Tina left for New York, telling her father she wouldn’t wait out the summer. In Rome she had called no one; she didn’t try to find out if Missy were around, she didn’t go sit in Piazza Navona to see who would walk through. She wanted to be gone because she wanted something deliberately harsh and tough in her life and that’s what the rest of the summer in New York would be: finding a place to live, eating alone, struggling with her laundry, coping, accommodating, making do. She had had enough of Italy. After indulgence came penance; she welcomed it.

On the plane she said good-bye to everything. With her own departure for New York, her father’s decision to live in Venice, where he would move into his sister’s place, and Weezy’s plan to go to Bologna, the family was finally scattered and undone.

And wasn’t it typical of each of them, she thought: her father in an emptying Venice whose last shoddy hold on life was the tourist trade, there to live on memories of his sea-captain ancestors’ vigorous past; and Weezy heading for a leftist commune in Bologna because that city had a Communist mayor, and since the streets were clean and the buses ran on schedule she could think the future had arrived for all of them; and Tina herself? Back to the monastic cubicle in the library to wrest from her love for Dante and company the license to be a woman professional in a world of men.

They all had separate lives now. Where would they meet for Christmas, for birthdays, or just to be together as in the days when her mother had always planned outings, fêtes, trips, occasions?

And where was Jason? Perhaps in Greece, or back in Rome, or at his grandparents’ place on Cape Cod. He might even be on that very plane with her. And Ferruccio?

After Castagna, she had told him she was not driving back to Rome with him, and he had left her at the railroad station in Nicastro. There she had started the long way back, speaking to no one, glum and absorbed until she arrived in Rome.

“Figlia mia,” her father had greeted her, surprised at the early return. “Back so soon!”

“It wasn’t good, papà,” she told him. “I want to go back to New York, to my work.”

He took her out to dinner that night.

He was looking old, vague as one of those dithery society women who try to be salesclerks in boutiques, vague but charming, and in their own way filled with sure taste. No facts, only taste. His brow wrinkled with concentration as he spoke to her.