At the end of the school year she went directly to Venice to see her father. He now lived in his sister’s small, old-fashioned flat. His studio was in the small bedroom at the end of the hall, and Tina shared with her aunt the large, high matrimonial bed that had belonged to the parents; made for the larger rooms of bygone homes, it now crammed the modest bedroom of the Morosini apartment.

Tina found her father and her aunt, their home and all of Venice gently decrepit and woebegone and yet with a serenity and sense of humor that was entirely missing in New York. Zia Lauretta, a strong, handsome woman of about fifty with the pronounced Morosini nose and dark wavy hair that resisted graying, fluttered about cooking soups and fish and commenting every so often to Tina on Venice’s state: “Che peccato!” she kept intoning. She kept strong in the damp winters, she said, by drinking the water in which seeped a curative mushroom sent all the way from Mexico. Tina loved the sense of outdated and outmoded confusion zia Lauretta exuded. She remembered what Jason had said about backwaters—they were the best places to live. Here nothing more turbulent than the city’s gradual sinking touched them, and that they didn’t have to reckon with immediately. The Venetians fled to the mainland to visit relatives or walk in the mountains when the summer tourist hordes began in earnest, but in the fall and winter Venice was theirs again, with its attenuated light and deep silences in the calli. There was no rush, no hurry. They walked through streets empty of motor vehicles and heard the plash of ages as the waters of the canals lapped upon the stones; once in a while the sound of a motor launch reminded them again of the adverse currents that the modern age had brought them and of the sentence of death that hung over them. But death is in all life, said the glory of the churches. And there was good dining in small, out-of-the way trattorie, there were caffès, the concerts at the Teatro Fenice, the meetings with friends at gallery openings, the long evenings along the canals, talking. Into this undemanding backwater Alberto Morosini had settled without demur; it fitted his nature. Tina saw it and understood and knew why neither she nor Weezy could live there. She would leave soon to visit Weezy.

But while she was still in Venice a card came for her from Weezy in Budapest. Tina read the message with a flush of anger: