Bellagrand: A Novel (57 page)

“I got it the first time, Domarind.”

Gina agreed to stay close, but before they got to the next hearing date, they were all arrested: Harry, Gina, and Alexander. They had been in Washington, D.C., protesting in front of the White House. Harry refused to leave Lafayette Park, and Gina and Alexander, staying close, were collateral damage.

“It’s not in the same jurisdiction,” Harry said to Domarind. “How can it be considered a mark against me?”

“Tell that to Frank and Jesse James.”

“I don’t believe the law got to either one of them,” Harry grumbled.

Domarind blinked. “Oh, right, I forgot. Okay, so you’ll be the smartest person in Liberty Jail,” he said. “Is that what you want? You can have the last word on this.”

“Clearly I don’t want to be in jail.”

“It’s not that clear, Harry. And what about your wife?”

“Under no circumstances does my wife go to jail.”

After months of legal machinations, Domarind persuaded the district attorney to accept a plea bargain. Harry got a two-year suspended sentence, six months’ probation, and four hundred hours of community service on a park-cleaning crew. He appealed only the community service, saying it would be impossible for him to work and serve the four hundred hours. When he was asked what he did for a living, Harry said he took care of his son while his wife worked at the Boston Library and at St. Vincent de Paul’s. Citing Alexander’s interests, the judge reduced the community service to a hundred hours, to be completed on the weekends when his wife was home. No one checked to see if Gina actually worked at the library or volunteered at St. Vincent’s.

“You’re lying in court now, Harry?” Gina said, as they walked home. “Isn’t there a name for that?”

“I have to edit and condense Bertrand Russell’s
Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
for a feature we’re running over the next eight weeks. I can’t be sweeping up garbage.”

Not three months later, Harry got himself arrested again, this time for nothing more than standing with a sign and yelling slogans. The sign said, “Workers of the World Unite!”

Domarind took the city of Boston to the cleaners, making his loud and heady argument on the pin of the First Amendment—the Espionage Act, Sedition Act, and
Schenck v. the United States
be damned. The country wasn’t at war. And the point of the First Amendment wasn’t protecting speech you agreed with, Domarind yelled from his own apple crate of the lawyer’s box, but speech you
didn’t
agree with. There was no revolution this time, nor treason. All Harry was doing was displaying the innocent words of the Third International. Harry and Gina fervently hoped that no one in court actually knew what the Third International or Comintern was: an apparatus of Soviet control over the international communist movement.
Unite
was such a good word. It wasn’t incendiary! It had many positive connotations. In fact, the very States of America were
United
!

The Boston judge slapped Domarind with contempt of court and denied the motion to dismiss. Domarind took Harry’s case to the District Appeals Court, and then to the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Massachusetts. The Supreme Court was next, and Domarind was fired up like a kiln. But the Federal Court overturned the original conviction, backing away from sedition and stipulating that just because Harry was on probation did not mean that his First Amendment rights could be trampled on.

Gina breathed a momentary sigh of relief.

Seven

THEY STOPPED RECEIVING INVITATIONS
to dinner and to social events like weddings and engagements. How short-lived her white-gloved existence had been, Gina thought, as she walked Alexander to Park Street School every morning.

The lunches with Meredith became sporadic and then stopped altogether. Meredith cited other obligations and duties, but during one such cancelled afternoon when Gina was walking down Beacon Street, she saw Meredith sitting outside a cafe, drinking tea with another Beacon Hill matron, and laughing. Gina walked by with her head raised, smiling as if she were the one having fun.

When she told Harry about it, he laughed. Good riddance, he said. Who needs them? I never liked them.

Their weekends were open, their Saturday nights free.

And then one morning, as Gina was walking up Beacon Street after dropping off Alexander, she saw two female acquaintances coming toward her, still some distance away, chatting with each other, and watched dumbfounded as they, without breaking their stride, crossed the street to avoid the discomfort of acknowledging or even passing her.

“You imagined it,” Harry said. “You are blowing it out of all proportion.”

It happened again and again. It happened with casual ease and across all spectrums: young and old, rich and working class, men and women—all ostracized her. At Alexander’s school, the other mothers stopped speaking to her. Oh, they nodded when she said hello, some even smiled, and then they hurried along as if they were so very busy or they had remembered a vital thing they had to attend to at that precise moment. It was as if she wore a scarlet letter on her chest, or maybe four. W of C. Wife of a Communist.

You’re imagining it, Harry said. Don’t be paranoid.

She devised a test. For a month she did not speak to anyone at Alexander’s school. And in that time no one initiated a conversation with her, not even about the Boston weather.

Alexander was no longer invited to other children’s houses; there were no more birthday parties, First Communions, cookie-making afternoons, no more games in the park. In May 1928, when she sent out twelve invitations for his ninth birthday, all twelve came back with regrets. So they took Alexander and his friends from Barrington, Teddy and Belinda, camping in the White Mountains instead. They had a great time. And Harry remained unperturbed. “Did you
want
to be friends with them?”

“I wanted to be friends with someone,” said Gina. She missed the social gatherings, her evenings dancing, the charity fundraisers, the hospital functions.

Harry looked at her disapprovingly when she continued to complain. “Have all our desires truly become so empty of meaning?”

Was Gina imagining it, or were Harry’s crowds dwindling, too?

Ben was right. Harry was a gifted orator, a fine rhetorical speaker, but he was losing his crowds. The system must be fundamentally rebuilt, he insisted. Okay, but most people didn’t want that, not even in the park on Saturday. So he got out of Boston: to Medford, Gloucester, Lexington, Arlington Heights. Gina and Alexander went with him, hoping to spare him arrest. For some reason his unsoftened rhetoric provoked the police less if his stylish wife and engaging child were by his side.

Soon the out-of-town crowds, too, lost their enthusiasm. Was it any wonder? Harry would tell his audience they had to suffer before they had what they needed. But he couldn’t answer their shouted questions about how long the suffering would last.

“You’re alienating your audience,” Gina told him after one especially unsuccessful outing.
Just
his audience, right?

“I don’t care,” he said. “I know it’s hard hearing what I have to say. They’ll come around.”

Gina bit her tongue. “Alexander! Off the swings. I know it’s hard hearing what I have to say. But the bus is waiting.”

“The good times will end,” Harry shouted in another homily on a Saturday morning on the Common in Watertown. “And then what? Yes, it’s good now. But it won’t be good like this always. Look at Miami. Do you see what happened there? That’s going to happen everywhere. What are you going to do when the money is gone? Where will you turn? Who will help you?”

“It’s a cycle,” someone yelled back. Someone always yelled back. “Your way, the good times will end for good.”

“No economic boom can last forever,” Harry roared. “If history taught us anything, it’s that.”

“Your way, we’ll never have an economic boom again.”

“Not true. It’s the end of injustice! The end of economic slavery! The end of war! You will reap the benefits of your hard work. You won’t go hungry.”

“I won’t be free either.” The heckler wouldn’t stop.

“What would you rather have, bread or freedom?”

“Man cannot live by bread alone!” someone else shouted out, a woman. They were joining in now, emboldened. Gina stood on tiptoe, to spot the woman who had said that. It almost sounded like her own voice, like something she might say.

Harry paused for an answer. “What will you do when the bread is gone?” he yelled.

“Throw yourself off the rock you stand on,” the woman shouted back. “Show us how the state will help you then.”

“I can throw myself off the rock till Kingdom come,” Harry said, “but you’ll still be out of work with no one to turn to. Who can you count on when all the jobs leave this city? You’ll have no one to turn to but yourselves. Is that the kind of country you want to live in? That’s not the America
I
believe in!”

“To the sewers,” a man shouted, clearly with some rhetorical powers of his own, “and you’ll take millions down with you! Your way we will live under the sword. Who wants that?”

“You’ll have bread!”

“We’d rather be dead than live under the sword. We’d rather starve.”

Hear, hear
, the restive crowd murmured.
Hear, hear
.

He wasn’t getting through to them.

“Harry,” Gina said on the bus back home, her arms around a sleeping Alexander, “do you know why you’re not getting through?” She wished she could sleep anywhere, like her peaceful boy.

“They’re not ready to receive my message,” he said wearily.

“No. Because yours are totalitarian dreams. That’s not the model for America. This isn’t the country for it.” To soften her words, she added, “Perhaps another country. Perhaps Russia.”

“Yes!” he exclaimed, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him before she said it that summer evening on public transit.

“I’m being
ironic
,” Gina said, brow furrowing. “How is the Soviet Union being held together? They’ve been decimated by their civil war. They pulled out of the Great War only to lose millions on their own soil. Russia is coming apart. How long will it be held together by the sword?”

“However long it takes.”

“Oh, Harry,” said Gina, so disappointed. “Even your utopian dreams have become Mussolini-like in their execution.”

“Which is to say
what
?”

“You’re fascist even in your daydreams, Harry.”

“You understand nothing, Gina.” He rubbed his perspiring face.

“Perhaps you can explain it better in Roxbury next Saturday. Because the people don’t seem to understand you either.” She nuzzled Alexander’s head and turned to the window.

“What hope is there, if I’m not getting through even to my own wife?”

Pointed silence was her only answer. He changed the subject. “Where have I heard the phrase
Man does not live by bread alone
?” he asked. “They keep shouting it at me during my orations, and I have no response. I feel like I need to have one.”

Benevolently Gina smiled. “There’s so much you don’t know. And you don’t even know you don’t know it. You want a proper reply to that?”

“Yes.”

“Next time you say: that’s right, man
doesn’t
live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

Harry groaned. “Oh no. It’s from the
Bible
?”

“From Christ’s forty days in the desert. From His chat with the devil about miracles and why He refused to perform them.”

“How is that possible? Everything I say you turn against me.”

“Shout back,” continued Gina, mild as the weather, “that Christ is the bread of life.
Cristo è il pane della vita.
”

“Oh dear God. Stop it.”

She stopped.

“The hopes that inspire communism,” Harry said, “are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount.”

“So tell that to your people, Harry,” said Gina. “Don’t hold back. Begin with that next week in Roxbury before you ease into the suffering.”

Eight

ON A FRIDAY MORNING
in late September 1929, Gina picked up the telephone receiver to call Esther to find out if she was fetching Alexander from home or from school and discovered that the line was dead.

She didn’t know what to do. Why would the telephone be broken? She sifted through the papers in Harry’s desk to find the address of the telephone company, but couldn’t find any of their bills. She looked for the checkbook, but couldn’t find that either.

Harry had already gone out; she no longer asked where, because she didn’t want to know, and he no longer told her, because he said he wanted to protect her from knowing. Alexander was in school. Gina had nothing but time. She had planned to go to St. Vincent’s. Instead she put on her coat and hat and went to the bank.

Afterward she might have stumbled in the opposite direction from home, toward the water, the docks, the ships, distant lands, somewhere far.

Somewhere else.

Anywhere else.

She was Miami, a once tropical paradise, isolated in a sea of raving white water. The railroads jammed and embargoed on the left, the
Prinz Valdemar
lying beached and sunk in her harbor on the right, precluding the arrival of rebuilding materials and any departure of battered tourists. No way out, by rail or by sea. Just Gina, Alexander, and Harry, bankrupt and trapped with the unquenchable, indestructible Mediterranean fruit fly.

Chapter 18

W
HITE
T
ERRORISTS
A
SK FOR
M
ERCY

One

S
HE WAS HUNCHED OVER
on the floor in the kitchen, her head in her hands. Harry was standing over her trying to explain what he couldn’t explain, like on a Saturday in Roxbury.

“There’s less money than I’d hoped there would be.”

“When you say less, you mean no money. Right? Because that’s what there is. Nothing.”

“Not nothing.”

“
Nothing
.”

There was nothing to say.

“Where is it?”

“What?”

“Where is our money?”

“Where do you think? We spent it.”

“On what?”

“On living. You don’t have shoes? You don’t have dresses? I don’t have books?”

“That’s all we have,” she said. “And I don’t have many dresses or shoes anymore. Three years ago I donated most of them to St. Vincent’s on consignment. Where is our money?”

“Boston is expensive. Now do you see why I wanted to move from the Mt. Vernon house? It drained our resources. We never should’ve lived there. We should’ve rented a smaller place from the start.”

She couldn’t look at him. What was she going to do when Alexander came out of his room for dinner? No dinner and his mother on the floor. For the sake of her son, she had to get herself together. “We lived like kings and queens in Jupiter,” she said, struggling to her feet, refusing his proffered hand. “We wanted for nothing. We ran a real house, not a hovel you rented us on Mt. Vernon. We had servants. We paid a rum-runner to smuggle all the liquor out of Cuba into our cellars. We had two cars. We had a boat. We spent barely twenty thousand dollars on that blissful, astonishing life.”

“I thought it was more,” he said.

“No. We came to Boston with enough for forty years of fine living. I know what we came here with. And you’re telling me that seven years later we don’t have enough to pay the June telephone bill? In September?”

“I
know
.” He was sheepish. “I can’t believe how fast the money has gone. I almost wish you were still taking care of it, like you did in Lawrence, and at Bellagrand. It was so much easier.”

“Easier!”

“Yes. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because I don’t know who you are,” she said. “I don’t know who I sleep next to every night.”

“Please don’t wring your hands like that. You’re going to break something. You’re scaring me.”

“I’m scaring
you
?
Dio mio
!” she cried. “
Dio mio
!
Is there nothing left to be exalted?” To despair was a sin, but Gina couldn’t help it—she was losing all hope.

“My struggle against inequality is left.”

“There is no more money left for your inequality!”

“There’s always some somewhere.”

Gina shook her head.

“Don’t worry about the rent, I told you. And Esther will take care of Alexander.”

Gina didn’t dare lift her eyes lest Harry see the boiling scorn in them. “How dismissive you are of her money,” she said, “and yet how sure of it. You rely on it the instant you reject it. You do understand that someone out there must make money so you can be a communist.”

“Who would that be? My sister? She wants for nothing. She hasn’t worked a day in her life.”

“Your sister,” Gina said, “spends her days volunteering at hospitals around Boston and raising money for the poor, for charitable food pantries and clothes bins. She and Rosa take dinner to the local home for the terminally ill every Sunday. She spends hours reading to people who are about to die. The only privilege your son has comes through her largesse. His bikes, his hockey skates, his shoes, clothes, books, his private school all come from her.” Gina couldn’t get far enough from him. The ten plagues had well and truly descended on Egypt if she was now defending Esther to Harry.

“I don’t want another material thing.”

“It’s always wise, Harry, not to want what you don’t have.”

“Don’t be flippant, Gina. Why can’t you trust me? It’ll turn out all right. It always works out, and this will, too.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But it will. I promise you. It’ll work out.”

“Where is it? Where is our money?”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“Yes, you do.”

He was silent.

Gina wanted him to tell her, to not be afraid to say the words out loud. The helpful bank manager had already informed her of the sacks of cash that had been carried out in wheelbarrows for the bail bondsmen, the court fees, the penalties, the legal costs. Bribe money to pay off the police and the lowly assistants at the DA’s office, who would inexplicably lose files, evidence, names of material witnesses. Domarind. It all added up—and how. Oh, and let’s not forget the barrelfuls of dollars that went to the Boston offices of the
Daily Worker
and to the Workers Party.

That’s where their money had gone. The communists had coined quite a profit from her misery.

“It’s Domarind,” Harry said. “He’s a vulture. He’s a shyster. A thief. He overcharges me for every minute he spends on my case. Every time he goes to court to file a five-minute motion, it costs me a hundred dollars. He is merciless with his fees. He’s terrible. Who recommended him? We couldn’t have done worse if the person who referred him hated me and wanted to cause me nothing but harm.”

“What are you talking about? Domarind has kept you out of jail for three years.”

“Is it my fault he overcharges me?”

She stumbled back against the kitchen table, tripping over the sash of her beige housedress. She almost fell. She didn’t understand the words that came out of his mouth. It was as if she had reverted to the language of her childhood. Everything he said sounded like gibberish. Why, just now he had said something so
irrational
as to make her doubt she’d heard it right. For a moment Gina thought Harry said it wasn’t his fault that all the Bellagrand money had gone to his lawyer.

Her face must have been a sight.

“Okay, okay,” he said, with a conciliatory tilt of his head. “I admit, a little bit did go to the CPUSA. Membership dues, small contributions, donations to the
Daily Worker
. It’s an operational issue. Printing costs, ink, newsprint, distribution—they’re all expensive. It’s like the local parish, Gia. Didn’t your mother tithe at St. Mary’s? Don’t you tithe at St. Leonard’s? It’s all right for you to give to the Catholic Church, but not all right for me to give to the Communists?”

She slammed her hands over her ears to stop herself from hearing him. For one agonized second she thought,
if I throw myself from the window, I will stop hearing him forever
.

“What happens now?” she whispered. “The host has been bled dry. Now what?”

“Bear with me a few more weeks. I’m working on a plan.”

How far was it to the window?

“Why can’t you trust me? Everything will work out fine.”

Why could she still hear him while her palms squeezed her head in such a vise?

The following day she was supposed to take Alexander to school, but at six in the morning he and she were all the way over in the North End, at St. Leonard’s. Mass was long over, and yet there she remained in the pew on her knees, her head bent, her hands clasped together.

“Mom, what are you doing?” Alexander whispered.

“I’m praying.”

“I know that. You’ve been kneeling a long time.”

Why do I suspect it hasn’t been long enough?

“What do you keep praying for, Mama? We have to go. I’m going to be late again. I was late four times already.”

I’m praying for you,
mio figlio
. That’s all I ever pray for now. Only you.

“Is he talking back?”

“Who?”

“God.”

“I don’t know,
caro
. I’m trying to listen, but all I keep hearing is
you
.”

Alexander thought for a moment. “That’s because Jesus has nowhere else to be,” he whispered, “but
I
have a math test first period, Mom. We have a really long walk . . .”

“We’ll take a taxi.”

She dragged herself up, and took him by the hand.

“Well? Did he answer you?”

Her arm around Alexander, she searched Salem Street in vain for a taxi. Her poor faithful Flaminio would’ve taken her to Park Street for free. “Yes,” Gina replied to Alexander. “With his silence, perhaps he did.”

“It’s good when God is silent?” Alexander looked at his mother as if she weren’t right in the head.

“Of course,
mio bambino.
It means things aren’t so bad yet that he must answer you. It means he’s busy taking care of those who need him more.”

Two

WEEKS THAT FELT LIKE YEARS
passed in leaden silence. The telephone remained disconnected. Gina hoped her sister-in-law would volunteer to take care of the unpaid balance when she discovered she couldn’t get in touch with Alexander. But it didn’t happen. Their standing arrangement simply continued. Every other Friday, Esther drove in from Barrington, picked up the boy after school and took him back with her for the weekend. They didn’t need to speak because they lived together three days out of every fourteen.

Gina’s self-imposed balloon of denial about all things was soon punctured by a letter she received from James Domarind.

Dear Mrs. Barrington,

I have been trying to get in touch with you by telephone for the
last three weeks, to no avail. I am writing to you because it is of
the utmost importance that you call me immediately and schedule an appointment to come and see me as soon as possible. There are grave complications in your husband’s ongoing legal proceedings that profoundly concern you, and which I must discuss with you at your earliest convenience.

Yours sincerely,

James Domarind, Esq.

PS As a side matter, my secretary informs me that your husband’s
last four checks for my retainer, for June, July, August, and September, have been returned by your bank for insufficient funds. I’m sure this is an oversight on his part, but I respectfully request that you please bring payment with you when you arrive for your appointment.

Gina wished she could close her eyes, wake up, and have it be morning the next day.

Or perhaps a day farther up the road.

But how far?

She couldn’t say.

No use wishing for that, she decided. Every tomorrow only leads to the end. And that would be upon her soon enough. This felt different from other crises, other problems, other hardships. There was something final about these waning Indian summer days. As if there was no way out.

Gina did not call Domarind, did not make an appointment to see him. She couldn’t pay him, so what was the point? If they had no money for the telephone bill, Harry’s lawyer was not going to extract a nickel from her purse.

A few days after the receipt of the hateful letter, on the morning of an unseasonably warm Tuesday, there was a knock on her door. Harry had already gone out; he couldn’t bear to stay with her in their cramped apartment. When she opened the door in her tattered housedress, there stood James Domarind, panting from walking up five flights of stairs. He tipped his hat.

“Good morning, Mrs. Barrington.”

“Good morning, Mr. Domarind.” She tried to calm her pounding heart. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

“No pleasure in this, Mrs. Barrington. But you haven’t responded to my entreaty for your presence in my office. I had no choice but to call on you in person.”

“I apologize,” she said. “I have not received any letters from you.”

Quietly he stood on the landing. “Why are you lying to me?”

“I’m not.”

“The last letter I sent, I sent certified. You signed for it yourself. I have your signature in my hands.”

She stepped out into the stairwell. “Yes, yes, I now recall receiving something.” She held the door almost closed behind her. “But you’re my husband’s lawyer. I passed on the letter to him. I don’t know what he did with it. He’ll be home later this afternoon. Would you like to come back then?”

Domarind shook his thick, slick head. “It’s you I came to see,” he said. “You’re the one I need to speak to.”

With reluctance, she allowed him inside, cursing herself for not finding the words to keep him out. She asked him to wait and hurried to change into a rust-colored autumn walking dress with a pleated flare, a drop-down waist, and velvet side ties. She pulled back her hair into a monastic bun. She pinched her cheeks to make them look less ashen.

She would’ve offered him coffee, but she didn’t have any. She would’ve offered him a baked good, but it had been a long time since she’d made anything sweet, bought anything sweet.

He must have seen her discomfort, because he took pity on her. “I don’t need anything,” he said. “I didn’t come here to eat. This isn’t a party. You are in trouble, Mrs. Barrington.”

They sat across from each other in the living room. She sat by the window in Harry’s hard chair. Domarind sat on the soft couch. When she needed to turn away from his tough, uncompromising face, which was all the time, she would look to the right and see the Common through a dazzling backdrop of leafy flame. She wondered if today was Harry’s apple crate day. Or was he teasing out the subtle nuances between Leninism and Trotskyism in a ten-thousand-word feature for the
Daily Worker
?
She looked away from the park. She didn’t know where to look, what to do. She stared into her hands.

“I’ll be brief and I’ll be blunt,” Domarind said, “because you are out of time. Have you heard of the Immigration Act of 1903?”

“Vaguely, why?”

“The Immigration Act of 1917?”

“I suppose.”

“The Immigration and Sedition Act of 1918?”

“Mr. Domarind . . .”

“I will explain.” He produced a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “In 1903, the government stipulated that four classes of undesirables be forbidden entry into the United States. Anarchists, epileptics, beggars, and importers of prostitutes.” He coughed, as if for emphasis. “But anarchists
first
, Mrs. Barrington.”