“I remember my grandmother Umbertina,” her mother used to say, “but I could never speak to her. She spoke another language. We could only look at each other and smile. Then she’d tweak my cheek. All my life I’ve missed speaking to her; she died when I was thirteen.”

Tina was high-strung and apprehensive; shadows of the precariousness of things were embedded in her as if the hold she had on life were always up for grabs. There were threats to her in everything: distant earthquakes, floods, wars, and epidemics. And when she learned that President Coolidge’s son had died from a blister on his heel that became infected, she thought of how tenuous her—anyone’s—life really was. A matter of ill-fitting sneakers. She was intensely self-centered and pavid, she excelled in what she did, and thoughts of death were never far from her.

Womb-shock, she thought—some indelible fear of not being born must have imprinted her forever and created that strong bond between her and her mother. Tina had always wanted to make up to her mother for everything: for the grandmother she couldn’t speak to, for the parents who didn’t understand her, for the husband who was too old.

Now, as she heard of her mother’s death, she sobbed out, “Oh, Mother, I’m sorry!” She was sorry for herself; she couldn’t think of life without her.

Duke came back to the apartment and he had some grass. He rolled joints and she clung to him. She knew, she said, how her mother had died; she was driving over the mountains to Ancona to see her lover.

“You know,” Tina related, huddled against him, as if telling a story, “I have this incredible memory of the time I first met Massimo—that was her lover. It was after junior year and I had been all summer with you in Tennessee instead of going back to Rome. Finally, papà insisted I come home. Before I left we tossed the I Ching—you remember, Duke?—and it said this incredible thing: ‘Do not be sad, it is fitting to be like the sun at its zenith.’ So I went back and there was my mother, whom I love a lot but have this terrible thing that I’d started to fight with her, too, and I didn’t know why except maybe because she wanted to monopolize me and strap me with her own hopes for herself, and I wanted to be with you. She was exasperating at those times! Still, I knew she had to be handled carefully: Papà kept talking about her sickness because of all her resentments against him, her parents, the headmaster at St. Gregory’s where she worked—everyone, it seemed, was trying to do her in, trying to keep her from being the great person she was supposed to be. But no one could figure out who she was supposed to be.