“No, Duke, I can tell. She was always reckless and not paying any attention to traffic or anything. I’d get very nervous as a kid and say ‘Mom, watch out’ and she’d say ‘Don’t bother me, I’m thinking.’ God! I’d be petrified! She’d go through stop-signs, make U-turns, drive as fast as she wanted, and act as if she didn’t have to obey any law. I remember when she got her license taken away for a while and that was terrible, ’cause my father hates to drive and she wouldn’t put up with not being allowed to drive, so she’d take the car anyway. It was this defiance she had—which was also a way to taunt my father because she thought he was too cautious.” Tina gave back the joint Duke had passed her. “But it was no accident. It was in the books from long ago.”

“Tina. It was a mountain road on a rainy day. It could have happened to anyone.”

“Yes, but it happened to her, and I bet, before the lights went out in her brain forever . . . I just bet, she had time to think, Well, I’m finally out of it!”

Tina gave way to sobbing. Then she became sick. As she lay back in bed, she thought with longing of her father.

In the years of separation from her family in Rome, first at Bryn Mawr and now at Columbia, distance had helped her love them all. In Rome it was a different story; it was hard, then, to put up with her father’s old-fashionedness. And every time Tina got used to a place, she had to leave: She got to Italy, hated it, loved it, then had to leave for America, hated it, loved it, and so back to Italy.

She had a recurrent dream of some idyllic crossroads in an unnamed part of Italy where a white villa stood on a hill surrounded by green, near water. Was it the crossroads of her life—this way to America, or that way to Italy? She didn’t know, except that the vision was more than a dream; it was the dim recall of something she had seen as a child while on a trip with her parents across the north of Italy. Where had they passed a crossroads? she would repeatedly ask her mother. And her mother would say, “I wonder if you mean Sirmione on Lake Garda, where we visited the ruins of what’s called Catullus’ villa.”

Was that the moment she had become a classicist? Tina wondered. Or a split personality?

Rome became another dreamplace she carried off to the wilds of America; and there, burrowed into modernity and high-speed highways, and rebellions and vast space and too much of everything, she nursed the dream, fearing with each return that it would get shabbier.