Bellagrand: A Novel (23 page)

They made crashing savage piercing love with the doors closed, the windows shuttered, trying not to scream through their antagonism in the sweltering dog day afternoon.

“Why won’t you leave me?” She breathed out, parched and spent. “You want to. You’ve wanted to for so long. You have friends that don’t include me, a life that doesn’t include me. You’re fomenting trouble while I spin and toil. Why won’t you go?”

“I’ll ask you the same question. Why won’t
you
go?”

“Where am I going to go? My life is here.”

“Mine too.”

They fell quiet, clammy with their exertions.

“You’ve really done it this time,” she said. “Really done it. The Sedition Act is implacable and you’ve flagrantly transgressed it.”

“I hate their laws, I find them loathsome. I fight on the side only of what’s right.”

“You’re standing on a soapbox in the middle of war, supporting Lenin and yelling for the overthrow of the U.S. government.”

“Yes. Like Lenin, I believe it’s morally wrong to send young men to war to fight for a cause no one, not the President, not Congress, not the hawks, the economists, or any of the politicians can even articulate. Imperial internationalist finance capital is as good a reason as any. No one can explain to anyone else why we are sending our young men to be slaughtered in Europe. Can you?”

“I don’t care.”

“Oh, you’d care if you had a son.”

She tore away from him, but he grabbed her and bound her close.

“Nowhere to go,” Harry whispered, holding her down, climbing on top of her. “Shackled together for life, you and I, and the chains are eating away into your lovely ankles.”

Eventually, when they were good and done, he released her, and she crawled to the edge of their small bed and curled into a ball, her back to him.

“We’re done,” he said.

“We’ve been done a long time.” She emitted a shallow groan. “And we didn’t even know it.”

Five

A MONTH LATER, IN
September 1918, Harry, Eugene Debs, and Emma Goldman were convicted under the Sedition Act for hindering the recruitment at a military station, attacking a police officer, and propagating vicious lies against the U.S. government. Their looming punishment was ten years without parole. It was better than the twenty-year sentence Bill Haywood received. Big Bill was found guilty of a total of ten thousand counts of sedition. Twenty years seemed a light penalty in his case.

Harry’s sentencing was in December, but his bail in the meantime had been raised to an unattainable ten thousand dollars because the district attorney deemed Harry a flight risk, and this time, the judge agreed. They returned to Gina the original bail amount, and she paid everyone back except the pawnshop. She had ninety days to buy back her ring, and it had been one hundred and thirty-seven. There was no way she could pay the interest and storage charges on it past the ninety days to keep it in the shop indefinitely. She barely had enough money for the bus to Concord each week.

Gina had asked him last time he was incarcerated in Concord why he never wrote to her, and he said it was because she would find their visits a lot less interesting if he bombarded her with words in the in-between days, but she recalled their Sunday visits, him sitting across from her, peeking at her through the diamond mesh of the steel partition, reading the newspaper, commenting on the week’s events, talking about the laundry, the awful food, and wondered if that was true.

Weeks into his imprisonment in October, Harry finally wrote to Gina.

Don’t come visit me. It’s best you stay away. Don’t take me too seriously, but no one writes letters anymore. It’s becoming a lost art. We scribble now, dictate commands. I’m sorry I’m not more charming. But it’s difficult to be amiable when around me everyone is falling like flies from the Spanish flu. If you come, you’re sure to get sick. I don’t want you to fall sick. I’m in a fog as to how you feel about me, after all the words you screamed at me in August, which sounded too much like the bitter truth. Perhaps I will get sick, and clarify your heart in the process. Maybe I’ll drop dead. Would you find that appealing? Perhaps I’m not being artful enough, but what I’m trying to say is, then you won’t even have to feel guilty about not visiting me. If the ditch digger perchance happens to return home again at the precise moment when I’m conveniently in prison, please give him my regards.

But Gina barely registered Harry’s ill-tempered letter. She was worried about her mother.

Six

MIMOO COULDN’T GET OUT
of bed. She kept vomiting, couldn’t keep anything down, not even water. She couldn’t move her frail body. Gina couldn’t work the looms at the mission or the sewing machines at the mending room because she had to stay home to take care of her mother. Salvo took time off from Purity for a day here, a day there, but it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t take time off and be the only breadwinner for his sister and mother. The Sodality Sisters began a collection to help Gina pay the rent and buy food. But it wasn’t enough. The mission got involved. Father O’Reilly got involved.

When it looked as if Mimoo had caught pneumonia, Gina borrowed money from Rita for a taxi and took her mother to the Lawrence hospital. She never left her side.

“Mimoo,” Gina said on a dark and quiet evening, sitting by her mother. “You say you know everything—why haven’t I been able to carry a baby? What’s wrong with me?”

“Child, I don’t have all the answers. Pray to the good Lord for guidance. I thought for a long time it was because you didn’t want a child. You know that God in His infinite wisdom wouldn’t want to give you something He knew you didn’t want.”

“You know I did, Mimoo,” Gina whispered. “What you’re saying is not true. I wanted one desperately. I still want one.”

Mimoo leveled a weak look at her daughter. “Good luck with that, now that your husband is in prison for the rest of your child-bearing life.”

Oh, Mimoo.

Oh, Harry.

“You and your Emma Goldman, you and your Margaret Sanger. They’re in jail too, just like that husband of yours. None of you believe in children.”

“I do. Maybe not they. But I do.”

“Well,” said Mimoo. She was wheezing, struggling to breathe. “No use talking about pointless things now. Your ship has sailed and is sitting in the pokey until 1928. Don’t be glum. You’ll have other joys.”

Like what
? Gina wanted to ask, but didn’t.

“Don’t leave me, Mama.”

Mimoo placed her cold, worn-out hand on her daughter’s wet face. Rales, abnormal sounds, rose from her chest. The skin was blue on her once olive face. “The greatest joy I have in my life is being your mother. Despite everything.”

A few hours later Mimoo bled from her mouth, gasping for air, unable to breathe, suffocating, not breathing. From beginning to end, barely a week, a faint candle flame.

Seven

GINA WAS WRETCHEDLY THROWING
up in the hospital lavatory, with her mother five doors away, untaken. She could hear her brother in the corridor sobbing. A nurse passing by said she should see a doctor. A mask was on her face. Gina put her own mask on. “What’s happening?” she asked the doctor who came to record the time and cause of Maria Attaviano’s death. Gina had been crying so hard and throwing up that her eyes were bloodshot. The doctor took one look at her and hurried to put his mask on. “No one is going to make it,” he told her, “absolutely no one, if you don’t get yourself into isolation immediately. You can’t be in the hospital coughing like that. What are you doing, making yourself sick, vomiting everywhere? Get control of yourself! Your mother got the flu. Millions of people are infected all over the Eastern seaboard. Tens of thousands have already died. Stay away from hospitals. Hospitals are hotbeds of germ activity. And this germ travels fast and is lethal. Have you
not
been reading the papers?”

Newspapers brought her nothing but bad news. She had deliberately stopped reading them after Harry went away.

Half of Lawrence turned out for Mimoo’s funeral. They all took up a collection for the priest and the cemetery. Luigi, the local coffin maker, made Mimoo a wooden casket free of charge for all the pasta sauce Gina had given him over the years. Father O’Reilly performed the service. All the bingo ladies from the parish sat in the front pews weeping. But other people were sick, too. You couldn’t miss the haunted faces, the translucent skin, the coughing. Something terrible was going around, something no one had seen before. Mimoo’s multitude of friends memorialized her, buried her, all walked in a procession after the casket to St. Mary’s Cemetery, all crossed themselves and sang
A
ve Maria
, but Gina could tell that they were crying for Mimoo while thinking, Who’s next? Do I have what she had? She worked last week, and five days later she’s dead. What is happening? Will it happen to me?

And Father O’Reilly, as if picking up on the black mood, read from Matthew for the funeral sermon, the parable of the Ten Virgins.

“Five were wise, but five were foolish,” he said. “The wise ones brought the oil for their lamps to meet the bridegroom, but the foolish ones left their oil behind. The bridegroom tarried. They slept. And then He came. The fools jumped up. Give us your oil, they said to the others, for our lamps are going out.

“Yet they failed. Not the humanity of those they asked, not the simplicity of their request, not their want, made them obtain what they wanted. Because no man can protect us if we are not ready,” Father O’Reilly said. “Not because he will not, but because he cannot.

“They ran to buy the oil and missed the bridegroom. I know you not, He said to them when they finally knocked on His door.

“So brothers and sisters, servants of God, I beseech you, the good Lord beseeches you, carry oil in your lamps, for you know not the day nor the hour. How frequently our Lord adds this admonition to us concerning the terrible ignorance of our earthly departure. You know not the day nor the hour. Be ready.”

Peculiarly the sermon had the opposite of its intended effect. The sobbing and coughing, the lack of comfort, and the increase in fear became only more resounding after the priest had finished.

Salvo couldn’t stop crying—before or after Father O’Reilly, as if the priest were incidental to Salvo’s sorrow. He wasn’t numb like Gina or unwell like her. He had been working and couldn’t get to the hospital before Mimoo died. He was inconsolable about not saying goodbye. “Just last week I saw her,” he kept repeating.

“She wasn’t well last week either, Salvo. You kissed her goodbye when you left, didn’t you?”

He wiped his nose in the wet windy weather. They were walking to the church reception hall after burying their mother. “I know,” he said. “But she was better than this. She was alive.”

They stayed together for a day or two afterward in their lonely house. Gina tried to talk to Salvo about Harry, but Salvo was an exceptionally hostile audience. She let it go.

“Come back, Salvo,” Gina said to him. “I don’t want to live alone. Stay with me.”

“If I stay with you, we’ll both be on the street because I’ll be out of work. How can I pay your rent?”

“Get a job here. Luigi is hiring.”

“I’m going to make caskets?”

“Is what you’re doing now so much better?” She sneezed.

“I work three jobs. I cook at the tavern on the weekends. And nights I’m on the docks, unloading olive oil, tobacco. You want me to give that up?”

She said nothing.

“Soon when the war is over,
you
might have to come stay with me,
sorella
. Might have to come live with me in the North End, no matter how much you don’t want to.”

“Is
the war going to be over?”

“Haven’t you heard? The Germans are about to lose the battle of attrition because the flu is killing more of them than the British and French.”

“The flu is on our side?” Gina said. “I don’t believe it.”

“The Germans are stronger and better trained. The strong die first.”

“That’s absurd!”

Salvo left after three days, after fifty of Mimoo’s friends came to bring Gina platters of food. She had nowhere to put any of it. On the plus side, she didn’t have to worry about shopping, buying, money, cooking.

On the minus side she had no appetite.

The weather didn’t get better.

Gina didn’t get better either. Many mornings she couldn’t get out of bed. “It’s normal,” said Rita, who looked in on her. “You just lost your mother. Why would anyone want to get out of bed after that?”

That was true. Gina agreed. But this physical malaise was not normal: the low-grade fever, the lack of interest in food, the whole-body dire exhaustion.

Salvo paid her November rent.

And then Rita got a low-grade fever and stopped working. She stumbled down the stairs one evening and said she was taking herself to the hospital because her chest was hurting like there was a baby in it trying to get out. Gina didn’t see Rita again. Two days later, Father O’Reilly buried Rita.

Gina was so afraid. She couldn’t take another day of fever and vomiting. She decided not to go to the hospital. Was it just her imagination, or did everyone who went to the hospital die there? As she dragged her body along Randall Street on the way to their family physician, she overheard two men smoking cigars and chatting on the street corner telling each other about their elderly fathers throwing up. As she walked past them too weak to button her overcoat, she thought, Is that what I am, elderly? I’m throwing up because I’ve gotten so old?

Her doctor, with the alliterative and endearing name of Clifford Clyde, examined her but blessedly did not appear to be as panicked as she was. She was embarrassed because as always she couldn’t remember which name was his first and which his last. Clifford or Clyde. She kept getting confused even after the receptionist behind the desk told her.

“My mother just died of the flu,” Gina said, and started to cry.

“Yes, I know. I’m very sorry about Mimoo,” said Clyde Clifford Clyde. “But I’m not sure
that’s
what’s troubling you. Is your husband sick?”