How Johnny knew about this . . . well, I suppose Frank had told him . . . These visits to Frank’s uncle, they weren’t something I liked to talk about much, nor did Frank. We dreaded them, but we had to go. Like my husband, Whiting was a writer, though of an entirely different nature: he wrote about religious issues and the crisis confronting the Catholic Church. The reason we went . . . Though the clergy was not allowed personal possessions, it wasn’t uncommon in certain circumstances for them to administer the inheritance of their relatives’ heirs, particularly—as in Frank’s situation—if the principal would revert to the Church. This was the case with Whiting. He controlled Frank’s stipend, his only real income: a dwindling inheritance his parents had left years before and placed under the uncle’s control.

“So . . .” my brother said.

How my brother looked at me then, I can’t explain. The way we are with each other, he knows things a brother might not usually know. The day before—to avoid prying eyes: the press, the palazzo staff-—he’d taken me on his Vespa down the Appian Way to where Paolo waited in his car, just outside the Aurelian Wall. It was the boundary of the old city, beyond which the ancients had buried their dead. Paolo and I went off behind the graves. All the while, my brother waited on his scooter.

“He wants to see you again,” my brother insisted. “Especially since tomorrow he’s going to Florence, to meet with Isabella’s family about the estate. He might be in Florence for a while . . . If we go now, you’ll have time . . .”

“I don’t know.”

I was conscious of how the light filtered through the flowers on the trellis, and of the sounds of a fountain bubbling nearby, the people muttering their gossip at the table. I heard the passersby on the street, the buses, all the noisy mess of Rome. I closed my eyes. He reached across the table. I should have resisted, but I didn’t. I was already with him, on the back of his scooter, darting through the shadows. I felt the dampness between my legs. I saw myself disappear behind the stones. I heard myself moan, and later I brushed the grass stains from my skirt.

12.