No, she knew what her analyst had to be like. He had to be reasonably attractive and agreeable in person or how would she be able to talk? How many times in Washington, during Alberto’s years as Italian cultural attaché there, had she met at parties all types of analysts, none of whom she would have ever considered taking into her confidence. Their neighbor in the suburbs was a psychiatrist—a pig-faced, pompous drear who spit out his lisped greetings so that she felt covered with spittle inside and out. Whoever would meet with such a person was more of a punishment seeker than Marguerite.

Marguerite believed in signs—“synchronization” was the word, Dr. Verdile would tell her later—and he, Elio Verdile, had all the right ones: V for victory and Elio for Helios the sun god, the giver of light and warmth, regeneration. And he lived in old Rome on a narrow slum street filled with the sound of artisans and not in fashionable, snobbish Parioli with the rest of the doctors. He was Sicilian, like her father’s immigrant grandparents. He spoke English, and she had thought this necessary until she discovered from the moment of their first meeting that it was she who preferred not to speak her mother tongue in analysis. The analysis was done in Italian. Am I avoiding my mother, she asked.

To go twice a week to sit and talk and smoke with such an attractive young man was her good fortune right from the beginning. Her going to him through those dark old Rome alleys reminded her of how, back in Gloversville, she had imagined assignations in Europe: the dark hallway of an unsavory-looking building without a portiere; the squalid staircase up to an unheated apartment filled with mysterious doors.

At her initial interview, she had been embarrassed when he had spoken about her going on a journey through a shadowy world whose hidden hazards she could no longer brazen out on her own. The Sicilian Persephone, she thought; down into Hades and then resurrection and rebirth. Life is a dark journey, he continued, at best illuminated only fitfully by a light whose provenance we know nothing of. Helios the sun god? she wondered ironically, until, moved by his composure and confidence and beauty, she let drop her resistance.

“What was your sickness when you had this dream?” he now asked her, coming back to her description of the classroom.

“I had a high fever—flu, I think. Then I got terrible cramps in my stomach and a feeling of being pressed. I had the doctor come, something I never do. He examined me and said there was nothing in my stomach, and right away the cramps dissolved.”

“So it was imaginary.”

“Not the flu—that I really had.”

“Why do you think you imagined those pains in your stomach?”

“But I told you! Everything came at once . . . my feeling lost in Florence . . . my meeting with the lawyer . . . Tina’s letter mixing her upheavals with mine . . . my parents’ constant harping on Tina as they used to do—still do—with me . . . this analysis. All these things—I probably got sick to get away from it all.”