Bellagrand: A Novel (60 page)

“It
was
what I wanted,” Harry said in a stunned voice.

“I
know
! So I gave you what you wanted. You wanted progressive? I gave you a modern version of the girl I never wanted to be. I wanted to run the restaurant with my brother and mother, have a house, have a baby with you, five babies! I might have dreamed about being a Harvard professor’s wife, but I didn’t want to march on the streets or be a Wobbly. I didn’t want Angela to die, or for you to be in prison, I didn’t want the unions or the syndicalists. All of it horrified me!”

“
You’re
horrifying me,” he said. “What
did
you want?”

“Nothing.” Gina wept. “Just you. I loved you. That’s it. From the moment I met you, I loved you. I stood with you. I went to Simmons College for you and adopted a radical air for you. I pretended to be interested in other boys, so you would think I believed in free love, because that’s what the socialists believed, that’s what Emma believed.”

“It was the least attractive thing about her sermons,” Harry said.

“You say that now, because I’m your wife.
Love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king.
Remember? How you liked waking up next to the woman who believed in free love on the beach in Revere.”

“Who wouldn’t? A medfly could’ve woken up in love next to you.”

They couldn’t look at each other, remembering the ocean sands in Hampton when their entire life lay open before them.

“Please, Harry,” she whispered, her breaking voice catching on every letter. “Don’t ask me to go to Russia with you. Don’t ask Alexander to go to Russia with you.”

“Gia,” he said, “I will never leave my son behind. Never.”

“Me neither.”

“So why are you saying you want to leave him?”

“Because I don’t want us to go!”

“You can live only one life. We all have to choose. Like before. Either Boston or Bellagrand. One or the other. You can’t have both.”

Bitterness flowed through her on the dry banks of her empty rivers. “And now, as my ultimate punishment,” said Gina, “I will have neither.”

Hours passed. The day was at a standstill. Alexander, the object of their agony, would be home soon. Unfed, unquenched, unresolved, Harry and Gina undressed and in bed tried to feed and quench and resolve themselves. They always had that to fall back on, the white rumpled sheets of their mutual ardor. When Harry wasn’t at the Athenaeum translating Joseph Stalin’s “Theory and Practice of Leninism,” but home instead, he still reached for her with wanton desire, he still whispered to her the breathless words she longed to hear, he still took from her the remains of her Sicilian passion. “
Man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by
,” Harry whispered, kissing her open lips. “
And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color . . .”

“Emma Goldman is slightly better than Green,” murmured Gina, her eyes closed, inviting his
languide carezze
. “But do we have to adopt the last part so literally?”

“Man is utterly helpless before love
,” he whispered into her damp throat, embracing her with his body, on top of her, holding her face between his hands. “Utterly helpless before
you
.
Tu mi hai rapito il cuore.
Isn’t that what you used to whisper to me?”

Spent, they lay naked, exhausted, counting down the minutes until their boy bounded up from the street.

Harry was on his back, eyes closed. “It has been so long since you’ve whispered to me in Italian,” he said. “I cannot remember the last time.”

That was true. The Italian verbal caresses had vanished. Gina was on her side, eyes open, staring at him. “What if you’re wrong about Russia, Harry?”

He sighed. His eyes still closed, he reached for her, stroked her back, leaned over her, kissed her face, held her to him, cradling her. “I’m not going to be wrong.”

“The price you pay for being wrong is too high.” She didn’t want to say it. She didn’t want to pay it. She didn’t want to admit to him how afraid she was for Alexander.

“What are you afraid of?”

“That people smarter than you will turn out to be right.”

“Who do you know that’s smarter than me?”

“Max Eastman.”

“Don’t listen to him. The man has been in a bad mood for ten years.”

She jumped up, went to her dresser, pulled out a newspaper article she had clipped and saved, came back to bed, and lay down, squinting at the page. Soon she might need glasses.

“
The universe of dialectical materialism
,” Gina read out loud, “
is a pantheistic god masquerading as matter and permitting itself forms of conduct equal to if not surpassing the cannibals at Carthage
.”

“Eastman wrote that?” Harry smirked. “He’s really left the collective, hasn’t he?”

“Yes,
after
he went to Russia he left the collective.”

Harry shrugged, mock-disappointed. “He used to be such a good socialist.”

“Listen to this—”

He took the article out of her hands and threw it on the floor. “Is he back in the States?”

“Yes.”

“So he spouts crazy things like what you’ve just read, and yet, alive and well, he has returned to America?”

“Yes.”

“Cannibals at Carthage indeed.” Harry laughed. “What do you think will happen to us?”

“I don’t know. They’ll throw us in prison?”

“Darling, why would they throw
us
in prison? Just think about what you’re saying.”

“What about the stories of brutal suppression?”

“All lies.”

“All of it, lies? Have you read any of the letters Max sent back home? The Bolsheviks permit no departure, no matter how slight, from Bolshevism.” She snickered. “
No socialists allowed
should be their motto.”

“Even
you
have bought into the propaganda, Gina,” Harry said. “I thought you were smarter than that.”

“I’m not smarter than Max Eastman,” she said. “The man who went to Russia to live the utopian dream now writes that in order to aspire to such a dream we must set aside all of our moral principles and advocate instead for fratricide.
Fratricide
, Harry! He is not saying prison. Oh no. He is saying murder. Cain killing Abel because killing Abel is now the right thing to do.”

“Gina, Gina, my love. Please.” Harry rubbed his face. “Don’t you see? The people who
are
in jail in Russia, they call themselves ‘socialists’ now, but not five minutes ago, the guns were still warm in their hands as they fought the Bolsheviks to the death in the civil war. That’s what Max observed. Civil war, Gia, not fratricide! Those people aren’t socialists. They are White terrorists. I wrote about them not too long ago for the
Daily Worker
. I know all about them. They simply use that term now, ‘socialists,’ to receive mercy. They are pitiful.”

“Do you mean they are deserving of our pity?” she asked. “What if you become one of those people?” Or me? Or Alexander. She couldn’t speak her son’s name aloud.

“We’re not going to Soviet Russia to fight
against
the Bolsheviks!” Harry exclaimed. “Why would we do something so stupid? Why even go?”

“Good question.”

“We are going to support them. To help them.”

She fell back on the pillow. “It’s like you read the paper, but you don’t
read
the paper.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Her provocation made him move away from her. They were too naked and unprotected, lying so close to each other.

“The
Globe
every week prints stories about the counter-revolutionaries that fester in Soviet political prisons,” she said.

“It’s capitalist propaganda. I don’t read the
Globe
.”

“I know, I know. You read the
Daily Worker
. Soviet propaganda.”

“I don’t read it. I write it.”

“Harry, Max Eastman, the man who hired you for
The Masses,
the once ardent communist, now writes that the word
capitalism
has been maligned, has been made deliberately sinister. He says it is nothing more than an abstract noun. Yet this uncoordinated impersonal entity has been transformed into the devil. It is but wordplay, he writes, to make a mortal enemy out of fog.”

“Gina, I don’t want to hear about Max anymore! He’s a turncoat.”

“You revered him.”

“Until he started to betray us, yes. And you should stop reading the
Globe.
Don’t be so unduly influenced. You must read critically. God! What else are they going to say? They don’t even recognize the Soviet Union. They’re never going to say it’s going swell over there.”

“Well, why not? If it is, why not?”

“Because that would endanger their whole belief system. You heard Domarind. Who wants to hear the death knell sound for their own way of life?”

“You think that’s what it is? The Americans are afraid of how great things are in Russia?”

“You should read Walter Duranty if you really want the truth about what’s going on there,” said Harry. “It’s true, a handful of counterrevolutionaries were arrested in a country of a hundred and fifty million people. There are now about five hundred of them in prison. Does that sound like a lot to you when tens of thousands are imprisoned here for speaking against that fog you call capitalism? And do you know where those five hundred are housed? Many of them are in Solovki, which is an ancient former monastery. Do you know where that is? On an island in the middle of the White Sea. Stunning surroundings, an excellent climate. Read Maxim Gorky, too. He wrote an essay about this so-called prison that I’ve recently translated.” Harry sat up in bed, eager, excited. “Health and good food is their daily regimen. That’s how the Soviets treat their enemies. I’m not making this up. The prisoners, French, German, Italian, write letters home. Maxim Gorky saw the island with his own eyes. They have walks twice a day in a grove of fruit trees.”

“Like orange groves?”

“Almost!” Harry laughed. “They have milk, tea, sugar, cigarettes, soup, meat, potatoes. Gia, they eat better than we do.”

“The poor I used to feed in the basement of Holy Lazarus eat better than we do.”

He patted her fondly. “They fish, they have lively conversations over tea and jam. There are no locks on the doors or windows.”

“Did you say Solovki is an island in the middle of the White Sea? Probably no need for locks then. Escape sounds unlikely.”

“It doesn’t
sound
like prison is what I mean. It’s more like the Cub Scout camp we sent Alexander to.”

“So not like prison at all?” she said.

“Exactly!”

“So just like Bellagrand?”

The breath was taken out of him for a moment. “I can see,” he said tersely, getting out of bed, “that you
refuse
to have a serious conversation. I’m telling you truths that should comfort you, and you make nonsensical analogies. Why even bother talking? Where was I?”

“I believe you were telling me how well we are going to live in a Soviet prison.”

“No! I was telling you how a civilized country treats its handful of political prisoners. Which is not going to be us. Unless you plan to go there to agitate.”

“Because that’s me,” she said. “An agitator.”

“You still get
my
blood up and boiling,” Harry said. “You agitate me, the calmest of men, into a temper.”

She opened her arms to him. He looked at her for a moment, and then came back to her. They held each other close, not moving.

“Communism is the future,” he crooned into her ear, like a love song. “Remember how you were taken with Ben”—Harry paused, deliberately—“when he kept spouting that Panama was the future? Can you allow
me
, your
husband
, the tiniest measure of the support you once accorded him?”

Ben.

It was with Ben that Gina had spoken about desire and sacrifice fifteen years ago.

“It’s time, my wife,” said Harry. “We’ve been talking about going since the October Revolution, when the idea became a reality. When the impossible was made possible.”

“Sort of like
the Word was made flesh
?”

“I guess.” As if he had no idea what she was talking about. She didn’t explain. “It’s time for us to go man the barricades.”

“There you go again,” she said, “inserting the language of war into the peacetime relations of men.”

“Gina!
Basta!
”

“You
basta
,” she whispered.

It was a standoff in their marital tango.

Alexander was walking home from school. Domarind was back in his office. The Justice Department was readying the deportation papers. There was nothing more to say. Gina got dressed, pinned up her hair, put on her warm walkabout coat and hat.

“Get up,” she said. “Alexander is almost home. Don’t forget to take him to his hockey practice at four.”

“Where are
you
going? I was going to read.”

“You can read at the rink. I’m going out,” she said. “I want to clear my head, and I need to think.”

“When you come back will you have an answer for me?”

She promised him she would.

“I want to know just one thing,” Gina said before she left. “Are you and I going to beg for mercy?”

“Never,” said Harry. “We are never going to be like those White terrorists.”

Chapter 19

P
SALM 91

One

C
AMBRIDGE WITH HARVARD
as its jewel is most beautiful in the fall. Gina had always thought so. The inflamed vermilion beauty stopped her heart. It took the breath from her lungs, brought her hand to her chest. She felt this especially keenly today as she got off the bus on Oxford Street and tarried a little, ambling slowly toward the Science Center. Past the white fence the Japanese lanterns glowed in the distance with the promise of later, when they would be the only light in the darkness, but now, the maples, ash, oak, and willow—syrupy sugar, fire, gold, and yellow—were all in a blaze. Her chin raised, her shoulders squared, she walked. Perhaps Harvard was especially poignant to her because she suspected she might be seeing it for the last time. Just as when they knew they were leaving Belpasso, every broken-down hut, every crumbling fence, the dirt roads, the deepest blue of the sea past the calamitous Etna looming above their city, made her and Salvo cry. They said they hoped to God the place they were sailing to would have a tenth of the beauty before their eyes.

And it did. America did.

On the second floor of the Science Center, she knocked hesitantly on Ben’s office door and waited. The door opened. He stood in front of her in a double-breasted suit, well-groomed but slightly creased, as if appearances were less important than the textbooks and essays piled on his desk or the young man in a tweed jacket, looking anxious and pale, sitting in the student’s chair, fretting.

“Gina, how are you? Is everything all right?”

“Yes, of course, I don’t mean to intrude . . .” Her mouth twisted. “Do you have a moment?”

Ben glanced at the nervous student.

She stepped back. “Another time, perhaps. Please. Go ahead.”

“Can you wait?” he asked. “I have him, then two more.”

“I’ll wait.”

“You’re sure? It might be . . .”

“However long. I’ll be in the Yard.”

“I’ll find you,” he said. “Enjoy the autumn day. There’ll be a blizzard for the next three months.”

“Oh, I’m sure of it.”

Forty minutes later, Ben found her sitting on the steps of the Memorial Church, wrapped in her wool coat.

“Sorry it took so long. Academic consults take forever. Are you cold?”

“Not at all.” Then why was she shivering? “I’m glad you could get away.”

“I have a lecture at six.” He sat down on the marble steps next to her. “Did you get tired of walking?”

“I didn’t walk. I just sat here. Taking in the view.” Together they looked out onto Harvard Yard, with Widener Library rising past the magenta maples, the golden oaks. It was nearing dusk. The lanterns would be lit soon. Her heart hurt.

“You know,” Ben said, “this is where I used to sit and wait for your husband to finish class.”

“I know. He told me.” Gina and Ben sat together watching the people—young like they had been—rushing to dinner with friends, to write their essays, to evening class, to life.

Ben gave her his hand to help her off the stairs. “Let’s walk a bit,” he said. “To keep warm.” They didn’t touch each other as they meandered under the sparse brilliant canopy of the last bloom of fall. She didn’t put her arm through his. This wasn’t Concord in 1914. No pumpkin fair awaited them through the historic archways at the end of today.

She made some small talk: the recent events (the Dow Jones Industrial average hitting an all-time high of 381); Ben’s teaching schedule (“no time to engineer the sorely needed expansion of Mass Avenue with four courses to teach”); Alexander’s hockey abilities (prodigious); the weather (fickle); Ingersol (fine); Esther (fine); Harry (silence).

“So what’s going on, Gina? How can I help? Is he in trouble again? I heard he fired Domarind.”

She took a deep breath. She told him of her meeting with the erstwhile counsel, and the rest. They had spent all their money on legal fees, court costs, other things.
What
the other things were was more than Gina cared to confess to Ben. There was nothing left, she said, and Justice and State were fed up to
here
. They didn’t want Harry in federal prison. All they wanted was for him to leave. Which was good, because that’s all he wanted. “I fear we haven’t got much choice,” she finished, but interrogatively as if she were expecting Ben to refute, or assent.

“So let him go,” said Ben. “You stay. Stay with Alexander.”

Gina felt small like a child when she shook her head.

“You’re not
seriously
thinking of going to the Soviet Union? Is this devil’s advocacy?”

She didn’t reply. Not because she didn’t want to. Because she couldn’t say the impossible words out loud.
We lost our American citizenship. We are going to be deported.

She told him, finally, reluctantly.

He stopped walking. “This is absolutely awful,” he said. “Does Esther know?”

“I don’t want to say anything to her until we’re certain what’s happening. Please don’t say anything. Please. Promise me.”

“Okay.” But he didn’t sound convincing.

They resumed their anguished roam in the afternoon crowd.

“Please, Ben. I know you and Esther talk. She can’t know. Not until we’re sure.”

“She can help, Gina.”

“No. She will only make things worse. Believe me.”

“How can she make things any worse?”

“Because Alexander makes her lose all reason. She will offer to keep him.”

Ben nodded.

“Don’t nod, Ben! She can’t have him. If we must go, he comes with us. Neither Harry nor I can have it any other way,
will
have it any other way. We will not leave him behind. Esther won’t understand, but you do, don’t you?”

Ben said nothing. They wandered around the whole of Widener before he spoke again. The grass between the crisscrossing paths was blanketed with decaying leaves.

“She can help you stay here.”

“Please . . . you don’t understand, and I can’t explain.”

“Fine.” He pulled his coat closed. “So what’s your question for
me
?”

Gina lowered her troubled head. Her choices were so narrow, it was like threading twine into the head of a pin. “Every decision in life can’t be this painful,” she said.

“No. Only the most difficult ones.” Ben paused. “Please let Esther help you, Gina. It’s not too late. She will use her father’s connections to keep Harry here.”

“It
is
too late,” Gina said quietly. “Harry wants to go to Russia. Can she help with that?”

“She is his sister. Maybe she can talk him out of it.”

“I can’t talk him out of strong tea too late at night. But she’s going to talk him out of
this
?”

“Gina!” Ben adjusted his hat and for a moment stopped speaking. After he collected himself and spoke, his voice was calmer. “Forget Harry for a moment. Do you think your father would have wanted you to leave America, to go to
Russia
?”

She deflected away from the honest reply. Which was no. “Perhaps. I don’t know. He approved of all sorts of progressive ideas. Russia still feels like the future to me. Unknowable, that’s true . . .”

“Is there any other kind of future?”

“No, you’re right. I suppose not. Should I maybe find a fortune-teller to help me?” She smiled at him, tilting her head, trying to lure him into a smile in reply. Instead he curtly glanced at his watch. He was losing patience with her.

“I need some advice from you, Ben,” Gina said quickly. “A word of wisdom. I need you to be my Rose Hawthorne.”

“I’ll be whatever you need,” he said with an unsuppressed sigh. “What’s your question?”

“Do you remember when you and I talked about Panama?”

“Which time?”

“Fifteen years ago.”

“Oh, okay. Yes, of course. That conversation is top of mind.” Now he smiled, if barely.

“I asked you then, if the heart of your only life was worth the sacrifice of going to Panama. Was your youth worth the risk, the threat, the danger, to do this impossible thing? And truly, it was impossible. A fifty-mile canal through mountains, one end at lower sea level than the other. And to do it in such a way that it permanently solved a grave international problem. The death, the disease, the expense, the sheer mechanical lunacy of it, do you remember the arguments and anger that flowed between men on this subject?”

“Too well. I teach a graduate-level course on it. Next class is tonight at six o’clock, if you’d like to pop in, have a listen.”

“What I’m asking is”—she regrouped—“don’t you think that in many ways, your past dilemma mirrors my own current mess, the life-and-death question before Harry and me? Well, before me, really, because Harry is not wavering. He made up his mind a long time ago.” Gina nudged Ben. “A little bit like you with Panama.”

They both reluctantly acknowledged the truth of this.

“So, the humans involved are just as intractable,” she went on, “and the issue of the future of the Soviet Union is as complex and uncertain as Panama. To build or not to build? To go or not to go? Will this fledgling thing that’s barely off the ground grow wings, or will it continue to be a bottom-dweller? Will it be a success, like Panama? Will it be worth it? You told me back then to ask you these questions in fifteen years because you couldn’t answer me when the canal first opened. So here I am, Ben. Little did I know how desperately I would need your answer. Was Panama worth the risk and the sacrifice?”

“In the case of Panama,” Ben said, “the answer is an unequivocal yes. I haven’t lost my life to accident or disease, I’ve benefited from my association with the canal, both personally and professionally, and quite apart from me, it has transformed the world.”

“Perhaps in a few years I’ll be able to say the same thing about the Soviet Union.”

“Transformed the world for the
better
,” Ben amended.

“Perhaps Russia will, too. Harry thinks so. He has faith.”

“Like in God?”

She nodded. “Man has to replace God with something.”

Ben stayed silent.

She knocked into him lightly. “Why are you so quiet?”

“I don’t know if I’m on Harry’s side, Gina.”

“Okay, but if you separate yourself from the personal . . .”

“This isn’t personal. This has to do solely with the question you put before me. Men are always looking for the bright hope that changes imperfect humanity into a perfect brotherhood, a society of inequality into one of economic equals. It’s especially true of modern man. But the Soviet Union is no longer an abstraction, or as some economist once called it, ‘a social myth to mull over at the dinner table.’ It’s a real and tangible thing.”

“Just like your Panama after it left the planning stage and entered the building stage.”

Ben allowed the similarity, but unhappily. “The question isn’t about the future,” he said. “It’s about the here and now. With Panama, we knew how long the canal would take to build, and we knew when we could hope to see the effect of it on maritime travel and international trade. How long do we plan to wait with the Soviet Union? Have they given themselves a benchmark, a barometer? Look at what the Soviets are doing now, taking farms away from the Ukrainians at the point of a Tommy gun. My question is, if, despite Stalin’s best efforts, communism doesn’t flourish, erasing the need for government by such and such a date, will the Bolsheviks admit they’ve failed? Will they give the country back to the tsars and the farms back to the farmers?”

“Well, no, clearly not to the tsars, since they’ve killed them all.” Gina didn’t know if they had killed all the Ukrainians.

“So what’s Harry’s answer? How long are they giving themselves to succeed?”

“As long as it takes, I suppose.” She squinted at him. Had Ben, too, been reading Max Eastman?

“And if it doesn’t happen in your lifetime,” Ben said, “how will you know if you’ve done the right thing? Panama didn’t purport to be the answer to all the world’s problems. Panama was a practical solution to a narrow, concrete dilemma. Personally, I’m wary about global programs that are dependent on fundamentally altering mankind.”

“Why do you say it won’t happen in our lifetime?” she asked. “Look at what Duranty wrote after returning from the Soviet Union. He is very optimistic.”

“Gina, are you arguing from a strongly held conviction, or just arguing? When you discuss this with Harry, what side are you on?”

She didn’t want to admit to Ben how many words she had used to try to change her husband’s mind.
All
the words. “I suppose on his side.” She stared at her feet.

“Okay. Sometimes you must pay a heavy price for where you stand. Harry must have said this to you once or twice. So then, what advice could you possibly want from me?”

She smiled. “Yes, Gina. Go. Of course it’s worth it.”

Ben nodded. “Yes, Gina. Go. Of course it’s worth it.”

“You’re just saying that. You don’t mean it.”

He laughed. “I told you back then, even when I could touch the immense change that was about to fall upon the globe, to ask me in fifteen years. Even when I was very sure, I told you I wasn’t sure.”

“But I’m asking you to give me an answer now,” Gina said. “Is it worth it? To go and build communism in the Soviet Union the way you went and built the canal in Panama?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said. “Are you willing to sacrifice your life for it?”

She was mute.

“I suppose you’d have to know the answer to one question,” he continued.

“What’s that?”

“At what price communism?”

They wandered along the shadowy leafy paths between Weld and Grays. She knew it was time to head to Johnston Gate and out, but she didn’t want to.

“I could ask you the same question,” she said. “At what price Panama?”

“Ah,” said Ben. “Clearly when I was young, I believed the answer was: the ultimate price.”

Was Harry willing to pay the ultimate price? Except it wasn’t just his head and hers he was staking on the tip of a sword. It was Alexander’s. Gina couldn’t stop shivering.

They were almost at the brick and iron gate that led out to Peabody Street, the gate she had blocked twenty-five years earlier to trap Harry into love, into herself.
Love never fails
.
But whether there be prophecies, they will fail.
The future was unknowable. Only love was knowable.