Free Irrepressible by Leslie Brody

racism.
    They spent days on the beach sunbathing and swimming, but Decca continued to give Miami poor reviews. Despite its purported glamour, it seemed shabby and sleazy. She and Esmond were stuck in an apartment alive with huge tropical cockroaches. Decca eventually came to see Miami as one of those end-of-the-road coastal destinations that attracted outsiders, dissidents, the lost, and the reinvented. Miami was full of characters, and she met them on the beach, in the bar, and at the track. As Decca would note in a letter to Unity (still unaware of her sister’s suicide attempt), this Miami
was much “like the South of France or Venice, all the people here have got something extraorder about them,” even the vapid rich. A couple they met in Palm Beach “have a French butler & although he talks perfect English they insist on talking to him in very bad French for the atmosphere.”
    They would stay in Miami for six months. In the evening, already exhausted from work at the drugstore, Decca would join Esmond as an employee at the Roma Italian Restaurant, where in quick time he worked his way up from general help to part owner. Eventually, Esmond would run the bar while Decca worked as a part-time bookkeeper and bouncer. She described with great pleasure the bouncer part of her job, in which she’d occasionally be asked to entice intoxicated women out of the restrooms. Esmond also considered Miami “mean, murky and meretricious.” For him this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He was drawn to its Graham Greene sort of tropical intrigue. It was also a great theater in which he could exercise all his considerable talent and charm, a place in which to lose himself. Behind the bar, he would perform characters: a Chicago gangster, a stiff-lipped butler, the sophisticated playboy, and the young immigrant barman, welcoming confidences and dispensing advice. For a while, the nights in the restaurant were an idyll. The Italian meals were delicious, plentiful, and free. Esmond’s energy, Decca’s beauty, and her sense of fun endeared them to their partners in business, the close-knit, amiable Italian American Chizzoli family. In Miami, the couple established a home and network of acquaintances. Unexpectedly, the Roma became their permanent address.
    It may have been the war news in the background or the rumors arriving concerning sister Unity, but as Christmas in Miami approached, Decca had the premonition “that something unpleasant would spring out at us from behind the garish façade of that horribly tinselly town with its maddening eternal sunshine pouring incessantly down.” In late December 1939, Decca learned from newspaper headlines that her sister Unity had shot herself in the head, but the bullet had not immediately killed her. Decca’s family soon confirmed that Unity had survived her suicide attempt. No one in England knew yet how seriously she had been wounded or that, on Hitler’s orders,
she had been transferred to a hospital in Switzerland. Every part of Unity’s story excited a prurient interest that sold papers. Reporters demanded to know just how close Unity had been to Hitler. Who was funding her repatriation? And how, when Britain and Germany were at war, did an unreconstructed Nazi get to return to England when the lives of so many anti-Nazis remained in jeopardy?
    Decca may well have been surprised by the newshounds who had discovered her in Miami, and by their number, but she was hardly inconspicuous. The press descended, hovering outside her house and inundating the restaurant. Reporters insinuated themselves with personal questions and demanded statements. One reporter offered Decca five hundred dollars for an interview; another bid one thousand. A third offered to arrange a transatlantic telephone call “to be recorded & used in a broadcast all over the U.S.” At night, sightseers would wander into the Roma and casually ask to meet “Unity’s sister.” This might have been good for restaurant