“I know what you mean,” Tina muttered. “I do the same thing at times, just so I can have the satisfaction of pretending to do my own thing; with Mom it was showing her I didn’t need her, or that the things she did and said were outmoded. All we can do now is make it up to her by being good to each other.”

Their father led the group into the cool grounds in the new part of the cemetery to the spot in the wall where Marguerite’s urn would be immured. He gave a brief eulogy.

“She said she had no country, nor any religion,” he intoned, “and yet she was one of the most religious spirits I’ve ever known, with a purity and candor that were both vulnerable and invincible. She was restless, as the person in search, the person of sensitivity must always be. . . .” As he spoke, his eyes squinting in the bright sun, his balding head hatless and exposed to a heat which, Tina knew, he would feel prejudicial to him, she thought of him not as her father but as the husband of her mother.

In her childhood he had been a perfect and tender and loving father. More recently he had begun to speak to Tina as a confidante, telling her that he could have been a happy man if it were not for her mother’s sickness; she was his cross, he said, but still his woman, the creature that God had entrusted to him, and he would always love her. Tina thought of that love, the love that accepted a person no matter what, defects and sickness and all, and asked for nothing from the person—no growth or improvement or change—and knew that such a love had done her mother in. Massimo, who had stretched her capabilities and expectations, was the man she had loved. And yet, how would it have been if they had shared home and children and all the fraying things of marriage as well as the good times? Was it always true that marriage meant the end of love? Again Tina wondered if she would ever marry; or would she have only those series of encounters that the feminists called “little marriages”—all the advantages of sex and companionship without commitment or entanglements? She had thought she loved Duke for what he had given her in a new approach to life. Then she had absorbed the Duke experience and found it was not a partnership for life, but another learning situation.