She blinked, realizing Tina had asked her a question.

“How did you and Battista meet?” she repeated.

Maria smiled. “He saved me from a life typing businessmen’s letters and got me where I am today.” As she told her story, Aristotle and Battista paused to listen.

It had been hard for Maria to get her break in opera, because her voice was too strong, too mature, for the chorus, and it had an unusual timbre. She needed directors who were prepared to risk giving her lead roles, but most were risk averse—unsurprisingly, given the astronomic cost of staging opera. She had trained in Athens, where she spent the war years living with her mother and sister, then moved to New York, where her father’s pharmacy business was based. After more than a year of disheartening auditions, she at last won a lead role, singing La Gioconda in Verona, and sailed to Italy alone at the age of twenty-three.

“It was a difficult time,” she told the Onassises. “There was resentment toward this young interloper who didn’t even speak fluent Italian yet had somehow landed the lead. The cast pushed past me backstage without saying buon giorno, and I went home alone most nights.”

She didn’t add that she was a whale of a girl in those days, over two hundred pounds of blotchy, dimpled flesh, with a nose that was too big for her face, and thick, black-rimmed glasses, without which she was near blind. Her appearance made her shy and awkward, another reason it was hard to make friends.

“I had a guardian angel, though.” She turned to Battista with a smile. “I met this man at a dinner party on my first evening in Verona and he took me under his wing. He was an opera aficionado and we bonded over our shared love of music.”

Battista took up the story: “When Maria’s contract at Verona ended, her father wanted her to return to New York and work as a secretary. To me, that would have been a criminal waste of talent. I offered to subsidize her for another six months while I introduced her to the directors I knew and tried to get her career off the ground.”

“What a clever investment!” Aristotle exclaimed. “You gained a beautiful wife and the world gained a magnificent talent.”

Battista grinned. “We had luck on our side. One evening, when we were strolling after dinner, we bumped into my friend Nino Catozzo, the director at La Fenice. A soprano had let him down at the eleventh hour. His production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde had been advertised, tickets sold, and suddenly he had no Isolde—so I suggested Maria for the role.”