Under the Rose. Flavia Alaya

even as they roared and spewed. Joan Brookbank, my new agent, rafted me to safety on the mighty flood that followed. In those tough middle years, the late, magnificent Ellen Moers, pioneering feminist critic and midwife of difficult literary births, inspired me to go on writing, almost literally handing me when she died to her brilliant friend, writer Esther (E. M.) Broner. I bless all these wonderful people for treating me not like a writer-in-the-making, but like a writer.

      As the manuscript circulated, and word got out about the story, I don’t like to think what went on behind the cupped hands of people who thought it too naughty for their imprint. Rumors abounded of characters like Harry Browne being written into soap operas. I have had an absolutely unbased paranoid fantasy that the New York Archdiocese had a role in thwarting the book’s publication at some point. But when a spate of new books appeared in the early 1990s about priests and women, when Annie Murphy became a celebrity, calling a scoundrel a scoundrel and proud of it, it seemed to a lot of people that “it” had been done, whatever “it” was. My contract had already died, a blessed death, as I see it now. For just as the TV producer’s story was not my story so neither was Annie Murphy’s or any of the other variant voices of women with priests that enjoyed their brief succès de scandale at the time.

      Had it not been for Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (because it is clearly the artist’s way to have a certain necessary chutzpah) I would not have approached The Feminist Press. Had it not been for Florence Howe and The Feminist Press’s Cross-Cultural Memoir Series, the story might never have been expanded into the fuller “life” it is now. If not for my editor, Jean Casella, it would never have become a “life” that I feel even tremulously proud to have written. I have told her that no one reading me has ever been so intuitive about what I intended to say and do, that when she could not see through my verbal impasses she always, always, inspired me to write my way out of them. Now I get to tell her in print. And to apologize for the weaknesses in me that in the end set the limit to how much better a book she could make it. As for the other Press staff, I thank them for all the care, the meticulousness and beauty, of their work, and for being part of a mission to understand women’s writing, as well as to keep it alive and in print.

      Ramapo College, its administrators and sabbatical and research committees, were an inevitable part of the process, giving me small amounts of released time—never enough of course! But they meant well and I am grateful. And I don’t know who I would be if it weren’t for the intellectual freedom to be who I am and have been there, or the wonderful colleagues I have lived with and loved in the School of Social Science over the years, especially Patricia Hunt-Perry, friend and soulmate across a single office divider wall. It was she who put my story up with much better peoples’ in a lecture series called “My Life is My Message” in 1996, and created a turning point in my sense of claim to a life worth having lived, let alone having written. This was clinched by a grant that same year from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to spend a month of blissful Vermont time writing, and being well-fed and lionized, at the Vermont Studio Center. They have a lot to answer for.

      I want to thank the many people who, having loved Harry Browne and vividly remembered the West Side scene in the sixties when I interviewed them in the eighties, launched heartily into stories that have enriched the book, especially Dr. Marvin Belsky, Mike Coffey, Monsignor Jack Egan, Father Tom Farrelly, Fred Johnson, Father Phil Murnion, and the delicious and incomparable Esta Kransdorf (Armstrong). Esta died suddenly in 1995, a shock that darkened a host of lives, and lost me my wisest and most discerning reader.

      Then there are my three children, Harry, Chris, and Nina, who jestingly refer to themselves as “spawn of Satan”—or the funniest and witchiest of them does, and cracks up the other two. Also their wonderful partners, Imelda, Rebecca, and Carl, who have stood by them as they stood by me. I still don’t get how they did it, all of them. How they not only let me go on writing like this, for what seems decades, but rooted for me, boasted about me, casting the movie at least three different times. Thanks to the rest of my family, especially my darling sister Ann (whose poignant roses illuminate these pages), for bearing all this self-indulgent revelation—so far as they have borne it. I think they know the worst is yet to come. My husband Sandy does too, and it seems almost presumptuous of me to say thanks for a love that has already survived tests of trust and courage that would wither lesser men, and will have to survive more.

      Finally, unutterable gratitude to all the people who have ever loved me in my life, my parents, my relatives, here, and there, my wonderful, devoted students, my friends, those I still have and those I have lost. And to all the artists and writers who have ever made it possible for me to think of myself as an artist and a writer.

       Part One

       TOSCA

       1

      The room I slept in as a girl stood high above the down-sloping green of what then seemed a great stretch of lawn at the arrowhead intersection of Sickles Avenue and Sickles Place. The room frames itself in my memory as a kind of Bluebeard’s tower, which I happened also to share, like the troubled heroine of that tale, with my younger sister Ann. Its two small casement windows faced north-northeast, and beneath the more easterly window, as winter dawn faintly grayed the sky, I can remember two shivering girls hugging the steel fins of the radiator for a warmth that existed only in memory or desire, praying desperately that it might heat up faster, wishing the furnace had not been so completely shut down, as it was every winter night no matter how bitter, by some iron economic hand.

      It was through the thinnish walls of this room that I first heard the mingled groans of my parents’ lovemaking. I think I did not yet know what the sound meant, for I remember praying when my mother cried out that she was not being hurt, and striving to suppress the surge of fear and anger that welled up against my father. And yet it was here, not so many dark nights later, that I was to discover the secret pleasures of my own body, as my exploring hand rode its smooth, new swales and warm grooves to a bliss I could not believe I owned—until a car headlight might blaze a sudden dazzling track of light across the black ceiling, and my sister, alarmed by my shallow breathing, might whisper, “Are you sick?” across the ten feet between our beds, and I whisper back that no, I was fine, and drop off to sleep like a stone.

      It was here, too, on a deep winter’s night, amid whoops and squeals that rang like a carillon of bells off the icy street below my window, that an episode of my lonely teenage melodrama played itself out by streetlight as Knowledge dropped straight from the Tree: Janet, who lived two houses away and had been my dearest friend of summer, companion of every Glen Island beach day, whispering secret sharer of the strange, disquieting girl-mystery of the soul kiss, had given the New Year’s Eve party she had promised after all, and had not invited me.

      Janet’s abandonment somehow awoke me to a peculiar aloneness that inspired one of my earliest stories, even to its closure with the shattering sound of the window blinds as they fell on the street scene of my wounded gaze. And I can remember thinking even then, at the raw age of fifteen, that, for better or worse, bitter or sweeter, the art of storytelling for me was going to be the art of telling the truth—meaning not, in the Aristotelian way, what might have happened, but what did. I could not tell tales, as others told, no matter how much I might envy the gift. Life as it came, as it unspooled itself in the newsreel of my mind, was like a script already written, already relentlessly storied, needing almost no touch of art except to find its intrinsic, if hidden, shape. This was a handicap at first, when “creativity” seemed by textbook definition to demand fantasy and invention, and I had convinced myself that to be a true artist I had to resist what came too easy and too unearned. Soon, by varying degrees of willing suspension, of wise passiveness, of acceptance of whatever gift was mine, learned or unlearned, earned or unearned, I let go of true art and allowed the storied universe to seem, to be,