Sacred Time Read Free Page A

reach the sand—more afraid than he is of drowning—he asks her name, Natalina, relieved to hear that she, too, is Italian, and then proposes to her while the tide is still pulling them out.
    It has become the story of their marriage.
    And it was not long before they had their first child, Victor, named after Victorien Sardou, who’d written the play that my grandfather’s favorite opera, Tosca, was based on. And since my grandfather loved Puccini’s operas above all other operas, it only followed that the girl, born two years after Victor, would be called Floria.
    My father and Aunt Floria liked to tease their parents about that first swim, how they had made it last because they got to touch each other in ways that would have been inappropriate had they just met on land.
    â€œIt would have destroyed Natalina’s reputation,” my grandfather would say.

    Riptide continued to swim, one mile every morning, in the pool of the building where her sister, Camilla, shared an apartment with Mrs. Feinstein. Both worked as teachers in Manhattan, but Mrs. Feinstein didn’t travel and saved her money for a Persian-lamb coat and elegant furniture. Their apartment had a fireplace and was two blocks from the East River on 86th Street.
    Sometimes I’d wear my swimsuit instead of underpants to Sunday mass, and afterwards Riptide would take me to Manhattan. I liked being on the Jerome Avenue El because it went by apartments and I’d see people cooking or sleeping or watching television. Whenever there was a game at Yankee Stadium, people on the El would stand up and lean toward the windows on the right, catching a moment of the game.
    Uncle Malcolm liked to take me to baseball games. Usually the twins would skutch, and he’d tell them, “No girls allowed at Yankee Stadium.”
    â€œI got us the best seats in the house that Ruth built,” he said the first time he invited me.
    Everything was exciting that afternoon: coming into the courtyard, where Uncle Malcolm bought me a program; going through the turnstiles, where he presented our tickets to the ticket takers; following him up steps so steep I really had to climb, steps to the top bleachers up in heaven; and squeezing into seats that were grimy and sticky from stale beer.
    â€œFrom here we can see everything that’s going on, not just part of the field—” He motioned to the box seats close to the third-base line. “—like those poor schmucks over there, who have to keep moving their heads.”
    I loved being this high up, loved the noise, the scoreboard with the numbers lit up, the vendors yelling: “Hot dogs, peanuts, soda, here.”
    Uncle Malcolm showed me how to fill out the program with a pencil, play by play, who got a strike, who got a ball. A couple of times he tapped the shoulder of the man in front of us. “Could I just borrow your binoculars for a second for my kid here?”
    He bought us peanuts and Coca-Cola and beer, nudged me so I’d shout whenever he shouted. Such noise…I’d never heard such noise before, shouting and fighting and vendors yelling, while I sat in our best seats, feeling hot and stuffed and thrilled.

    Great-Aunt Camilla’s pool was in the basement, across the hall from the trash room, and the lockers were rusty and stank of chlorine and rotting swimsuits that people had forgotten. Riptide and I would dive into the murky green water, chase each other’s toes, shriek with joy when we’d startle each other by surfacing unexpectedly.
    My father laughed when I figured out one day that, by swimming one mile a day, Riptide could swim to Italy in nine years.
    â€œShe’s the kind of woman who might just do that,” my mother said.
    â€œI’d rather take an ocean liner,” Great-Aunt Camilla said.
    Now and then Great-Aunt Camilla and Mrs. Feinstein would join us in their pool and swim like real grown-ups, their bodies long and narrow, so