The main room and kitchenette faced east: mornings were sunlit and glorious, afternoons depressing. Further adding to the intensity of those afternoons with my sister-in-law was the fact that I grew up here. Forty years ago, my parents owned just this section of the fourth floor; thirty years ago, they bought the next-door apartment and combined the two, in part because my father wanted to see the sunset, and the abrupt darkness that settled over this side darkened his mood; he moved his office to the other half, where, at that hour, through the pine boughs, a mawkish pink or dramatic orange spread over the sky. The light my nephews were growing up with was the same light in which I learned how to obey, how to please others, how to leave projects unfinished. The square footage doubled after purchasing the place next door, this after my father started earning real money: they installed double-glazed windows, and added gilt frames around the mirrors, the first pretenses of a couple coming from two different backgrounds—my father more lower-middle-class, my mother more elegant and more religious—who had found common ground in their frugality in the seventies and in Catholic social movements; newly rich, my parents now felt compelled to invent a style that represented them, even if they were still socially frugal, because my father didn’t wish to socialize with his work colleagues, and so my parents’ dinner parties for old friends—not entrepreneurs or investors—just became more sumptuous, with chicken in aspic, silver dinnerware, sets of eighteenth-century glasses in a cabinet … that extravagant square footage had now disappeared between two families, and traces of the elegance demanded of the rich in the eighties survived only here and there, like ancient architectural ruins. My parents had an imperial age purely due to the demands of status, but they passed through this period with no ideology and therefore no great need to erase it completely. Now my parents and Luca and Daniela all lived surrounded by stucco and decorations and colors that contrasted with the new design sense that Daniela (a graduate in architecture) had brought to her side of the apartment and then to her in-laws’ side, through her various presents. She’d scraped off the veneer, removed the gilt frames, the fake columns, the Greek-shrine bookshelves, the trompe l’oeil.

Daniela was ashamed to have a nanny, especially once her son’s fevers had stopped: the ordeal of Gionata’s first year and a half had forced her to have a nanny whose salary was covered by her in-laws, not to mention their free apartment, but now that she sometimes got a whole night’s sleep, she was troubled by her own good fortune. It didn’t seem right when so many mothers had to make do on their own.