Tina remembered that Thanksgiving weekend as making her feel wildly uncertain and putting her in a deep depression—for where was her place? Tim and Jason could always go back to Cape Cod, but she might get a cable tomorrow saying that the family was moving again.

Obsessed with this, she had gone back to college and written a term paper on place and movement. She quoted Plutarch: “It is not the places that grace men, but men the places”; Shakespeare: “O place, o form/How often doest thou with thy case, thy habit,/wrench awe from fools!”; Bacon: “As things move violently to their place and calmly in their place, so virtue . . .”; and Toynbee: “Civilization is a movement, not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.” The writing had given her peace. She had learned that Grandmother Jowers’ saying was from Emerson.

In the plane, suspended once again between Old World and New, between one thing and another, it gave her the same peace to sort out her thoughts; to put them in some order in the container of her mind, at least for the moment.

It seemed that Umbertina’s secret of success was her total uprooting, followed by total replanting. Positioning, thus, became dignified, while positioning which was merely the restlessness of the moment undirected by anything but whim was destined to be barren. Like, Tina realized, her womb, which had been scraped bare because the seed scattered there had been cast by chance, not planted to bear fruit.

Well, never mind. She would get it together. She would settle into her work. Her work was her permanence and her dignity. And then, after that, Che sarà, sarà.

The trip to Calabria, every so often, flashed through her mind like glinting pieces of mosaic that she tried to shape into a whole, a pattern of serious design. But it was surreal, like pieces in a kaleidoscope, which never regroup in the same configuration but with each shake of the memory go into some new interpretation of their parts.

So, Calabria. It was fragments only. Bits of color came to her mind: the hard, desolate yellow of the burnt-out plains; the bright blue of the sea where she and Ferruccio had swum and sunned; the bright white of the sand; the tender green of the chestnut burrs in the forests of the Sila and the deep green ivy-covered ruins of the abbey in the valley below Castagna; the splash of bright colors in the markets and flowering balconies.

Yes, she remembered the landscape, the food and wine, occasional snatches of Ferruccio’s talk. But mostly she remembered the sense of Umbertina’s having eluded her.