The doctor then instructed Lucrezia, her father and mother, as well as their visiting cousin, who naturally had joined them in watching me, that I was to be packed in ice until my fever had dropped to nearer normal.

Lucrezia, armed with two champagne buckets, was sent up the road to La Busola, the night club that, with its “pounding music,” annually came so close to spoiling our vacation because of Dad’s sleeplessness. Once there, Lucrezia shoveled ice into her buckets from the large freezer in which steaks, fish, and bottles of vodka were stored and then brought them back to my sickbed.

As the ice progressively did its work, it was harder to float. Soon I exchanged my wings for mere blurred vision and finally sleep, a sleep punctuated by the low murmur of my mom’s voice as she sat next to my bed and read aloud to me when I became restless.

In the morning she was asleep on Rachael’s bed, her Bible open on her lap.

Chapter 5

ONCE A YEAR, ON OUR ITALIAN VACATION, we would leave the beach early to spend the afternoon strolling along the waterfront of Santa Margherita. We would unfavorably compare the lot of the English tour groups who inhabited the huge waterfront hotels and ours. They, poor misguided fools, had purchased “package” vacations in England. Probably, “they were just working class people who didn’t know any better,” said Mom.

We would walk along the palm trees and fountains that bordered the beachfront with the busy street and the wall of ornate hotel facades overlooking the traffic to our right and the sea to our left. On the beach thousands of migrant holiday makers sat in rows of deck chairs arranged in huge squares, as if the seating from some vast tightly packed auditorium had been transplanted onto the hard-pressed beach. Head to toe, they reclined with their radios, card games, cigarettes (the British working class apparently not knowing that “Tobacco is a filthy weed and from the devil doth proceed”), and alcoholic drinks.

As we surveyed them, we pitied them. Little did they know that, as Dad said, they’d been sold a bill of goods. They might have spent less money and found a decent pensione in a less crowded spot, paid for half pension, and been free of the crowd, like us.

“But we wouldn’t really want all these people on our beach, would we, dear?”

Mom was practical about such matters.