Tina was thinking of how complicated things were between men and women and how things always got in the way, yet how, in the main, things had seemed mostly good with her mother and father despite the fact that they had both committed the great error of their times—total romanticism. As a child Tina had often heard her father’s joke about America making her mother acceptable to him in marriage; as a southern Italian she would have been too foreign, he said.

“Money helped too,” Marguerite would add sarcastically. “While the Morosinis were sinking with Venice, Umbertina was on the way up in America. Money is a great equalizer.” The Venetian Morosinis might have had centuries of civilization and walnut furniture, but Tina’s mother had had youth and optimism, and when Alberto Morosini, so much older than she and from such a different background, had said they would be artists together and asked her to marry him, she accepted. Then they struggled with the mismatch until one of them gave up.

But how do you know when it’s right? Tina wondered.

She went back to the terrace and stood looking out over the ledge. Farthest away was the white speck of the Pauline fountain on the Janiculum, where she could imagine Garibaldi, mounted, looking down at the city; in the middle distance the dome of the Pantheon was like the shell of a giant turtle basking in the reddish light; nearby were the treetops and watchtower of the Quirinale; unseen, just beyond Palazzo Barberini, Bernini’s triumphant Triton raised the conch shell of sensuality to his lips and sounded its notes louder than all the traffic that swirled about him.

She turned to go in, satisfied. As she did, her eye caught the overhead straw matting, which was sagging, and she thought, It won’t last till fall. The terrace was perfect, yes, but no lighting for night had been thought of; as in all their homes, there was this visible edge of impermanence, of things falling apart. Was the matting made of straw instead of something more durable because her mother’s taste kept her to the natural? Or was it because when setting up this terrace she would have sensed the futility of spending money for anything more permanent, since in a few years, at most three or four, they would be moving on? That’s what they’d always been, Tina mused—campers on the move, vagabonds with aristocratic baggage and topnotch pots and pans to drag behind them as they traveled.