“Do you want to come up and sit on the terrace?” Jason asked. The Jowers family had a penthouse apartment overlooking Piazza Navona. Tina, who had been a classmate at St. Gregory’s of Tim Jowers, Jason’s younger brother, had been to parties on the penthouse terrace. She pictured herself now at those high school parties, standing off by herself contemplating, a slight scorning smile turning the corner of her mouth as she gave in to anger and envy. Oh, to be one of the Jowers, she would think; it was not just their perfect place in Rome that got to her, since her home was beautiful, too—it was their perfect lives. The first year Tina and Tim were at college in the States, he had invited her for Thanksgiving weekend to the Cape, where the original Jowers homestead, much expanded from 1710, was still his grandparents’ family home. It had given her a sense of stability she had never forgotten. For even though the Morosinis were a Venetian family for centuries past, there was no continuously inhabited dwelling place with which they were identified and where all their history was laid out to say to themselves, and others, who they were. The Morosinis were scattered away from Venice, their furniture divided and crumbling, their male line extinct after her father.

“No,” said Tina, “let’s just walk to the Corso. Am I glad you came along!”

“I am, too, Tina. I wanted to call about your mother. I just got back yesterday and Dad told me.”

“Thanks, Jason.” She was silent as they walked along, then said, “Is Tim back?”

“Tim’s working out his CO duties in Boston. For a conscientious objector, he’s got a great assignment—he’s working for a museum. Here, have a peach.” He dug in the net and got out a couple of peaches that they ate as they walked along.

Typical of Jowers males, she thought, their ease in shopping for peaches as well as dodging the draft. “You both landed on your feet with the war business,” she said. “Being active in the SDS didn’t keep you from law school or Tim from graduating.”

Something not as strong as resentment, but akin, welled up in her. Some people just knew how to live, she thought. They managed not to have commitments they couldn’t throw off, or honesty, which was Duke’s deadly virtue. She liked the whole Jowers family and envied them their easy sense of self. Yet she was the daughter of a poet, she reminded herself; a descendant of people who had been sea-captains in Venice long before the first Jowers, a Puritan, built his little shelter in the New World. And she was Umbertina’s descendant, too. Somehow the knowledge made her feel both insecure and blessed above all others.