Chapters (47)
- 1. Cover Page
- 2. Title Page
- 4. Author’s Note
- 5. Dedication
- 7. Prologue
- 8. Part One: Umbertina 1860 - 1940
- 9. Chapter One
- 10. Chapter Two
- 11. Chapter Three
- 12. Chapter Four
- 13. Chapter Five
- 14. Chapter Six
- 15. Chapter Seven
- 16. Chapter Eight
- 17. Chapter Nine
- 18. Chapter Ten
- 19. Part Two: Marguerite 1927 – 1973
- 20. Chapter Eleven
- 21. Chapter Twelve
- 22. Chapter Thirteen
- 23. Chapter Fourteen
- 24. Chapter Fifteen
- 25. Chapter Sixteen
- 26. Chapter Seventeen
- 27. Chapter Eighteen
- 28. Chapter Nineteen
- 29. Chapter Twenty
- 30. Chapter Twenty-One
- 31. Chapter Twenty-Two
- 32. Chapter Twenty-Three
- 33. Part Three: Tina 1950 –
- 34. Chapter Twenty-Four
- 35. Chapter Twenty-Five
- 36. Chapter Twenty-Six
- 37. Chapter Twenty-Seven
- 38. Chapter Twenty-Eight
- 39. Chapter Twenty-Nine
- 40. Chapter Thirty
- 41. Chapter Thirty-One
- 42. Chapter Thirty-Two
- 43. Chapter Thirty-Three
- 44. Chapter Thirty-Four
- 45. Chapter Thirty-Five
- 46. Afterword
- 48. About the Author
- 49. About the Feminist Press
- 50. Also Available from the Feminist Press
And as he showered, she thought, the best sign is that I can hardly remember the past; all the rest is hardly there . . . or, if there, finally weightless. Gloversville, London, Washington, Florence, the moving back and forth, the regrets—gone now.
“When will you bring your shaving stuff? I’d like to see it here,” she called over the running water.
“The next time.” Then he came into the room wrapped in a towel, drying himself and watching her put on her underclothes. “Let me see you, amore; let me see how elegant you are.”
“What is it your son says?” she said, coming over to open the towel and put herself inside with him.
“He says, ‘You have to be gentle with women—right, papà?’ ‘Certainly,’ I say. And he, ‘But we men command, right? We decide.’ ‘Yes,’ I say.”
“I like that. I like you.” She stepped back and looked at him nude, his body brown and matted with wet hair.
“Friends for life,” she said, hugging his damp body to her.
“For life,” he echoed.
29. Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty
Many externals imposed on their separate lives but Marguerite and Massimo pooled their network of friends and both managed to be at the same places together.
It was a wonder to her that they managed it in the complexity of their different lives. But they did. (Squisitamente italiana, old Bacchetti could have written of their relationship, for where else but in Italy could it have flourished so well?)
When fall came they left the piazzas and started meeting at Otello’s.
“I had a tape all made and ready to switch on if by chance Alberto answered the phone tonight instead of you,” said Massimo, greeting her.
“Why can’t you talk to Alberto? He knows I’ve got this translation thing with you.”
“No, I can’t at the moment. Perhaps later. But it bothers me if he answers.”
“What did the tape say?”
“How to vote in the coming elections—monarchist.”
She laughed. “Is that what you’ll do?”
“I won’t vote anything. They’re all the same—impostors. Most people I know woke one morning toward the end of the war and declared themselves socialists. The night before they had been fascist. Now they’re warming up to communism. Look at Leone: He likes to act the man of the Left but he’s the first to want to live in bourgeois comfort.”