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your father so she don’t have
to go back to crawling on her knees to her own father.”
    Aunt Maggie sighed. “Coming to America and not being the designer
she thought she would be was one thing, but being disowned by her own family,
by her own father, for being involved with a
man whose fam ily, although now in America, came from the sud ,
below Napoli, came from niente , nothing, had left her no choice to go
home to Italy.”
    Her mother had come here, wanting to be something more than a wife
and mother? Once she married into the Maschere family did Teresa regret it?
    Aunt Maggie hesitated then, and was quiet for a while. “We were
not good enough for them. That is what she believed. Her family, her brother
Guiseppe, and her sister Elena–they know.” Mary Grace noticed Aunt Maggie tense
up, sighing, and shaking. She should just stop this right now, but Mary Grace
was realizing that she did need to know, as here it was again, missing pieces– why
were the Maschere’s not good enough?
    “What are you talking about not good enough? You said her brother
set it up? Did my mother even talk to her family about me? I don’t understand
Aunt Maggie. What did you do? What did your family in Italy do?”
    There was nothing but questions and more ques tions, or maybe
just one. “My mother was so miserable. Was she always so miserable?”
    Or was it only after having me? This thought Mary Grace did not
voice, could not say out loud.

 
    Gaining or Losing Ground
    Chapter 18
     
    MARY GRACE SPENT another evening drinking two glasses of wine and
then another, and finally a fourth. This is terrible, just terrible. Nothing
about this family is any good! Family? Were we even a family or were we just a
bunch of misfits? She spoke out loud to no one. She spoke into the walls of
her apartment. She went over and over in her head Aunt Maggie’s stories.
    I have to stop. I’m so sick of these ghosts haunting me. Why can’t
I just accept that my mother didn’t love me? But, why? It was her lowest
point. She stayed in bed for the next two days.
    Oh, Gracie, when was the last time you were happy?
    The lake. Into her mind surfaced the last time just she and her father had
gone up to the lake. Dad, you didn’t just
work and drink, you really liked to fish. Re member how you liked to sit
by the water. To sit where it was quiet. Remember, I would draw pictures,
pictures of the ducks and geese on the edges of the lake. I liked to draw every
detail, like how their feet sunk into the muck where the ground was soaked,
draw their feet and beaks, and the distinctions among them. Dad, you were next
to me, fishing, we were quiet together. She smiled remembering her father
asking her what the names were of each of the animals she had drawn. Together
they had named them—stretch neck, crooked beak, and bean head—the last one in
Italian— testa fagioli .
    It was so long since she had thought of it, that she did draw,
that she and Luigi had laughed together. Dad, help me. I did what you asked.
I took care of her. And now I am taking care of Aunt Maggie, but there is so
much I didn’t know!
    I’m not going crazy. Maybe I do need to know who my mother was,
and what made her so miserable all her life. The past doesn’t go away. Didn’t
Aunt Maggie find that out even though she tried to bury her past, it didn’t go
away until she finally exposed it?
    Was Aunt Maggie talking about the love letters or the letters from
Italy to her mom? She kept insisting to Mary Grace about letters from her
mother’s sister, but Mary Grace had yet to find any other letters. She had
searched in Aunt Maggie’s apartment and there was nothing in her dresser
drawers, nothing in the trunk up the attic, nor in the many boxes she found in
the cellar.
    Maybe Aunt Maggie was confusing the letters,
mix ing
them together in her mind.

 
    Part III

 
    Records from Pistoia, Italy
    Chapter 19
     
    MARY GRACE READ about the Tuscany hills be tween Lucca and
Florence where