Strangers call me sweetheart, dear, young lady. There are still anxious, blank, wearied faces but there are also newly cheerful ones. A bearded guy holding a red flower in one hand and his girl’s arm in the other goes by singing a peace song while she struts in her flapping bell-bottoms, leaning close to him. Some blacks on a construction job at Columbus Circle stop to listen and one calls, “Make it a love song, brother!”

Giorgio introduces me to his friend Piero Paco, hero of the Italo-American breach into American literature. He looks like a massive gangster but turns out to be a plain, nice guy with a lot of folksy stories and no complexes. He doesn’t feel guilty about blacks, doesn’t care about elevating Italo-American prestige. He’s no missionary for wops. No gripes about the Establishment. He just decided in the best American way to write a book that would make half a million bucks because he was tired of being ignored.

“You don’t think struggling Italo-Americans should stick together and give each other a push up from the bottom of the pile where they’ve always been?” I ask him. But he’s no struggling half-breed anymore. He’s made his pile; he’s all-American now.

“I’m not going to push that crap,” he says engagingly.

We’ll get no equivalent of the Jewish intellectual hero or the black martyr from him, I think. I like him. He’s gross and good and sits like a big bespectacled Buddha in Giorgio’s fussy little place asking for soda pop while we drink Scotch. He wears short socks, so a good bit of his thick white legs is always in view; he smokes stogies.

Giorgio says andiamo and we go to a Chinese restaurant where Paco’s fortune cookie says he’s lazy and mine that I’ll achieve success.

Tina comes to town and crowds into Giorgio’s with me. He looks like he’ll cry, but I tell him we’re leaving the next day. I take her to see Hair. Twenty-five bucks for our tickets, and she who contests American materialism and dresses in rags doesn’t say a word. Sometimes even America works, is classic and good. A zippy audience in chain-mail boleros, see-through pants and skirts, loose hair, and tatters among the careful suits from suburbia. Tina and I get pelted with daisies.

I say, “Tina, do you care about what’s happened to me and papà?”

She says, “I love you both. When you told me, I had to think of your problems as those of another person and not as my mother’s. It was scary and it hurt and sometimes I felt it wasn’t fair—but it was good. I got to know you as a person, to know what was going on in your mind. And then I came to love you more.”