Bellagrand: A Novel (21 page)

She stood pressed against him in the city clerk’s office, in front of the justice of the peace, with a small bouquet of red roses in her hands and a ring on her finger. The stenographer and the prosecutor’s secretary agreed to witness their vows. The justice made a little speech about uniting them in matrimony, about the commitment they were making to each other, about marriage being a journey, not a destination. Ironic, because it certainly felt like a destination to Gina. The journey had been just to get there.

I now introduce you to the world for the first time, the justice said, as Mr. and Mrs. Harold and Jane Barrington.

Then they were kissing and kissing. He held her to him, and she wasn’t going to be the first to pull away. Her dress, still damp with rain, her hair curling extravagantly after being wet, her hands moist inside the silk gloves—she felt as if she were being spun around, as if on a merry-go-round, as if in a waltz.

Her eyes were closed to shut out the words of the justice of the peace to Harry. “Have you promised yourself to any other bride?”

“I have not, Your Honor.”

Have you promised yourself to any other bride?

I have not, Your Honor.

Why of all things should she hone in on these thirteen words, the ones that stuck in her craw, as round and round they went, swirling like a small-cell hurricane. Was it a bad omen for newly wedded bliss to lie to an officer of the law?

The train to Chicago was interminable. They booked a private sleeper car. It was the only thing that saved her small-town Sicilian honor. She tried to stay quieter than the high-pitched caterwaul of the wheels against the rail, quieter than the intermittent ejaculation of the hissing steam engine. Their wedding night of consummated pyre was spread across a thousand miles and six states.

Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible
was what the justice of the peace had said, quoting Thomas à Kempis.

Why did the quote that was meant to strengthen them only weaken her?

Six

ARMS WRAPPED AROUND HERSELF,
Gina walked beside the Lawrence canals and the Merrimack River until it got dark, and then went home. She was half-hoping Harry wouldn’t be home; he often wasn’t. But no such luck.

There he was on their porch, sitting, smoking. She walked past him, thought of saying something, thought better of it, and quietly went inside. Because it was Saturday night, Mimoo had somehow gotten herself together and gone to the bingo hall on Essex. The dinner dishes were still piled in the sink. Gina filled it up with water, dropped in a dollop of soap, and rolled up her long sleeves, made of black crepe as if she were a widow.

She heard him come in, shut the door, pace back and forth behind her. She heard his voice. “You know, I used to think Rose Hawthorne placed entirely too much importance on her father’s favorite theme—sin. But now I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps what was required was more emphasis, not less. In any case, the lesson, weak or strong, seems to have been lost on you.”

He didn’t ask her a question, so she didn’t reply. Her hands nearly broke the porcelain cup she was washing. She was afraid his words were true. Insufficient emphasis, lost lessons, lack of remorse.

“Tell me,” he said, with fake calm, “how does
that
man of all the men out there jibe with your political awakening? Have you told him you’re a feminist and an anarchist?”

“An armchair anarchist,” she said. “In
your
derisive words. I won’t go to jail for it.” She continued to wash the dishes.

“You’ve never met a more free-market rationalist, a more anti-free-love traditionalist than him. Everything he believes, you pretend to me is anathema to you. I always thought you and I were of the same mind on these things, but perhaps
I’m
the one being pretended to.”

“Perhaps you are.”

He fell mute.

Her gaze was on the dishes. She struggled not to sigh. Not to cry.

He came up behind her, too close, not close enough.

“Did you do it to punish me?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She squeezed shut her eyes.

“You explain nothing,” Harry said, breathing hotly into the back of her head. “You just shop and cook and lie down with me.”

“And work. Like a good wife.”

“No one can accuse you of anything but.
All
in a day’s work, in a day’s life. But I need you to explain one thing to me.”

She opened her eyes and swilled the plates in the soapy water. She heard him struggling with his words.

“Why didn’t you just go with him?”

“Why would I?”

“Stop it!”

She was afraid he was going to shake her until the confessions tumbled out.

“Tell me. Why didn’t you?”

She heaved out her sadness. “I didn’t want to.”

He heaved out a breath. “When? Then? Or now?”

“Harry, please.”

“I’m asking you a fucking question. Then or now?”

“Then.”

He exhaled his heartbreak behind her, right into her hair. She shut her eyes again, her hands hanging limply in the dishwater, her squared shoulders rounding.

“And now?”

Ben got married. He married Ingersol in Panama. Gina wanted to scream, to sob, to weep. Rose had told her that, and then Gina lost her baby.

“Then
and
now,” she replied, her voice a vapor.

“Why don’t you tell me I left you alone too long?”

“You left me alone too long.”

“Why don’t you tell me I’m not the man you thought I was.”

She said nothing.

“Nothing more
you will say?”

“There is nothing
to
say.” Her head was lowered, as if she were praying, confessing, repenting.

“Tell me you don’t love me,” Harry whispered.

“I can’t,” she said. “
Ti amo.
”

He staggered away. “I wish I’d never come back,” he said in a groan. “I wish I didn’t get paroled early for good behavior.”

“Not early enough,” said Gina.

“Why did I work so hard for it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why struggle for good behavior in prison . . .”

“So I could come back to
you
!”

She raised her hand. The back of her hand was to him, as her back was to him. She wouldn’t even turn around. “You didn’t let me finish. Why struggle for good behavior in prison when there is no such compunction in your free life?”

“You’re lecturing
me
about good behavior?”

“I haven’t said a word to you, ever.”

“Who can find a virtuous wife?” he asked desolately.

“A virtuous husband, that’s who,” she replied, never turning from the sink. She had the sheaf of letters to Harry from Reed and Haywood, from Elizabeth Flynn and Mary Vorse, forwarded from the prison after Harry had been released, letters opened and read by Gina, now lying deep in the closet, below her ice skates. She didn’t know how he could have missed them. That’s how she knew that Mary Vorse corresponded with her husband in ways that seemed too politically intimate, as if she were replying to his own intimate thoughts. She didn’t have Harry’s letters. Not to Mary Vorse, not to herself. He did not write to his wife, only to the woman who in her replies quoted Shelley.
And my heart ever gazes on the depth of thy deep mysteries,
Mary had written to Gina’s husband.

They stopped talking. The tank was empty. They had run out of all fueling words. Gina finished cleaning up. Harry threw away the newspapers. Mimoo was still not home. Gina couldn’t go to sleep until she helped her mother get ready for bed, and wished Mimoo could come home from bingo a little earlier just once.

Upstairs, she lay next to Harry for a few minutes listening to him breathe, hard and broken. “I thought we were so strong that nothing could touch us,” he said.

“Oh God. We are.
Mi dispiace.
Forgive me,
marito
. . .” With exhaustion she reached for him.

He jumped out of bed. Both his hands were up as if either to surrender or to shove her away. “Not a
word
more about it. Especially in our bed. I know I accused you of not explaining anything. Believe me, that’s but a small mercy. We can do one of two things, you and I. We can talk about it and then part for good. And perhaps that’s best and maybe it’s what you want.
You
tell me. Or we can walk on and pretend it never happened. Pretend there’s nothing to talk about, as if it doesn’t exist between us. Those are our two choices. Rather, those are
your
two choices. What will it be?”

“Do you want to part with
me
?”

He blinked. His hands were still up. “You know I can’t,” he whispered, clawing at his chest as if he wished to rend it open like a cloak. “You are my only Calais.”

Gina opened her arms. “As you are mine.”

He came back to bed.

They walked on.

Except . . .

Gina had to stop working at Rose’s Home, reluctantly, regretfully. Harry couldn’t take it. He said nothing but she could tell it was impossible. She couldn’t explain it to Rose, but Rose understood everything.

“You know what my father said about regret?” Rose said when Gina went one last time to say goodbye. “About choosing a path you later think has led you astray? He said there was a fatality to it, a feeling so irresistible it had the force of doom, which invariably compelled human beings—you, your husband—to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event had given the color to your lifetime; and the more irresistibly you returned to that spot, the darker the tinge that saddened it.” She kissed Gina’s crying face. “Every single thing in this world,” Rose said, “is marble and mud, my darling child. The only thing you can do is make the best of it.”

Chapter 6

T
EN
D
AYS THAT
S
HOOK THE
W
ORLD

One

Y
OU WANT TO GO
where?”

“Russia, I told you.”

“But
why
?” It had begun as a normal Sunday afternoon. She had been about to start on an early dinner. It was April, and warm out. She had been thinking they could eat outside. Maybe amble down to the Common to see if the ducks had hatched more babies.

“Gina, have you been reading the papers? Or even the magazine I work for? Russia is about to have a bona fide revolution!”

“Didn’t they just have a revolution last month?” It was 1917. “The Tsar abdicated, Kerensky is signing decrees with a gold pen in the Winter Palace. How many uprisings can they have in one year? But more to the point, what do their buffets of revolutions have to do with our business, yours and mine?”

“Only everything.”

“Only nothing. Why would we go to Russia? The annual Boston spring fair is next month. I wouldn’t mind going to that.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.”

“Max said he would raise money for John Reed and me to go.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “He can’t raise ten dollars to pay you for a week’s work. But he’s going to raise money to get you to Russia?”

“I desperately want to be part of something bigger, to be part of history. Don’t you?”

“Um . . . no.”

“You’ve become so provincial.” Unamused, he returned to leafing through the paper. “I realize when it happened. The moment you became hell-bent on having a child, your concerns now begin and end with the bedroom. Shame, really. You used to have such an abundance of other passions.”

“Funny that. There was once a time you used to have only one.” She said it because she knew he would ignore her words, and true to himself, Harry didn’t disappoint. He ignored them. She said quite a lot to him that he simply ignored.

“Louise Bryant is going.” That was to bait her. Because he knew she ignored nothing. Louise was John Reed’s wife. As if she were the perfect wife, this prize of a woman who married John Reed and immediately set up house with his best friend, the playwright. Gina wouldn’t be baited. Not yet. He tap-tapped at the paper. “Lenin just returned to Petrograd from Geneva. A triumphant return to the country that exiled him. He’s ready to overthrow Kerensky and the Mensheviks who have betrayed the communist cause by making devil’s bargains with absolutely everyone.”

“And is Lenin promising not to make devil’s bargains with anyone?”

“Of course.” He stood up to come near her.

“Well,” Gina said, “if what you’re saying is true, then Petrograd is the
last
place you and I want to be.”

“No, please be serious.” He took her by the arms and turned her to him.

“Do I seem facetious to you?” Her solemn brown unimpressed eyes met with his inflamed gray ones.

“We
must
go.” He stopped. The look on her face must have been a sight. “
I
must go.”

She shrugged as if to say, you do what you must do.

Harry continued his persuasion. “Your Emma Goldman is going.”

“I care about this why?”

“Come on, princess. We will go for solidarity.” He shook her a little. “Gina! I have been dreaming of this moment.”

“You’ve always been a dreamer, that’s true. But dreaming of going to Russia?”

“Yes!”

“Quietly, then, because this is the first
I’m
hearing of this particular dream.”

“I have been talking about nothing but this moment for twenty years.”

“About going to Russia?” She tried not to sound incredulous.

“I have to go . . . to watch a new order be born. To stand shoulder to shoulder with giants. To bear witness to the most radical change your eyes will ever see.”

“Radical change?” She emptied the dried dead flowers out of the grimy vase. She used to always have fresh flowers in the house. It had been weeks since these tulips had withered and died in a centerpiece on her table. “Harry, do you forget I’m an immigrant? I came from a volcanic town. My father cut hair for free for all the poor people in Belpasso and charged the rich people triple so he could save enough for me to come here.” She laughed. “America
is
my radical change. I came here on a boat, remember? I told—” She broke off. It wasn’t Harry she had told this. She blinked to shake off the past, the memories, everything. “And I will tell
you
again”—Oh, what an elision, what a fraud—“I have zero interest in leaving this country.”

“Not forever,” Harry said. “For a month. Maybe three.”

“Last time I heard that, you were in prison fifteen months. And what do I do with my mother?”

“Stop hiding behind her, for once. You can’t move to Boston, to New York, can’t go to Russia. You might as well be in Belpasso for all the good America’s doing you.”

“What, I came to America to abandon my mother? My father would be well pleased.”

“Can’t Salvo take care of her?”

“What is it with you men?” She shook her head.

“What men?”

“Harry, Salvo has been paying half of the rent for three years, while you’ve been yodeling for
The Masses
.”

“Max Eastman calls me indispensable to our publication!”

“Salvo pays Mimoo’s doctor’s bills. He comes to visit her on Sundays.” Though not today because Harry was home. “He cooks for her when he comes. But he is not her daughter. He can’t take care of her. He is a man.” She wanted to ask if Harry could have taken care of his own mother, but she knew the conversation would then snap to an instant halt. Perhaps that was preferable.

“She’ll be fine for a month. She’s got a townful of friends. She knows every single person we pass on the street. Last time I took her shopping it took us forty-five minutes to walk two blocks! She’s got more friends than I’ve had dinners. Come on, Gia. History!” Harry was beseeching, not authoritarian. “Aren’t you the least bit excited?” He was turning forty in a few months. His hair was lightened a shade by the oncoming gray, but it didn’t look gray, more like sand after rain. He was still slim and thoughtful, put-together and rumpled at the same time, as if the clothes fit or didn’t, and he was all right either way. His eyes were sparkling clear. They weren’t fog and they weren’t slate. She hadn’t seen him this animated in months, maybe years. It made her slightly happy to see him excited, but only slightly, and she wouldn’t admit it to him.

“Not the least bit.” She turned back to the sink. The dead tulips thrown away, she scrubbed the inside of the filthy vase. “Harry, you’ve been in constant trouble with the law. What if they don’t let you come back?”

“Not constant. I’ve been careful lately.”

“They’re threatening to close down
The Masses
because of the stuff you write.”

“I know,” he said proudly. “I told you Max says I’m indispensable.”

“Yes—to me, not to him.”

Nicely true to form he ignored her. “And why wouldn’t they let me come back? And who’s they?”

“The Americans.”

There was a silence from him as if he were speaking one step behind the beat of his thoughts.

Encouraged, she went on. “America has just entered the war . . .”

Unfortunately this sent him in another direction, an apoplexy of vitriol against Wilson. “The man got reelected on one slogan!” he said. “One. Do you remember what it was?”

“I do,” she replied, “but I don’t care.”

“He kept us out of war. That’s it. Six words got him reelected. That was what, four months ago?”

“He did keep us out of war—for almost three years. Maybe that’s what he meant. He did use the past tense.”

“You’re joking, right? Hair-splitting over fraud perpetrated upon the American people?”

“Besides,” Gina continued, calmer than her husband, “Wilson told us the war would be over in a flash. The most it would take, he said, is six weeks.”

“Six weeks?” Harry sneered. “He also wants to sell you a bridge. Mark my words, the clang of noisome machines is about to be ousted by the clatter of even more noisome machine guns.”

“Don’t be such a pessimist, Harry,” she said. “Dream bigger. Wilson thinks you can have both.”

He laughed. “I’m not a pessimist,” he said. “I’m an eternal optimist.”

“I was joking. You did laugh, correct?”

“I always tell you not to worry about anything. I always tell you everything will turn out all right. This too.” Turning her away from the vase and the dead flowers, he took her into his arms, toward himself and his agitation. “We’ll go to Russia to get away from Wilson’s foul oppression of lies and deceit.”

“The laws have gotten so much stricter,” said Gina, spooling her long arms around his neck. “You can’t behave like you used to. They’ll throw us both out of the country.” She kissed him. “They’ll say we were supporting the Bolsheviks.”

“We
are
supporting the Bolsheviks.” He kissed her back. “I’m an American citizen. They can’t refuse me reentry into my own country.”

“Are you sure about that?”

He wavered. “Almost certain.”

“It’s dangerous out there,” she said, trying a different tactic. When Harry wanted something this intensely, it had always been difficult to move his needle in a different direction. He was the same way with everything, whether or not it made sense, whether or not it was good for his life, for business, for his marriage. Sometimes that persistence was arousing. Sometimes it was exasperating. And sometimes it was frightening. This felt a little like all three. They were standing spousally close. She didn’t want to move away. “The
Lusitania
was torpedoed, full of civilians,” she said. “What if we won’t be able to come back through the war-torn seas?”

“So we’ll stay on for a few more months. Just you and me.” He tilted his head.

Shaking hers, Gina kept silent. Bad portents flew like crows through her insides. She moved away from him, her attention back on the vase. The glass was permanently stained. It was not going to get crystal clean no matter how hard she scrubbed it.

He came up behind her, close, so close. His arms went around her waist, his face pressed into her hair. “Gia, what’s really behind this?”

She didn’t want to say. She didn’t want to go, that was plain, this she told him. But she didn’t want to say what was really behind this, not yet.

She changed the subject the only way she knew how. “Well, you’re behind me for now.” She wiped her hands dry and turned to him for good. She lured him away from Russia with her willing, receptive, vulnerable body, hoping it would be enough and he would let it go.

As always, Harry let the wrong thing go. A few days later he told her that Max Eastman couldn’t raise enough money for Harry
and
for John Reed to travel to Russia. Harry asked her if they had enough money in the bank to pay for two third-class tickets to France. She showed him the bank ledger. They didn’t have nearly enough for two sea passages, two train tickets, plus money to live in Petrograd. Gina closed the bank book with barely hidden satisfaction, hoping that would be the end of that, practical matters resolving his abundant enthusiasm.

But Harry had other ideas.

“Clearly both of us can’t go,” he said, pacing through the living room. “Your mother is not well anyway. You said so yourself. And you don’t really want to go. You said so yourself. I’ll go by myself. I’ll be back for Christmas.”

“As if Christmas has some kind of special significance for you!” Sicilian-like, not Boston-like. She wished she didn’t feel so run over by the turn of this ludicrous conversation.

“I don’t want to go without you,” he said. “You know that. I don’t want to be away from you. But I desperately want us to go. Please. Can we hock your wedding ring? We’ll have enough for a trip around the world and back with the money we get from it.”

She became so weak she had to sit down.

“You want me to sell my wedding ring?” she said in horror.

“Not sell,
pawn
.”

“And how do you propose we will
ever
get it back? What’s your plan for getting it out of hock? You’re mad! You’ve lost your mind.”

“What’s gotten into you? Why are you snapping at me like a turtle?”

“Harry, we’re not giving away my wedding ring. Never.”

“I’ll go by myself then. We have just enough for me to go.”

Gina chewed her lip as if she were trying to chew it off.

“We don’t have enough money for the revolution
and
a baby,” she said haltingly.

He was momentarily stunned into silence. “Who said anything about a baby?”

“I’m saying it now.”

He was stunned into a longer silence.

“Oh, so this one you do bother to tell me about,” he said dully, sounding defeated.

“You told me to tell you everything.”

“You could’ve waited to tell me after I left.”

“What?”

“Written me a letter. Sent me a telegram. Never mind.”

“I’m telling you now because I don’t want you to go. And we have good reason not to.
I
certainly can’t go.” She palmed her still flat stomach.

“How far along?”

“A few months. Around three.”

He looked down on the table, at their bank book, at maps of Russia, newspapers of war and disaster, posters of proletarians.

“I’ll be back before it’s born,” he said weakly.

“It’s due in October 1917,” she said. “What if you’re not back? What if the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks get into a scuffle and the upheaval continues until then? What if you get thrown into prison there, get sick, or . . . worse? You want your child to grow up without a father?”

“It’s the revolution . . .” he said.

“
Mio amore
, the baby is also a revolution,” said Gina.

Harry didn’t go.

Two

SIX WEEKS LATER,
in June 1917, just as
The Masses
was being shut down by the Espionage Act, Gina started to bleed. She stopped all work, all movement, lay in bed, and prayed, tried to save herself, save her child. No success, only sorrow.