“Silly!” her mother laughed at her. “Those birds weren’t real! They were mechanical. They were wound up and made to come out when I cut the cake in a certain place and released the spring.”

It was still a romantic story.

At Sammy’s wedding Marguerite looked around and saw the old relatives who had disappeared from sight once her father had moved to a better neighborhood. Now there they were again, the derelicts and left-behinds. As a child she had begun to learn that bettering oneself meant getting out of the Italian neighborhood. Then in school, with her Irish classmates, the Italians, by contrast, had embarrassed her by their foreignness. Now her foreignness joined theirs on the huge Burke lawn.

There was dark Uncle Nunzio, with his thick black eyebrows like shaggy caterpillars across his face; there were the Scalzos who were laborers or carpenters; there were the ones who spoke broken English and had gold teeth in their mouths; the women with their mustaches and the men with baggy pants; the Old Man, that poor guy with the broom she used to see at her father’s place. Grandpa Scalzo had never made good in America like her mother’s family, the Longobardis.

“It’s a good thing your father works as hard as he does, or who would take care of his family?” her mother always said. “Not any one of them could make good on their own—they all depend on your father to look after them.” Marguerite, as a child, had not only felt sorry for her father and his having to work so hard to provide jobs for everyone else, but had also felt from her mother’s tone how terrifying it must be not ever to make good and to be despised for it.

Marguerite observed the Burkes and their friends at the reception; what distinguished them from the Italian group was their indifference to class. They had made it so long ago and were so well established that it didn’t matter to them that Betty was marrying beneath them. A charming deviation was just that: charming. For the Longobardis and Scalzos, still involved in evolution, it was a different matter. Still, you couldn’t say the Scalzos were the way they were because they had so recently been Italian, Marguerite thought. It was also something they had chosen. The Italian-American complex was too intricate a notion for her to unravel in that scene, and it was a relief to hear herself called.

“Marguerite, come over here and meet a friend,” her cousin Louis Longobardi was saying. Louis was smooth—a well-spoken, witty med-school student, the first son of her Uncle Paul and Aunt Pauline Longobardi. “This is Lennart Norenson,” he said, indicating a very tall, loose-limbed laughing man at his side. “He’s a classmate from Dartmouth and was in Cato. I thought he should have some fun, too; isn’t that right, Len?”