Janice and I decided to look for every Antonello da Messina in Sicily.  Mostly portraits, they had a noble clarity and the suggestion of a quick intimacy that was obviously more than one could hope for with persons so grand.  There weren’t very many of them and Sicily wasn’t very large; but there were twenty of them and Sicily, if you subdivide its size by its means of transportation, is five times as big as the United States.  We were looking at inaccessibility, and no doubt about it.  There was one supposed Antonello hung in a chapel on the side of a cliff I couldn’t imagine how anyone but a goat would manage to get there.  Four of the paintings were in cities that were easy to reach.  The rest were finally it seemed randomly scattered over that savage island, which was not exactly organized to assist one in the task of seeing them.

          We had to content ourselves with seeing six, which wasn’t bad, given our limited means, of money, transportation, and time.  My father was propositioned by a young Sicilian man who offered him sex in exchange for money, but my father refused.  My mother encouraged the local “artists-for-tourists” by purchasing samples of their work.  Janice’s and my daughter, Melissa, was only a tiny little girl then (two years old) and she was featured in many, many photographs, most of them shot on the elegant grounds of a large hotel built into or inspired by a monastery—I forget its name.  What do you think about this situation, Stuart? my mother said.  What situation? said my father.  The fact that Kenny and Janice pay so little attention to us?  Melissa!  Melissa! she called the tiny girl.  Come back from the edge of that garden.  She might fall off.  My father went and picked up Melissa.  He was wearing a white suit and smoking a Lucky Strike.  At home he had a Buick but here he had a rented Peugeot.  I don’t know why he didn’t have a Fiat but he had a Peugeot.  Stuart!  What, Lillian?  My father was holding Melissa now by the hand and he was smiling as she was attempting to lead him around.  This way! this way, Dumpa! she said.  Well, you haven’t answered my question, said my mother.  Well, Lillian.  My father smoked.  At this moment Janice and I appeared around the hotel bend.  We found a new Antonello, I said, and some peaches, Janice said.  Here, look!  I’ve never tasted anything so delicious in my life, said my mother.  Janice picked up Melissa and gave her a big kiss.  Hello, Baby!  Mamam mama, Melissa said, agitating and pointing.  There was something she wanted Janice to see.  Two rabbits were holding completely still in the garden.  A blue-and-red feathered bird—what was it? it couldn’t be a parrot—landed near them and still they didn’t move.  Oh, how wonderful! Janice said.  Then she hesitated, and my mother changed her facial expression.  We shouldn’t go any closer or they’ll be frightened.  How was your morning, Lillian? Janice said, holding tight to one hand of Melissa and approaching my mother’s chair.  At this, my mother got up, raising herself as if it were difficult and saying something like Oooohf!  You don’t know what it’s like to get old, she said.

          Janice and I looked beyond the family’s doings to the exquisite tone, pathos, dramatic poses, and coloring of Antonello’s paintings.  As often as not, we were walking about with some form of the following sentence in our heads: “Antonello introduced easel painting into Italy.”  He found it in Holland.  That meant that, before him, everything that was painting in Italy had been frescoes or paintings on wood.  Antonello ruined painting—frescoes were better!  Antonello saved painting!  Where could it have gone, that wall-dependent art?  These ideas were nourishment to us.  A wide-brimmed hat above her, and with my father standing at her side, my mother in the hotel garden breathed the Sicilian air.