And then Barzini’s voice, doubly amplified, hit the night: “The winner of this year’s Strega is Tomaso Campo with his A Spiral of Mist.” He had beaten Massimo by twenty votes, and in a great glare of light was being photographed for television. Some boos came from the tables. Marguerite felt dizzy. Then the sound of music came from the nymphaeum and everyone rose to dance, dissent softly dying.

As the five long-legged hippie players beat out a frenetic rhythm on their red electric guitars, oblivious of the machinations of the evening in the excitement of their own sensations, Marguerite looked down from the sinuous curving balustrade to the incredible scene below. The scruffy hippies had set up their instruments in the niches around the lily-pool. A girl in a tiny square of gleaming plastic skirt and long hip-boots was gyrating to the music and singing into the microphone in her hand. The elegant people were descending the twin staircases to do the shake, and nothing was out of place, nothing jarred. The old and beautiful biscuit-colored stone of the balustrades, the spears of silhouetted pines, the mossy rocks of the pool, the carved reclining figures of Father Tiber and Father Arno, the invisible shadows of Julian III and his cardinals—they all lent their benevolent presence.

And I used to wonder about Puritan John Milton being the guest of a cardinal in Rome, she thought. In this land where everything is accommodated. Where nothing is resolved because it’s all an unfolding spiral.

“Well, this is finished, if God is willing, for another year,” Alberto was saying. “What do you say, Giorgio and Angela? Leone and Aurelia?”

“I say let’s direct ourselves toward Pallaro’s for fettucine and end the evening on a serious note.”

“What evening? It’s already morning, Giorgio,” said Angela.

“All the more reason! Let’s go. . . .”

As she got up to leave, taking Alberto’s arm to steady herself, somewhere from her memory Marguerite heard the pursy-mouthed refrain of her convent-school days. “Who pays the fiddler?” Sister Theresa was saying grimly to the class of girls in their blue-serge uniforms. “The girl pays the fiddler.”

Nothing had changed.

33. Part Three: Tina 1950 –

Part Three

Tina, 1950–

34. Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-four

The telegram arrived at the 1920s Tudor house in the good part of Gloversville on a day when Sam Scalzo was getting ready to meet his golf foursome at the club and Carla Scalzo was thinking of going downtown to a sale. Her grandparents recounted the whole thing to Tina when they saw her at Christmas.

After the shock wore off, they agreed it was typical of Marguerite. Their daughter had always managed to upset them.

Sam had answered the ring at the door and taken the overseas cable. It was from Rome and read: “Margherita killed in car crash STOP Weezy is with me in sorrow STOP Advise Tina compassionately. Alberto.”