Under the Rose

August 30, 1999
In an emotionally extravagant memoir that favors stream of consciousness over structure, Alaya (Gaetano Federici: The Artist as Historian), a literature and cultural history professor at Ramapo College in N.J., recounts her longstanding, clandestine relationship with a Roman Catholic priest. She brings to life her Italian-American upbringing in a large extended family, capturing the complexities of her relationship with a father who, hoping to protect her sexual innocence, restricted her freedom. Shortly after leaving college, she found both love and freedom in Perugia, Italy, where she was living on a Fulbright scholarship and met Father Harry Browne, a 40-year-old Irish-American priest. Browne reciprocated her feelings, and their love affair blossomed when they returned to New York and became deeply involved in tenant organizing on the Upper West Side. When Alaya became pregnant, she fled to Italy to have her baby, so as not to jeopardize her lover's position in the church. She later relocated to New Jersey and, through the births of two more children, kept their father's identity a secret while Browne's ongoing political activism burnished his reputation as a charismatic radical priest. In 1970, ill from the demands of single motherhood, Alaya finally told Browne either to live openly with her or to leave permanently. He chose to live with her, but remained a priest until his death from leukemia 10 years later. Alaya squarely lays the blame for her lover's divided loyalties at the feet of a regressive church. She is less convincing, however, in her protestations that their domestic situation allowed her the freedom to be herself. B&W photos. Author tour.