Bellagrand: A Novel (49 page)

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death . . . Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

Inspector Javert could not have been right, could she?

Shangri-la.

Are there carnivals in Boston, she asked him, her voice fading, like that of Frances Barrington, like that of Alessandro Attaviano.

Every day, baby, Harry said, there will be a carnival.

Part Three

T
HE
M
AN
W
ITHOUT A
C
OUNTRY
1922–1929

The rain was pouring down,

The moon was shining bright,

And everything that you could see

Was hidden out of sight.

—Anonymous

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

—Wordsworth

Chapter 15

I
SADORA AND
S
ERGEI

One

T
HEY RENTED A GRAND
old brownstone on Mt. Vernon, the finest of all fine streets in Beacon Hill, just a few doors down from Henry Cabot Lodge’s house. The home they found was spacious, if a touch musty, but the kitchen was renovated, and the light-hued walls and rugs reflected electricity usage instead of coal, which made all things dank and dark with its by-product soot. The house had light. It wasn’t
white
, like the other house. Some of the walls between rooms had been knocked down, giving the illusion of space. Harry and Gina wanted to buy, but the owners weren’t selling. It had been his wife’s family homestead since the early 1800s, the weary husband explained. They weren’t living in it now because it was too cold for them in the winters, so they had moved to South Florida, of all places. They wanted a quiet respectable family to take care of their prized Beacon Hill property. The Barringtons, with a professorial, Boston Brahmin husband and only one child, seemed ideal.

Harry told Gina not to worry. They would move in and take their time to look for the perfect house to buy.

They had left Bellagrand in early August, during the muggiest of muggy weather, but in Boston things weren’t much cooler. Boston was airless and stifling, and, as Gina pointed out to a less than receptive Harry, the warmest of oceans was no longer twenty yards across the road.

Esther’s reunion with Alexander was an extended tearful embrace. For as long as Salvo had cried saying goodbye, Esther now cried saying hello. “I’m so happy you’re here,” she kept saying to a delighted but confounded boy. She offered to take Alexander to her newly bought summer cottage in Truro, to give Harry and Gina a month to themselves—to look for a house, buy furniture, apply to Harvard, settle in, make friends, hire help, and all without worrying about what to do with a child in the city. Rosa and I will take him clamming, Esther said. The fishermen would love to show him how to do it. Alexander didn’t know what clamming was, but was thrilled nonetheless. Gina and Esther were formal with each other, as if they had just met.

“Alexander, I was going to give you lunch,” Esther said, carrying him away to the nearby car with Clarence waiting, “but you are very heavy. What are they feeding you?”

“I’m big for my age, Mama says.”

“Your mother is right. Maybe no lunch for you today then? You look as if you’ve had plenty to eat.”

“Aunty Esther, I’m starving.
Zio
Salvo always feeds me a lot.”

“Does he? Well, then, I’ll have to feed you even more. Did he feed you ice cream?”

“Two scoops and fudge.”

“I know a place where they’ll give you three scoops, fudge, and whipped cream. Let’s go there now.” Esther didn’t look back as they sped down Mt. Vernon.

Gina and Harry spent the month overheated and buying new furniture. They had left everything behind, even Harry’s favorite malachite table, even the mosaic table he had made himself.

They engaged a charmless but highly recommended real estate agent, who did not wear silk suits or cart small boys around, but who did take Harry and Gina to look at the available properties in the area. Houses were expensive, and nothing was as beautifully located as the sprawling brownstone they had rented. They decided to stay put. Gina found Alexander a playgroup on Byron Street that all the pre-school-age Beacon Hill children attended. It would be good for Alexander to play with other children, and she could make friends with the Beacon Hill mothers.

But in September, when she started taking him, she discovered that the women who brought the children were not the mothers but the nannies. The mothers were at recitals and conservatory meetings, having fundraising lunches, buying art for the Boston Museum, and opening hospital wings. Gina wanted to make friends, but knew socializing with nannies wasn’t appropriate. She looked up her old friend Verity, who had lived in Back Bay, but learned to her disappointment that Verity was back in Lawrence with her husband and seven children. Seven! She had more than enough for a volleyball team. Gina kept meaning to visit her.

A few blocks down Mt. Vernon on Louisburg Square lived a beautiful, vivacious woman named Meredith, wife of a financier and a mother of two, one of them a boy Alexander’s age. She had the potential to be a friend, and Gina made a determined effort to find common ground with the stylish and well-connected woman. She seemed to grasp well the intricacies of the social calendar and the duties expected of a Beacon Hill wife.

The first thing Meredith did was advise Gina to hire a full-time nanny, without which, the young woman said, it was much more difficult to keep to a proper schedule. Big money needed to be spent to make Boston more modern, more literary, more progressive. The symphonies, the concerts, and the lavish dinners were not going to organize themselves. Gina ignored Meredith’s principal piece of advice as long as she could, changing the subject, even laughing it away. “You’re so funny, Meredith,” Gina would say.

“But I’m not trying to be funny, Jane,” Meredith would reply.

“I know. That’s why you’re funny.”

Gina suggested activities she and Meredith could do together with their children, like walking in the Public Garden, or going to the Freedom Docks, parts of which were being converted into an immigrant museum. Meredith would think for a moment. “You mean the two of us, with the children and the nanny?”

“I was thinking without the nanny.”

“Without the nanny? But what if the children need something?”

Gina shifted from foot to foot at Meredith’s front door. “What could they need? Like an ice cream?”

“Well, I don’t know, do I? But I know they need things because Gemma is always fetching one thing or another.”

Gina pulled on Meredith’s sleeve. “Come on. It’s a beautiful afternoon.” Alexander stood almost quietly by her side, holding a soccer ball, every once in a while whispering, “Mom, let’s go, Mom, let’s go, letsgoletsgo—MOM.”

“Darling,” Meredith said with a disapproving glance at both mother and son, “you simply
must
hire a nanny. It’ll make your life
so
much easier.”

“My life is not very hard,” Gina said. “All I do is play with my boy.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Meredith, arching her perfect eyebrows.

It took a month for Gina to ease Meredith into the Public Garden for a “quick” walk, fitted in grudgingly before pre-opera cocktails, an invitation to which Gina and Harry had politely declined.

“Why are we going to the Public Garden?” Meredith grumbled. “It’s not Sunday. I’ll walk with you there on Sunday. That’s when all the mothers walk their children, after church and brunch on Sunday afternoon.”

“We can go then, too,” Gina said. “But today Alexander and Walter want to play ball.”

“Darling, please don’t tell me you still haven’t followed my advice to hire someone. Good help is the one true measure of a respectable home.”

“I have a housekeeper, if that’s what you mean. She is very good.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Meredith said, her eyes flicking to Alexander, who was running ahead with Walter and his tag-along toddler sister, Mabel.

Gina nodded. “Trouble is, Meredith,” she said, “it took me a really long time to have my one child, and I don’t want someone else to take care of him.
I
want to take care of him.”

“But that’s just not how it’s done, darling,” Meredith said. “It’s simply not done. Where
are
you from?”

“Sicily.”

“Sicily? Really! You must tell Edward. He’ll be fascinated. He studied the African cultures at Brown. He’d love to talk to you about it. When are you free for dinner?”

“Sometimes Harry’s sister takes Alexander on the weekends. Maybe then?”

Harry found Edward an unacceptable bore, and the four of them didn’t get together as often as Gina would have liked.

It was a shame, because Gina really wanted to establish a friendship.

Harry would try to make her feel better. “What can I tell you? Maybe she can get herself a more scintillating husband. If I hear one more word about the taxidermy of gazelles, I’ll taxidermy him. And you—hire a nanny and you’ll fit right in. The ladies of the house do not cook their own meals.”

“Or look after their own children.”

Harry would shrug. “Now, in Florida you stepped all over Emilio’s toes by meddling in his kitchen—”

“You mean
my
kitchen.”

“He was a good sport about it. But here, it’s not done. The housekeepers will gossip. Their ladies will gossip. And then the men will gossip about me.”

“Better that than another word about antelopes,” she said.

He laughed, catching her in an embrace. “Quite right. But do you really want to socialize with people who need a lesson in geography with their cocktails? You keep trying to explain to them that Sicily is not part of Africa. They’re not grasping it, though.”

“Perhaps it’s the language barrier,” Gina said. “It’s like Babel.”

While Gina settled into their new life, Harry settled into his. He took a long time to apply to Harvard’s doctoral program. They had moved too late for him to attend the fall semester, but he made plans to start in the spring, researching a number of dissertation topics in the meantime.

Their first fall in Boston, he was even-tempered and happy, except for one early morning in October 1922, when he fumed more than usual after glancing at the newspaper.

“Did you see the way they treated her?” he said. “It’s shameful. Just shameful.”

“Who?”

“I thought you’d seen the papers.”

Gina usually got up before Harry and glanced over the news as she made breakfast and got ready for the day. “Obviously not carefully. What happened?”

Harry threw the paper down in disgust and went upstairs. Gina flicked through the front pages. She found nothing there, but buried in the arts section was a short article on Isadora Duncan’s dance performance the night before at the Boston Theater. The mayor of Boston banned Duncan from performing in Boston ever again after she bared her breasts to the public and yelled, “Life is not real here!”

There was something else, too. She had held up a flowing red scarf and proclaimed that red was the color of life and vigor. “This is red,” Isadora Duncan shouted. “And so am I!”

“Do you think the mayor is being unreasonable?” Gina asked Harry when he returned downstairs.

“Unreasonable? He’s abhorrent. Where is Alexander? I’m going to the Athenaeum. I want to say goodbye.”

“Still asleep,” Gina said. “You can go and wake him.” She studied her husband thoughtfully. “I didn’t realize you were such an aficionado of Isadora. We should’ve gone to see her perform.”

“Hardly aficionado. Besides, all the tickets were sold out. But the woman comes to our city on tour and the officials treat her with contempt.”

Gina stirred her coffee. “Isn’t she now a Russian citizen?”

“What does
that
have to do with anything? The mayor is scaremongering.”

“Maybe. But what do you care?”

“I don’t. I just think it’s shameful.” He bent to her for a kiss. “I’ll go wake him. I promised him I’d take him to a soccer game later today. Where are you going to be?”

“Nowhere.” She paused. “I was thinking of going to Lawrence to visit Verity.”

He laughed. “Yes, okay, but on the off chance you don’t go, where can we meet up? I feel I’m close to choosing a new topic. I want to play with Alexander, but I also can’t wait to talk to you about it.”

Harry spent almost a year deciding on his dissertation and thesis. He couldn’t find a topic worthy of his interest. Every morning he left the house all dressed up, as if he were going to work at the bank, and walked up the street to the Athenaeum, just past City Hall, where they had been married. The Athenaeum was the oldest library in the United States, with entry by special membership only. It was not open to the general public. Access to it was one of the perks of belonging to the exclusive Beacon Hill Club. Harry loved going to the Athenaeum not just because the stacks were private, but because the depth of the library’s research materials was profound. He said he had never worked so hard in his life at anything. He spent long days there. Initially he had wanted to choose a topic involving Russian literature or poetry, but Gina talked him out of it. She thought he should stay away from all things Russian. Kenneth Femmer, Harry’s probation officer, wouldn’t approve, she said. Harry agreed.

After a fall and spring of studying, reading, researching, and talking to Gina about his plans, when it came time to apply to Harvard, Harry demurred. A week or two later, he told her he would not be comfortable going there and was thinking of applying instead to another university to get his doctoral degree.

Gina was taken aback. “I thought the whole point was to go to Harvard, your alma mater. Isn’t that what you told me in Jupiter?”

“That’s just it,” he said. “That’s precisely the part I don’t enjoy anymore. I didn’t know I was going to feel this way, but I have too many bad memories of being poorly treated by the economics chair, and by my peers—the people I thought were my friends—and also by the students. Their sense of entitlement is matched only by their arrogance. I’m just not comfortable with the thought of returning.” He shrugged. “Live and learn. I find the place repulsive, to be perfectly honest. I hope never to set foot on that campus again.”

She didn’t know what to say. She said nothing.

“It’s not a problem, Gia. I’m allowed to go to a university other than Harvard while I’m on probation.”

“I said nothing.”

“I just want a different intellectual environment. I want new friends, and respect. A fresh start. I’ll clear it with Femmer. I’m sure it won’t be a problem for me to go to Medford.”

“What’s in Medford?”

“Tufts.”

“That’s where you want to go?”

“Very much. The school has an excellent reputation.”

Gina tried to calculate the distance in her head. “I think it’s too far.”