Tina looked about her before they went through the gate in the high wall. A half-block away Rome was filling the air with its normal clamor of siren sounds, trams, trucks, and late-morning traffic. Across the street from the walled cemetery, oblivious to the coming together to formalize loss, a stout Roman housewife was hanging wash on her balcony; she wore a bright, sleeveless dress and gossiped audibly to a neighbor on an adjoining balcony.

Of course everything goes on, Tina thought; Mother goes into the wall, an urn of ashes, and everybody else goes on washing, gossiping, honking horns, working, living. She thought of years earlier her mother reading to her and Weezy the story from Winnie-the-Pooh in which Eeyore has a birthday and says in his dour way, “Birthdays? Here today, gone tomorrow.” So with mothers, thought Tina.

A few people had gathered outside the wall of the cemetery. Angela was there and some of Marguerite’s American friends; the Agostinis, Missy and her parents, a few of her father’s colleagues, and Jason. No Massimo Bontelli, she thought without surprise. It was a beautiful day, he would be at the sea. Her father was greeting people. He looked old and tired, his face drawn and lined. He had never been a tall man, or a strongly built one, but now he seemed shrunken and aged. His face was frowning and deep wrinkles were set in it. His thickset neck seemed more than ever drawn into his shoulders; his prominent nose was sharp.

“The last time I was here,” Weezy said in an undertone to Tina, “it was the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Keats’s death in Rome, and Mom told me to stay out of school so that we could go together to the ceremony at his graveside. I thought that was so cool of her. We were here and it was a beautiful day in February, I remember it, but I began to get restless when this English poet started speaking, so Mom started getting cross with me. I was doing it on purpose—I wanted to show how impatient I was with the formal ceremony and the British dignitaries and all that sort of official thing. I wanted to show how much closer I was to Keats than anybody else there by suffering through the stuffiness. And actually, all the time I rather liked it; I liked being there and hearing Keats’s poetry read in English accents. But I didn’t want Mom to know. I keep thinking of that now because so much of what we do is really dishonest—really putting on a front so that people won’t know what we really feel.”