Bellagrand: A Novel

by Simons, Paullina

  Salvo sighed. His black eyes glistened. “I can never set foot in the house where that man resides.”

  “The man who’s your sister’s husband?”

  “Whatever you call him.” He blinked, shrugged, deflected as always. “Tell Mimoo I’m thinking of changing professions. Look at this.” He showed his sister a pipe inlaid with intricate carving. “The Battle of Bunker Hill is carved on it,” he said with incredulity. “Isn’t it fantastic? I want to be a pipe carver. I know a guy. I’m trying to get in as an apprentice.” He shook his head. “There’s an idiotic rule, though, we’re trying to get around. I have to apprentice for twenty-five years before I can become a carver. Can you imagine?”

  She gazed at him fondly. “You gonna become a pipe carver, Salvo? Do you even hear yourself?”

  They chuckled, they hugged. Turning her around, Salvo pointed her down the street. “Go. Quick. Or he’ll think you’re stepping out on him. Although maybe then he’ll leave you and you’ll finally be free like Papa wanted.” He stuck some bills into her hand. “Kiss Mimoo for me. Tell her it’s for Christmas. I’ll have more on Wednesday. I’m trying to get hired by the Purity Distilling Company. They make molasses here in the North End. I get a job there, I’d be set for life. Union and everything. Tell Mimoo that so she stops fretting. Now go.”

  Two

  ON THE TRAIN BACK, Gina thought about Salvo’s words. She didn’t think Harry would interpret her lateness as faithlessness. He wasn’t that kind.

  Her hands were on the cold glass, her palms. The train was stopped in the well, waiting for a signal.

  They tried hard to make the best of it. Did Gina ever complain? How could she complain when she had been given what her heart wanted most. You’d have to be an ingrate to complain after that, wouldn’t you?

  Mill workers were being laid off left and right, though it was nearing the holidays. Gina was lucky to have her job. Talent and style, Angela had said to her with approval. But how much style did Gina need to work in the mending room? She wore white to work, she didn’t dye wool anymore. She worked with ladies at a table, dressed in a skirt in a room full of windows.

  Then why did she sometimes wish the buildings would burn to the ground?

  Once, in 1886, there had been a fire. Why did she recall that wistfully?

  So many blessings. She sewed handmade costumes, walked in city parades, dressed the nurses, supported their floats.

  She worked on Mill Island, but she wasn’t a carpenter, wasn’t a machinist. Her long curly hair didn’t get tangled in heavy equipment. She wasn’t hospitalized for months with a near-fatal injury like her friend Pamela.

  She wasn’t a child anymore. The child labor laws no longer applied to her.

  Many things no longer applied to her.

  For a time Gina had worked at Duck Mill, making cloth out of specialty cotton called canvas that was also used to make sails. Tonight on the train it came back to her. Making a sail. For a boat on the ocean. Having the wind take her away. In any direction. She dreamed about the sails as she spun the cotton. She worked blazing fast, as always, but dreamed languidly of warm water and boats and the wind grabbing hold of her with the sail up. Well, why not? Harry was such a dreamer. It’s one of the things she loved most about him. Why shouldn’t she allow herself a dream or two? What, only the young and the (formerly) wealthy were allowed to dream?

  Things hadn’t quite turned out as she thought they might, planned they would, dreamed they could. It was cold on the train. Like in their house. She closed the coat tighter around herself, breathed into her woolen scarf, curved into a ball.

  For one, she truly had believed in her Italian, family-centered heart that after a few months Harry would make amends with his family.

  They had spent the summer after they were married at her mother’s house in Lawrence while they figured things out. She continued to work with Salvo in his restaurants. A few nights a week she helped out at St. Vincent de Paul’s mending their donations. She had intended to return to Simmons College in the fall to finish her degree. She expected to move to Cambridge when Harry started teaching at Harvard again and to commute to classes from there.

  It took him until the morning she was rushing off to register for her fall semester to show her the letter from the head of the economics department terminating Harry’s relationship with Harvard University.

  He said he didn’t have all the answers. She hoped he had some. He had been reading so much, out on the porch in a rocking chair, his nose always buried inside one thick educational tome or another. Surely he could have read a morsel that would solve just one of their problems. But he couldn’t solve her senior year in Simmons.

  “What do you propose we do?” he had said. “Live apart? I live here with your mother, brother, cousin, while you live on campus close to Archer?” Archer was a boy who had liked Gina.

  She suggested they both move to Boston.

  “What would we live on? Your bookstore salary?”

  Gina didn’t know what to say. She cocked her head this way, that, looked out on to Summer Street, chewed her lip. “You could, oh, get a job.”

  “Doing what?”

  Gina wanted to point out the sewing machine, the looms, St. Vincent’s, St. Mary’s, Salvo’s restaurants, the houses Mimoo cleaned, the quarries, the lumber yards, the printing presses, the textile mills. She wanted to gently remind Harry of his black contempt for indolent Dyson, a boy proud of his desire to work only five hours a day. She wanted to tell him that Canney’s, the basket-weaving factory, was hiring. She didn’t say any of these things. Because you couldn’t say them to a descendant of one of the Founding Fathers, an aristocrat. “How are we going to live?”

  He shrugged and she saw in his face that he didn’t have a plan. “I’ll figure it out. This is new for me, uncharted. Give me time.”

  She stood in front of him in her smart coat and hat, her walkabout shoes. She had her green purse in her hands, that’s how close she had been to going to the train station to catch the 9:45 to Boston to register for senior fall. Slowly she put down her purse and untied the ribbons of her hat.

  That was six years ago.

  “I was going to become even more politically active on campus,” Gina told him when she still told him things. “I was going to form a club to advocate for women’s suffrage. Perhaps other rights too. Advocate for women to be allowed to attend Harvard University one day. Maybe even teach there.”

  “Women teach at Harvard?” Harry laughed. “What are you saying? That’s not a right, that’s folly.”

  “I wanted to get my master’s.”

  “I wanted things too,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “They’re sitting in front of you in a skirt and blouse.”

  “Indeed.” The verbal conversation ended and another conversation, less verbal but no less intense began.

  “I’ve already worked in Salvo’s restaurant, Harry,” she said, picking up the topic of work a few days, weeks, years later. “I kept books, hired and fired, hosted. Washed dishes. Made pizza. I did all that.”

  “So now you want me to take a job even you don’t want?”

  “You want to continue living with my mother?”

  “You know I don’t,” Harry said quietly, in the little bedroom they shared, with her Shaker nightstand and dresser, her narrow wooden bed. “You’re too quiet in your mother’s house. As if you’re afraid she’ll hear us.”

  “I am afraid she’ll hear us.”

  After they had tried hard to make sure Mimoo didn’t hear them, Gina tried again. “We both want it, we have to find our own place, darling.”

  “Well, we can’t find our own place,” Harry said, “without money.”

  She hung her head. “Not money,” she said. “Work. We can’t find it without work.”

  He stared at her blankly. “That’s what I said.”

  “No. You said . . .”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Without work,”
Gina said, “there is no money.”

  “Oh the miseries of constantly toiling for a subsistence!” he exclaimed. “How does one ever have a moment to discover his path in the forest if one is always scrounging a penny or two for his next meal?”

  “Immigrants don’t have the luxury of paths in forests,” Gina said. “They’re too busy working.”

  “But I’m not an immigrant.”

  She didn’t want to remind him he was also without luxuries.

  The train ride was too long.

  She would prefer not to be cold.

  She would prefer not to have to work so long, so hard, so late that when she fell into bed she was too tired for dreams, for nightmares, for love.

  Though in some ways raw exhaustion was preferable to having time to sit and think when the trains were stalled and the miseries multiplied.

  Blessedly the train began moving. She would try again tonight. Everything had changed. He had to know that.

  Three

  GINA DIDN’T GET BACK to Lawrence until after nine and walked with her eyes averted past the establishment that used to be her brother’s dream, where the crowds used to mob him for lunch because he made the most delicious pizza in town. She kept her eyes to the ground and rushed the mile across Haverhill, past the Common, to Summer Street, a mile back to Mimoo’s small folk Victorian home they had been renting since 1899.

  Braced for questions about her late arrival, she climbed the porch stairs and opened the door. Harry was sitting at the kitchen table with his back to her, papers and maps in front of him, huddled over them with Angela, Joe, and Arturo. He turned his head to her, smiled absentmindedly, distant intimacy in his eyes, and turned back to the table. Indeed there were loud words, but they weren’t for her. The four of them were animatedly discussing something problematic. But they always animatedly discussed something problematic.

  “What is more important?” Arturo asked. “Freedom or equality?”

  “Why can’t we have both?” said Harry. “Why do we have to choose? I don’t want to choose. And I want the people of Lawrence to have both. I want them to be free, to live in harmony, to be selfless and happy, and I want them to have economic, material equality. Not one or the other. First Lawrence, then everywhere. Right, Gia?” Harry wore a flannel shirt untucked and had a four-day growth on his face, there since Friday. His sandy hair was long, almost long enough to tie back. No one had hair like that, she kept telling him. That’s why I like it, he told her. There is no one like me. His clear gray eyes were as lovely as ever, his voice strong, calm, droll.

  She bent to kiss his cheek. “Right, tesoro.”

  Lightly he leaned his head into hers. “You’re home late. Have you eaten?”

  “I’m not hungry. Salvo was working and Phyllis didn’t get the baby until after seven.”

  “Did you talk to Salvo, Gia?” Angela asked. “About Christmas?”

  Gina hung up her coat and hat, put down her small purse. She took off her shoes, put on her slippers. She went to the cast-iron stove and lit the kettle. Then she spoke. “I did talk to him,” she said. “Anyone for a cup of tea?”

  But they were buried in the labor laws of Massachusetts. No one replied. She made one for Mimoo, and when it was steeped and sugared, she walked past the round table at which the radical knights sat, plotting and planning, and headed upstairs to her mother’s bedroom.

  “Arturo says he’ll come for Christmas,” said Angela, her hand over his.

  “I’ll come too,” Joe said. “If I’m invited.”

  “Of course, Joe,” said Harry. “The more the merrier. Gina, you’re all right with Joe coming for Christmas dinner?”

  “If he brings the turkey, why not?”

  “Is your wife joking?” she heard Joe say. “Where am I going to get a turkey?”

  “She’s joking,” said Harry. “She fancies herself as a bit of a comedienne.”

  Mimoo was lying on the bed, still in her street clothes. She was salt and pepper gray now, heavier than when she had first come to America, but no quieter.

  “About time you came to see your mother after being gone all day. How is he?”

  “Why don’t you get under the covers, Mimoo?” Gina said, setting the cup of tea by the bedside.

  “I’ll get under the covers when I’m good and ready. What did he say?”

  “Who? Joe?”

  “Don’t play dumb with me. What do I care what that fool has to say about anything? What did my son say?”

  Gina sighed.

  Mimoo turned away.

  They sat for a few moments while downstairs boisterous voices planned unrest and street action.

  “Help me get ready for bed,” Mimoo said. “I’m tired.”

  Gina helped her mother up. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Nineteen twelve will be better.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I am.”

  Mimoo laughed. “Do you not hear what’s going on in your very own kitchen? What are they conspiring about? Mark my words, it will be the worst year yet.”

  “What are they always conspiring about? Strikes. Demonstrations. Petitions for better wages. It’s all talk, don’t worry.” She squeezed her mother’s hand. “I only know what I know. It’ll be a good year. You’ll see.”

  “You know what would make next year a better year? If my son and that no-good husband of yours made amends, put the past behind them, sat down at the same table.”

  “I’m working on that.” Gina unhooked Mimoo’s dress and underskirts, took off her stockings. She slipped the nightgown over her head and brought her a basin filled with water. When her mother was in bed, Gina laid Salvo’s money on the nightstand beside the cup of tea.

  “He thinks money is going to make up for it?” Mimoo said. “Tell him I don’t want his money.”

  “We tried that,” Gina said. “He didn’t speak to us for a year. He had a baby and didn’t tell us.”

  “The way your brother gets around, how do you know he had just the one?”

  “Mimoo!” Gina covered up her mother and kissed her.

  Mimoo took her daughter’s hand, looked her over, touched her pale face, pushed the strands of her dark curls behind her ears.

  “I’m good,” Gina whispered. “Don’t worry. Just tired.”

  “What else is new? Did you hear? Your friend Verity is with child again.”

  “Dio mio, no. How do you know this?”

  “I play bingo with her mother every Saturday. She told me. What is that, her sixth baby now?”

  “Fifth, Mimoo. Stop it.” Gina rubbed her eyes. “How does she do it?”

  “Clearly you haven’t taught Verity your foolproof methods of family planning,” Mimoo said. “Someone should tell her that human beings in many ways are like vegetables: quality and not quantity is what counts.”

  Gina smiled, leaning down again to kiss her mother. “I learned that well,” she said. “No one can accuse me of disastrous overbreeding.”

  “Mia figlia, no one can accuse you of any breeding at all.”

  The smile gone from her face, Gina stepped away to the door.

  “Tell them to keep it down,” Mimoo said, clutching her rosary beads. “Some of us have to get up in the morning.”

  Four

  HARRY WAS TRYING TO sleep, but she wasn’t having any of it.

  “Don’t give me this tired business,” she whispered. “You weren’t too tired for revolutionary blather.”

  He put his hand over her mouth. “It was just blather. I’m exhausted.” He kissed her. “Tomorrow we’ll talk. As long as it’s not your usual Christmas sermon.”

  “Which is . . .”

  He mimicked her. “Harry, when oh when are you going to make amends with your family?”

  “What a good question.”

  “I’m sleeping. I can’t hear a word you’re saying. I’m dreaming you’re quiet.”

  She shook him.

  He groaned.

  “Shh,” she said. “Or
Mimoo will think we’re up to no good.”

  “If only,” said Harry, his fingers pressing into her.

  “First we talk, then we’ll see about other things.” They were conjoined under the covers of their small bed. It was cold. They pressed against each other to stay warm.

  “I won’t be awake for the other things.”

  But something was signaling to Gina that he might be.

  “Why aren’t you nicer to Arturo?” Harry murmured into her neck. “Angela feels deeply wronged that you and Mimoo aren’t more friendly to him.”

  “I’m friendly.” But it was true her mother was intractable when it came to Arturo. As if she saw black ravens above his head.

  “American polite. Not Italian friendly.”

  “I’m trying to be more American and less Italian in all my ways.”

  His hands were over her body, under her nightgown, his mouth finding her mouth. “Please don’t. Anything but that. Be Italian, I beg you.”

  “Italian then in all ways,” she murmured back. “Not just in this one way you love.”

  “I’ll take the baby with the bathwater.” The blankets came off slightly as he clung to her, his mouth on her bare shoulders, the nightgown pulled away. She squirmed away from his mouth, she was hypersensitive, and what to say about that? Nothing really, except . . .

  “Speaking of babies . . . um, listen . . . I wouldn’t mind a little baby, Harry.”

  “What?”

  “You mentioned babies.”

  “I didn’t mention babies. I mentioned a metaphor.”

  “I was thinking of an actual baby.”

  “Since when?”

  She didn’t want to confess that for a long time she had been counting out her days, crossing them off her womb’s relentless calendar. “For a little while now.”

  “I thought we agreed no. We both said no.”

  “We did agree on this,” she said into the pillow.

  He had been lying on top of her back. Now he climbed off. “Well, then.”

  “Well, then nothing. I changed my mind. That’s the prerogative of being a woman.”

  Harry sat up. He was perplexed in expression and body. Gina had to suppress an affectionate laugh. “How can that be?” he asked. “Every other week you’re distributing illicit pamphlets about some reproductive freedom thing or other. Just this morning I saw in your bag an article from Lucifer the Lightbearer.”