His mother had been dark, a woman with unbelievable heavy-lidded black eyes, the bedroom eyes of an earthy saint. He scarcely could remember her face, but to summon her eyes at will he had merely to close his own. On the nights when his father had come home sotted—apostate Myron Silberstein drowning in the strega he had adopted along with pet Italian phrases to demonstrate the democracy of his marriage, sounding his anise-scented shrieks for help (O puttana nera! O troia scura! O donna! Oi, nafkeh!)—the little boy would lie awake in the dark trembling at the sick thud of his father’s fists against his mother’s flesh, the slap of her palm against his face, the sounds often ending in other noises, hot and frantic, slick-liquid and gasping, that made him lie rigid, hating the night.

When he was in junior high school and his mother four years dead, he discovered the story of Gregor Johann Mendel and the garden peas and set to work plotting his own hereditary picture, hoping without admitting it that his brown hair and eyes were a genetic impossibility: that his father’s blondness should have been passed on to him, and that perhaps after all he was a bastard, the product of his beautiful dead mother and an unknown male who possessed all the noble virtues so lacking in the man he called Poppa.

But the biology books disclosed that the combination of moonlight and shadow added up to groats.

Ah, well.

At any rate, by this time he was bound to Myron Silberstein with cords of love as well as strings of hate.

To prove it, you damn fool, he told the image in the mirror, you scrape together two hundred dollars and then let him talk you out of it, out of almost all of it. What had shone in his eyes when his hands—those Hebrew-violinist’s janitor’s hands with coaldust engrained in the knuckles—had closed around the money?

Love? Pride? The promise of life’s best surprise, an unplanned drunk? Did the old man still chase after love? Doubtful. Middle-aged impotence common to alcoholics. Sooner or later certain chains bound everyone, even Myron Silberstein.

Only one person, the grandmother, his vecchia, had ever been able to cow his father. Rosella Biombetti had been a small woman from southern Italy, white hair in a bun, everything else of course black: shoes, stockings, dress, kerchief, often even mood, as if in mourning for the world. There were pits on her olive face, left there when she was four years old in the Avellino village of Petruro and every one of her parents’ eight children had come down with vaiolo, the dreaded smallpox. The disease took no one but it scarred six of the children and ruined the seventh, an eight-year-old named Muzi whose mind was burned into soft ash by the high fever, leaving him a Something who eventually became an aging bald man in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, playing all day with his spoons and bottle caps and wearing a ragged sweater even when layers of July heat shimmered over Larimer Avenue.