Bellagrand: A Novel (22 page)

There was no hiding this loss from him even for five minutes. She lay in her bed while a crying Mimoo changed her dressings, and a mute Harry slept sitting up on the couch. Both devastated, they took out their crushing disappointment on each other. He blamed her for forcing him “for no reason” to miss out on the greatest experience of his life. And she, beyond blaming anything or anyone, feeling responsible for everything, disappeared wholly inside herself. She became nearly mute, stopped speaking. She prayed only to become like Helen Keller before the water flowed into her palm, to live in a place inside her soul where no words, no symbols, no sounds had any meaning.

To get away from Lawrence, Harry scrambled to get his visa application approved for Russia, but was informed by the State Department it was already too late. With the war raging and the United States in the midst of it, only a few exit visas per year were currently allowed, and they had all been applied for and allotted until January 1918.

Harry was forced to read about the storming of the Winter Palace from John Reed’s dispatches to Max Eastman and relate it to Gina with barely controlled hostility. And she, with barely controlled hostility, pretended to listen.

“Lenin has abolished all private property,” said Harry. “One of his thirteen decrees upon taking power.”

“Abolished,” Gina repeated. “It’s now illegal in Russia to own land?”

“Correct. All property finally belongs to the working man.”

“Ah. What about all the men who presently own land or real estate in Russia?”

“They’re out of bounds of the new law.”

“So what happens to their property?”

“It will be confiscated, I guess.”

“Nice,” said Gina, going back to her sewing. The pedal went down, the machine resumed its rat-tat-tat sound. “Taking the pails from other kids in the sandbox. I’m sure that’ll happen without a fight.”

“What did you say?” The noise of the sewing machine partly covered her words.

“Nothing, nothing. I was being ironic. I almost smiled.” There was not a glimmer of a smile on her face.

After the Bolshevik Revolution in October but no baby, Harry became even more vociferously antiwar. The more Gina implored him to stay quiet, the louder he railed. He fully supported Lenin’s pledges to pull Russia out of the war. Russia was not only communist now, but pacifist; two ideals Harry fell firmly behind. Weeks after Lenin took power, Russia stopped fighting on the side of the Allies and brought its soldiers home. Trotsky started negotiating with Germany for a separate peace. Everywhere in the United States, in Britain, in France, Russia was condemned as a traitor. The war could be lost by the Allies because of Russia’s actions, was what everyone wrote in their newspapers and editorials. But in Harry’s circles, Russia was a heroine. They could not say or write enough about her bravery for
The Masses
. The magazine was shut down twice for seditionist prose, and its chief editors taken to court.

Once Harry was free of the burdens of editing literary and political criticism and had some time on his hands, he began to attend every antiwar rally, big and small, in the vicinity of Boston, many in the presence of Emma Goldman. “No one says things against the war as clearly and vigorously as she,” Harry told Gina. “Why do you refuse to come with me, now that I’m starting to really respect her?”

“I can’t imagine why,” Gina replied, wishing for less cleverness from both Goldman and her husband, who with their public remonstrations were flying headlong like blind birds into the Espionage Act.

“Don’t worry about that,” Harry told an increasingly anxious Gina. “Worry only about what’s right.”

In March 1918, Leon Trotsky finally signed a separate peace with Germany, ceding to the Central Power two-thirds of Russia’s territory and a quarter of her population.

“I see what you mean, Harry,” said Gina, “about Lenin never making a devil’s bargain with anyone like that snake Kerensky. You’re right, he’s nothing if not an honorable man.”

They didn’t speak for a week after she said that.

A month later, in April 1918, Harry and a hundred others were arrested at the ill-fated recruitment station near Faneuil Hall during a loud demonstration that had turned violent. He was arrested after a futile year of protesting an inevitable war, a war everyone knew with cloudless clarity that the United States, a new global power, must one day join and would one day join. There was brutal language and an assault on three police officers. But most damagingly, there was once again the willful obstruction of a recruiting enlistment station, an act that was suddenly, as Harry found out only after he was openly charged, punishable by
twenty years
in prison as per the newly enacted sedition clauses of the Espionage Act.

Three

AT FIRST HARRY TOOK
what he called his “bad fortune” in stride. Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman had also been arrested in other parts of the country for their protests against the war, as was Bill Haywood. Harry thought he was in good company. He told Gina the United States simply couldn’t convict all those public figures at once. Gina thought Harry was wildly naïve and said so. “You pretend you want peace,” she told him, “but all you do is foment strife. You, Big Bill, Emma, Eugene Debs. All you do is sow seeds of conflict and struggle. And then you lament why you don’t have the two things you clearly do not want.”

“Which are?”

“Peace,” she said, “and freedom.”

“Did you come to jail to visit me or to torment me?”

“Why do I have to choose?”

All their savings for a car that never happened were not enough to make his extortionate bail. She borrowed from a resentful Mimoo, from St. Vincent’s, from Father O’Reilly, and from the First Savings Bank of Lawrence—and was still short by half.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men,” Harry said to her in the city jail while she was battling to raise the money for his release, “which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, and all the voyage of your life is bound in shallows and miseries.”

Gina bowed her head, pretending to agree with him, while bitter tears fell from her eyes.

“You have nothing to cry about. You’re not in prison.”

“I once wrapped you in myself,” she said to him, “but you have wrapped me in your own shallows. And yet look how deep they are. If you’re convicted, you could go away for twenty years! That’s
your
choice, but I’m going to be thirty-three and without a husband. That’s not
my
choice.”

“Your choice was me. And this is who I am.”

She struggled up. The visiting hours were over.

“Doesn’t seem fair, does it,” she said blackly, “that one wrong decision can thus lay waste my life.”

Which wrong decision did she mean? His decision to parade against Faneuil Hall? Or her decision to marry him?

“Your life? What about my life? I could’ve gone to Russia and could right now be writing dispatches about it, like John Reed. It’s all I wanted. Instead you forced my hand and kept me here, and now look at me. Look where I am.”

“I didn’t know you were so passionate a writer, Harry.” Gina clutched her years-old frayed purse. “You’re barely even a letter writer. It’s a lost art, I hear, letter writing.”

He was scarcely listening to her.

“Did you hear what John Reed wrote to Max Eastman?” He was red with his disappointment. “The people are crowding to his lectures by the hundreds, by the thousands!”

“That’s because John Reed is wisely not in prison.”

“They protest against the way things are! That’s the now, the protest is the future. Did you read what he wrote? That people weep with joy when they hear him, knowing there is something so close to dreams coming true in Russia.”

She was weeping too for a place where dreams came true.

Instead of going to Russia, Gina pawned Harry’s two-carat diamond ring and paid his bail.

Four

RELEASED FROM PRISON,
Harry returned to Lawrence and spent the summer of 1918 on pretrial hearings and motions, preparing his defense and shuttling back and forth to Boston. They were completely broke, materially and emotionally, and had nothing to say. Despite Harry’s casual apathy, they both feared the ominous tide that was coming, like a tsunami after an earthquake. They both understood the change in the American air. The country was at war, and Harry broke its laws shouting hate from the pedestals and throwing rocks. Gina ground out each day through sheer will: get up, work, clean, help Mimoo, pray, sleep.

But by the end of August she couldn’t take it anymore. By the end of August she had something to say, having come to the end of her very long tether one broiling afternoon when she had returned home for lunch to find the house a wreck and Harry unshaven and insolent.

She glared at him, trying to calm herself before she spoke. She counted to ten, breathed deeply. It didn’t work.

“What?” he barked. “I’m trying to put together my defense. I have no time for women’s work.”

“Do you know what Nathaniel Hawthorne says?”

“I don’t give a fig. Now is not the time for his pithy sayings.”

“On the contrary, it’s precisely the time. He says,” Gina continued in a controlled eruption, “that even a
dull river has a deep religion of its own. So, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though perhaps unconsciously
.”

“What does that have to do with me? Are you calling me dull?”

“No, no.” She shook her head. “You’re
far
beyond that. I don’t agree with Nathaniel this time. I don’t think you have religion running under the sludge. I think with you, it’s just sludge.”

Gone were the yesterdays of well-appointed drawing rooms and Harry in his gray waistcoat and white-pique trousers, entertaining by the fire with a cocktail in his hand. This Harry wore the same stained cotton trousers ironed by her last Sunday and a brown shirt misbuttoned and torn at the collar. She used to repair his old clothes, but when her sewing machine broke and they didn’t have the money to repair it, she stopped. To think that Harry once wore lacquered shoes when he courted her in New Hampshire, dazzled her in silk morning shirts in Revere Beach, accompanied her on the ocean promenades in black swagger coats to contrast with her pink summer dresses.

“Oh, you’re delightful this afternoon. Why in the world did you even come home for lunch if you’re going to be like this?”

“Why in the world did I beg and borrow and pawn my diamond to get you out of jail if you’re going to be both lazy and nasty? Look at our house! Look at you!”

“I’m nasty? Are you listening to yourself? I should’ve just stayed in jail.”

“Perfect!”

“No one nags me there.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“Lots of things you have no clue about, sweetheart.”

“Do you have a clue about how to be a good husband?”

“Oh, like you have about being a good wife?”

She gasped, let out a hiss of shallow air.

“God! Why didn’t you just leave me three years ago?” she yelled, hurling his newspapers and cigarette butts at him.

“Why didn’t you leave
me
?” He shot up out of his chair, the ashtrays, cups, papers falling to the floor.

“I should have! I’d rather be without a husband than live like this, unforgiven. Why did you bother to stay if you knew you couldn’t forgive me?”

“Why are you so provincial? What does any of this have to do with you? Have you been stricken blind with brain fever? Is that why you can’t see?”

“I see everything!”

“I’m about to lose my life!” he yelled. “I don’t know what
you’re
talking about. Forgiven you for what? That you fucked another man while you were married to me, pretending to love me? You aspire to be so bourgeois, Gina. You think your tawdry dalliance is what keeps me up at night?” He laughed. “I’m long past that. This has nothing to do with you, princess, what’s happening now. So go put on your silk gloves and pretend you’re a fine lady, go tend to your little business, whatever it is. I stopped thinking about you long ago. The world is in dire upheaval while you waltz around with your head in the clouds pretending what’s happening with us is about some degrading personal bullshit! I don’t give a shit about personal. Can’t you see? The world is being turned upside down. I don’t recognize the world anymore.”

“Funny, that’s what you said to me when you were falling in love with me on the beach in Hampton.”

Caught sideways, he breathed out brine and regret before he spoke. “Yes,” he said, panting through his clamped teeth. “And I was right. You turned me inside out, and since then my life has never been the same.”

“Shut up! If I hear one more word about all you gave up for me, I will hang myself! You’ve held your sacrifice over me like a bludgeon for thirteen years so you don’t have to do a single blessed thing you don’t want to do. And every time I ask you for the smallest thing, the littlest thing, you beat me over the head with your fucking sacrifice! I’m sick and tired of it. I’m sick and tired of you. What favor do you think you’ve done me?” She was shaking, barely standing, grasping the back of a chair. “With or without you, my life is exactly the same. Worse with you. I’m still with my mother, in Lawrence, broke, without a baby—”

“And that’s
my
fault?”

She burst into tears.

He took one step toward her. “I’m s—”

She put her hands up to stop him. “Get away from me. Even when you’re here, you’re not here, except to make a dire mess of all things.”

He stepped away. “Don’t worry, soon you’ll be without me. So no more mess. All good?”

“It’ll be better than this. Anything would be better than this.”

“Right. And I won’t fret about you. I know that while I’m in prison you’ll find a way to comfort yourself.”

She slapped him across the face. He let her. They stood glaring at each other, panting.

“You gave away your married body and
I’m
the one getting slapped?”

“I thought you didn’t give a shit about it?”

“And you believed me?”