Bellagrand: A Novel (52 page)

“Still.”

“Still nothing! It should’ve taken you a year to finish. You could’ve been done in nine months and never had to lay eyes on him.”

“I was starting from the beginning. You mean two years. And is that what you hoped for? That I’d never run into him?”

“I didn’t hope for anything. I didn’t think about it.”

His stance, his glance, remained accusing. “I don’t believe you.”

“Be that as it may.”

“Well, just imagine my tidy humiliation,” said Harry, “when I accidentally bumped into him on my second or third day there, taking a stroll in the Yard. He was quite surprised, too.”

“To see you?”

Harry smirked dismissively. “That you didn’t tell me he was there. He lectures there now. They’ve offered him tenure. He decided to accept. The gall of that man! Do you know he actually said to me that if there was anything I needed, anything at all, not to hesitate to ask him. Imagine!”

She covered her face. Not out of shame. To stop herself from screaming.

“What does Ben have to do with what I saw you doing this afternoon?” An awful realization struck Gina. “Tell me, are you or are you not attending Tufts?”

Harry was silent. “No,” he finally said. “I’m not.”

“You never attended?” She grabbed on to the chair for strength.

“I never attended.”

“And the Athenaeum . . .”

“Oh, I go there to work. It’s remarkable there. I am left in peace. I get so much done.”

“What work are you talking about!” Anger made her ramrod straight. “You’ve been lying to me, to your son, to your sister for years. Getting your doctorate, Thermopylae, the Greeks, King Leonidas, all complete bullshit! You lied to me about leaving your radicalism behind, about what you do each and every God-given day when you’re away from this house—and you bring up Ben at Harvard?” Her chest was closing up. Panic. She couldn’t take a breath deep enough to continue speaking.

“Stop shouting! We’re not in Sicily. Do you want Alexander to hear you?”

She lowered her voice. He was so good with words, wielding them like a hammer over her anvil. “What else besides your communism are you hiding from me?”

“Don’t be absurd.” He tapped his heart. “Communism is my only mistress. I’ve joined the Workers Party.” That was the current moniker of the Communist Party of the United States of America, forced to go underground by the Red Scare of 1919, the year Alexander was born. What a momentous year 1919 had been.

“But what have you been doing with yourself?” She pushed breath through her closing lungs. “Three years of what, Harry?”

“Three years of revolution in secret, Gina. Even you couldn’t know. Three years of translating Soviet pamphlets into English. That’s how good my Russian is now,” he said proudly. “I learned while I was in prison and I’ve put it to good use.”

“Translating.”

“Yes. I’m the Boston editor-at-large of the
Daily Worker
,” he said. “I co-write and edit many of the longer articles we publish. And like Ben’s mother, Ellen, many moons ago, I’m starting a new organization. It’s called the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. I’ve just finished a month-long study on unemployment and how to fight it.”

“You find no irony in that?”

“I won’t be baited by you.”

“No?”

“No. You want to know what I’ve been doing with my time? I’ll tell you. I’ve been extraordinarily busy. I’m proud to say I helped James Cannon with the research for his monumental piece, ‘The Fifth Year of the Russian Revolution,’ one of the most influential pamphlets the Workers Party has produced.”

She stood without words. He stood and counted off his accomplishments on his fingers.

“After Lenin died, I wrote a ten-thousand-word piece on his life and work. I was the one who wrote the famous letter from the Communist International to the Mexican Communist Party that’s been recently quoted by all the newspapers in America. I edit the arts section, and co-edited the
Poems for Workers
anthology
.
I’m very proud of that one. And I publicly advocate for the Workers Party, what it stands for and why everyone should join, which is what you saw me doing today.”

“Are you done?”

“No,” he said. “My point is that in the three years prior to
these
three years, I was doing fuck all. Lollygagging in a beach bungalow. But these past three years, I’ve been
alive
!”

Her knees would not give way. She was made dense by incomprehension, like a block of concrete.

“And I did it without anyone knowing,” he continued, all his feathers up. “Not just you, but, more importantly, Femmer. My goal was to work, but to keep it underground. Now that he’s out of my life, we don’t have to worry.”

“How proud you must be. The way you were carrying on today in a public place, it’s only a matter of time before they catch up with you. The Red Scare hasn’t passed.” It’s right here on Mt. Vernon Street, she wanted to add. “You think there won’t be a crackdown? That you can just keep living like this?”

He nodded.

“And the promise you made me in the beach bungalow?” Gina asked. “When you said you would do right by me, by Alexander, that you would stick by your family?”

“I
am
sticking by my family,” he said. “I am devoted and true. The question is,” he added, “whether my family is devoted and true to me.”

Gina squeezed the glass she was holding so tightly that it shattered in her hand and cut her fingers and palm before falling to the floor. Harry stepped forward to help her, but she flung out her arms to block him, drops of crimson blood flying between them.

“You were going to get your degree,” she said, her voice breaking. “You were going to get a respectable job, become a professor, become
something
.”

“Why are you overreacting like this?” he exclaimed. “What’s changed? I’m still the same man I always was.”

“But I thought you were going to be a new man!” She could barely speak. “What’s your plan? Yelling, protesting on Boston streets? Translating Soviet propaganda for the
Daily Worker
? Is that your permanent strategy? Writing articles on the differences between Leninism and Trotskyism? Are they even paying you?” She saw his face and laughed bitterly. “I thought so. You’re about to turn fifty. Are you just going to keep doing this? Little by little tearing down everything?”

“Not little by little,” he said. “The strike-breaking and the union-destroying actions of the American democracy continue unabated. They must be stopped. Passaic, New Jersey, is in a struggle against starvation wages—”

“Oh God! Stop it! Stop speaking!”

“Stop shouting!”

“Who’s going to save you this time, Harry?” she whispered, wrapping the hem of her skirt around her injured hand. “Who is left to save you?”

“I don’t need anyone to save me. I don’t need saving.”

But who is going to save
me
? Gina wanted to ask as she crept out of the room like the war-wounded. Who is going to save your son
?

Three

GINA WAS NUMB
for two days, the shock wearing off slowly, her hand scabbing over, her heart too, but once the fog in her head cleared and the wound healed, she started to make quiet plans to leave with Alexander and go to Tequesta to stay with Salvo until she figured things out. In her outward life she still met with Meredith and her other friends, helped at St. Vincent’s, cooked dinner, picked up Alexander from school and did homework with him, even entertained Esther on Sundays. Inside she gnawed on the bone of how best to leave. She suspected that if she informed Harry of her plans he might not let her go, or worse, he might prevent her from taking Alexander, because he knew that without her boy she would and could never go anywhere permanently. But how could she swipe Alexander from his father without a goodbye?

It was impossible.

Weeks passed as she watched her son happy in his life, watched him having fun with his father, watched Harry at home, the same as always: dry-witted, modestly affectionate, calm, serious of purpose, affable, parentally straight. After seething in secret, she soon began questioning the wisdom of her intended actions. She began wondering if Harry had been right, if she might not have overreacted. Was she really going to hold him to the promises made to Janke when he was under house arrest? At the same time, whenever Harry left the house in the morning, Gina was filled with churning dread until he returned. She was afraid he would be apprehended on the street like a common criminal, and she would have to explain
that
to Alexander. Neither of her alternatives was easy: taking the boy to Florida for a little time apart, or staying in Boston and seeing Harry, a Barrington no less, a first Bostonian, a citizen of Beacon Hill, behind bars for being a communist? Neither she nor Alexander would be able to show their faces anywhere in the city, not the school or the park, or the shops on Charles Street and Newbury, where everyone knew them by name.

She stopped sleeping in their marital bed. Two weeks, then three she stayed in one of the guest rooms. Harry did not come in, beg her to come back, ask what she was doing. At night he would read and work at his round table by the window, and when he got tired, he would go to bed. In the morning, he would come down to breakfast, in his suit, ready for his day, have some bread, eggs, a sip of tea, and be on his way.

All day he was gone from her house. All night she was gone from his bed.

Once, Alexander asked him what he was going to do that day, and after brief eye contact with Gina, he said, “I’m writing a long article, son, on how American imperialism is the greatest menace of the capitalist world.”

“What’s menace?”

“Alexander,” said Gina, “let your father go. Can’t you see he is late?”

How easy she had been to deceive! Three years to get his doctorate! He fed her his lies, and she swallowed them like a sheep, with nary a bleat. She was being punished for her sins. Absolutely. This is what it must have been like to be Alice twenty years ago. Harry had been five minutes away from finishing his doctorate—and then he crashed into Gina at the narrow pass through the Harvard gates. While Alice was busy planning their wedding, their trip to the volcanoes of Europe, Harry was under crisp white sheets with Gina, all their weapons surrendered. Blissfully oblivious, Alice prepared for the future, not knowing that the life she was living was a mirage and the man she loved an illusion.

Gina felt like that now.

That’s why she never pried. She closed her heart, her eyes, pretended it all was fine. He was right. She didn’t want to know. Because in the bitter light, she had only two options. Leave. Or stay.

In this manner of purgatory, the summer passed. Cape Cod with Esther, Cub Scouts, clamming.

Gina continued to live, paralyzed, motionless, frozen in place.

She knew what kind of a mother she was, but what kind of a woman was she? What kind of a wife? She cooked for him, and cleaned for him, but refused to touch him, refused to lie down with him. Eventually she would force his hand and he would leave her, to get elsewhere what she no longer offered him, what he no longer took from her.

Whom could she talk to about this? Why did
his
communism isolate
her
from other people? Why did the philosophy of brotherhood, of collective ethic, of fraternal community, alienate
her
from the rest of the world more successfully than any solitary confinement? Perhaps she could contribute an article about
that
to the
Daily Worker
, for free, of course, because they clearly had no money to pay her. Communism as the greatest force of alienation in the modern world.

Whom could she turn to?

Esther? She and Esther were like a divorced couple. Courteous for the sake of the child they both cared for, and nothing more, even when they got together at Esther’s summer home in Truro. Gina carried herself as if always on the verge of leaving. Meredith? The woman who couldn’t understand why Walter and Alexander might want to play ball after school in the park? Meredith and the others talked about clothes and museums, not marital problems. Gina was the wife of a man who preached the coming end of Boston’s easy life to the residents of Boston! Her current friends would be aghast if she were to tell them the truth about her husband, the civil man who sat in their parlor rooms on Saturday nights and let his objection simmer on low while all around him the political waters heatedly boiled over.

Her old friend Verity, with a team of children in a noisy home? To talk to Verity, Gina would have to go to Lawrence.

She couldn’t talk frankly to Salvo. His only advice would be to leave Harry instantly.

Ben?

Oh, God help her.

Rose Hawthorne was not well, and in any case, now lived in New York. Gina had not seen Rose since their return. No short day trip to Concord to ask Rose for a dose of wisdom.

Her options narrowing, Gina returned to Harry’s bed. He was as fervent and intimate as ever. “I’m so glad you are with me,” he whispered. “That you’ve finally realized it’s just a tempest in a teapot.”

She cried.

Afterward, this was their pillow talk.

“Gia, we still
refuse
to recognize the Soviet Union!”

“Perhaps we think it’ll go away if we ignore it.”

“Russia is not going anywhere. It’s not capitalism, Gia. It doesn’t eat itself.”

“Maybe they hope it will. Eat itself.”

“Who is this
they
?” He was too agitated to hold her in his arms. “This is coming from the American Federation of Labor, no less! Did you read the
Globe
today?”

Gina pulled the blanket over her body, trying to get warm. She nearly pulled it over her head.

“They’re such cowards.” Harry pounded the bed. “Fucking Green.” William Green had become the new head of the American Federation of Labor after Sam Gompers died.

“Shh!” She didn’t want her son waking up, overhearing. His bedroom was next to theirs. What if, God forbid, he ever started to talk like that? She was teaching him to be a proper Bostonian, always polite.