Tina could hear her mother’s voice tinged with its hysterical edge of contempt as she spoke of Gloversville: “That terrible place . . . it couldn’t even keep its trees and beautiful old homes, the only good things about it. They’re all gone. The houses have been made into offices and the lawns are parking areas. There’s a motel on the corner of Main and Elm streets where the Frys’ Greek Revival mansion used to be. You can look through the glass siding and see people eating breakfast. That’s progress . . . that’s America!”

That was her mother. Always disappointed; nothing ever lived up to her standards. The Nativity scenes of the season had jolted Tina into a remembrance of her own fleeting pregnancy. She felt no emotion over the abortion; it had been something to get through on the same level as her Salk shots. The only things that touched her in the buried realm of her feelings were her mother’s death and the loss of Jason, and those were private woes that she keened over silently. The rest was arrangements.

She felt more miserable about her aloneness in the cold corridors of the nurses’ quarters, where she knew no one, than she had about her abortion. She felt invisible in those gray corridors, an unnoted presence among the nurses and their silly jokes of labeling food packages “fecal matter” in the common fridge. They all shared the kitchen facilities, and while the nurses sat over tea and discussed the clap, Tina would fry her miserable egg and try not to hear. She felt desperate loneliness, an uncertainty about everything, and the chill of knowing she had been wrong to leave Jason.

There were times she spent the day without speaking anything but perfunctory remarks—no conversations, no human exchanges of thoughts and feelings. At times she went to bed hungry and thrashed around in her bed sleepless, feeling her emptiness, feeling the indifference of the city, which made all her best plans seem futile exercises. Or she’d look up from her books in the library with a start and wonder what life existed for her in the academic world she had chosen. There was no love like the Liebestod anymore.

Now, as she stood in Rizzoli’s, musing, trying to decide on a book for her grandfather, she glanced over toward the end of the store where the Italian newspapers and magazines were stacked, and saw, with a surge of relief and gladness, the blond aureole of Missy’s hair.

“No browsing allowed, signorina,” Tina said, sidling up to Missy, who was standing there reading a copy of Oggi.

“Tina! How great to see you! I knew that if I wanted to run into you in New York all I had to do was hang out at Rizzoli’s for a while.”

“What are you doing in town, Missy?”