Self-assurance in others was magnetic to Marguerite. Richard Wareham was someone who had never been alien anywhere: Wherever the Warehams had been, first in England and then for the past three hundred and some years in Virginia, they had been the rootstock, the gentry.

Her answer to his “And you?” was her self-introduction: ex-Catholic, ex-wife, ex-American suburb.

They began to sit together at the pension for meals. They walked about the city together, making purchases for the respective homes they were setting up; she showed him Florence; he took her around to meet friends of friends from back home. They sat around and drank, and she, keeping up with his drinking, began to talk. She told him everything.

“Honey, you’re pure—pure as the driven snow,” he told her. “You’re not out for tail or money or status. All you want is the pat on the back, an affirmation of existence.”

“That’s it, Richard!” She leaned toward him, looking into his clear blue eyes, eyes that had remained, somehow, candid in a face lined and carved with wryness. “I have to know I exist, at least that,” she said intently, searching him to see if it were all a joke. “But how did you know?”

“Honey, that’s the ontological predicament. We’re all in it. We all need our daily pat on the back, along with our daily bread.”

In talk they had become intimate: “This is soul-talk, honey, and I need it as much as you,” he told her. She knew he did. Beneath the chuckles and courtliness, beneath the soutane and chasuble, there was his own brand of fear as real as hers. With all his Wasp assets what explained his being there, alone, a man in his forties, in an outpost of his church and not in the American mainstream where ambition and immediate advantage could have put him?

“I may come to your church, Richard,” she told him. “I may even make an offering to help pay for all the drinking we do.”

“Why that would be great, honey, just fine. I’ll sing and preach just for you.”

“You’re not a preachy man, Richard—Alberto probably was, more than you. And yet you’re not just bluffing—you do believe, don’t you? It isn’t just a line of work for you like any other?”

“Nobody likes their work,” he said, bemused. Then, in his rich, throaty, upper-class voice he said simply, “Yes, I do believe. It’s my problem that no one else does. I’m doing my Father McKenzie bit, honey. You know that Beatles song ‘writing the words of a sermon no one will hear, no one comes near’? That’s me.”