Their house on Prospect Avenue adjoined the park named for Friedrich von Schiller, for it was in a mixed German and Italian neighborhood, modest but not run-down. Prospect Avenue climbed a hill, and at the top, where Schiller’s statue stood, was the prospect over the city that gave the street its name. Perhaps it had once been a grand view, worthy of Schiller’s gaze.

By the time Marguerite knew it, it overlooked factory sites, the large creamy mass of General Hospital, and the old-fashioned dwellings and stores of the Italian North Side. Prospect Avenue itself was a quiet clean street of neat houses, porches, and trim gardens. The yard Uncle Nunzio tended was an exotic diversion from the adjoining Germanic ones. He had a fig tree (which he buried in the winter), grapevines, and other fruits instead of zinnias like his neighbors. And he made wine in the cellar, strong and sour-smelling.

All that appealed to Marguerite. At the same time she sensed how un-American it was and how her parents disapproved.

After Sam Scalzo moved his family to a Tudor house in a fine residential area, Carla still sent Marguerite and Sammy back to the house on Prospect Avenue every Saturday to play with their cousins.

On good mornings they played cowboys in the park; when it rained they played in a kind of catch-all room next to the kitchen. In the kitchen, with its warm and comfortable smells of sausage making, they ate at Aunt Emma’s long oilcloth-covered table.

And every Saturday afternoon, rain or shine, they went down the street a few blocks to the old Schiller movie house. They saw the Charlie Chan detective films; they saw Shirley Temple, Tarzan, and Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers. They even went to see the mushy love stories that starred Ann Harding or Kay Francis or Anita Louise. They saw everything and they ate bags of penny candy or popcorn. Deleterious and addicting as a narcotic, those Saturday-afternoon films in the shabby theater seeped their culture into Sammy and Marguerite, into Tony and Vic Vitale, imprinting indelibly on their minds the look and feel of American life. They believed what the movies showed them: Real American lives were effortlessly happy ones. This only reinforced the odd quality of her own life for Marguerite.