speak truth to power, which eventually landed him back at La Sapienza, where—when I lived in Rome—I would sometimes meet up with him for a drink.
After that last big round of protests, in the summer of 1976, tensions on the island simmered, and life resumed its normal rhythms. But in 1986, when the No.
4 reactor melted down at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the anti-nuclear movement in La Maddalena and elsewhere in Italy began to gain traction.
The following year, Italians voted to decommission the country’s nuclear power plants, and many people—including me—assumed that the United States’ nuclear-powered submarines would soon be dispatched to more hospitable waters.
Still, the Americans remained in La Maddalena.
It was not until 2005 that the Department of Defense announced NSA La Maddalena would close.
No one believed it, but three years later, Teo and I stood down at the pier alongside hundreds of Maddalenini to watch the last in a long line of submarine tenders depart Santo Stefano Bay.
On the deck, hundreds of sailors in white dress uniforms manned the rail, and I have to admit that the sight of them all lined up like that, paying tribute to the people who had hosted them for the better part of forty years, was enough to make me weep.
It was the end of an era, and even though many of the island’s residents—Francesca chief among them—were grateful to no longer be living with the threat of nuclear disaster, there was also a great deal of sadness.
For better or worse, the American and Sardinian communities had become enmeshed, and the separation, like any, was not without pain.
La Maddalena is quieter now than it used to be, which suits Teo and me just fine.
In town, most of the evidence that the Americans were ever there is gone.
The compound was subdivided and redeveloped long ago.
There’s a grocery store where the Administration Building used to be, and another building has been converted into a boutique hotel.
The housing complex at Trinità, including the elementary school, proved useless to the Maddalenini, and while there was some talk of converting the houses into vacation rentals, the plans stalled.
As of now, the whole complex sits empty, slowly returning to the earth.
Sometimes I like to picture archaeologists excavating the site in a thousand years.
At the elementary school, where there still hangs a banner that reads WELCOME ALL TO OUR COMMUNITY OF LEARNERS, they will uncover laminated copies of the Pledge of Allegiance and vinyl records of Schoolhouse Rock!
and, for a time, be left scratching their heads as to what these American relics are doing on a tiny Italian island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.
It’s morning now, and soon Teo and I will go for our walk.
We like to go early, before the sun is too high in the sky.
I know you’re busy with your mom now, but that won’t always be the case, and when your life gets a little quieter, think about coming to La Maddalena.
We have a spare room that gets great light, and if you drag the desk in front of the window, you’ll have a view of the sea.
It’d be a nice place to write your book, and you’re welcome any time.