As for Ricky's mother, she wasn't well liked, although it was generally agreed that she was an upright, devout woman. She gave to the church and was always there if the nuns needed a new water heater for the convent, or a new roof. But people said there was something cold about Guisipinna Gaspari. In the old country her family had been a very big deal—they were northerners, of course—and she never let you forget it.

Ricky's two older brothers were a different story. Joe and Tommy Gaspari were twins. And to the first-generation Italian American kids of New Haven the Gaspari twins were heroes. The boys had earned their fame in high school on the football field. After graduation they'd both gone on to Yale, where they had cemented their reputations on the Yale team. It was that Ivy League connection that had made them glamorous to the youngsters of Lu's generation.

It was common knowledge that Yale had a quota for young men with too many vowels in their last names. The school did take in young men of “foreign,” that is, non-Yankee backgrounds, and there were a handful of Italian American families in New Haven that boasted a Yale graduate in their midst. But most of those boys were hardworking day students who lived at home and didn't participate in campus social life. The sons of Eli didn't fraternize with the sons of immigrants, and the sons of immigrants were expected to understand that. But not the Gaspari twins. Not only had they shared a suite in Saybrook College on the Yale campus, but they had pledged one of Yale's best fraternities. Tommy was known to have dated a girl whose New England pedigree went back to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It helped that the Gaspari family was rich, and that the clan had been in the country for generations. Still, the people of Italian New Haven—even those who said the Gasparis were snobs—were proud. Then after Pearl Harbor, the twins had signed up the very next day—Joe for the navy, Tommy to become a paratrooper—and the pride knew no bounds.

Ricky led Lu to the restaurant kitchen, where he seated her at a large wooden table and served her a dish of lasagna that smelled as good as her mom's. “You must have heard of my brothers,” he said, with the younger brother's worshipful tone she recognized from her own tribe. Then, to cover, he added quickly, “They're both a couple of jerks.”

She nodded.