The children were shy. The little girl, Marguerite, had the round face and light eyes of her grandfather Serafino. The little boy, Sammy, was dark—dark as a child of the Calabrian plains; it must be his Sicilian blood on the Scalzo side, Umbertina thought. The Sicilians, she had heard long ago in New York, were often spoken of as Africans. They were quarrelsome, though not as bad as the Neapolitans and those from Campagna, like Pauline’s family, the Colombos.

“Say hello,” Carla prodded. “Say ‘Come stai, Granma.’”

“Coe-may-sty, Granma,” the children said in unison, not knowing what they were saying.

The old woman smiled broadly and nodded her head, reaching over to pat them and pull affectionately at their cheeks. “Bene, bene” she said over and over, reassuring them.

It was their ritual; it was all they could say to each other. But the affection was there in the pats and the smiles. Later Marguerite would ask her mother, “Why does Granma look so strange?” And she meant: She doesn’t look like other grandmothers, the American grandmothers in schoolbooks.

“Your grandmother came from Italy,” Carla would say, leaving the child to wonder what place that was.

Umbertina sat regally under her tree like an old Indian squaw, and mounds of food were placed around her like offerings. Daughters and daughters-in-law in sleeveless white frocks and white stockings kept coming up in a steady stream with the trays of food they had prepared. There were about fifty of the family gathered there, and Umbertina looked contentedly about her. They brought fried chicken parts, her favorite fried sweet peppers to be eaten in huge chunks of fresh-baked crusty bread, tomatoes sliced and dressed with chopped basil, fresh corn on the cob, eggplant fritters, stuffed zucchini, huge tubs of fresh salad greens, whole forms of caciocavallo cheese. It was like Thanksgiving; the Longobardi Thanksgiving took place in the summer in a meadow where all the family gathered around the head of the family, Umbertina, and offered her their services, goods, and children—all that food, those cars, the well-dressed young people who, like Jake’s older sons, went to college to become businessmen. She had never taken to the American Thanksgiving and its strange foods. “In this country they even have una festa delle galline,” she used to say sarcastically each time it came around. She didn’t like November, when the earth couldn’t be worked and the trees were stripped of leaves and the skies were leaden gray. Umbertina liked the sun on her shoulders, the grass green under her feet in a meadow, a lake before her eyes, and blue skies above.