I nodded. He motioned with his chin for me to climb into the boat. I struggled to hoist myself over the high prow of the rowboat. The Banini laughed at my effort, then proffered a sinewy brown arm to help me. My hand scrabbled, wet and slippery on his hard, dry forearm. He pretended to let me fall back into the water, I made a grab for the side of the boat; as I slid backward, he caught my wrist and lifted me in one quick swoop into the boat. Dripping, I sat for a couple of seconds in the warm sun. Then I crawled from the front boat he was rowing into the one behind it, then onto the last one in the “train.” There I looked about me at the familiar skyline.

Tall cypresses spiked the top of the hills. Here and there a villa broke the roll of the mountain. Where pine trees stopped, the gray smoke of the olive groves began and ran mistily down in shadows almost to the water. On the point sat the “Castle,” a nineteenth-century villa, magnificent and frescoed, built like a Norman tower with some Renaissance remembrance in its colors, the size of its windows, and its fieldstone foundation made of huge, rough-hewn blocks. It was a fabulous building. People said that J. Paul Getty owned it.

On the beach the Banini’s assistant was putting out the neat rows of red-and-white-striped deck chairs. Each with its own umbrella, ashtray, and side table. The deck chairs’ rental cost was added to the pensione bill at the end of your vacation. We only rented one. This was so Mom could sit comfortably while she read aloud to us. The rest of us would lie on towels. The English family, the Bazlintons, rented a chair for each of them, even Jennifer. But they wasted their chairs. Jennifer was never in hers; her father went and stood talking at the espresso-pizza bar above the beach. Mrs. Bazlinton did not even come out to the beach until about twelve noon and left early each day to go shopping. When she was on the beach, she wore a two-piece bathing suit! Our mom always wore a one-piece bathing suit. It had a little ruffle, like the beginning of a skirt around it, so that no one would get the idea that our mom was immodest, let alone a loose or worldly woman.