Here, huddled in my coat with my back against the old customs house, I sat for hours looking across the water to the postcard everyone knew-Ruskin’s waves of marble, the gilt of San Marco catching the first morning sun, the columned landing stage filling with boat traffic, all the beautiful buildings rising out of the water, out of consciousness, the city’s last dream.

I thought at first that my mother would tire of it, the way she tired of everything finally except the past, but Dr. Maglione was an unexpected wrinkle, a piece of future. After my father died there had been a period of melodramatic grief, followed, I assumed, by a series of friendships. But these had happened, if they had happened, offstage. I was away at school, then in the army, then overseas, so what I knew came from letters, and these had been full of other things-volunteer work, openings, her three-week job (unpaid) at the Art of This Century gallery and the inevitable fight with Peggy Guggenheim that followed. Then she had come back to Europe, not really looking for anyone, and suddenly there he was. Not slick or too young or in any way unpleasant-not unlike my father, in fact, gray hair thinning at the temples, quiet, almost reticent. And yet amused by her, the way my father had been, both of them perhaps drawn to a quicksilver quality neither possessed himself. In any case, he was here, making her look brighter, in love with Venice, not even aware the rooms were cold. So I put off going back to New York, unsettled, not sure where any of us was heading.

“He’s not a fortune hunter, you know,” Bertie said. “Besides, if you’re after money, why not young money? Much nicer. And you know I adore Grace, but she can be a handful. Anyway, he had doges in his family.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It does if you have them. And he’s a real doctor, you know, it’s not an honorific. My doctor, in fact, and I’m still here.”