“You’ll leave,” Missy said. “I know you. Anyway, I called Duke from the airport to say hello before I left and he said he missed you. He sent his love.”

“He should have sent grass,” Tina said glumly. How distancing it was to stand there at that hour and think of Duke in New York, ambling down the paper-strewn, littered, and shabby Broadway up near Columbia to get a fix. How much older and more sinister New York always seemed compared to Rome.

“Missy, do you want a beer?”

“Sure, but then I’ve got to go. They want me back for dinner. Some fat cat from the States is going to be there—it might make my career. Jesus!”

“You’re too much,” Tina said with a smile. “What is your career?”

“Beats me, but I guess it’s something every nice girl should have. At least at home that’s the way they talk. I’d just as soon go on pumping gas in Cambridge, living with Lou, and going to dance classes.”

“That’s what I mean about you—no existential problems.”

“And no bread, either.”

Tina went through the perfect rooms to the kitchen, soothed by the sight of familiar things all in their places, liking the tranquillity of old, known objects that turned up again and again in their homes even though so much was lost with each move.

With each move things had passed from their home to the homes of friends or to strangers who had come in response to an ad to buy. But always a nucleus remained: Morosini family things like the hand-rubbed walnut credenza and the round table with the flatiron scorch mark, the instruments and logs of the Venetian sea captains, the elegant Thonet armchair from the country law-office of some great-uncle, a grandmother’s sewing table, a game table with green baize top and delicate tapered legs, and even nonna Catina’s parchment bound boarding-school notebook with exercises in math, French, and morality.

Opening the door of the giant turquoise American refrigerator with its huge separate freezer compartment, Tina thought of her mother. Her strangeness was everywhere in that dark little Italian kitchen.

It was there in the Italian stove, whose oven was never meant to accommodate a Thanksgiving turkey or bake American birthday cakes but which was subjected periodically to Marguerite Morosini’s wishful thinking. Over the stove hung the gleaming pans of Revere Ware that had followed them over the ocean and back, time and again. Most absurd was the attempt at American kitchen gaiety and efficiency in a land where it didn’t matter, for a kitchen was the maid’s place, and as long as it had a water faucet and some gas burners no one cared in what decor the elaborate meals were produced.