“I believe in the power of thought to communicate over distance,” he confided to her. “I will be communicating with you through magnetic thoughts, wherever you are in the world.” And then, leaning toward her, he told her that while she was away he had dreamed of her one night; she was wearing the linen djerba he once brought her from Tunis and was looking angry about something. He had said “What’s wrong, Tina mia?” but then the dream vaporized. When she told him that at the probable time of the dream she had been in a bad temper and that she had worn her Tunisian mantle in Calabria when nights were chilly, his face lit up with eager triumph. “Ah, so that’s how it was!” he said, smiling, pleased that his dream was confirmed.

Christ, how beautiful he is, she thought. Can he really feel me so strongly? “Oh, papà,” she said, as they walked home through the empty streets, “I’m not sure of anything. Do you think things will ever turn out right for me?”

“Have faith. Each of us has a moment of grace. Yours will come.”

The trip to Castagna had not brought revelation. It was, in fact, the summary of all her trips: hapless.

All those childhood trips back and forth over the ocean, first in ships, then by plane; both she and Weezy had memory books their mother had started for them, each with a trip diploma glued in and places for seals enough to attest to ten trips over the ocean. But ten hadn’t been enough, and she had stopped noting down the dates of her trips long ago. The point was, all that gadding about and no center. That’s it, no center to hold on to.

It’s all a question of moves and positioning, Tina reflected. In the family, only Umbertina’s move had had at its center a firm purpose. She had positioned for survival; success followed on its own.

Umbertina’s sons and daughters had engaged in other positionings—social ones that had as their steps better neighborhoods, bigger houses, the Rotary Club, country clubs, garden or bridge clubs, colleges.

By the time it came to Tina’s mother, moves were not positioning but lack of it—an erratic, blind dashing around, away from every center and certainty. The fata morgana of her life was the conviction that someday, in the right place, she could start her work; yet each time she thought she approached it, it vanished.

Only Alberto Morosini’s center had always held. No matter where his wife had led him, his center of family tradition and religion stayed still, embedded within him. Scenery didn’t matter. Nothing outside was as important.

And now here Tina was, alone in the plane, not talking to anyone, not eating the plastic dinner, not looking at the movie or plugging music into her ears, but considering her own moves.