“Just the other week,” Angela was saying, “there was the scandalous case of the four-months-pregnant woman who had been beaten by her husband and fell into a coma. She was brain-dead but there was a great deal of commotion about keeping her body alive as an incubator so that the fetus would live. Well, finally she died, and the fetus, too. Then it came out that her husband had beaten her because she wanted to have an abortion. She was twenty years old and already had two small children. Naturally she was viewed as the monster, while the husband, who beat her to death, was looked upon as acting within his rights. At her funeral service the priest said, ‘She was a mother who gave two lives into the world. She was also a wife. In the next life she will still be a wife and a mother.’”

Angela paused, jerked her head upward, and with a thin ironic smile let her words sink in. “That’s Italy for you, mia cara. The men here are almost Arabs in their attitudes toward women.”

Angela Cambio was a liberated woman, a journalist, a feminist, a pillar of the Left. She had been her mother’s closest Italian friend. She lived in an attico in the center of Rome and had frequent parties, deliberately mixing a hodgepodge of political views and opposing types so that, as she said, her salon would ferment with exchange and not be just another boring gathering of safe people reinforcing each other’s ideas.

“Pazza,” her father said of Angela Cambio. “A crazy woman—one of those new restless types that come from some backward village in the middle of the mountains to Rome and imagine they can become someone they’re not.” But her mother had admired Angela; she was always speaking of her writing, her husband having left, her being sent as a correspondent to England for several years, her doing so many things and living successfully on her own in a man’s world.

It was, in fact, her mother’s admiration for Angela, whose name was written in that last diary entry, that had brought Tina to her to find out how to be tested for pregnancy. Weezy had been offended and angry. “If you need an abortion,” she said, “I can arrange it for you through the feminist group. We have some trusted doctors who will do it for you safely, unhumiliatingly, and not expensively. But Angela Cambio!” Weezy sneered. “She’s one of those dilettantes who’s into everything superficially, but nothing seriously. She pretends to be a feminist, a leftist—anything that she thinks is fashionable or newsy at the moment. How could you get mixed up with her?”

“She was Mom’s friend—Mom mentioned her name in her diary. It seemed like the right thing to do.”