Bellagrand: A Novel (15 page)

They went for an evening walk into town, where they found a small restaurant with hay bales at its doors. They walked in like a gentleman and a lady. He held the door open for her, took her cape, her hat, her gloves. Gina could not remember the last time she and Harry had the money to go out together for an evening. She didn’t want to remember.

It couldn’t be true, she thought, as the server pulled her chair away from the table to allow her to sit, that since Harry’s all-consuming, life-transforming pursuit of her back in 1905, she had not been to a restaurant for dinner? She pressed her lips together to banish the memory and the tears of self-pity that weren’t far behind.

There was candlelight and fine china. Voices were hushed and the laughter delicate. She wanted to tell Ben that no Italian she knew spoke so low and laughed so daintily, but didn’t. When they ordered, she spoke so low, and when he made a joke, she laughed so daintily. During aperitifs Ben asked her why she kept herself in such check. “That’s not how I remember you.”

“I’m grown up now.”

“Yes, but you were a girl on fire when I knew you. Where is the Sicilian?”

She didn’t reply. She didn’t want to tell him how hard she worked on herself to hide the Sicilian parts—the loud boisterous voice, the flailing gesticulations, the instant emotions, the lilting accent—lest they expose her to all the world as an immigrant. She didn’t want to tell Ben how desperately she wished to be not an immigrant, but like the girls she envied, the girls from Harry and Ben’s world.

Girls like Alice.

The way Ben knowingly blinked at her, it was as if he already knew.

“You’ve become so proper, why?”

She said nothing.

“You want to be like the girl he left behind, the girl he left—for you?”

She flushed. “It’s not like that.”

“What is it like then?”

“Not like that.”

“So explain it to me, like I explained the Culebra Cut to you.”

“I’m just grown up, that’s all. Sicily is the child part of me.”

He shook his head. “You’ve taken deportment and speech lessons. You’ve learned how to dress, how to laugh, how to speak. You did it all to hide who you are.”

“Harry doesn’t much care for the loud Italian,” Gina told Ben. “For the flashes of my Old World self.” Except for the times he wanted nothing from her
but
her Sicilian flame. Oh God! Could there be one exchange this entire evening, just a merciful
one
, when she wasn’t recalling her husband after every sentence?

“I feel as if I should go visit him,” Ben said. “It seems wrong not to. We were such good friends. I want him to know there are no hard feelings. Do you think I should?”

“It might make him feel worse,” she said. “Point up the stark contrast between your freedom and his incarceration.”

“That’s true. But not to visit him even once . . .”

She agreed. “His mood is not great. It won’t be like your old times.”

“Few things are. And why should he be in a swell mood? He’s in prison.” Ben sighed as they sipped their wine and buttered their bread. “What’s he reading nowadays? Maybe I can get you a book to take to him.”

“If it’s in Russian, then yes.”

“He’s reading
Russian
? Good God of Jacob, why?”

“At first he wanted nothing to do with the Russian writers, but Max Eastman and John Reed have been in touch with him recently and now he’s all about learning to speak Russian like them.”

“Your husband is trying to be like John Reed?” Ben laughed. “So just like you, he’s trying to become someone else?” He eyed her with affection. “Would you like Harry better if he were a Russian-speaking Bostonian? I’ve never heard of such a combination.”

Gina laughed, too, and said she liked Harry just fine without his ever speaking a word of Russian. “But then I’ve never heard of an explosive-detonating Bostonian either, so there you have it.”

“Ah, okay, but the question is, do you like me better now that I’m an explosive-detonating Bostonian?”

She knew it was a rhetorical question that didn’t require an answer, but if she absolutely had to answer, she would admit that the answer was yes.

During peach cobbler, Ben brought up Lawrence.

“Gina, why do you always keep running somewhere else other than Lawrence when you’re not working? From the beginning you’d sneak out on trains and come to Boston, first for my mother and her radicals, then for Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman. Now you come here to Concord. I’m not saying you don’t work for a noble cause with Rose. All I’m saying is, isn’t there a noble cause in Lawrence? Why are you always running somewhere else? Or am I plain wrong about this?”

She thought for a long time. She finished her cobbler before she spoke.

“You’re not wrong,” she said at last. “I used to fool myself into thinking it was for this reason, or that. And even to come here, I mean, Harry is here, and—”

“Gina, that’s not why.”

“No, it’s not,” she agreed. “Truth be told I want nothing to do with the immigrants. It’s terrible to say.”

“It’s not.”

“It is. Like I’m not grateful. But I’m just so bone-tired of them! I’d prefer to live anywhere but Lawrence. It is so ethnic—the stores, the smells. Like the North End, but worse. All I want is to live somewhere people aren’t drying their washing outside their front windows and making their mozzarella fresh on the street. When I come to Concord it’s so peaceful. Even robins don’t sing too loud here. Everyone is polite, no one raises their voice, and on the benches in town men are reading calmly under the umbrellas, while nannies push the babies up and down. The women talk
sotto voce
, and the men take off their hats when a woman approaches. There is something classy about that. It’s so staunchly American.” She paused.

“And what else?”

“And . . . you couldn’t imagine twenty thousand women stampeding down the Concord streets, trampling each other without any regard for anyone’s safety or security, could you? Spitting, hollering, breaking windows, kicking the men, flailing on the ground in a temper tantrum that lasts sixty-three days.”

“No,” Ben said. “I can’t imagine it.”

“That must be it.” Gina took a long, lingering sip of her dessert wine. “I want to live in a place where Bread and Roses is as distant as the stars.”

Ben stopped driving her back to Lawrence on Saturday nights. Their dinners would run too late, and she had to be back in Concord early the next morning for the ringing of the five bells and for Harry. It made no sense to do all that driving, her to Lawrence, Ben to Boston. She started staying regularly overnight at the Wayside and Ben rented a room at the Ridge Bed and Breakfast down Lexington Road as it wound down a steep hill, around a field, a stream, and a meadow, away from town, from Rose, from Harry.

One Sunday in November Gina didn’t visit Harry. The next Sunday she told him she had been sick, things weren’t right, she hoped it would pass.

If October was a month for painted leaves, then November was a month for cloaking.

In December, Gina went to see Elston Purdy, and was shocked to learn that the judge presiding over Harry’s case was adamant: his sentence having already been commuted from five years to two, Harry was not getting out early.

“But you said . . .”

“That’s what they told me. I think they changed their minds because of the war. They don’t want troublemakers on the streets. Nothing but a headache for the police.”

“Not even for Christmas?” She tried not to sound despondent. “What do I tell him? Oh God. Even the Germans and the French declared a ceasefire for Christmas.”

“Perhaps your husband should’ve been a Frog or a Kraut then. His bad luck is to be an American who wants to wreak havoc
here
because the Frogs and the Krauts are having a fistfight
there
.”

“Are your loyalties divided?” Harry asks Gina on a cold December Sunday after she relates to him the awful news from Purdy about the parole. At first he is so upset he can’t even talk about it.

“What?” She stumbles in her speech, trembles.

He stares at her petulantly. “What’s the matter with you? I meant, do you wish your home country Italy was on Germany’s side?”

“Why in the world would I wish this? I’m an American now. And we’re not at war.”

“Yet. Did you march against the war last Saturday as you promised me you would?”

“Quietly, but yes,” she says. “I was a good antiwar American, me and Emma Goldman and fifteen hundred others. Do you care that you and she sound exactly the same when you talk about this war?”

“There are no anarchists or socialists when it comes to imperialist wars,” he says. “Everyone should be on the same side.”

“You’re lucky I wasn’t arrested like you,” she tells him. “Then where would we be? Who’d visit us?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “You barely visit me.”

She glides over his words as if she hasn’t heard him.

“Apparently the arrests are getting more common and the convictions harsher. The constables were quite angry with us.”

“How angry? . . . Lawrence angry?”

They stop speaking, even looking at each other. What more is there to say after that? When the time comes, she leaves, almost runs, without telling him a single piece of Rose’s wisdom for the week, and he doesn’t ask her for one.

Five

“BEN, HOW IS IT
that you didn’t find yourself a nice Panamanian girl and settle down?”

“Who says I didn’t?”

They were on Broadway in Lawrence walking between rows of Christmas trees. Gina was determined to make this a good Christmas for her mother. Salvo was in between girls, and the intemperate mother of his child had found a fisherman from Maine and moved to Acadia, taking Mary with her. Salvo was drowning his sorrows at the local tavern and with the local girls. Gina invited Ben for Christmas, but he had to spend it with his own mother. “If only to keep her from getting herself arrested for her antiwar fervor. I keep warning her they’re about to pass the Espionage Act. No more small infractions for civil disobedience. Every cross word against the war is about to be called high treason. Does Mother listen to me? Never has, never will. I have to do what I can to save her from herself.”

But Gina needed his help tonight carrying the tree, so Ben was helping her.

“Where is this girl?” she asked.

“Which girl are you talking about?”

“Ha!”

“Believe it or not, you have to be quite careful with the girls in Panama, too,” Ben said. “Their fathers and brothers carry lethal weapons. It’s almost like Sicily.”

“Who would think?” she said with a delighted chortle. “Everywhere you go in the world, silly men keep trying to protect their daughters and sisters.”

“Do you know why?”

“Because only men know so well what men are like?”

“Exactly!” They both laughed.

They found a tree, not too large, not too small, just right. Ben paid for it, and they each grabbed an end and walked from Essex to Summer Street carrying it between them through the twinkling evening. December was a good month to walk in Lawrence. There was no washing on the streets. It was crowded, the Christmas lights were up, music played from the open shops, people were happily buying gifts.

“There
is
a girl waiting for me back in Panama,” Ben said. “But she doesn’t want to live here, and I’m not sure I want to live there.” He paused, catching a breath. Gina, too, was panting. The tree was heavy. “She still writes me.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

They struggled to get the tree inside, broke off several of the branches, then trimmed it in her small parlor room near the porch window. “Is she a nice girl, Ben? What’s her name?”

“Ingersol. She’s nice.”

“Is she pretty?”

“No, I prefer my women deeply unattractive,” Ben said. “Of course she’s pretty.” Smiling, he recalled her. “In Panama the women have a very natural look to them. But they wear a lot of gold jewelry.”

“Real gold?” She jangled the bracelets Harry had given her long ago.

“I don’t know about that. But their dress, called the
pollera
, is all white, and has gold accents on the hem and around the puffy sleeves. It’s very feminine. Different from here. The dress is always white, for purity, for innocence, I guess, but it’s got ruffles everywhere, and gold buttons and in the back there’s a train almost like a peacock tail.” He shook his head in amusement. “So yes, white, but a come-hither-and-marry-me white.”

“So the best kind?”

“Not if you don’t want to get married.”

Gina nudged him lightly. “You’re funny. So what do you eat for your Christmas meal in Panama? Maybe I can make it for you here next time you come.”

“Can you make chicken
tamales
?”

She didn’t know what those were.

“
Arroz con pollo
?” he asked. “Rice with chicken.
Pavo
?
That’s turkey.
Relleno
?
Stuffing. Something called
Puerca asada pernil
, a meat dish? Eggnog. Lots of fruit.” He grinned widely. “Bananas, red and yellow.”

“You’re funny with the bananas. Did you say eggnog?”

“Eggnog like you’ve never had in your life.”

“Well, certainly, that’s true, since I’ve never had eggnog.”

They were done with the tree and with dinner. Mimoo was upstairs with Rita listening to the radio in Rita’s attic apartment, and Gina and Ben had a few moments to themselves with tea and honey cake before he had to drive back.

“You’ve never had
this
eggnog. It’s called
ron ponche.
Rum punch.”

She got up and went to the cupboard to get out a pitcher and two glasses. “Do I have any of the ingredients? Maybe I can make some for you tonight.”

“Let’s see.” He went to stand by her at the counter. “Do you have sweetened condensed milk?”

“Yes.”

“Evaporated milk?”

She pulled down three cans.

“Eggs? We’ll need six of them.”

She got out a half-dozen eggs.

“Nutmeg? We don’t absolutely need it. I’ll bring some next time I come. What about rum?”