Laughing, his face spread in the rippling lines of a wide James Cagney smile, he sang in rich ecclesiastical voice: “‘All the lonely people/where do they all come from?/All the lonely people/where do they all belong?’ That’s me—that’s you, honey.”

She would have reached for him, but for all their talk he had maintained an absolute physical reticence that left her stranded on the shores of that new territory they might have explored together but never would. It was as if, talking, they had sighted those shores but could never decide to leave the comfortable, uninvolved places they occupied next to each other on the ship of their tentative cruisings, to put themselves on land where life began in earnest.

He was a charming host. His chaplain’s residence was ready while she was still staying at the pension waiting to get into her place. He invited her for opening dinner. “Welcome to Turpitude Hall!” he exclaimed of his small ground-floor apartment set in a garden behind a high wall. “Here I am vying in ratty splendor with all the pensions in Florence thanks to the discards of my lady parishioners.”

“My foot! You’re elegant, Richard, look at you—nifty slipcovers and lampshades and even a picture wall. It’s me who’ll be living in genteel poverty, not you. You have all the old dames to dote on you and make you casseroles. That’s why you’re always fussing around them.”

“I like the old. They know their place, finally, and have accepted it. Not like the young, always striving for something—something better or worse, but in any case different. All those young people and their existentialism can beat the be-Jesus out of any man.”

Sometimes Marguerite would stop by his place while he was still in his old college sweat-shirt and pants watering the plants he was succoring through the heavy summer. “It’s not what I’d call a mature garden yet,” he told her, pointing out the empty places between the drooping plants, “but it will get there. I’ve thought of inviting my ladies for a pot party to help fill in the empty part.”

“What kind of pot is that, Richard?”

“Flowerpots, my dear. Unless you can find the other kind, and then after the others go we’ll take a little trip together.”

Marguerite often thought of her mother saying, “The Episcopals are a social crowd. And the higher they are, the more they drink.” It was certainly true. Richard drank like the Irish she remembered at the golf club; then he’d get expansive and tell jokes.