Bellagrand: A Novel (7 page)

Gina and the sisters hurried to collect a few dozen warm coverings. It wasn’t enough, but it was a start.

“Can you help me cart them?” Bill asked. “You’re Harry’s wife, aren’t you?” He brazenly appraised her with his one good eye.

She nodded as she helped him put the coats and boots into a wheelbarrow.

“Why is he hiding you? Why are you never by his side? He’s out there every day busting his hide, helping the righteous cause. Why aren’t you supporting the women?”

Gina didn’t want to tell him the truth. She wanted to tell him nothing.

“I work here,” she replied tersely. If Harry hadn’t told Bill about the baby, she certainly wasn’t going to. If Harry hadn’t told Bill she worked in the soup kitchen making lunch for the strikers, she wasn’t going to.

“Are you not on our side?” He glared at her with his one eye.

“I’m on your side,” she replied in her smallest voice.

He forgot to turn his good profile to her, such as it was, and left her staring at him full on. She muttered something vapid about looms and missions and her work for the church. All her bravado had left her. She began to understand why her husband couldn’t say no to this man. She was pregnant. She was hardly going to provoke him into an argument. He was completely intimidating.

“Come and help me,” he said. “It’s nearly lunchtime.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “I make the food. Hot beans. Bread.”

“Ah. Very good. But today you can help me serve them.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to. My regular girl is out sick. The nuns can spare you for an hour or two, can’t they?”

“They can’t.”

The sisters assured Gina they could.

“I have to speak to Harry first,” Gina muttered.

“Come, we’ll find him together. Put on your coat.”

She left with Bill, trying very hard not to stare into the vacant horror show of a socket that once housed his eye. Rumor had it that he had punctured it with a knife while whittling a slingshot when he was eight. She tried to walk on his right side, so he would walk closer to the curb, but Bill had suddenly become less self-conscious about his ocular deficiency. It was windy and cold and ice was falling. Bill wore a tailored gray wool overcoat and didn’t want the mud and slush to spatter it as cars and horses passed by. He kept talking to Gina in an endless harangue, but she pulled her hat over her ears and eyes so she wouldn’t hear him or be forced to look up into his dead milky deformity. She was drowning in her anxiety over heading straight to Union Street after promising Harry she would keep away. Surely he wouldn’t be upset when he learned his boss made her do it. Madame Camilla indeed! The only real money they had was the money this man was paying her husband. From blocks away she could hear the mob, even through her hat and over Bill’s booming voice.

The crowds were impassable; it was only because she was with him that they were able to push through. He could push through a stone barricade. They distributed the meager coat donations to some women in the picket line in front of Wood Mill and walked through the low iron fence of the Corpus Christi church to the lunch tent.

“Bill, I really need to speak to my husband,” Gina said. “You said you would go find him?”

“I said I would go find him,” he repeated to mock her. “Yes, I’m now your fetch boy.”

“I’ll be glad to go myself. I’ll be right back.”

He put his hand out. “Stay here. Serve the women. I’ll find him.”

Her hands were shaking so bad she could barely ladle out the beans into bowls. The gruel kept spilling from the sides, upsetting the women.

No sooner had Bill left than a dozen or so state troopers appeared out of the human sea to confront her at the cast-iron pot, telling her that if she didn’t want to be arrested for aiding and abetting the criminal elements out and about on the street, she’d better stop what she was doing, and head on home and out of trouble. Finding this to be eminently and blessedly sensible advice, Gina moved away, planning to rush through the back streets to Summer Street. But a hundred shouting women in front of her hot beans ordered her not to move, but to feed them as she had come to do, feed those who were fighting for
her
rights. The police again commanded her to leave.

Tempers got short, bodies inched closer.

Within moments it got so pulsing loud that Gina could scarcely think for the din of enraged noise. All she knew was she wanted out—not now, not later, but thirty minutes ago. She cursed the day Harry ever shook Big Bill’s hand. She cursed the day she took Angela to see Emma Goldman, the fateful day she introduced her to Arturo.

There was a wall of people between her and anywhere. Big Bill was nowhere to be seen. In the near distance, across Union Street near the red doors of the factory, Gina spotted Angela. She thought she heard Angela’s strident voice, frenzied above the rest. Helplessly Gina looked around for Harry. She wouldn’t be able to explain to him how she had ended up here, in the worst possible place at the worst possible time with cold faces and empty stomachs and flared rage all around. She tried to hide near the police, but most of the direct action was aimed at them. They were the frontline.

The iron pot was flipped over—by the police? By the protesters?—and hot beans dripped onto the wet slushy pavement, onto her boots and the police boots and the battered footwear of the strikers. There was nowhere for her to run, nowhere to move. No one was going to part the red irate crowd for her so she could run to safety through the alleys.

Someone grabbed her arm from behind, yanked her sideways. She spun around. It was Harry.

She started to cry.

“What are you doing?” he shouted because she wouldn’t have heard him otherwise, although he was standing in front of her. “What the hell are you doing here? I told you . . .”

“I want to go home!”

“Gina! God, why did you come here?” They were surrounded on all sides. The tent was shaking on its supports, any minute it was going to come down. He pulled her close for the briefest of moments, then yelled to her to crawl under the table. She saw Angela thirty heads away getting trampled, screaming, shoving, slapping somebody, in desperate trouble herself.

“Harry, look, Angela . . .”

“Can’t help her now,” he said, pulling Gina under the table.

“Angela!” Gina shouted, hoarse, out of breath. Angela didn’t hear.

Big Bill reappeared with great force. He pushed his way past the sticks of the police and confronted Harry. “Come with me,” he yelled, grabbing Harry’s arm. “We need your help.”

“I can’t, Bill,” Harry shouted back, pulling away. “My wife.”

Bill didn’t even glance at Gina. “She’ll be fine. She’s safer than the rest of us. Come quick. Vandalism in the grocery store—the coppers are about to arrest Arturo. I need your silver tongue. Come! Quick.”

Harry stared desperately at Gina. “Go, Harry,” she said. “Go with Bill. Go help Angie.”

“I’ll be right back,” he said—and was swallowed up by Big Bill and the mob.

Under the table she curled into a ball, covered her head and closed her eyes. She lay on the dead January grass in a fetal position, facing away from the mob, facing toward the church, praying it would help, that anything would. A gaggle of people caught in the clash barreled in under the table after her. The narrow table was knocked over, the legs broke apart, it fell on their heads, on Gina’s. There was only screaming.

Behind her there was the sound of assault, fists meeting faces, sticks meeting bodies, black panic, wild confusion. She imagined Milan, long ago, her revered brother Alessandro, hotheaded, impulsive, mule-stubborn, beautiful, dead, vile unrest, horses, policemen, stampede, a knife flying out, a life snuffed out, one life, then another. For who could live bearing the weight of your child’s last moment. Her father couldn’t.

Popping sounds. Shots? Everybody
really
screamed. She kept her head covered. More firecracker noise, perhaps return fire? Gina squeezed shut her eyes. Harry, Harry, come back to me, please. Legs, boots, feet, bottoms of coats whooshing by, people falling. She was shoved hard in the back by someone trying to get up, someone else stepped on her ankle trying to get away. Still in a fetal position, she put one hand on her head and the other on her stomach to protect the fragile life barely forming. Another boot landed on her head, on her knuckles. Man, woman? She couldn’t even stand up in her blind terror.

“Get your fucking head off the ground, lady! Or you’ll get your skull bashed in! Get off the ground!”

Harry, Harry?

It wasn’t Harry. She was yanked into a standing position by a man. People running everywhere. Tent stakes violently pulled from the ground. People tripping over them, heavy gray canvas falling on their heads. The man who helped her up looked down at the ground at her feet and said, “Lady, are you shot? You’re bleeding!” The last thing she thought before fainting was that Harry was going to be so upset she hadn’t stayed under the table.

Seven

WHEN SHE CAME TO,
she was in her bed. No Harry, no Arturo, no Joe, no Angela. Only her mother sitting by her side, silently crying. Her mother and Salvo!

“Salvo?” Gina was so happy for a moment. She raised her hand to reach for him.

“Why doesn’t anybody
ever
listen to me?” Mimoo said, sobbing into her rosary beads. Her arthritis and tears prevented her from counting them properly. She kept rolling them around between her barely mobile fingers.

“How are you feeling,
sorella
?” Salvo said, the hat in his hands twitching.

“Where’s Harry?” Gina reached down to touch her stomach. “Is he all right? What’s happened?”

Salvo got up and left the bedroom before Mimoo could speak.

Mimoo shook her head. “He’s not all right,” she said. “Things are as bad as can be, child. Harry, Arturo, Joe have all been arrested. Along with dozens of others.” She sobbed in a prayer. “They’re about to be charged with murder.”

“Murder? What murder? Harry too?”

Mimoo cried louder. “Our precious angel, Angela. Your cousin. Like your sister. Gone. Struck down. Stray bullet. Right to the heart. Oh!”

Santa Maria, prega per noi peccattori.

Gina tried to stand up.

“Stop it, lie down,” Mimoo said. “You’re still bleeding, it’s not safe for you, you’re sick, lie down.”

She would not lie down. “Bleeding, why?”

Her mother wouldn’t answer her.

“Mimoo? Salvo!”

“Don’t call him. He can’t speak to you.”

“Salvo!”

“You lost your baby, Gia, my child.
Nessuna sofferenza, ma la vita eterna.
”

Now Gina didn’t want to speak to anyone. Clutching her stomach, she turned away.
Where is Harry?
she whispered, but no one heard.
I need my husband
.

Salvo was so upset, he couldn’t come back into the room to comfort her. Mumbling a few indecipherables from the door, he left, ran.

No one knew what had happened. In the commotion, shots ringing out, Angela was dragged inside a shop, everyone thought for safety. The police opened fire, fearing they had been fired upon. Perhaps she had already been shot before she was pulled inside the grocery store. No one could say for certain, but when the crowd had dispersed, Angela’s blood flowed in the streets and Arturo and Joe had been arrested. They had been nowhere near Essex Street, nowhere near Angela. But because they were Wobblies, they were charged with conspiracy to incite a riot—in other words with a felony that resulted in a woman’s death. That was murder. If convicted they faced execution.

No one saw Angela get hit or fall. No one heard the shot that pierced her heart. There were dozens of injured people on the ground, but only one of them lay dead, shot through the chest. Angela was twenty-eight years old, though all the papers later said Annie LoPizo was thirty, not knowing that Angela Tartaro had long ago lied about her age when she first came to America from Sicily so she could get the job that eventually claimed her life.

Angela’s life wasn’t the only one claimed. For days blood seeped out onto the starched white sheets of Gina’s bed.

Bill kept the strike going as long as he could, but a few weeks after Angela’s death, it ended. It took sixty-three days, fifty thousand women, one dead woman, and one lost baby. American Woolen agreed to all the demands, and the women returned to work without a contract in mid-March.

Everybody but Angela.

Eight

JOE AND ARTURO WERE
held without bail. Because Harry was not a member of the IWW, he was charged with a lesser crime of assault and destruction of private property. Bail was set against him, bail that no one could pay.

It took Gina a little while to get herself together to go see Harry in the Lawrence city jail. She couldn’t face him. She finally went because she dreaded the questions he might otherwise ask. What took you so long to get here? You’re my wife, why didn’t you come?

He said nothing. He couldn’t look at her. He didn’t reach for her across the table, he didn’t speak to her, offered no words of comfort or remonstration. He just sat, and she sat. She was too afraid she would cry so she held her tongue and kept her mouth shut. His inscrutable gray eyes were focused on anything but her.

“Are you all right?” he finally said. His voice was raspy.

Shrugging, she nodded, but didn’t trust her voice.

“Can I get out?”

“I don’t know how,” she said. “We don’t have the money for bail.”

“Can we collect some? It’s just a loan.”

“It’s five hundred dollars, Harry.”

“It’s temporary. Just get me out of here.”

“How do you propose I do this?” She squeezed her hands together.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t want to be in jail. I can’t stay in jail.”

“Harry,
please
can you call your father?”

His gray eyes froze over. He blinked in judgment. “No.” He stood up.

“Harry, please. He can help you. He
will
help you.”

“I went to him once, when he called in the money he had lent to your brother. Do you remember how he treated me?”