Bellagrand: A Novel (34 page)

“Or the notes she left for you and me around ours.” He straightened out and put his arm around Esther. She tilted sideways, to him.

“I’m sorry, Harry,” said Gina. “I’m sorry, Esther.” They didn’t speak. “How did your father manage?”

Esther shrugged. The shawl had slipped off her shoulder. “Who knows? He never refers to her unless he absolutely has to and never by name. I sometimes mention her in passing when we talk about other people or other events in our life, but we don’t discuss it.”

Gina didn’t understand. That wasn’t how things were done in her family. Everything was agonized over. But it occurred to her that to render judgment on the father was to judge the son as well, for she and Harry had been married nearly fourteen years and this was the first time she was hearing about the death of Frances Barrington.

“Harry never talks about his mother either,” Gina said.

“Is it any wonder?” said Esther.

“What’s there to talk about?” said Harry. “The less said, the better.” He nudged his sister. “You and I used to talk about her sometimes.”

“Yes,” Esther said. “Before you wiped your life clean of your family, we would occasionally talk about our mother.”

“Father told me not to come back, so I listened. I was an obedient son.” Harry’s arm remained steadfast around Esther. “Do you remember who couldn’t shut up about Mother? Louis.”

“Oh my, yes.” Esther rubbed her eyes. “Until he went deaf, he continued to go on and on about her.”

“What did he keep repeating?” Harry fixed his sister’s shawl and squeezed her to him. “He would say, your mother’s heart went done and broke.”

“And who can go on living when your heart’s done and broke?” Esther finished for Harry.

Gina slumped in her seat. Her eyes searched the faces of her husband and his sister. The fire had long gone out, and it was nearly dark except for a single candle flame, melting the last of the wax onto the plate on the table.

“Did she leave anything behind for you, Esther?”

A single tear ran down Esther’s face. Harry drew her closer to him. “Nothing but gloom for my sister.” He took a breath. “A chest of ornaments and charms. And a quote from Job.”

The candlelight flared in a brief squall, and was out.

Esther spoke, her voice like wet, loose gravel. “
Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?
”

Five

THE BIG HOUSE WITH
all its noises was so strangely quiet after the two clucking, fussing women had left.

The windows were open, the French doors flung wide to the great lawn. Gina lay in the hammock under the palms. There was no breeze, the palm fronds motionless above her head. She brought with her a book about babies, but drifted off as soon as her eyes touched the words on the page.

Oh, the illusion of romance in a white house built on such desperate desire. It seemed so real. She opened her eyes to search for him.

Harry was near the waterline and the lilies. It was hot and he was shirtless. He was tanned, his ash hair bleached by the sun. He looked almost blond. He shaved only on Mondays to impress Margaret Janke; the rest of the week he sported a porcupine stubble he tickled Gina with. His gray eyes looked blue in the hazy ceaseless Florida sunshine. He was cleaning the boat, getting the hooks and the fishing lines ready. He was always outdoors, digging, hammering. He built a table for himself so he could sit and read at it. Gina couldn’t believe her eyes. He had built a table! And not just any table, but a round pedestal table with a carved-out base and a mosaic top. It was intricate and stunning. Why are you so surprised? he had said, casual as all that. Do you think all I do is read and make love to my wife?

That
is
all you do, she replied.

She gave him nectar for the starved honeybees every afternoon, between the swimming and the sleeping.

But when she lay in the hammock like this and watched him, often she would cry. Could what she had learned about him explain away his initial reluctance to having children, or was that too facile? Every once in a while she would find him staring at her swollen body with uncharacteristic anxiety, with dull disquiet, and she would wonder if he perceived her differently now that she was about to become a mother. Did Harry define
mother
as someone who could abandon her children on a whim of the heart? She bought their baby silk rompers and yellow pajamas. She painted pink flowers on the walls of the baby’s nursery, sewed little bonnets and napkins and swaddling clothes. She vowed to redefine motherhood for Harry into the thing it really was, the divine thing.

They put gasoline in the white boat he himself had named
Frances
and with Fernando’s full approval took it out onto the Intracoastal Waterway, traveled downstream to Lake Worth, anchored it in a small estuary by the hanging palms, pretended to fish, had a picnic lunch, and purred about names for their baby. Gina suggested naming the girl like the boat. Harry balked so loudly, the herons flew away. He wouldn’t consider it. She wouldn’t consider a boy’s name. She was convinced they were having a girl. “I have a girl feeling,” she said.

Under the myrtle in the delta of the tidal woodlands, they decided on Grace, for how else to explain what was happening to them?

Gina brought bags of white and yellow purchases home to a perplexed Harry. “How can one tiny baby require such a department store of a wardrobe?” he would ask. “I have three shirts. Why does he need twenty?”

“She,” Gina would correct him, the floral extravaganza of silk and pink cotton on full display.

“You know, dear wife, my enormous beauty queen, my wise and undulating princess, there is a slight possibility, a chance, however remote, that this child might be a masculine child.”

“No chance,” said a panting Fernando, who had carried Gina’s purchases upstairs to the master bedroom. “In Cuba we are very good at predicting. We have a gift. Your señora is definitely having a girl.”

“All right, well, if the oracle from Cuba proclaims it so, please, continue to buy pink bibs.”

Emilio and Carmela were put on reduced schedules, because Gina wanted to gestate and hibernate with Harry in privacy, but the groundskeeper continued to work overtime mowing the back acre of their green, salt-tolerant wide-blade Seashore Paspalum grass that sloped into the water.

Margaret Janke disapproved when she saw the man sweating outside one Monday morning. She said Harry should be mowing the lawn himself, like his wife, who cleaned the house, sewed dresses, and made shrimp in garlic sauce over pappardelle.

“My wife also makes her own tomato paste,” Harry said, his eyes twinkling. “I help her with that.” Gina, lush and abundant in her organdy and muslin embroidered pastel ensemble, was pruning the orange trees nearby so she could listen in, and she shook her fist at him in mock outrage, grinning like a happy child.

“You should mow your own grass, Mr. Barrington,” Janke repeated. “You worked in the laundry room in prison, didn’t you?”

“Do you want me to mow the grass or do the laundry?”

“Both. Why not? You have time. You learned your way around the laundry room quite well. I know, I have your prison reports from MCI.”

“Is this MCI? I worked the laundry room so I could buy smokes.”

“Without work, man is incomplete. Man is nothing,” Janke said. “Look at your wife.”

“I’m looking.” His eyes smiled at her. Her eyes adored on him.

“Look how many hats she wears. She is always cleaning something, cooking, fixing, sewing, mending. Now she prunes. Do you see?”

“Also shopping. She’s doing quite a lot of that. Also creating human life,” Harry added. “Doing a marvelous amount of that, too. As you can see.”

“If you don’t occupy yourself, Mr. Barrington, if you don’t find some motion in your life, very soon you will find yourself weary, gloomy, fretful, and vexated.”

Harry stood from his mosaic table where they had been sitting, having iced tea. “Officer Janke,” he said. The twinkle faded from his eyes. “Don’t misquote Blaise Pascal to me. If there is one thing I know it’s my French mathematicians. I am never idle, not for one minute of any day. I don’t have enough hours to do all the things I want to do. I don’t have enough minutes to read the books I want to read, to think about them, to write synopses of what I read in the journal I keep for that purpose. Pascal talked about man being completely at rest without passion and without study. That is not me. It’s never been me. I am brimming with passion.”

“For all the wrong things, Mr. Barrington.”

“Also, for some of the right things, Officer Janke.” A glance at the overflowing woman standing and grimly listening with shears in her hands. “But your job here is not to judge my business or my diversions.”

“My job is to prepare you for the outside world, which you’re going to reenter in less than three years’ time.”

“No,” said Harry. “Your job is to be my warden. That is all. I prepare myself. I am not weak, nor empty. I rejoice in the world. My heart is not weary. I have no gloom. I wake up every morning just after dawn and can’t wait to begin my daily purpose.”

“Do you feel you have purpose, Mr. Barrington?”

“Without question, Officer Janke. My purpose is not yours—to spy on an adult man in the prime of his life to make sure he doesn’t wander too far from the plantation. But I will stand up for my work every day. I am preparing myself for a new life, for a new law. I recognize the life my wife and I had been living in Lawrence is done with. I understand there will come a time when other things will be required of me. So I work now at what I can, and I don’t despair as I wait for the bright future.”

Janke said nothing, her skeptical gaze on his affronted tanned, slender frame.

“I will not train in Bellagrand to be a parole officer,” Harry said, “if I interpret your critical gaze correctly.”

“You interpret it incorrectly.”

“I will not be a jailer. When this brief period of isolation is over, my wife and I and our soon-to-be-born offspring will have a whole life still ahead of us. I am preparing myself now for that time. So I can be the best husband I can be, the best father I can be. What you judge as my stillness, I know is fullness, and an active interest in the world around me.”

Gina stepped up to the table. “Excuse me, Harry, may I?”

With a light bow he took a step back.

“I wear many hats, you’re right, Officer Janke,” Gina said, metal shears open and flashing in her hands. “One of them is defending my husband. Leave him alone. You are not a philosopher. You are a warden. So come on Mondays and ward. And you are quite wrong about him. What you perceive as fruits of his idleness are actually the fruits of his solitude. Now, is there anything else we can get you before you go?”

Six

HARRY WAS KISSING HER
awake, then shaking her awake. “It’s after two, Sleeping Beauty. Do you want to have lunch?”

“I can’t believe I’ve slept so long,” she muttered, needing his help to lift herself out of the hammock.

“You’re like a turtle on your back,” he said, rubbing her belly and hoisting her under her arms. “I can’t imagine this is not going to get funnier as you get bigger.”

“I can’t imagine getting bigger,” she said, stretching and walking to the house with him.

“That’s true. You’re as big as Bellagrand.”

“I’m starved, is what I am. Did Emilio make lunch?”

“He didn’t,” said Harry, but before she could open her mouth to complain, he added, “I did.”

“You
what
?”

“Oh goodness, why are you crying?”

Harry had made them a feast: shrimp and avocado salad and cucumber-and-cream-cheese sandwiches. They ate on the veranda. From across the water, Gina could hear the plaintive sounds of Spanish guitar. They ate in near silence, making the smallest of small talk.

“It’s good to be alone together, live alone together.”

Reaching over, Harry fondled her belly, her ample breasts, molasses-dark from the sun. “Clearly we managed to be alone together before, otherwise I’d still be in jail, and you’d be mending dresses in your Portuguese mill.”

She was happy to have him be light with her, jolly. “Do you realize,” she said to him, her mouth full of watermelon, “that if I hadn’t hocked my wedding ring to make your bail, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now? I wouldn’t be pregnant, we wouldn’t have Bellagrand.” She shook her head, reaching for another slice. “It was terrible to give it up. But look what I have instead.” She gazed at him, then reached out to caress his sandpapery cheek with her sugary hand. He said nothing.

She waited. “Why aren’t you saying anything?”

“What should I say?”

“I don’t know. Something. Anything. I wasn’t talking to the herons on the dock.”

“Indeed. I figure I’d better keep silent. A minute ago you were weeping like a willow over a cucumber inside a piece of bread. So I can’t say what I want to say because you won’t stop crying until May, if then, and I’ll never get any peace.”

“Harry! Say.”

“I don’t want to make you cry.”

“Please,
mio diletto
,” she whispered. “Make me cry.”

He said he would be right back and disappeared. She waited, finishing her watermelon, looking out onto the water. When he came back, he went around to her chair and kneeled down on one knee on the limestone veranda.

“What are you . . .”

He handed her a small gift-wrapped box.

Her hands dripped with watermelon juice. She didn’t even open the box before she cried.

“Do you see why I wanted to say nothing?”

“Oh, Harry. What did you do?”

“I don’t know. Are you going to sit and cry or are you going to open it?”

“I’m going to sit and cry,” she said, sitting and crying.

After she wiped her hands, she opened the little black box. Inside, sitting in blue velvet was her two-carat diamond betrothal ring, sparkling, shining.

Open-mouthed, she stared at the ring, at him, still on his knee in front of her.

“What’s happening?” she said. “Is this a magic trick? I don’t understand.”