When you put your head under the water, you could hear your heart beat in your ears. You could also hear distant outboard engines better than you could when your head was out of the water. I tried it many times. Head under water, I could hear a boat coming. Head out, nothing. Head under, it was closer now. Head out, still nothing. Then it rounded the point. Now I could hear it head out of the water since the point of the bay no longer blocked out the sound. Dad had told me to be careful of how sound was amplified underwater. He said if I was swimming underwater, and someone exploded something, my eardrums would pop because water magnified the sound, so I should watch out. I never figured out how to be careful of this. How could you tell if someone was about to drop a bomb in the water near you?

The boat had some people in it from a yacht. The Very Wealthy as Dad called them. The Very Wealthy were not merely rich people, let alone middle class; they were so rich that they could own yachts! Dad told us that if you had to even ask how much money you had to have to own a yacht, then you knew right there you didn’t have enough.

Dad said, “Maintaining a yacht is so expensive that it ends up costing more than the boat itself; only the Very Wealthy can bear those sort of expenses.”

Yachts would anchor in the next bay from ours. If you swam out far enough, you could look into the bay where they were moored, where the Very Wealthy kept their boats, in a harbor that was the most wonderful, glamorous, and interesting place in the world—Portofino.

The Banini hurried forward to help two girls in two-piece bathing suits, really small immodest ones, out of the boat from the yacht. An older man, my mom said “clearly not their father,” as she glanced meaningfully at Dad, waited to disembark until the Banini had pulled the launch far enough up on the beach so he could step out onto the dry sand. He had cream-colored white pants and white shoes on.