“Ciao, Giorgio, mille grazie. We’ll see you in Florence.” Tina and I get out of his hair and take the bus uptown. Three well-dressed black teen-agers are talking about their Fred Braun shoes, a leering creep across the aisle leans over and looks up my skirt. We pass a man jogging up Sixth Avenue. We get off at Columbus Circle—soft green and yellow forsythia in the park, a stupendous new glass building gone up, a bagel man. “America stinks,” says Tina glumly. Some shrunken invalids in wheelchairs are taking the sun together at the park entrance. The banks are filled with dapper black employees who are marvels of efficiency and courtesy. Charge accounts still work: I rent a car and we drive off toward Gloversville. Beautiful George Washington Bridge. Beautiful country. Great roads. I head upstate. An apostate.

“Well, I suppose you went to see Hair” says Mother on the threshold, welcoming us back. I leave Tina to skirmish with her grandmother and go downtown to my childhood dentist, who asks, “How’s Italy these days?”—amused that it’s still there. He’s installed in a super suite in crummy downtown and treats me the least bit coldly, as if it’s not really nice to live abroad if you don’t have to, like the military.

Tina gets a ride back to Bryn Mawr and I say good-bye till Florence. “Oh, Mumu,” she says, kissing me good-bye, “just think of what you’re giving up!”

The folks have had time to ruminate in my absence and are ready for the attack. “If you’re set on this separation, then the best thing is for you to come back here to live, where we can help you. This is your country. You and the girls are Americans, after all.” Back in Gloversville I might still give Mom a real wedding before it’s too late.

“You have to think of the children,” says Dad. “You’ve got others to think of beside yourself.”

No, Great White Father, you’re wrong. First me, this time.

Dad takes me down, in the bowels of his bank, to the vault to survey his domain of portfolios and see what will eventually be mine, the fruits of his labor. I feel real tenderness toward the fatigues of his life, his hanging on, his faith in America. America the Dutiful.

Even so, he lives in fear and dread of what’s happening to his America: all those bums on welfare to support, the good-for-nothing hippies, the disrespectful college kids—“I’d rather have my boys in the service where they’d at least get some discipline and learn to be neat than in some atheist, hippie college,” says Steve’s wife—the traitors and cowards who won’t die to defend the country from the communists in Vietnam, the pushy blacks who are getting as bad as the pushy Jews. Old America was going, leaving them all in the lurch.