I have a dream about my English professor, a woman.

(I have no English professor.)

•

Over breakfast, I ask my mother to tell me more about certain vague images that, until now, were packed away deep in my childhood.

Alongside them, I have others that no one in any family gathering has ever alluded to in my presence, which is why I’ve come to doubt their authenticity or at least the accuracy of my memory.

Here are the scenes I will not resurrect with my mother: My paternal grandfather, his peasant build, heavy clothes, goatee, and tall, straight cane, not for support but as a symbol of command, of war. His pleasure in taking me for a stroll through the vineyards, his way of pausing, picking some fruit from the vine, conversing. And his need to pour into my soul, with stern bitterness, his unfortunate childhood, his life of hard work. Then, voice charged with passion, he would chaotically evoke distant chapters of our family history and the source of the special pride he took in them: the bravery and daring of our forebearers—his and mine both, he specified—who were soldiers or suicides. Then he would proclaim in his Italian dialect that I understood perfectly, “Twelve—twelve suicides there have been among us.”

Were these fantasies of glory, the revenge of a man whose life had been filled with humiliation and adversity? Did he dream this history? Did I dream he dreamed it?

If it wasn’t a dream, then counting my father, who wasn’t tallied in my grandfather’s count, the number of suicides added up to thirteen.

Even setting aside the high numbers my grandfather exalted, isn’t it the case that during my own lifetime two of my relatives have put an end to themselves?

There’s only one, the older cousin, gasping for air on his pillow, that I can ask my mother about, though it’s certain to distress her. She’s slow to respond, perhaps thinking that if she can put me off this once I won’t insist again. “There’s so much I have to do this morning: the shopping, soup for the children.”

She keeps stalling. “We’re in the middle of breakfast . . . is this the right time to talk about sad things?”

It’s true, the hour of coffee and buttered toast is not a melancholy time, as the sun makes the kitchen its own and happily colors the air.

I don’t push her, but she senses my anxiety and reluctantly gives in. “I was almost twenty. . . Grandfather had just come back from Italy, where he went to look for grapevines that would be hardier, more resistant to disease. Here’s the story: He brought back some vines and also a widow, a very young widow. She’d be useful, he said, for working the land. Those were different times, desperate people were easy to come by. They fled here from Europe so they could eat.