Tina knew her father’s story—through albums, the family artifacts, the charts and documents and letters that always followed them in their travels, and through his and her mother’s accounts. From both sides of his family he inherited a love of order and routine but little or nothing of the commercial astuteness of the sea-merchants. He lived among the artifacts and paraphernalia of things past and let the present bear him where it would.

The shape of his future had been the American girl Marguerite Scalzo. Proposing, Alberto had said they would learn each other’s language and be artists together, although it would be wise if they started a family soon.

There never was time, Tina remembered her mother saying, to live as artists, the two of them. The babies and moving absorbed Marguerite and slowly her vision of herself swerved. Alberto relied on words as Marguerite did on her feelings for truth. When he told her that she should be happy with things as they were—with her successful husband, her beautiful home, her fine daughters—and not pine after what was lost or the illusion of her fulfillment as an artist, she tried to examine why her feelings mistrusted him. It was not what he had said before! Not knowing what else to do, she kept them moving; and Alberto let himself become the victim of her unrest.

All this went through Tina’s mind as she weighed her father’s words about her mother.

“The immurement is already tomorrow,” he was saying, almost to himself. He was pulling the dried blooms from the geraniums and dropping them on the terrace. A handwritten will had been found in Marguerite’s desk which said that if she died in Rome she wanted to be cremated and put to rest in the Protestant Cemetery. Arranging her death aesthetically was like setting up one of her homes. “If she had been buried as Church tradition recommends, we could have planted some of these flowers she loved on the gravesite. But she wanted to be cremated.”

Weezy had come out onto the terrace, and overhearing her father, she said, “It’s her way of being recycled into the universe, papà.”

“The soul awaits an afterlife, not a general recycling,” he answered.

“Well, to each his own belief, papà,” Weezy continued. “She didn’t believe in the afterlife.”