A Circular Journey

Being at Bellagio

Being at Bellagio In a late spring of some years ago I was racked with doubts: a completed novel, still unpublished, was in a drawer awaiting not only a publisher but even an agent who would represent it and send it out to some welcoming editor. And I was planning another book about six American women writers and how Italy had played into their lives. Their stories connected with my own discovery of Italy where I had begun to write, had married an Italian writer, and had lived for some years. But entwined with the pleasure I took in planning a new book was the risk that it, too, could end up in a drawer. For what was the point of writing without being realized in print and brought to readers? Was I indulging in false hopes, a dotty dame, now living and working alone, finding no outlet for my work? And then one Friday returning home from my library job and playing back my telephone messages, I heard the director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center asking if I were still able to accept a residency at their Center on Lake Como. I had previously applied without success. Now I was their first choice of three alternates to replace a professor who had had a heart attack and dropped dead on his lawn the day before he was to arrive in Italy. Would I be ready to leave on Monday? Yes! I called back. Then came reality. How would I ever make it in time? Bellagio’s New York office was sending me a packet of information by express mail. I had to arrange with the library for leave, pay my mortgage and other bills, and call the agent at Cape 131 Cod who was handling the sale of my place there to notify him of my whereabouts in Italy should there be an offer and he had to be in touch with me. And I was still correcting the galleys of my Aldus book! On the day of departure, my last chores and packing done, I almost missed out when an artist friend, lost in his work, forgot to pick me up for the drive to the airport. I made the flight to Milan. In the air I thought of my second daughter, Susanna, who had been born there in a sultry and oppressive July, and, having breathed her first air in Italy, has made it her home. While awaiting the birth I had seen an ad in the magazine Grazia for a rental at Bellagio on Lake Como and suggested to my husband Antonio that we take the place and spend a month on the lake after the baby was born. As it turned out, we did have a month at a lake, but it wasn’t Como; it was grim, gray Lake Oneida outside my hometown, Syracuse, New York. My parents wanted to see the new babe and her two-year-old sister and invited us over to stay with them on the lake. Life is full of chance correspondences. So many years after Susi’s birth I, now widowed, was about to have my month at Bellagio after all. And a flowering of ideas for stories began to sprout, wanting to be written. Yet, once on the plane—quite empty, thankfully—I stretched out across the adjoining empty seats to collapse with the emotional and physical fatigue of the forced march of the past few days. As I dozed off I thought of Cynthia Ozick who, in spidery handwriting on a postcard, had once queried me, Why don’t you apply for Bellagio? She and I have had a tiny, occasional correspondence about authorship for over two decades following my interview of her for a Westchester magazine. She is always gracious , concerned, encouraging and with a surprising and equalizing acceptance of me, unknown in the wider world, as a fellow writer. She, of course, had been to Bellagio, has had her MacArthur , her Guggenheim; she writes her novels and other works and 132 hands them to her agent of four decades who sends them off to Knopf her forever publisher, and, ecco, fatto! She is in print, in collections, on panels, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She seems to wonder why that is not my procedure . But publishing for me has been a trial of endurance...