“The trouble is,” he said, frowning and busying himself with sweeping up the withered blossoms which were scattered about on the terrace, “that it is not to each his own, with that facile kind of relativism that makes only for chaos and unhappiness in this world. There is a traditional order which the Church upholds and it guides us out of the anarchy of self, the concentration on one’s own personal salvation. Your mother never understood the beauty and harmony of the great universal Church. She could not stand authority and she lost herself in the illusion of trying to realize herself.”

“Papà,” said Tina impatiently, “in this day and age not everyone can believe in the authority of the Church. The pressures of these days are different from just speculating about the afterlife and the soul’s salvation. We have to save ourselves, the world . . . the environment. . . .”

“You will end up an activist,” he said.

“Not Tina,” said Weezy, sitting at the table and lighting up a cigarette. “She’s too into the academic life and books.”

“And you’re the revolutionary, eh?” he said, addressing Weezy. “Ah, bambina mia,” he said with an air of grievance, shaking his head. “Revolution, which you students want, won’t solve anything—it takes a slow and fatiguing evolution whose results will be far beyond the generations immediately involved. It takes faith to work for the changes we’ll never see. You cannot with impunity throw away the two thousand years of tradition and human experience that the Church represents.”

“That’s the old line, that’s the old rationale. No one will go for that now.”

“You are too much in a hurry,” he said. “That was your mother’s sickness—she was too much in a hurry. Even her death was a result of hurry: Why was she speeding on a wet day? What was it but another instance of her restlessness and lack of serenity? Death must be merited, not reached with defiance of all rules or chosen because one is tired.”

Having swept carefully and made a tidy pile, he put the dead blossoms into a plastic bag and returned the broom to its corner.

They were arriving at one of her mother’s favorite places in Rome: the Protestant Cemetery at Porta San Paolo near the pyramid of Gaius Cestius. Even in death she had managed superb surroundings for herself. Now she would be forever under Rome’s clement skies in the same place that held Keats’s body and Shelley’s heart.