Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel
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Synopsis
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini’s Italy to 1940s Los Angeles—a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
“A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that’s a true joy to read.”—Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere
“A gorgeous book . . . sublime.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Guardian, Booklist
Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest.
Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won’t speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.
Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father’s fate—and her own.
Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. It is a love letter to life’s bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work The Washington Post calls “a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles.”
Release date: August 2, 2022
Publisher: Hogarth
Print pages: 412
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Mercury Pictures Presents: A Novel
Anthony Marra
SUNNY SIBERIA 1
when you entered the executive offices of Mercury Pictures International, you would first see a scale model of the studio itself. Artie Feldman, co-founder and head of production, installed it in the lobby to distract skittish investors from second thoughts. Complete with back lot, sound stages, and facilities buildings, the miniature was a faithful replica of the ten-acre studio in which it sat. Maria Lagana, as rendered by the miniaturist, was a tiny, featureless figure looking out Artie’s office window. And this was where the real Maria stood late one morning in 1941, hands holstered on her hips, watching a pigeon autograph the windshield of her boss’s new convertible. She’d like to buy that bird a drink.
“It’s a beautiful day out, Art,” Maria said. “You should really come have a look.”
“I have,” Artie said. “It made me want to jump.”
Artie wasn’t known for his joie de vivre, but he usually didn’t fantasize about ending it all this close to lunch. Maria wondered if the Senate Investigation into Motion Picture War Propaganda was giving him agita, but no—the crisis at hand was on his head. His bald spot had finally grown too large for his toupee to conceal.
Six other black toupees were shellacked atop wooden mannequin heads on the shelf behind his desk, where a more successful producer might display his Oscars. They were conversation starters. As in, Artie began conversations with new employees by telling them the toupees were the scalps of their predecessors.
As far as Maria could tell, the six hairpieces were the same indistinguishable model and style, but Artie had become convinced that each one crackled with the karmic energy of the hair’s original head, unrealized and awaiting release, like a static charge smuggled in a fingertip. Thus, he’d named his toupees after their personalities: The Heavyweight, The Casanova, The Optimist, The Edison, The Odysseus, and The Mephistopheles. Artie had never felt more at home in his adoptive country than when he learned the Founding Fathers had all worn toupees, even that showboat John Hancock. The only one who hadn’t was Benjamin Franklin. And look how he turned out: a syphilitic Francophile who got his jollies flying kites in the rain.
“Maybe the toupee shrunk,” he said, still hoping for a miracle.
“I think you’ll need one with more coverage, Art.”
“That’s the second time this year. Christ, when will it end?”
“Life’s nasty and brutish but at least it’s short.”
“Yeah? I’m not so optimistic.”
Artie didn’t believe in aging gracefully. He didn’t believe in aging at all. At fifty-three, he maintained the same exercise regime that had made him a promising semi-professional boxer before a shattered wrist forced him into the only other business to reward his brand of controlled aggression. (He still kept a speedbag mounted to his office wall and liked to pummel it while in meetings with unaccommodating agents.) Sure, maybe he lost a step; maybe his knees sounded like a pair of maracas when he climbed stairs; maybe the boys in the mailroom let him win when he challenged them to arm-wrestling matches—but he wasn’t getting old.
Or so Maria imagined Artie telling himself. In truth, she’d begun to worry about him. In four days, he would sit at a witness table on Capitol Hill, where he would testify alongside the heads of Warner Bros, MGM, Twentieth Century–Fox, and Paramount. It was shaping into a pivotal confrontation between campaigners for free speech and crusaders for government censorship. But as far as Maria could tell, Artie was more preoccupied with his toupee than his opening statement.
On the topic of censorship, he said, “Have you heard back from Joe Breen?”
“Earlier this morning.”
“And? Will he approve the script for Devil’s Bargain?”
Maria said nothing.
“I’m going to pull the rest of my hair out, aren’t I?”
“I’m afraid so,” she admitted.
Maria had started working at Mercury a decade earlier, rising from the typing pool to the front office. At the age of twenty-eight, she was an associate producer and Artie’s deputy, a job that demanded the talents of a general, diplomat, hostage negotiator, and hairdresser. Among her duties was getting every Mercury picture blessed by the puritans and spoilsports who upheld the moral standards of movies at the Production Code Administration. The grand inquisitor over there was Joseph Breen, a bluenose so distraughtfully Catholic he’d once bowdlerized a Jesus biopic for sticking too close to the source material; apparently, a foreign-born Jew advocating redistribution smacked of Bolshevism to Breen. Committed to making pictures gratuitously inoffensive, Breen withheld Production Code approval from any movie dealing with contentious subjects. Throughout the 1930s, if you only got your news from the local picture house, you’d find the American South untroubled by Jim Crow and Europe untouched by fascism. But by late summer 1941, not even a force of blandness as entrenched as the Production Code could keep the European crisis from the screen.
In response to pro-interventionist messages in recent movies, a group of isolationist senators accused Hollywood of plotting with Roosevelt “to make America punch drunk with propaganda to push her into war” against Germany and Italy. Congressional hearings were hastily arranged to investigate these charges and propose legislative remedies. And Artie Feldman, ever reliant on the free publicity of controversy to find an audience, wanted to both undermine the legitimacy of the investigation and capitalize on his newfound notoriety with Mercury’s next movie.
Maria passed Artie the script she’d received back from the Production Code Administration that morning. Joe Breen had rerouted scenes with the frantic arrows of a besieged field commander. Devil’s Bargain was a clever idea—no matter her misgivings, Maria would admit that much. Written by a German émigré, it retold the Faustian legend through the story of a Berlin filmmaker who agrees to direct indoctrination movies in exchange for the funding to finish his long-gestating magnum opus. In a pivotal sequence, a visiting delegation of American congressmen watches one of these propaganda films and leaves the theater persuaded that the real enemy to peace is not in Berlin but in Hollywood. Of course, insinuating that US senators were easily duped conspiracists ensured the script would never receive Production Code approval. Maria supposed she should feel disappointed, yet for reasons she would not admit to Artie, she was relieved Joseph Breen had sentenced Devil’s Bargain to death by a thousand cuts.
“I’m surprised he didn’t censor the spaces between the words,” Artie said, flipping through the blue-penciled script. Maria’s marginalia were heavily seasoned with profanity and exclamation points. “Breen’s always had it in for me. I’ve never understood it.”
“You did call him a ‘great sanctimonious windbag’ in the New York Daily News.”
“I was misquoted. I never called him ‘great.’ ” Artie tossed the script on his desk and peeled off his hairpiece. His liver-spotted scalp resembled a slab of pimento loaf. Maria always found the sight of it oddly moving, a sign of the trust established over the ten years they had worked together. Artie allowed no one else at Mercury to see him in between toupees. He turned to her and said, “What do you think—any chance we can salvage this?”
Artie assumed Maria’s background made her a natural fit for supervising the production of Devil’s Bargain. Long before she became his second-in-command, Maria and her mother had fled Italy as political exiles after Mussolini had her father, one of Rome’s most prominent lawyers, sentenced to internal exile in the Calabrian hinterlands. Over the years their correspondence had imbued Maria with a contempt for censors and a talent for circumventing them.
Sometimes she felt life had professionalized her to hide in plain sight. Fascism and Catholicism had educated her in navigating repressive ideologies, and growing up a girl in an Italian family meant you were, existentially, suggested rather than shown. Gesture and insinuation comprised the Italian American vernacular, from mamma to Mafia, and coming from a diaspora where desires and death threats went articulately unspoken, Maria had a knack for smuggling subtext past the border guards of decorum at the Production Code Administration. Nevertheless, in the case of Devil’s Bargain, she agreed with the censors’ decision. Meddling in politics was for the rich, the powerful, or the self-destructive; she learned this from her father’s example and had no wish to become him.
“I think this one is well and truly Breened,” she said.
Artie nodded and tossed the toupee into the trash. He replaced it with the richer sable of The Mephistopheles. Its deployment was cause for hope, not least for its wider coverage. To conserve its occult charge, he spared The Mephistopheles for the most important negotiations. Artie was trying to establish a new credit line to ensure financing in case things went south in Washington. He and his twin brother, Ned, had a meeting that afternoon with Eastern National, a consortium of hard-charging Wall Street slicks who likely knew the etiquette for expunging drunk-driving fatalities from the legal record.
Securely helmeted, he swiveled around in his desk chair. “How’m I looking?”
The truth was that Artie exceeded his protégé’s talent for euphemism.
“You don’t look a day over twenty-five,” she said.
This elicited a rare grin from Artie. As a master bullshitter, he encouraged his apprentice’s efforts. Despite her sex and ethnicity, he knew Maria was, at heart, a Feldman Brother through and through.
“I pay them to lie,” Artie said, nodding in the direction of the accounting department. “I pay you to be honest.”
“Honestly, you look like Elmer Fudd’s dad.”
Artie winced. “I don’t pay you to be that honest.”
“Then you should pay me more.”
“Let’s not get carried away. But I suppose that’s the impression we want to make on these East Coast bankers. It takes a genius to know when to be taken for a fool.”
Maria smiled. “In that case, you’re a regular Einstein, Art.”
“Hey, you laugh, but you of all people should know being underestimated is a competitive advantage. When these Mayflower Society Wall Street suits see me, they’ll think they can use my fedora as a bedpan. It goes against everything they’ve been taught to take a loudmouth immigrant in a bad rug seriously.”
“You look like Elmer Fudd’s dad,” Maria said, “and the Yankee Doodle Douchebag across the table won’t see who you really are.”
“And who am I?” Artie asked.
“At the bargaining table? You’re Mephistopheles.”
Enlivened by the wig’s demonic power, Artie felt ready to slay his enemies. He stood up and stuffed his arms into his jacket sleeves. A canary chirped at him from the brass cage at the end of his desk. The bird had been an anniversary gift from Mrs. Feldman. The accompanying note said Artie could use the companionship. Artie had named the canary Charles Lindbergh, on account of it being an excellent aviator but otherwise a real piece of work. There was comfort, Maria imagined, in reducing one’s enemies to caged and easily throttled creatures.
“Where’s the statement you plan to read before Congress?” Maria asked. “I’ll edit it this afternoon.”
Artie shrugged and said nothing.
“Art. You’re flying to Washington tomorrow morning.”
“I haven’t prepared an opening statement,” he admitted. All at once, he felt very much like the man he spent a great deal of psychological effort convincing himself he was not: a middle-aged narcissist whose bald spot had outpaced his toupees, a guy about to have his loyalties questioned and character maligned on the largest stage in America, an ex-boxer who could defend himself in a dark alley but not in a well-lit hearing room on Capitol Hill.
“It’s going to be a show trial, Maria. It doesn’t matter what I say. I just…I just don’t see this ending well.”
Rubbing his temples, he seemed taken aback by his own uncertainty. No matter how often he was proved wrong, Artie never stopped insisting he was right. Whether he was speculating on the physics of Joe DiMaggio’s swing, the name of the capital of New Zealand, or Rita Hayworth’s natural hair color, his confidence made you nod in agreement, even if you knew he was talking complete crapola. And now he dropped into his chair as if crumpling beneath the weight of what he did not know and could not predict.
The bleak foreboding in his face concerned Maria. Artie could be maddening, capricious, and self-absorbed, but he had done more to support her career than anyone else. He had promoted her over the protest of male colleagues. He respected her opinion and had faith in her abilities. When he learned another executive had tried to get handsy with her, Artie slugged the guy and gave Maria his job. Editorials denouncing Artie for rending the nation’s moral fabric papered his office wall in lieu of good reviews, but there was no one whose morality Maria admired more than his.
“Listen, how about I come with you to Washington,” she suggested. “We’ll prepare your opening statement on the flight in.”
“You really want to watch me get fed to the lions?”
“I’m from Rome. My people invented the sport.”
“That’s very reassuring,” Artie said.
“Besides, my father was a defense attorney in the early days of Mussolini’s regime. I’m not unfamiliar with show trials.”
Artie gave her a grateful nod. “Book yourself a seat on the flight out of Mines Field tomorrow.”
They walked out to the lobby, past the miniature of the studio lot. Out on the street, the heat radiating from the asphalt painted sedans and roadsters in impressionist smudges. Due north, the mansion-heaped hillsides looked like a plutocratic favela. When they reached Artie’s Lincoln, he gave her a letter. “Do me a favor. Get this in today’s mail, will you?”
The envelope was addressed to German-occupied Silesia, to the last known address of Artie’s older sister. He wrote her every day but hadn’t received a reply in months. It was thin enough to contain nothing at all, yet Maria accepted the envelope in both hands as the true weight drained into it from Artie’s downcast eyes.
Maria put her hand on his shoulder, squeezed once, and slipped the envelope in her purse.
Wanting to change the subject before she could offer words of sympathy, Artie said, “It’s a real pity Devil’s Bargain didn’t receive Production Code approval. Can’t you just picture me touting it in my congressional testimony?”
Maria could. Inevitably, the most creative aspect of any Mercury production was the publicity campaign promoting it.
“I bet no one’s ever plugged a movie before Congress.” Artie turned to an imaginary camera. “If the senators here really want to learn about the dangers of propaganda, I’m happy to offer them complimentary tickets to Devil’s Bargain, opening this December in a theater near you. Remember I’m under oath when I say Devil’s Bargain is the best motion picture of the year—that’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“You can thank the Pope of the Production Code for saving you from perjury.”
“The Pope of the Production Code, huh,” Artie said. The phrase sent a flicker through his glassy eyes. “You’re from Rome. You must know what’s his name. The pope’s house painter. Michael Angelo.”
“Michelangelo,” Maria corrected.
“Whomever. The point is, that Sistine Chapel is something, isn’t it? You want to know what I think?” She didn’t, but Artie’s opinions moved with the tottery insistence of a drunk barging past the maître d’. “I think this Michael Angelo character must’ve been the Preston Sturges of his time.”
“Sure,” Maria said, smiling. “He was okay.”
“Okay? Okay? Somehow Michael Angelo got away with painting peckers on the pope’s ceiling. And mind you, we’re not talking one or two. There must be dozens up there. I bet the pope can’t raise his eyes to God without getting flashed by some smart-ass saint.”
“Michelangelo had a sense of humor, I’ll give you that,” Maria said.
“I can’t show a husband and wife faithfully married for fifty years sleeping in the same bed without that two-bit Torquemada Joe Breen farting brimstone on me. And yet the pope’s private chapel has more southern exposure than a ballpark bathroom at the bottom of the seventh.”
Artie looked at Maria and across that long stare the musculature conjoining their intuitions flexed.
“You know what? I think Michael Angelo would have done very well in Hollywood. To get away with that, and on the pope’sceiling. How do you think he did it?”
Maria folded her arms and leaned against the hood of Artie’s Lincoln. “Clearly, he and the pope reached an accommodation,” she said, trying to visualize the Sistine Chapel. “Michelangelo could paint peckers to his heart’s content, so long as he painted them small.”
“Bingoski.”
Maria understood what Artie was getting at. For years, Maria had devised strategies for smuggling the profane beneath the most sensitive censorial snouts. At her best, she passed more colorful bullshit than Babe the Blue Ox. Through charm, flattery, faux naiveté, and veiled threats, she convinced censors of Artie’s honorable intentions the way her father had once persuaded courtrooms to believe in the innocence of the incorrigibly recidivistic. When meeting with Joe Breen to discuss a Mercury production, she dressed demurely, low hemlines and high necklines, no jewelry but a golden cross. She so credibly explained away the innuendos Breen unearthed that the head censor would begin to fear that he was the pervert. Ten minutes later, Breen would be hotfooting his way to midday Mass and Maria would have a Production Code seal for a picture called Aren’t They Cousins? Beneath her cross she was all killer.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Artie said. “You find a way to get Devil’s Bargain past the censors and I’ll give you the producer’s credit.”
Maria eyed him warily. She’d been an associate producer for several years now and had yet to receive a screen credit, but she distrusted any transaction that gave her what she wanted. “Why now?”
“Because you’ve earned it,” he said, offering her his hand. After they sealed the deal with a handshake, he added, “Now go knock Michael Angelo down a peg or two.”
it was half past noon, and Maria thought she might catch Eddie in the commissary before he went back on set. She found him wedged between a couple extras, with a makeup man’s tissues still tucked into his collar, opining on the dearth of serious theater in Los Angeles.
He was well acquainted with the topic. Eddie Lu was a self-taught Shakespearean actor and the night clerk of the Montclair, the residential hotel just off Hollywood Boulevard where Maria lived. Though he radiated the leading-man exoticism that catapulted Valentino to stardom, Eddie didn’t benefit from even an Italian’s off-brand whiteness, and thus Fu Manchu villainy was the most he could reasonably hope for. Unreasonably, he hoped for more. He knew by heart the leading lines of the major tragedies, but the stage was no less miserly with opportunity than the screen. He’d lost the lead in Hamlet to a corn-fed idiot from Iowa who wanted to give his notes to the playwright. “If Hamlet were the Prince of China, you’d be my first choice,” the director had told Eddie apologetically.
In addition to being an immensely talented and unemployable actor, Eddie was Maria’s boyfriend. They had consummated their ongoing flirtation two years earlier at the New Year’s Eve party, where they tested the sound insulation of Mercury’s recording booth. Maria moved into the Montclair the very next day.
“All’s well on set?” Maria asked, taking the chair beside Eddie.
“I’m beginning to think The Landlady Dreams of Arson! isn’t the masterpiece of emotional restraint I was led to believe,” he said. Maria steered bit parts to Eddie now and then, if only to keep him in good standing with the Screen Actors Guild, and he could only accept her nepotism by hating every single second of it.
“Tell me what you really think,” she said.
“I really think the mascot of this place should be a gutter. Why do you stay here, huh? Forget Paramount, you could work anywhere.”
Several months earlier, she’d been offered a job at Paramount. It was twice the salary but a tenth of the power of her current position, and despite Eddie’s urgings, she had declined.
“Artie promoted me out of the typing pool. He brought me up in this business. That means something.”
“It means he can take advantage of your gratitude,” Eddie pointed out.
“If I wasn’t so concerned about maintaining domestic bliss,” Maria said, “I might wonder aloud why someone so unhappy with his career is so eager to advise me on mine.”
Eddie smiled sheepishly and raised his hands in surrender. “Those who can’t do, teach.” He nodded to the woman who sat alone at the table nearest to the exit, extinguishing a cigarette in the dregs of her cantaloupe and cottage cheese. “Speaking of new hires, who’s she?”
“Anna Weber,” Maria said. “One of the Germans. We took her on a couple months back. She did some of the miniatures for Metropolis.”
More and more exiled Europeans had appeared at Mercury in recent years. You could map the march of fascism across Europe based on Mercury’s employment rolls. In a moment of uncommon candor, Artie had confided that his only professional expectation of these émigrés was that they ease his conscience by cashing their paychecks. A number had never worked in movies before. So, Maria had been pleasantly surprised to find that by hiring Anna, Artie had brought on a miniature architect in complete command of her craft.
“From Metropolis to Mercury.” Eddie shook his head at the injustice of it all. “What a shame. Speaking of which, it’s about time I return to the great debacle.”
He reached under the table and squeezed Maria’s hand. As he passed Anna’s table, he said, by way of introduction, “Welcome to sunny Siberia, Mrs. Weber. It only gets worse.”
Maria helped herself to the last bites of Eddie’s apple pie and unfolded her notes on the table, but instead of Devil’s Bargain she found herself thinking of the scale model of Mercury. She didn’t know what drew her to it. Perhaps it was seeing Mercury through a medium anathema to that of the movie factory it depicted. So much of a movie’s meaning came down to who it deemed worthy of a close-up, a perspective, a face. But within the zoomed-out omniscience of the miniaturist’s gaze, all were worthy, as if the camera had pulled back until it held every bit player in its frame.
If you were to pull back right then, you would see Anna, the miniature’s architect, alone at her table, sketching a Berlin tenement on her napkin. Pull back farther and you would see Artie coasting west on Santa Monica Boulevard in a cream-colored Continental, each block bringing him nearer to the brother he loathed. Pull back farther still and you would see Union Station, where a Calabrian fugitive traveling on a dead man’s papers was stepping off the train with Maria’s address in his pocket, a cigar box in his carpetbag, a knot in his throat.
And you would see Maria pass an equatorial jungle, a Gothic castle, a brownstone street as she crossed the back lot to her office. You would see her linger at the Italian Piazza set. Change the signage and it became any European village, but Maria had modeled the set on the little piazza in Rome where every Sunday her father had taken her to the cinema. It was a small square encircled by clay-roofed buildings, cafés, and shops, all false fronts. The marble and travertine were painted plaster and plywood. Standing there, Maria repopulated the empty piazza with the evening passeggiata: pigeons bolt from footfall, sleek signorinas glower from the imperious heights of their heels, an old man’s part wilts over his forehead as he scoops steaming balls of horse manure into a fertilizer bag. In the alleyways, loaded laundry lines lift imperceptibly with each droplet of evaporated weight. Everyone watches one another, yet no one sees Maria. She’s twelve years old, walking beside her father. Their footsteps rise and fall, rise and fall, like sewing needles stitching them to the city, and it seems impossible that this is about to end, that it’s all about to disappear, that outside the confines of a Hollywood set, she will never see Rome again.
The landscape of exile was loaded with trapdoors like these. A misstep and the ground fell away. She was back in the place she fled, even now, in her office, at the Olivetti she had inherited. Long before it sat in a second-tier studio, her typewriter was stationed on her father’s desk, where the legal appeals it recorded had overturned dozens of guilty verdicts. No matter the termination notices or ultimatums she had composed on its chromium keys, Maria still regarded her father’s typewriter as an instrument of mercy.
Even now, all these years later, she could feel her father’s eyes on her. He watched and waited to see what she did next.
2
it was inevitable: whenever maria thought of Rome, she returned to that final summer when every Sunday her father took her to the air-conditioned cinema instead of church.
Those outings had been a wonderful, worrisome development, her father’s attentiveness one more sign of their reduced circumstances. Historically, he relied on a draconian Scottish governess to facilitate his infrequent excursions with Maria. But the governess, maid, and cook had been dismissed that spring, leaving the apartment vacant and forlorn with only her parents in it. Her father saw things differently: parenthood had been more agreeable to Giuseppe Lagana when someone else looked after his daughter, and without hired help to contain the twelve-year-old, the six-room apartment on the Aventine had never felt more unmanageable and overrun. If nothing else, it was educational. For instance, Giuseppe learned that the more time he put into cooking dinner, the less of it Maria would eat. He learned that she refused to use an alarm clock like a civilized person and just getting her out of bed in the morning was a half-hour ordeal of escalating threats that left him winded and exasperated. He learned that her favorite color was mint green. He learned how swiftly she could send his thoughts swerving from the homicidal to the enchanted. Now, on the first Sunday in August, he felt outnumbered when he met Maria at the front door and followed her into the late afternoon light.
“Don’t tell your mother, okay?” He locked the door behind him. “She might not appreciate our…program of cultural enrichment.”
“Because she thinks we’re going to church.”
“Hey, if you’d rather we go to—”
“No,” Maria said quickly. Her Calabria-born mother had an arriviste’s disdain for common entertainment, instead preferring to be bored in uncomfortable shoes at marathon operas and gallery openings. These outings with her father were Maria’s only chance to visit the cinema.
“Then don’t tell your mother.” Maria mouthed the words as her father spoke them.
Giuseppe studied his daughter, this befuddling creature in a gray dress and red bow. She kept her buoyant black curls spring-loaded within bobby pins that sparkled in the sun. Somehow, they had become a couple of fellow hobbyists with a shared interest in deceiving his wife. It was a nice change of pace, given that his relationship with his wife was based on him deceiving himself. Ever since Giuseppe confessed the extent of their financial predicament, he and Annunziata largely spoke through Maria. She served as messenger, translator, and negotiator, a purportedly neutral broker they both tried to co-opt with bribes and blandishments. The faculty Maria had developed for playing her parents off each other—extracting concessions that in peacetime neither would consent to—might have frightened Giuseppe had he not actively encouraged it.
They ambled down the Aventine Hill, passing beneath stained-glass saints while trolley wheels skated over rails with the sound of swords honed for combat. Across the Tiber, steeples and spires wrinkled in the heat. This was the first summer the Laganas hadn’t fled the city for the seaside resorts on the Adriatic. As if to defy the weather—or to punish himself for marooning his family in it—Giuseppe wore his herringbone three-piece. A serious suit, crisply ironed, lapels as wide as shark fins. It was much too hot for winter-weight wool, but when he recognized in the mirror the fussily dressed lawyer he’d once been, a vanished sense of adequacy returned to him.
By the time they entered the public gardens, he’d begun to melt. An old man skull-capped in a wet handkerchief watched with amusement from a park bench. “Bet he has some regrets,” the old man told the dog panting at his feet.
If anything, the old man understated the case to his dog: regrets were all Giuseppe Lagana had these days. It seemed unbelievable now, but as recently as last autumn he’d still been among Rome’s most sought-after defense attorneys, a lawyer who could wield a technicality like a battle-ax. Once you could have entered any prison in Lazio and found jailbirds reciting his courtroom poetry like schoolboys quoting Dante. By spring that time in his life had ended. Newly enacted legislation outlawed opposition to the fascist regime and instituted the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State, a system of extrajudicial show trials to try and sentence political subversives. Giuseppe had made his reputation defending socialist, anarchist, and communist agitators following the Great War; now those potential clients had either fled abroad, renounced their prior allegiances, or been sentenced without trial to terms of internal exile in the south. It rendered a defense attorney with Giuseppe’s particular talents and clientele increasingly unemployable.
Each morning he lifted his hat from the stand, popped his head into the kitchen, and cheerfully announced he was off to “work.” He overestimated his ability to mislead his family while underestimating his ability to mislead himself, a shortcoming of the professionally equivocal. At night he waited to come home until after Annunziata had retired to the guest room in which she had taken up permanent residence. Whatever confidence he projected in the morning had burned out by evening. He’d need another seven hours of sleep to convincingly lie to his wife for another thirty seconds. He hung his hat in the darkened foyer and crept into the kitchen, where Maria sat at the table in her pajamas. Her body drained its drowsy warmth into his chest as she leaned against him. Sometimes his fear of failing her astonished him.
“I thought we agreed you wouldn’t wait up for me?”
“I woke up,” she said. “A bad dream.”
“The crocodiles again?”
“Not me. Mamma had a bad dream.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard her.”
Giuseppe resisted the urge to ask more. For years, the sedative Annunziata needed to fall asleep submerged her in a dreamworld she struggled to wake from. In her nightmares she drowned: kicking, flailing, gasping for air as the tsunami pulled her under. Back when they shared the same bed, he would wake to her furious movement, alarmed by how little he could help the thrashing woman beside him. Taking Annunziata’s hands in his own, he would whisper reassurances until his voice reached through the ocean roar and guided her to the surface.
“Your mother’s fine,” Giuseppe said. “We’re all completely fine.”
After putting Maria to bed, he went to his study, locked the door, and ratcheted a fresh sheet of paper into the Olivetti. Ever since his employment had dwindled to long hours staring at a silent telephone, he kept himself busy with…well, what exactly could you call this document that by now had sprawled to fill six accordion folders? Not a series of appeals, though that was what they were. In the evenings while waiting for his wife to fall asleep, he ventured across the city to interview the families of those convicted through the Special Tribunal. He cataloged the meager and fabricated evidence, chronicled the departures from settled law, measured the mauling of his mother tongue in the rulings issued at drumhead trials. ...
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