Assunta’s Beans

What do you want to eat today?” I ask my husband. It seems to me a very sweet, solicitous question for a wife to pose, but it never fails to irritate Victor. “I can’t think about it now,” he usually snaps. But on this day he says, “How about Assunta’s beans?” It was said not without mischief, I am sure, because we hadn’t had Assunta’s beans since she had made them last, 45 years earlier.

Before we were married Victor had come to Italy to write and h