Her translation of his poetry was securing him a name in the States and even reverberating back to Italy to reinforce his literary position there. His cultural work in Washington was satisfying and brought him important contacts. But Alberto himself had not changed. He remained what he always was: the man from Venice who was proud of his traditional ties. And if this acceptance of himself was essential because of the serenity and confidence it gave him, it also bound him to the past and to a narrowness of view. He saw no reason to explore, to try and discard, to range. Restlessness, he said, was the reason for Marguerite’s unhappiness.

“No,” she said. “Staying still is.”

Alberto wrote of provincial Veneto life with a nostalgia attuned to other times and other people. For their time he was irrelevant, a backwash. When Cesare Servi, the Italian critic, wrote that Alberto’s work “stood out scandalously from the modernity of the rest of contemporary Italian writing,” Alberto couldn’t have been more in agreement. That’s how he wanted it.

Their third child, a son named for Alberto, was born after they had been in the States a few years. One summer when Marguerite took the children to Gloversville for a visit to the grandparents, she overheard a conversation in a beauty parlor that seemed to highlight the hurt of her life, the unfairness of being left behind while Alberto thrived. Hadn’t he promised to make a person of her?

“Why don’t you go to a charm school?” a woman at the beauty shop was saying to the young male hairdresser who worked on her in the chair next to Marguerite’s. “It’s too much to expect someone to live with you thirty, forty years or so and you’re boring. It’s not fair. Everyone should improve themselves, do something, not just stand there and bore people to death. Especially the ones who’ve got to live with you.”

“You’ve put me right in the dumps,” said the hairdresser. And Marguerite with him.

“Well, everyone should try to have some personality,” the woman continued. “With all the articles there are now in Reader’s Digest and everything, you don’t even have to read a whole book—just get the gist of it in a magazine.”

“I guess I’m just tired when I get home,” said the hairdresser.

Marguerite compared that exchange with Alberto’s offhandedness. “I love you as you are,” he’d tell her, “with all your defects.”

She felt it was his global acceptance of her that was her ruin. He never sharpened her, needled her; he took her for what she was, and if she was nothing, that was all right with him too. But not for her. She wanted him to want her better than she was. She wanted the fulfillment of her old college prophecy: “Someday you’ll find your place in the world.”