In New York she felt competitiveness throbbing in the air and became frenetic because of so much going on, because of the sense of space to fill. In Rome she was squelched by the sense of time: Everything had already been thought of and done—it was time to rest and savor.

“You know, Missy, papà’s trying to get me to stay on in Rome with him instead of going back to Columbia in the fall. He says I can do better in the classics over here—get a fellowship at the Academy, or go to the University of Rome. And what can I say? In a practical way he’s right. He’s trying to hold me because Weezy is going off; she’s already made her declaration. As a family we’re finished.”

“It happens to all families, Tee, sooner or later. I haven’t felt like a real part of my family since I went away to college. I come back because it’s a free place to hang out for a while and I love Rome.”

“See that oleander, Missy,” Tina said, pointing to a flowering white plant that stood in a huge terra-cotta pot in the center of the terrace. “Every time my mother brought guests out here she’d say her little joke: ‘There’s a Spanish proverb,’ she’d say, ‘that in the house where the oleander blooms, the girls of the house don’t marry. I have two daughters and I can never tell whether to get rid of the oleander or the daughters.’ ”

At Columbia in her library cubicle, Tina would think of the blossoming oleander. Would she or Weezy ever marry? Weezy, according to her radical-feminist principles, had said she never would accept an obsolete bourgeois institution. But Tina couldn’t tell. Symbolically there were implications about the oleander that perhaps her mother hadn’t realized. Did it mean that in the kind of home Marguerite Morosini set up, her daughters were deliberately warned against marriage? Was it her way of saying, “My daughters, keep the plant which is pleasure and shun marriage which is prison”? For the oleander was always there, while her parents’ marriage had become more tenuous than its falling blossoms.

“Look at this place!” Tina said to Missy, leaning over the ledge. “I’d have to be crazy to leave it.” Her eyes took in the fountains and gardens and noble backside of Palazzo Barberini, whose serene proportions filled the view from this last of her mother’s homes. The top-floor apartment, though in the center of Rome, was removed from the monstrous traffic, the noise, the throngs on the too-narrow sidewalks, and the overload of sweating, badly dressed tourists who added to the summer temperature. It was a time when, if her mother were here, they would be going to the Marche.