Stone lay on his back, sweating, breathing hard, while Dolce went into the bathroom and came back with a warm face cloth and tended to him.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Yes, indeed,” he replied. “I think I’m ruined for the day; I’ll never get out of bed.”

“You rest, and I’ll fix us some breakfast”, she said, then went away.

Stone lay staring at the ceiling, then drifted off. He was awakened by Dolce getting back into bed and by wonderful smells. He sat up and built a backrest of pillows, and Dolce set a tray in his lap. He stared down at scrambled eggs, sausages, English muffins, orange juice, and a thermos of coffee. The Sunday New York Times was on the bed beside him.

“I could get used to this,” he said, buttering or muffin. He looked over, and Dolce was having melon and coffee. “You fattening me up for something?” The eggs were delicious.

“You don’t gain weight,” she said. “I know all about you; you eat and eat, and stay the same size. How do you do that?”

“I chose my parents well; they were both slim all their lives.”

“If I ate everything my aunt Rosaria put in front of me, I would weigh four hundred pounds,” she said.

“Are you named for her?”

“Yes.”

“Is she your only other relative?”

“Most of my relatives are dead; Mama died last year, and Papa’s two older brothers died a long time ago, when they were in their twenties.”

“In their twenties? Of what?”

“Of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Oh.”

“Papa wasn’t even allowed to go to the funeral; his father shipped him off to Columbia Law School and told everybody he was in Europe, studying. He wasn’t allowed to come to Brooklyn for three years. He was the only student in law school who went to class armed.”

“It’s hard to think of your father doing anything as crude as firing a weapon.”

“He never had to, as it turned out, but Papa is a survivor; he would have done whatever was necessary.” She gazed at him. “It’s a family trait.”

“Did you know your grandfather?”

“No, he died a long time before I was born. Papa was still in his twenties, so he had a heavy burden to bear. He didn’t marry for a long time, for fear of making his wife a widow. It took him years of work to stabilize the situation he inherited. It was a mess.”

“But no longer?”

“No longer. Papa has devoted his life to making the family respectable; that was why he was so upset when I married Johnny.”

“Why did you marry him?”

She laughed. “I was a virgin. With Papa watching over me, it was the only way I could get laid.”

“There must have been more to it than that.”