“Your mother used to think I should be a lion,” Alberto Morosini was saying composedly as he loosened the soil around a large potted laurel and then stood back and looked at his work. It was the laurel that Marguerite had given him on his sixtieth birthday because, she said, he was a poet and poets are crowned with laurel. “The leaves are also good to roast meat with in case the poetry fails,” he had replied good-naturedly.

Tina thought of that as she glanced over at her father with a quizzical look. He liked his daughters to be there when he returned from his office in the evening, and to converse with him while he prepared himself a Scotch-and-water and went out on the terrace to relax in what he called his paradiso and to look about at his plantings. He would loosen his tie, take off his jacket, and remove his shoes while Tina or Weezy went to the study at the end of the hall and brought out his old leather sandals.

He had created the garden on the terrace. Patiently he had espaliered the riccasperma against the wall, set up the lattices and trained the vines along them, and looked all over Rome for the terra-cotta scallop shell that he had set into the wall as a catch-basin beneath the water tap. Each evening he watered and trimmed and poked. Sometimes he returned with plantings—daisies, margherite, were for his wife, he said, and of all his flowers she was his favorite, though the most difficult one. “Come sei difficile, amore,” he had written to her in one of his poems.

Tina made it a point of being home when her father got there since Weezy was acting so badly, straining with impatience to be away and going on about why did they have to be together at dinner . . . in fact, why bother with dinner? Tina wished she could be as tough when it came to deciding whether she’d stay there in Rome with him or go back to New York at the end of summer. She even wished she could talk about the abortion with him, but she knew it was impossible. He would try to persuade her to have the child and let him keep it, and that was something she could not live with.

This evening she was watering the plants while he puttered around. She always enjoyed his company; sometimes she met him for lunch at Café de Paris or they would go to a film together. It was, transparently, part of his campaign to keep her there and they both knew it and joked about it. “What you need is a vaccine against the States,” he told her, “and I’m going to supply it.”

“But I’ve got friends there and commitments in my work, papà.”

“All life is a question of recasting,” he replied.