Bellagrand: A Novel (9 page)

The money trickled in with the mail. Instead of being in the thick of her bed, Harry was once again in the thick of trouble. And the silk strike in Paterson was violent and unending and destined for failure. No. It was Big Bill and his radicalism that was responsible for the gradual dissolution of her marriage.

Rose watched her conflicted face. “If you have the time, on Saturdays or Sundays, why don’t you come and help me here? I can’t pay you, as you know. We never pay, but we could definitely use a pair of good hands. I can feed you. You can sleep at the Wayside if you need a place to stay.”

“What about my mother?”

“Don’t you have a brother?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“A boy also can be a good child to his mother. Ask your brother to be a good son while you help me.”

Gina took off her coat. “No use in fretting,” she said. “How about I help you now?”

Three

“THINGS ARE STILL QUITE SPARTAN
,” Rose said to Gina as she took her around the ward, a long annex attached to the Wayside, and showed her where they kept the salves, the bandages, the sponges, the bedpans. “Please stay away if you become with child again. Just in case. Sometimes we have lepers staying with us. They are highly infectious. There is bacteria in the air from all sorts of sickness. If you’re blessed enough to fall pregnant, don’t breathe in the air of the dying. Promise me?”

“The danger of that while the strike continues,” said Gina, “is slim. But how do
you
not get sick?”

Smiling, Rose raised her eyes and palms to the ceiling. “The God of all comfort comforts us in our tribulation so that we may give comfort to those who are in any trouble.” Rose put her arm through Gina’s. “You are a good girl, and you’re going to be just fine.” She leaned in for a confidence. “You know, I had no nursing experience before I started caring for the incurably sick. Oh, yes. Don’t be so surprised. But like my dear father, I have always been fascinated by medicine. He wanted to be a doctor before he became a writer, did you know that? Not a lot of people do. What do you think? Did he make the right choice in his life’s path?”

“Hard to say no to that, isn’t it, Rose? His books bless the future generations.”

“I suppose they do. But look, please don’t tell anyone else that I have no nursing training. They’ll close me down for sure. Come with me—I hear Alice.”

Gina blanched.

“Not
that
Alice,” Rose said gently. “
My
Alice. She must be back from her walkabout. She goes around Concord twice a week, in the afternoons. Visits the sick in their homes.” The nun paused. “Though I must say, I’m surprised the other Alice is still so top of mind for you.”

“What can I say?” Gina nodded. “She left me with a few parting words I haven’t been able to shake from my heart. Her valedictory salvo, so to speak. When things aren’t going well, her words are all I can think about.”

“Clearly what catches seed is the grain of truth, no matter how small.”

“Not even that small.” Gina pointed to the door. “Let’s go say hello.”

In the front hall they were greeted by a plump serious woman. “Gina,” Rose said, “you remember my friend and colleague Alice Huber, don’t you?”

Nodding, Gina shook Alice’s hand.

“Alice used to be a portrait painter,” Rose told Gina with a proud smile.

“I’ll tell my own story, Rose, dearest.” Alice took Gina’s other arm. Flanked by the petite sisters, the towering Gina walked through the ward between the beds of the dying. “It’s true I used to be a portrait painter,” Alice concurred. “But my heart wasn’t in it. I was looking for something else. I said that when I found a work of perfect charity, I would join it. And so I did.”

“It’s not for everyone, Alice,” Rose said. “Don’t judge people.” She looked up at Gina. “My friend can be too critical sometimes, God love her. I tell her all the time—people are the keepers of their own souls, not you.”

“And do I listen, Rose?”

“Hardly ever.”

“Exactly. Do you know, Gina,” Alice continued, “that before we built this small annex, we housed the sick right in Rose’s Wayside?”

“And it wasn’t even my Wayside anymore.” Rose laughed. “Imagine how my dear Harriet felt about it.” The Wayside was the only home Nathaniel Hawthorne had ever owned. In 1879, many years after his death, Rose and George bought the beloved house to keep it in the family. Financial hardship forced them to sell it just four years later to George’s publisher and his wife, Harriet Stone, also known as Margaret Sidney, the writer of children’s books.

“We bathed them and changed their dressings right in the parlor room.”

Rose nodded. “In the summers we used the front porch for their beds. My father used to sit and have his morning tea on that porch.”

“And in New York we collected the sick into three cold-water flats on the Lower East Side,” said Alice. “We managed. They managed.”

“Well, yes,” Rose said. “Because our goal wasn’t convenience. It was to do something to comfort other hearts than ours. To take the lowest rank of human beings—both in poverty and in suffering—and put them in such a condition that if our Lord knocked on our door, we would not be ashamed to let Him in.”

“Let’s go then and comfort other hearts than ours,” said Gina, rolling up her sleeves. “Perhaps we can make our Lord proud.”

Eighteen months went by.

Four

IN OCTOBER 1914, GINA
was in the kitchen at the Wayside making chicken soup for the annex patients and mopping the floor when there was a knock on the glass pane of the back door. She had been thinking about the lateness of the hour and her long trip home to Lawrence when the soft knock startled her out of her musings. She opened the door and in front of her stood Ben Shaw. He took off his hat, bowed to her slightly, and smiled.

“Ben?” She almost didn’t recognize him, having not seen him in nearly fifteen years. They hugged like the old friends they were, kissed each other on both cheeks like Europeans. Instinctively Gina’s hands lifted to adjust and pin up her always falling-down hair. She smiled with joy at seeing his kind, familiar face, fleetingly wishing she looked less grubby.

“Benjamin, I am
stunned
to see you!”

“Why?” he asked cheerfully. “Did you think I’d be dead by now?”

Ben had been in Panama, engineering and building the Panama Canal. His modulated tenor hadn’t changed, his amiable face was as handsome as ever. His dark eyes sparkled, the expression in them when he looked at her familiar and welcome and true, but in all else he was hardly the same person. He was a grown man now, not an eager, smitten boy. His dark hair was clipped short and graying above his ears. He had an impeccably groomed salt-and-pepper goatee, was thin like a steel pole, and extremely tanned. So tanned that if Gina hadn’t known better, she would’ve guessed he was of Mediterranean or South American stock. Lines had gathered under his friendly eyes and around his burned-by-the-sun mouth. He wore thin-wire glasses that made him look like a solemn scientist. Yet he was still inimitably Ben when he smiled.

He walked in, placed his sharply structured hat on the entry table, hung up his wool coat. He wore a smart gray serge suit, a white shirt, a silk tie. He looked modern. He looked successful. His black shoes had been recently shined. He looked as if
he
had been recently shined. A seamstress, a textile expert, a dreamer of high fashion, Gina knew about such things. He was put together well. Like Harry had been once, before he married her.

She was disappointed in herself, at how happy she was to see him again, to see a familiar face that belonged to a man who had once gazed upon her with unreturned affection. She put on a kettle to make him some tea, and then puttered around feeling flustered, not knowing what to ask him first or what to get hold of next. She was all too aware of her drab brown dress, the stains of her difficult work on it, the labor-scratched hands, the short unpolished nails.

She saw herself as if through a looking glass, a reflected plain Gina, not the blaze she had once been, but a working woman wan of face and devoid of makeup, with no embellishments in her skirt or sparkles in her auburn hair. Deeply self-conscious, she busied herself with their cups of tea. They sat down at the tiny table in the corner by the window, where she sat by herself during the brief breaks in her day.

“You’re dressed too well for someone who’s been digging in mud for a decade,” said Gina.

“Digging is a weak word for what we’ve been doing. I won’t miss that part.”

“So tell me everything—where to start—what in the world are you doing here?”

“Here in Boston or here at Rose’s?”

“Yes!”

“I could ask the same of you.”

“I help out on the weekends. They’re always short-staffed.”

“I thought you had to be a nun to work here?” he said, teasing her.

She chuckled at the memory of her silly fifteen-year-old self being mortified once by that question, but she was not discomfited anymore, not blushing. “Well and truly, the time for the nunnery has passed,” Gina said. “But don’t change the subject. What are you doing here?”

“I came to pay Rose a visit. She told me you were here, in the back. It would’ve been rude not to stop by and say hello.”

“Pay Rose a visit?” Gina was flustered. “How could you possibly know her?”

Ben smiled. “Have you forgotten? My family knows her because of you.” He reminded her that it was through her intervention that Rose had come to Boston and ministered to his aunt Josephine Shaw Lowell who had been terminally ill with cancer. “Months after you brought them together, Aunt Effie died with Rose at her side.”

So much had happened, Gina had forgotten indeed. She nearly cried at the sharp, stinging memory of that awful night, when she first discovered what a torment it was for Harry to face up to the truth of immutable things.

“Aunt Effie left a good portion of her estate to Rose’s Home, here and in New York,” Ben told her. “Twice a year, still, the Shaws and the Lowells do a blowout charity bash for Rose and Alice.” When Gina winced at the sound of the name
Alice,
he frowned. “I meant Alice Huber.”

“I know,” Gina said. “Who else could you possibly be fundraising for?”

“Quite right.” Ben tilted his head sympathetically. “Listen, you must feel bad about the way things turned out. Don’t. This is what was meant to be.”

“Who says I feel bad?”

Ben smiled. “Unlike your husband, I’m not the black sheep.
I
still keep in touch with everyone. I hear certain things.”

“Oh. Like what? What did Esther tell you?”

“Nothing. What I’m trying to say is, don’t worry about Alice. She is fine.”

Gina sniffed skeptically. “If you say so.”

“I say so because it’s true. She married a rancher from Texas a few years back.”

“No!”

“Yes. When her father died, she sold his lumber company and took his money and her mother with her. She now runs a four hundred-acre cattle spread somewhere near Austin. Has two little ones. Is completely happy from what Esther tells me.”

“Texas!” Marveling, Gina stared out the window at the sugar maples and the elms framing the green clearing.

“That’s the only part you heard? Texas?”

“Texas is just shorthand for what I’m feeling.” She sat for a moment, hand on her heaving chest, trying to squeeze relief from her repentant heart. She took a deep breath. “And Harry’s family is well, I hope? Herman, Esther?”

“Yes, everyone’s all right now.”

Gina perked up. “Now?”

“Harry’s father had a heart attack a few years ago. In 1912.” Ben paused for meaning or maybe for a reaction from Gina.

Gina lost her baby in 1912. She shuddered. “But he’s better?”

“Yes. Of course now Esther is out of sorts.”

“Why? She must be happy you’re back home.”

“I don’t know about that. Elmore, her husband, just left for England.”

“What on earth for?”

“Some archduke got shot in Bosnia.”

“Ah, yes. The pesky archduke.” She sounded exhausted even to herself.

“Dr. Lassiter went with the Red Cross as a medic. Esther is not pleased with him, to say the least.”

“I know how she feels.”

“Why?” Ben asked. “Has Harry become an army medic and gone to England?”

“Sure.” Gina stared out the window. “Something like that. And your mother?” Ellen Shaw had quite a reputation around Boston, demonstrating day and night against each affront to the independence of women and every encroachment against the isolationism of the United States.

He nodded agreeably. “Fine. Militant as ever.”

“Tell her to be careful,” Gina said. “Or she’ll be sharing a cell with Harry.”

“So I keep telling her. What did
he
do?”

“Which time? I don’t know. Kept arguing?”

Ben whistled in fond amazement. “Don’t they know he is the original objection maker? They can’t punish him for his essential nature. But seriously, what did he do?”

“Broke the terms of his probation by inciting a riot in Paterson during the silk strike. Have you heard about that?”

“Yes,” Ben said. “I heard something about that. Where is he?”

“Nearby. Up in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution near Warner’s Pond. That’s why I’m here every weekend. I work Saturdays and take the bus to visit him on Sundays.”

“Prison!” Ben looked disbelieving. “That doesn’t seem like the Harry I knew.”

“It’s really been an unending smorgasbord of humiliation.” Gina almost cried. “No, no,” she quickly said, catching herself, keeping away the hand that reached across to her. “My own life is the last thing I want to talk about. I am, however,
completely
enthralled by your wonderful reappearance. Tell me really why you’re back.” She made an effort to smile. “Who’s getting married this time?” Ten years ago Ben had sailed home from Panama to be best man at Harry and Alice’s wedding.

“Just like last time,” he said. “Nobody.”

They sat cupping their tea, warming their hands on it. The New England flaming fall was on full display; inside and outside glowed with light like fire.