devilish strength, and I confronted my father. He was reading in his library while Mrs. Clay rattled the dinner dishes in the kitchen. I went into the library, closed the door behind me, and stood in front of his chair. He was holding one of his beloved volumes of Henry James, a sure sign of stress. I stood without speaking until he looked up. "Hello, there," he said, finding his bookmark with a smile. "Algebra homework?" His eyes were anxious already.
"I want you to finish the story," I said.
He was silent, tapping his fingers on the arm of the chair.
"Why won't you tell me more?" It was the first time I had ever felt myself a menace to him. He looked at the book he had just closed. I knew that I was being cruel to him in a way I could not understand, but I had begun my bloody work, so I would have to finish. "You don't want me to know things."
He looked up at me, finally. His face was inscrutably sad, deeply furrowed in the light from his lamp. "No, I don't."
"I know more than you think," I said, although I felt that was a childish stab; I wouldn't have wanted to tell him what I knew, if he'd asked me.
He folded his hands under his chin. "I know you do," he said. "And because you know anything at all I will have to tell you everything."
I stared at him, surprised. "Then just tell me," I said fiercely.
He looked down again. "I will tell you, and I'll tell you as soon as I can. But not all at once." Suddenly he burst out, "I can't bear it all at once! Be patient with me."
But the look he gave me was pleading, not accusing. I went to him and put my arm around his bowed head.
March would be chill and blustery in Tuscany, but my father thought a short trip in the countryside there was in order after four days of talks - I always knew his occupation as "talks" - in Milan. This time, I didn't have to ask him to take me along. "Florence is wonderful, especially off-season," he said one morning as we drove south from Milan. "I'd like you to see it one of these days. You'll have to learn a little more about its history and paintings first, to really get a kick out of it. But the Tuscan countryside's the real thing. It rests your eyes and excites them at the same time - you'll see."
I nodded, settling into the passenger seat of the rented Fiat. My father's love of freedom was contagious, and I liked the way he loosened his shirt collar and tie when we headed off for a new place. He was setting the Fiat to a hum on the smooth northern highway. "Anyway, I've been promising Massimo and Giulia for years that we'd come. They'd never forgive my passing this close without a visit." He leaned back and stretched his legs. "They're a little strange - eccentricis the way to put it, I guess, but very kind. Are you game?"
"I said I was," I pointed out. I preferred staying alone with my father to visiting strangers, whose presence always brought out my native shyness, but he seemed eager to see his old friends. In any case, the vibration of the Fiat was lulling me to sleep; I was tired from the train trip. A spell had come over me that morning, the alarmingly belated trickle of blood my doctor was always worrying about and for which Mrs. Clay had awkwardly supplied my suitcase with a mass of cotton pads. My first glimpse of this change had brought tears of surprise to my eyes in the train lavatory, as if someone had wounded me; the smudge on my sensible cotton underpants looked like the thumbprint of a murderer. I'd said nothing about it to my father. River valleys and village-piled distant hills became a hazy panorama past the car window, then blurred. I was still sleepy at lunch, which we ate in a town made up of caf¨¦s and dark bars, the street cats curling and uncurling around the doorways.
But when we pulled upward with the twilight toward one of twenty towering hill towns, stacking themselves around us like the subjects of a fresco, I found myself wide awake. The windy, cloud-swept evening showed cracks of sunset on the horizon - toward the Mediterranean, my father said, toward