I’d tell myself that my parents, Salvatore and Mary Carducci, didn’t settle in one of the Little Italys on the East Coast but went on to Minnesota because everyone there was so blond. The truth is they came from a small town in the north of Italy, and everybody from there either went to Argentina or the United States, and those who came to America passed right through New York and went on to Duluth because all the others from their village had gone there. My father, a refined-looking man, always wore his fedora at a slight tilt. Mr. Proud used to laugh when he referred to people who came from Naples as “four-legs” and from Sicily as “sheep lovers.” He called me his Principessa, and implanted the idea that what I needed was an Italian boy who didn’t look Italian. My father, who, according to my mother, always had the smarts for business, didn’t want to do what the other Italians were doing, fruit and vegetables or a barber shop. He had what he called “a real American idea,”
