Diane came over to say good-bye to me. “You couldn’t pay me enough to relive my adolescence,” she said, brushing my cheek with her own. “I’m going back to the Gold Coast. And I’m definitely staying there. Take it easy, Warshawski.” She was gone in a shimmer of silver fox and Opium.

Caroline hovered anxiously around the locker-room door, worried I would leave without her. She was so tense I began to feel uneasy about what I was going to find at her house. She’d acted just this way when she’d dragged me home from college one weekend, ostensibly because Louisa had hurt her back and needed help replacing a broken window. After I got there I found she expected me to explain why she’d given Louisa’s little pearl ring to the St. Wenceslaus Lenten fund drive.

“Is Louisa really sick?” I demanded as we finally left the locker room.

She looked at me soberly. “Very sick, Vic. You’re not going to like seeing her.”

“What’s the rest of your agenda, then?”

The ready color flooded her cheeks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She flounced out the school door. I followed slowly, in time to see her get into a battered car parked with its nose well into the street. She rolled down the window as I walked by to yell that she’d see me at the house and took off in a squeal of rubber. My shoulders were sagging a little as I unlocked the Chevy door and slid in.

My gloom increased when I made the turn onto Houston Street. I’d last been on the block in 1976 when my father died and I came back down to sell the house. I’d seen Louisa then, and Caroline, who was fourteen and following determinedly in my steps—she even tried playing basketball, but at five feet even her tireless energy couldn’t get her onto the first squad.

That was the last time I had talked to any of the other neighbors who had known my parents. There was genuine grief for my gentle, good-humored father. Grudging respect for Gabriella, dead ten years at the time. After all, the other women on the block had shared her scraping, saving, cutting each penny five ways to feed and shelter their families.

Now she was dead, they glossed over the eccentricities that used to make them shake their heads—taking the girl to the opera with an extra ten dollars instead of buying her a new winter coat. Not baptizing her or giving her to the sisters at St. Wenceslaus for schooling. That disturbed them enough that they sent the principal, Mother Joseph Something, around one day for a memorable confrontation.

Maybe the biggest folly of all to them was her insisting on college for me, and demanding that it be the University of Chicago. Only the best did for Gabriella, and she’d decided that was Chicago’s best when I was two. Not, perhaps, comparing in her mind with the University of Pisa. Just as the shoes she bought herself at Callabrano’s on Morgan Street didn’t compare to Milan. But one did what one could. So two years after my mother’s death I’d left on a scholarship for what my neighbors called Red University, half scared, half excited to meet the demons up there. And after that, I’d never really gone home again.