But all Italians were. They darted effortlessly from subject to subject like gorgeous butterflies glittering with wit and daring paradox, never staying long enough to be challenged and caught by the slower, deeper thinkers. . . . What a beautiful, quick people, Marguerite reflected. I am not: I am ponderous. I have not the retort quick, the blandishment supreme, the aphorism ready. They leap around like graceful hares and I am the slow tortuous turtle who will get there eventually but with no class, no performance, no verve. I haven’t the nerve, nor the skill, to make their mistakes. But maybe I’ll learn.

Marguerite wondered if, as Alberto’s wife, holding superb dinners for his friends, she could ever be so brilliant. She tried to think of herself as a handsome, arrogant woman taunting young men and bowing ironically to their exclamations of delight. She would hold salons and wear impeccably made black gowns with a single great jewel. She would be a poet’s wife, Lesbia Purissima, bearing in fierce pride and dignity the pains of her unhappy past.

Tomorrow, she thought, there’s Don Giovanni. In the spring I’ll see Sirmione. It won’t be bad, not bad at all.

All that had led up to the declaration on the temporary bridge across the Arno that windy February night when Alberto proposed to her. She had been prepared.

“I have been in despair,” he told her on the bridge. “I have seen my family disappear and my friends die in the war. I have felt alone in the world. And then you came like an unexpected gift into my life when I had given up all hope of finding the woman I could love and with whom I could start a new family, new hope. What you have told me about your life proves nothing more than what I knew from the beginning—you are pure, limpid, and serene. You have not only sensibility and freshness, you have a deep innocence that can’t be touched by any Gillo. The rest of what makes a woman, maturity, you will learn through marriage, as I will learn—or try to—your American optimism.”

It couldn’t be wrong if he needed her, too, she thought.

When she wrote home of her plans, her parents wrote back that it was completely out of order for her to marry a man they didn’t know, and typical of her. “Italy has no future and never will,” her father wrote. And her mother: “There is the family to account to, and all our friends. What will they think if we don’t have the wedding here? It looks like you’re running away again, or have something to hide. You owe us some consideration.”

“This marriage is mine,” she wrote back with little grace.

23. Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

Marguerite’s pursuit of culture had amused Alberto when she was living in Florence before their marriage.