We would rinse our fingers in these bowls, then wipe them off on our napkins. Mom always rubbed the floating lemon slice on her fingernails. She said it was good for her cuticles. When she wiped her hands on her napkin, they didn’t leave any marks, but when I dried off my hands, the napkin seemed to get a lot more used up. On Friday her napkin always looked about like it had when she got it the Friday before. But mine looked like somebody had spilled something. A lot of dirt would come off my hands during the week and Janet said we would all die of cholera if we had to live with me much longer.

After our late breakfast Dad asked me if I would like to go on a hike. Our vacation hike was a tradition. We lived in the mountains in Switzerland and often went hiking there. Why Dad wanted to hike in the hills above Portofino when we were on our seaside vacation I never knew. I didn’t dare to say no since I knew it was important for a father and son to be together. Mom said so.

Mom and the girls put on their bathing suits and went to the beach while I got dressed. My T-shirt was already sticky before we even crossed the road and started up the little trail with all the lizards on it behind the brick building that the Banini kept his tools in and that smelled of old paint and dead fish.

As we started up the path Dad walked in front to “set the pace.” If he was in a good Mood, he would set a pace that I could keep up with easily. But if he had been fighting with Mom, the pace would be set so as to punish me for the fight. As we left Mom behind and the walk took on a life of its own, then Dad’s Mood would improve and he would slow down for me, and after I caught up to him, we’d walk on together.

The trails we walked on in the hills above the Mediterranean were of all different kinds. Bits and pieces of old Roman roads, donkey paths up to hill farms and olive groves, even some roads that Mussolini had had his engineer corps build before the war to service hilltop military bunkers. When you passed the bunkers, you could imagine soldiers in them with machine guns waiting for the Allies to come up the very path you were on. As we rounded a corner Dad pointed to a bunker ahead.

“By this time they would have opened fire,” he said.

I looked into the dark mouth of the overgrown gun port. “How could you get past them, Pop?”

“Well, some men would come up from the side and lob hand grenades into the gun port. That’s how you’d take ‘em out.”