Table of Contents
The Infinite Passion of Expectation
Nights in the Gardens of Spain
Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?
Introduction
By Jane Vandenburgh
GINA BERRIAULT CAME into life and her own very acute state of sensitivity and awareness during the late 1920s in one of our dimmer coastal towns—Long Beach was then so parochial it was known as “Iowa-by-the-Sea.”
Richard Yates, in his tribute to Berriault’s work, calls her California “that warm and dismaying place.” Here she is, in the title story from this volume, describing a street in just such a town:
Every house had a palm tree and a lawn, and some had a piano inside, a dark, sternly upright object in its own realm called the living room. Delia and her family had no piano and therefore
