Bellagrand: A Novel (10 page)

“The papers have been writing about nothing but your canal.” Gina smiled with pride. “You always said the impossible was possible. And you were right.”

“You mean I was a lunatic. I looked at nothing but mountains and mud and said we would build a fifty-mile waterway above sea level with concrete dams to push giant ships through.”

If she could whistle and she weren’t a lady, she would have. “It’s extraordinary.”

“It’s madness.”

“It’s a phenomenon! They’re calling it the
engineering wonder of the modern world. Just like you said it would be.”

“It was nothing like I thought it would be.” He shrugged. “I said a lot of things when I was young and foolish. I received a healthy dose of reality in Panama.”

“Did you get yellow fever, too?” Gina asked, appraising him. He seemed toughened, but somehow worn-out. He looked as if he needed a juicy steak, a stiff drink.

“Yes. Washed my face in the river. Teaches me.”

“Well, you don’t need to go all the way to Panama to catch yellow fever,” said Gina. “Mother Jones’s husband and four of her children died of it somewhere in Tennessee.”

“It was touch and go for me, too, for a while. Though now I’m immune for life.”

“Really? From malaria, too?”

“No, but I do carry a small bottle of quinine with me everywhere I go.”

“I don’t think there’s much risk of malaria in Concord, Ben.”

“One can never be too careful against that wretched blight.”

“That’s true.” Her elbows were on the table, her head resting between her hands. “So they didn’t need you in Panama anymore?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that in August we finally had our first ship navigate through. I stayed until mid-September to make sure there were no irrecoverable disasters, and at first sign of trouble, when one of the levees failed to open, I sailed home.” He laughed. “I told them I was testing the time of travel through the canal instead of around Cape Horn.”

“How did you get here?”

“The liner took me to Key West where a railroad met me.”

“A railroad in Key West? Isn’t it an island?”

“So you would think. Little did I know that in the last ten years, some man named Henry Flagler was bringing a railroad over one hundred and fifty miles of sea to Key West, precisely because of our canal. He thought the United States could use a southernmost port connected by rail to the mainland.”

“Oh, that is amazing! So many amazing things everywhere. People working, making things.” She shook off her words, coughed. Why were the simplest things so hard to talk about? “Are you home for good?”

“We’ll see.” He smiled, slightly rueful. “I’m afraid I still miss it terribly, against all reason. Why in the world would I miss the sandflies and what they do to my body? What if I discover I can’t make a life anywhere else but in the infested malarian tropics?”

“Hmm. You look like you adjusted well.” She appraised his tailored suit, his crisp white shirt. “Are you working here?”

“As opposed to what? Of course I’m working. Still and ever with the Army Corps. Headquartered in Boston, but constantly out on civil engineering projects.”

“Oh, Ben.” She sighed, remembering the past, gazing at him fondly. “So how was it? Where did you live? What did you eat? Did you work long days? Did you get hurt? Was there any fun?”

He smiled, with amusement, with pleasure. “That’s a mouthful of questions.”

“I know. I’m sorry!”

He got a look in his eyes as if he were recalling a lost lover. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever imagined.”

“Aren’t most things?”

“I don’t know,” said Ben. “Depends on the things.” Without a blink, he continued. “Panama is more mountainous than I expected. More dramatically landscaped. Rocky. It’s nearly completely covered by impenetrable forest. Dissected with rivers, streams, deep gorges. It’s tropically hot, it pours rain like you’ve never seen, and then is dry like the desert. The fish is good.” He smiled broadly. “The women are very friendly.”

“Well, who wouldn’t be friendly to a handsome American man like you,” Gina said, just as Rose stuck her head in, reminding her that the patients were still not fed, and it was well past six. But there was still so much to talk about! Gina jumped up with regret and hurried to the stove, organizing the tray with the stacked soup bowls and bread.

“Here,” Ben said. “Let me help.” He took off his suit jacket, unbuttoned his vest, rolled up his white sleeves, and carried the soup tureen into the annex.

It was after seven and dark when they were finished with the feeding and the cleaning up.

“Sorry you spent such a long time helping me,” said Gina. “I thought we might have time to go for a walk. Concord is lovely in the fall.”

He chuckled.

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m trying to remember what Louisa May Alcott wrote about Concord. As I recall, it wasn’t very complimentary.”

“It couldn’t have been that bad,” Gina said. “She lived and died in Orchard House, just down the road. But . . .”

“Another time perhaps.”

“Yes.” She mulled things over quickly, chewing her lip. “Could you maybe take me back to Lawrence? I don’t like to travel alone. You could keep me company, we could finish our catch-up and I’ll make you dinner for your trouble.” She smiled. “What do you say? I have a recipe for mustard chicken.”

He nodded. “I’d be happy to take you home. You shouldn’t travel alone this late. But let’s not wait until Lawrence. How about dinner first? You must be hungry after a full day’s work. Let’s go to Wright’s Tavern.”

“Go where?” She glanced at her skirt. “I can’t . . . I’m not dressed for dinner. I can’t show myself in a nice restaurant.”

“Who said anything about nice? Wright’s Tavern, I told you. You’ll be the best dressed woman in the place. Possibly the only woman.”

She laughed. “Ben, what could you possibly know about taverns in Concord?”

“It’s the only thing I know about Concord. Except what Louisa May Alcott wrote.”

She chewed her lip, curious, ambivalent, hungry.

Ben must have been reading her thoughts. He leaned closer to her. “You’re worried about propriety?”

She nodded.

“Manners do dictate that a woman cannot be seen out and about with a man alone unless she is married.”

“That’s what I feared, I mean, um,
thought
.”

“But Gina, do I need to remind you that you
are
married?” Ben straightened up. “In every way, even this one, we can be proper Bostonians.”

She laughed happily, she couldn’t help herself. “Please, another time?” She really wasn’t dressed to go out. Ladies didn’t go out in stained clothing in public. She pulled out a train schedule from her purse.

“I tell you what,” Ben said, taking the booklet out of her hands. “How about we take my car.” He led her outside.

“You have a car?”

“Why are you surprised? Everybody has one.”

“We don’t,” Gina said. “We can’t afford it. Harry says only rich people have cars.”

“That may have been true in 1905 when Bill Haywood was yelling that only oppressors like Harry had cars. But now, thanks to Mr. Ford and his assembly line, there are two million cars on the road. He has transformed the United States. A nation of toilers is fast becoming a nation of consumers.”

“Not me,” Gina said. “I’m still a toiler. You must make a good living if you can afford a car.” She said this with a feeling approaching envy.

“Not really. I just make a living. But I will say that in Panama”—he smiled—“they paid us engineers as if we were kings. They paid us more than they paid the doctors! Can you imagine? And they paid the chief engineers most of all. I saved all my money. I had nothing to spend it on. All I did was work. The housing was paid for and the Canal Commissary fed tens of thousands of workers for free.”

Gina could tell he was trying to make her feel better. Someone else to pay for her food and housing? What would that be like?

Rose walked out to say goodbye. “Ben, come again. You’re always welcome.”

“Maybe next time I could help a bit more?”

“Help do what?” asked Gina.

“I don’t know. This place is run by women. There must be something a man could do. Fix a window? Repair a doorknob?”

Rose put her grateful hand on Ben’s. “You know one of my deepest regrets is that no matter how I try I can never get good devoted men to come and shoulder the burden of this work, care for the sick men the way we attend to sick women.”

Ben lowered his head to her. “I don’t know about attending to the sick, Sister Alphonsa,” he said, using the name Rose had adopted when she joined the convent. “But I’ll fix your windows and patch your doors.”

“Oh!” Gina said. “We have dozens of projects like that.”

“We certainly do,” said Rose. “Our Ben can also be a servant of relief.”

After they passed Andover and neared Lawrence, Ben slowed down his vehicle. Gina hadn’t nearly finished her story of the last ten years of her life.

“Since he got mixed up with that horrible Cyclops of a man,” Gina was telling Ben, “it’s been nothing but trouble. And do you know why?”

“Because wherever that man goes, trouble follows?”

“Exactly. Lawrence strike, people dead. Paterson strike, people dead.” Gina shook her head. “Do you know who else Harry met in Paterson? John Reed. Have you heard of him?”

“No, I’m afraid not. Should I have? I haven’t been following the strikes and the radicals.”

“And Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. She is quite the inspired feminist, that one.” Gina’s mouth tightened in flagrant disapproval. “He was gone for months gallivanting with them, carousing . . .”

“Not Harry, not carousing.”

“And then they all got arrested.”

“For carousing? Or gallivanting?”

“For conspiracy to incite riots. And this time he was a member of the IWW. He broke the terms of his parole five ways to Sunday. John Reed and Max Eastman bailed him out. Someone had to. His bail was set at a thousand dollars!”

Ben tightened his grip on the wheel.

“But now he’s in union with the Greenwich Village radicals. He calls himself a revolutionary. Harry, your oldest friend, my bookish quiet husband, a revolutionary! Can you believe it?”

“No. Perhaps just a drawing-room revolutionary?”

Gina shook her head. “He keeps talking of moving to New York when he gets out.”

“When is he getting out?”

“Not sure. He served a reduced sentence for the Paterson strike, six months or so, and not long after he got out, in May, the archduke got shot! So Harry started protesting a war that hadn’t begun. This time there wasn’t even a trial.” Gina sighed, deeply weary. “He received a mandatory five-year sentence that for a reason I can’t fathom got reduced to two. Can’t be Elston Purdy, Harry’s public defender, as he is awful. But Purdy assures me Harry will be out in time for Christmas. Apparently he’s a model prisoner.” She swallowed. “Between the arrests and the strikes, I can’t help but think he wants to be away.”

Ben made an incredulous sound as he drove on. “It can’t be that.”

“You don’t think so? Then why would he, knowing he’s out on probation, be charging an army recruiting station, blocking the entrance, yelling, ‘Commercial rivals are having a fight and for
that
our young boys are going to die?’ ”

Ben shook his head.

“While you were building and opening the engineering wonder of the modern world,” said Gina, “some man named Franz Ferdinand was murdered in Bosnia and because of a random death half a world away, my husband is once again in prison.”

She didn’t speak again until they were back in Lawrence.

They got home around nine. No one was in. Saturday nights Mimoo went to vespers and played bingo. Salvo was out God knows where. He told his sister he served beer in a saloon on Friday and Saturday nights. Gina and Mimoo never saw a penny of that money.

Ben sat down at Gina’s formerly revolutionary table while she put together some potatoes with cold mustard chicken and opened a bottle of red wine. They sat down together and broke bread.

“This is very good,” he said, eating hungrily. “But you don’t make Italian food anymore? Your brother was such a good cook.”

“After what happened to his restaurants, no, we don’t make Italian food like we used to. No one wants to cook it, no one wants to eat it.”

“You know, Gina,” Ben said, “years ago when I learned that Harry helped Salvo, everybody thought I was upset because of
you
, but really I was just jealous because I thought he’d be having Italian food every night.”

Flushing at Ben’s casual admission that once there was a time when he might have been upset over her, Gina tried to respond in kind—lightly. “Well, Harry did have it every night,” she said lowering her eyes. “Now he has it sporadically.”

“That’s a real shame,” said Ben. “So where’s your brother?”

“During the week he works at Purity in the North End. On the weekends he’s back home. We see him much more now that Harry’s away. Mimoo is happy. It’s quite a predicament. On the one hand, my husband is in prison, on the other hand, my brother is home.”

Ben finished eating. “So what happened?” he asked quietly, wiping his mouth on a napkin. “I thought the restaurants were doing so well.” He poured Gina more wine.

“Esther didn’t tell you?”

“Esther doesn’t know what happened. She just knows they were sold. Tell me. We have time. When is Mimoo coming home?”

“Eleven. And she’ll be delighted to find you here.”

Ben smiled. “Just like old times.”

They sat at the table as Gina poured out her life to Ben, all the Salvo, Harry, and Angela miseries of it.

Five

AFTER THE ELOPEMENT SALVO
invites Harry, who’s “between jobs” to come work at the family’s two restaurants. Harry says, “Doing what? I can’t make pizza.”

They laugh. “Of course you can’t.” Because he isn’t Italian.

Harry mopes for days, and only when Gina presses him does he reveal to her the contents of the letter he recently received from Herman Barrington calling in the mortgage on Salvo’s two restaurants. Salvo has been slow in making the payments, and after what has transpired, Herman has no interest in remaining flexible. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you what a vindictive, cruel son of a bitch my father is. I know I should have said something sooner. Please don’t be upset with me. I tried to make it right. I even went to see him.” Harry can’t look at Gina’s dumbstruck face. “Do you know how hard that was? I went to him for help, to ask him to reconsider, to give Salvo a little more time to pay, and he wouldn’t let me in, wouldn’t come out to speak to me! Sent his lackey instead.”