She had seven living children and twenty-seven grandchildren, but to none of them could she really speak. There wasn’t much to say anymore, anyway. At the end of her life she was much alone, and when her eyes fell on the little tin heart, she would think of the quiet of the hills she had come from. Who was it who had given her that heart? It was hard to remember. Ah, yes—the charcoal maker.

She had never gone around moaning the way the other women had done, and missing the old country; she hadn’t been scared or disheartened—those weren’t her words—but she had at times been angered at what it had been given her to fight against. Her loyalty to the new country was nevertheless without end, and as soon as they gave the vote to women she, too, had voted as an American citizen.

And at the end she understood Serafino.

It was 1940. Italy, she heard, had entered the war. How enraged Domenico would be! How everything seemed to repeat itself!

Nearly eighty, as she lay dying, her vision dimmed so that Jake and Amelia and Ben and Carla and the others at her bedstead became dim gray shadows, and then a sudden brightening came to her eyes as in a vision of light she saw the lost coperta of her matrimonial bed with all the intensity of its colors and bright twining of leaves and flowers and archaic designs in its patterns. “Ah!” she gasped, at its beauty.

As Jake leaned over to hear her better, she asked for a cup of water from the spring.

“What spring, Mama?” he asked.

“Castagna,” she whispered. Then she was gone.

19. Part Two: Marguerite 1927 – 1973

Part Two

Marguerite, 1927—1973

20. Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

Marguerite was the middle child, born soon after Sammy and a few years before Steve. “You’re the ham in the sandwich,” Sammy used to joke when they were kids.

She didn’t think so; ham was something familiar, something her father liked between pieces of Italian bread for his Saturday lunch before he went to play golf. And in her family she felt not familiar, but different.

Marguerite was not popular as her brothers were. “You have no personality,” her father would tell her, hoping to open her up. But Marguerite would take it wrong: “Everyone has a personality,” she told him, “you just don’t like mine.”

It made her sad in a way to be unlike the others, but also proud. It made her think that her life was going to go in diverse ways from what she saw around her—it might not be popular but it would be richer in experiences, more intricate, like an exotic dish or a fabulous place such as she saw in the pages of Holiday magazine.

“Why aren’t you like everyone else?” her mother puzzled. “Where did we go wrong with you?” But these weren’t questions a child could answer.