“Everything is here for you,” he continued, stopping between words to give his characteristic snort. “You could translate my new novel and get a credit that would help you in your own career, besides earning some money.” (Stay near me, he was really saying, and enjoy this high civilization; forgo the compulsion of trying to find your way in the jungle of self-realization that is New York and enjoy the fruits of being part of my success; start by translating. . . . Was that, she wondered, the beguilement he had used with her mother, too?)

She began to understand how her mother had been charmed and led from her own aspirations by the soft cadences of this Venetian poet. He charmed and pleased everyone; he had a great gift for gab and a gentle, humorous kind of fun-poking that was very Venetian in origin, like the oldtime signori who could with deep bows and the reverent greeting of “Your servant, sir!” poke fun at the person addressed. It was in the same vein of satiric irony, deceptive in its amiability and gentleness, that he spoke of his wife’s silly pranks. He had never seen her as a woman, it occurred to Tina, but only as a deliciously perverse creature whose eccentricities and foibles he was fated to put up with.

Tina used to overhear at parties the clucking of Italian women when her father amusingly told them how he often had a “tost” standing up in a caffè-bar for lunch, or gulped down the various poisons of a tavola calda at noontime. They didn’t have dinner at noon, he explained, because his wife worked in the library at St. Gregory’s and his daughters had lunch at their American school. And she would sense the women wondering how he put up with a wife who had overturned the civilized Italian schedule of life in order to impose an American one on him.

Actually, as Tina knew, her father preferred the arrangement of a light lunch at noon, a habit he had picked up during his years in the States. And not coming back home at midday left him free to lunch with friends, call on his doctor at home and dine with him there, or go out with writers who might be in town. But he was not the man to say, “I prefer it this way.” He didn’t mind the kind of innuendo that presented him as a hapless victim.

He had always been a victim. A victim of the First World War, which left him fatherless at age nine; a victim of genteel poverty, of a guilt-laden and rigid Catholic education, and of his own romanticism. He would be a poet, he said, and his companion in life would be a gentle woman, the queen of his home.