She opened her newsmagazine in the train: There was Audrey Hepburn divorced, two months from forty, biting her lip in a pretty show of being flustered, looking like a little girl in her pink Cardin mini-dress as she married the handsome young psychiatrist of thirty-one and started life all over again—as perfect as one of her films. No cobwebs in Roman Holiday, Sabrina, or Gigi: all happy endings staged beautifully. Christ, how one would stage one’s life if one could! Yet isn’t that what she had done? Staged marriage and motherhood for years and years until she had been done in by the fakery. The stage props had dropped and she had been left alone in all the artifice to get out of her sham costume as best she could and find another part, in another theater, with other actors. At forty-two. Jesus! She wasn’t Audrey Hepburn.

(“You are young, pleasing, elegant—not like some women, who are impossible,” Dr. V. had told her. And she had turned on him, furious, accusing him of being Dr. Pangloss, of being so stuck in his optimism that he couldn’t begin to see her problems.)

Then suddenly it had been simple: She would get a divorce.

A reddish-haired man entered the compartment of the train and sat next to her. She was aware of him as she drew into her corner and looked out the window.

She thought, of all things, of Umbertina Longobardi, who had emigrated to America as a young wife. Marguerite wondered if her own fears were worse now than those faced then by that Calabrian peasant, her grandmother. Had Umbertina wondered as she lay in steerage, separated from her husband and with her sons by her side, what her life would be like, what its meaning was? Had she wondered how she’d speak? And to whom? Marguerite had never been able to speak to the old woman in her lifetime; they had had different tongues. Now she could, but Umbertina was dead and buried in Cato. Oh, Grandma Longobardi, give me your guts!

As they passed Orvieto, Marguerite applied herself to what she had to do in Florence. She had to find a job. What could she do? Dissemble. Anything else? Translate, teach, type. She had written Tina at Bryn Mawr to ask what she thought about chances over there. Tina, her firstborn. Everything had started to fall apart when Berto died. Her only son. Her last child. Then Tina had left Italy for college. (“Imagine, Dr. Verdile, a child already in college!” “But you’re still young,” he says, pulling on his English pipe.)

“May I see your paper?” Marguerite said to the man seated next to her in the compartment.

“Of course, of course,” he said after a moment of surprise.

She stared at the newsprint; did I ask for the paper or did I ask him to make love to me? Always she asked for love . . . when she asked the shoemaker if the heels on her shoes could be fixed for tomorrow, when she asked the flower man how long the anemones would last, when she asked Alberto’s guests if they wanted more ice in their drinks, when she asked Tina’s boyfriends to return the books of hers they borrowed.