It was as if by storming into Castagna in Ferruccio’s red Maserati she had tried to take the old woman and the place by force. She had tried to buy Castagna—its postcards and souvenirs, to appease it by promising to send things to the priest. But she had not found Umbertina with all that. She was only beginning to do so now that the distance grew between her and Italy.

Castagna had been a hard nut to crack, and the fault was not in the place but in her, the seeker. She had gone heedlessly with Ferruccio. But perhaps it would have been the same thing with Jason. For the revelation she had to find was not in the mountains of Calabria, but in her own mind. Knowing, the nut would be cracked, the kernel revealed.

God! she thought, I sound like Jason philosophizing. A deep pang of regret settled in her alongside her stomach’s sense of emptiness. Dear old Bear and their childish games. The sadness of all aborted things came over her and she curled in her corner near the window, putting her head on a pillow against the pane and trying to sleep.

As her thoughts subsided, one last one drifted through the cloudy territory of her mind: Here I am, up in the air, midway between Italy and America. How funny. How prophetic.

It was almost Christmas. Tina stood in Rizzoli’s bookstore responding to the warm wood paneling, the prints and fine books, the sound of Gesualdo madrigals, the entire atmosphere that looked and sounded Italy to her. She heard Italian spoken by elegant people: “Facciamo un Korvette’s,” a stunning woman in mink said to her companion, and the words tossed off so nonchalantly kept ringing in Tina’s ears with their echoes of great style and utter assurance.

She was in the bookstore to find a gift for her grandfather. At Bergdorf’s she had seen a very plush scrapbook labeled “Give the Gift of Immortality.” It was meant to hold photos and had blanks to be filled in with data: name, birthplace, marriage, children, etc. Immortality, all packaged and giftwrapped as Americans like things; for a moment she was tempted to get it for her grandfather. Then it made her angry. Finally she wondered why she cared.

Tina thumbed through a splendid photographic volume on the antiquities of Sicily and wondered if her grandfather would like it, or if she would be trying again to browbeat him into an appreciation of Italy that he had always resisted.

She was going to Gloversville for the holidays. She was going so that she could get away from the little cubicle in the library where she studied and the slightly larger one, on 114th Street, in the nurses’ quarters, where she slept.