Morrell and I toured the Siena Opera House, where Gabriella had performed her only professional singing role, Iphigenia, in Jommelli’s opera, thanks to which I have the most insane middle name in Chicago. We even met a frail diva, now almost ninety, who remembered Gabriella from their student days together in the conservatory. “Una voce com’una campana dorata.” A voice like a golden bell, as I knew: Gabriella used to fill our five-room bungalow in South Chicago to the bursting point when she sang.

When she arrived in Chicago, a poor, clueless immigrant, Gabriella answered an advertisement for a singer in a Milwaukee Avenue bar, where the backroom boys tried to take off her clothes while she sang “Non mi dir, bell’idol mio.”

My dad had rescued her from that, my dad wandering in for a beer in the middle of a scorching July afternoon and pulling her away from the groping hands of the bar manager. My father had been a Chicago cop, a kind and gentle man who adored my mother from that day forward.

Looking at the Baroque cupids holding up a plaster banner in the Siena Opera, I felt the gulf between the stage and the music, where Gabriella began her life, and the bungalow in the middle of the steel mills where she ended it. How could my father and I have ever been enough to make up for all that Italy’s racial laws forced her to renounce?

That part of the trip had been difficult, but when we left Siena, and Pitigliano, Morrell and I spent a pleasant two months together. It became clear to us both, though, that this trip marked the farewell tour of our affair. We had thought when we planned this vacation that it would deepen our relationship. Since we worked at unusual jobs that kept us from home for long stretches, we’d never spent concentrated time together. As the time came for Morrell to catch his train to Rome and the direct flight to Islamabad, we both realized we were ready to say good-bye.

I flew home from Milan a few days later, sad, wondering what it was that had kept Morrell and me from a deeper, tighter bond. Was I too messy or Morrell too compulsively tidy? Maybe I was too prickly, as some of my friends suggested, for anyone to get close to me. Or maybe, ultimately, each of us reserved our deepest commitments for work. Morrell’s career as a journalist covering international human-rights issues looked so much more glamorous than my own, so much more deserving of a deep commitment. After all, I spend my time looking at frauds and sleazy con artists.