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By Root 684 0

for refusing to marry the suitor her father had chosen, giving up her life because of a religious conviction. Apparently, they tried to kill her three times and it didn’t work; they tried to strangle her, then behead her. Whatever they did, she wouldn’t stop singing. Finally she was suffocated in a kind of steam-room prison. It was all so far from anything that had come Lucy’s way. It didn’t occur to me that she’d find the story disturbing. But she ran out of the place crying and I had to chase her down the street. I was terrified. She isn’t very self-sufficient. The way she’s lived, the way we’ve made it possible for her to live, she hasn’t had to cope with very much of the larger world.”

“Is that a good thing for a girl, the way we all have to live now?”

“It’s the way it has to be if she wants the kind of musical life she says she does. There are things she has to be protected from so that she can devote herself. It’s simply the way it is.”

“Devote herself.” Don’t you mean sacrifice, she wants to say. She sees by the line of his mouth that nothing she could say would make the slightest impression. And she knows it’s a mistake to advise him about his daughter. Whom she has never met. Whom she has no wish to meet.

The church is empty. They approach the figure of Cecilia, white marble behind glass: the simulacrum of a coffin. Her face is invisible; it is turned toward the wall of black marble, as if this slender girl were merely sleeping in an uncomfortable way. Her head is covered by a veil. Barely visible: the cut across her throat that signals her beheading. The white marble rests itself against a background of sheer black.

“She seems so vulnerable,” Miranda says. “So girlish. Elegant. Delicate. Refined. I wonder if those concepts are of use to women now? Or if they’re simply a danger.”

“You want her to have spat in her executioner’s face before he cut her throat? What good would it have done? What difference would it have made?”

“There’s no romance for me in passive female suffering. What would your mother have said?”

“I like to think she would have found it beautiful. I like to think you do.”

“I do, despite everything I know. Rome is difficult for me in just this way. It makes a mockery of everything I know is right and true. I know that it’s right and true that lovely young women should not be brutally killed. And yet, being here in this unclear light, I’m touched by the poignance of her posture, of her graceful giving up. All those words, ‘graceful,’ ‘elegant,’ they required so much renunciation, and I wasn’t going to stand for that. Not if I wanted to be the kind of person I wanted to be. Not if I wanted the world to be the kind of place I wanted it to be. Even this light: I feel like I can’t quite see properly. But I like it, and then I think: how can you like a lack of clarity? In America, we’re devoted to clarity. My house has fifty windows. Sometimes I have to shade my eyes from the sun when I walk across the living room. But I like it here and I’m not sure I should. I’m not sure I like it that I like it.”

“That, I think, must be good for you.”

“I’m trying to live an ethical life.”

“Here, for this moment, there is nothing you can do that is right or wrong. Nothing you can do but be here with this beautiful thing.”

“But if I didn’t find it beautiful, if I weren’t moved by it, you would use the word ‘wrong.’ If I came in here with a gaggle of shouting Floridians off a tour bus, eating ice-cream cones or throwing McDonald’s wrappers on the floor: you would say that was ‘wrong.’ ”

“A different kind of wrongness.”

“But wrongness, nevertheless. Which is why, Adam, it’s untrue to say that right and wrong are impossible here.”

“And what does it mean to you if I say you’re right?”

“It means I’m right.”

“That’s always been so important to you.”

“Of course, to whom would it not be important?”

“To me. Because to me, ‘It is all a darkness.’ ”

“Who said that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Someone, maybe in the seventeenth century. Or maybe I made it up. I’m very drawn to the darkness. You see how the whiteness