“I can teach or write.” Her ears were filled with the noise of talk from commercials, and her eyes kept darting involuntarily to watch the people on the screen exclaim, laugh, react to a deodorant. It made her jittery and tense.

“I don’t understand this infatuation with Italy!” her grandfather was saying, rattling his newspaper and looking agitated. “Where will that get you? Italy has no future. What has Italy ever done for the world?”

“Civilization, Gramp.” She thought with sad resignation of this useless old argument, and of how, paradoxically, non-Italians like the Jowers family were so Italophile. What was wrong with the immigrants’ children that left them so distrustful of their italianità? It was, she knew, the burden of the second generation, who had been forced too swiftly to tear the Old World from themselves and put on the New. They were the sons and daughters ashamed of their illiterate, dialect-speaking forebears—the goatherds and peasants and fishermen who had come over to work and survive and give these very children, the estranged ones, America. Tina was torn between compassion and indignation: She understood him, why couldn’t he understand her?

“Yes, all right, Italy has had all those artists and Verdi and opera and all that. But let me ask you, what good has it done?”

“Well, I suppose you’d say what good does it do me to know Dante and to make the Divine Comedy the base of my future. All I can say is that it’s my way, and I have to be doing what I want and know; otherwise nothing makes sense. It’s like you, Gramp—you loved your business.”

“And what about Weezy?”

“She’s dropped out of everything and just lives as best she can—doing translations or giving English lessons when she needs the money and living very cheaply with a bunch of others like her.”

“Is that any way for her to live?” he asked disgustedly. He was an austere man, a man of propriety.

Again Tina thought of Weezy and their mix of despair and anger at never being able to reach the grandparents: “It’s so weird to have people like them treating me like an idiot!” Weezy would exclaim. Strange indeed, thought Tina, the way they could be so confident that only their lives were worthy of emulation.

“I’d like to see you both married,” her grandmother said with a worried frown.

“Nonna!” Tina said in a tone of annoyance. “I want my life to have some meaning beyond just marrying; I don’t want to be unhappy in the way Mom was. . . .”

“Your mother was never happy, married or not,” Carla retorted. “Your mother, Tina, never knew what she wanted. But you’re more like my mother, the Umbertina for whom you’re named. She was a strong person and she stuck to her guns.”