Congratulations, Lombardi!! I would just like to state some things quickly again.

• Mike returned from the war, he's now in the cold, dreary chill of New England, at an Ivy League school.
• Now he was away from his family, his food and his women.
• In his lonliness he falls in love with a college girl who just HAPPENS to be a W.A.S.P. because not many Italian girls are there.
• Going with Kay is a result of the above as well as another act of rebellion against his father's traditions, and an effort to further distance himself from his family.
• Kay was not just a different culture, she was a different race. Mike didn't slap her when she admitted the abortion, he slapped her when she spoke with contempt about "...this Sicilian thing!"
• Mike told his father "I'm with YOU now", and that means in all ways.
• Even if Apollonia would have had a moustache , she brought the life and fun out of Mike, and she would have understood the life of "The Family".
• Mike resigned himself to Kay in order to have kids. There was affection but NO passion.
• He was thinking with his penis with KAY in college, NOT with his beautiful Sicilian, funloving woman, the symbol (Tony D said it well) of the purity of the traditional Sicilian life.

I won't say more.But I cannot believe this thread even got started... And let me be even more frank just to show you that I'm not a hard-hearted man, and it's not all dollars and cents. She was beautiful; she was young, she was innocent. She was the greatest--HEY HEY ...here I go again...lemme getta holda myself...I gotta go. Sorry.