The walls of the palazzo—palazzaccio, the Romans called it, using the pejorative to signify not only their contempt of the ugly building, but of Justice, Law, everything official—the walls were dirty and pocked, as if they had been shelled. Marguerite and Alberto took an elevator filled with corpulent lawyers to the second floor and there went into a courtroom that was beginning to fill with people standing in groups. “La Legge è Uguale per Tutti” was inscribed above the judges’ richly carved wood bench, and Marguerite regarded it silently. As if anything inflexible, any absolutism could be justice! she thought. And above the inscription, as if to render absurd the statement that the law is equal for all, hung the crucifix, present in every school, court, hospital, and post office of Italy and negating by its mere presence the idea of equality. This is a Catholic country, it said; this is a country run by interests that need to be lubricated by continual lip service to Catholic precepts; so it spoke to atheist, Jew, pagan, Protestant, and anyone else outside the structure.

The other women in the room aspiring to freedom were elegant, black-dressed, pouting or sullen women who stalked back and forth like the caged she-wolf on the Capitoline. Marguerite imagined they all had lovers somewhere waiting for them; they would all go on to elegant places for dinner with champagne after the separation was legally accorded. Or they would fly to London, Nairobi, Vienna for the weekend. Or perhaps just telephone to say “It’s over and done with now, I’m free,” and meet their man later that night in their own place.

Not she. She would go back to Alberto’s home that night. She would prepare dinner as she always had, and sit at the table with him and Weezy as she always had. He had told her she could stay on as a guest there the few days remaining before her flight; she had her room to herself, he would sleep in the studio as he had done for all the past months. When she came back, she would make arrangements for going up to Florence.

Marguerite studied the inscription in a bronze wreath above the chief judge’s seat: “Lex.” She thought of Lex Barker. Lana Turner. Now there was someone who had gone through marriage as if she were trying on shoes. And not tight nun’s shoes.