After an outburst of nostalgia in a letter home from college her father had written back in admonishment: “Non sempre è un utile esperienza rivedere i luoghi dove si sono vissute ore di fiaba che sono irrepetibile.” Right. Correct. It’s not always useful to see again the places where one has lived enchanted hours that are unrepeatable. But she clung to the illusion that what she did was in the name of survival, not usefulness.

Her father counseled Yoga. In college she had swiftly taken up pot smoking, protesting, nudeness, and hitching around to other colleges for weekends. She sought friends from Rome like Missy, or Tim Jowers who was at Yale—all of them alienated in the raw new world. The boys from St. Gregory’s in Rome were buddies, not lovers, and they were all clinging together because they were outsider Americans and they felt strange and uneasy in their land that was not precisely their land because so much of their lives had been spent abroad. They hated America and were seduced by it: the great open stretches of the West, where they hitched during spring vacations; the casual friendliness of the people; the simplicity of life. But then there was ugliness, too: the gross cars, the overheated places and bad food, and the hideous Vietnam war.

She was overcome in America by the feeling of extension, of space, which coincided with her own internal feeling of uncontrol, of utter chaos, which, in her prayers, she hoped to be saved from at the last moment by some decree of direction. She put a poem by Thomas Kinsella that said this for her in her wallet:

I choose at random, knowing less and less.

The shambles of the seashore at my feet

Yield a weathered spiral: I confess

—Appalled at how the waves have polished it—

I know that shores are eaten, rocks are split,

Shells ghosted. Something hates unevenness.

The skin turns porcelain, the nerves retreat,

And then the will, and then the consciousness.

Something hates unevenness. That was it, she thought. That’s me.

And she turned it into the classic temperament. I will be a scholar, she said. I will banish unevenness.

And then she met Duke. Jim Frank Dukane from Harvard.

She was returning, sullen, from a Thanksgiving-weekend visit to Gloversville. More than any others, her grandparents made her feel a foreigner in a foreign land, longing for the backward enlightenment of Italy.

In the off-campus house where she lived with five other students and the occasional others who showed up, she had just gotten into her room when she turned back toward the door and saw looking in at her quizzically the lanky fellow with the strawlike hair whom she had seen around and heard called Duke.

“Nice to have you back,” he drawled in his soft, slow southern voice, looking at her intently.

She stared back, still sullen, and said, “Yah.”