She was excited now, feeling an emotion that she hadn’t experienced in a long time. Her eyes fixed Verdile’s and she leaned forward, talking rapidly. “I always fantasized about my grandmother. I always thought I wanted to get back to her elementary kind of existence . . . her kind of primitive strength. I’ve always felt that my life was wasted on abstract ideas rather than being rooted in reality; even a brutal reality would have been better than the vagueness I’ve been floundering in. Naive, my daughters call me. What they mean is soft, mushy. My grandmother, though, was tough. You know, I’ve always suspected it was my grandmother Umbertina who brought me to Italy in the first place. But I’ve never even taken the time to go see where she came from. I’ve never found her.”

He smiled back. It always seemed to her that apart from the analysis they had a good thing going between them, like old friends, chatting. A kind of ease that was new to her with a man, even though she was always aware of his being a man.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she murmured then as if weights had once more settled on her shoulders. “You know, while I was sick, I had Alberto bring me my father’s old remedy, that hot lemonade with whiskey he used to call a hot sling. It was comforting. It was like going back to my childhood. It made me think of my father in a way that was different from usual. Before it used to be in labeled slots: Authority, Filial Duty, Respect to Parents—all those hang-ups I grew up with. Only now I’ve started to think of him with compassion as another guy caught up in the same goddam struggle and whose life hasn’t been easy. I remembered a photo of him in our album, at eighteen on his motorcycle when he had already organized the business but was still only a kid full of God knows what kind of dreams of an exciting future. I thought of him separating himself from the Italians of the North Side to make himself into a real American. He turned reactionary to do it, but he started courageously. He was caught in a terrible trap; he couldn’t be either Italian like his father and mother or American like his models without feeling guilty toward one or the other side. And even now he doesn’t know how to be American while accepting his Italianness because it’s still shameful to him. So there’s conflict and bitterness.

“And my mother, too. Beneath her comfortable life, what is she really? Someone who never looked straight at truth and accepted it. And then my childhood, my family, all those years of growing up, marrying, until I’m here talking with you. What has it all been but a trying to fit myself into abstractions, trying to live everyone else’s idea of what my life should be. And while I lived it I couldn’t see it—it was all written in an invisible ink that’s only now coming into sight.”