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strangers on streetcars.”
    “But I didn’t, and what trouble was I going to get into? He was a very nice boy, otherwise why would he insist I sit down? Besides, he was on crutches.”
    “As if that matters! Grace, you remember Pearlie Kulick, and the boy who’d been in the accident.”
    Pearlie Kulick was a name Bea had never heard. Still, she didn’t ask about Pearlie, or the boy, or even the accident—since if she were to ask, the story would doubtless prove unsuitable for children’s ears. This was another conversational peculiarity of Mamma’s, especially in Grace’s presence: she was forever alluding darkly to people and anecdotes unfamiliar to Bea and then refusing to elucidate. You might almost suppose, given how many unspeakable stories she knew, that Mamma over the years had encountered nobody who wasn’t a dope fiend, a wife beater, a sexual deviant, a shoplifter, a floozy, a confidence man, a heartless seducer—just as you might spend weeks in Aunt Grace’s company and conclude that she’d never met anyone who wasn’t kindly, generous, sympathetic, well-intentioned. How could the two of them be sisters?
    Yet they were and—perhaps more to the point—each was the only life long family the other had. Bea’s Grandpa and Grandma Schleiermacherhad died too long ago for Bea to remember either clearly. There had been no other Schleiermacher children—just the two girls, Sylvia and her eleven-months-younger sister, Grace—and the only Schleiermacher cousins were settled way out in California. Given, also, that Uncle Dennis had no immediate family nearby (only a half brother, in New Jersey), and that Papa was an only child, it was logical that the Poppletons and Paradisos got together as often as they did: most every Saturday, and sometimes weekdays as well. Likewise it made sense that Grace had chosen to ignore the whole issue of her older sister’s jealousy, blithely fending off an endless series of digs, accusations, slights, complaints.
    Yet this was to presuppose that Aunt Grace actually identified them as such. Really, there was no saying how much she understood. Contemplating her now (noting the solemn if sympathetic way Grace shook her head over poor, mysterious Pearlie Kulick), you might swear that here was a woman who embodied the notion that petty sniping cannot exist among those grand enough to surmount it.
    After the men returned, empty-handed, and Stevie emerged blue-lipped from the lake, the seven of them settled around the picnic table. This moment was always eagerly awaited: the unveiling of Aunt Grace’s picnic basket. She wasn’t merely a marvelous cook. Her things always looked so pretty.
    When Bea was occasionally asked where her passion for art originated, the obvious answer was from the Paradisos. In addition to being a fine builder, Papa was a master craftsman. The wooden pull-toys he’d constructed for his children when they were little—a lamb for Bea, an owl for Edith, and for Stevie a rooster whose wings waggled when you dragged it behind you—were extraordinary. And Papa’s father, Grandpa Paradiso, had once been (long ago, back in Italy, before his health broke) a genuine sort of artist who specialized in those trompe l’oeil effects so dear to the Italian imagination. (Bea had seen examples in books.) Grandpa Paradiso had adorned simple houses and he had embellished palazzi. He was a kind of muralist. He’d painted windows opening out of nonexistent rooms, doors leading into nonexistent corridors, shrubs bordering nonexistent gardens. Yes, at one time he’d been a celebrated artist, up and down the coast of Liguria, in Italy, cradle of the greatest art the world has ever seen.
    But there was an art-loving side to the Schleiermacher family, too, as embodied in Aunt Grace, whose visual flair surfaced in unexpectedbyways. Her house brimmed with curiosities that had enchanted Bea’s childhood: peacock feathers, a pink blown-glass snail whose shell was revealed as