Her response to her father used to be invariably uncritical: She adored his charm and gentleness, she was proud of him. But now shadows began to worry at the edge of her acceptance as she saw him in a new light.

“When we were in the country,” he went on, “your mother would get upset if I wouldn’t set out with her at high noon to bicycle up and down the hills of Monterubbiano. Or she’d suddenly want to go down to the beach and swim at night. It was, of course,” he added as if an afterthought, “part of her charm.”

Funny, thought Tina, how her ear now caught the intonation of irony that had probably always been there. She could fit between his own words the desperate ones from her mother’s diaries; together they made a dissonance that saddened her. For if their perfect marriage had been like that, what chance was there for ordinary ones?

“Papà,” said Tina, “she was also concerned for you. The doctor had told you after your heart attack that you should exercise, build up your resistance. She was concerned that you didn’t get enough exercise. You still don’t.”

She looked at the slight figure of her father. She was taller now than he, and his thickening paunchy middle made him seem shorter yet. He was balding and what hair he had left was turning white. As a young man he had been beautiful; in the family albums he still was: polished, dark tan, his figure lean and flat with the slim muscular calves of a bicycler, his hair a mop of black ringlets. But, as her mother used to say, she hadn’t known him then, she had taken him on faith for the boy he was.

“She was an activist, your mother. She didn’t know the contemplative life. Sometimes I’m afraid you’re the same way; you don’t think things out rationally—you explode, act on impulse, and then are sorry. You must calm down.”

Tina knew what he meant about thinking things out rationally; the height of rationality for him would be that she stay there in Rome with him, in their beautiful home with the classics right at hand, instead of going back to New York to pursue them in the stacks of the Columbia library. It seemed perverse, as he painted it, to want to go back to the grim gray world of upper Broadway and the dreary little hamburger shops, the cheerless dorms, the cold long winter, and the pinched living on a fellowship while being exploited as a graduate assistant to teach beginning language classes.