Bellagrand: A Novel (51 page)

Goodbye my friend, goodbye
,
Esenin wrote in his own blood before he died.
There is nothing new in dying, but living also is no newer.

Life is not real here.

Chapter 16

B
ATTERY
W
AGNER

One

A
LEXANDER, DID I EVER
tell you the story of a man named Samuel Sebastiani?”

“No. Tell me now.”

They were ambling through the Public Garden. It was summer, 1926. Gina took his hand. Alexander let her. At seven he was still young enough not to be embarrassed by his mother. She wore a wide white hat with a purple silk ribbon. He wore a light skimmer cap, which made his hair appear almost black. They made quite a picture shimmering together down the floral paths. Maybe they would have time to get some ice cream before she had to be back to start dinner.

“Samuel was born in Italy.”

“Just like you.”

“Yes. But in Tuscany.”

“That’s not like you.”

“Right. In Tuscany his family grew grapes, and made wine. He came to America when he was eighteen. He was penniless.”

“That’s not like you either. You were fourteen.”

“Right. Samuel went to San Francisco.”

“That’s not like . . .”

“Alexander.” Gina put an affectionate hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You don’t have to point out every difference between my story and Samuel’s. It’s not a game of spot the difference. It’s a listening game.”

“Oh! How do you play?”

“I talk, you listen.”

“Oh.”

“Now then. Where was I?”

“He was penniless in San Francisco.”

“Precisely. He worked for three years in a quarry in Sonoma, cutting up cobblestones.”

Alexander raised his hand.

“You don’t have to raise your hand,
mio figlio
. What is it?”

“What’s a quarry?”

Gina fought the impulse to cover him with kisses in public. “It’s a big dusty pit in the ground which is mined for rocks and stones.”

“Oh.”

Like the granite quarry your father and I meandered to, alone for five minutes, me in a sheer pink froth, like bubblegum, him in a suit, our whole life in front of us, feeling happier than we had the right to feel, wanting nothing more than to be together. Quarry also means prey. I hope that doesn’t apply here, to me and your dad.

“In 1896,” she continued, after the barest of pauses, “Samuel bought a wagon with four horses, loaded up this wagon with cobblestones, and carted them to San Francisco, where he began supplying the city with much needed building material. A few years went by. He made money. Lots of money. He made enough money to buy the quarry.”

“He must have been rich.”

She nodded. “He saved his pennies. He did well. The stones from his quarry were used to build the city hall in Sonoma.”

“What’s city hall?”

She pointed far across the sloping expanse of the Boston Common to the shining gold dome on top of Beacon Hill. “
That’s
our city hall. A big government building. In which your father and I got married, by the way. Not important. By 1904, Samuel had saved enough to buy some land to grow grapes. And he bought and bought, and grew and grew, just like his family did in Tuscany. He made the grapes into wine. He built the Sonoma Valley, which is where the wine industry was born in the United States.”

Alexander was quiet. Gina waited. “Well?”

“You and Dad got married in a government building?”

“
Madre di Dio!
That’s all you have to say?”

“What is wine?”

“Something adults can’t drink anymore. It’s a delicious adult beverage.”

“Why can’t you drink it?”

Gina smiled. “Too much of it makes you silly in the head. Our government decided it didn’t want us to get silly in the head. So they outlawed wine.”

“What’s outlaw wine?”

Gina laughed.

“Mom . . .” Alexander furrowed his brow. “What does it have to do with me?”

“Every story has something to do with you, son.”

“You keep saying that. But how does this one?”

“Well, think about it, and you tell me.”

He thought about it. “I never want to get married, yuck, but if I ever did, I want to get married in a church, like Aunty Esther.”

Gina shook her exasperated head. “No,
cuore mio
. Samuel is the kind of man I want you to be. If the good Lord gives you five stones, make ten from them. If he gives you fifty, make a hundred. He gives you one? You make two. Work like Samuel. Turn your stones into wine, Alexander. Do you understand?”

“You want me to dig for stones?”

“No . . .”

“Drive a wagon?”

“No.”

“Make horses into wine?”

“No—” The sun was going straight to her head. “Why must you be so literal?”

“What’s literal?”

Both Gina and Alexander stopped speaking. Across Charles Street on the Boston Common, they heard a distant booming voice. They waited for the cars to pass. They crossed the road. There was a crowd assembled on the grass.

But the voice! It sounded troublingly familiar. A needle went into Gina’s heart. They stepped closer, Gina holding Alexander tightly by the hand. “Don’t be afraid, son,” she said. “They’re a little boisterous.”

“I’m not afraid,” he said calmly.

She pushed on, standing on tiptoe, trying to see the speaker.

“It sounds like Dad, doesn’t it, Mom?”

Gina gripped Alexander’s hand.

“Mom, let go. Ouch.”

“Sorry.”

The voice was so intense! But that’s not how Harry spoke. He was measured, thoughtful, evenly calibrated. It was rare for Gina to hear his unmodulated voice. Yet here it was, and in public. She paid no attention to the content as she pushed through the crowd, muttering to the old men and young women, pardon me, excuse me, dragging Alexander behind her.

The crowd was lapping up the speaker’s words. All around her they hooted and clapped. Some booed, shouted things, but everyone was engaged, fired up.

Finally, Gina and Alexander stepped forward into the open area in front of the speaker. It can’t be him, she thought, paling, her entire Beacon Hill world fading, washing away in the highest tide, just like that, before her eyes.

“Long LIVE the proletariat as it goes forth to renew the WHOLE world! Long LIVE the working men and women of all lands! By the strength of their HANDS they built up the WEALTH of nations! They now LABOR to create new LIFE! Long LIVE Socialism, the religion of the FUTURE! Greetings to the fighters, to the WORKERS of all lands! Have faith in the victory of TRUTH, the victory of JUSTICE! Long LIVE humanity, fraternally united in the great ideals of equality and freedom!”

“Look, it’s Dad,” said Alexander.

Two

HARRY GLANCED AT THEM
standing below the crudely made construction, a wooden crate, his boxy pulpit. He barely paused to acknowledge them. A blink for her, a blink for the boy, his attention redirected to the crowd.

“What’s Dad yelling about?” Alexander asked Gina.

“I don’t know, son.” An icy numbness flooded her. She shivered, still clutching the child’s hand. “I’m not sure it’s Dad.”

“Dad!” Alexander waved.

Harry waved back.

Alexander turned his face to his mother. “It’s Dad.”

Gina pushed her way out of the crowd and on shaking legs hurried home with Alexander. Her mind was empty of thought. Her heart was empty of feeling. It was as if she had been anesthetized, body and soul.

Alexander got busy reading and trying to start a fire by rubbing together two rocks he had brought home. Gina got busy making ravioli with pesto sauce.

The front door opened, closed.

Harry stood in the kitchen.

She thought her voice might fail her, like her body, paralyzed. But no.

“How was your day at Tufts, dear?” she asked. “Your dissertation going well? Almost done?”

He said nothing.

She said nothing.

“Don’t be upset.”

“You don’t think I should be upset?”

“I didn’t say that. I’m asking you not to be.”

“I shouldn’t be?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“There’s a lot you’re not saying, Harry. Reticent as a mute. What’s the matter? Gave it your all on top of the apple crate?”

“Remember what I told you about Oscar Wilde and women with a sense of humor?”

She wiped her hands on a dishrag. “Do I seem to you as if I’m remotely joking?”

“Don’t be upset.”

“Oh. Okay, then. I won’t be. That was simple, wasn’t it?”

They ate dinner, the three of them, as always.

“Dad, why were you shouting this afternoon?”

“I wasn’t shouting, son. I was passionately speaking about things I believe in.”

Alexander swallowed his ravioli. “Sounded like shouting to me.”

“Maybe next time you can come with me. Hold my notes, my pens, my bag of pamphlets.”

“When? Because I’m going to Aunty Esther’s on Friday.”

Gina sprang up. “
Tesoro
, if you’re done eating, go to your room and finish your reading or making your fire. Please.”

“I’m not done eating.”

“I hear talking but not a lot of eating,” said Gina. She didn’t sit down. She could barely hold her tongue.

Finally, after the water torture of artificial civility, they were alone downstairs.

“What are you doing, Harry?” They were in the drawing room with the door shut, standing far apart, the length of the couch between them. Gina didn’t know where to look. She couldn’t look at her husband.

“What I’ve always done.”

She could barely get the words out. “I thought you were done persuading other people. Isn’t that what you told me?”

“I’ve finished with trying to persuade the bourgeoisie we live amongst,” he said. “I’m not interested in winning over
their
hearts and minds. I’m with your Emma on this.
What others consider success, the acquisition of wealth, power, social status, I consider the most dismal of failures
.”

The disappointment must have shown brutally on her face. He took a step away, his back pressed against the bookshelf.

“Don’t be cross because you can’t remake me into the man you want me to be,” he said. “You can’t even remake yourself into the woman you want to be.”

“In this also, you are wrong,” Gina said. “I am how I wish to be. I have remade myself like this.” She swallowed, her throat dry. “I thought you were done with it all.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because that’s what you told me. It was in the past. Nothing more than the foolishness of our youth.”

“Is that what it was to you? Foolishness?” Now he looked disappointed in her.

“No. It was youth.” It took a titanic effort not to throw at him the empty glass she was holding. She waved her hands across the great unknown, to the great beyond. Most things in the universe were completely beyond her understanding. “Since 1919, when your father saved you from ten years in prison,” Gina said, “you’ve been promising all of us you were finished with the things that put you there.”

“And you believed me?”

“I did,” she said. “Not your father. You couldn’t hide it from him. He knew! All along he knew. He kept trying to warn me. He said as much. I didn’t listen. But tell me, were you
ever
planning to show me the face you’ve been hiding?”

Harry thought about it—or pretended to think about it. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “You were so happy. I didn’t want to ruin things.”

“Ruin things,” she repeated. “What was I happy with? Fraud?”

“Happy with me. And I wasn’t deceiving you. Not really. You were content to look the other way.”

“I was oblivious,” said a demoralized Gina. “That’s not the same. I wasn’t looking the other way.” But even now she couldn’t look directly at him.

“I guess,” Harry said, as if he didn’t believe it. As if even he didn’t believe he had kept himself
that
well hidden. As if he wanted to chide her for not paying closer attention. He walked around to her side of the couch. She stood quietly, her shoulders slumped. She was vanquished. He took her hands in his. “Gia . . . listen to me,” he murmured. “It is only right that idealists like us, who have stopped believing in God, should seek some other way to make out of earth a heaven, out of men and women earthly angels—selfless, altruistic, hardworking, resolute, strong.”

She pulled her hands away from him. “I don’t fit into your model of the perfect socialist, Harry,” she said. “I’m not an idealist like you. You have me all wrong. I have not stopped believing in God.”

He shook his head, persisted. “You
are
an idealist.”

Vehemently Gina denied it. “Not me. Idealists see the world as it is, find it wanting, and then strive to remake it into how they think it should be.”

“Yes!” he exclaimed, as if they were in full agreement.

“That’s not me,” said Gina. “That’s
never
been me. I’m all for improvement of course . . .” She paused. “Like a Christian. Knowing I will fail, I strive to be better. I struggle to be good. But what I’m not is an idealist. I see the world for what it is, but think a little better of it.”

“Like me?” He smiled. “You see me for what I am, what I always was, what you fell in love with, and accept me anyway?”

She wanted to whisper
yes
, but couldn’t.

He stopped smiling. “So what do you call that, then? What do you call yourself?”

“A romantic,” Gina replied.

They stood apart as if at separate fronts. He was unrepentant, acting as if he had done nothing wrong, and it was she who had transgressed.

“How did you manage to do this and go to school?” She blanched. “Is this why the degree has been taking so long?”

He said nothing in response, but seemed to be chewing over the truth.

“Is this why you decided on Tufts instead of your alma mater, the place that educated your family going back ten generations? Because it would be easier to keep this heady deception going?”

“No.” He spoke coldly. “I chose Tufts because I wouldn’t be dragged to be lynched into the square where your Panamanian ditch digger is teaching. Why didn’t you tell me he was at Harvard?”

For a moment Gina was speechless. “What does that have to do with
this
?” Now it was she who became unrepentant. “What does it have to do with
you
? You are using Ben to lie to me? You aren’t getting an engineering doctorate, are you?”