My grandmother Zerlina wore sack-like cotton housedresses with tiny blue and red flowers printed all over them. She understood English perfectly, but whenever she had something to say she always spoke in Italian, in the vigorous peasant's dialect that she grew up with in Craco, in Basilicata. Her favorite chair was a sturdy mahogany rocker cushioned with small, flattened-out pillows. She would sit there for hours, listening to scratchy, static-interrupted music from the big Philco radio while reading, with a magnifying glass, the tightly printed news columns of Il Progresso. She had a thick, corpulent body, brown eyes, and wore her graying hair in a bun loosely held together with bobbypins. She seemed always weary, weighed down, as if her life were a constant struggle with gravity and it was only with the greatest reluctance that she consented to allow herself to continue in existence. I have no recollection of ever seeing her in the act of smiling. Which is a problem for me, because in the one photograph I have of her—a picture that I myself took with my first camera, a Kodak Brownie—she is standing between my grandfather and my Uncle Phil, and unmistakably she is beaming a smile. It's a smile I can't remember, a smile that somehow I seem to have misplaced. In the photo they're standing in their backyard, in Brooklyn, in front of a trellis full of roses. My grandfather, both hands in his pockets, is not smiling. He has a bemused, baffled expression on his face, as if, in that instant, he became aware that life had somehow played a hideous trick on him, and there was nothing to do but submit. Uncle Phil, too, is without a smile, but there is neither surprise nor acquiescence in his gaze, just a poignant sense of