Marguerite felt sick and alone. Richard’s drinking and vapid socializing were exhausting her. Before falling asleep, in the last effort of thought, it came to her that Richard’s waspness was nothing new. In another form it was Alberto’s thousand years of Venetian family tradition all over again. If nothing was ever going to be shaggy enough, why, for Christ’s sake, had she given up Alberto only to make an arrangement with Richard? To be Mrs. Wareham instead of Signora Morosini when it was all the same thing, without, however, Alberto’s warming physical need of her?

She hadn’t been able to see Richard before for his charming accent and James Cagney smile, for the First Families of Virginia pin he pulled out to show her, for the stories of Aunt Maybelle, and the feeling of honeysuckled verandas at the ancestral home. Richard tooling around in a red Thunderbird, Richard sparkling with wit and courtliness, Richard living on private income like someone from a Trollope novel.

It just wasn’t shaggy enough.

Weezy had already gone to Rome by train for the long All Saints’ holiday weekend with Alberto when Marguerite decided to drive down.

The drive down was uneventful until she entered the city. Then, because she had left Florence in midmorning, she found herself entering Rome at exactly the worst time—the critical ora di punta, when the intensity of normal traffic (if anything mobile in that overtaxed conglomerate of jammed streets, fumes, cries, honking, insults, collisions, grazed pedestrians, crazed drivers, virulent policemen—if any of such could be called normal) was quadrupled by everyone’s going home for the midday closing of everything.

Marguerite found herself on an abnormally sweltering October 31st under the noon sun in an enormous traffic jam, before, behind, to the right, to the left, as far as she could see.

A bus strike had augmented the usual throngs of Rome cars to a gigantic monstrosity, an incubus blown up to absurdity. Jean-Luc Godard’s end of the world.

After fifty-five minutes of slow passage down Via Po, she found herself stuck in the narrow funnel that directed cars from Via Pinciana to Via Veneto; stuck there in the giant pile-up not really caring much anymore if she ever got out. It could be the solution to everything: buried alive in a Rome traffic jam. Her remains to be added to the other strata of history, to be excavated someday in a fever of excitement—and all it would be was she, Mad Marguerite, the white rabbit, late of Florence, having tried not to be too late for Rome.