Little by little she became convinced that this place was not with Alberto. One Christmas vacation she went off to Bermuda alone for a week. To rest, she said. And when Alberto came to pick her up at the airport, she told him on the drive back home that it was time for them to quit. That night he cried, saying she was all he had and loved in the world; and she couldn’t stand that, so she stopped thinking of real solutions and imagined others.

Flashback scene: At the Senior Banquet she is in an evening dress hunting for her place-card at the long table. Each name on the cards is accompanied by an appropriate remark. Marguerite finds and reads her card: “Someday you’ll find your place in the world.” Everyone laughs. Zoom in on present scene: The lovely still-young widow is dressed all in white at the funeral of her husband, noted poet and critic. She is graciously receiving the condolences of eminent Italians; many writer friends of her defunct husband come up and embrace her warmly. His close friend, the noted womanizer Leone Eccli, gives an extra pressure to her hand as he kisses her on both cheeks and looks into her eyes. Her husband has died of a heart attack after the great emotion of hearing that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. . . .

What had marriage become? Not even the fury of hate or violent unhappiness. A vague discontent. Middle-age malaise. Scenes from Cheever stories.

“Andiamo, bambina mia,” Alberto would say when he saw her dispirited. “You love me, too—you just won’t admit it to yourself. I would do anything to make you happy; you know that. But it’s you who resist seeing the happiness you have. You’re always wanting something impossible. You must accept what you have—and first of all, yourself.”

He wanted her to be happy much in the same way her father had.

“I’m not your sister or some old cousin in Venice,” she would retort. “For me the unexamined life is not worth living—Aristotle!”

“No, Socrates. You Americans know nothing of philosophy, but you should at least get your facts right.”

“Don’t give me that sarcasm!”

“But what is it you need to be happy? Don’t you have everything?”

Fifteen years after she had decided on marriage over love, if you asked Marguerite Morosini what it had brought her she would have answered bitterly: being a hausfrau, an au pair, mother hen, sister goose, and pumpkin pie; the shadow and steppingstone of her husband, a victim of multiple cultural shock, an innocent and trusting American stooge to cynical Italian guile, Daisy Miller to Alberto’s Machiavelli. An ex-American, a non-Italian, a crossbreed.

Or wasn’t it that she wanted to be just that—unfixed and directionless, even in her aspirations? A wanderer and perpetual wonderer.

24. Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen