“Oh, Weezy,” said Tina, genuinely moved, “it’s as if we’ve all come unstuck now that Mother’s not here. It’s as if we won’t even be a family anymore.”

“Families are the assholes of the world.”

“Oh, you’re so cool!” Tina said. “Remember how you used to go around quoting French aphorisms when you were going to Sainte Dominique? Well, as Molière said, there are fagots and fagots—meaning there are families and families, and ours is different.”

“That’s right,” said Weezy. “This family’s all crazy in different degrees.”

“Wait till you’re off wherever you’re going, you’ll miss this to come back to. How can papà leave this beautiful place!”

“It’s too big and it’s too expensive,” Weezy said dryly. “And papà never liked Rome, anyhow. He’ll be happy back in Venice living with zia Lauretta and working on his dramatic poem.”

Tina contemplated her sister. Weezy was pulling the strands of her long hair, twisting her face around to view the ends, to see if they were split. Her hair was lovely and thick, abundant, with warm auburn lights. It was the best thing about her. A cute face, Tina thought, but childish and vague-looking. An Italian girl would have known how to make that face interesting, taking advantage of plainness by becoming clever and using grace instead of beauty to charm.

Weezy the weasel, Tina used to tease her as a child. And there was something weaselly about her, something furtive and secretive that made her father call her his mysterious daughter. Tina thought she knew the type, she had seen it in the States: the dropouts, the superior beings who were above everyone else in sensibility and poetics of the soul, which was all, they said, education was about—certainly not the rote learning and straining after grades and fellowships that Tina was into.

In fact, Weezy played the flute and read the Russians. She was also into real life. That was Weezy’s big thing—that she gloried in real work, sweat, the hard edges of existence, survival. She had worked as apprentice to a bookbinder, as a dishwasher in London, as a grape picker at harvest time in the Marche, and had been a cook in a summer camp for mentally defective youngsters. To be bruised and roughed up by life, to experience it all, that’s what she wanted. To go on long, enlightening wanderings, to keep from being stuck in the academic world. Schools are now what factories were during the Industrial Revolution, she said—dehumanizing. Even if life outside the Ivory Tower was mediocre, she wanted to feel it in its reality.