in her Italian-English dictionary. Debole. She said the word to herself. Then she made a noun of it. Debolezza. Weakness. He was a weak man, he was very weak, she said silently, to no one in particular. Or it wasn’t to no one; it was to many people, to whom she felt an obligation to explain. At twenty-five, she still felt herself a girl, and therefore someone who owed things to people. Especially the ones who believed in her. She was a girl in whom many people had believed. The nuns had been the first; her mother had needed the example or the prodding of the nuns in order to believe. Even Yale, it seems, had believed in her. They had accepted her into the doctoral program in art history; she was traveling on a grant they had provided, allowing her a month in Lucca to explore her dissertation topic: Matteo Civitali, a fifteenth-century sculptor, most of whose work was in Lucca. “She’s an unusual girl, Mrs. Riordan; uncommonly intelligent. But it’s more than that. She has tremendous powers of concentration.”
