Tina went down the hall to her mother’s room to begin going over her things, as her father had asked her to. It was a large room with an oversize bed, where for the past year or so her mother had slept alone—like a mother abbess, her father said. La madre badessa, he called her. She said it was because he snored. Every morning she had awakened to the susurrant fountain in the gardens below and had gotten out of bed to the same stupendous sight. On a long table at the wall opposite the bed were the souvenirs of many auspicious beginnings: the jewel-making books, the bits of interesting stones now used as paperweights that were to have been crafted into belts and necklaces; the jars of photographic stuff that were to have started her on her career. There were boxes of all sorts and shapes holding things. Everything was in order; there were no unsightly piles as if something had been in the works and was now interrupted forever. No, the main surface of the table was clear, still waiting for the work to begin.

Above the writing table, dangling from a piece of yarn, was the tin heart Tina remembered always having been in her mother’s room wherever they had lived. “It’s from my grandmother Umbertina,” Tina had been told as a child. “She wore it when she was a goat girl in Calabria. Someday I’m going to find the place she came from.” Now Tina took the crudely shaped piece and ran her fingers over the hammered design. She wondered how it was worn. Then she knew what she was going to do this summer—she would go to Calabria to find Umbertina. My namesake, she thought; a strong woman who had direction in her life.

Alongside the table was a velvet-covered chaise from some Morosini signora in the Veneto who had used it to recline on after the midday meal as ladies were supposed to do, to read or embroider or receive her husband’s embraces; but in her mother’s household, there was no family dinner at noon and the chaise was more a wistful relic than anything useful.

A dressing table held several more boxes, including a handsome eighteenth-century Venetian toilet-box decorated in découpage that held her mother’s jewelry. Tina opened the box and looked at its contents as she had done since she was a little girl, coveting the beads and bracelets and especially the large ring set with a diamond and two emeralds on interweaving bands of white and yellow gold that was her mother’s engagement ring. Ever since childhood Tina had loved and wanted that ring. “Mom, someday can I wear this?” she would ask. “Someday,” her mother would answer.