Curious, Tina thought now, how attached her mother had been to drawers and boxes and to the idea of having everything contained, in place; she who tore it all apart so readily, ready to move on, sending them winging like birds of passage on the flights of her inquietude.

Against the far wall was the armadio that housed her mother’s fashionable Rome wardrobe. Tina opened it. She pulled out a rich wine-colored suede skirt and put it on, remembering the first sight of her mother in that skirt with her wine-colored boots and how she had envied her. She once had envied everything about her mother—her clothes, her life, that perfect room. “Why do you have to have the best room in the house?” she had said when they first moved there, knowing how silly she was to say that, because all parents always had the largest and best room and what she was really saying in her petulant way was, “Why isn’t that me sleeping in the large matrimonial bed with a husband and being the queen of this beautiful place?”

Instead, she and Weezy had always shared a room until Giovanna had been fired, and then Tina had insisted on having a room of her own and Weezy had gotten the tiny maid’s room. Weezy! That silly waif . . . that waifish revolutionary! At least Tina would end up with something after she finished her studies.

As if her thoughts had summoned her sister, Tina heard the front door open and Weezy come down the hall.

“Weezy, I’m in Mother’s room,” she called. “I’m going through her clothes. Papà wants us to pick out what we want and pack up the rest to give away. What do you want? I’m going to take this suede skirt.”

“You can have it all,” Weezy said. She came in, slight, shabby, carrying her art gear, and sat down on the huge bed. She was dressed in a cotton skirt and an old shirt, and her bare legs were pale and unshaven. Her hair hung loose over her shoulders and bangs covered her forehead. She was fair-skinned—as white, she joked, as Carpaccio’s Venetian whores.

“You could be more cooperative,” Tina said.

“I should be more like you,” Weezy answered sarcastically.

“I’m not about to take all this stuff back to the States,” Tina went on. “Besides, how can you live in Rome and not want to look and dress better?”

“This is how I feel like looking and dressing,” Weezy said pointedly. “Anything else wouldn’t be me—it’d be you or Mom. You’d better take it all. I’m going to Spain and then maybe over into Morocco this summer. After that I think I’ll move up to Bologna. Papà will probably go back to Venice.”