Bellagrand: A Novel (46 page)

“Did they leave you alone in prison?” Gina asked, nudging him, standing close, leaning over him, resenting the damn news.

“I always enjoy your apt comparisons.”

“What about all your lofty interlocutions to Janke? Were they just for show?”

“No. What interlocutions? Oh. Work? Yes, I was trying to manage her.”

“Like you’re managing me right now?”

“Not very well, am I?”

“Why probate? What do you care? You said you didn’t. So why?”

He said nothing. He was engrossed in Russia’s war debt. Perhaps he hadn’t even heard her.

“Harry!”

“Oh no . . .” He put his hands on the paper, and finally looked up at her with weary, affectionate eyes. “Gina,” he said mildly. “Let’s make a bargain. I can finish my paper, and then I’ll take you to lunch in town, and we’ll have a proper conversation. Where would you like to go? The Breakers? Would you like to drive down to Palm Beach?”

“Alexander is showing houses with Salvo this afternoon,” she said, “but Salvo has plans at three so he has to drop him off. Maybe Palm Beach another time? When we can make a whole day of it.”

“Okay. Today we’ll go to Seaside. Now, may I finish the one little article that I’ve been trying to finish for the last twenty minutes?”

He took her to an early lunch on the harbor at Seaside, a local popular seafood joint.

She made small talk. Did you see that the herons have just given birth to their young?

He replied that he saw them.

Did you like the dolphins at dawn this morning? They finally reappeared in the ocean. Summer is close.

Yes, he said. It was nice to walk so early in the morning on the empty beach and see them frolic.

But finally, not small talk.

“You know,” he said, “with the probate almost over, the papers we’ve been waiting for are finally being drawn up. They’re going to be with us next week. The papers for the beneficiary transfer. We’ll go to the bank together. I’ve asked Jenkins to put both our names on the deed. So that Bellagrand can belong fully and equally to both of us.”

“That’s good. Who is Jenkins?”

“Trevor Jenkins, the bank manager.”

“Oh.”

He took her hand. “Does that make you happy?”

What was the correct response? “Yes, Harry,
il mio unico delitto
,” she said. “It does.”

She was waiting, waiting, waiting . . .

“What if I told you I wanted to go back to university to finish my doctorate?” he asked over the shrimp
ceviche
appetizer.

There it was. Gina looked thoughtfully into her soda. “I didn’t know there was a university in Jupiter,” she said. “I thought the closest one was in Miami.”

“Not Miami. Cambridge.”

She wanted to focus on him, but could not. Her vision had blurred. She continued to stare into her soda. “Harvard?”

“Gia, look at me.”

Somehow she looked. He took her hand, as if he were proposing marriage. Only the kneeling was missing. “What if I told you I wanted to move back to Boston?”

She couldn’t speak for a moment because she couldn’t catch a breath, as if her lungs had deflated. And there she had thought it was a choice of
vocation
that had been at issue! Alas. She had mischaracterized the thorny subject by one crucial letter.

He continued to hold her hands across the white tablecloth. “Don’t get upset. Hear me out first.”

“Hear you out, then get upset?”

“What if we moved back and bought a mansion in Beacon Hill? You’ve always wanted to live there. Where the fancy people live.” Harry smiled. “Alexander could play on the Boston Common every day.”

She pulled her hands away. She used all her Protestant training not to rip them away. “I dreamed about Beacon Hill,” she said, careful not to raise her voice, “long ago. Before I had laid my eyes on Bellagrand. You know I don’t want to live anywhere else.”

“Come on,” said Harry. “You’ve always been a city girl.” He tilted his head, full of easy charm. “You’d be so beautiful in your day frocks and court shoes, your pillbox hats and long silk gloves. You could join the Daughters of the Revolution. You could get a job at the Boston Library in Back Bay. Give historic tours of Beacon Hill. Tell me you wouldn’t want that.” He spoke as if dreaming the dream for her.

“Oh, so
I’d
work.”

“No, no. You could go back to school, too. Get your degree from Simmons. I know how much you once wanted that. I can give that back to you, what I took from you. Maybe you could become a teacher.”

She tried not to move a facial muscle. “What would we live on?”

Raising his hand, he pointed across the shining waters. “Same thing we’re living on now. Bellagrand.”

She was mute.

“We’d have two houses?”

“We’d sell this one.”

Her throat hardened like concrete. She could barely shake her head. She still couldn’t breathe.

“Sell it,” he continued, as if not seeing her distress, “and with the money we’d make from it, we’d move back to Boston and live like royalty on Mt. Vernon Street.”

All her effort went toward shallow panting. “The deed is not even in our names yet,” she managed to croak. “The ink is still in the inkwell for our signatures. And you already want to sell it?”

“If it’s to return to Boston like conquerors.”

She tried to take a gulp of air, but couldn’t.

Harry grabbed her trembling hands. “Listen to me, my beloved wife. I want you to have the urban life you dreamed of.”

She tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let her. “I have the life I want.”

“Do you have any idea how much this house must be worth? We haven’t had it properly appraised, as my father advised. But we’ll do it now. Salvo can help us. When Flagler built it, it was worth a pretty penny. But now? Gia, my father was right, we could be sitting on a field of gold!”

“Is it a potter’s field?” She wouldn’t raise her eyes to him.

“A what?”

“Never mind.” She admired his enthusiasm, but why was it invariably that his excitement meant a diminished life in her? Why did a numbness pour over her, like coldly moving lava? Why was she terrorized instead of enthralled? She shook her head. “Harold, I don’t want to sell Bellagrand.”

He let go of her, sat back. “Did you just call me
Harold
?”

“That’s your name, isn’t it? I’m not changing your name, am I?” Like I had changed mine. Even God wouldn’t recognize me, wouldn’t find me anymore.

“You want to continue living here, as we have been?”

“That’s all I want.”

“But
I
want to go back to Boston,” he said. “I want to get my doctorate at Harvard. And Gina—I’d like to be closer to my sister. She is the only family I have left.”

“I want to be close to my brother,” Gina said. “He’s the only family
I
have left.” She couldn’t tell Harry that she and Esther were not on speaking terms and might never be again. What had transpired between them felt unfixable.

“I know she’s been difficult with you. She’s reeling. It’s hard for her without my father in the house. And she desperately misses Alexander. Your brother is a vagabond. He moved here on a whim, he’ll move back on a whim. Come on, be reasonable. My sister is never leaving Boston, and we’re all she has. She wants us close. Alexander especially.”

“Alexander only.”

“Okay.”

“Alexander also benefits from being close to his
zio
.” Cucumber sandwiches, seafood salad, crab soup, barely eaten, barely looked at. “Esther can come stay with us here whenever she wants,” Gina said. “As before.”

“It’s not the same. You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”

“You’re not listening to what I’m saying.”

“But we already lived your way for more than three years, Gia. Can’t we now try my way?”

“We lived your way for fourteen years.” Did she really need to remind him of it?

He mock-laughed. “
Lawrence
was my way?”

“Of course,” she replied calmly. “Who else’s? Mine?”

“Okay, okay. But can’t we now live the
other
life you wanted?”

She shook her head.

“I am a Bostonian,” Harry said. “Maybe
you
can be transplanted like a mangrove, but not me.”

“I’m not a mangrove,” Gina said. “I’m an immigrant. I have already transplanted myself. I’ve already remade myself into something new. An American.”

“I’m an American, but I’m not going to be a Floridian. This is always going to feel second best to me. It’s never going to feel like home. Why can’t you understand that?”

Gina looked out across the water. Somewhere on the other shore stood their house. If she squinted, she could almost make out its white stucco walls.

“Why sell it?” she asked. “Why can’t we just continue borrowing against it, as we’ve been doing?”

“How can we be free with a noose like that around our necks?”

“Bellagrand is not a noose,” Gina said. “She is freedom.” She looked away. She didn’t want him to see her expression—as if she didn’t know him. How could he feel so starkly different than she did about Bellagrand?

“Allow me to disagree with you,” he said, “having just done time inside her fortress walls. Besides, do you remember what Esther told us? Eventually we’d have to pay back the money or sell the house. We won’t be able to keep borrowing indefinitely.”

“If it keeps rising in value, we could.” She would rather do that than sell. Or the worst: sell
and
move.

“Rising in value? One of these days remind me to give you my lecture about capitalism.” Harry gestured to the waiter for the bill. “Nothing in it goes up without eventually crashing down.”

Gina pulled herself up from the table. “That’s not what you said to Esther in the beginning when she told you there was an end to everything.”

Harry took her by the elbow. “Gia, who knew, but my sister was right. There is an end to everything.”

They paid and left in silence.

Three

A DAY TICKED BY.
And then another.

“Don’t you love it here?” They were in their bed late at night, both fragile and naked.

He shrugged, his tone conciliatory. “I like it here. I like it because you like it. But you like it more than I do. I don’t like the hot sun as much as you. I don’t enjoy the beach as you do. I will never think of Jupiter as home. I’m not a country boy. And Alexander is not one either. Even if he is, I don’t
want
him to be one. I want him to grow up to be cosmopolitan and suave.”

“Like you?”

He squeezed her. “Yes, father wants son to grow up to be like him. Stop the presses.”

“As your father wanted you to be like him?”

He breathed in deeply before speaking. “Gia, what does Florida have to do with who we are? What is Alexander going to grow up as? There is nothing for him to do here. For him or for me,” he added.

“Flagler found something to do. He changed the world here.”

“By building a few houses?”

“Why are you being derisive? Yes, like your father in Boston, by building a few houses, like this one, and then a railroad, and St. Augustine, and Palm Beach, and Miami. By spending the last ten years of his life building an impossible bridge to Key West, a bridge that spans nearly a hundred and fifty miles over water, to make it the closest U.S. port to the Panama Canal.”

Harry visibly tensed. She regretted ticking off Flagler’s list of accomplishments starting and ending with the worst. But why did he have to be so dismissive?

“Well, the railroad and the canal are already built,” Harry said. “Nothing more for me to do on that score. But I’m not just talking about me.” His arms were off her body. He lay in his corner of the bed. She lay in hers. “I’m talking about our
son
, Gia. What is he going to do in Florida? All he does is build dwellings for frogs and birds and gators. All he does is fish and swim, and run around the tennis court. I know it seems fun now, when he is little. But what kind of life is that for him in the long run? Alexander is too good for Florida. You know it. He can be anything he wants.”

“Clearly you haven’t asked your son what he wants to be.”

He turned his head to stare at her with blank incredulity. “Have I asked a three-year-old what he wants to be when he grows up? Um, no, we haven’t had that particular father and son talk yet.”

“You should go ahead and ask him. Because he is all set.”

Harry crept over and hugged her, as if she had told the funniest joke. “Gina! This place is a dead end for a smart boy like him. He can grow up to be mayor. Governor. President. Everyone who meets him—much to my irritation, I admit—sees what a remarkable child he is. Don’t thwart your son’s essential nature. Let him grow up in a place where his greatest talents, his greatest potential will be realized.”

Gina tried not to cry. “There is nothing but beauty here.”

“Those who visit Attica think there’s beauty in it also. But I’ve been in exile.”

I don’t want to sell the house, Gina kept repeating like a poem, like an omen.

But we must, he kept repeating, if we’re to have the kind of life we want.

“I don’t want another life. Only this one.”

“Is that true?”

Yes, her heart cried, while her lips stayed silent. “To live your life facing away from the truth is to live out your life in hell.”

“The truth isn’t in Bellagrand!”

“It is.”

“Where’s my sophisticated Simmons girl?” Harry whispered in the dark. “The young girl of velvet and chignon is now a woman in full bloom. Don’t you want to wear white gloves while strolling on Beacon Street?”

“Instead of a sundress on Fiesta Avenue?” She paused, changed tactics. “What would your mother want? She left you this house. What do you think her wish would be?”

“Who can say?”

“
You
can say. Read again the note from her you have by your bedside.
Such a house that may he never forget the romance of youth
.”

“By virtue of her rejection of her one and only life, she denied herself the right to have a say about anything.”

The next morning Harry called Alexander back as he and Gina strolled down the beach, arm in arm, all three of them barefoot so they could wade in the surf. “Son,” said Harry, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”